Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

by Michael Chabon

  “The plaintiff,” said the occupant of the backseat, concealed from view by the driver and by the fact that she was canted over the car seat—duly faced to the rear—with her blouse unbuttoned, her bra cup unlatched, her nipple the sole joy and plaything of the car seat’s occupant, whose parents had argued, though only briefly, over whether to name him Kudu (suggested by his father) or (in honor of his maternal grandfather) Clark. She was topping Clark off now, having restored him to sleep after he determined, for unknown reasons, to cause a disturbance midflight.

  Just as she eased the cork of her nipple with a moist pop—a sound that never failed to densify the cloud of embarrassment around Clark’s older brother—from the slumbering vessel into which two ounces of rich hindmilk had just been decanted, a second Outback rolled to a stop along the curb. From it emerged the cetacean form of Michael Oberstein, Esq., in a remarkably ugly taupe mohair suit whose construction, Archy thought, must have necessitated the cruel slaughter of dozens, possibly hundreds, of moes. It did not so much clothe as wad him.

  Archy got out of the car to greet Moby, eager for the excuse to release himself from the cramped, styleless, and mildly punitive confines to which, once he had conceded that a ’74 El Camino legendary for its unreliability might not be the most suitable car for a family man, fate had sentenced him. Selling the El Camino was only part of a diverse package of concessions, amendments, resolutions, and reparations that he had agreed to under the terms of his repatriation to the house on Sixty-first Street. One day, he hoped, this foreordained path would lead, amid countless chutes and precious few ladders, to the square of ultimate redemption—Forgiveness. Parts of the journey had been painful, and Archy rarely bothered to shield his wife and sons from awareness of this pain. But he had confessed to no one how bitterly he wept on the day when some dude from Livermore drove his El Camino away.

  He raised a hand to Moby, who was molesting the knot of his necktie in the side mirror, then nodded to the plaintiff, Garth, standing by the half-white, half-blue crib looking wary, closed down, and as worn out and sleep-deprived as Archy.

  “She’ll be right out,” Archy said. “Boy’s just finishing his snack.”

  The plaintiff nodded, then turned back to the crib with an air of regret or longing, as if he would much rather continue with his brushwork than go through what Gwen had in mind.

  At the back of the carport on a workbench, a radio reported on the count facing Miguel Tejada, and below the radio, strapped into a bouncy seat, busting out with some intricate mudras, lay the troublesome baby. Archy had forgotten its gender and name. The baby had something wrong with its skin, he noticed, some kind of weird blotches of discoloration on its fingers and face. A wire of panic lit up in Archy’s chest; it had never occurred to him that Garth might have actual grounds for his lawsuit. Then he saw that the blotches appeared to be precisely the same shade as the blue stain on the half-painted crib.

  “It didn’t occur to me that she was going to lick it,” Garth said.

  “They will lick pretty much anything, is my understanding,” Archy said.

  “Yo, Arch,” Moby said. “What up. Mr. Newgrange, Mike Oberstein. We spoke on the phone.”

  Moby skipped the hand theatrics for once and rolled on over to shake Garth Newgrange’s straight. He turned back to the car as Gwen climbed out of the backseat, running a finger down the buttons of her blouse, tugging her skirt down over the dimples of her knees.

  “Hey, Gwen.”

  “Hi, Moby. Hello, Garth.”

  Moby had spoken to the man, prearranged it for them to come over, but Garth looked ambushed. He folded his arms across his chest, took a deep breath. “Hello.”

  “This is my husband, Archy. Archy, this is Garth.”

  Archy got the man to unlatch one hand and offer it, small and freckled with melanin and white latex semigloss.

  “That’s, in the car, that’s Titus, Archy’s son. Titus, get out of the car and give this man a proper greeting.”

  Titus, operating under the terms of the more modest package that he had negotiated with Gwen, which included room, board, and at the end of his own Candy Land path, the ambiguous pink-frosting-roofed gingerbread house of a family to love him and fuck him up, instantly got out of the car, observed the agreed-upon conventions of civilized intercourse among strangers, and got back into the car. The boy was still visiting their planet from his own faraway home world, but Archy figured that with time, he would adjust to the local gravity and microbes. Keeping close to the baby most of the time, as if Clark were the object he had crossed the stellar void to study.

