Telegraph Avenue (20 page)

“Yesterday was long and confusing,” she began, knowing this would not do, that the logical conclusion of the line, were she to follow to it, must be that fault lay not with Gwen or bad luck but with poor, long, confusing yesterday afternoon. “Normally, Doc, I am way too proud ever to put myself in the kind of position that I put myself into yesterday when I lost my cool.”

Aviva sneaked a glance at her partner and, somewhere in the profoundly dark recesses of her deep-set eyes, sent up an arcing flare of warning. Gwen had not come to discuss with Paul Lazar, MD, the flow and vagaries of her pride or her cool.

“And so,” Gwen tried.

She became aware of a flat, fetid taste building up at the back of her tongue. In coming here, she saw, she had been instructed not only to swallow her pride, apologize to this man who had insulted her with a racial slur, but also to put up with his smugness, and his bike shorts, and worst of all, the equine grin of his woman in the photograph, which no longer struck Gwen as pitiably friendless so much as self-satisfied, boastful, the smile of someone who felt that she most belonged on the tops of mountains. Or, no, maybe the bike shorts were the worst thing of all.

“And so,” she resumed, “looking back over my conduct. And taking into consideration the strong recommendation of my partner. Who has spent her whole professional life standing up to doctors, hospitals, insurance company bean counters . . .”

“Gwen, darling,” Aviva said, mixing forward the Brooklyn, either to ironize the term of endearment or else by way of genuine warning.

“. . . so that you can be sure she knows, the way I know, that just like we have to be twice as competent, twice as careful, twice as prepared, twice as sensitive, and twice as cool under fire—”

“Are we talking about midwives or Jackie Robinson?”

“—as some Lance Armstrong wannabe doctor with a diploma from—” she checked the med school sheepskin—“Loma Linda—”

“Whoa,” Lazar said. “Excuse me?”

“—just like she knows we have to be twice as good at everything as you all—”

“For God’s sake, Gwen—”

“—you can be sure that Aviva knows, because she’s the one who told me, and because God knows I’ve seen her do it enough times herself, that we also have to eat
twice as much shit
.”

Aviva fell back in her chair.

“So that’s what I’m here to do. In two bites. Two little words. Not the two words I might choose to say if I had any choice in the matter, but I don’t.”

Gwen stood up with what felt to her like remarkable alacrity and even, for the first time in many weeks, a kind of grace. The sight of Aviva slumped and fuming in her chair, the glitter in Lazar’s eyes—he would move to have their privileges pulled, no doubt about it—stirred no answer of remorse or regret. She went to the door, and put her hand on the knob, and turned back to Dr. Lazar, and, not quite as if she were telling him to go fuck himself, not quite as if she were suggesting that he conduct an experiment to see how far up his ass he could fit the saddle of his three-thousand-dollar Pinarello, but rather with the full force of the pity to which lately she had pinned her hopes of slipping through this ordeal without ruining everything that she and Aviva had both worked so hard to accomplish, found two little words to sum up her feelings toward this narrow-assed, C-sectioning, insurance-company-obeying excuse for a doctor, toward his entire so-called profession, toward the world that regarded everything that was human and messy, prone in equal measure to failure and joy, as a process to be streamlined and standardized and portion-controlled:

“I’m sorry.”

Feeling as if she were kicking her way across a swimming pool, free of mass, momentum, inertia, Gwen went through the outer office to the door. Aviva caught up to her at the elevator, change jangling against a key ring in her tote bag.

“I’m sorry,” Gwen said again, and this time it was not an expression of regret for the things she had said or done but rather the opposite: Her apology was, as apologies so often are, fighting words. She was sorry only that she was not sorry at all.

S
he rolled to a stop in front of the house, footsore, craving a shower, each soft part of her body affixed with an epoxy of hormones and sweat to at least one other part. Nauseated by the tide of jasmine that surged down the front porch across the yard to beat against the slat fence in a spiky spray of blossoms whose color and smell reminded her of the flesh of spoiled bananas. Irritated by the insect buzz of a harpsichord on KDFC (which she obliged herself to tune in to for the supposed relaxing properties of baroque music, despite its always having struck her as the auditory equivalent of trying to fold origami in your mind). Preoccupied not by the proper strategy for facing the inevitable board to which, after her latest self-righteous outburst, she and Aviva must now submit themselves but instead by trying to cook up some plausible excuse to bail on tonight’s childbirth class. She cut the engine. The door to the garage, irremediably cluttered, swung open on its hinges, irreparably creaky. And here came Archy, dressed in his three-piece Funky Suit—ten yards of purple satin—backing a massive wooden chunk of gig equipment along the driveway toward the bed of his El Camino, apparently in no need at all, as usual, of any excuse to forget about Lamaze.

