Telegraph Avenue (26 page)

“We’re fine,” Aviva said.

“Really?” Chewing, acting unconcerned, tugging at the collar of her embroidered cowboy shirt.

“Sure, whatever. I’m fine. Gwen’s fine. Gwen will be fine for at least another . . .” Aviva looked at her watch, a man’s Timex with the face worn on the inside of the right wrist, as if she had everything timed, down to this pending revelation, and was committed to staying on schedule. She frowned, looking disappointed by what her watch told her. “Like, call it five minutes.”

Kai frowned, eyebrows knitting Sal Mineo–style, and closed the door behind her softly, as if in reproach.

“What’s happening in five minutes?” Gwen said.

“Gwen,” Aviva said. Then there was another long Aviva pause, profound and charged. “Gwen, have you talked to Archy?”

Archy has cancer and is hiding it from you, his wife
; that was what Aviva’s grave expression implied.

Gwen ripped a fistful of sanitary paper away from the sheet beneath her. “What’s wrong?” she said, and once again she felt herself caught up in a cyclone of metal and pavement.

“So he didn’t say anything.”

“What would he say? Is he sick?”

“Oh, God. No. No, he’s fine. He, too, is totally fine. For the moment.”

“For the next five minutes.”

“Call it four now.”

“Aviva, what is this?”

“Shit. Okay. You’re sitting down. That’s good.”

“Just a minute,” Gwen said. “Hold on. I feel like maybe I want to be standing up.”

“Gwen, no, I think you should—”

“Let me put a little weight on it, Aviva.”

Aviva fussed at the bandage, found it acceptable, then released the ankle to Gwen.

“Much better,” Gwen said. “Thank you so much. Now, what the heck?”

There was a soft knock on the examining room door. Aviva looked at her watch again.

“Aviva, what
is
this?”

The door swung open, and Gwen saw Julie walk in with the kid who had shoved her out of the path of the bus. The kid pushed back the hood of his sweatshirt. He was like a smaller, skinnier edition of Archy’s dad, a 45 to Luther’s LP. It took less than a second for her to formulate that first wild guess.

“Oh, dear Lord,” Gwen said.

The boys stared each in his own all-consuming way at his shoes, at Gwen’s ankle, at the floor.

“Titus,” Aviva said. “Meet Gwen.”

“Hey,” said the boy. He looked to be about the same age as Julie, fourteen, fifteen. Gwen undertook the biographical math, syllogized a couple of stray remarks separated by years, guessed at the rest.

“Your last name Joyner?”

The kid looked up sharply but got his playful Luther Stallings smile in place just before meeting her gaze. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Okay,” Gwen said. And then somebody turned over the record, and
Archy’s Cheatin’
came back on, and the first track on side B was called “Jamila.” Gwen had never met Jamila Joyner, which, as always, made it so much easier for her to sketch the woman in her mind, with all her wicked contours. “Is she in town?”

The smile winked out like a drop of water on a hot range. “No, ma’am.”

“Uh, his mom passed away,” said Julie. “A long time ago.”

The throb of jealousy subsided, and Gwen’s heart, taking its first tentative steps since Aviva had unlocked the office door, went out to Titus, who suddenly looked closer to twelve than fifteen.

“Titus is staying with us,” Aviva said. “At the moment.”

“
What?
Since when?”

“Since Friday. Gwen, I’m sorry. I was respecting Archy’s wishes. God only knows why. He said he was going to tell you. He said he needed a little time to sort things out.”

So this, and not his grief over Mr. Jones, or his shame at being caught with the Queen of Sheba, or cancer, was the secret that Archy had been keeping from her, the hollow underlying his physical presence in the room, the delay in replying to her questions. Not that he had a son but that said fruit of his loins was going to be
moving in with them.
Then Gwen would be responsible for three babies instead of the two she had ordered.

“You should have just let that bus hit me,” Gwen said. “You should have ridden right on by.”

