Telegraph Avenue (19 page)

“I might be the cause of this particular distraction coming your way,” Mr. Jones said. “Titus stays with Mrs. Wiggins. You know that house across the street from me?”

“Yeah, okay. She was Jamila’s, like, auntie.”

“I see the boy come out the house one day, something about him seemed familiar, you know? Boy had on a little sweater vest. Hair in order, crease in his jeans.”

“He does present a neat appearance, I will give you that.”

“We started talking.”

In those three words, Mr. Jones condensed a two-week history of passing nods. The boy coming and going on his bicycle at any given time of the day or night, Mr. Jones looking for signs of creeping doom on the child but observing, day after day, nothing of note except a small and fiercely maintained repertoire of button-downs and blazing white tees. Then, all at once, a blast of conversation, Titus drawn in by a burst of eerie parrot zitherings coming through Mr. Jones’s kitchen window, KQED having shown
The Third Man
the night before.

“Boy told me he wants to be a movie director,” Mr. Jones said. “Talking about Walter Hill, Sam Peckinpah, Stanley Kubrick. I’m thinking, well, all
right
.”

“He has taste.”

“Then he mentions how he likes Tarantino. So I told him about the class. Only when we got there, this one dude in a wheelchair.” Mr. Jones broke off, pressed his lips together. Took a deep breath, shaking his head in furious sorrow. “Says he has a
bird
allergy
.”

According to Dr. Hanselius at the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, bird allergies were, quote, extremely uncommon, unquote, and something in the lingering sting of humiliation that Mr. Jones had felt that night, a sense that he and the bird had been the victims of some esoteric form of bigotry, fed the anger that had been mounting in him since finding out that the Leslie wasn’t ready for tonight’s gig; since being thrown out of the Tarantino class; since the assassination of Marcus Foster or Dr. King; since 1953, 1938.

“Son of a bitch probably sleeps on a feather pillow every motherfucking night,” Mr. Jones said.

He looked at the bird, feathers giving off that faint parrot smell of scorched newspaper, in whom all his loneliness and outrage were distilled. Fifty-Eight screamed like a slide whistle.

“So I had to leave,” Mr. Jones said, aware that his explanation of his role in bringing Archy his son had fallen somewhat off track. “Titus stayed. And Nat’s boy was, like, sitting right there.”

“In the front row, right by the teacher?”

“Right down front and center. Guess the two of them, they must have hit it off. I thought maybe it could happen, boy might find his way to you sooner or later.”

“You mean you knew?”

“Not for sure.”

“But, I mean, Mr. Jones, how come you didn’t just
tell
me?”

Mr. Jones squirmed at the question. “Figured I already played my part. Might be y’all’s turn next. You and him.”

“Wow,” Archy said. “Huh. You are a cryptic old motherfucker sometimes, Mr. Jones.”

“I can’t disagree.”

“You move in mysterious ways. Did you tell
them
?”

Maybe that was when Mr. Jones began to realize that he felt offended. “Think I would say something to them, not you?”

“Must of taken some serious figuring between them, find their way to my doorstep.”

“That where Titus is now, your doorstep?”

“Figurative doorstep.”

“Not living with you?”

“From, like, one day to the next? Uh, yeah, ‘Hi, I’m your son,’ ‘Great, okay, you can move in’?”

Mr. Jones tried to find the flaw in this scenario. He loved Archy Stallings and had always tried to see the best in him. He was struggling to understand what would keep a man from taking hold of the unexpected blessing of a live boy, good-looking and correct, with commendable taste in film directors.

“I don’t move that fast, Mr. Jones, you know that. And like I told you, I didn’t say nothing about it yet to Gwen. I’m already number one on her shit parade due to certain lapses in judgment.”

“But you didn’t leave him with Mrs. Wiggins?”

“Nah, he’s staying with Nat and them for right now. Figured, make Julie happy. Have himself a little slumber party up in the attic.”

“That ain’t what you figured,” Mr. Jones said.

“No,” Archy agreed. “No, you’re right. It’s just, with the baby coming, and the Dogpile thing . . .”

“Distractions.”

“Yeah.”

“Getting you off your main focus.”

“That’s right.”

“Which is what, again?”

“Huh,” Archy said. “Hey, Mr. Jones? What’s wrong?”

Mr. Jones was up and out of his chair. He reached out a hand to Fifty-Eight, and the bird sidled up the gangplank to its inveterate perch.