The class was held Saturday evenings in the community center of a Baptist church on Telegraph. Gwen had selected it, from among the dozens that weekly rehearsed the expectant of Berkeley and Oakland in techniques of breathing and relaxation, because she had heard that it drew young black couples. She hoped not only that she and Archy might thus (so ran the fantasy) befriend the nice 60/40 boho-to-bougie-ratio mommy and daddy of some future nubby-headed little playmate for their baby but also, by an unhappy mathematics, to reduce the possibility that she would bump into one of her patients among the circled yoga mats. As it turned out, the only other black people attending the underenrolled session that convened each week beneath the humming fluorescent tubes of the recreation hall, with its lingering fug of feet and armpits from the capoeira class that preceded it, were a pair of single mothers having only their own mothers to coach them, and the husband halves of two biracial couples, one Asian wife, one white. The instructor, Ms. Pease, also taught in the church’s religious school, and she had a Sunday school manner at once saccharine and condemnatory. In any case, there was nothing for Gwen to learn: Apart from whatever marital and parental unity it might symbolize, their attendance was manifestly, even blatantly, for the benefit of Archy. Yet every week he forgot about class until Gwen reminded him, then he tried to pretend that he hadn’t forgotten, then he spent the entire class wearing a look so earnest, so engaged, so eager to absorb the parturient wisdom of that bitter and treacly old windbag Charmayne Pease that there was no way—and Gwen had tried—to credit it as genuine.

This facial expression, too patient, too forbearing, too sincere to be anything but mocking, had begun to occupy the space between his chin and forehead sometime early in her pregnancy. It was a kind of précis, for Gwen, of her husband’s whole attitude toward impending fatherhood as its duties and obligations had so far been revealed to him. He could take the business seriously, it seemed to her, only to the extent that he knew enough, most of the time, to pretend to take it seriously. Even then she had to push his nose in it to get him to pay attention, forcing on him articles and Web links related to spina bifida, dorsal sleeping and SIDS, the pros and cons of pacifiers. Reading aloud to him from pregnancy books that she bought and feigned to study, bored and perpetually quarreling in her mind with the authors, only so that Archy would be obliged, lying beside her in bed at night, to listen to her reading aloud. It was like one of those Piaget experiments on babies: The prospect of being a father, when you removed it from his immediate view, ceased, in his mind, to exist. And the reappearance, whenever Gwen reminded him, was more painful to her than the vanishing.

So she arrived home that night, having spent the afternoon listening like some Zen apprentice to the sound of Aviva not saying anything about the meeting with Lazar—the silence more painful than any reproach, Gwen’s life furnished perhaps too amply with people who wore you
out
with paradox—feeling that smooth cranium of dread lodged against her rib cage, prepared to let her lying, cheating, no-good Darling Husband off the hook tonight—and look at the fool! Saving her the trouble. Messing around with his bungee cords and his moving-van blankets. Big and purple as the cause of all her problems, the ridiculous splendor of his platform saddle shoes measuring in lofty inches the distance between him and any world that might construe itself in terms of duty and obligation.

Though only a few minutes earlier, she had been trying out on herself various backhanded or gently sarcastic ways of telling Archy that she wanted only to spend tonight tangled on the couch with him, eating Fentons Swiss milk chocolate from a half-gallon carton and watching whatever program he felt like watching, now she perceived that she would rather let him fuck every woman in Ethiopia and Eritrea, in twos and threes, than let him miss out on the company of Ms. Pease.

Then she caught sight of the play of muscle across the back of his jacket, glints like the naps of knife blades, as, in a single effortless arc, he hoisted the big wooden cube of the amplifier—old Mr. Jones’s precious Leslie, on whose repair Archy had lavished their final weeks of childless freedom—into the back of his car. Hoisting that great big thing as if it were a carton full of packing peanuts. Gwen let out a sound that slipped unintentionally from the intended
hmmph
of disapproval to a bass thrum like the loosing of some inner string.

“Uh-oh,” he said, turning. “You got your hand on your hip, that way.”

“I know you must be
unloading
,” Gwen said. “Even though it looks like you’re putting stuff
in
.”