G
nat. In his ear, born with it. Hearing the current of his own blood, neural crackle, the omnipresent pulse of the worldwide electro-industrial power and information grid, the unheard music. His head a dish to pull down cosmic background radiation, sines and signals, diminished sevenths coming through the wires of time and space to vibrate secret membranes. Hearing
something
. His moods (unmedicated at the present) prone to act as filters on the input. Melodies on the up days, harmonic structures, polyrhythms, samples and snatches, phrases and hooks, discrete musical ideas. On the down days or in a mixed state, only that rhythmic humming, theorized by one of his many former psychiatrists to be—what else—a dim dull echo of his ma, deceased when Nat was not yet two. A lullaby in the darkness, a steady soothing pat on the diapered behind. Yeah, whatever. But always, inside, beneath, interlaced with the auditory hallucination du jour, that constant invariant tone, at once low and sharp, infuriating, precious, steady as a handrail. On the menu for this morning, a looping Maceo-style fill, a joyous stab of horn, today shaping up to be an up day, oh, fuck yes, bee-da-lee-dop ba-deeda-la-
dee
!

Also on the menu: fried chicken, Richmond-style. Biscuits. Beans and rice. And most assuredly, greens. Greens the secret weapon, the skeleton key to the soul of a man of Garnet Singletary’s age and provenance. Collards the thing to catch the conscience of the King of Bling.

But the kitchen, oy, the kitchen. Ba-deeda-la-
dee
-dop! A fucking disaster area. Nat recalled with a pang how his stepmother, Opal, a bookkeeper in the billing department of Thalhimer’s department store, would always stay on top of the disorder, cleaning up after herself in measured intervals, a logic in the steps of her preparations, scraping the trimmed-away ribs and veins of the collards into the garbage while the leaves came to a low simmer in their pot of fatback liquor; the bowl in which the beans had been put to soak the night before washed and sparkling in the wire dish rack as they boiled; the biscuits mixed—the recipe, passed down from the lifelong employer of Opal’s mother, a Mrs. Portman, calling for both yeast and baking soda—then left all night to rise under a damp towel in the refrigerator, nothing to be done but roll them out and cut them, put them in the oven ten minutes before you rang the dinner bell. Opal Starrett,
aleha hasholem
, rendered justice with her Scotch Brite pad to every pot, pan, and dish along the way, wiping down every surface to a laboratory shine, leaving herself to contend at the end only with the baking sheets, the big cast-iron skillet, and the blast radius of spat fat on the stovetop.

As with so many other things about her, Nat admired the orderly progression of his stepmother’s kitchen, but he could never hope to emulate it. He came wired, like Julius the First, to do everything all at once. Puffs of flour escaping from the requisite brown paper bag in which, with cracked black pepper, cayenne, and salt, he shook the pieces of chicken—legs and thighs, as today’s clientele required. A whole weather system, storm fronts of flour moving across the kitchen from west to east. A scatter of dried beans underfoot, their comrades steeped for an hour in boiling water in lieu of the overnight soak rendered impossible by his impulsive play for the King of Bling’s support. The lard—another secret weapon in the battle for the soul of Garnet Singletary—starting to mutter and pop in the skillet. It was Opal’s skillet, inherited along with her Panzer-plate baking sheets on which half the projected three dozen biscuits lay in domino-spot arrangements, and the big gray Magnalite pot that held Nat’s simmering collards, their trimmings piled on the counter alongside peeled onion wrappers, a cut-away strap of fatback rind, the arctic landscape of Nat’s uncompleted biscuit rolling. Better not to think about the rice, Christ, the rice, some of it duly sucked up into the belly of the dead-battery DustBuster that was lying abandoned on the floor in the middle of all the unsucked rest of it. All that rice, raining down when he yanked the bag from the pantry shelf, someone, likely Nat, having put it back with its wire tie very loosely twisted. Though it was kind of remarkable the way the sound of raining rice seemed to lay itself down so sweetly over the horn riff in his head, a shimmer of steel brushes on a hi-hat.

