Telegraph Avenue (35 page)

Julie, in his nocturnal wrestling with her sleeping bag, had crawled so far that she nearly stepped on him when she came into the room. The hollow of his hairless chest, the puzzled knot of his brows, the soft straight hair pasted by night sweat across his bony forehead, all stirred deep memories of the nights when she used to watch him for Aviva and Nat, sing him her grandmother’s grave lullabies. His innocence then struck her, as she recalled it now, as having also been her own: before Nat and Aviva fixed her up with Archy, before the long, gathering disappointment of her professional life.

She preferred not to look at Titus, snoring away under a goofy and tragic mantle blazoned with an image of Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges in matching sweaters. She felt sorry for him, but she did not want to feel sorry for him, and so she let him piss her off. Meanwhile, the mystery smell, it became clear to her pregnant nose, plain as the pall of carnage, was the smell of old hamburger. She made the mistake of looking more closely at the clamshell package on the table. A pink and beaded gray streak of fat dribbled like candle wax down the outside of it and sent a rocket of hot bile arcing from her belly to her mouth.

She would have been willing to bet forty-five dollars that ninjas and Green Berets did not, generally speaking, incorporate vomiting into their operational procedures. The humiliation of that would be too much to bear; Archy had spent, without complaint, a fair amount of time in the early days of her pregnancy handling her various ejecta.

The molecules of oxidized fat seemed to trail her like malodorous pixies as Gwen crept down the hall to the bedroom and opened the bedroom door. The blinds were drawn, but in the window behind Archy’s auntie’s old Marie Antoinette−style dresser, the job had been poorly done, so that they hung at an angle to the windowsill. In the daylight seeping under this hypotenuse, Gwen could see Archy heaped up on the bed, flat on his back. It was a round bed that Archy had brought to the marriage—he called it his secret-agent bed—and with his legs and arms spread in four directions, he reminded her of the naked man by Leonardo da Vinci, squaring the circle or whatever it was. Only Archy was not naked; he had on a pair of Cal basketball shorts. Her objective lay right alongside him, bent double, ignored or perhaps trying to wriggle away. All the other, more conventional pillows had been kicked or flung over the side of the bed and lay in dejected attitudes on the floor. Typically, Archy slept flat on the mattress and employed a pillow only to cover his face when a room was too full of light. He was not going to miss the body pillow at all.

The molecules drifting downwind from the burger-joint packaging in the living room seemed at last to abandon their pursuit of Gwen. She could stand to breathe through her nose again, and what she smelled was her bedroom, her husband, her life. The clove-and-citrus redolence of his aftershave, a Christmasy smell. A smell she had fallen in love with early on. Now it struck her as a tonic, bracing and restorative, steeling her to reach for the pillow, careful, moving slow, holding her breath. She grabbed two feather-fill fistfuls of pillow and began to peel it away from the mattress one patient millimeter at a time.

Archy rolled over onto his side and, with a sharp intake of breath, threw his legs around the body pillow. He pressed his hips against it, took it in his arms, drew it close to him. He embraced it, let his breath out shuddering, sighed once, and began to snore. Gwen froze, horrified, thrilled, and pricked by a sense of betrayal, though whether by her husband or the body pillow, she would not have been able to say.

“Don’t get up yet,” Archy said without opening his eyes. Begging in his sleep. He took another long appreciative sip of unconsciousness, weighing the flavor of it in his mouth, smacking his lips. “Don’t leave me.”

Gwen considered a number of possible rejoinders to this, among them “Too late, motherfucker,” “I’m sorry,” “I won’t, ever again,” and “You are talking to a
pillow
.”

She let go of the forty-five-dollar pillow without saying a word. She turned and slipped back out of the bedroom. As she looked up from easing the door shut and releasing the doorknob with practiced soundlessness, she saw Titus standing at the other end of the hall, watching her, not quite smirking, not quite looking confused. Those blue-green Luther Stallings eyes, rimed with the unreadable force-field shimmer that veiled the light eyes of black folks.

“I just came to get my special pillow,” Gwen said in a pathetic whisper.

Titus nodded, then seemed to notice that she was not carrying anything.

“I changed my mind,” Gwen said.