“Yeah, no, uh, we got a gig tonight. A good one. Kind of political fund-raiser, up by Kensington. Cragmont, someplace, off the Arlington or—” He saw that she was not interested in details of North Berkeley geography. “Oh, shit. It’s Saturday.”

“Are you sure?”

“Okay,” he said, “here’s the thing. They really don’t need me. It’s Nat and Boom and Mr. Jones, and long as I get him the Leslie, that man with just his one left foot can do anything that I could offer on bass with two hands. Seriously.” He consulted his watch. “We run it up there, drop it off, grab you something to eat, raise that blood sugar up to a useful level, we can make it back down for the birthing class right on time. Sound like a plan?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, that does sound like a plan,” Gwen said. “But not
your
plan. Your plan, let me guess: Toss the rest of that stuff in there.” She gestured to the J Bass in its case, the bass amp and preamp, stacked beside the right front fender of the El Camino. “Head on up to North Berkeley, not even give a second thought to the only important thing you have going on in your life right now. I bet you didn’t even write me a damn
note
.”

At this grave charge, Archy started to register a protest, prepared to make his objections known, feeling his way into it like a man backing down a hallway in the dark, as if hoping that when he reached the far end, he would discover, with a cry of vindication and triumph, that indeed, au contraire, he had written a note and simply, in the interval, forgotten. But no; the hope of this died in his eyes. Then he got himself an idea. Held up a finger. Patted his pocket. Nodded. Overplaying the whole thing with an air of comic pantomime, trying to defuse her by acting cute, a tactic with a decent record of success over the years, though failures were numberless and spectacular. He reached into the breast pocket of the Funky Suit jacket, took out a black Sharpie and a scrap of paper that proved to be an unpaid city of Emeryville parking ticket issued two years earlier, scrawled a few words on the back of it, and passed it to her with a ceremonious lack of ceremony. Gwen folded it in half without reading it, wondered why on that June afternoon two years previous his El Camino had been parked in front of 1133 Sixty-second Street, concluded that it was either a woman or a basement full of some dead man’s records, folded it a second time, and poked it back into his hand.

“I am going to take a shower,” she said. “Go to La Calaca Loca right now, and get me one of those
elotes
they have, light on the chile, and a fish taco, two fish tacos, the batter kind. And a bottle of that
tamarindo
, and have it back here and waiting for me when I come down.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Archy said.

A funny look passed across his face, like the flicker of a television during a brownout, and his eyes darted from right to left, tracking the cicada whirr of a bicycle. She turned to see the back of a long-limbed boy on a bicycle, maybe a neighborhood kid, nobody she could place, and when she looked back at Archy, he was swinging the rest of his gear into the El Camino, saying,“
Elote
, huh, yeah, that sounds good. I could eat Mexican every day.” He turned back to her. “I love Mexico.” He wiped his forehead with the back of one satined arm. “Baby, let’s go to Mexico. Like, tonight. Come on. Let’s do it. Let’s
move
to Mexico.”

“Ha ha.”

“I’m serious.” He made his face all serious, or maybe it really did fall out that way for once. “I am being totally sincere.”

“And I am totally, sincerely, about to have a baby, Archy. How am I going to go to Mexico?”

Even as the words burst from her lips, she regretted them, realizing, probably before Archy did, that when he went to Mexico, he need not take her along. Archy could go to Mexico, flat out move there, any damn time he wanted to. He could leave tonight.

Archy took off his sunglasses to wipe the lenses on the end of his necktie. Barefaced, he gazed at her, expression ironic, just kidding, for now.

“Fish tacos,” he said. “For days.”

T
he valet parkers in matched tan coveralls stood shoulder to shoulder like convicts chained at the ankle, heads back, chins pointed at the sky. Something up there causing them to ponder. Archy nosed the El Camino up the hill toward them and the venue: round tower of butterscotch stucco with a Juliet window, blue-tiled arch in a butterscotch gate. Creeping up the street as it traced the switchback course of some old arroyo, neighborhood cars shouldering in from both sides to leave clearance just sufficient for his wide-track choogling slab of lost Detroit. Archy already feeling crowded enough by the marital silence that at present filled the vehicle, knowing perfectly well, with all the almanack sagacity the word “husband” implied, that the present silence was more portent than aftermath. A formulating stillness. That pressure drop, brooding and birdless, right before the touchdown of a tornado.