  “And there she is,” Gwen said, noticing the blue-stained baby in her seat. “Little Bella.”

  “There she is,” Garth agreed, not saying No thanks to you.

  An awkward silence ensued that Archy did not have the energy or the courage to break.

  “Can we—Garth, I was hoping we, you and I, could talk?” Gwen said, gesturing to the stairs that must lead downslope to the house.

  “Here’s good,” Garth said.

  Gwen blinked, looked at Moby. “Okay,” she said. “All right. I guess what I came here to say isn’t going to take very long, anyway. It’s really just two words long. I should have said them to you a long time ago, the day that Bella was born, right away. But they are not, they have never been, words that come very easily to me, I don’t know why. Maybe because, I’m not making an excuse here, but maybe because, the way I was raised, you know. That, basically, I have nothing to apologize for. Almost as a matter of, I want to say, policy. Politics, if you will. But even if that’s true in a broad, you know, like, historical sense. On the personal level—”

  “You said tell you if you ran on at the mouth,” Moby said.

  “Two words,” Gwen repeated, as though to herself.

  Archy was enjoying this. He had been dwelling in a deep, capacious, and impregnable doghouse for weeks. He tried to remember if he had ever heard Gwen utter, in any but the most pro forma way, the phrase that came, halting but credible, to her lips.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  When she seemed content to leave it at that, Garth cross-armed and frowning without much of an apparent rise in temperature, Moby lofted an eyebrow toward one of the upswept flukes of his bangs: Go on.

  “I’m sorry that I lost my temper the way I did,” she said. “With the doctor. I let my . . . my . . .”

  “Self-righteousness?” Archy suggested helpfully.

  Gwen nocked a scowl to her bowstring, aimed it at Archy, then lowered her bow and nodded. “Self-righteousness. My thin skin. Part of the same thing, I guess, that makes it so hard for me to apologize. But I do apologize, and I am sorry. My focus right then ought to have been on Lydia and the baby and nothing else. I failed them, and I failed you, and thank God that baby of yours is healthy and beautiful, because if anything had happened to her . . .”

  She started to lose it, pulled herself together. Carried on. “I understand your anger. I accept it. But I’m hoping that you might find it in your heart to forgive me.”

  “Okay,” Garth said.

  “Okay, you forgive me?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Why not?”

  “Does this mean—” Moby said. “I’m sorry, but, informally acting as Gwen’s attorney, I have to ask. Are you dropping the lawsuit against her and Aviva?”

  “No problem,” Garth said.

  When they got back in the car and drove away, Gwen let herself go. She cried until they got down to the lower gate of the Claremont Hotel, and then she stopped. “I think you ought to try it,” she said.

  “I already did,” Archy said. “I got no traction.”

  “I wasn’t ready then,” Gwen said. “I didn’t know how good it feels.”

  “Okay,” Archy said. “I’m sorry, Gwen. I fucked up long and often, in all kinds of ways, and I’m just nothing but sorry about that. Do you think you could find it in your heart to forgive me?”

  “No,” Gwen said.
<
br />   “What?”

  “But almost.”

  He glanced over at the boy sitting beside him, staring out at the road, nothing much happening in his expression but a bright shine on the eye.

  “Okay, then. Titus, you, too. I’m sorry I wasn’t any kind of a father to you for the first fourteen years of your life. You are a fine young man, and I hope to do right by you from now on. Do you think maybe someday you could find it in your heart to forgive me?”

  “Okay,” Gwen said. “That’s it. You’re good.”

  Then they stopped for a red light, and the baby woke up again, disconsolate and hungry, and Archy stepped on the gas to get them home. It was weeks before he realized that he had never gotten an answer out of Titus, and by then the matter seemed to have lost its urgency.

  Archy and Nat met at the property, an upstairs suite in a handsome commercial block of the 1920s, on the Berkeley-Oakland line. Red roof tiles, oak beams, stucco painted a Lena Horne shade of tan. The ground-floor tenants included a hardcore bike shop, an avant-garde knitting supply, and a dealer in vintage tube amplifiers.

  “Already got that crank vibe going strong,” Archy observed. “You’re going to fit right in.”

  “Funny,” Nat said. He was pacing off the larger of the suite’s two rooms, laying out the shelving, stocking it with vinyl. Wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling. Satan architecting Pandemonium. “It doesn’t make you nervous, three thousand pounds of records on the second floor.”

