Telegraph Avenue

by Michael Chabon

  She towed him down to Forty-second Street and turned the corner. They rode past Mr. Jones’s, the house looking empty and forlorn. On the porch stood the perch where Fifty-Eight used to sit, empty, abandoned. She pedaled on, rolling toward the door of the house where Titus’s auntie moldered like some ancient monarch whose kingdom had gone to lawlessness and ruin. The lady—she’d said to call her Mrs. Jew—hoisted the bike and rolled it up the crumbling front steps of the porch. She pounded on the door, bang! bang!

  “Titus,” she told the young man who opened the door, eighteen, nineteen, pop-eyed and heavy-jawed, with a frowsy tangle of chin beard. Shirtless, lean-bellied, his skin blotted with unreadable, uninterpretable tattoos. The elastic of his boxer shorts and an inch of dark blue lozenges on light blue background emerged from the waistband of his knee-length denim shorts.

  “Titus,” Mrs. Jew said again.

  The young man gardened at his chin beard with two fingers. Julie lingered on the bottom step, feeling exposed and dangerously faggoty in his short shorts and his sleeveless T-shirt. From the open mouth of the house came a steady exhalation of marijuana and a low rumble of television, maybe a football game. There were voices, too. Not angry or hostile. Just voices. People talking, laughing.

  “I teach kung fu,” Mrs. Jew said.

  “Kung fu?”

  “Bruce Lee Institute. Around the corner.”

  Julie remembered his father telling him once about how when Julie was little and he would go around the neighborhood wearing his little Batman or Spider-Man costume year-round, people used to think he was cute and all. But when he went around the block dressed up like Superman, people would light up. Over and above the cuteness of some little dude masquerading around all solemn-face in the gaudy S-suit, there was something about the idea of Superman that made people happy. It was probably like that when you mentioned Bruce Lee.

  “Bruce Lee,” the young man said. “He really was a student there?”

  “I was his teacher.”

  “For real? You?”

  “I kick his ass,” said Mrs. Jew. “On a daily basis. ”

  “Yo,” the young man called, glancing over his shoulder into the house. “Where Titus at?”

  Somebody said something, and the man stepped aside. It was easily accomplished, without violence, subterfuge, or even use of the word “please.” Julie felt ashamed of his trepidation and anxiety, but he did not renounce them as he followed Mrs. Jew into the house. It was old and cramped, maybe kind of charming once upon a time. The fireplace mantel had that medieval feel you saw in a lot of little bungalows. Handsome columns of painted wood held up the ceiling here and there. The living room was all about the television, an old rear-projection number whose sun-dimmed display struggled to contend with the color palette of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Three teenage boys and two girls on a sectional tartan-plaid sofa repaired with accumulated yards of silver duct tape. On the floor a girl about Julie’s age, in a Catholic-school skirt, and four or five little kids. The girl looked more Latina than black to Julie, and one of the little kids was almost white, with drifts of reddish-brown curls. Across from the plaid sofa, a young man in a wheelchair breathed air from a green steel tank. He laughed into the plastic breathing mask. An empty bag of spicy Cheetos lay on the floor. On the coffee table stood two large bottles of Coke. A pizza box. A plastic tub that once held Trader Joe’s animal crackers. It was messy, dirty, crowded, and there was a miasma of Cheetos, but mostly, it was a bunch of kids sitting around watching a show that Julie also enjoyed. He had been expecting strobe lights, peeling wallpaper, people passed out on the floor, the flash of crack pipes. Twenty-four-hour pounding of woofers. Baleful people, he thought, lurking in the corners of shadowy rooms.

  He was such a racist.

  The young man who had greeted them at the door led them all the way to the back of the house, down some ill-sorted steps to an addition. In one of the bunks, a boy not much younger than Julie lay cuddling a Game Boy.

  “Titus?” Julie called.

  It was a kind of bunkhouse, furnished with a variety of bunk beds of different periods and styles, some made of steel tubing, some of scuffed and gouged wood. Not much light. In the rear corner, on the bottom bunk, under a Blue’s Clues sleeping bag, Julie found Titus. “Hey,” he said.

  “What are you doing here?” Titus said from under the comforter, voice muffled but sounding, to Julie’s ear, roughened by weeping. “Man, get the fuck out.”

