Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

by Michael Chabon

  He threw the blanket over the suitcase and walked up the street to Flowers & Sons, stopping in at the Fed to pick up a sack of holes. There was bound to be a funeral today, but as of nine A.M. the august pile sat dozing under its eaves and ivy. Nothing moving, doors shut tight. Archy walked around to the back of the building. Two hearses, the old LTD Crown Victoria and a newer Town Car, waited calmly in their stalls. The hood of the Crown Vic ticking like a pot on the boil. Archy went up to the service door and knocked twice, polite but with intent.

  “What’s up, Bank?” he said when the door opened up to him. “Here to pick up my pops.” He tried to make it sound prearranged, part of everyone’s schedule for the day.

  Something above and to the left of Archy’s head, possibly something microscopic or invisible, interested Bankwell more than Archy did. “Can’t help you,” he said.

  For the first time, somewhat belatedly, Archy gave serious consideration to the danger of this, huh, undertaking. “Bank, look here,” he said. “Check it out.” He held out the sack, a plain white paper bag free of logos or labels, but there was no mistaking it. Chance and their connoisseurial natures had brought Archy and Bankwell together at the counter of the United Federation of Donuts at least twice in the past few years. The man would know that promising bulge, the neat pleat across the top when Mrs. Pang filled your sack.

  “Raised glazed,” Archy said. “Six, have them all.”

  Bankwell could not help glancing at the bag, but in the end not even half a dozen raised and glazed could compete with the invisible or microscopic thing behind Archy’s head.

  “Geeked old fucker told me everything,” Archy tried. “Blabbing, all rambling. Talking about that killing him and Chan did back in the day, the gangster in the Panther club, killed him with a shotgun, nobody ever got charged?” It was a wild guess, a string of them, charms of rumor and gossip hung from a chain of audacity. Half-remembered talk in the kitchens of his earliest childhood, mingled with the acrid hiss of a hot comb and the chink of ice in glasses of Flavor Aid. A strange look of recollection on his father’s face once, halfway through a broken anecdote about Huey Newton. For all he knew, it might be his father and not Chan Flowers who had pulled the trigger. “So, Bank, you not letting me come in there off the street, I don’t know. I can easily hear your uncle characterizing it in the future as stupid.”

  For the first time, for a second or two, Bankwell’s eyes lingered on Archy, and they were not cold or hostile. Only weary, worn out, like he was just so fucking tired of trying to avoid doing any and all of the ten thousand things that Chan Flowers might one day, reviewing them, come to characterize as stupid. Then—resembling Gwen last night to a degree, when she had swung aside to let Archy come ranting into the house, looking to equip his journey to Belize—Bankwell stepped back. A stone gate rolling away to let the doomed archaeologist into the snake-riddled temple.

  “Do come in,” Bankwell said.

  Along with the backyard coops of heirloom laying hens, the collectively owned pizzerias, the venerable Volvos that had rolled off the line at Torslanda before ABBA first went gold, the racks of Dynaco tube amplifiers, the BPA-free glass baby bottles, and the ramshackle wonderland known as the Adventure Playground, one minor component in the patchwork of levees erected by the citizens of Berkeley, California, in their ongoing battle to defend their polder against the capitalist flood tides of consumerist uniformity, was a telephone hanging on the wall of the Jaffe family’s kitchen, a model 554 with a rotary dial, smiley-face yellow, its handset connected to its plastic shell by a snaking twenty-five-foot helix of yellow cord, kinked by old and unsolvable knots. In conspiring with Archy to retrieve the boys, Nat was obliged to tax this cord to its limit, stretching it across the living room with its gray-green shag carpeting (another little dike against the flood), right to the point where the carpet trim met the inlaid oak border of the front hall floor. Then, little by little, Nat wound himself up, looping himself in coils of yellow cord like a fork involving itself in a plate of spaghetti, Cleopatra sending herself to Caesar in a carpet. By the time his conversation with Archy was over and he went to hang up the phone, Nat had coiled himself all the way back to the kitchen and was as thoroughly tangled as Charlie Brown in kite string.