  “Building had a total retrofit,” Archy said. “Two thousand one. Previous occupant was a Pilates. You know they have all those heavy-ass machines.”

  “I have spent surprisingly little time around Pilates machines.”

  “They are heavy,” Archy said with a show of patience. “Mr. Singletary had the floor braced, cost like ten grand.”

  “ ‘Mr. Singletary,’ ” Nat said.

  Archy put his hand to his chin, bunched up his shoulders, shook his head. Sheepish little smile on his face.

  “Now the motherfucker’s going to own the building and the stock,” Nat said. “Doesn’t even care for music.”

  “He likes Peabo.”

  “Peabo is actually quite underrated,” Nat said.

  “Not by Mr. Singletary.”

  “Huh.”

  The baby woke up and began to fuss. Archy took an Avent bottle from the hip pocket of his leather car coat, uncapped it, gave the nipple a sniff. Crouched down beside the car seat to urge the bottle on his son, fitted it to his lips, waited for him to resume his nap.

  “Go to all that pain and trouble to have it,” Archy said. “Then spend your life keeping the little fucker sedated.”

  “He doing okay?”

  “Seems to be.”

  “That’s formula?”

  “Last of the frozen breast milk.”

  “The lactation consultant couldn’t help you guys?”

  “Nat, please.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Catch one baby, now you’re the damn La Leche League.”

  “What’s the rent again?”

  “Eight hundred.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Includes water and trash. A third interest in a half-bathroom. I’d say that’s low, for a building of this outstanding caliber.”

  “I imagine you would,” Nat said. “That’s just the kind of thing a real estate agent is supposed to say.”

  “Oh, I can definitely talk the talk,” Archy said. “Alas, that ain’t what’s on the exam.”

  “Are you going to take it?”

  “I’m still deciding.”

  “The baby is a great gimmick. Who’s not going to want to buy a house from a giant-size cuddly black man with an achingly cute little baby?”

  Archy pondered the question. “Almost no one,” he said.

  “I think you have to go for it.”

  “I think you do, too,” Archy said. “Mr. Singletary—Garnet—you already gave him too much time, as it is, to reflect on his rash offer.”

  Nat looked around at the bare tile of the floor, black and glossy as a record, the freshly painted white walls, the three small windows that overlooked the alley behind the building. “Won’t be a counter. Nobody coming here to hang out, shoot the shit,” he said. “I thought that was all Garnet cared about at Brokeland.”

  “I guess something put him in a generous mood. Mr. Jones dying. Dogpile Thang going south on Chan Flowers. G Bad’s moving the whole deal over to the city, going to put it in Hunters Point.”

  “I heard Visitacion Valley.”

  “But I’ll tell you, Nat, I get the feeling his good mood’s about to wear off. Chan Flowers is already back on his feet, brushing the dirt off his shoulder. Shifting the blame, pulling the levers. Got a guy in the economic development office fired because ‘the city government lost Dogpile,’ so on, so forth. The guy who got fired? Was Abreu’s brother-in-law.”

  “No more counter,” Nat said, resuming his previous train of thought. “No more bins, writing up the little comments in Sharpie on the dividers. No more watching the world go by through the front window. That magic window. No more customers.”

  “You would have customers,” Archy said. “All over the world. Every time zone, some Samoan, Madagascar motherfucker, hitting you up for a five-thousand-dollar original pressing of Blue Note 1568, deep groove, mono. Anyway, there’s folks, I’m not saying who, but there is a general consensus at large, Nat, says you are not really a people person.”

  “I like people in theory,” Nat said. “That’s what was good about Brokeland. It was all just a theory we had.”

  “Turns out,” Archy agreed.

  “So now, you’re saying, it’s time to get real.”

  “Follow my helpful example.”

  “Selling real estate.”

  “That’s only one of my many ways.”

  “And for me to get real, I need to start a website that will sell forty-year-old chunks of vinyl on consignment to invisible Samoans.”

  “I showed Mr. Singletary the books,” Archy said.

  “You what?”

  “He went over them. Got way down deep inside.”

  Nat shuddered. “A man of courage.”

