Telegraph Avenue (24 page)

“What? Nah, he just—I—nah, no, ma’am.”

They were coming more abject and automatic now, those “ma’ams,” and she pressed it, channeling an old, dead Texan woman she had never met, getting her thumbs into the seam she had found.

“That’s what I heard. Stay with the Jaffes, eat all the tempeh you can hold.”

He looked at the plate in front of him with the face of one betrayed. “You put tempeh in the
pancakes
?”

“Only a little,” Aviva said. “Kidding. Nobody’s going to force you to eat tempeh against your will. So, uh, okay, so where
did
you go?”

He pushed the suspect plate away and started to stand up.

“I didn’t excuse you, mister.”

Titus nodded; that was indeed the case. He sat back down in the chair and turned to an article in
American Cinematographer
, a man in a white suit gazing at a wedding-cake riverboat that was stuck on a jungle mountain, she forgot the name of that one. An old back issue Julie had picked up somewhere, the Flea Market, the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse. She got up, rebelted her robe, poured herself a cup of coffee, and sat down across the table from him.
Fitzcarraldo.
She had seen it at the Telegraph Repertory junior year, right around the time she met Nat, who tore tickets there two nights a week. Eighty-four, ’85, right toward the bitter end for that stuffy old black box
.
Not long before the night he came to her rescue. Who knew what might have befallen her if he hadn’t come along, with his belated Isro and his unlikely, heart-melting Tidewater accent? Remembering Nat as he was then, the world’s most pretentious high school dropout, coming on to her with some complicated theory about Peter Lorre and a jumbo cup of free popcorn. Simultaneously working at Rather Ripped Records and Pellucidar Books, all long gone. The man like some exiled Habsburg, bred and schooled to unite the crowns of kingdoms lost. At one time she had been able to console herself with his air of heroic obsolescence for the burden, material and emotional, that being married to him imposed upon her. Now the best she could hope for most of the time was to shake her head at him with more amusement than scorn.

“So, okay, you don’t want to be here. Where do you want to be? With your dad?”

The boy appeared to find the article about
Fitzcarraldo
quite fascinating, or perhaps he had fallen asleep again. Aviva couldn’t see his eyes.

“You and Julie have your last class tonight.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Julie says you want to be a movie director.”

No answer.

“He said you’ve written a screenplay.”

He dipped the tip of his left forefinger—he was a lefty—into the pool of maple syrup that remained on his plate. She resisted the urge to slap his hand, as she would have slapped Julie’s. It took him a while to figure out what he wanted or could permit himself to say.

“That he knows about.”

“You’ve written more than one?”

“Five.”

“Tell me the title of one of them.”

“May I be excused now?”

“Just another minute of torture.”

“
Incident at Al-Qufa Bridge.
”

“Al-Qufa Bridge? Is it—is it a war story?”

“It’s a, like,
adaptation
of ‘Incident at Owl Creek Bridge.’ Only in the Gulf War, not the Civil,” he said, catching her endlessly policed racist self red-handed. “By Ambrose Bierce, so it’s in the public domain, so I don’t got to pay no rights.”

“You know, your father, Archy, he served in the Gulf War. In the army.”

No answer.

“Did you know that?”

“Can I go?”

“Go where?” She had a sudden intuition. “Do you know where he lives?”

“Where who lives?”

“
Archy
. You ride by his house, don’t you? At night. On your bike.”

“I have to use the bathroom.”

He looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time all morning. His eyes were filled with pleading, begging her to put him out of his misery.

“Fine,” she said, and as he darted around her to get out of the Torquemada chamber, she touched his shoulder with a right hand that had kept a thousand children from going too far, too fast. “But hear me out. I don’t want you getting my son into trouble, staying out all night. And don’t you ever lie to me again.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Don’t call me that anymore, please. Aviva will do.”

“Got it,” the boy said. “Now, please, get your fucking hand off me, Aviva.”

She let him go. He started out of the kitchen, then turned back.

“Your boy’s a little dick-sucking faggot,” he said. “Case you were wondering. And that ain’t no lie.”

“Way to start,” Aviva said. “Way to build that foundation.”

“C
all me Moby.”

Gwen clutching her belly as she ran up the front walk of the Nefastis Building, a three-story concrete dingbat whose breezeway spawned dust devils of swirling take-out menus and bougainvillea bracts. Miles from the elevator, possibly the slowest elevator in the Western Hemisphere, miss it and she would have to wait at least ten minutes. Calling, “Oh, Mr. Oberstein, could you please hold that for me?”

The name on the shingle that Gwen walked past every working day of her life read
OBERSTEIN
, and she had never met anyone who looked more like an Oberstein, particularly in a three-piece suit. Plus, it always seemed to her that the man’s preferred nickname preceded a silent Dick. But the man stuck out a Weejun to keep the elevator doors from closing in her face, and he spent a lot of money every month helping to thin the vinyl herds at Brokeland, so she called him what he wanted her to call him and thanked him for holding the door.

“Thank you, Moby,” she said.

She observed that, along with his blue suit and brown loafers, he was wearing white tube socks with a blue stripe. “You’re up early,” she further observed. Six-thirty in the morning—on Mondays, Berkeley Birth Partners kept early-bird hours, to serve the workingwomen. Moby would be the only life-form in the building besides Gwen and the turtles in Dr. Mendelsohn’s terrarium.

“Gots to be in federal court at nine
A.M
.,” Moby said, going into that strange ghetto minstrel routine of his, or maybe trapped inside it permanently, a soft white moth caught in a drop of hip-hop amber. “And I am
not
ready. I’m
trine
to get legal standing for whales, bring suit against the navy on their behalf?”

“Oh, right,” Gwen said, only half remembering the story, whales in perdition, baffled by submarine ponging. Still, the man was one-up on her. He was following his heart in his working life, doing what he loved, loving what he did. “Good for you.”

They inched skyward. The elevator banged, mooed, and screeched, sounding like Sun Ra and that whole awful Arkestra trapped inside of an MRI machine.

“Low-frequency sonar? Like the navy is testing? That is some bad shit. Fucks with their internal guidance systems, they beach themselves, get brain damage. Every time they test it, you have dead whales washing up in the dozens.”

“I have to be honest, Moby,” Gwen said, aiming a magician’s-assistant
ta-da!
at the surprising feat that was her belly. “I’m not too fond of the word ‘whale’ these days.”

“You due any day, right,” Oberstein said. “ ’Bout to pop.”

“Four weeks.”

“Whoa.”

“That’s what I’m telling you. Truthfully, I’m impressed we both fit in this elevator. Come next week I might need to get an elevator of my own.”

“Least in five weeks you ain’t gonna be pregnant no more. But I’m a still be fat.”

“Oh, let me tell you something.” She had not slept well, troubled by the struggling knot in her belly, by the throb of her aching back. By black and red bursts of Lydia Frankenthaler bleeding out, Cochise Jones pinned and gasping under the juggernaut weight of his B-3. By thoughts of Archy and his furtive approach to grief. Holding his sadness close, as if it were a secret, the man always moving from one thing he couldn’t talk about to the next, sneaking across the field of his emotions from foxhole to foxhole, head down. She knew it had to be the loss of Mr. Jones, though she couldn’t shake a sense that there was something else bothering him. She wondered if maybe he already had something else going on the side; if he was in love with Elsabet Getachew; if he had lied when he said Mr. Jones left money to pay for the funeral, and was secretly bankrupting them to put the old man in the ground in what he termed, worrisomely, fitting style. But mostly, the problem was the throbbing of her back. “I will
always
be pregnant.”

“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.