Telegraph Avenue

say about it?

“Had three things on my wish list,” said Luther, “coming out of the program last year. And one of them was not ‘Please let my son slap me upside my head, pull my hair, and sit on top of me, motherfucker must weigh two hundred and forty, two-forty-five.’”

“Yeah,” Archy said. “Oh. Sorry about that.” He unstraddled his father, lurched to his feet. Luther rolled over onto his back and lay there, staring at the cottage-cheese ceiling, at the box that held Terrell Padgett. His eyes brimmed over, but he blinked the tears away, and they were gone.

Archy reached down and held out a hand to Luther. Luther took it. He let Archy pull his weightless wiry armature off the floor. When Archy tried to get his fingers loose, Luther held on to them. His grip was the inveterate iron thing that had punished cinder blocks, pine planks, Chuck Norris. Archy gave up and let his father shake his hand.

“That was number two on the list,” Luther said.

The mom was a kid, two months shy of twenty-one, her baby’s father out of the picture. She worked the line at Chez Panisse and from time to time sold cupcakes out of a taco truck. When Aviva had first met her, she was a strawberry-blond third-grader named Rainbow, the daughter of the facilitator of a women’s- business network Aviva had belonged to at the time. A wordless slip of a girl, moving sideways at the edges of rooms. Now she was dyed to a shade of blackberry brunette, had dropped the second syllable of her name, tattooed maybe 60 percent of her body with a gaudy loteria of half-allegorical objects (a bee, an umbrella, an egg in an eggcup), and, for today at least, taken center stage in her world. In the world; Aviva still felt that way after all these years, after having caught a thousand babies and been afforded every opportunity by routine, patient-borne neurosis, or the health care industry to grow disenchanted, jaded, or bored with the work. A person tended to see herself as a streetlamp on a misty night, at the center of a sphere of radiance, but that was a trick of the light, an illusion of centrality in a general fog. A laboring woman, though, while she endured her labor, lay at the center of something truly radiant in four dimensions; every birth everywhere, all the vectors of human evolution and migration originating and terminating at the parting of her legs.

“I feel like I’m going to shit,” Rain said. She had gotten all the way to eight centimeters within two hours of her first contraction, but the journey to the hospital seemed to have slowed her down. “What if I shit in the bed?”

“I dare you,” said Aviva.

Click of the door latch, inrush of hospital hum. Aviva had her back to the door of the pretty new LDR that Rain had lucked into, blond wood and chrome trim, a suggestion of slim Danish moms giving birth to strapping young socialists. Audrey, Rain’s mother, leaped up from the armchair to drag the curtain around the bed with a rattle of BBs.

“Ms. Jaffe?” It was one of the nurses, a Filipina named Sally, a good nurse, with the same well-trained way Gwen had of being sugar-sweet and kick-ass at the same time. “Your darling husband is here.”

It was Aviva’s turn to leap to her feet. She could not recall Nat ever having shown up at the hospital, unbidden. Maybe to bring her a more comfortable pair of shoes, something to eat. For him to turn up out of the blue had to mean bad news, disaster. As she followed Sally down to the nurses’ station to meet him, she fished her phone from her back pocket, looking for the voice mail she must have missed. No calls from Nat or Julie. No calls from anyone at all.

He was drawing an invisible mandala across the glossy tile with his high-top Chuck Taylors, head down, hands in the back pockets of the jeans she liked best on him, humming the soundtrack to his impatience. When he saw her, the panic in his face gave way so suddenly to relief that she thought he would cry.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Gwen’s in labor.”

“Is Archy there?”

“No. She’s not home, Aviva. She’s here.”

“Oh, no.”

“Yeah. Her water broke, there was meconium?”

“A lot?”

“Not a lot, but some. The doc said we probably don’t need to worry yet, but they wanted her admitted and on the monitor. In case there’s some fetal distress.”

“Who’s the attending?”

“Your boy.”

“Lazar?”

“Quite the charmer.”

“Shit! Were you with her when her water broke?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

A blankness drifted across his face like ink from a squid, alerting her that the next words to issue from his lips were going to maintain a fraught if not adversarial relation to the truth. “I lost my phone,” he said.

“Lost it where?”

He shrugged. “In the car.”

She decided, whatever the lie, to let it go for now. “How is Gwen?” she said.

Since leaving the house to meet Rain and Audrey at the hospital, Aviva had been aware, a ground underlying the figure of every calm suggestion she made to Rain, every forbearing interaction she had with the staff, that the whole of her emotional capacity—carefully concealed from everyone around like the blacked-out windows of some wartime aircraft factory—had been shifted over to the production of anger; she was furious with Gwen.

No, it was something deeper and more selfish, more craven than fury, which had to Aviva’s ear a notion of scourging, of refining fire. Aviva was hurt. And her anger was the especial, bitter anger of the indicted. Gwen was breaking their partnership, renouncing their shared calling, for reasons that Aviva could not dismiss without doing violence to certain inconvenient and embarrassing facts about the nature and demographics of their practice, about the paradoxical taint of the boutique that hung over modern midwifery, a profession that had at one time, not long ago, confined its ministrations to poor and to rural women. Aviva was annoyed—though this annoyance was also not uncontaminated by consciousness of those fucking facts—by the deft and ruthless mau-mauing to which Gwen had, with perfect justification, subjected the hapless review panel. And that in spite— or because—of Gwen having saved their asses by so doing.

“She is not happy,” Nat said. “She doesn’t know where Archy is, that’s one. Two, no way is she ever letting that fuckhead Lazar lay one hand on her, quote unquote. Three, get your ass down there, please, as fast as you can. She needs you, Aviva. She says she’s not going to have the baby without you there to catch it.”

“How sweet.”

“I’m just the messenger. And I better get back to her. I don’t think Julie is a whole lot of support.”

“Julie?”

“He’s with us. He’s kind of—”

“How did that happen?”

Again a mild facial paralysis, a narrative dystonia slackened his features. “I picked him up,” he said. “Uh, on the way.”

“What the fuck is going on, Nat? No, forget it. I’ll kill you later.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Later works for me.”

“Good. Now. Tell Gwen—”

“Aviva?”

It was Audrey, standing in the corridor making a tentative little handwringing gesture, her head inclined toward the door of Rain’s LDR. “She says she wants to push.”

“Ho-kay,” Aviva said. She gave Nat a push of her own, fingers to his sternum, rocking him back a step or two. “Tell her I’ll be there as fast as I can. You help her get settled, see her into a room, all right? Make yourself useful. Play the dad. Think you can do that?”