  “He asked me a lot of questions. Who did I know that was trying to make it online, how they handled it, did they go through eBay or have their own online store or what. I guess he even went and talked to some people, talked to the dude at the mailbox store about shipping costs. He thinks you could do it. Sell off all of Mr. Jones’s wax. Make you and the estate some money. And Nat, if Garnet Singletary smells a profit, I think you got to take that shit seriously.”

  “Wait, I have to get real and take shit seriously?” Nat said. “At the same time?”

  The empty bottle fell out of Clark’s hands, startling him awake.

  “Oh, shit,” Archy said. “Okay, little man. All right.” He unstrapped the baby and grabbed him, threaded him through the handle of the car seat. Cupped the baby’s bottom in one palm while the other hand played triplets on his back. Clark was not impressed. Archy fished an enormous key ring out of the other pocket of his John Shaft car coat, barbed with dozens of keys, each one stamped DO NOT COPY, the green plastic fob bearing the legend SINGLETARY PROPERTY MANAGEMENT. He jangled the keys in front of Clark’s face. Clark listened in apparent horror to their clangor. Archy tried to pass the key ring to the boy, let him jingle it for himself, and the keys clanged against the tile floor. At that Clark nearly jumped out of his OshKosh onesie.

  “Wow,” Nat said. “Quite a set of lungs.”

  “Sometimes you have to do this,” Archy said, taking his son under the arms and subjecting him to a firm oscillation, his hands sweeping and rising, sweeping and rising, back and forth across his body, steady as the works of a clock. As he was synchronized to the rotation of the earth, or maybe just stunned by the sudden increase in velocity, Clark quieted down some. But he remained unwilling to commit fully to silence. So Archy added a complementary leg move to the pendu
lum swing, a simple harmonic motion, up and down.

  Titus Joyner appeared in the doorway of the empty two-room suite. He watched his father’s absurd dance routine with unfeigned, possibly good-natured scorn.

  “What?” Archy said.

  Titus held up Archy’s cell phone. “You left it in the car,” he said. “She called.”

  “What I tell you about that ‘she’ shit?”

  “Gwen. She called.”

  “Yeah? Clark, man, come on. What’d she say?”

  “Said don’t forget she’s working tonight. At the hospital.”

  “Shit, I did forget. I have to get dinner.” He looked at Nat. “Gwen started in at Chimes, part-time LDR nurse.”

  “I heard. Aviva ran into her on the ward.”

  “Just to keep some money coming in.”

  “We figured. Medical school’s going to be a stretch?”

  “What do you suppose?”

  “She can get help. Smart and experienced as she is. What school’s not going to want her?”

  “You are replete with rosy predictions today about our future.”

  “Just quoting Aviva.”

  “Gwen’s worried Aviva’s still mad at her.”

  “It was a blow. It was, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Kind of like a divorce. You don’t stop—I mean, you’re mad, but. Let me try him?”

  “No, man, I got it.”

  “You don’t stop loving the person. You miss them.”

  “You do.”

  “Come on, give me little mister.”

  The partial charm of the pendulum treatment had long since worn off. Archy shrugged and handed over the baby, whose cries had taken on a feline rasp.

  “Hey, hey, big boy. Okay, now. We’re friends, aren’t we? Oh, yeah, we go way back, Clark and I.”

  But Nat, though he broke out his most sonorous and somniferous material to hum, proved no more adept than Archy at quieting the baby.

  “Give him,” Titus said.

  Archy okayed it with a nod, and Nat passed the baby to his older brother, who carried him out of the suite, along the hall, to the terra-cotta stairs of the old building. By the time he came out onto the sidewalk, Clark appeared to have run out of things to complain about. He lay supine in a crook of Titus’s arm, hot and sweaty and smelling of clabber. The October sunshine was dusty and mild. Halloween a week off, here came Julie Jaffe, rolling up on his skateboard, ready a week ahead of time. All in black, blazer, pants, a black string tie like Val Kilmer’s in Tombstone. Wearing a long, threadbare satin glove, purple and finned, on his right hand. Hair dyed a matte black. Stealth hair, absorbing all ambient light, reflecting nothing. Black hair, red freckles, kind of weird in combination, but somehow he made it work. He left his white earbuds buried in his ears. Stomped on the tail of the deck, flipped it up into his arms. “What’s up?” he said.