Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

“I would like to be done,” agreed Gwen’s first early bird, Jenny Salzman-House, who shared Gwen’s due date but had gained only twenty-eight pounds to the forty-seven that Gwen had managed to pack on. “How about you?”

Jenny was pale pink and long-limbed with a boyish face and blond hair cut in an unflattering Volvo-shaped bob made popular by female tennis stars of the seventies. The swell of a thirty-week child offered little in the way of spectacle, even when she lay back on the examination table and bared her abdomen to the heavens and to the shadowless glare of the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. She carried her pregnancy like a football tucked into the crook of a fullback’s arm, invisibly and with aplomb. Whereas Gwen’s belly was like some kind of Einsteinian force, warping the fabric of space-time as she moved through it. She was not, this morning, inclined to sympathize with Jenny and her nineteen-pound shortfall of woe.

“I am done,” Gwen said. She squeezed a shining coil of ultrasound jelly onto Jenny’s modest dome and then settled the business end of the Doppler against it. “Over and done.”

“Tell me about it.”

Gwen switched on the Doppler, and they listened to the tide of static that flooded the room. Jenny smiled bravely through the usual instant of informationless panic. Then that steady whistling emerged from the void: an interstellar signal, a jet exhaled from the pulsing gill of some denizen of the deep. Rhythmic evidence of life from the bottom of the sea or the farthest rim of the universe. A set of valves and pistons speaking a machine’s simple language.

“Hello, baby,” Jenny said.

Gwen added the baby’s current heart rate to her notes on Jenny’s weight, temperature, and abdominal girth. Everything was normal, hardly worth noting at all. Everything was always normal until it wasn’t. Until the roar of static endured in the examination room without interruption. Until the arc of the belly measured no greater than it had at the previous visit. Until the typical placenta got stuck in the average uterus, started hemorrhaging, and you ended up rushing in the back of an ambulance through the chicanes of Berkeley, sticky with blood and uterine goo, mouthing off to doctors, trying to save two lives. It was not that there was no point or purpose in notating the normality of Jenny’s pregnancy. It was that nothing was normal, ever, in midwifery or life; there were only levels of ignorance and denial, of obliviousness to the cetacean looming of disaster. Her marriage was founded on deception and lies. The work that she did meant nothing to the people—her people—to whom she most hoped and desired that it—that she—would matter. In the end, everything was only a ceaseless flow of static, fundamentally no different from silence. The background noise of creation. The implacable flood of time.

“Everything’s fine,” Gwen told herself, shuddering, switching off the Doppler. “And you’re feeling okay.”

“Just huge.”

“Oh, girl. Don’t even.”

“Yeah, no, the only problem I’m having right now is that my husband finds pregnant women sexually arousing.”

“I am so sorry to hear that.”

“Yours?”

“If I would ever let him near me.”

In the first third of the second trimester of her pregnancy, Gwen for a time had permitted Archy to indulge in her like a cartoon wolf with a knife and fork, a napkin knotted around his neck. Laid herself out and piled herself high as a Las Vegas buffet and let him keep filling up his plate. From the thirteenth week to the seventeenth, some kind of hormonal messaging crackled along the wires between them, and their bed was lit as by lightning. She could not quite take pleasure in his conventional presence within her, but she discovered, for those strange weeks, an unheard-of appetite for taking him in her ass, some kind of peptide flood that opened her up down there as she had never been opened before. That was over now; she was done with that, too. Sometimes in the night, his leg would arc across her, and she would feel a kind of rage at the contact, an insult to her person, a flicker of fire along her skin. Clearly, in his banishment from her interiors, he had rebelled. He had taken his empty plate and his napkin and gone to Ethiopia to get his fill. Licking his animal chops.

“Would you like me to instruct you not to have sex anymore?” Gwen said.

“Oh, would you?”

“No problem.”

Gwen wiped the gel from Jenny’s belly and rinsed the Doppler, adrift in a poignant memory of those vanished weeks of fire. Jenny wandered in her conversation as she resumed her suit, blouse, and briefcase, from an account of madness in the Rockridge housing market to a description of something preposterous and beautiful that had been done to figs at Oliveto.

“Can I also tell him you ordered him to make me a root beer float every night for the rest of my pregnancy?” Jenny said as they left the examination room.

An urge to consume root beer, dark, astringent, foaming, and sweet, tore through Gwen’s soul.

“Have him call me,” she said. She felt demeaned, mocked by her servitude to hormones and to the winds of her moods, powerless in her hugeness as a whale with no attorney, hollow and tired and faking it (as Mike Oberstein, Esq., would have put it) 24/7.

These sensations only increased when she emerged into the waiting room, with its 1980s-modern oak armchairs padded in raspberry wool and its random gallery of foam-core mounted Gauguin posters salvaged from some ancient Roth-Jaffe trip to Denmark, brown-skinned bare-breasted wahines and somber van Gogh potato fields under the arcane legend NY CARLSBERG GLYPTOTEK, and saw the next three early birds stacked up and waiting. A shrink, a real estate agent, and a new patient, another white lady, Coach briefcase at her feet, looking like, of all things, an attorney.

“Goodbye, Jenny,” Gwen said, fighting down the obscure, Danish-illiterate discontent that stirred in her every time the words NY CARLSBERG GLYPTOTEK forced themselves into her mind. She turned to the ladies in the raspberry chairs. “Hello, Jenny. Hello, Karen.” She considered the new patient, an older mom in a loose black pantsuit, a classic Berkeley cat lady, suit and wearer both adrift in an aureole of dander. “Hello…”

“Jenny.” The cat lady smiled. “Believe it or not.”

“Three Jennys,” Gwen said. “How about that.”

“This is the second time it’s happened since I’ve worked here,” said Kai, the Birth Partners receptionist. Born female but not feeling it too strongly. Hair worn slicked and short, white T-shirts, cuffed jeans, played saxophone in an alternative marching band. They worked street fairs, hipster potlatches, the edges of open-air concerts, showing up flash-mob-style, dressed in yachting hats and frogged military jackets like that Chinese funeral band over in the city, performing skewed Sousa marches, brass-band church music, and Led Zeppelin songs. They called themselves Bomp and Circumstance. “Only the other time it was Carolyn.”

Gwen smiled back at the third Jenny and turned with a shameful yet profound and yawning dread to face the second, who gathered her own purse and briefcase and hoisted her baby freight with a lurch, then aimed the whole payload in Gwen’s direction.

The door to the office creaked open with its trademark creature-feature spookiness, a sound, impervious to oil can and WD-40 alike, that had in turn haunted the practices of a Jungian analyst, a couples therapist, a specialist in neurolinguistic programming, a hypnotherapist, a shiatsu practitioner, and a life coach before settling in to mock the tenure of the Birth Partners in suite 202. A very young woman with a wide Mayan face looked in and said softly, “Sorry.”