Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

“You’ll help me, right, Arch? If I promise I won’t do anything stupid, lose my temper? If I keep it constructive and positive? You’re going to help me fight?”

Before he could get an answer out of Archy—not that, when you came right down to it, he really needed one—a pattern of percussion intruded from outside the store, getting itself all tangled up with the thing Jack DeJohnette was laying down on the store’s turntable; the door banged open; and the boys came in, Julie and that kid, Julie giving off strong waves of something heavily plated with Moog and in a tricky time signature, sounded like Return to Forever. The boy never went anywhere without that fucking eight-track now, bopping all over town with his woeful Isro and his bell-bottom jeans, some kind of little Jewish soul elf. All of Nat’s regret and retrospective longing to connect to his son seemed to turn at once to irritation. He reached for the eight-track’s dial, and the volume dropped to zero.

“Who’s this?” Nat turned to the other boy. “Who are you?”

“Okay,” Julie said. “So. Dad.”

From the time he went verbal—two, three years old—Julie had made it a point to appear before the bench with his arguments scrubbed and tidied. Business plan all formatted and punctuated. Scheming, deep scheming, but letting you see that he was scheming, that your consciousness of his machination was a part, maybe the key element, of his scheme.

“This is Titus Joyner. He and I met in my film class, you know, ‘Sampling as Revenge,’ the Tarantino thing, which by the way is awesome, this week we get to watch Clockwork Orange , which is possibly not as great as 2001 or The Shining but is maybe number three, as I think you will agree.”

Nat signaled that he was willing at least to argue this—he was not personally interested in any top three that did not include Barry Lyndon— but something had come over Archy. He stared at Titus Joyner, unblinking, breathing through his mouth. A kind of exploratory alarm, Nat would have said, as if he’d just realized he had left his wallet in a taxicab in a city far away and was trying to remember how much money it contained.

“Yeah,” Julie said. “So, moving along, Titus, say hi, Titus.”

“Hi.”

“So, what can I tell you? Titus just moved to Oakland, not, what, not even two months ago, from Texas. He is fourteen years old, extremely intelligent, and well behaved. Really good at MTO . Has excellent habits of personal hygiene, as you can see.”

Indeed, the kid’s pleats, seams, and hemlines were all crisp and tidy. His nails were flawless seashells.

“He was living with his granny Shy in Texas, but Shy died, and now he is living at his old, crazy, like, senile auntie’s house, where there were already—what was it—fourteen?”

He turned to his friend, who was staring blindly up at Art Kane’s famous photograph of that great day in Harlem, looking like his ears were full of hornets that he was trying not to anger or disturb.

“Nine,” he said softly.

“Nine!” Julie cried, as if this were a number even greater and more outrageous than fourteen. “He’s living in unsafe, unhealthy, and unsanitary conditions, and don’t get all wiggy on me, okay, Dad, but I told him that, pending an intense family discussion between you and Mom, he might be able, we might consider, seeing as how he is such an awesome, nice, smart person with so many startling creative ideas and what I might be tempted to call a truly fresh cinematic vision—”

“Resist the temptation,” Nat said. “I beg you.”

“I was hoping he could stay with us. Unless maybe—”

Julie turned to Archy. Hitherto, he had been carried away on a gust of his own enthusiasm, but his nerve or his blarney seemed to fail him as he saw the look in Archy’s eyes, which Nat felt he would have to describe, trying to avoid exaggeration, as raw panic. The surname Joyner belatedly played a chord in Nat’s memory, a mu major, something a little off about its beauty. Jamila Joyner, a girl Archy had been stuck on, stuck to, the summer when he and Nat first met. Right after he came home from Kuwait. A girl who stayed around enough to wear Archy out, then went on home to Oklahoma. Or possibly, come to think of it, to Texas.

“Well,” Nat said. “I guess congratulations are in order.”

Archy stood in the front bay window of his house like a doomed captain on the bridge of a starship, pondering, as if it were a devourer of planets, the approach of his wife’s black BMW. Stroking his chin, using intricate mental tables of cosines and angles to decide whether the intensity of Gwen’s response to the business with Elsabet Getachew would be squared or full-on cubed by the news that his child had appeared out of nowhere, or rather out of some nowhere known only, it seemed, to Julie Jaffe. The results of Archy’s calculations were sobering.

The BMW pulled up to the house and then sat, lights lit, engine heat troubling the atmosphere above its hood, windshield a glossy gray-blue blank of reflected sky. Daylight was taking its sweet time fading into dusk, and the street at suppertime seemed to be holding its breath, torn into patches of deep shadow and sunshine, motionless but for the little white moths stitching their loopy crewelwork in the honeysuckle. In the sandpit of the tiny playground, dozens of toy vehicles and appliances lay bleached and upended, primary-colored plastic ruins as of some toddler cataclysm.

The door on the driver’s side swung open. Gwen took hold of the doorframe with her left hand and the door itself with her right and, jaw set, head lowered as to a thankless task, simultaneously heaved and thrust herself, belly first, out of the car and onto her feet. For a few seconds she wavered there like the evening itself. Then she reached into the back of the car and came out not with the assault rifle, rocket launcher, or perhaps flying guillotine that Archy feared but rather an aluminum water bottle and the shoulder strap of her birthing bag. She tried to yank the bag by its strap through the space between the back of the driver’s seat and the doorframe, but it got wedged. She jerked hard and then stumbled as something—the strap, probably—gave way. When she went to unlatch the seat back, she dropped her car keys. They bounced once and skittered under the car. She let the broken strap dangle and fell back against the side of the car with a show of quiet despair.

Over the past hour, Archy had envisioned Gwen’s return according to a number of scenarios, incorporating into these fantasies of anger, reproach, and reconciliation elements derived from Italian opera, pornographic films of the mid-eighties, and footage of tornadoes vandalizing Kansas with lightning and wind. Gwen lost her temper so rarely, and with such a lasting sense of self-betrayal, that it was difficult for Archy to imagine with any accuracy how far beyond the unprecedented events of that morning she was capable of going. But it had never occurred to Archy that Gwen would come home to him covered in defeat.

She stood there leaning against the car, looking at the broken strap of her birthing bag as if its frayed ends encoded the general intentions of the universe toward her. Archy padded down the front walk of his house, his step light and cautious, the pavement warm against his bare feet. He assumed that the sorrow, the weariness of spirit attested to by the slump of Gwen’s shoulders, by her bowed head, by the whole pregnant-lady version of The End of the Trail she had going, that all this served to express the cost to her of returning to his cheating embrace.

“I’m sorry,” he said, all his planned speeches and formulas forgotten. “Gwen, I just— Ho .” He came around to face her square-on and saw the blood on her shirt. The antennae of two sutures on her cheek. “Damn, girl, what the fuck?” An iron bar, cold as a flagpole in winter, plunged into his chest. “Are you—?”