Telegraph Avenue (34 page)
Authors: Michael Chabon
whacked
by some formidable opiate, when Gwen came in, stood by the bed, clasped the mom’s hands in both of her own, Gwen’s cool palms destined to linger afterward in some underlayer of the mom’s memory and then, minutes or centuries later, when the mom opened her eyes again, just before she turned her head from the afternoon dazzle of the window to greet her daughter and see about rustling her up a little milk, the mom saw a flicker of red in a live oak tree beside the parking lot, a savage red, a bird, a parrot! that stalked along a limb of the live oak, looking as if it were talking or even singing to itself, gathering itself together with a hint of fussiness and then regaining the sky, bearing for the herded hills with their pied coats, fixing a course that carried it over the duplex on Blake Street in whose master bedroom another father and son lay watching something together in lieu of conversation, side by side on the bed, propped up by pillows, faces lit by the screen of a laptop computer that the father balanced on his abdomen angled so that if they lay very close together, they could both get a good view of the movie, one of nine discs that Julie had dug out of the blaxploitation section at Reel Video and brought home by way of research for his Tarantino class at the Senior Center, this one,
Strutter
(1973), starring the current fugitives from the Bruce Lee Institute in the full flame of their youth as a gun-toting, ass-kicking, frequently coupling double shot of funky magnificence, Luther Stallings cast as the ex-marine Vietnam vet trained to the point of artistry in techniques of stealth, infiltration, and hand-to-hand combat, then court-martialed and dishonorably discharged after he intervened to prevent a (white) captain from raping a hamlet girl, set loose with his commando skill set in the world of banks, pirated art collections, shipments of bullion and jewels, who is stalked (the first film in the projected trilogy being an avowed blaxploitation twist on
The Thomas Crown Affair
) by the leggy, implausibly monikered, and scantily clad insurance investigator Candygirl Clark, who must betray him to collect her paycheck, the son delighting in the movie’s overall ambiance of insouciant cheapness, his father in its evocation of a time, a year, 1973, marveling at a string of little bits of the past (two-tone red-topped mailboxes, long rows of telephone booths in bus stations, old guys, routinely lounging around in suits and ties) that, without his noticing, had vanished as surely as mushrooms under the passing boot of Super Mario, father and son both impressed, and on a number of levels, by Valletta Moore, for her kung fu skills, for that orange outfit with midriff cutouts and the orange hip boots, for a touch of the doe- or even cross-eyed in her hard-ass glare, most of all impressed by the ineluctable cool of Luther Stallings in his prime, the way he underplayed every scene as if confident that he could meet its needs without resorting to words, the liner notes for the forthcoming DVD boxed edition of the trilogy (packed now in the back of the Toronado) explaining that, on the first day of shooting, Stallings (author of said liner notes) had borrowed a pen from the director (who later went on to direct hundreds of episodes of
Trapper John, M.D.
