Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

He was such a racist.

The young man who had greeted them at the door led them all the way to the back of the house, down some ill-sorted steps to an addition. In one of the bunks, a boy not much younger than Julie lay cuddling a Game Boy.

“Titus?” Julie called.

It was a kind of bunkhouse, furnished with a variety of bunk beds of different periods and styles, some made of steel tubing, some of scuffed and gouged wood. Not much light. In the rear corner, on the bottom bunk, under a Blue’s Clues sleeping bag, Julie found Titus. “Hey,” he said.

“What are you doing here?” Titus said from under the comforter, voice muffled but sounding, to Julie’s ear, roughened by weeping. “Man, get the fuck out.”

“Okay,” Julie said, and tears came to his own eyes. He started to turn away but then wiped his face with his arm. The little kid with the Game Boy was staring at him. “I just came to, uh, tell you that I thought you might want to know that Gwen is having the baby. About to. Right now. I mean, she’s in labor. If you come now, you, you know, you could kind of like, be there, or whatever. When your brother’s born.”

Titus didn’t move or speak.

“He got a brother?” said the boy, doubtful.

“Almost,” said Julie. “Titus, come on. We got your bike. Let’s go, don’t miss this. It’s really awesome. Brothers are cool. I wish I had one.” He looked at the boy. “Right, brothers are cool?”

“Not really,” the boy said.

“Could you, maybe, like, could we get a little privacy?”

“Why, so you can suck his dick?”

“Yes, totally,” Julie said without missing a beat, exhilarated by his own daring. “Here.” He took five dollars out of his wallet. “Go buy some candy or something.”

The kid left. Julie sat down on the corner of the bed.

“I know, I mean, I get that you…” He took a breath, let it out. “I just wanted to say, if you came back here, you must have been feeling pretty lonely right then. Like, okay, Archy was being an ass and all. But, I mean, this is your brother, it’s a, here’s your chance, you know? To have somebody that loves you and looks up to you. Besides me, I mean, because I know that’s, like, not really such a big deal.”

“Get up,” Mrs. Jew said. “Go to the hospital. Now. Or I will kick your butt. Do you believe me?”

Titus sat up, looked at Julie, then back at Mrs. Jew. Nodded yes.

Over. A rest between measures scored for kettledrums. A patch of blue sky between two rolling thunderheads.

Gwen in the birthing bed, between contractions, hating the only friend she had in the world. Hating his aftershave: a compound of unlit cherry cigar and the cardboard pine tree dangling from the rearview of a taxicab. Underneath that smell a deeper rancor, raw bacon gone soft in the heat. Hating the shine of his scalp through crosshatched hair. The whitehead at the wing of his right nostril. The fur on the backs of his fingers. Hating him for not being Archy.

Nat sat upright in a leatherette chair, chin raised, stiff-backed, looking like he was waiting for something freaky to happen, something that would demand more from him than he was prepared to deliver, like maybe any minute Nurse Sally was going to roll some weird Filipino piano into the room, made from sharks’ teeth and tortoiseshells and coir, which he would be expected to play. The expression on his face saying, Please, Lord, do not let this spectacle become any more revolting than it already is. Eyelids half-lowered, widening, narrowing again, the poor man trying to find that sweet spot between shut-tight-in-horror and wide-eyed-attentiveness-to-the-miracle-of-birth. Jitter in his legs. Hunch of impatience in his shoulders. Considering that the man had been married to a midwife for seventeen years, Gwen considered it surprising how little he seemed to know, recollect, or be able to intuit about the needs of a woman in labor. The sum of all the birthing wisdom he had managed to acquire was compassed within a cup of ice and the area of the washcloth that he regularly returned to the bathroom to douse with water and wring out in the sink before returning it, blessedly cool, to her forehead.

“Thank you, Nat,” she said, furious with gratitude.

Had to be a thousand degrees Kelvin in the LDR, Gwen feeling strangely but not pleasantly buoyant in the heat. Sweating, fouled, writhing. Hair like a gorgon’s. The bed a swamp. Her skin in full rebellion, as if the baby were something not only to be expelled from her womb but shed from the outside, too; the hospital gown intolerable, abrasive, a crust of toast against the roof of the mouth. Gwen felt desperate, wild to labor naked. Wanted to rip off the gown, burst from it like the Hulk trashing one of his professor-dude lab coats. But here was this guy who was her only friend, wanting to see her naked even less than she wanted him to. His gaze already, every time Gwen rolled over or sat up, lashing around the room like a loose garden hose. The man appalled by the horror of it all, head down, cringing, a palace lackey sent into the foulness of the labyrinth to tend the roaring Minotaur. And humming. Running a metal key, a broken bottleneck, back and forth endlessly along a taut string of piano wire.

“Nat, boy, I beg you, you have to cut it out with the god damn humming.”

“What humming?” Nat said.

He got up and opened Gwen’s phone for the tenth time, trying to raise Archy. The gesture exhausted Gwen; she hated it more than all of the other incredibly annoying things that Nat was being, doing, and saying right now, put together.

“You might not want to do that. Archy Stallings comes through that door, Nat, swear to God, I’m going to call security on him.”

She had caught him on the point of dialing the last digit, his finger hesitating over the nine. Eyebrows arched, looking at her, entertaining the remote possibility that he had misheard her.

“Put. The motherfucking phone. Away.”

Nat nodded, lips pursed, eyes wide, his expression saying, O- kay . He snapped the phone shut. Sometime around the time that Gwen uttered the obscenity, Nurse Sally had come back into the room, or rather, she was simply there again. Endowed, Gwen noted, with her own combination of odors, almond extract and armpit and some inexcusable derivative of gardenia.

“Hi, Mom, we are fine?” Sally said in that mildly broken English, in that treacly little voice, with that unbearable giggle. “I think your wife, hee, she’s still trapped,” she told Nat. “That other mom, my goodness, she is taking her time.”

“We’re fine, Sally,” Gwen said, working as much normal into her voice as she could manage. Tiring now. Needing to be done, with a longing that brought her—just when she hoped most to appear cheerful, fresh as a daisy, infinitely game to wait it out—to tears. “Just hanging.”

“Totally,” Nat agreed.

“How often?” Sally wanted to know. She went right to over to the heart monitor. “Huh,” she said. “I’m sorry, Mom. Ms. Shanks, I’m so sorry. I have to get the doctor in here. I know you want it to be Ms. Jaffe. I heard you had, I don’t know, some kind of problem with Dr. Lazar. But I think we can’t wait anymore.”

“What is it?”

“I think it’s a deceleration. Just a little one, but. Time for doctor.”

“Oh,” Gwen said, watching Sally’s flowered back as she race-walked out of the room. “Oh, no.”

She was barely able to get the words out as another great slow umbrella of pain opened inside her. Combing her thoughts, yanking them into a pigtail. Everything fading but the pain: the room and its furnishings, the whispering of pumps and monitors, the circuit of the hours, daylight, the world. The husband who had abandoned her to bear their child into that world. Pain like a closing of the eyes.