Telegraph Avenue

by Michael Chabon

  At these words, perhaps, the state senator felt a slight misgiving, a mild Braxton-Hicks spasm of dread, recalling the purpose for which he had been flown up here yesterday, aboard Gibson Goode’s private airship, the Minnie Riperton, Goode on his way to some kind of memorabilia show, the senator catching a ride.

  “And that reminds me.”

  He turned back to the hostess, her evident impatience with his delay motivated less by some schedule she was sticking to than by her possible desire for reassurance about the upcoming election, which he hoped he would be able to provide.

  “All right, Robin,” he told her. “Let’s do this.”

  He shook hands with the pregnant woman, who appeared distracted, lost in thought, even surprisingly, given her original discomfiture, uninterested in the rising star from Illinois.

  “You’re right,” she said, and for a second he could not retrieve the thread of conversation that she was following. “I have been wasting my life.”

  “Oh, don’t be too hard on the brother, now,” he said, trying, with departure imminent, to keep his tone light.

  “I don’t mean him,” she said. “I mean, I do, but I don’t. I mean what you said about work. About putting your heart and soul into something meaningful. Thank you for that.”

  She shook his hand with a puzzling solemnity.

  The band was silenced, the guests assembled, and Barack Obama loped into the living room, at ease and smiling. He stood against a high wall painted cinnamon brown, under a display of retablos, battered squares of scrap tin and steel on which credulous souls of Mexico had painted, with painful and touching simplicity of technique, scenes that depicted their woes and expressed in stark terms their gratitude to the Holy Mother of God or various santos and santas for the granting of relief. The state senator seemed to at least one observer to feel the weight of such wishes upon him. He paused for a couple of seconds before opening his remarks.

  “He was the closest thing you had to a father,” said the pregnant woman to the man in the big purple suit, filling, at least for those standing nearby, that prolonged silence with her grave whisper, “of course you’ve got to bury him properly.”

  The kid sat at Aviva’s kitchen table, wearing the cast-iron dungarees, sweater vest, and short-sleeved plaid shirt in which he had bade her good night the previous evening. If Julie was always a premature zayde, born nostalgic, born cranky, born 103 years old, then maybe that was the connection he felt to old man Titus, what to make of him, hunched over a magazine beside a box of Nat’s All-Bran in an acrylic sweater vest, sinking his palm into the cheek of his inclined head, so lost in whatever he was reading that he did not look up when Aviva stopped in the doorway, belting her robe more tightly around her waist, and said, “Morning, you.”

  Titus sat there, perfecting his stillness. She had yet to make up her mind about the kid—she was still collecting evidence—but Aviva liked him for his immobility, his effortless parsimony of movement. He was not a Drummer on All Resonant Surfaces, like Julie, or a Perpetual Hummer of Infinite Tunes, like Nat. She was willing to give Titus credit for that much, at least.

  Over the course of the day and two nights of his exile among the Jaffes, Aviva had gotten into the habit of doling out to Titus these modest quanta of credit, none larger or more valuable than, say, a nickel, or a pinto bean. For his neatness, his familiarity with soap and water, his polite manners, his readiness to clear his place after dinner without being told. Behind each of these qualities, she felt the ghostly hard hand of the late Texan grandmother, and it must have been in honor of that lost woman of iron that Aviva was keeping Titus’s file open, because from the instant he came limping into the house with that constipated granddaddy walk of his, humping a stained sailor’s duffel, bearing, safety-pinned to his soul like a note scrawled in his putative father’s hasty hand, an indefinite embargo on sharing the news of his existence with her partner and best friend, Aviva’s snap judgment on the kid was: Trouble. Trouble for everyone but trouble especially, she guessed, for Julie, who had clearly fallen into some kind of inchoate and disorderly love with Titus Joyner.

  Nat agreed (a rare pairing of those words) that on the advent of Titus, all the recent incidents of inexplicable behavior on the part of their son appeared to snap into alignment. Only Aviva’s long habit of taking the temperature of her own racism, of her biases and stereotypes about young black males (or about the iron-hard perdurance of their grandmothers) enabled Aviva to set aside, for the time being, her gut reaction—the boy was trouble—and admire Titus’s stillness. Here was yet another quality that he did not share with her own ill-washed, ill-mannered, sloppy, and hyperactive offspring.