She felt a pulse of tightening across her belly that she knew meant dehydration. The boy got out of her way as she moved past him into the kitchen. Standing behind her, he became the only thing that prevented her from backing away in horror at what she discovered there.

“Oh my
God
,” she said.

The boy concurred with a mirthless snort.

“What did you
do
?”

“He said you could grind coffee in the blender.”

“Who did?”

“Julie.”

“Did he also say you could shoot Ragu out of a SuperSoaker? Because that’s what it looks like happened in here.”

The boy shrugged.

She soldiered in, holding her breath as if walking into a recently vacated portable toilet, and ran herself a glass of water from the sink. “Now I see why you put the chain on the back door.” She drained off the whole twelve ounces in one greedy draft. “It was for the protection of others.”

“That was Julie, too,” Titus said. “He gets scared.” Again there was not quite a smirk on his face; his expression held too much curiosity for that.

“I know he does,” Gwen said.

Something, some routine tenderness in her tone or aspect of her he had not considered, made him train his curiosity apparatus on her. He measured her circumference and girth. “You got a special pillow for that,” he said, pointing at her abdomen.

“A body pillow.”

“To hold it up when you’re sleeping?”

“I don’t really sleep,” Gwen said. “But especially not without.”

“So, and, that kid in there. That’s, like, my brother.”

Gwen thought about rinsing the lipstick from the rim of the water glass, but in the unlikely event that anyone noticed it among the marinara Pollocks and the termite mounds of plates and pans, the print of her lipstick could serve as a calling card, a silver bullet, a bent joker.

“Or sister,” she said.

“You didn’t have no ultrasound?”

“
Any
. We asked them not to tell us.”

“You want the surprise.”

“Archy does. I don’t like surprises.” It came out sounding more pointed than she had intended, but not inappropriately so.

“Why don’t you just find out and not tell him?”

“I could do that,” she said.

“What. Aw, you already did,” Titus guessed. “Am I right?”

Gwen took the chain off the back door. “Half brother,” she told Titus before she went out into the rest of her day. “And half I don’t know what.”

“W
ho was that?” man wanted to know.

Nothing but questions ever rising from that quarter, man shaking them up in the cup of his fist like a handful of dice every time he walked into a room that was furnished with his son.
You like Rice Krispies? English muffins? Baseball?
Star Wars
? Peaches? The ladies? Mos Def? Cats? Dogs? Mentos? Monkeys? Nobody ever taught you to brush your teeth when you wake up in the morning? Did that shirt used to be
white
? How you spend so much time playing that damn
game
? What would happen if you read an actual Marvel motherfucking
comic book
one time? You ever hear of washing a dish? Listen to Duke Ellington? Do you know who Billy Strayhorn was? Aw, shit, are you
trying
to break my heart?
Letting fly the dice. In that regard, the man offered little in the way of novelty; Titus felt himself to be a vortex around which the questions of adults routinely came to circle, like that wheel of plastic he had seen one night on the Discovery Channel, out there past Hawaii someplace, great big endless turning of plastic bags and pop bottles. Every conversation a quiz, a debriefing, an interrogation, a catechism. Every sentence fitted at the end with its whiplash curl, a hook to snare him. And every single one of those questions, at bottom, nothing but rhetorical, admitting of and needing no reply.

“Who was
who
?” Titus said.

Take it in, feed it right on back at them.

“You were talking to somebody, sounded like a woman. Was it Gwen?”

“Who’s Gwen?”

“Boy, you know who Gwen is. My
wife
.”

Titus produced an elaborate shrug, three-part, multilayered like a Vulcan chessboard. “I guess.”

“You guess.”

“She was here.”