,
Knight Rider
, and
Walker, Texas Ranger
) and crossed out 63 percent of his lines, violating every code and bylaw of the trade, possessing the gift, rife among failed geniuses (though you would find no such observation in the liner notes), of a strong sense of his own limitations, coupled with the championship kung fu, the snap and the acrobatics of it, its kinship to certain dance moves of James Brown—the Popcorn, for example—its message of bodily liberation from the harsh doom of physics, “so awesome,” as the son expressed it, noting several times in an approving way that made the father feel a squeeze of compassion for the son, the amazing resemblance between young Luther and Mr. Titus Joyner, so that when the movie was over, the father, closing the laptop, took an awesome Stallings-worthy leap of his own, plying the son with questions more pointed than usual about his friendship with young Mr. Joyner, and a story emerged, a tale, as the father perceived it, of unrequited love such as teenage boys often undergo in each other’s company, with all the emotion on Julie’s side, the father aware as the conversation progressed that he was woefully unprepared for this, not the gay part, that was whatever it was, but for the world of hurt and heartache (homo or hetero) into which his son had so rapidly passed, and his heart went all the way out to the boy, giving up that line of inquiry and affording his son an opening to turn the tables with the question “So what happened to him, anyway?,” inaugurating a long, close interrogation as to the post-
Strutter
career of Luther Stallings, the exact nature of his relationship to his son, his present whereabouts, if known, Nat lavishing on each question the scant information he possessed, recognizing not without disapproval, and fuck the heartache, that his son was in the early stages of a full-blown obsession, which was why when Aviva came home, giving off an air-conditioner smell of the hospital, and slumped her bag on the bedroom floor, she found them geeking out on the interwebs (as Julie put it) about Archy Stallings’s father, watching his collected works in three-minute clips and having a better time than she’d had with either of them in a long time, and for a second she looked hurt and angry, but then that gave way to bittersweetness as Aviva dropped between them on the bed, looking more defeated than either of them had seen her in a long time, and by means of this modest dogpile, they attempted to ensure their mutual comfort as the parrot, tired of flying, came down in a cedar tree in People’s Park, where it established a lookout over a small party of feral teenagers who carried on for quite a while, darkness at last rewarding its vigil with half a lemon, the husks and pits of a number of avocados, and an entire tomato, which it consumed with a measured ferocity, then crept for the night into a shallow but adequate knothole, in which it passed the next two days before seeking out fresher fare and settling, after further wanderings, in the untended and paradisiacal backyard of a foreclosed house near Juan’s Mexican, where other birds long ago had raided a loquat tree and then dropped or shat out the pits, reared by time and neglect to a fine establishment of loquat trees frequented heavily by the legendary flock of North Berkeley parrots, the Leaf Men of that neighborhood, far from the heartaches and sorrows of Telegraph Avenue.
A
change of state. Molecules in transition, liquid to vapor. A Chinatown dollar-store teacup flying a dragon kite of steam.
“No more sleep!” said Irene Jew. With a whoosh, the window shade abandoned its post, and sunshine surged through the breach. “Time to get up. Big day!”
Gwen opened her eyes. Dust motes drew paisleys across the dazzle: molecules in transition. And Gwen just another molecule, a big fat molecule, tumbling random through space.
“Big day,” she ironized. “Woo-hoo.”
Her world now consisted of four walls and a lone window at the back of the dojo, secreted behind a knobless door that was in turn concealed behind a life-size, full-length still photograph (slick pecs and abs, flying slippered right foot, teeth gritted in a predatory smile) of the eponym and presiding spirit of the Bruce Lee Institute of Martial Arts. Her life was a bedroll and a blue duffel, a meal in a paper bag, every day adding its sorry page to the history of the homelessness.
The thirty-sixth week was fertile ground for self-pity in the gravid female, and Gwen’s thoughts upon waking struck her as neatly diagnostic.
Master Jew cupped the teacup with its painted mountain landscape in her tiny hands, trained to mend and heal, as well as to deal blows by Lam Sai Wing, who had studied under the great doctor and righter of wrongs Wong Fei Hung. She squatted beside the sleeping mat in her black cotton pants and shapeless white tunic, waiting out her latest hidden guest and source of irritation until, at last, said individual hoisted herself halfway out of the bedroll. Gwen took the cup into the outsize hands that had cupped the tender skulls of a thousand babies and whose lineage of instruction likewise could be traced directly back to the nineteenth century, to a midwife named Juneteenth Jackson, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Gwen’s twice-great-grandmother.
“Hot
tap
water,” Gwen said. She made a face. Her tone damned not only the idea of drinking hot tap water but all the eventualities that had led her to another lonely reveille in this glorified closet, its sole ornament a Chinese dollar-store Ming vase in which stood a plastic red Gerber daisy that was really a ballpoint pen. To this cut-rate futon with its smell like stale waffles. To this moment at which a cup of hot tap water must—she would not have dared to refuse Master Jew—be drunk. “What I need is a cup of coffee.”
“Coffee make your baby restless,” Master Jew said. “Make him want to run away from home one day.”
Along with the cup of hot water, then, Gwen must evidently accept an implicit criticism of her own flight from home and hearth. A ninety-year-old Chinese master of kung fu, even a female one, was not likely to be all that progressive, you had to figure, when it came to the question of proper relations between husband and wife.
Gwen drank and was amazed, as always, by how good hot tap water actually felt and tasted, how well it suited your throat and gullet going down, how drinking it seemed to loosen some inner string or melt an inner coldness you did not even know that you harbored. Master Jew claimed to be able to cure all kinds of ailments with nothing but a mugwort cigar and the regular consumption of moderately hot water. In the darkness of Gwen’s belly, the son or daughter of her worthless husband gave a flutter kick of gratitude for the drink.
“How’s your back?” said Master Jew.
Gwen reached the fingers of one hand to palpate the muscles at the small of her back. In the past few days, her pregnancy had been finding new, painful uses for the largest knots of muscle on her frame. She woke in the company of charley horses, grandma cramps, stiffness of the joints. She shrugged. “It hurts.”
Master Jew knelt and reached behind Gwen to plunge her fingers into the root system of the lumbar like a gardener with a crocus to transplant. Gwen drew in a sharp breath at the pain, yet the abrupt rough contact of the old woman’s cool, dry, soft-skinned fingers came as a shock to her exiled heart. Gwen loved Master Jew the way one was supposed to love one’s kung fu master: furiously, like a child.
“Better,” Master Jew said.
“A little,” Gwen admitted.
Here was the reason that Gwen had been drawn into and persevered with her studies at the Bruce Lee Institute for so long, training hard for nearly four years until she had earned her black belt: because qigong, like Master Jew, didn’t seem to care if you believed in it or not.
She passed the empty cup back to the old woman, who acknowledged without gesture or word the look of gratitude in Gwen’s eyes. Master Jew also noted a thickening of the young woman’s pretty features, a blurring of her wide gaze. Overnight Gwen appeared to have moved into the climax of her term. The baby was going to arrive so soon, and here was this woman with her life in disorder. Working too hard. Taking care of other mothers-to-be while neglecting her own health. To make matters worse, she had spent the past three nights sleeping in this tiny room, in a hip-pocket world that crackled with male energies. Master Jew hawked up a pill of phlegm and spat it with feline delicacy into a linen handkerchief.
No, it would not do.
When Gwen had shown up for class on Monday night, with a packed duffel bag in the back of her BMW convertible and traces of tears on her cheeks, long-ingrained instincts had caused Master Jew to reach out and catch the falling young woman. But now the teacher saw that she had not handled the matter properly. Irene Jew was a very old woman—she liked to boast, improbably, that she was the oldest Chinese woman west of the Rocky Mountains—and over the long years of wandering and exile, from Guangdong to Hong Kong to Los Angeles to Oakland, she had presented countless students with the black sash that was the mark of longest study and hardest training, pain, devotion, tedium, and work. Some of these students had been capable of magnificence and others of brilliance, and a few had partaken of both qualities. Until now, however, none of them had ever been a pregnant black woman who drove a BMW. Master Jew never quite knew how to behave toward Gwen Shanks.
“This place very bad for you,” she said. “Bad smell. Also bad to look at. Ugly.”
“Yes.” Gwen made a sound, a hoarse intake of breath that might have been the precursor to tears or one of her big sputtering guffaws. She massaged her face, took her hands away, opened her eyes. “I mean, no, it’s all right, but. I’m sorry.” She reached for the bed jacket in a metallic shade of good brown silk that lay folded by the futon and pulled it around her. She wore silk pajamas that matched the robe, piped with white. “I just need a good night’s sleep.”
Her duffel lay open, all the clothes and shoes and bottles of lotion encased in Ziploc bags. It was time to get up and get dressed for her big day; at three
P.M.
she and Aviva were due to go before a board charged with reviewing the status of their privileges. Gwen looked at the clothes she had stuffed into her bag three nights ago, the distended stretch tops and yoga pants, the preposterous bras and geriatric panties. “Just one good night of sleep.”
“Need your pillow.”
“I do,” Gwen said, yearning for the long, cool expanse of the Garnet Hill body pillow that for months, interwoven with her legs, arms, and belly, had been her truest lover. “I do need my pillow, so bad.”
“Go home,” Master Jew said. “Get it.”
“I can’t.”
Master Jew turned her back to Gwen. Across the scarred and glossy bamboo floor of the studio, four high windows looked out onto the blue glazing of a summer Oakland sky crazed with telephone wires. Behind the concrete hulk of the old Golden State market, a palm tree hiked its green slattern skirts.
“Okay, I know you need me out of here. I’m so grateful you let me stay this long. After today I’ll go to a hotel, I’ll rent an apartment. One of those little places down in Emeryville by the movie theater. IKEA’s right there. Get a crib, some dishes. Whatever I’m going to need. I know I’ve been kind of lying around here moping and feeling sorry for myself. My back hurts, and I’ve been maybe in a little bit of shock. There are a lot of things I don’t know. If I can take care of a baby on my own. If I’m going to be able to keep doing the work I have been doing for the past ten years.”
Master Jew kept her back to Gwen, who knew that her speech had been disrespectful and poorly judged in both its length and its tone.
“I’m sorry,” Gwen concluded. “Seriously. Tomorrow, next day at the latest, I’m out of here.”
The teacup—smaller than the first, red and gold with an intricate carpet pattern and a goldfish—was in Gwen’s face before she realized that Master Jew had moved, a sudden accident of vision like a blackout or a camera flash, and by the time she realized that the crazy old lady had actually
tossed a teacup at her head
, Gwen’s right palm was smarting, and the intercepted cup lay cool against her fingers, where, at the base of her thumb, it gave up one last drop.
“Big day. Get dressed,” Mrs. Jew said. “Then go get your pillow.”
G
wen felt nervous about her footing, her status under her own roof. So she had in mind a kind of marital Grenada, the deployment of massive force in support of a modest, even risible objective. But when she drove past the sleeping house at 6:51
A.M.
(an hour with which her husband had never been intimately acquainted), it looked so ordinary, blue-painted cedar shakes peeling, honeysuckle strangling the slat fence, empty tanks from the Arrowhead bubbler ranged along the front porch, that she lost her stomach for a fight. She rolled right past the house and, for an instant, considered driving on.
True enough, as she had told Master Jew, the body pillow did not just preserve her sleep: there were nights when she felt it was the only thing in this world that felt and understood her. True to its name, the body pillow had come to embody the unknown child inside her, mute and shapeless but imbued with some distinct essence or presence of the baby to come. The body pillow was a doll that she nightly cuddled as, in weird pregnancy dreams, the baby was transformed into all manner of beasts and vegetables and stuff a whole lot freakier than a pillow. At the same time, she knew, it was only a forty-five-dollar body pillow she had bought online. It could easily be replaced.
“The hell with that,” she said aloud, and parked the car in front of the Lahidjis’ house. “I want my damn pillow.”
She did not get out of the car. She did some qi breathing. She groped for the shimmery little bead at the center of herself. She tried to harness or at least to tidy up her qi. She had enough conflict to deal with today, she reminded herself, without adding to the toll of stress, measurable in rads, to which she and the baby had been exposed. Still, her sense of outrage over all that Archy had done and failed to do as a husband, a father, and a man remained undiminished by her reluctance to confront him, and that outrage fixated on, swarmed like a cloud of bees around, the sum of forty-five dollars. She was not going to throw that money away. She had left behind many things of value in the house when she left Archy, and if she never got back any of those things, so be it; let the body pillow serve to redeem the remainder of the life and possessions she had abandoned. She got out of the car. Only one course open to her: to come in not like a battalion of marines overwhelming some little isle of coconuts but like Special Forces: surgical. Stealthy. In and out.
