Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

“Maybe they’re planning to hold us up.”

“Huh,” Archy said, feeling, at this echo of his own offhand first reaction, a vague anxiety at the sight of Salt and Pepper over there, waiting to get spilled. “That why you came back?”

“No, Archy,” Nat said. “That’s not why I came back.”

U seless , by James Joyce . That was Nat’s father’s joke, passing sentence on himself when he spaced on the dry cleaning, when the phone bill went past due and service got cut, when he could not start a fire or turn over an engine, when he ran another candy store or newsstand into the ground. A man with a talent for nothing but tipping weary waitresses, slipping lollipops to babies when their mothers’ backs were turned. Saddled with the especial uselessness of the third-generation socialist, one of the lonely grandsons of Eugene V. Debs, stood up by Utopia, stranded with a payroll to make. Fatherhood among the Jaffes afforded a history of uselessness, with Nat only the latest chapter: luftmenschen, ineptitudes, and bankrupts going all the way back to Minsk Guberniya. Standing there like an ass in the doorway to Julie’s room— fucking useless! —serving up the traditional blend of banter and bluster, an old family recipe. Seeing misadventure, doubt, confusion in his son’s eyes and having not a clue what to do about it. Knowing that as the boy got older, every such moment might turn out to be the last of its kind. Something to be seized upon and savored, not allowed to slip away in hints and smart remarks.

Carpe diem. Was there ever a more useless piece of advice?

Nat remembered how, when he went back for his father’s funeral, a few weeks after he and Aviva started sleeping together, he found the old man’s copy of Ulysses in a box of ten-inch records, mainly classical, mostly Shostakovich. That chunky softcover from the late fifties or early sixties, fat “U,” slender “L,” swaybacked, edges sueded, pages yellow as the filter of a smoked cigarette. Tucked into his father’s favorite passage—the hungry cat giving its morning oration—Nat had found a clipping from the Times-Dispatch. NEWSSTAND OWNER FOILS ROBBERY. A Sunday morning in 1968 in Shockoe Bottom. Suspect, a Negro male in his early twenties, asked for a copy of Bird Fancier on a shelf behind the counter, then rifled the cash register when the owner’s back was turned. Pistol-whipped a customer who tried to intervene. Store owner Julius Jaffe, forty, then struck the assailant with a ( Times-Dispatch ) newspaper weight. Alertly flagged a passing police car. Almost certainly averted further violence, the suspect having served time at Powhatan for attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon. Julius the First was not the type to save clippings, never one to stand back and admire himself—the fifteen-year-old story came as news to Nat, who could only conclude that, though his father never spoke of it, the incident had meant a great deal to him. A high point in a life lived at sea level, prone to flooding.

At the time, when he was in the midst of mourning his father, the discovery of the clipping had made Nat smile. Three weeks earlier, walking home from the Telegraph Repertory where he worked as an usher, Nat had interrupted a mugger in the act of taking a wallet, a watch, and a silver Tibetan barrette off a young woman whom Nat recognized as a regular patron of the theater, particularly fond, it seemed, of the work of Elliott Gould, to whom Nat had always fancied he bore a resemblance. Nat acted without reflection, plan, or reservation and was rewarded for his courage with a blow to the stomach and a night in the arms of the young woman, whose name was Aviva Roth. As he read the old clipping—teary at the thought that the incident had meant so much to Julius that he kept a record of it between the favorite pages of his favorite book—it did not occur to Nat, not for an instant, that the day would come when he, too, would look back on a moment’s thoughtless heroism, almost twenty years before, as the only useful thing he had ever done.

“First thing, I came to apologize,” he told Archy. “I’m sorry. I fucked up.”

“I see.”

Archy was going to delay acceptance for a while, Nat knew. Apologies were the flip side of Nat’s huffing and puffing, and they flowed so freely from his lips that the people in his life had learned to hold out against them as stoutly as against the tantrums that necessitated them. Hunker down in the house of bricks, wait and see if Nat planned to come all the way down the chimney. He always did.

“That’s why the donuts,” he said.

“They are appreciated,” Archy said. He opened the box, surveyed its contents like he was taking a first look at a crate of fresh inventory, there being, of course, as Archy often explained to Nat, a profound spiritual analogy, hole and all, between donuts and vinyl records.

“So, I’m sorry. I was a total ass. That’s first. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I will apologize to everyone personally. Mr. Jones, Moby. All of them.”

In the last paragraph of that clipping from the Times-Dispatch , it had been reported, with a certain editorial bemusement, that after foiling the robbery, storekeeper Jaffe had been heard to apologize to the would-be robber for having beaned him with a lead ingot.

“Okay, okay,” Archy said, wigwagging his hand impatiently. “I got it. Apology accepted. What’s the second thing?”

“The second thing is,” Nat said, and as he prepared to adumbrate the second item on his agenda, it did him the great favor of occurring to him: a sentence that his father, rest his soul, had never quite managed to articulate aloud, at least in Nat’s hearing. “I am not going to lose this motherfucking store.”

“Well, all right.”

“Because I don’t know about you, but I feel like, Archy, if I don’t have this place? I’m not sure I really have a place.”

“I hear you.”

“You think it’s melodramatic.”

“You? No way.”

“Because I’m totally serious,” Nat said. “Look at me. What else am I fit for, you know? The ice melts, where do you put the penguin?”

“A valid question.”

“Where else am I going to be .”

“In the spiritual sense, you mean.”

“Exactly.”

“Besides,” Archy said, his eyebrows saying, Brace yourself, you are about to get fucked with , “like, in your house. With your family .”

“Archy, I love my wife, and I love my son. You know that.”

“I do.”

“You’ll attest to that.”

“I will.”

“But this store is my world. These are my records . You know?”

“I do know, Nat.” For all of Archy’s teasing, the tongue-in-cheek approbations, Nat had felt his words landing, sticking, here and there, like snow on ready ground. When you chose to pledge your share of labor and your worldly assets to partnership with a man who liked to get up on his high horse, make speeches, let it rip, it was probably because you knew that somebody had to do that from time to time, and it wasn’t going to be you. “This store is our world.”

“You get that.”

“I do.”

“So that’s why I’m not just going to stand around being useless,” Nat said, having worked it all out: the feeling of being caught under the wheels of the Dogpile juggernaut that Mirchandani’s news had first engendered. The bitterness of his talk with Julie. The memories of his father’s bookmark life. “I’m going to fight them.”

“Gibson Goode?”

“Gibson Goode. Chan Flowers. All those motherfuckers.”

Archy smiled, neither mocking nor quite pleased. The smile you gave something, good or bad, when it showed up right on time.