Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

“Shit, I did forget. I have to get dinner.” He looked at Nat. “Gwen started in at Chimes, part-time LDR nurse.”

“I heard. Aviva ran into her on the ward.”

“Just to keep some money coming in.”

“We figured. Medical school’s going to be a stretch?”

“What do you suppose?”

“She can get help. Smart and experienced as she is. What school’s not going to want her?”

“You are replete with rosy predictions today about our future.”

“Just quoting Aviva.”

“Gwen’s worried Aviva’s still mad at her.”

“It was a blow. It was, you know.”

“I know.”

“Kind of like a divorce. You don’t stop—I mean, you’re mad, but. Let me try him?”

“No, man, I got it.”

“You don’t stop loving the person. You miss them.”

“You do.”

“Come on, give me little mister.”

The partial charm of the pendulum treatment had long since worn off. Archy shrugged and handed over the baby, whose cries had taken on a feline rasp.

“Hey, hey, big boy. Okay, now. We’re friends, aren’t we? Oh, yeah, we go way back, Clark and I.”

But Nat, though he broke out his most sonorous and somniferous material to hum, proved no more adept than Archy at quieting the baby.

“Give him,” Titus said.

Archy okayed it with a nod, and Nat passed the baby to his older brother, who carried him out of the suite, along the hall, to the terra-cotta stairs of the old building. By the time he came out onto the sidewalk, Clark appeared to have run out of things to complain about. He lay supine in a crook of Titus’s arm, hot and sweaty and smelling of clabber. The October sunshine was dusty and mild. Halloween a week off, here came Julie Jaffe, rolling up on his skateboard, ready a week ahead of time. All in black, blazer, pants, a black string tie like Val Kilmer’s in Tombstone . Wearing a long, threadbare satin glove, purple and finned, on his right hand. Hair dyed a matte black. Stealth hair, absorbing all ambient light, reflecting nothing. Black hair, red freckles, kind of weird in combination, but somehow he made it work. He left his white earbuds buried in his ears. Stomped on the tail of the deck, flipped it up into his arms. “What’s up?” he said.

“Yo, check it out,” said Titus. “It’s Johnny Cash.”

Julie tugged out each earbud, pop, pop. He crossed his eyes at the baby, kissy-faced him. Reached out one finger, touched the tip of it to a teardrop that clung to Clark’s cheek. “Why was he crying?”

“Boy don’t really need a reason,” Titus said.

“I saw you coming out of Fred’s Deli, uh, yesterday.”

“Yeah.”

“With Kezia. She’s pretty.”

“She’s all right.”

“I knew her at Willard. Actually, I went to kindergarten with her. She was always really nice to me.”

“She remembers you, too.”

“And those guys, Darius and, um, Tariq, I know them, too. They’re okay.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, they aren’t the worst. It’s good you made friends or whatever.”

“Julie.”

“I’m sorry.”

Titus looked away. Watched the traffic, lips compressed, an air of imposing patience on exasperation. “Everybody crying,” he observed.

Without quite looking at Julie, he handed over the cloth diaper that had come along with his brother, stuck to his pj’s by static electricity. Julie used the diaper to wipe his eyes. It came away bearing the calligraphy, painted in smeary guyliner, of his sadness.

“Sorry,” Julie said. “I’m such a loser.”

“Nah, whatever.”

“I made a couple friends, too.”

“I know.”

They stood there along the shoulder of the street that had carried them, rolling, into the darkness of a few lost summer mornings.

“Oh, fuck, what time is it?” Julie said at last.

“Like around three?”

“Fuck. My dad can’t be late. My mom sent me to get him, he must have his phone turned off. They upstairs?”

“Yeah. Can’t be late for what?”

Julie waited before replying, took a deep breath. Rolled his eyes. “Picking up trash by Lake Merritt,” he said.

“Ho.”

“I know, right? How could I not be a loser?”

“Stealing a zeppelin, though. I mean, that’s kind of badass.”

“No, it isn’t. He just untied it. It went up. It came down in Utah. I better get him.”

After Julie went inside, Titus sat down outside, on the topmost step. He propped Clark next to him on the step, holding him up by the armpits, and they pretended for a minute that Clark knew how to sit. At this point, that was about as much fun as the boy knew how to have. A few minutes were lost to this pastime, and then Julie came back out of the building with Nat behind him. Titus returned Clark to the crook of his arm.

“Archy’s just locking up,” Nat told Titus. “He’ll be right down.”

“Okay.”

“Say hi to your stepmom for me.”

“All right.”

Nat walked over to the Saab, which bore the marks of its cruel treatment at the hands of a hurricane fence, got in, and drove off to Lake Merritt to pay down his debt to society amid its eternal snows of goose shit.

Titus and Julie clasped fingertips—one bare-handed, one gloved—yanked loose, brought their fists together in a soft collision. Then Julie laid down his board.

“Yo, Artist Formerly Known as Julie,” Titus said. Julie turned. “I’ll probably be on tonight. Like around ten, all right? Meet me in Wakanda.”

“If I get my homework done,” Julie said. “Okay.” Then he hopped onto the deck of his skateboard and pushed off, rumbling down the sidewalk away from Titus.

“Y’all not going to hang out?” Archy said, coming out of the building swinging the empty car seat, locking the front door with a key from the jingle-bell key ring.

“Maybe I’ll see him on MTO. Here, you take him. Go on,” Titus told Clark, turning custody of the baby over to their father. “Y’all smell like Monterey Jack.”

Archy and Clark were reunited on friendlier terms than those under which they had last parted. “What’d you do?” Archy said to Titus.

“Nothing.”

They watched Julie skate away into the late-October afternoon, looking back over his shoulder only once.

“He still play as a girl?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s his name?”

“Dezire. With a z.”

Archy shook his head slowly, a gesture that put him somewhere between admiration and disdain. “That’s how you friends now. In a game. With him being a girl and you being, what’s it?”

“Black Answer.”

“Right. Dezire and Black Answer, hanging out in downtown Wakanda.”

“No, but we mostly meet up in the Blue Area of the Moon.”

“Of course.” Archy buckled Clark into the car seat, snapped the seat into its base in the back of the station wagon. “Right, shorty?” he said to the baby. “I mean, where else?”

Clark, as yet unfamiliar with the secret domed refuge postulated, in the pages of Marvel Comics, to lie forever hidden on the moon’s far side, said nothing.

“That’s pretty much the only place,” Titus said.

He got into the backseat so that he could, when required, make faces at Clark or give him a bottle. Archy started for home along Telegraph, but then when they hit Sixty-first Street, he missed the turn.

“Where we going?” Titus said.

“To Wakanda,” said Archy.

“Where?”

“The Blue Area of the Moon.”

He didn’t stop when they got there, though. Just slowed down, in his drag-ass, baby-smelling, style-free Subaru wagon, long enough to check out a banner announcing, in baseball-jersey script, the imminent opening for business, between the United Federation of Donuts and the King of Bling, of a trading card store called Mr. Nostalgia’s Neighborhood. Beyond the fourth grade or so, Archy had never taken much interest in baseball cards, but he could feel the underlying vibe of that particular madness. Although he knew he would never be able to set foot in that building again without breaking his heart, he understood that the new operation held promise, and in principle, at least, he approved. The merchandise was not the thing, and neither, for that matter, was the nostalgia. It was all about the neighborhood, that space where common sorrow could be drowned in common passion as the talk grew ever more scholarly and wild.