At this news, his father got hollow-eyed, his big old Yogi Bear cheeks going all slack. Standing there by the bedroom door where his
wife
had stood a few minutes ago. Tying and retying an unsuccessful bow in the sash of his playboy bathrobe. Man took in the socks littering the hallway floor, the stink of male habitation in the house. He closed his eyes, working on must be like two, three hours of sleep, eye sockets purple with fatigue. No doubt picturing the devastation in the kitchen, the trash heaps in the living room, the skinny little underpantsed white boy tangled up out there in that crusty old sleeping bag. Reconstructing in his mind the likely path of her visit. Understanding how disgusted she had been by it all. Running through the whole scenario like the flashback at the end of a detective film that shows the murder as it must have gone down, everybody sitting around the parlor or the conservatory or whatever, under the framed butterflies and the stuffed tiger heads, while the detective laid it all out.
She was standing right there; you needed only to wake up and you would have seen her. But you did
not
wake up, did you, Mr. Stallings?
He dragged one hand across his face slowly and with intent, like he was hoping to erase its features. He opened his eyes.

“Fuck me,” he said. “
Look
at this shit.”

He kicked on down the hallway, trailing that lemon Pledge smell he had, almost but not quite brushing against Titus as he went by. When he came into the living room, what he discovered there seemed not only to confirm but to deepen or dwarf his worst fears.

“What she want to be coming here today,” he said, his voice barely loud enough to hear. For once it did not sound like a question.

So Titus didn’t answer. Not—this time—because he made it a point of pride to spurn or duck his father’s and all the pointless questions of the adult world, but because what was he going to say? Mention had been made of a body pillow, but Titus understood that a body pillow explained nothing, was only what Hitchcock called a MacGuffin. The swell of the woman, the arc of the brother who deformed her, the serious way she had of speaking to Titus, looking at him not boy-you-best-get-yourself-together serious, like Julie’s mom, but scientist serious, skeptical, fascinated by what she saw. How was he going to put any of that into words?

His father said, “Jaffe, get up.”

Julie sat up at once, pink nipples like a pit bull pup’s, not a hair on him anywhere except for, under his left arm, if you knew about it, one coarse wire like an eyebrow whisker, about which it was not unknown for Titus to tease him. Julie blinked, focusing on the man, cross-eyed and hungover on the vapors of his last dream of the night.

“Gwen was here,” the man told him.

Julie nodded, then saw that something more was wanted. He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he tried.

“Not asking you. Titus says Gwen was here. Just now.” He turned to Titus. “In this room?” Titus nodded again. “In the kitchen?”

“Had a drink of water from the sink.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Archy said. He looked back at Julie. “So you didn’t see her, then?”

“I was asleep,” Julie said.

“Yeah, I was asleep, too. Only one
wasn’t
asleep was my boy Titus, here, and as usual, he don’t have too much to say on the subject.”

Titus got that a criticism was intended by this last remark, although he did not consider it to be so. You could damn yourself with silence but never so effectively as by running your mouth. He hung back as his father approached the disordered and, at best, to be honest (owing to the poor quality of the original film stock, subpar camerawork, third-rate video transfers, routine yet crazy story lines, and wooden dialogue), broken evidence of Luther Stallings’s having, at one time, shone forth from the screens of ghetto grindhouses. At first the man seemed not to notice the DVDs, preoccupied instead by the crumpled napkins, the twenty-four-ounce cups, the greasy packages of leftover food. With the hopeless energy of someone trying to save worthless knickknacks from an impending wildfire, he gathered up the cheese-edged clamshell packages, the used forks and straw wrappers, and all the other refuse the boys had left out last night when, at three-thirty
A.M.
, man still not home from a gig in the city, they finally switched off the television and went to sleep. Stacked it all precariously in his arms as if there were a chance that the wife might return any second.

“
Fuck
me,” he said again. He stomped into the kitchen, growling once when he comprehended the full disastrousness thereof. Banged around under the sink until he found a garbage bag, tumbled into it all the garbage he was holding. Folding anger up into himself like a hurricane gathering seawater, he swept through the kitchen picking up trash. Came stomping back into the living room, fat ghetto Santa with the soul patch, slinging his Hefty sack.

“I cannot
believe
you little motherfuckers left my damn house looking like this,” he said, accurately but without justice, since in so leaving it, they had only been following the principles of housekeeping as laid down after his wife’s departure by the man himself. The dire state of the kitchen was as much his fault as anyone’s. “Can’t believe she came this morning.” As if, say, she came yesterday or tomorrow, whole place would have been done up shiny and correct, and today was some freak of the housekeeping schedule. “House looking like a garage full of crackheads. She should of— Wait. Hold up.”