Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

“Yeah, I don’t know, she—”

“You tell her about Titus yet?”

It was like dropping into a manhole, hearing that name. Every motherfucking time. Walking down the street, sun on your sunglasses, beats in your earbuds, rolling with your own particular roll along the pavement, and then fwoop! Not even the puff of smoke or patch of ashes that a thunderbolt might leave behind. Gwen was always accusing Archy of not thinking or caring about, not preparing for, the baby who was on its way. Which only showed how little she knew him or, to be fair, how parsimonious he could be in sharing with a woman, with anyone, the almost constant state of anxiety in which he was living. Anxiety that, for example, had led him to volunteer to keep an eye on little Rolando yesterday, to see how he could manage the whole diapers-and-formula routine. But this boy. Titus . His son, half grown and staring him down from the far side of all that resentfulness and abandonment. If Gwen knew about Titus Joyner—and sooner or later, she was going to find out—then there would be justice in her charge of obliviousness, lack of consideration. Because since yesterday Archy had been trying to resume his former state of happy ignorance and think as little as possible about the child he already had.

“That revelation is still, uh, forthcoming,” he said.

“Maybe you should try it out on her now,” Nat suggested. “Holistic approach. Cure it with poison. Fire with fire. Drive her insane from a totally different direction, she comes out at zero.”

“Yeah,” Archy said without enthusiasm. “Right now we’re at week thirty-six, I don’t think I have too much influence over the situation inside her head anymore.” Nat inclined his head, pursed his lips, nodding, having nothing to offer in the way of argument. “How’s he comporting himself round your house? Titus.”

“Oh, uh, fine. I don’t know. He’s okay. Funny kid.”

“Funny.”

“Solemn little motherfucker.”

“Solemn as in?”

“Solemn as in somewhat restrained in his emotional palette.”

“Fronting? Being hard?”

“Maybe some of that. But it seems like he and Julie—”

Before Nat could continue, he saw something that made both his eyebrows shoot up. His face went blank, like the screen of an Etch A Sketch, in a single shake.

“Hey, lady,” he said.

El Boom said, “Look out.”

Look out, here came Gwen, through the French doors that connected the patio to the living room with its arcing vaults and folk-art Virgins. She had checked a vintage bowling shirt out of Archy’s library, pink on black, originally sported, according to the inscriptions in silkscreen and embroidery thread, by an inferably large gentleman named Stan, bowling in the service of Alameda Wire and Pipe. She was bearing straight for Archy, endowed by pregnancy with that locomotive chug. No chance that she was coming to tell him he was off the hook, forgiven his sins, large or small. Gwen had never in her life arrived at forgiveness in the physical absence of its needful object. Not, at least, without the intervention of some external force: the advice of her father, for example, or of Dr. Nickens, the pastor of her childhood church, or, under certain conditions, some trumping piece of bad news. Said absence affording too convenient a vessel for the laying in of refined counterarguments, further supporting examples, freshly recalled instances of past infractions, etc.

“Hello, Nat,” she said. “Arch. Um. Okay. Listen here.”

Level and cool, she looked from Nat to Archy and back, and with an interior lurch, Archy concluded that Gwen had descended from the El Camino to issue an ultimatum in the presence of Nat Jaffe and the world, and whatever it was or however she phrased it, he would have to tell her about Titus, and that would be that, adieu and later to the second great partnership of his life, not because he had a son on the side, which, all right, was maybe no big thing, but because he had never mentioned the fact to Gwen, ever, neither in passing nor in detail. Because in ten years or more, Archy had never thought of the boy, not once, a habit of oblivion that continued even now, with the kid back and smacking up against the outside of their life like a moth banging against a lampshade. Stashed there, up in the Jaffes’ attic.

Archy knew an instant of pure panic. Nothing caused him greater revulsion than signs of weakness in a man, keenest of all in himself; and there was no one in this world weaker than someone trying to keep something secret, unless it be someone obliged to confess.

“I can’t stay, Nat,” he said, deciding to throw the littlest confession overboard first, see where that got him. “I’m really sorry. Gwen and I have birth class tonight, and when I said I could play, I just fucking forgot.”

“No,” said Nat and Gwen at the same time. Jinx, lock, you owe me a soda . And then Nat, without waiting for anyone to speak his name and release him, said, measuring the words, always happy to take the opportunity to educate, “Please, no, I totally get it. That shit is important, Arch. They’ve done all kinds of studies. You’re on your game, things are going to go a lot easier for Gwen and whoever that is in there.” He pointed a furry finger at Gwen’s belly. “Y’all go on and go.”

“No,” Gwen repeated. “Guys, I— Archy, your phone rang, in the car. I answered it.”

The mainspring of Archy’s panic tightened farther, his thoughts, like Nat’s watch, running seven minutes ahead of themselves. Ransacking all the files, thinking what girl, bitch, or lady, what mess did he leave lying around.

“It was Garnet Singletary,” Gwen was saying. “Archy, Mr. Jones. He, oh, Archy, he died. He’s dead.”

“He… what?” Archy said, feeling the words first as a surge of blood to his cheeks. “No, I saw him this morning.”

“I guess—I guess the neighbor lady, uh, Mrs. Wiggins, across the street. She’s the one who called the ambulance.”

Archy not all the way there yet, enough presence to notice how Gwen seemed rattled, shaky. This is true , he thought.

“I talked to him two hours ago!” Nat said, as if he thought these words could disprove, discredit, the nonsense Gwen was talking. He ran his fingers through his steely Brillo. Fished his phone out of the hip pocket of his jacket. “Yeah, hey, Garnet,” he said. “Nat Jaffe. What the fuck?”

He spun away across the patio, his back to Gwen and Archy, skeptical to a fault, doubting every story he heard on principle until he got independent confirmation, anything at all remarkable that anyone felt like putting out there an “urban legend,” a “misnomer,” a “popular delusion,” a “false etymology.” One of the man’s balls there to question the testimony of the other, both of them doubting what his dick had to say. Probably hoping Garnet would help him get hold of Mrs. Wiggins, the police report, the coroner’s statement.

Oblivious, El Boom woke up the kick drum, divvied out sixteenth notes between the hi-hat and snare, then began to lean heavily on the one, working up a half-drunk second-line crab-step rhythm that stumbled somehow into the break from “Funky Drummer” (King, 1970). Mr. Jones always claimed James Brown as a cousin on his mother’s side (offering no evidence that would satisfy Nat Jaffe beyond an unsupported mention in the liner notes for Redbonin’ ). Archy remembering the way Mr. Jones one time got down off his stool at Brokeland to execute a tricky Mashed Potato across the tile floor, studying his bitty bird feet with a dazed smile as if they were a couple of miracles.

“Oh, no,” Gwen said. “Archy, please don’t start that.”