Gwen decided to try the back door first. She slipped—without much clearance on either side of her—along the broken snake hide of the brick walk that ran between the house and a hurricane fence, the fence woven with morning glory like some kind of feral basket. She sneaked past the kitchen windows, past the garbage and recycling bins, through that whole shadowy side zone of the house, which she had entered rarely over the years, a dense and leaf-shadowed passage hospitable, or so she always imagined, to rats. That thought hurried her along.
The backyard looked worse than she remembered. Brick barbecue area, angel’s trumpet tree hung with yellow wizard hats, chain-link fence obliterated from view in many places by green flows of ivy and jasmine and morning glory. Shaggy stand of pampas grass. The forlorn expanse of concrete that some previous occupant of the house, through an excess of laziness or optimism, had painted lawn-green. It was a mangy, scraggly, jungly mess that must be lowering property values as far away as Claremont Avenue. It was an embarrassment. But Gwen had been gone only a week; this ruin was the work of years. A faithful record of her untended life.
She averted her gaze from the broken latticework around the foundation of the house, the loose weather stripping that peeped like a gang banger’s drawers from the seams around the back door. When she and Archy bought the house, it had been a semi-wreck, cheap but ill used. They had prepared a list of the repairs and improvements they were going to make. This list was divided among the required, the optional, and the fantastic. They put in new toilets and sinks, using a book from the library. They redid the floors, rehung the windows, patched the roof. It was the first common project of their marriage, and looking back on that time, Gwen felt a twinge of loss and regret for their happiness. In time they had crossed off all the things that were required, but when they reached the next phase, they opted against the optional. At some point well before they arrived at the fantastic, they had lost track of the list.
Gwen unlocked the back door and pushed, but the door pushed back. The chain was set. It was a formidable chain installed by the previous owner, and to Gwen’s knowledge, neither she nor Archy had ever employed it. There was something unnerving about the vigor with which the chain resisted letting Gwen enter the house. It was as though Archy had changed the locks on her. Gwen was insulted. She was about to start pounding, demanding an explanation, but she remembered her maternal resolve to stay calm. It occurred to her that Archy might feel less secure without her in the house, and the thought touched her. She shut the back door with a soft click and crept back around to the front door.
As she let herself in, she realized that a faint rolling hum she had taken, coming up the porch steps, for the vibration through the old fir floor of the refrigerator, or maybe the humidifier in the basement, maybe even some kind of distant cement mixer or the MedEvac helicopter landing on its pad over at Children’s Hospital, was in fact the entwined snoring of two boys. Julie Jaffe lay half extruded from Gwen’s old sleeping bag, shirtless and shockingly pale, with little pink guinea-pig nipples. Titus had been neatly interred beneath Archy’s
Diff’rent Strokes
sleeping bag, only his weird fingery toes and the upper half of his face visible. A glacier of DVD cases slid across the coffee table,
Strutter
,
Ghetto Hitman
,
Soul Shaker
, all those crazy crap-ass movies that Archy’s father had spent the seventies cranking out or being cranked out by. Peeking from under a Styrofoam clamshell from which a couple of french fries poked like the feelers of a large and cautious insect was another disc on whose label she recognized the astonishing Afro of Valletta Moore, along with the barrel and silencer of the .357 she fondled, in that iconic pose from the poster of
Nefertiti
, forty stories of endless brown leg with a pair of highjacked fuck-me pumps for a ground floor, yellow satin hot-pants jumpsuit for a pediment. The room hung heavy with a fug of puberty, microwave popcorn, and something unidentifiable but horrible.