Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

“It’s not my blood,” Gwen said in a bitter tone, as if to suggest that by rights it ought to be. She raised her head and tried to meet his gaze but could not seem to manage it. “I—” Now she looked at him. She had those beautiful Seminole eyes, mysterious and hooded, their color between tea and molasses. They filled rapidly with tears as if through the sudden breach of some inner dam. “I messed up, Archy.”

She let go of the broken strap, fell against him. Smell of a hospital in her hair, smell of hard work and failure rising off her body, and somewhere in the midst of it, a miscellaneous note of incense. She went completely boneless on him, expecting him to hold her up, all one hundred and sixty-odd pounds of her, bloodstains and belly, arms thrown around his shoulders. He resolved to do it. He belted her to him with his arms like her chute had failed and they were plummeting earthward a hundred miles an hour at the mercy of wind, cable, and rippling silk. He resolved on the spot to be equal to the challenge of bearing up. He was a husband who could be true. He was Superman grabbing hold of the train engine as it plunged from the bridge.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said.

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he regretted them. This breakdown or whatnot, he saw, had nothing to do with him or with their marriage. Gwen had sacrificed her dignity to return home not for his sake but for her own, because she needed to fall apart, and that was something she would permit herself to do only at home. So here she was, bloody and wrung out and ragged, and Archy had no motherfucking way of knowing whether it was going to be okay.

“Did somebody die?” he said. “Gwen. Honey. A baby?” She shook her head. “A mom ?”

“Nobody,” she said. “Nobody died. The baby, the mom’s fine.”

“You’re fine, too?”

She nodded. He laid a hand on her belly, and as always, the contact stirred him sexually. Something fructuous about the swell of her, asking to be opened.

“The baby?”

She stopped crying abruptly, with a sputtering finality, like the last frame of film running out on a reel. “The baby is fine.”

“Aw, then,” he said, fighting down the hard-on, even more inappropriately timed than usual, that had begun to unfurl in his boxers.

“No, Archy, listen, I can’t—I’m not—Oh, Archy, I messed up so-ho-ho bad .”

She sank to the ground, and Archy sank with her, the Man of Steel dragged along by the plummeting train. His arms ached, his knees trembled. Gwen seemed by the second to gain pounds and babies and fluids in her amnion.

“Come on inside. Yeah. Stand up. It’s okay.”

He hoisted her and she stood up, her legs going back about their business, but that was all she could seem to manage. She laid her head against his chest and rested. He was thinking, I can stay here like this all night until my arms break off and fall on the ground in a million pieces , failing to notice at first how intently Gwen was pressing her face against the front of his shirt, pressing it right up to the skin at his collar, now the hollow of his throat, taking deep inquisitorial breaths.

“Why do you smell like candles?” she said.

She drew back, watching him. She pulled a wad of paper napkins from the pocket of her bloodstained shirt and blew her nose.

“Long story,” he said, “Now tell me what happened.”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it. I lost my temper. Now we’re going to have our privileges revoked at Chimes, and Aviva’s pissed off at me, and we’ll probably have to close down our practice, and … and…”

Titus Joyner, riding his brakeless bicycle, rounded the corner by the Island of Lost Toys, the surface of his bare chest lustrous as motor oil. Wearing his T-shirt with the neck hole encircling his head and the rest hanging down behind like a burnoose. Archy’s heart tipped and fell from its shelf. He had persuaded Nat and the boys to go no farther for now, to say nothing to Aviva or anyone else, least of all Gwen. He did not deny or even seriously question the boy’s claim on his paternity. He remembered having heard about Jamila getting pregnant with a child he half assumed to be his, a half assumption that did not prompt him to protest or take any action at all when she went off to Arkansas or wherever to have it. Whenever he heard one of the popular songs of the era, which had provided a soundtrack, as it were, to the blind flailing of his spermatozoa through the inner darkness of Jamila Joyner, he might spare a nano-momentary thought for that child. But until this afternoon Titus had remained an eternal fat, stolid toddler dressed in the world’s tiniest tuxedo, as in the one photo of him that Archy had seen, years ago, sent by the Texas grandmother along with news of Jamila’s death in a car crash. No other comment, no request for the check—in the amount of $375.00—that Archy had provided, uniquely, in return for the photo and the tragic news. He had kept his distance with the boy in the store today, but he was careful not to be cold or unfriendly. The embrace they had exchanged was perfunctory and all but imperceptible to Archy behind the turmoil of his emotions. Now the boy pedaled past, eyes forward, expression blank, looking at neither Archy nor Gwen, neither left nor right, wearing his T-shirt do-rag. He was, like Gibson Goode and the impending fat, stolid toddler in Gwen’s belly, going to ruin everything.

“Who’s that?” Gwen said, watching Archy intently as he watched the kid ride past. There must have been some kind of slackening of Archy’s jaw or widening of his eyes. “Archy, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” said Archy. At the last possible instant the kid folded. His eyes slid toward Archy, flicked at him before returning front. “I’m— Nothing. No.”

He watched the kid ride off, then turned to face the ruination of his wife, trying to think what he could do. “Wait here,” he said. He walked over to the El Camino in the driveway and opened its passenger door, then slid out the enormous pink aircraft carrier of the cake box from Neldam’s.

“What,” Gwen said, taking a deep shuddering breath, her face wary but brightening visibly, at least to Archy’s trained eye. “In God’s name. Is that.”

“Dream of Cream,” Archy said.

Can’t play a Hammond through no apology,” said Mr. Randall “Cochise” Jones. “ ’Less you got some new type a patch cord I don’t know about.”

Making it a joke, wanting to hide his irritation. Up all night, spinning five thoughts in his head: Gig tomorrow. Brown and gold plaid. Bird need his arthritis drops. Gas up the van. Get the Leslie. Gig, plaid, bird, van, Leslie; needle in a locked groove endlessly circling the spindle of his mind. Mr. Jones felt ashamed of that scanty midnight track list. When he was a younger man, his insomnia used to play it all. Sex, race, law, politics, Bach, Marx, Gurdjieff. All kinds of wild and lawless thinking, free-format, heavy, deep, and wide. Now, shit. Fit it all onto a pissant five-track EP going around and around.

“Said, be here Saturday,” Mr. Jones said.

“I know I did.”

“Black man my age, that could be asking a lot.”

“But here you are,” Archy said.

“Here I am.”

Here he was, sixty-six and still, in fact, lean and strong. The brown and gold plaid giving off that good casino-lobby smell of leisure suit fresh from the cleaners. Bird on his shoulder freely dosed with dandelion tablets mashed into a dish of Quaker grits. Van gassed up to the tune of fifty dollars, backed into the boy’s driveway. It was a white ’83 Econoline, odometer rolled over twice, napped with gray dust. Sitting there, rear doors open, empty as a promise. Boy had told him last week he was finished with the job.