“Mr. Jones, what did I say? Why you leaving? I’m not quite done, but I’m almost.”

“Just bring it to the gig,” Mr. Jones said. “It don’t work, fuck it.”

He started toward the back of the van, wanting—or feeling that at the very least he ought—to tell Archy about Lasalle, born and died April 14, 1966. Tell him about the two hours and seventeen minutes’ worth of the pride and the joy that Archy had been squandering for fourteen years. He went to the Econoline, slammed the doors on the empty cargo bay. Mr. Jones helped the bird onto the headrest of the driver’s seat, where he liked to ride, clutching the shoulder belt with one claw to keep its balance.

“Maybe you need to start trying to focus on the distractions instead,” Mr. Jones said. “Maybe then they wouldn’t be so distracting.”

“Mr. Jones! Hey, come on, now. What’d I say?”

Mr. Jones got into the van, started the engine. Even over the slobbering of its three-hundred-horsepower V8 Windsor, he could hear Archy repeating uselessly, “Mr. Jones, I’m sorry.”

“P
ulling a Band-Aid,” Gwen said.

“Not even,” Aviva said.

“You promise?”

“I promise. Be brave.”

Aviva was flying the bravery flag. Feet planted side by side, flat on the gray Berber wall-to-wall. New sandals with straps that crisscrossed in epic-movie-style up past her ankles, toenails freshly painted plum. Suntanned legs shaved, shins shining like bells in a horn section. Gray linen skirt and white linen blouse, not new but tailored with severity and maintained with care. Blouse buttoned to a professional altitude and yet at the collar managing to betray a fetching freckled wedge of clavicle and suprasternal notch. On her lap, an abstruse tome entitled
Acupuncture: Points and Meridians
.

“ ‘Be brave,’ ” Gwen said. She tugged at the hem of the overworked black maternity skirt she had pressed into service for this exercise in ritual humiliation. Her shirt, though crisp and clean, was originally her husband’s and Hawaiian. But her hair was looking all right. Clean, springy, baby locks freshly twisted. Her hair was definitely equal to this morning’s ordeal, and in that Gwen found a modicum of comfort if not, perhaps dangerously, defiance. She cleared her throat. “If I was brave, Aviva, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

“I mean long-term brave,” Aviva said. “Big-picture brave.”

“The cowardly kind of brave.”

“Right,” Aviva said. “As opposed to the stupid kind.”

This distinction accorded with Gwen’s experience and, to a lesser extent, her beliefs; and yet making it did not comfort her at all. “You swear,” she said, seeking this guarantee for the third time that morning. “Aviva, you swear to me.”

“It does not mean a thing,” Aviva said.

“Because, I have to tell you, it feels so meaningful that I kind of want to vomit.”

“You going to be sick?” said the Saturday receptionist, looking over from her monitor to study Gwen, her tone saying,
Don’t you
throw
up in my office.
She had a vibrant head of sister curls, and Gwen recognized her as a fellow disciple of Tyneece at Glama. They had crossed paths a few times, pilgrims to the shrine. Something about the woman had always bothered Gwen, and now she knew what it was: an invisible, pervasive miasma of Lazar.

“You know, I might?” Gwen said. She lowered her voice to the peculiarly audible whisper common among the women of her family; peculiar not in its audibleness but in the disingenuous way that, like God handing down His commandments to a bunch of folks He knew perfectly well were going to break all of them repeatedly for all time, it bothered to be a whisper at all. A Shanks woman with a practiced embouchure could not only modulate the dynamics of her whisper but send it through closed doors, around corners, across time itself to echo everlastingly, for example, in the reprobate ears of a granddaughter married to a no-account man. “Having to eat you-know-what will do that to you.”

Aviva lowered her face to her textbook, not quite in time to conceal a smile. The receptionist, for her part, did not appear to find Gwen amusing. Her long fingernails resumed their furious clacking against the keys of her computer, a sound that had been annoying Gwen, she realized, since they sat down. Gwen shifted in one of the vinyl-upholstered steel chairs that furnished the waiting room, tipping herself first onto her left buttock and then onto the right. Whenever she leaned one way or the other, her thighs peeled away from each other with a sigh, like lovers reluctant to part. The muscles at the small of her back had gathered themselves into an aggrieved fist. Baby’s head was jammed up against the left side of her rib cage, just under her heart, right at the spot where Gwen ordinarily felt premonitions of disaster.

