to power her engines, to fund her stake in the American dream—struck her for the first time as a liability. As purely tragic. There was no way to partake of it without handing it on down the generations.
Then Archy walked into the room in a yachting cap. Stood there gawping at her. He looked a mess, creased, untucked, his hair misshapen. In the instant before his new son tumbled, bawling and purple, into mortality and history, Gwen’s heart was starred like a mirror by a stone. One day the feeling might come to resemble forgiveness, but for now it was only pity, for Archy, for his father and his sons, for all the men of whom he was the heir or the testator, from the Middle Passage, to the sleeper cars of the Union Pacific, to the seat of a fixie back-alleying down Telegraph Avenue in the middle of the night.
Then she was holding her own little man, with his smell like a hot penny and his milky blue eyes, and although she had taken no drugs and received no anesthesia, she thought she must be feeling kind of loopy nevertheless, because it seemed to her that a handsome black uniformed policewoman, whose name-badge read LESTER, had come into the LDR along with Nurse Sally and Dr. Lazar—brown cop, golden nurse, white doctor, all of a sudden it was like some kind of nightmarish version of
“What’d I miss?” said Archy.
A 2002 Subaru Outback station wagon, fatigues-green, pulled into the driveway of the house on Stonewall Road, over the blood-brown stain deposited five weeks earlier by the leaky gaskets of Aviva Roth-Jaffe’s Volvo. The man of the house, red-bearded and slight, was in the carport, adrift on a floe of spread newspaper, painting a blue crib white. He worked his brush down one slat, finishing the stroke with a dainty twist of the wrist, laid the brush across the open mouth of his paint can, and rose to his feet, clad in a spattered pair of fawn Naot sandals. You could see from his diffident smile that neither the Subaru nor the occupants of its front seat, a hulking black man in a pumpkin beret and a black teenager who, even through the windshield, was visibly in the grip of an intense, perhaps fatal, spasm of embarrassment, meant anything to him.
“The plaintiff,” said the occupant of the backseat, concealed from view by the driver and by the fact that she was canted over the car seat—duly faced to the rear—with her blouse unbuttoned, her bra cup unlatched, her nipple the sole joy and plaything of the car seat’s occupant, whose parents had argued, though only briefly, over whether to name him Kudu (suggested by his father) or (in honor of his maternal grandfather) Clark. She was topping Clark off now, having restored him to sleep after he determined, for unknown reasons, to cause a disturbance midflight.
Just as she eased the cork of her nipple with a moist pop—a sound that never failed to densify the cloud of embarrassment around Clark’s older brother—from the slumbering vessel into which two ounces of rich hindmilk had just been decanted, a second Outback rolled to a stop along the curb. From it emerged the cetacean form of Michael Oberstein, Esq., in a remarkably ugly taupe mohair suit whose construction, Archy thought, must have necessitated the cruel slaughter of dozens, possibly hundreds, of moes. It did not so much clothe as wad him.
Archy got out of the car to greet Moby, eager for the excuse to release himself from the cramped, styleless, and mildly punitive confines to which, once he had conceded that a ’74 El Camino legendary for its unreliability might not be the most suitable car for a family man, fate had sentenced him. Selling the El Camino was only part of a diverse package of concessions, amendments, resolutions, and reparations that he had agreed to under the terms of his repatriation to the house on Sixty-first Street. One day, he hoped, this foreordained path would lead, amid countless chutes and precious few ladders, to the square of ultimate redemption—Forgiveness. Parts of the journey had been painful, and Archy rarely bothered to shield his wife and sons from awareness of this pain. But he had confessed to no one how bitterly he wept on the day when some dude from Livermore drove his El Camino away.
He raised a hand to Moby, who was molesting the knot of his necktie in the side mirror, then nodded to the plaintiff, Garth, standing by the half-white, half-blue crib looking wary, closed down, and as worn out and sleep- deprived as Archy.
“She’ll be right out,” Archy said. “Boy’s just finishing his snack.”
The plaintiff nodded, then turned back to the crib with an air of regret or longing, as if he would much rather continue with his brushwork than go through what Gwen had in mind.
At the back of the carport on a workbench, a radio reported on the count facing Miguel Tejada, and below the radio, strapped into a bouncy seat, busting out with some intricate mudras, lay the troublesome baby. Archy had forgotten its gender and name. The baby had something wrong with its skin, he noticed, some kind of weird blotches of discoloration on its fingers and face. A wire of panic lit up in Archy’s chest; it had never occurred to him that Garth might have actual grounds for his lawsuit. Then he saw that the blotches appeared to be precisely the same shade as the blue stain on the half-painted crib.
“It didn’t occur to me that she was going to lick it,” Garth said.
“They will lick pretty much anything, is my understanding,” Archy said.
“Yo, Arch,” Moby said. “What up. Mr. Newgrange, Mike Oberstein. We spoke on the phone.”
Moby skipped the hand theatrics for once and rolled on over to shake Garth Newgrange’s straight. He turned back to the car as Gwen climbed out of the backseat, running a finger down the buttons of her blouse, tugging her skirt down over the dimples of her knees.
“Hey, Gwen.”
“Hi, Moby. Hello, Garth.”
Moby had spoken to the man, prearranged it for them to come over, but Garth looked ambushed. He folded his arms across his chest, took a deep breath. “Hello.”
“This is my husband, Archy. Archy, this is Garth.”
Archy got the man to unlatch one hand and offer it, small and freckled with melanin and white latex semigloss.
“That’s, in the car, that’s Titus, Archy’s son. Titus, get out of the car and give this man a proper greeting.”
Titus, operating under the terms of the more modest package that he had negotiated with Gwen, which included room, board, and at the end of his own Candy Land path, the ambiguous pink-frosting-roofed gingerbread house of a family to love him and fuck him up, instantly got out of the car, observed the agreed-upon conventions of civilized intercourse among strangers, and got back into the car. The boy was still visiting their planet from his own faraway home world, but Archy figured that with time, he would adjust to the local gravity and microbes. Keeping close to the baby most of the time, as if Clark were the object he had crossed the stellar void to study.
“And there she is,” Gwen said, noticing the blue-stained baby in her seat. “Little Bella.”
“There she is,” Garth agreed, not saying
An awkward silence ensued that Archy did not have the energy or the courage to break.
“Can we—Garth, I was hoping we, you and I, could talk?” Gwen said, gesturing to the stairs that must lead downslope to the house.
“Here’s good,” Garth said.
Gwen blinked, looked at Moby. “Okay,” she said. “All right. I guess what I came here to say isn’t going to take very long, anyway. It’s really just two words long. I should have said them to you a long time ago, the day that Bella was born, right away. But they are not, they have never been, words that come very easily to me, I don’t know why. Maybe because, I’m not making an excuse here, but maybe because, the way I was raised, you know. That, basically, I have nothing to apologize for. Almost as a matter of, I want to say, policy. Politics, if you will. But even if that’s true in a broad, you know, like, historical sense. On the personal level—”
“You said tell you if you ran on at the mouth,” Moby said.
“Two words,” Gwen repeated, as though to herself.
Archy was enjoying this. He had been dwelling in a deep, capacious, and impregnable doghouse for weeks. He tried to remember if he had ever heard Gwen utter, in any but the most pro forma way, the phrase that came, halting but credible, to her lips.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
When she seemed content to leave it at that, Garth cross-armed and frowning without much of an apparent rise in temperature, Moby lofted an eyebrow toward one of the upswept flukes of his bangs:
