Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

“I heard this was supposed to be an emergency,” he said. “But honey, you’re so hot, I’m afraid you going to set fire to my cotton balls.”

“Now, don’t lie to me, Mr. Robert.”

“I’m serious! You’re radiant! I need a Geiger counter! I need to get me one of those lead suits like Homer Simpson wears.”

Mr. Robert was a scabrous if outdated gossip with a brusque, pointillist touch and a habit of asking questions without waiting for answers. When he had finished, he took hold of her chin in his slim, dry fingers and turned her head this way, that. One eyebrow lifted in a skeptical arch. Then he let Gwen get a gander at herself in the mirrored wall of the salon.

“I almost look beautiful,” she told his reflection.

“Almost?” his reflection said, looking hurt. “Honey, fuck that, Mr. Robert doesn’t leave no one looking almost .”

“No, you’re right, thank you, Mr. Robert,” she said quickly, as he began with an angry clatter to return his brushes and bottles to the pink tackle box. “I look fly .”

He didn’t say anything, but she caught the shrug of the left wing of his mustache, a half-satisfied half-smile. He packed up his gear, slow and deliberate, from time to time rubbing the ache of age out of his fine brown long-fingered hands. Tyneece had already collected Gwen’s money for this emergency session, but when Mr. Robert looked up from his kit, Gwen was holding out a twenty-dollar tip. Mr. Robert shook his head and pushed away her proffering hand.

“Hit me next time,” he said.

“No, Mr. Robert—”

“I was born in my momma’s kitchen,” he said. “In Rosedale, Mississippi. Was a midwife like you brought me into this wonderful world.”

“Yeah, well,” Gwen said, touched, embarrassed, regretting, in spite of the progress it seemed to imply, the loss of the world of black midwives catching black children, grappling the future into the light one slick pair of little shoulders at a time. “After today I might not be a midwife too much longer.”

As appeared to be his habit—maybe Mr. Robert was a bit deaf—he ignored her. “Before she called my daddy in to see me for the first time,” he continued, “this lady, the midwife, she took a lipstick out her purse? And made up my momma’s mouth. She combed my momma’s hair. Fixed her up, you know? Got her ready. That was how my momma always told it, anyway. Sometimes I wonder, you know, hmm, was that, did that give me the idea,” hand on a hip, pointing with the other hand, the genie of himself addressing himself in far-off Rosedale long ago, “‘Mr. Robert, when you grow up, you going to be a makeup artist!’”

He hoisted his tackle box onto the wheeled trolley and bound it carelessly with loops of green bungee cord. “Do you think something like that,” he said, “something that happened in the room when you were born, you could notice it, and it would stay with you the rest of your life?”

“I wouldn’t put anything past a baby,” Gwen said.

At 2:55, her Chimes General parking ticket tucked carefully into a zip pocket inside her handbag, Gwen trundled through the high, wide sliding doors she had come through so many times before, having so much more at stake, those other late nights, long afternoons, and early mornings, than her own small, personal fate. The feeders and freshets of East Bay humanity flowed through the filter of the hospital lobby, all the wild variety of life in the local pond. A gang banger rolling toward the elevator with a bouquet of lilies and Gerber daisies stuffed under his arm, a sunburned old buzzard with a physicist shock of white hair and camp shorts, a one-legged, three-fingered bearded biker dude she figured for a lax diabetic being eaten by neuropathy, two new moms—one Asian, one veiled and tented in the laws of Islam—waiting in festive wheelchairs with their babies for their husbands to bring the cars around. Scrubs, coveralls, nightgowns, baller jerseys, and patterned hippie-chick skirts, a pair of Buddhist monks flying the saffron, probably Thais from over at the Russell Street Temple. At the sight of them, Gwen was rapt by a need for the little coconut-and-chive pancakes they served there Sunday mornings, but it was a Thursday, and anyway, Candygirl Clark never would have permitted a craving, even for Thai temple pancakes, to divert her from a mission.

“Wow,” Aviva said, taking in the fruit of Gwen’s resolve. Shoes, dress, jacket, the exuberant coils of her restored coiffure. “Don’t you clean up nice.”

Gwen gave a tug on the front hem of the dress.

Aviva was at her gravest, slim and efficacious in a taupe suit with a skirt that fell to just above her knees. Her hair, regularly—you might even have said carefully —threaded with gray, was pulled into a wide barrette of chased Mexican silver. No makeup at all apart from a touch of color on her lips, a shade or two more vivid than her own natural rose-pink. Rested and collected and projecting, Gwen thought, the slightest touch of resignation to her fate. Having given Gwen’s appearance a good going-over, she lingered on Gwen’s eyes, as if trying to discern in them some clue to her partner’s thinking or state of mind.

“You ready for this?” Aviva said.

“I am so ready for this,” Gwen said.

“Yeah?” Alerted, curious. “Know something I don’t?”

“Not so far,” Gwen said, sweet as pie. “But it’s only been ten years.”

“Huh,” Aviva said, bullshit sniffer set as ever to a brutally low ppm.

Gwen tried to go wide-eyed and innocent, feeling, of all things, strong and positive and—but for the lack of six little coconut milk pancakes, steaming and flecked with green onion, nestled in their paper cradle—surprisingly ready.

“I’m just going to try to, you know, maintain my dignity in this matter,” she said. “I don’t intend to embarrass myself ever again.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Aviva said. “ ’Kay, then. I guess we should probably head on up.”

Gwen checked her watch. “Let’s give him a minute.”

“Give who a minute?”

“Moby,” Gwen said, and then she saw the big man stutter-stepping leftward to avoid collision with an elderly black couple helping each other out the front door, a human lean-to, temporary shelter against the day.

She had called Moby right after the fateful shower, her last ever at the Bruce Lee Institute, during the course of which, caught in the brainstorm breeze of all those negatively charged ions, Gwen had found herself imbued with the spirit of Candygirl Clark.

“All your little self-deprecating pregnant-lady fat jokes to the side,” Moby had told her over the phone, “I really only represent whales.”

“Yeah, I know that,” Gwen had said. “But Chimes General doesn’t.”

“Did they suggest y’all bring a lawyer along?”

“No, on the contrary, technically, it’s just an informational thing. But that’s what makes it such a good idea. Look, Moby, you don’t even have to say anything. Just sit there with, like, your necktie, your briefcase, all big and intimidating like you are.”

“No shit. You think I look intimidating?”

“You definitely have the potential.”

“To be badass?”

“Like, a form of badass.”

“The intimi da tion fac-tah!”

“Sure.”

Admittedly, she felt a doubt then, hearing the eagerness kindle in Moby’s voice along with that horrible Electric Boogaloo accent, but today was not about doubt, second-guessing, hesitation. Today was about doing what one had to do while approximating, to the best of one’s own and Mr. Robert’s abilities, the condition of flyness.

And here the man showed up wearing brown Birkenstock sandals with his baggiest navy suit over black socks.