  Then she heard the moist, slow rasp of Titus’s breathing: The kid was sleeping. His hair, hitherto maintained with curatorial punctilio in an archival 1973 Afro, was lumps and nap, a topographical globe. He sat propped up and snoozing in the mild gray sunshine that irradiated the morning fog outside the kitchen window, over a copy of—she went over, reached in, and peeled back the front cover of the magazine—American Cinematographer.

  Out of the self-assembling nanoparticles of her pessimism, in Aviva’s imagination, a narrative began to take shape. Titus’s nappy head, the unchanged clothes to which there clung an unmistakable if faint smell of Berkeley at night (purple salvia, jasmine, fog, cat spray), the evident depth of his slumber.

  Oh, the sneaky little shit!

  She backed out of the kitchen so as not to wake him before her theory could be confirmed. Like most people with a suspicious nature, she was gifted at sneakiness herself and inclined to be stealthy in the corroboration of her theories. She crept upstairs to Julie’s room and eased open the door, ignoring three separate tacked-up signs warning off a variety of intruders in Klingon, runic, and (presumably) simulated blood. In the dim light, in his IKEA bed, Julie lay curled into a ball so impossibly tiny that she didn’t dare look at it, lest nostalgia for the vanished little old man he once had been impede her investigation. On the floor of the attic room, the futon bed, unrolled two nights earlier to accommodate Titus, bore a faint oblong indentation, but it was still made, the covers as tucked and taut as the boy’s shirttails and pleats. To Aviva, this suggested or rather confirmed that Titus had lain down on it, fully dressed, until he felt that it was safe to sneak out through the lone attic window, whose lower sash was open as wide as it could go. Under the window, Titus’s megalith sneakers lounged at louche angles, suggesting that he had kicked them off as soon as he came tumbling back in from outside.

  Aviva went over to stand beside Julie’s bed, trying to determine from the visible evidence—the arcing bones of his spine, a tangled sketch of knees and elbows in the bedclothes—whether he, too, had sneaked out of the house last night, then sneaked back in. Using perspicacity as a shield against panic. No telltale shoes, no flung socks.

  Aviva went back down to the kitchen and began angrily to cook Titus’s stated favorite breakfast, pancakes and bacon. She broke the eggs as if they were the spurious arguments of unworthy adversaries. With the contempt we reserve for those who fail to deliver on arrant boasts, she watched the bacon shrink in its own fat. She peeled the bubbling pancakes from the griddle and flipped them over with a sense of cutting off a pointless discussion. In the batter, buttermilk and baking soda enacted their allegory of her emotional pH. By the time she had, in her view, cashed out the boy’s account in silver-dollar pancakes and a sizzling rasher of the Berkeley Bowl’s best applewood-smoked, she had worked through and expended most of the outrage that her discovery of his nocturnal adventuring had stirred in her. This was in compliance with Aviva Roth-Jaffe’s official policy on outrage, which was that, even when justified, it was an ineffective tool.

  “Okay, mister,” she said, setting the plate in front of him. “Wake up.”

  He started, opened his eyes wide, unstuck his cheek from his hand. He looked at her, at the plate, back to Aviva. Putting it together, where he was, what she had made for him, those wide brown e
yes going all moist and puppy-dog. Just as Aviva felt the last inch of annoyance drain away, she saw Titus remember what a hard-on he was supposed to be. His gaze iced over. His nostrils flared as if they detected in the steam off the pancakes a distinct whiff of something vile.

  “Thank you,” he said, neutering his voice of any gratitude, cutting a neat wedge out of the stack of pancakes.

  “When did you get in?”

  Instead of replying, he hoisted up stratified forkfuls, one after another, as if they were riding a conveyor belt to his mouth.

  “You can drop the man-of-few-words routine, dude. I hear you running your mouth to Julie. I know you think you’re making a statement about how pointless it is to talk to adults or white people or whatever, but you’re just being disrespectful. I haven’t done anything to deserve your disrespect. I know your grandmother didn’t raise you to be rude.”

