Telegraph Avenue

not comfort her at all. “You swear,” she said, seeking this guarantee for the third time that morning. “Aviva, you swear to me.”

“It does not mean a thing,” Aviva said.

“Because, I have to tell you, it feels so meaningful that I kind of want to vomit.”

“You going to be sick?” said the Saturday receptionist, looking over from her monitor to study Gwen, her tone saying, Don’t you throw up in my office. She had a vibrant head of sister curls, and Gwen recognized her as a fellow disciple of Tyneece at Glama. They had crossed paths a few times, pilgrims to the shrine. Something about the woman had always bothered Gwen, and now she knew what it was: an invisible, pervasive miasma of Lazar.

“You know, I might?” Gwen said. She lowered her voice to the peculiarly audible whisper common among the women of her family; peculiar not in its audibleness but in the disingenuous way that, like God handing down His commandments to a bunch of folks He knew perfectly well were going to break all of them repeatedly for all time, it bothered to be a whisper at all. A Shanks woman with a practiced embouchure could not only modulate the dynamics of her whisper but send it through closed doors, around corners, across time itself to echo everlastingly, for example, in the reprobate ears of a granddaughter married to a no-account man. “Having to eat you-know-what will do that to you.”

Aviva lowered her face to her textbook, not quite in time to conceal a smile. The receptionist, for her part, did not appear to find Gwen amusing. Her long fingernails resumed their furious clacking against the keys of her computer, a sound that had been annoying Gwen, she realized, since they sat down. Gwen shifted in one of the vinyl-upholstered steel chairs that furnished the waiting room, tipping herself first onto her left buttock and then onto the right. Whenever she leaned one way or the other, her thighs peeled away from each other with a sigh, like lovers reluctant to part. The muscles at the small of her back had gathered themselves into an aggrieved fist. Baby’s head was jammed up against the left side of her rib cage, just under her heart, right at the spot where Gwen ordinarily felt premonitions of disaster.

“What I need,” she said, in the same Shanks whisper, audible to the dermatologist in the office next door, “is something to wash it down with.” Thinking of a cup of creamy white suff, which she would never again permit herself to enjoy. “Something to get rid of the taste of—”

“Shush,” Aviva said. She reached down for her handbag, unzipped an inner pocket, and took out a miniature airplane bottle of Tabasco sauce. “Put a few drops of that on it.”

Gwen took the bottle and shook it a few times, thinking, Squeeze a few drops into Lazar’s bathroom soap dispenser. Massage the stuff right into his stubbly pink head. Work it right on down to the pores.

As she pictured herself, oddly satisfied, performing this bit of revenge grooming, the door between the waiting room and the examination area swung open and Dr. A. Paul Lazar, FCOG, came out. He appeared to be in a transitional state between the delivery room and the seat of his bicycle, green scrub top worn over slick black Lycra shorts and a pair of Nike bike shoes. In this hybrid getup, he looked perfectly suited to his waiting room, which conformed to the general aesthetic of Berkeley doctors’ offices by freely mixing elements of a secondhand furniture showroom, a real estate title company, and the Ministry of Truth from 1984. Lazar was better-looking and not as young as Gwen remembered him, not quite so pallid and dead-eyed. But there was still something fish-faced about the man.

“Ladies,” he said inauspiciously. He held out his hand for them to shake it, with an air of portent but also a hint of mischief, as if they had gathered to sign a treaty that would permit him to occupy their country in the guise of defending it. “Come on in.”

Aviva slid the acupuncture atlas into a canvas KPFA tote bag and stood up. Gwen leaned on Aviva’s arm for help getting to her feet. Lazar watched her rise with a bright diagnostic eye. Dread or the skull of her baby seemed to wedge itself deeper between the bones of Gwen’s rib cage as she followed Aviva into the office. It was a dull tank—black steel shelves, artwork by Pfizer, view of the parking lot—enlivened only by the disorder of Lazar’s medical texts and by a framed photograph of him sharing the sun atop some gray-green mountain with a horse- toothed young woman and two Italian bicycles. Lazar and his wife or girlfriend were smiling with an air of dutiful rapture, the way you did when some total stranger agreed to snap a photo of you. Gwen fanned the flicker of pity that lit within her at the sight of Lazar’s office, sensing that the light of its flame offered her sole hope of finding a path out of the mess she had gotten the Birth Partners into. Pity and pity alone could mask the bitter taste of shit.