  “Okay,” Julie said, and tears came to his own eyes. He started to turn away but then wiped his face with his arm. The little kid with the Game Boy was staring at him. “I just came to, uh, tell you that I thought you might want to know that Gwen is having the baby. About to. Right now. I mean, she’s in labor. If you come now, you, you know, you could kind of like, be there, or whatever. When your brother’s born.”

  Titus didn’t move or speak.

  “He got a brother?” said the boy, doubtful.

  “Almost,” said Julie. “Titus, come on. We got your bike. Let’s go, don’t miss this. It’s really awesome. Brothers are cool. I wish I had one.” He looked at the boy. “Right, brothers are cool?”

  “Not really,” the boy said.

  “Could you, maybe, like, could we get a little privacy?”

  “Why, so you can suck his dick?”

  “Yes, totally,” Julie said without missing a beat, exhilarated by his own daring. “Here.” He took five dollars out of his wallet. “Go buy some candy or something.”

  The kid left. Julie sat down on the corner of the bed.

  “I know, I mean, I get that you . . .” He took a breath, let it out. “I just wanted to say, if you came back here, you must have been feeling pretty lonely right then. Like, okay, Archy was being an ass and all. But, I mean, this is your brother, it’s a, here’s your chance, you know? To have somebody that loves you and looks up to you. Besides me, I mean, because I know that’s, like, not really such a big deal.”

  “Get up,” Mrs. Jew said. “Go to the hospital. Now. Or I will kick your butt. Do you believe me?”

  Titus sat up, looked at Julie, then back at Mrs. Jew. Nodded yes.

  Over. A rest between measures scored for kettledrums. A patch of blue sky between two rolling thunderheads.

  Gwen in the birthing bed, between contractions, hating the only friend she had in the world. Hating his aftershave: a compound of unlit cherry cigar and the cardboard pine tree dangling from the rearview of a taxicab. Underneath that smell a deeper rancor, raw bacon gone soft in the heat. Hating the shine of his scalp through crosshatched hair. The whitehead at the wing of his right nostril. The fur on the backs of his fingers. Hating him for not being Archy.

  Nat sat upright in a leatherette chair, chin raised, stiff-backed, looking like he was waiting for something freaky to happen, something that would demand more from him than he was prepared to deliver, like maybe any minute Nurse Sally was going to roll some weird Filipino piano into the room, made from sharks’ teeth and tortoiseshells and coir, which he would be expected to play. The expression on his face saying, Please, Lord, do not let this spectacle become any more revolting than it already is. Eyelids half-lowered, widening, narrowing again, the poor man trying to find that sweet spot between shut-tight-in-horror and wide-eyed-attentiveness-to-the-miracle-of-birth. Jitter in his legs. Hunch of impatience in his shoulders. Considering that the man had been married to a midwife for seventeen years, Gwen considered it surprising how little he seemed to know, recollect, or be able to intuit about the needs of a woman in labor. The sum of all the birthing wisdom he had managed to acquire was compassed within a cup of ice and the area of the washcloth that he regularly returned to the bathroom to douse with water and wring out in the sink before returning it, blessedly cool, to her forehead.

  “Thank you, Nat,” she said, furious with gratitude.

  Had to be a thousand degrees Kelvin in the LDR, Gwen feeling strangely but not pleasantly buoyant in the heat. Sweating, fouled, writh
ing. Hair like a gorgon’s. The bed a swamp. Her skin in full rebellion, as if the baby were something not only to be expelled from her womb but shed from the outside, too; the hospital gown intolerable, abrasive, a crust of toast against the roof of the mouth. Gwen felt desperate, wild to labor naked. Wanted to rip off the gown, burst from it like the Hulk trashing one of his professor-dude lab coats. But here was this guy who was her only friend, wanting to see her naked even less than she wanted him to. His gaze already, every time Gwen rolled over or sat up, lashing around the room like a loose garden hose. The man appalled by the horror of it all, head down, cringing, a palace lackey sent into the foulness of the labyrinth to tend the roaring Minotaur. And humming. Running a metal key, a broken bottleneck, back and forth endlessly along a taut string of piano wire.

