Telegraph Avenue

by Michael Chabon

  “First thing, I came to apologize,” he told Archy. “I’m sorry. I fucked up.”

  “I see.”

  Archy was going to delay acceptance for a while, Nat knew. Apologies were the flip side of Nat’s huffing and puffing, and they flowed so freely from his lips that the people in his life had learned to hold out against them as stoutly as against the tantrums that necessitated them. Hunker down in the house of bricks, wait and see if Nat planned to come all the way down the chimney. He always did.

  “That’s why the donuts,” he said.

  “They are appreciated,” Archy said. He opened the box, surveyed its contents like he was taking a first look at a crate of fresh inventory, there being, of course, as Archy often explained to Nat, a profound spiritual analogy, hole and all, between donuts and vinyl records.

  “So, I’m sorry. I was a total ass. That’s first. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I will apologize to everyone personally. Mr. Jones, Moby. All of them.”

  In the last paragraph of that clipping from the Times-Dispatch, it had been reported, with a certain editorial bemusement, that after foiling the robbery, storekeeper Jaffe had been heard to apologize to the would-be robber for having beaned him with a lead ingot.

  “Okay, okay,” Archy said, wigwagging his hand impatiently. “I got it. Apology accepted. What’s the second thing?”

  “The second thing is,” Nat said, and as he prepared to adumbrate the second item on his agenda, it did him the great favor of occurring to him: a sentence that his father, rest his soul, had never quite managed to articulate aloud, at least in Nat’s hearing. “I am not going to lose this motherfucking store.”

  “Well, all right.”

  “Because I don’t know about you, but I feel like, Archy, if I don’t have this place? I’m not sure I really have a place.”

  “I hear you.”

  “You think it’s melodramatic.”

  “You? No way.”

  “Because I’m totally serious,” Nat said. “Look at me. What else am I fit for, you know? The ice melts, where do you put the penguin?”

  “A valid question.”

  “Where else am I going to be.”

  “In the spiritual sense, you mean.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Besides,” Archy said, his eyebrows saying, Brace yourself, you are about to get fucked with, “like, in your house. With your family.”

  “Archy, I love my wife, and I love my son. You know that.”

  “I do.”

  “You’ll attest to that.”

  “I will.”

  “But this store is my world. These are my records. You know?”

  “I do know, Nat.” For all of Archy’s teasing, the tongue-in-cheek approbations, Nat had felt his words landing, sticking, here and there, like snow on ready ground. When you chose to pledge your share of labor and your worldly assets to partnership with a man who liked to get up on his high horse, make speeches, let it rip, it was probably because you knew that somebody had to do that from time to time, and it wasn’t going to be you. “This store is our world.”

  “You get that.”

  “I do.”

  “So that’s why I’m not just going to stand around being useless,” Nat said, having worked it all out: the feeling of being caught under the wheels of the Dogpile juggernaut that Mirchandani’s news had first engendered. The bitterness of his talk with Julie. The memories of his father’s bookmark life. “I’m going to fight them.”

  “Gibson Goode?”

  “Gibson Goode. Chan Flowers. All those motherfuckers.”

  Archy smiled, neither mocking nor quite pleased. The smile you gave something, good or bad, when it showed up right on time.

  “You’ll help me, right, Arch? If I promise I won’t do anything stupid, lose my temper? If I keep it constructive and positive? You’re going to help me fight?”

  Before he could get an answer out of Archy—not that, when you came right down to it, he really needed one—a pattern of percussion intruded from outside the store, getting itself all tangled up with the thing Jack DeJohnette was laying down on the store’s turntable; the door banged open; and the boys came in, Julie and that kid, Julie giving off strong waves of something heavily plated with Moog and in a tricky time signature, sounded like Return to Forever. The boy never went anywhere without that fucking eight-track now, bopping all over town with his woeful Isro and his bell-bottom jeans, some kind of little Jewish soul elf. All of Nat’s regret and retrospective longing to connect to his son seemed to turn at once to irritation. He reached for the eight-track’s dial, and the volume dropped to zero.

  “Who’s this?” Nat turned to the other boy. “Who are you?”