“So,” Lazar said. “Here you are.”

“Here we are,” Gwen agreed, trying to stand up to his blue eyes as they further annotated her case. Edema, melasma.

“I know I have you two over a barrel,” he said. “I appreciate the gesture nevertheless.”

He smiled insincerely to show them that he was pretending to be kidding. The flame of Gwen’s pity was snuffed out. She screened a brief martial arts sequence in her imagination, perhaps a hundred frames in all, ending with a different gesture, one that would introduce her foot to the knob of Lazar’s larynx. She retained control of herself and resisted the urge to share this scenario with him. Still, his remark proved difficult for either of the partners to rally back over the net.

“I—” Gwen glanced at Aviva. “I spoke to Lydia this morning. She sounds good. I don’t know if you—”

“She’ll pull through just fine,” Lazar said. No thanks to you, said his eyes.

No, no, Gwen was only being paranoid. She had been out of line yesterday. Allowed her emotions to overcome her judgment, which was not at all like her, by nature and fiat, by habit and preference. Powerful as her emotions could be, she had known since she was seven years old that they were good for very little, and that by contrast, her judgment was uniquely reliable. It was all that, and the long, bloody unraveling of the birth yesterday, and then the hormones rolling like a thunderhead across the prairie of her third trimester, that had led Gwen to betray her principles. From a medical point of view, Dr. Lazar had performed flawlessly. Gwen had no clinical beef with him, none worth jeopardizing their standing at the hospital, which, like that of all nurse-midwives who had privileges at Chimes, was always mysteriously fragile. Now, thanks to an intervention by Aryeh Bernstein, all that Gwen needed to do was speak the two most meaningless words in the English language to Paul Lazar, and she would be forgiven. An apology, what did Nat always say, supposedly quoting his dad: It was a beautiful thing, no, a miracle of language. Cost you nothing and returned so richly. Easy for Nat to say.

“Yesterday was long and confusing,” she began, knowing this would not do, that the logical conclusion of the line, were she to follow to it, must be that fault lay not with Gwen or bad luck but with poor, long, confusing yesterday afternoon. “Normally, Doc, I am way too proud ever to put myself in the kind of position that I put myself into yesterday when I lost my cool.”

Aviva sneaked a glance at her partner and, somewhere in the profoundly dark recesses of her deep-set eyes, sent up an arcing flare of warning. Gwen had not come to discuss with Paul Lazar, MD, the flow and vagaries of her pride or her cool.

“And so,” Gwen tried.

She became aware of a flat, fetid taste building up at the back of her tongue. In coming here, she saw, she had been instructed not only to swallow her pride, apologize to this man who had insulted her with a racial slur, but also to put up with his smugness, and his bike shorts, and worst of all, the equine grin of his woman in the photograph, which no longer struck Gwen as pitiably friendless so much as self-satisfied, boastful, the smile of someone who felt that she most belonged on the tops of mountains. Or, no, maybe the bike shorts were the worst thing of all.

“And so,” she resumed, “looking back over my conduct. And taking into consideration the strong recommendation of my partner. Who has spent her whole professional life standing up to doctors, hospitals, insurance company bean counters…”

“Gwen, darling,” Aviva said, mixing forward the Brooklyn, either to ironize the term of endearment or else by way of genuine warning.

“…so that you can be sure she knows, the way I know, that just like we have to be twice as competent, twice as careful, twice as prepared, twice as sensitive, and twice as cool under fire—”

“Are we talking about midwives or Jackie Robinson?”

“—as some Lance Armstrong wannabe doctor with a diploma from—” she checked the med school sheepskin—“Loma Linda—”