  “Nat, boy, I beg you, you have to cut it out with the goddamn humming.”

  “What humming?” Nat said.

  He got up and opened Gwen’s phone for the tenth time, trying to raise Archy. The gesture exhausted Gwen; she hated it more than all of the other incredibly annoying things that Nat was being, doing, and saying right now, put together.

  “You might not want to do that. Archy Stallings comes through that door, Nat, swear to God, I’m going to call security on him.”

  She had caught him on the point of dialing the last digit, his finger hesitating over the nine. Eyebrows arched, looking at her, entertaining the remote possibility that he had misheard her.

  “Put. The motherfucking phone. Away.”

  Nat nodded, lips pursed, eyes wide, his expression saying, O-kay. He snapped the phone shut. Sometime around the time that Gwen uttered the obscenity, Nurse Sally had come back into the room, or rather, she was simply there again. Endowed, Gwen noted, with her own combination of odors, almond extract and armpit and some inexcusable derivative of gardenia.

  “Hi, Mom, we are fine?” Sally said in that mildly broken English, in that treacly little voice, with that unbearable giggle. “I think your wife, hee, she’s still trapped,” she told Nat. “That other mom, my goodness, she is taking her time.”

  “We’re fine, Sally,” Gwen said, working as much normal into her voice as she could manage. Tiring now. Needing to be done, with a longing that brought her—just when she hoped most to appear cheerful, fresh as a daisy, infinitely game to wait it out—to tears. “Just hanging.”

  “Totally,” Nat agreed.

  “How often?” Sally wanted to know. She went right to over to the heart monitor. “Huh,” she said. “I’m sorry, Mom. Ms. Shanks, I’m so sorry. I have to get the doctor in here. I know you want it to be Ms. Jaffe. I heard you had, I don’t know, some kind of problem with Dr. Lazar. But I think we can’t wait anymore.”

  “What is it?”

  “I think it’s a deceleration. Just a little one, but. Time for doctor.”

  “Oh,” Gwen said, watching Sally’s flowered back as she race-walked out of the room. “Oh, no.”

  She was barely able to get the words out as another great slow umbrella of pain opened inside her. Combing her thoughts, yanking them into a pigtail. Everything fading but the pain: the room and its furnishings, the whispering of pumps and monitors, the circuit of the hours, daylight, the world. The husband who had abandoned her to bear their child into that world. Pain like a closing of the eyes.

  “Hee breaths,” Nat managed to dig up from somewhere.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Gwen countersuggested.

  Paddling to stay on top of the wave as it broke, trying to ride it. A big one, really big, the biggest one yet, high, wide, deep, and rolling on and on like an earthquake. Impervious as an earthquake to her will, which amounted in the end to nothing more than the words “please be over” repeated for what felt like hours.

  This time there was no rest between measures, no patch of blue. The flow of pain within her simply shifted, shunted by some switch in the rail yard of her nervous system, from the bands of steel that belted her abdomen to someplace lower and farther inside. To her horror, then, and as from a great distance, she heard her own voice blubbering, pleading with Nat, begging him to run and get Aviva, drag her ass out of that other room with that cupcake girl, that skinny little tattooed chicken wing, because the baby was coming now, and Aviva needed to be there to catch it. For so long Gwen had scorned, condescended to, or pitied, in varying measure, the doomed and futile dreams, the hopeful visions of soft light and ambient music and a kind of vaginal satori, that pregnant women were prone, in their birth plans, to fall to dreaming. Now she saw that her own doomed birth plan, simple as it was, burned in her heart with a utopian fire. It comprised only one item, and that was Aviva, calm and crafty, without resort to knives, drugs, or synthesized hormones, smuggling the life of her man-child into the light. Any light, any child; let the only certainty be Aviva Roth-Jaffe. Gwen swore to Nat and to Sally, when the nurse came back in to announce that the doctor was on his way, that she would not permit this baby to exit her body, that she would hang on to him, that she would chew nails, lasso herself to granite boulders, fold space-time down to an endless single point, until Aviva could be fetched.

  “Go!” she tried, and maybe, right about then, she went a little crazy. “Jesus Christ, Nat, you’re so fucking slow! Go get Aviva now!”