At 9:45
A.M.
the first batch of chicken parts sank, to the sound of applause, into the pig fat. The fat set about its great work, coaxing that beautiful Maillard reaction out of the seasoned flour, the smell of golden brownness mingling with the warm, dense, bay-leafy, somehow bodily funk of the beans, and with the summertime sourness of the greens like the memory of white Keds stained at the toes with fresh-cut grass, Nat stepped through the time portal that opened within the ring of seasoned iron. Riding the kitchen time machine. Turning the pieces of chicken with a pair of tongs, his hum, which he did not even know he was emitting, like the steady press of massaging fingers at the back of his neck, he remembered Opal standing at the ancient Hotpoint on East Broad Street in high heels and a Marimekko apron patterned with big coral poppies, cursing out Julius the First, furious over some fresh piece of poor judgment, some dud of a snack cake, that Monument Liquor and News was now stuck for to the tune of ten cases, some no-account relative of Opal’s to whom Nat’s father had, against her emphatic instructions, loaned three hundred and fifty dollars they could ill afford, while in the lower sash of the casement window behind the stove, a pair of tiny electric fans executed a broad parody of Nat’s father (and for that matter, prefiguratively, of Nat himself) going around and around and around, with unimpeachable intentions, to no effect at all. At last with her chicken pieces neatly mounded and her biscuits tumbled into a basket lined with a clean dish towel, Opal would knock on down the back hall in those high heels to the crazed wooden stairway, barrel staves and bent nails, something out of a Popeye cartoon, bolted to the back of their row house, throw open the door, and stand there on the landing, fanning up a hopeful breeze with her manicured brown hands, unimprisoning her soft dark dove-winged hair from its head scarf, saying in that wild negro Yiddish of hers, “That is sure enough a
mechiah.
” Thirty, almost thirty-five years ago that would have been, Nat’s professional expertise wanting to sweeten the memory with maybe some fresh-minted Isaac Hayes filtering in from the stereo in the living room, or the first Minnie Riperton album,
Come to My Garden
. Opal had been into poor sweet Minnie in a big way.

Aviva, as in so many other respects, held to Opalish principles when it came to approaching a mess in the kitchen, and she was going to fucking freak when she saw what he had done,
Time machine my
ass
, Nat,
Jesus! She herself had knocked out some kind of semi-elaborate breakfast this morning for the boys, pancakes, bacon, and yet when Nat arose from bed pregnant with his scheme to win the heart of Garnet Singletary, and came into the silent and gleaming kitchen, he found only a corky trace of bacon in the air to betray her. Aviva, first white woman Nat had ever taken a romantic interest in, and the only one of his girlfriends who ever met the standard or received the approval of his stepmother. The latter being expressed, shortly before Opal’s death, in a brief speech to Nat that could have been delivered by Aviva herself: “Don’t fuck it up.”

Forty minutes after the first batch of chicken went into the fat—without his having restored a modicum of order to the kitchen—Nat was still busy with the tongs and the drumsticks, mindful of Opal’s absolute prohibition on crowding the pan. By the time all those hard-ass little red beans, rushed into their fatback bathwater, had managed to relax enough to jump on over into a casserole with the rice, it was nearly 10:40. Time to get moving. The King, more often one of his entourage, could usually be seen passing the windows of Brokeland with a bag of McDonald’s, maybe a fish sandwich from Your Black Muslim bakery, sometime around noon, twelve-thirty at the latest. Nat needed to get in there just as the man’s hunger was calling to him.

Like a dog in a cartoon, forepaws a turbine blur as he hunted up a buried bone in a churn of dirt, Nat excavated the cabinets and ransacked the drawers looking for usable serving containers and suitable platters. Piling up behind him mountains of mateless lids and lidless bottoms, rattling cake pans and pie plates. Souvenirs of ancient Tupperware parties, ice cube trays, Thermos cups with no Thermoses, Popsicle molds with no sticks, roasting racks, bamboo skewers, a kitchen scale! Nat figured on serving up to five or six Singletary satellites, hangers-on, maybe even K of B shoppers. He hoped that at least a few of them would find his arguments rendered sound and his blandishments persuasive by the invincible rhetoric of Opal Starrett’s cuisine. To begin with, he needed only to reach the King.

And Garnet could be reached. Oakland-born and -raised, his roots snaked back deep into Texas and Oklahoma. By laying out the meal that he now carefully packed in tubs, wrapped in foil, stacked into a plastic milk crate (whose freight of unsorted and mostly unsellable vinyl recordings, among them several offerings by Jim Nabors, Nat freely added to the disorder of the kitchen), and schlepped downstairs to load into the back of his aging Saab 900, Nat would be speaking to Singletary in a deeper language. Like a wizard to a dragon in a novel on his son’s nightstand, speaking in the Old Speech.

