Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

At this grave charge, Archy started to register a protest, prepared to make his objections known, feeling his way into it like a man backing down a hallway in the dark, as if hoping that when he reached the far end, he would discover, with a cry of vindication and triumph, that indeed, au contraire, he had written a note and simply, in the interval, forgotten. But no; the hope of this died in his eyes. Then he got himself an idea. Held up a finger. Patted his pocket. Nodded. Overplaying the whole thing with an air of comic pantomime, trying to defuse her by acting cute, a tactic with a decent record of success over the years, though failures were numberless and spectacular. He reached into the breast pocket of the Funky Suit jacket, took out a black Sharpie and a scrap of paper that proved to be an unpaid city of Emeryville parking ticket issued two years earlier, scrawled a few words on the back of it, and passed it to her with a ceremonious lack of ceremony. Gwen folded it in half without reading it, wondered why on that June afternoon two years previous his El Camino had been parked in front of 1133 Sixty-second Street, concluded that it was either a woman or a basement full of some dead man’s records, folded it a second time, and poked it back into his hand.

“I am going to take a shower,” she said. “Go to La Calaca Loca right now, and get me one of those elotes they have, light on the chile, and a fish taco, two fish tacos, the batter kind. And a bottle of that tamarindo , and have it back here and waiting for me when I come down.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Archy said.

A funny look passed across his face, like the flicker of a television during a brownout, and his eyes darted from right to left, tracking the cicada whirr of a bicycle. She turned to see the back of a long-limbed boy on a bicycle, maybe a neighborhood kid, nobody she could place, and when she looked back at Archy, he was swinging the rest of his gear into the El Camino, saying,“ Elote , huh, yeah, that sounds good. I could eat Mexican every day.” He turned back to her. “I love Mexico.” He wiped his forehead with the back of one satined arm. “Baby, let’s go to Mexico. Like, tonight. Come on. Let’s do it. Let’s move to Mexico.”

“Ha ha.”

“I’m serious.” He made his face all serious, or maybe it really did fall out that way for once. “I am being totally sincere.”

“And I am totally, sincerely, about to have a baby, Archy. How am I going to go to Mexico?”

Even as the words burst from her lips, she regretted them, realizing, probably before Archy did, that when he went to Mexico, he need not take her along. Archy could go to Mexico, flat out move there, any damn time he wanted to. He could leave tonight.

Archy took off his sunglasses to wipe the lenses on the end of his necktie. Barefaced, he gazed at her, expression ironic, just kidding, for now.

“Fish tacos,” he said. “For days.”

The valet parkers in matched tan coveralls stood shoulder to shoulder like convicts chained at the ankle, heads back, chins pointed at the sky. Something up there causing them to ponder. Archy nosed the El Camino up the hill toward them and the venue: round tower of butterscotch stucco with a Juliet window, blue-tiled arch in a butterscotch gate. Creeping up the street as it traced the switchback course of some old arroyo, neighborhood cars shouldering in from both sides to leave clearance just sufficient for his wide-track choogling slab of lost Detroit. Archy already feeling crowded enough by the marital silence that at present filled the vehicle, knowing perfectly well, with all the almanack sagacity the word “husband” implied, that the present silence was more portent than aftermath. A formulating stillness. That pressure drop, brooding and birdless, right before the touchdown of a tornado.

They passed Nat’s Saab, rolling up to the valet stand where the four parkers in their Carhartt zip-ups stood gawping at the sky, Hispanic kids as varied in size and girth as sample popcorn servings ranged along a movie theater snack bar. Gwen poked her head out the window on her side of the El Camino, saw what they saw, slumped back against the bench seat. Fitted her folded arms between her breasts and belly. Spoke for the first time in approximately eighteen minutes, or at any rate laid down an utterance, troubling to pack it beforehand, like a jihadi packing an IED, with shards of irony, nails of bitterness, jagged chips of bleak wonder.

“ Huh, ” she said.

Archy got out of the car. For a second or two, his eyes were diverted by the great canvas of city, bay, and bridges stretched across the frame of eucalyptus trees beyond the terra-cotta roof tiles of the venue. Paint laid on with brushes fat and fine, washes of fog and winking sun on window grids, the foundered wreck of Alcatraz, the iron giant jubilating up there on Twin Peaks. And then there it was, against the curve of August sky.

As long as his forearm, as fat around, humming to itself like Nat Jaffe evolving a theory about the profound effect on world history if Hank Crawford had not stood up Creed Taylor for the sessions that became the first album by Grover Washington, Jr., the Dogpile blimp slid by. All black from nose to fins, emblazoned on its flank with a red paw print and the Dogpile name in bold red slab-serif type. A taunt implied in the sloth of its passage, lazy and deliberate as a Benz-load of bangers rolling by your door with their windows down.

“We’re not staying,” Archy told the valets as he went around the back of the El Camino to unstrap the Leslie in its swaddling clothes.

“How about you just leave the suit, then,” one of the parkers said. “Because my flashlight is dead.”

Archy might have liked to offer the young man, if not a return critique of the brown bag he was standing stuffed into like a furtive forty-ounce, at least an anatomical storage suggestion with regard to the putative flashlight. But like all pure stylists, Archy had long since learned that in handling those who could not dig, the only proper course was to carry on confusing them. Light ’em up, blow ’em out like candles. The intended effect of his withering stare was diminished to a degree by the snort of laughter that came out of Gwen.

“Flashlight,” said his betrayer. “I love it.”

The musicians had been asked to set up out-of-doors, beside a goldfish pond at the far end of a slate-flagged courtyard strung with chili-pepper lights and paper lanterns: pink concertinas, green pagodas. Archy came huffing and heaving through the French doors, moving fast under a hundred pounds of Leslie, harried along by a calmly panicking little Asian chick with a clipboard over which her pen hovered, ready to inventory every ding or scrape Archy might be inclined to put into a wall or doorway.

“Thank you for coming, by the way,” she said. “At such short no—oh. Oh my God, please be careful.”

“I am known for my carefulness,” Archy assured her. “I would say thank you for letting us play, but the truth is, I’m doing you a favor, ’cause we are way better than that weak shit that canceled on you, fully three of those guys are dentists.”

“Oh, well, thanks,” said the girl from the campaign.

Nat, wearing his red Jazzmaster slung low across his narrow hips, raised an index finger and the opposite eyebrow, signaling to Archy. Warning him not to interrupt or spoil the effect of the display of ferocious swearing being mounted by Stanley “El Boom” Ellerbe, hunched over the leg bracket of his floor tom, fiddling at it with a plastic table knife. El Boom was a bus driver, as notorious for jinxed equipment as he was for letting out, in long and enthusiastic skeins, the choice words he bit back and stored up all day long in serving the public and the whims of traffic behind the wheel of the 51. Cool as a cup of crushed ice on the drums, though, El Boom kept time like an atom clock.