  “Okay,” Julie said. “So. Dad.”

  From the time he went verbal—two, three years old—Julie had made it a point to appear before the bench with his arguments scrubbed and tidied. Business plan all formatted and punctuated. Scheming, deep scheming, but letting you see that he was scheming, that your consciousness of his machination was a part, maybe the key element, of his scheme.

  “This is Titus Joyner. He and I met in my film class, you know, ‘Sampling as Revenge,’ the Tarantino thing, which by the way is awesome, this week we get to watch Clockwork Orange, which is possibly not as great as 2001 or The Shining but is maybe number three, as I think you will agree.”

  Nat signaled that he was willing at least to argue this—he was not personally interested in any top three that did not include Barry Lyndon—but something had come over Archy. He stared at Titus Joyner, unblinking, breathing through his mouth. A kind of exploratory alarm, Nat would have said, as if he’d just realized he had left his wallet in a taxicab in a city far away and was trying to remember how much money it contained.

  “Yeah,” Julie said. “So, moving along, Titus, say hi, Titus.”

  “Hi.”

  “So, what can I tell you? Titus just moved to Oakland, not, what, not even two months ago, from Texas. He is fourteen years old, extremely intelligent, and well behaved. Really good at MTO. Has excellent habits of personal hygiene, as you can see.”

  Indeed, the kid’s pleats, seams, and hemlines were all crisp and tidy. His nails were flawless seashells.

  “He was living with his granny Shy in Texas, but Shy died, and now he is living at his old, crazy, like, senile auntie’s house, where there were already—what was it—fourteen?”

  He turned to his friend, who was staring blindly up at Art Kane’s famous photograph of that great day in Harlem, looking like his ears were full of hornets that he was trying not to anger or disturb.

  “Nine,” he said softly.

  “Nine!” Julie cried, as if this were a number even greater and more outrageous than fourteen. “He’s living in unsafe, unhealthy, and unsanitary conditions, and don’t get all wiggy on me, okay, Dad, but I told him that, pending an intense family discussion between you and Mom, he might be able, we might consider, seeing as how he is such an awesome, nice, smart person with so many startling creative ideas and what I might be tempted to call a truly fresh cinematic vision—”

  “Resist the temptation,” Nat said. “I beg you.”

  “I was hoping he could stay with us. Unless maybe—”

  Julie turned to Archy. Hitherto, he had been carried away on a gust of his own enthusiasm, but his nerve or his blarney seemed to fail him as he saw the look in Archy’s eyes, which Nat felt he would have to describe, trying to avoid exaggeration, as raw panic. The surname Joyner belatedly played a chord in Nat’s memory, a mu major, something a little off about its beauty. Jamila Joyner, a girl Archy had been stuck on, stuck to, the summer when he and Nat first met. Right after he came home from Kuwait. A girl who stayed around enough to wear Archy out, then went on home to Oklahoma. Or possibly, come to think of it, to Texas.

  “Well,” Nat said. “I guess congratulations are in order.”

  Archy stood in the front bay window of his house like a doomed captain on the bridge of a starship, ponderin
g, as if it were a devourer of planets, the approach of his wife’s black BMW. Stroking his chin, using intricate mental tables of cosines and angles to decide whether the intensity of Gwen’s response to the business with Elsabet Getachew would be squared or full-on cubed by the news that his child had appeared out of nowhere, or rather out of some nowhere known only, it seemed, to Julie Jaffe. The results of Archy’s calculations were sobering.

  The BMW pulled up to the house and then sat, lights lit, engine heat troubling the atmosphere above its hood, windshield a glossy gray-blue blank of reflected sky. Daylight was taking its sweet time fading into dusk, and the street at suppertime seemed to be holding its breath, torn into patches of deep shadow and sunshine, motionless but for the little white moths stitching their loopy crewelwork in the honeysuckle. In the sandpit of the tiny playground, dozens of toy vehicles and appliances lay bleached and upended, primary-colored plastic ruins as of some toddler cataclysm.