  “Why do you do that?” Aviva said from somewhere behind the haycock of balled-up tissues that Gwen had been heaping on the kitchen table over the past hour or so, bringing in the harvest of her marital woes. “I worry it’s a bondage thing.”

  “What did he say?” Gwen said, blowing her nose, tossing the Kleenex onto the pile.

  “What did he say?” Nat repeated. A shameless bit of cheap stalling. He wondered—it was a new variation on the question that had been preoccupying him all morning—how much to share with the women in the kitchen. Before he could resolve the question, the phone rang again. A woman at the other end of the line identified herself as Officer Lester of the Oakland Police Department.

  “Are you the owner,” she wanted to know, “of a black Saab sedan, a 1990, California license plate 3AUH722?”

  “Uh, yes,” Nat said, feeling a lurch in his chest, “yes, I am, why?”

  Gwen and Aviva looked over, alert to the crease in his voice as Nat backed out of the kitchen. Tangled up from ankle to waist in the phone cord, moving too fast. Hungover, if not still slightly drunk, from last night. Losing his balance, struggling to stay on his feet, he put out a hand to grab hold of the back of the Morris chair. The cord ripped loose from the telephone and, at this sudden release of tension, began to unwrap itself from Nat’s legs, arcing outward with a kind of majestic sweep, accelerating as it spun faster and faster until, as the last loop arced free, the severed tip of the cord lashed up and stung Nat on the cheek, painfully.

  “Ow,” Nat said, feeling his cheek for blood. “I have to go.”

  “Go where? Who was that?” Aviva said, and then her cell phone rang, and once again Nat was saved from having to come clean. Aviva studied her phone, snapped it open. “This is Aviva. Yes? Oh, hi. Are we on our way? Okay, now. Listen to me.”

  Hours, inches; water broken, the bloody show; contractions coming with some urgently measured regularity. Even at times when he was not wanted by the Oakland police, Nat had long since stopped attending to the variably unvarying particulars that accrued by telephone as his wife went about her work bringing new hotheads, failures, and fools into the world. But standing at the kitchen sink, printing roses onto a paper towel with his cut cheek, Nat noticed an uneasiness creep into Gwen’s face as she listened to Aviva patiently instructing the latest father to drive the latest mother to Chimes General, where every day new fools were minted by the dozen. The mournfulness, the air of resignation that been there from the time Gwen came in the front door, seemed to give way to something colder, something closer to resolve.

  “Audrey and Rain are headed to the hospital,” Aviva told Gwen, closing the phone.

  “Uh-huh,” Gwen said, as though Audrey and Rain were the stuff of rumor, friends of friends. “Well, good for them.”

  Aviva pushed back from the table, scooping up blooms of tissue and herding them into the kitchen trash. “You okay?”

  “Kind of wrung out, but.”

  “Let’s test-drive those privileges.”

  “Ah . . .”

  “I know you’re— I mean, honey, I know you’re hurting. That’s why you need to work. Work is good.”

  Moving around the kitchen, Aviva a series of dissolves, seven things at once, stacking rinsed tea things in the dish rack, zipping a fresh package of Chux into her bag, tying back her hair with a scrunchie, fishing a Band-Aid out of the hell drawer, taping it to Nat’s cheek. Only thing she was not doing: seeing what Nat saw as it gathered in Gwen’s face. Across the background noise of panic and impatience, he began to detect a steady signal of regret.

  “I mean, Gwen, I love you,” she said. Whiff of chocolate on her breath as she leaned close to tend Nat’s wound, sour, burnt, almost smoky. “And Archy’s act
ing like a complete ass. But in the end, how far is sitting around crying going to get you.”

  “I agree.”

  “I mean, if you aren’t feeling well, or—”

  “I feel like shit, actually, but otherwise I’m fine.”

  Now Aviva picked up on it. Turned, shouldering her go bag, to see the face that matched up with Gwen’s tone. “What?” she said.

