Telegraph Avenue

“Solemn as in somewhat restrained in his emotional palette.”

“Fronting? Being hard?”

“Maybe some of that. But it seems like he and Julie—”

Before Nat could continue, he saw something that made both his eyebrows shoot up. His face went blank, like the screen of an Etch A Sketch, in a single shake.

“Hey, lady,” he said.

El Boom said, “Look out.”

Look out, here came Gwen, through the French doors that connected the patio to the living room with its arcing vaults and folk-art Virgins. She had checked a vintage bowling shirt out of Archy’s library, pink on black, originally sported, according to the inscriptions in silkscreen and embroidery thread, by an inferably large gentleman named Stan, bowling in the service of Alameda Wire and Pipe. She was bearing straight for Archy, endowed by pregnancy with that locomotive chug. No chance that she was coming to tell him he was off the hook, forgiven his sins, large or small. Gwen had never in her life arrived at forgiveness in the physical absence of its needful object. Not, at least, without the intervention of some external force: the advice of her father, for example, or of Dr. Nickens, the pastor of her childhood church, or, under certain conditions, some trumping piece of bad news. Said absence affording too convenient a vessel for the laying in of refined counterarguments, further supporting examples, freshly recalled instances of past infractions, etc.

“Hello, Nat,” she said. “Arch. Um. Okay. Listen here.”

Level and cool, she looked from Nat to Archy and back, and with an interior lurch, Archy concluded that Gwen had descended from the El Camino to issue an ultimatum in the presence of Nat Jaffe and the world, and whatever it was or however she phrased it, he would have to tell her about Titus, and that would be that, adieu and later to the second great partnership of his life, not because he had a son on the side, which, all right, was maybe no big thing, but because he had never mentioned the fact to Gwen, ever, neither in passing nor in detail. Because in ten years or more, Archy had never thought of the boy, not once, a habit of oblivion that continued even now, with the kid back and smacking up against the outside of their life like a moth banging against a lampshade. Stashed there, up in the Jaffes’ attic.

Archy knew an instant of pure panic. Nothing caused him greater revulsion than signs of weakness in a man, keenest of all in himself; and there was no one in this world weaker than someone trying to keep something secret, unless it be someone obliged to confess.

“I can’t stay, Nat,” he said, deciding to throw the littlest confession overboard first, see where that got him. “I’m really sorry. Gwen and I have birth class tonight, and when I said I could play, I just fucking forgot.”

“No,” said Nat and Gwen at the same time. Jinx, lock, you owe me a soda. And then Nat, without waiting for anyone to speak his name and release him, said, measuring the words, always happy to take the opportunity to educate, “Please, no, I totally get it. That shit is important, Arch. They’ve done all kinds of studies. You’re on your game, things are going to go a lot easier for Gwen and whoever that is in there.” He pointed a furry finger at Gwen’s belly. “Y’all go on and go.”

“No,” Gwen repeated. “Guys, I— Archy, your phone rang, in the car. I answered it.”

The mainspring of Archy’s panic tightened farther, his thoughts, like Nat’s watch, running seven minutes ahead of themselves. Ransacking all the files, thinking what girl, bitch, or lady, what mess did he leave lying around.

“It was Garnet Singletary,” Gwen was saying. “Archy, Mr. Jones. He, oh, Archy, he died. He’s dead.”

“He… what?” Archy said, feeling the words first as a surge of blood to his cheeks. “No, I saw him this morning.”

“I guess—I guess the neighbor lady, uh, Mrs. Wiggins, across the street. She’s the one who called the ambulance.”

Archy not all the way there yet, enough presence to notice how Gwen seemed rattled, shaky. This is true, he thought.

“I talked to him two hours ago!” Nat said, as if he thought these words could disprove, discredit, the nonsense Gwen was talking. He ran his fingers through his steely Brillo. Fished his phone out of the hip pocket of his jacket. “Yeah, hey, Garnet,” he said. “Nat Jaffe. What the fuck?”

