Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

“Okay, I know you need me out of here. I’m so grateful you let me stay this long. After today I’ll go to a hotel, I’ll rent an apartment. One of those little places down in Emeryville by the movie theater. IKEA’s right there. Get a crib, some dishes. Whatever I’m going to need. I know I’ve been kind of lying around here moping and feeling sorry for myself. My back hurts, and I’ve been maybe in a little bit of shock. There are a lot of things I don’t know. If I can take care of a baby on my own. If I’m going to be able to keep doing the work I have been doing for the past ten years.”

Master Jew kept her back to Gwen, who knew that her speech had been disrespectful and poorly judged in both its length and its tone.

“I’m sorry,” Gwen concluded. “Seriously. Tomorrow, next day at the latest, I’m out of here.”

The teacup—smaller than the first, red and gold with an intricate carpet pattern and a goldfish—was in Gwen’s face before she realized that Master Jew had moved, a sudden accident of vision like a blackout or a camera flash, and by the time she realized that the crazy old lady had actually tossed a teacup at her head , Gwen’s right palm was smarting, and the intercepted cup lay cool against her fingers, where, at the base of her thumb, it gave up one last drop.

“Big day. Get dressed,” Mrs. Jew said. “Then go get your pillow.”

Gwen felt nervous about her footing, her status under her own roof. So she had in mind a kind of marital Grenada, the deployment of massive force in support of a modest, even risible objective. But when she drove past the sleeping house at 6:51 A.M. (an hour with which her husband had never been intimately acquainted), it looked so ordinary, blue-painted cedar shakes peeling, honeysuckle strangling the slat fence, empty tanks from the Arrowhead bubbler ranged along the front porch, that she lost her stomach for a fight. She rolled right past the house and, for an instant, considered driving on.

True enough, as she had told Master Jew, the body pillow did not just preserve her sleep: there were nights when she felt it was the only thing in this world that felt and understood her. True to its name, the body pillow had come to embody the unknown child inside her, mute and shapeless but imbued with some distinct essence or presence of the baby to come. The body pillow was a doll that she nightly cuddled as, in weird pregnancy dreams, the baby was transformed into all manner of beasts and vegetables and stuff a whole lot freakier than a pillow. At the same time, she knew, it was only a forty-five-dollar body pillow she had bought online. It could easily be replaced.

“The hell with that,” she said aloud, and parked the car in front of the Lahidjis’ house. “I want my damn pillow.”

She did not get out of the car. She did some qi breathing. She groped for the shimmery little bead at the center of herself. She tried to harness or at least to tidy up her qi. She had enough conflict to deal with today, she reminded herself, without adding to the toll of stress, measurable in rads, to which she and the baby had been exposed. Still, her sense of outrage over all that Archy had done and failed to do as a husband, a father, and a man remained undiminished by her reluctance to confront him, and that outrage fixated on, swarmed like a cloud of bees around, the sum of forty-five dollars. She was not going to throw that money away. She had left behind many things of value in the house when she left Archy, and if she never got back any of those things, so be it; let the body pillow serve to redeem the remainder of the life and possessions she had abandoned. She got out of the car. Only one course open to her: to come in not like a battalion of marines overwhelming some little isle of coconuts but like Special Forces: surgical. Stealthy. In and out.

Gwen decided to try the back door first. She slipped—without much clearance on either side of her—along the broken snake hide of the brick walk that ran between the house and a hurricane fence, the fence woven with morning glory like some kind of feral basket. She sneaked past the kitchen windows, past the garbage and recycling bins, through that whole shadowy side zone of the house, which she had entered rarely over the years, a dense and leaf-shadowed passage hospitable, or so she always imagined, to rats. That thought hurried her along.

The backyard looked worse than she remembered. Brick barbecue area, angel’s trumpet tree hung with yellow wizard hats, chain-link fence obliterated from view in many places by green flows of ivy and jasmine and morning glory. Shaggy stand of pampas grass. The forlorn expanse of concrete that some previous occupant of the house, through an excess of laziness or optimism, had painted lawn-green. It was a mangy, scraggly, jungly mess that must be lowering property values as far away as Claremont Avenue. It was an embarrassment. But Gwen had been gone only a week; this ruin was the work of years. A faithful record of her untended life.

She averted her gaze from the broken latticework around the foundation of the house, the loose weather stripping that peeped like a gang banger’s drawers from the seams around the back door. When she and Archy bought the house, it had been a semi-wreck, cheap but ill used. They had prepared a list of the repairs and improvements they were going to make. This list was divided among the required, the optional, and the fantastic. They put in new toilets and sinks, using a book from the library. They redid the floors, rehung the windows, patched the roof. It was the first common project of their marriage, and looking back on that time, Gwen felt a twinge of loss and regret for their happiness. In time they had crossed off all the things that were required, but when they reached the next phase, they opted against the optional. At some point well before they arrived at the fantastic, they had lost track of the list.

Gwen unlocked the back door and pushed, but the door pushed back. The chain was set. It was a formidable chain installed by the previous owner, and to Gwen’s knowledge, neither she nor Archy had ever employed it. There was something unnerving about the vigor with which the chain resisted letting Gwen enter the house. It was as though Archy had changed the locks on her. Gwen was insulted. She was about to start pounding, demanding an explanation, but she remembered her maternal resolve to stay calm. It occurred to her that Archy might feel less secure without her in the house, and the thought touched her. She shut the back door with a soft click and crept back around to the front door.

As she let herself in, she realized that a faint rolling hum she had taken, coming up the porch steps, for the vibration through the old fir floor of the refrigerator, or maybe the humidifier in the basement, maybe even some kind of distant cement mixer or the MedEvac helicopter landing on its pad over at Children’s Hospital, was in fact the entwined snoring of two boys. Julie Jaffe lay half extruded from Gwen’s old sleeping bag, shirtless and shockingly pale, with little pink guinea-pig nipples. Titus had been neatly interred beneath Archy’s Diff’rent Strokes sleeping bag, only his weird fingery toes and the upper half of his face visible. A glacier of DVD cases slid across the coffee table, Strutter , Ghetto Hitman , Soul Shaker , all those crazy crap-ass movies that Archy’s father had spent the seventies cranking out or being cranked out by. Peeking from under a Styrofoam clamshell from which a couple of french fries poked like the feelers of a large and cautious insect was another disc on whose label she recognized the astonishing Afro of Valletta Moore, along with the barrel and silencer of the .357 she fondled, in that iconic pose from the poster of Nefertiti , forty stories of endless brown leg with a pair of highjacked fuck-me pumps for a ground floor, yellow satin hot-pants jumpsuit for a pediment. The room hung heavy with a fug of puberty, microwave popcorn, and something unidentifiable but horrible.