  “I’ve been trying to tell you, wanting to. But I just—”

  Aviva sat down heavily and lowered her bag to the floor. It was an authentic replica of the kit bags carried by the crew of the Sulaco in the movie Aliens, something Julie had picked up at WonderCon a couple of years back. Nat was not sure how ironically Aviva intended her patients, as they contemplated the fearsome creatures who were about to burst from their abdomens, to take it.

  “Let’s hear it,” Aviva said.

  “This whole thing with Archy,” Gwen continued. “It’s just, seriously, it’s not the main thing. I mean, it could be, but I’m not going to let it be the main thing. This baby, whoever he turns out to be? He can be the main thing. Him and my work.”

  “Well, that’s what I’m—”

  “My real work.”

  “Your real work. What’s your real work?”

  “The other night, somebody told me how Archy is lucky to have found something that he can really put his heart into. However wrong or crazy it might look to some people.”

  “Yes?” Aviva said, sounding wary. “Well, that’s true, isn’t it?”

  “I’m sure it is,” Gwen said. “You have that, Aviva. Nat, too. But I . . .” She hesitated and seemed to change her mind about what she was going to say. “And then at the review board, with those doctors. Those smug, cocky, self-satisfied—”

  “Gwen, it’s fine. You stood up to them, and they caved. Now you’re good. I— Nat? What are you looking at?”

  There was a patch of sky fringed with Indian paintbrush, visible through the kitchen window, devoid of anything but blue. Nat could not keep his eyes off it. “Hummingbird,” he said.

  “Gwen,” Aviva said, “you don’t need to worry about those assholes anymore.”

  “I’m not worried,” Gwen said. “It’s just . . . I’m sick of having no power in this game, Aviva, and them having it all. Of always fighting against feeling useless. Of how sad it makes me feel that sisters won’t go to a midwife. Also, frankly, I’m sick of overprivileged, neurotic, crazy-ass . . .” She stopped talking. She tucked her crossed arms between her breasts and belly like a pencil behind an ear.

  “You were going to say white ladies.”

  “Yes!” Gwen said. “With their white-lady latex allergies, and their white-lady OCD birth plans, and that bullshit white-lady machismo competition thing they all get into,” putting on a whiny white-girl voice, “ ‘I went twenty-seven hours without an epidural! Oh, I know just how you feel, I went forty-four!’ I’ll take out loans. I talked to my mom and dad, they’re willing to help me. My mother’s overjoyed, in fact.”

  “Overjoyed, help you what?”

  “I figure I start studying now. As soon as I have this baby, I mean. For the MCATs. By next September, I get my application together, this guy’s going to be a year old.”

  “You’re going to medical school?”

  “I told you. I don’t want to be fighting them anymore. So I’m just going to, I figure, I’m just going to go ahead and be one. Then when I reach out to a black woman while she’s having a baby, maybe then she’s going to reach back.”

  “Okay,” Aviva said. “Great. Thanks for sharing.” She got up from the table and picked up her Nostromo bag, her eyes two small dark Ripleyesque coals. “I’m going to go be useless. Audrey is so overprivileged, she’s paying for this birth with her unemployment.”

  Nat started toward her, but she was out the door before he could reach her. Down the stairs of the deck to the backyard. A few seconds later, they heard Hecate’s agitated rattle, the inveterate scrape as she backed down the curb.

  “Whoa,” Nat said.

  “I know.” Gwen looked dazed. “Crazy, right?”

  “So you aren’t going to the birth.”

  “No. No, I’m not.”

  “Can I ask you a question, then?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can I get a ride?”

  “Huh? I mean, yes, yeah, but where’s your car?”

  Nat returned to the kitchen window and found again only a trackless, shadowless, and above all, zeppelin-free patch of sky. This benign expanse of blue offered, alas, little in the way of reassurance.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll explain on the way.”

  Flowers had stashed them in a visitation room, under a gable of the sweeping bungalow roof. It was a minor room, cramped and out of the way, with latticed wallpaper that invited tedium. Window curtains the color of scorched ironing, a disturbance of pigeons outside. A room reserved for dead folks who were forgotten or unmourned, with the strange angles of a theater carved from the balcony of a chopped-up movie palace. In his spaghetti-western black suit, Flowers straddled a backward chair facing Luther and Valletta, who sat installed on an armless sofa side by side, like mourning parents. A closed coffin on a velvet bier held someone unknown.

