Telegraph Avenue

  “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.”

  “Pulling 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 d
eeper 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.

  “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.

  She 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.