“Oh ho ho,” said the King of Bling as Nat backed, carrying the milk crate, through the steel mesh door of the eponymous establishment. Singletary reigned from his stool behind the glass counter in his cave of gold, atop his pile of rope and finger rings. Apart from the treasure in the cases, there was nothing else to look at in the shop: plain white tile floor, bare walls paneled in Masonite. Singletary himself devoid in his person, as always, of the least gleam or half-ounce of bling, filling out a guayabera shirt, looking sweaty-hot in his Jheri curl, toward which he took a studiously historicist stance. Strapped like Bullitt over the arm with a licensed .44 that, as he never tired of assuring the curious, had more than once, in the service of the King, been called upon to do what its manufacturers had intended. “I had a feeling. Soon as I saw that little flyer you was passing around.”

“Did you, now,” Nat said, doubting it.

As his trade demanded, Garnet Singletary was a keen assayer of human alloy, though he would say what he needed to say, Nat knew, to induce among the general public, whether buying or pawning, that he was even sharper than that. But it wasn’t like Nat was attempting some subtle bit of statecraft, or considered himself inscrutable, a master of neighborhood diplomacy. This was a fairly straight-ahead play.

“Read me like a book,” he said.

He winked at Ervis Watson, more often known as Airbus, who quite amply served as muscle for the King of Bling, a six-five, three-hundred-pound first line of defense in a velour tracksuit, weaponless apart from his ordnance arms and his howitzer legs, beyond whose bulk, events rarely penetrated to the point that the services of Singletary’s sidearm were required. King of Bling was half the size of Brokeland, dividing with the United Federation of Donuts the former premises of an Italian butcher, and between Singletary, Airbus, and the stock in trade, arranged in two long and two short table showcases on the floor and a tall cabinet that ran the length of the north wall, there was not a lot of room to turn around.

Airbus did not acknowledge the wink or indeed move the slightest feature of his face. Nat understood that the attempt to elicit a superficial comradeship by winking was a standard gambit of the environmentally nervous white man. He was not the least bit nervous, having grown up in the black part of Richmond with a black stepmother, black friends, black enemies, black lovers, black teachers, and culture heroes who, barring a few Jewish exceptions, were almost exclusively black. But he had so profound a horror of black-acting white men, such as Moby, that he drove himself with a near-pathological rigor to avoid any appearance, in manner or speech, of trying to pass. He would let his chicken do the talking.

“I brought you guys some lunch,” he said. He set the milk crate on the counter behind which Singletary sat on his stool. “Thought you might be getting a little tired of the Big Macs.”

Singletary squinted at the crate, then looked at Nat, running through possible negative scenarios that might arise once Nat opened the containers stacked in the crate: hustles, robbery schemes, some kind of nasty hummus or shit you were supposed to eat off a leaf. Then the smell coming from the food, a breeze off the coast of the past, worked its way into his nostrils, well defended as they were by his Billy Dee Williams mustache, and a wild surmise lit up the chilly precincts of his face. Nat lifted the platter of chicken and paused, milking the moment, fingers ready to peel back the blanket of aluminum foil at any time. All that was required was a sign from the King of Bling.

Singletary stared at Nat with a curious mixture of hopefulness and misgiving. He glanced at Airbus as if uncertain whether to split or double down on a soft eleven. Then he nodded once:
Hit me.
Nat ripped away the sheet of foil.

“Ho, shit,” said Airbus.

“I was expecting maybe you might have a few more people around,” Nat said as he set out the containers of beans, rice, and greens and tore open the foil packet of biscuits. Forks, knives, paper plates. A small ottoman of foofy Marin County butter. “Maybe feed a couple of your customers, too.”

“Aisha was here, but she getting the baby’s picture taken up at Hilltop Mall,” Singletary said. He smiled. “I might have scared away some of the other people like to waste my time and theirs sitting around here all the damn day. Medication I been taking for my blood pressure have a tendency to make me a little
irritable
, from what I hear.”

Airbus looked prepared but declined to comment on this rumor.

“Customers,” Singletary continued. “That I don’t know. Business been a little slow this morning.”