  And yet all the time that she raved, and fought, and swore to keep the baby clutched within the intricate and formidable musculature of her uterus, she felt, more powerfully than any sorrow over the spoiling of her birth plan or the latest and greatest failure of her husband to meet his obligations to her, an urge to push the baby out. She knew that it would be useless, too late, for anybody to run.

  Nobody ran. Nat got to his feet. There was something weird in his expression, a stoniness, a condemned look, as if he had made up his mind to do something irretrievable. Looking back at this moment afterward, Gwen would see him stepping into a harsh shaft of light.

  “A minute,” Gwen said. “Just one. Oh, Nat, please. Let’s wait for Aviva just one more minute.”

  “No fucking way,” Nat said.

  So she abandoned her modest dream of utopia, pushed it out of herself with the violence of disappointment.

  “I am going to shit,” she announced.

  “Okay,” Nat said. “Go for it.”

  “It’s going to be so disgusting. I’m so disgusting.”

  “That reminds me,” Nat said. He went into the bathroom and washed his hands, lathering them with a precision she found commendable from the standpoint of hygiene but questionable given the imminence of parturition and, given the size of the turd that she felt she was about to expel from her bowels, possibly premature.

  “Oh my goodness,” she said. “Oh, Nat, oh.”

  He hurried out of the bathroom, drying his hands on a towel. Without apparent hesitation, he directed his attention to her crotch and said, “Oh my God. Okay.”

  He leaned in, reaching toward her, hunching the way he hunched over the keys of a piano. With a sense of regret, Gwen forced herself to stop pushing. The irritation, the discontent verging on rage that had been flowing freely through her for the last hour backed up inside her, weighing like a dammed river against the floodgates. She balanced on a point between rage and its relief. Amid the layers of conscious thought and the involuntary actions of her body, Gwen found herself in possession, coolly palmed in her thoughts like a dollar coin, of the idea that she was about to bring another abandoned son into the world, the son of an abandoned son. The heir to a history of disappointment and betrayal, violence and loss. Centuries of loss, empires of disappointment. All the anger that Gwen had been feeling, not just today or over the past nine months but all her life—feeding on it like a sun, using it to power her engines, to fund her stake in the American dream—struck her for the first time as a liability. As purely tragic. There was no way to partake of it without handing it on down the generations.

  Then Archy walked into the room in a yachting cap. Stood there gawping at her. He looked a mess, creased, untucked, h
is hair misshapen. In the instant before his new son tumbled, bawling and purple, into mortality and history, Gwen’s heart was starred like a mirror by a stone. One day the feeling might come to resemble forgiveness, but for now it was only pity, for Archy, for his father and his sons, for all the men of whom he was the heir or the testator, from the Middle Passage, to the sleeper cars of the Union Pacific, to the seat of a fixie back-alleying down Telegraph Avenue in the middle of the night.

  Then she was holding her own little man, with his smell like a hot penny and his milky blue eyes, and although she had taken no drugs and received no anesthesia, she thought she must be feeling kind of loopy nevertheless, because it seemed to her that a handsome black uniformed policewoman, whose name-badge read LESTER, had come into the LDR along with Nurse Sally and Dr. Lazar—brown cop, golden nurse, white doctor, all of a sudden it was like some kind of nightmarish version of Sesame Street in here—and was asking Nat Jaffe to come along with her. Nat washed his hands and then, exchanging a hangdog shrug with his partner, followed Officer Lester out of the room.

  “What’d I miss?” said Archy.

  A 2002 Subaru Outback station wagon, fatigues-green, pulled into the driveway of the house on Stonewall Road, over the blood-brown stain deposited five weeks earlier by the leaky gaskets of Aviva Roth-Jaffe’s Volvo. The man of the house, red-bearded and slight, was in the carport, adrift on a floe of spread newspaper, painting a blue crib white. He worked his brush down one slat, finishing the stroke with a dainty twist of the wrist, laid the brush across the open mouth of his paint can, and rose to his feet, clad in a spattered pair of fawn Naot sandals. You could see from his diffident smile that neither the Subaru nor the occupants of its front seat, a hulking black man in a pumpkin beret and a black teenager who, even through the windshield, was visibly in the grip of an intense, perhaps fatal, spasm of embarrassment, meant anything to him.