Telegraph Avenue

his blarney seemed to fail him as he saw the look in Archy’s eyes, which Nat felt he would have to describe, trying to avoid exaggeration, as raw panic. The surname Joyner belatedly played a chord in Nat’s memory, a mu major, something a little off about its beauty. Jamila Joyner, a girl Archy had been stuck on, stuck to, the summer when he and Nat first met. Right after he came home from Kuwait. A girl who stayed around enough to wear Archy out, then went on home to Oklahoma. Or possibly, come to think of it, to Texas.

“Well,” Nat said. “I guess congratulations are in order.”

Archy stood in the front bay window of his house like a doomed captain on the bridge of a starship, pondering, as if it were a devourer of planets, the approach of his wife’s black BMW. Stroking his chin, using intricate mental tables of cosines and angles to decide whether the intensity of Gwen’s response to the business with Elsabet Getachew would be squared or full-on cubed by the news that his child had appeared out of nowhere, or rather out of some nowhere known only, it seemed, to Julie Jaffe. The results of Archy’s calculations were sobering.

The BMW pulled up to the house and then sat, lights lit, engine heat troubling the atmosphere above its hood, windshield a glossy gray-blue blank of reflected sky. Daylight was taking its sweet time fading into dusk, and the street at suppertime seemed to be holding its breath, torn into patches of deep shadow and sunshine, motionless but for the little white moths stitching their loopy crewelwork in the honeysuckle. In the sandpit of the tiny playground, dozens of toy vehicles and appliances lay bleached and upended, primary-colored plastic ruins as of some toddler cataclysm.

The door on the driver’s side swung open. Gwen took hold of the doorframe with her left hand and the door itself with her right and, jaw set, head lowered as to a thankless task, simultaneously heaved and thrust herself, belly first, out of the car and onto her feet. For a few seconds she wavered there like the evening itself. Then she reached into the back of the car and came out not with the assault rifle, rocket launcher, or perhaps flying guillotine that Archy feared but rather an aluminum water bottle and the shoulder strap of her birthing bag. She tried to yank the bag by its strap through the space between the back of the driver’s seat and the doorframe, but it got wedged. She jerked hard and then stumbled as something—the strap, probably—gave way. When she went to unlatch the seat back, she dropped her car keys. They bounced once and skittered under the car. She let the broken strap dangle and fell back against the side of the car with a show of quiet despair.

Over the past hour, Archy had envisioned Gwen’s return according to a number of scenarios, incorporating into these fantasies of anger, reproach, and reconciliation elements derived from Italian opera, pornographic films of the mid-eighties, and footage of tornadoes vandalizing Kansas with lightning and wind. Gwen lost her temper so rarely, and with such a lasting sense of self-betrayal, that it was difficult for Archy to imagine with any accuracy how far beyond the unprecedented events of that morning she was capable of going. But it had never occurred to Archy that Gwen would come home to him covered in defeat.

She stood there leaning against the car, looking at the broken strap of her birthing bag as if its frayed ends encoded the general intentions of the universe toward her. Archy padded down the front walk of his house, his step light and cautious, the pavement warm against his bare feet. He assumed that the sorrow, the weariness of spirit attested to by the slump of Gwen’s shoulders, by her bowed head, by the whole pregnant-lady version of The End of the Trail she had going, that all this served to express the cost to her of returning to his cheating embrace.

“I’m sorry,” he said, all his planned speeches and formulas forgotten. “Gwen, I just— Ho.” He came around to face her square-on and saw the blood on her shirt. The antennae of two sutures on her cheek. “Damn, girl, what the fuck?” An iron bar, cold as a flagpole in winter, plunged into his chest. “Are you—?”

“It’s not my blood,” Gwen said in a bitter tone, as if to suggest that by rights it ought to be. She raised her head and tried to meet his gaze but could not seem to manage it. “I—” Now she looked at him. She had those beautiful Seminole eyes, mysterious and hooded, their color between tea and molasses. They filled rapidly with tears as if through the sudden breach of some inner dam. “I messed up, Archy.”

She let go of the broken strap, fell against him. Smell of a hospital in her hair, smell of hard work and failure rising off her body, and somewhere in the midst of it, a miscellaneous note of incense. She went completely boneless on him, expecting him to hold her up, all one hundred and sixty-odd pounds of her, bloodstains and belly, arms thrown around his shoulders. He resolved to do it. He belted her to him with his arms like her chute had failed and they were plummeting earthward a hundred miles an hour at the mercy of wind, cable, and rippling silk. He resolved on the spot to be equal to the challenge of bearing up. He was a husband who could be true. He was Superman grabbing hold of the train engine as it plunged from the bridge.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said.

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he regretted them. This breakdown or whatnot, he saw, had nothing to do with him or with their marriage. Gwen had sacrificed her dignity to return home not for his sake but for her own, because she needed to fall apart, and that was something she would permit herself to do only at home. So here she was, bloody and wrung out and ragged, and Archy had no motherfucking way of knowing whether it was going to be okay.

“Did somebody die?” he said. “Gwen. Honey. A baby?” She shook her head. “A mom?”

“Nobody,” she said. “Nobody died. The baby, the mom’s fine.”

“You’re fine, too?”

She nodded. He laid a hand on her belly, and as always, the contact stirred him sexually. Something fructuous about the swell of her, asking to be opened.

“The baby?”

She stopped crying abruptly, with a sputtering finality, like the last frame of film running out on a reel. “The baby is fine.”

“Aw, then,” he said, fighting down the hard-on, even more inappropriately timed than usual, that had begun to unfurl in his boxers.

“No, Archy, listen, I can’t—I’m not—Oh, Archy, I messed up so-ho-ho bad.”

She sank to the ground, and Archy sank with her, the Man of Steel dragged along by the plummeting train. His arms ached, his knees trembled. Gwen seemed by the second to gain pounds and babies and fluids in her amnion.

“Come on inside. Yeah. Stand up. It’s okay.”

He hoisted her and she stood up, her legs going back about their business, but that was all she could seem to manage. She laid her head against his chest and rested. He was thinking, I can stay here like this all night until my arms break off and fall on the ground in a million pieces, failing to notice at first how intently Gwen was pressing her face against the front of his shirt, pressing it right up to the skin at his collar, now the hollow of his throat, taking deep inquisitorial breaths.

“Why do you smell like candles?” she said.

She drew back, watching him. She pulled a wad of paper napkins from the pocket of her bloodstained shirt and blew her nose.

“Long story,” he said, “Now tell me what happened.”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it. I lost my temper. Now we’re going to have our privileges revoked at Chimes, and Aviva’s pissed off at me, and we’ll probably have to close down our practice, and … and…”

Titus Joyner, riding his brakeless bicycle, rounded the corner by the Island of Lost Toys, the surface of his bare chest lustrous as motor oil. Wearing his T-shirt with the neck hole encircling his head and the rest hanging down behind like a burnoose. Archy’s heart tipped and fell from its shelf. He had persuaded Nat and the boys to go no farther for now, to say nothing to Aviva or anyone else, least of all Gwen. He did not deny or even seriously question the boy’s claim on his paternity. He remembered having heard about Jamila getting pregnant with a child he half assumed to be his, a half assumption that did not prompt him to protest or take any action at all when she went off to Arkansas or wherever to have it. Whenever he heard one of the popular songs of the era, which had provided a soundtrack, as it were, to the blind flailing of his spermatozoa through the inner darkness of Jamila Joyner, he might spare a nano-momentary thought for that child. But until this afternoon Titus had remained an eternal fat, stolid toddler dressed in the world’s tiniest tuxedo, as in the one photo of him that Archy had seen,