Telegraph Avenue

by Michael Chabon

  “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 sens
ations 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.”

  Karen, the Jennys, and Gwen all turned to regard the young woman. She was at once tiny and voluminous, at least three inches under five feet tall and call it seven months pregnant, with nowhere to put her unborn child but way, way out in front of herself. Indian features, hair black and glossy as a well-seasoned skillet, yanked to one side of the back of her head and knotted with a sparkly pink scrunchy. Over a pair of black leggings, she wore an extra-large T-shirt that randomly advertised a liquor store and bait shop in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey. The shirt strained across her belly and gaped at the armholes, where her arms emerged sharp at the elbows and thin at the wrists. As she spoke her tiny sentence, her cheeks flushed in circles so precise they seemed to have been painted on. This might be her fifteenth summer of life.

  She took half a step into the waiting room, glancing from the face of one woman to the next, connecting the dots with an expression of mounting regret. Struggling to read the unfamiliar text of this wan and well-worn room, which, for all Gwen knew, looked exactly like the Bureau of Human Vivisection down in Tegucigalpa, or wherever it was the girl had started out.

  “Hi!” Gwen said so loudly that the girl started. At the sight of this young woman with her skinny arms, her shadowed eyes, her look of lostness, her shirt on which a largemouth bass leaped joyfully onto the hook that had come to destroy it, Gwen’s heart seemed to expand with a kind of dark longing and, like the Grinch’s, with a shattering of glass. “Come in! It’s okay.”

  “I think maybe she called yesterday,” Kai said. “Was that you? Areceli?”

  “Areceli,” Gwen said. The girl nodded once, then stopped, narrowing an eye as though she had been warned to expect false blandishments in the grim reception room of the Vivisection Bureau. “Do you speak English?” Areceli gave her head a tentative shake, drawing back toward the door. “Entre,” Gwen begged her, her UC Extension Spanish serviceable but bearing inexplicable traces of a Boston accent, “por favor, entre, puedo verle enseguida.”

  “Lo siento mucho, pero tengo un desayuno muy importante a las siete y media,” said the next Jenny, “y no puedo esperar.”

  Gwen laid a hand over her chest as though to hold back the heart before it could fly forever out toward the young woman who was going to redeem everything. Reluctantly, but recognizing the need to undertake at least a minimum of patient management—a skill, chore, or art that she generally preferred to leave to Aviva—Gwen turned to the second Jenny.

  She said, “¡Usted habla muy bien español!”

  “He pasado dos años en Guatemala,” said Jenny II, “enseñando al Quiché como manejar una cooperativa del tejer.”

  Gwen blinked, picking her way along, getting entangled in Quiché and then landing facedown in tejer. She had just realized that she did not give a shit where Jenny learned Spanish when she heard the mausoleum creak of the door hinges and the sigh of the door as it closed.

  Gwen was paralyzed by a panic that was half outrage, as if she understood from the sudden lurch in her belly that she had been scammed or shortchanged, as if the young pregnant woman were a confidence artist who had lightened Gwen’s wallet of a painful and irrecoverable sum.

  “Excuse me,” she said softly as she chased after Areceli, and once again the demon in the door hinges mocked the possibility of therapy, healing, recovery, of having one’s life coached. She ran down the hall, past the offices of the whale attorney, to the elevator. When she jammed her finger against the button, the doors slid open at once. Areceli must have taken the stairs.

  This was a barren arrangement of concrete slabs strung on rebar like vertebrae on a spinal cord. Gwen went to the second-story landing and stood listening for the scrape of the girl’s descending tread, the telltale bass chiming of the stairway’s steel frame. There was nothing, just the steady breeze that came ceaselessly whistling up the stairwell with a Halloween plangency even on the most windless of days.

  One by one she took the steps, rocking the whole building as she descended, or so it seemed to her, calling Areceli! And then she burst out into the morning, Telegraph Avenue, the chiming rattle of a train of grocery carts being driven across the parking lot of Andronico’s, a watery shout echoing from Willard Pool, the urgent sigh of a kneeling bus across the street—a shuffle of folks toward the bus doors, among them a ponytail spray of iron-black hair.

  “Wait! Areceli! Espera!” Gwen threw up a hand as if to hail the AC Transit bus like a taxicab, and with a heedlessness remarkable even for Gwen, she threw herself into the middle of the avenue. A voice said, “Look out,” and then she got lost in metal and the smell of metal and the cruel metallic ring of her tailbone against the curb.

  “Sorry,” said the bicyclist. He had not hit her, she realized; he had pushed her out of the way of an oncoming bus. He was a wiry teenager wearing neat jeans, a hoodie cinched low and shadowy over his face. “You hurt?”

  There was a gash in the leg of her pants. She poked a finger into it and discovered a scrape; no other apparent injuries apart from those to her everlasting pride.

  “I’m fine,” Gwen said, trying to catch her breath. “I’m pretty sure. Thank you.”

  She waved to the boy, who nodded. Before he climbed back on his bicycle and pedaled off, he seemed to be considering—it would seem to her later—whether or not to offer her, from deep within his Ringwraith hood, some piece of advice or useful information.

  “You just aren’t a careful person,” said a voice, familiar, soft-spoken, a man’s. “Are you?”

  Garth Newgrange, the dad, behind the wheel of a lettuce-pale Prius. Nosing his way into the driveway that led to the underground structure of the office building that recently went up next door to the Nefastis
Building. Jacket, tie, dressed for work, though as far as Gwen could remember, Garth worked in downtown Oakland. He must be here bright and early to see his doctor or dentist.

  “How is Lydia?” Gwen said, feeling she lacked the energy to puzzle out how Garth had meant to engage her with his opening remark; let alone energy sufficient to engage him in return. But there was something off about his words, no doubt, something broken in his tight smile.

  “How is Lydia? Lydia is very upset, actually. We are all very upset. The whole thing was traumatic for everyone. It was literally a trauma. All right?”

  He was, and she did not believe she had ever encountered such a thing before outside the pages of a novel, white with anger.

  “Garth—”

  “Lydia had a dream, Gwen, and you and Aviva, you guys just— You fucked it up.”

  “A dream?”

  “Yes.”

  “Garth, Lydia had a baby.”

  “I am aware of that,” he said. “Yes, Lydia had a baby. She has a baby, and I have an attorney. His office is, ha, in the building right next door to you. Funny, right?”

  “Are you— You’re suing us?”

  “I plan to,” Garth said. “I very much plan to do just that.”

  “But . . . what? Why? I know it was hard, things could have gone better, but she and the baby are fine.”

  “Who knows if the baby is fine?” he said. “You don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “Garth, please.”

  They were already in enough trouble, she wanted to say, without him piling on some nonsense lawsuit, waste of everyone’s time and money. But if she said that, he would probably go and report it to the attorney in the next building, and somehow it would end up getting used as evidence against them.

  “I hope your lawyer is better at their job than you are,” he said, easing his foot off the brake, punctuating the remark and the interview with an exclamation mark. The part of the exclamation mark was played with aplomb by Garth’s middle finger.