  The door on the driver’s side swung open. Gwen took hold of the doorframe with her left hand and the door itself with her right and, jaw set, head lowered as to a thankless task, simultaneously heaved and thrust herself, belly first, out of the car and onto her feet. For a few seconds she wavered there like the evening itself. Then she reached into the back of the car and came out not with the assault rifle, rocket launcher, or perhaps flying guillotine that Archy feared but rather an aluminum water bottle and the shoulder strap of her birthing bag. She tried to yank the bag by its strap through the space between the back of the driver’s seat and the doorframe, but it got wedged. She jerked hard and then stumbled as something—the strap, probably—gave way. When she went to unlatch the seat back, she dropped her car keys. They bounced once and skittered under the car. She let the broken strap dangle and fell back against the side of the car with a show of quiet despair.

  Over the past hour, Archy had envisioned Gwen’s return according to a number of scenarios, incorporating into these fantasies of anger, reproach, and reconciliation elements derived from Italian opera, pornographic films of the mid-eighties, and footage of tornadoes vandalizing Kansas with lightning and wind. Gwen lost her temper so rarely, and with such a lasting sense of self-betrayal, that it was difficult for Archy to imagine with any accuracy how far beyond the unprecedented events of that morning she was capable of going. But it had never occurred to Archy that Gwen would come home to him covered in defeat.

  She stood there leaning against the car, looking at the broken strap of her birthing bag as if its frayed ends encoded the general intentions of the universe toward her. Archy padded down the front walk of his house, his step light and cautious, the pavement warm against his bare feet. He assumed that the sorrow, the weariness of spirit attested to by the slump of Gwen’s shoulders, by her bowed head, by the whole pregnant-lady version of The End of the Trail she had going, that all this served to express the cost to her of returning to his cheating embrace.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, all his planned speeches and formulas forgotten. “Gwen, I just—Ho.” He came around to face her square-on and saw the blood on her shirt. The antennae of two sutures on her cheek. “Damn, girl, what the fuck?” An iron bar, cold as a flagpole in winter, plunged into his chest. “Are you—?”

  “It’s not my blood,” Gwen said in a bitter tone, as if to suggest that by rights it ought to be. She raised her head and tried to meet his gaze but could not seem to manage it. “I—” Now she looked at him. She had those beautiful Seminole eyes, mysterious and hooded, their color between tea and molasses. They filled rapidly with tears as if through the sudden breach of some inner dam. “I messed up, Archy.”

  She let go of the broken strap, fell against him. Smell of a hospital in her hair, smell of hard work and failure rising off her body, and somewhere in the midst of it, a miscellaneous note of incense. She went completely boneless on him, expecting him to hold her up, all one hundred and sixty-odd pounds of her, bloodstains and belly, arms thrown around his shoulders. He resolved to do it. He belted her to him with his arms like her chute had failed and they were plummeting earthward a hundred miles an hour at the mercy of wind, cable, and rippling silk. He resolved on the spot to be equal to the challenge of bearing up. He was a husband who could be true. He was Superman grabbing hold of the train engine as it plunged from the bridge.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he said.

  As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he regretted them. This breakdown or whatnot, he saw, had nothing to do with him or with their marriage. Gwen had sacrificed her dignity to return home not for his sake but for her own, because she needed to fall apart, and that was something she would permit herself to do only at home. So here she was, bloody and wrung out and ragged, and Archy had no motherfucking way of knowing whether it was going to be okay.

  “Did somebody die?” he said. “Gwen. Honey. A baby?” She shook her head. “A mom?”

  “Nobody,” she said. “Nobody died. The baby, the mom’s fine.”

  “You’re fine, too?”

  She nodded. He laid a hand on her belly, and as always, the contact stirred him sexually. Something fructuous about the swell of her, asking to be opened.

  “The baby?”

  She stopped crying abruptly, with a sputtering finality, like the last frame of film running out on a reel. “The baby is fine.”

  “Aw, then,” he said, fighting down the hard-on, even more inappropriately timed than usual, that had begun to unfurl in his boxers.

  “No, Archy, listen, I can’t—I’m not—Oh, Archy, I messed up so-ho-ho bad.”

  She sank to the ground, and Archy sank with her, the Man of Steel dragged along by the plummeting train. His arms ached, his knees trembled. Gwen seemed by the second to gain pounds and babies and fluids in her amnion.