“What I need,” she said, in the same Shanks whisper, audible to the dermatologist in the office next door, “is something to wash it down with.” Thinking of a cup of creamy white
suff
, which she would never again permit herself to enjoy. “Something to get rid of the taste of—”

“Shush,” Aviva said. She reached down for her handbag, unzipped an inner pocket, and took out a miniature airplane bottle of Tabasco sauce. “Put a few drops of that on it.”

Gwen took the bottle and shook it a few times, thinking,
Squeeze a few drops into Lazar’s bathroom soap dispenser. Massage the stuff right into his stubbly pink head. Work it right on down to the pores.

As she pictured herself, oddly satisfied, performing this bit of revenge grooming, the door between the waiting room and the examination area swung open and Dr. A. Paul Lazar, FCOG, came out. He appeared to be in a transitional state between the delivery room and the seat of his bicycle, green scrub top worn over slick black Lycra shorts and a pair of Nike bike shoes. In this hybrid getup, he looked perfectly suited to his waiting room, which conformed to the general aesthetic of Berkeley doctors’ offices by freely mixing elements of a secondhand furniture showroom, a real estate title company, and the Ministry of Truth from
1984.
Lazar was better-looking and not as young as Gwen remembered him, not quite so pallid and dead-eyed. But there was still something fish-faced about the man.

“Ladies,” he said inauspiciously. He held out his hand for them to shake it, with an air of portent but also a hint of mischief, as if they had gathered to sign a treaty that would permit him to occupy their country in the guise of defending it. “Come on in.”

Aviva slid the acupuncture atlas into a canvas KPFA tote bag and stood up. Gwen leaned on Aviva’s arm for help getting to her feet. Lazar watched her rise with a bright diagnostic eye. Dread or the skull of her baby seemed to wedge itself deeper between the bones of Gwen’s rib cage as she followed Aviva into the office. It was a dull tank—black steel shelves, artwork by Pfizer, view of the parking lot—enlivened only by the disorder of Lazar’s medical texts and by a framed photograph of him sharing the sun atop some gray-green mountain with a horse-toothed young woman and two Italian bicycles. Lazar and his wife or girlfriend were smiling with an air of dutiful rapture, the way you did when some total stranger agreed to snap a photo of you. Gwen fanned the flicker of pity that lit within her at the sight of Lazar’s office, sensing that the light of its flame offered her sole hope of finding a path out of the mess she had gotten the Birth Partners into. Pity and pity alone could mask the bitter taste of shit.

“So,” Lazar said. “Here you are.”

“Here we are,” Gwen agreed, trying to stand up to his blue eyes as they further annotated her case. Edema, melasma.

“I know I have you two over a barrel,” he said. “I appreciate the gesture nevertheless.”

He smiled insincerely to show them that he was pretending to be kidding. The flame of Gwen’s pity was snuffed out. She screened a brief martial arts sequence in her imagination, perhaps a hundred frames in all, ending with a different
gesture
, one that would introduce her foot to the knob of Lazar’s larynx. She retained control of herself and resisted the urge to share this scenario with him. Still, his remark proved difficult for either of the partners to rally back over the net.

“I—” Gwen glanced at Aviva. “I spoke to Lydia this morning. She sounds good. I don’t know if you—”

“She’ll pull through just fine,” Lazar said.
No thanks to you
, said his eyes.

No, no, Gwen was only being paranoid. She had been out of line yesterday. Allowed her emotions to overcome her judgment, which was not at all like her, by nature and fiat, by habit and preference. Powerful as her emotions could be, she had known since she was seven years old that they were good for very little, and that by contrast, her judgment was uniquely reliable. It was all that, and the long, bloody unraveling of the birth yesterday, and then the hormones rolling like a thunderhead across the prairie of her third trimester, that had led Gwen to betray her principles. From a medical point of view, Dr. Lazar had performed flawlessly. Gwen had no clinical beef with him, none worth jeopardizing their standing at the hospital, which, like that of all nurse-midwives who had privileges at Chimes, was always mysteriously fragile. Now, thanks to an intervention by Aryeh Bernstein, all that Gwen needed to do was speak the two most meaningless words in the English language to Paul Lazar, and she would be forgiven. An apology, what did Nat always say, supposedly quoting his dad: It was a beautiful thing, no, a miracle of language. Cost you nothing and returned so richly. Easy for Nat to say.