Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

Archy got out of the car to greet Moby, eager for the excuse to release himself from the cramped, styleless, and mildly punitive confines to which, once he had conceded that a ’74 El Camino legendary for its unreliability might not be the most suitable car for a family man, fate had sentenced him. Selling the El Camino was only part of a diverse package of concessions, amendments, resolutions, and reparations that he had agreed to under the terms of his repatriation to the house on Sixty-first Street. One day, he hoped, this foreordained path would lead, amid countless chutes and precious few ladders, to the square of ultimate redemption—Forgiveness. Parts of the journey had been painful, and Archy rarely bothered to shield his wife and sons from awareness of this pain. But he had confessed to no one how bitterly he wept on the day when some dude from Livermore drove his El Camino away.

He raised a hand to Moby, who was molesting the knot of his necktie in the side mirror, then nodded to the plaintiff, Garth, standing by the half-white, half-blue crib looking wary, closed down, and as worn out and sleep-deprived as Archy.

“She’ll be right out,” Archy said. “Boy’s just finishing his snack.”

The plaintiff nodded, then turned back to the crib with an air of regret or longing, as if he would much rather continue with his brushwork than go through what Gwen had in mind.

At the back of the carport on a workbench, a radio reported on the count facing Miguel Tejada, and below the radio, strapped into a bouncy seat, busting out with some intricate mudras, lay the troublesome baby. Archy had forgotten its gender and name. The baby had something wrong with its skin, he noticed, some kind of weird blotches of discoloration on its fingers and face. A wire of panic lit up in Archy’s chest; it had never occurred to him that Garth might have actual grounds for his lawsuit. Then he saw that the blotches appeared to be precisely the same shade as the blue stain on the half-painted crib.

“It didn’t occur to me that she was going to lick it,” Garth said.

“They will lick pretty much anything, is my understanding,” Archy said.

“Yo, Arch,” Moby said. “What up. Mr. Newgrange, Mike Oberstein. We spoke on the phone.”

Moby skipped the hand theatrics for once and rolled on over to shake Garth Newgrange’s straight. He turned back to the car as Gwen climbed out of the backseat, running a finger down the buttons of her blouse, tugging her skirt down over the dimples of her knees.

“Hey, Gwen.”

“Hi, Moby. Hello, Garth.”

Moby had spoken to the man, prearranged it for them to come over, but Garth looked ambushed. He folded his arms across his chest, took a deep breath. “Hello.”

“This is my husband, Archy. Archy, this is Garth.”

Archy got the man to unlatch one hand and offer it, small and freckled with melanin and white latex semigloss.

“That’s, in the car, that’s Titus, Archy’s son. Titus, get out of the car and give this man a proper greeting.”

Titus, operating under the terms of the more modest package that he had negotiated with Gwen, which included room, board, and at the end of his own Candy Land path, the ambiguous pink-frosting-roofed gingerbread house of a family to love him and fuck him up, instantly got out of the car, observed the agreed-upon conventions of civilized intercourse among strangers, and got back into the car. The boy was still visiting their planet from his own faraway home world, but Archy figured that with time, he would adjust to the local gravity and microbes. Keeping close to the baby most of the time, as if Clark were the object he had crossed the stellar void to study.

“And there she is,” Gwen said, noticing the blue-stained baby in her seat. “Little Bella.”

“There she is,” Garth agreed, not saying No thanks to you.

An awkward silence ensued that Archy did not have the energy or the courage to break.

“Can we—Garth, I was hoping we, you and I, could talk?” Gwen said, gesturing to the stairs that must lead downslope to the house.

“Here’s good,” Garth said.

Gwen blinked, looked at Moby. “Okay,” she said. “All right. I guess what I came here to say isn’t going to take very long, anyway. It’s really just two words long. I should have said them to you a long time ago, the day that Bella was born, right away. But they are not, they have never been, words that come very easily to me, I don’t know why. Maybe because, I’m not making an excuse here, but maybe because, the way I was raised, you know. That, basically, I have nothing to apologize for. Almost as a matter of, I want to say, policy. Politics, if you will. But even if that’s true in a broad, you know, like, historical sense. On the personal level—”

“You said tell you if you ran on at the mouth,” Moby said.

“Two words,” Gwen repeated, as though to herself.

Archy was enjoying this. He had been dwelling in a deep, capacious, and impregnable doghouse for weeks. He tried to remember if he had ever heard Gwen utter, in any but the most pro forma way, the phrase that came, halting but credible, to her lips.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

When she seemed content to leave it at that, Garth cross-armed and frowning without much of an apparent rise in temperature, Moby lofted an eyebrow toward one of the upswept flukes of his bangs: Go on.

“I’m sorry that I lost my temper the way I did,” she said. “With the doctor. I let my… my…”

“Self-righteousness?” Archy suggested helpfully.

Gwen nocked a scowl to her bowstring, aimed it at Archy, then lowered her bow and nodded. “Self-righteousness. My thin skin. Part of the same thing, I guess, that makes it so hard for me to apologize. But I do apologize, and I am sorry. My focus right then ought to have been on Lydia and the baby and nothing else. I failed them, and I failed you, and thank God that baby of yours is healthy and beautiful, because if anything had happened to her…”

She started to lose it, pulled herself together. Carried on. “I understand your anger. I accept it. But I’m hoping that you might find it in your heart to forgive me.”

“Okay,” Garth said.

“Okay, you forgive me?”

“Of course,” he said. “Why not?”

“Does this mean—” Moby said. “I’m sorry, but, informally acting as Gwen’s attorney, I have to ask. Are you dropping the lawsuit against her and Aviva?”

“No problem,” Garth said.

When they got back in the car and drove away, Gwen let herself go. She cried until they got down to the lower gate of the Claremont Hotel, and then she stopped. “I think you ought to try it,” she said.

“I already did,” Archy said. “I got no traction.”

“I wasn’t ready then,” Gwen said. “I didn’t know how good it feels.”

“Okay,” Archy said. “I’m sorry, Gwen. I fucked up long and often, in all kinds of ways, and I’m just nothing but sorry about that. Do you think you could find it in your heart to forgive me?”

“No,” Gwen said.

“What?”

“But almost.”

He glanced over at the boy sitting beside him, staring out at the road, nothing much happening in his expression but a bright shine on the eye.

“Okay, then. Titus, you, too. I’m sorry I wasn’t any kind of a father to you for the first fourteen years of your life. You are a fine young man, and I hope to do right by you from now on. Do you think maybe someday you could find it in your heart to forgive me?”

“Okay,” Gwen said. “That’s it. You’re good.”

Then they stopped for a red light, and the baby woke up again, disconsolate and hungry, and Archy stepped on the gas to get them home. It was weeks before he realized that he had never gotten an answer out of Titus, and by then the matter seemed to have lost its urgency.