  He chewed the last mouthful, weighing her argument, thinking it through. He swallowed. Took a sip of milk. “Could you please repeat the question?” he said.

  “What time did you get in? I know you were out, Titus. Your bed hasn’t been slept in. Don’t even try to lie to me.”

  “Huh, yeah, well, I don’t wear no watch, so. . . .”

  The confirmation of her guess did not amaze her—her guesses, rooted in pessimism, were tantamount to Laws of Physics—but neither did it console her. She felt her initial sense of panic begin to return. “Did Julie go out with you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh my God.”

  Aviva fell into a chair at the table. Sometimes in the event of a shoulder dystocia, after everything else had failed, a doctor would attempt the Zavanelli maneuver, planting his hand on the head of the shoulder-bound baby, pushing it back up into the darkness. Aviva effected a similar maneuver on the sense of panic that was struggling out of her into the light of morning.

  “Well,” she said. She sat back, trying to come up with something reasonable and authoritative to say. “Where did you go?”

  He seemed genuinely to consider attempting to answer her question. Then he picked up a piece of bacon and shrugged. “Everywhere,” he said. “Just, like, walking around.”

  “Walking around?”

  “Riding my bike. Him riding his skateboard. Can’t do much beside ride it, but he can hook a ride on my bike, I kind of like give him a tow.”

  She could see it: Julie rolling along behind Titus through the summer darkness of Berkeley, holding on to his friend’s shoulder, the way she had seen other pairs of skater boys do.

  “I don’t want you doing that anymore,” she said. “Not while you’re a guest in my house. You go to bed, you stay in bed, you wake up in bed in the morning. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She had to admit that she loved the “sirs” and “ma’ams” that flowed from his lips so readily, drawled out like pats of butter smeared across a biscuit. She remembered hiking in Yosemite with Nat and Julie a few summers back. Climbing to the top of the Mist Trail up a preposterous stairway of stones proposed, cut, hauled, and fixed immovably into place, proof against time and earthquakes, under the auspices of the WPA. She remembered feeling grateful to those long-dead men, the planners and the workers, for their foresight, their labor, the heroic absurdity of that granite stair. That was how she felt, whenever he would “ma’am” her, toward the dead grandmother of this boy.

  “When you do that, Titus,” she said, softening her tone because she was getting in his face, “when you sneak out of my house like that, you are showing disrespect toward me.”

  The boy shook his head, face indented with the thumbprint of a smirk, eyes downcast to show his pity for her.

  “What?” Aviva said. “You don’t agree?”

  “I ain’t— I’m not saying nothing.”

  He took up the study of the backsplash behind the sink, tiled in iridescent rust red and cream. Aviva once hated that tile, then for a decade ignored it, and now felt toward those earth tones the same poignant derision she felt toward much of the surviving evidence of the 1970s. The boy might have been staring longingly at some bleak and lonely peak of snow.

  “I don’t even want to be here.” His eyes abandoned their scrutiny of the high cold home of his soul long enough to toss a mocking look in her direction. “No disrespect.”

  “Really?” Aviva said, knowing that she had him on that one, wondering what she hoped to gain from prolonging this conversation, asking herself why she couldn’t cut the kid a break. “That isn’t what Julie said. He said you begged him to let you stay with us.”

  “What? Nah, he just—I—nah, no, ma’am.”

  They were coming more abject and automatic now, those “ma’ams,” and she pressed it, channeling an old, dead Texan woman she had never met, getting her thumbs into the seam she had found.

  “That’s what I heard. Stay with the Jaffes, eat all the tempeh you can hold.”

  He looked at the plate in front of him with the face of one betrayed. “You put tempeh in the pancakes?”

  “Only a little,” Aviva said. “Kidding. Nobody’s going to force you to eat tempeh against your will. So, uh, okay, so where did you go?”

  He pushed the suspect plate away and started to stand up.

  “I didn’t excuse you, mister.”