  “Come on inside. Yeah. Stand up. It’s okay.”

  He hoisted her and she stood up, her legs going back about their business, but that was all she could seem to manage. She laid her head against his chest and rested. He was thinking, I can stay here like this all night until my arms break off and fall on the ground in a million pieces, failing to notice at first how intently Gwen was pressing her face against the front of his shirt, pressing it right up to the skin at his collar, now the hollow of his throat, taking deep inquisitorial breaths.

  “Why do you smell like candles?” she said.

  She drew back, watching him. She pulled a wad of paper napkins from the pocket of her bloodstained shirt and blew her nose.

  “Long story,” he said, “Now tell me what happened.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it. I lost my temper. Now we’re going to have our privileges revoked at Chimes, and Aviva’s pissed off at me, and we’ll probably have to close down our practice, and . . . and . . .”

  Titus Joyner, riding his brakeless bicycle, rounded the corner by the Island of Lost Toys, the surface of his bare chest lustrous as motor oil. Wearing his T-shirt with the neck hole encircling his head and the rest hanging down behind like a burnoose. Archy’s heart tipped and fell from its shelf. He had persuaded Nat and the boys to go no farther for now, to say nothing to Aviva or anyone else, least of all Gwen. He did not deny or even seriously question the boy’s claim on his paternity. He remembered having heard about Jamila getting pregnant with a child he half assumed to be his, a half assumption that did not prompt him to protest or take any action at all when she went off to Arkansas or wherever to have it. Whenever he heard one of the popular songs of the era, which had provided a soundtrack, as it were, to the blind flailing of his spermatozoa through the inner darkness of Jamila Joyner, he might spare a nano-momentary thought for that child. But until this afternoon Titus had remained an eternal fat, stolid toddler dressed in the world’s tiniest tuxedo, as in the one photo of him that Archy had seen, years ago, sent by the Texas grandmother along with news of Jamila’s death in a car crash. No other comment, no request for the check—in the amount of $375.00—that Archy had provided, uniquely, in return f
or the photo and the tragic news. He had kept his distance with the boy in the store today, but he was careful not to be cold or unfriendly. The embrace they had exchanged was perfunctory and all but imperceptible to Archy behind the turmoil of his emotions. Now the boy pedaled past, eyes forward, expression blank, looking at neither Archy nor Gwen, neither left nor right, wearing his T-shirt do-rag. He was, like Gibson Goode and the impending fat, stolid toddler in Gwen’s belly, going to ruin everything.

  “Who’s that?” Gwen said, watching Archy intently as he watched the kid ride past. There must have been some kind of slackening of Archy’s jaw or widening of his eyes. “Archy, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” said Archy. At the last possible instant the kid folded. His eyes slid toward Archy, flicked at him before returning front. “I’m— Nothing. No.”

  He watched the kid ride off, then turned to face the ruination of his wife, trying to think what he could do. “Wait here,” he said. He walked over to the El Camino in the driveway and opened its passenger door, then slid out the enormous pink aircraft carrier of the cake box from Neldam’s.

  “What,” Gwen said, taking a deep shuddering breath, her face wary but brightening visibly, at least to Archy’s trained eye. “In God’s name. Is that.”

  “Dream of Cream,” Archy said.

  II

  The Church of Vinyl

  Can’t play a Hammond through no apology,” said Mr. Randall “Cochise” Jones. “ ’Less you got some new type a patch cord I don’t know about.”

  Making it a joke, wanting to hide his irritation. Up all night, spinning five thoughts in his head: Gig tomorrow. Brown and gold plaid. Bird need his arthritis drops. Gas up the van. Get the Leslie. Gig, plaid, bird, van, Leslie; needle in a locked groove endlessly circling the spindle of his mind. Mr. Jones felt ashamed of that scanty midnight track list. When he was a younger man, his insomnia used to play it all. Sex, race, law, politics, Bach, Marx, Gurdjieff. All kinds of wild and lawless thinking, free-format, heavy, deep, and wide. Now, shit. Fit it all onto a pissant five-track EP going around and around.