He spun away across the patio, his back to Gwen and Archy, skeptical to a fault, doubting every story he heard on principle until he got independent confirmation, anything at all remarkable that anyone felt like putting out there an “urban legend,” a “misnomer,” a “popular delusion,” a “false etymology.” One of the man’s balls there to question the testimony of the other, both of them doubting what his dick had to say. Probably hoping Garnet would help him get hold of Mrs. Wiggins, the police report, the coroner’s statement.

Oblivious, El Boom woke up the kick drum, divvied out sixteenth notes between the hi-hat and snare, then began to lean heavily on the one, working up a half-drunk second-line crab-step rhythm that stumbled somehow into the break from “Funky Drummer” (King, 1970). Mr. Jones always claimed James Brown as a cousin on his mother’s side (offering no evidence that would satisfy Nat Jaffe beyond an unsupported mention in the liner notes for Redbonin’). Archy remembering the way Mr. Jones one time got down off his stool at Brokeland to execute a tricky Mashed Potato across the tile floor, studying his bitty bird feet with a dazed smile as if they were a couple of miracles.

“Oh, no,” Gwen said. “Archy, please don’t start that.”

She wiped at her own cheek with a forearm. She came over and did her best to get herself around him. He was too high and she too deep. So she pulled him over to a chair, one of those Mexican affairs made out of pigskin and sticks. She fell onto his lap, panicking the chair. In her arms, Archy let go of himself for a minute. The smell of Gwen’s hair, cool against his cheek, clean, flowery.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I know.”

All at once—just like that—he could feel her forgive him. Somewhere in the midst of the continent of shock and grief that was Archy Stallings, a minor principality rejoiced.

“Closest thing I had to a father,” he said.

“That’s what you always said.”

She meant it to sound sweet, he knew, but it came out sounding like reproof as much as eulogy. Gwen got along with Mr. Jones, but to her he was a sweet-natured, emotionally vague, and reticent man whose greatest steadfastness, away from the keys of his organ, was loyalty to his parrot and to leisure wear of the 1970s, nothing at all like a father in any important way. Archy did not disagree with that assessment. He was okay with coming in second to Fifty-Eight, parrot was like some kind of prodigy, a Mozart of the birds.

“He was loading the Hammond,” Nat said, slipping his phone back into his pocket. “I guess he didn’t have the straps right on the dolly. The Hammond fell on top of him.”

Day I need help moving that thing is the day I give it up for good. Archy had let him go, let him walk out of the garage. Angry, stirred up about something that Archy would never understand. Careless, distracted, nobody to help him lift that heavy, heavy thing.

“Oh, uh, hi,” said Leslie the clipboard girl, peering out from behind Gwen, the one they sent in with a stick to poke the wrestling bear. “So, people are starting to show up? Robin and David were thinking you might want to, uh. Start?”

“We’re ready,” Nat said. “Just, uh, I’m going to have to make a little adjustment in the fee for you all, a reduction, I mean, because my bass player has a birthing class, and it turns out, wow, tragic thing, my organ player, he, uh, he just died.”

“Oh, no,” Leslie said, blinking. She glanced down at the clipboard, looking for a little help from the campaign on how to proceed in the event of a dead musician. “I’m so sorry.”

“So I only have a two-piece for you tonight. Guitar and drums. But we can—”

Two of the valet parkers came out onto the patio. One had Archy’s Jazz Bass in its soft gig jacket, the other coming right behind him with Archy’s tubes and wires. The lead parker handed Gwen a claim ticket for the car, and Gwen nodded them toward Archy.

“You got a trio,” she said to Leslie. “Plus one pregnant lady in a bowling shirt.”

Just before his hostess for the evening, who held the patent on a gene that coded for a protein to prevent the rejection of a transplanted kidney, directed everyone to gather under the carved and