  “Look here,” said Flowers as Bank showed Archy into the room. “We got Thurston Howell III.”

  “Luther,” Valletta said, and gave his knee a shove.

  In Archy’s dream, it had felt like such a revelation to encounter again, to recall with such force, as if he had forgotten them completely, the crook of his mother’s fine Cherokee nose, the down on her forearms, the lingering hint of her childhood lisp. The dream had returned all that, the way a day at Stinson—the sourdough bite of a Negro Modelo, the rattle of a kite on the wind—could be restored to you by an old calendar page in a bottom drawer. At Motor City the other day, Archy had come in so pissed off at Titus and Julie, so unwilling to be there, wedged so deep in the pocket of his fury, that he hadn’t been able to see the real Luther, only the Luther required by his anger. Only whatever you saw when you pictured a dead mother and a father you had long since cut out of your life, for your own protection. Photographs and phantoms on the retina.

  Now he remembered: The man sat low and scatter-limbed, but he could bounce up out of a chair, on his feet and ready to go, faster than anybody Archy knew, as if someone had dropped a coffee in his lap. That was still true. The cleft in his chin, how it seemed to have been incised by a pottery tool, deft and deliberate. The way he would scowl at you just long enough for it to make you uncomfortable, long enough for you to wonder whether he was kidding around or if you’d actually committed some sin, some forgotten transgression, before he finally pulled the rip cord on the Cleon Strutter smile.

  But he was so wintry now, snow in his hair, frost on his eyebrows! Though the height and the breadth of him remained impressive, he had lost mass, gravity. He scowled at Archy from under the icy ledge of his eyebrows. Clear-eyed, possibly sober, but Archy had seen Luther sober before. That was no big thing. With Luther, a period of sobriety was a kind of Groundhog Day, a shadow needing sunshine to foretell interminable gray. Archy hung back by the door and waited. At last, like a fading custom, the Stallings smile revived.

  “I hope you don’t mind, Chan,” Luther said, still looking at Archy, “if I asked my mediator to join us.”

  Here it came: Time for Luther to put on a show. Archy’s heart sank, and he was about to say Hold up when it occurred to him that he had come for no other purpose than this.

  “I parked my zeppelin in the clergy spot,” Archy said. He settled the yacht cap more firmly on his head, thinking it best to own the hat, to live up to it. “Hope that’s all right.”

  He let his father take hold of him for the first time in a decade, maybe longer. Laundromat, motel air freshener, no shower, Valletta’s perfume. The bones of his shoulders. Luther making a sound, deep down, sounding like Cochise Jones at the foot pedals of his B-3.

  “Hey, Vallet
ta,” Archy said, getting free of Luther.

  “Hello, Archy. I’m sorry you got mixed up in this.”

  “You okay?”

  “I’m just fine, thank you, honey.”

  She looked like she had been fighting. No doubt, she had directed some energy toward putting herself together that morning, sleeveless white blouse, clementine-red skirt short enough to arrest the breath in your lungs. But she had since come apart here and there. One shirttail was untucked. Springs and coils broke the long rolling sweep of her hair. Luther had his bathrobe on, blue happi coat patterned with white cranes, gray kung fu shorts, Yip Man slippers. Bank and Feyd must have rolled him out of bed.

  The nephews had taken up their accustomed foo-dog posts on either side of the door. Feyd looked correct, even daring, for a nephew, in a brown suit with an orange shirt and a dark purple tie, but the malandro swagger was out of the boy, standing with his head hung and his toes together, freshly scolded by Uncle Chan, Archy would have bet, for the spectacle they must have made beefing with a couple of bokken-wielding, vomiting fourteen-year-olds in the stairwell of a MacArthur Boulevard motel. Bank looked abused, his right cheek chewed up, his tie askew, radiating an air of outraged humility, as if he had been assaulted, say, by a skinny little gay kid armed with a hickory sword.