  Titus nodded; that was indeed the case. He sat back down in the chair and turned to an article in American Cinematographer, a man in a white suit gazing at a wedding-cake riverboat that was stuck on a jungle mountain, she forgot the name of that one. An old back issue Julie had picked up somewhere, the Flea Market, the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse. She got up, rebelted her robe, poured herself a cup of coffee, and sat down across the table from him. Fitzcarraldo. She had seen it at the Telegraph Repertory junior year, right around the time she met Nat, who tore tickets there two nights a week. Eighty-four, ’85, right toward the bitter end for that stuffy old black box. Not long before the night he came to her rescue. Who knew what might have befallen her if he hadn’t come along, with his belated Isro and his unlikely, heart-melting Tidewater accent? Remembering Nat as he was then, the world’s most pretentious high school dropout, coming on to her with some complicated theory about Peter Lorre and a jumbo cup of free popcorn. Simultaneously working at Rather Ripped Records and Pellucidar Books, all long gone. The man like some exiled Habsburg, bred and schooled to unite the crowns of kingdoms lost. At one time she had been able to console herself with his air of heroic obsolescence for the burden, material and emotional, that being married to him imposed upon her. Now the best she could hope for most of the time was to shake her head at him with more amusement than scorn.

  “So, okay, you don’t want to be here. Where do you want to be? With your dad?”

  The boy appeared to find the article about Fitzcarraldo quite fascinating, or perhaps he had fallen asleep again. Aviva couldn’t see his eyes.

  “You and Julie have your last class tonight.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Julie says you want to be a movie director.”

  No answer.

  “He said you’ve written a screenplay.”

  He dipped the tip of his left forefinger—he was a lefty—into the pool of maple syrup that remained on his plate. She resisted the urge to slap his hand, as she would have slapped Julie’s. It took him a while to figure out what he wanted or could permit himself to say.

  “That he knows about.”

  “You’ve written more than one?”

  “Five.”

  “Tell me the title of one of them.”

  “May I be excused now?”

  “Just another minute of torture.”

  “Incident at Al-Qufa Bridge.”

  “Al-Qufa Bridge? Is it—is it a war story?”

  “It’s a, like, adaptation of ‘Incident at Owl Creek Bridge.’ Only in the Gulf War, not the Civil,” he said, catching her endlessly policed racist self red-handed. “By Ambrose Bierce, so it’s in the public domain, so I don’t
got to pay no rights.”

  “You know, your father, Archy, he served in the Gulf War. In the army.”

  No answer.

  “Did you know that?”

  “Can I go?”

  “Go where?” She had a sudden intuition. “Do you know where he lives?”

  “Where who lives?”

  “Archy. You ride by his house, don’t you? At night. On your bike.”

  “I have to use the bathroom.”

  He looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time all morning. His eyes were filled with pleading, begging her to put him out of his misery.

  “Fine,” she said, and as he darted around her to get out of the Torquemada chamber, she touched his shoulder with a right hand that had kept a thousand children from going too far, too fast. “But hear me out. I don’t want you getting my son into trouble, staying out all night. And don’t you ever lie to me again.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Don’t call me that anymore, please. Aviva will do.”

  “Got it,” the boy said. “Now, please, get your fucking hand off me, Aviva.”

  She let him go. He started out of the kitchen, then turned back.

  “Your boy’s a little dick-sucking faggot,” he said. “Case you were wondering. And that ain’t no lie.”

  “Way to start,” Aviva said. “Way to build that foundation.”

  “Call me Moby.”

  Gwen clutching her belly as she ran up the front walk of the Nefastis Building, a three-story concrete dingbat whose breezeway spawned dust devils of swirling take-out menus and bougainvillea bracts. Miles from the elevator, possibly the slowest elevator in the Western Hemisphere, miss it and she would have to wait at least ten minutes. Calling, “Oh, Mr. Oberstein, could you please hold that for me?”

  The name on the shingle that Gwen walked past every working day of her life read OBERSTEIN, and she had never met anyone who looked more like an Oberstein, particularly in a three-piece suit. Plus, it always seemed to her that the man’s preferred nickname preceded a silent Dick. But the man stuck out a Weejun to keep the elevator doors from closing in her face, and he spent a lot of money every month helping to thin the vinyl herds at Brokeland, so she called him what he wanted her to call him and thanked him for holding the door.