Telegraph Avenue

“Well,” she said. She sat back, trying to come up with something reasonable and authoritative to say. “Where did you go?”

He seemed genuinely to consider attempting to answer her question. Then he picked up a piece of bacon and shrugged. “Everywhere,” he said. “Just, like, walking around.”

“Walking around?”

“Riding my bike. Him riding his skateboard. Can’t do much beside ride it, but he can hook a ride on my bike, I kind of like give him a tow.”

She could see it: Julie rolling along behind Titus through the summer darkness of Berkeley, holding on to his friend’s shoulder, the way she had seen other pairs of skater boys do.

“I don’t want you doing that anymore,” she said. “Not while you’re a guest in my house. You go to bed, you stay in bed, you wake up in bed in the morning. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She had to admit that she loved the “sirs” and “ma’ams” that flowed from his lips so readily, drawled out like pats of butter smeared across a biscuit. She remembered hiking in Yosemite with Nat and Julie a few summers back. Climbing to the top of the Mist Trail up a preposterous stairway of stones proposed, cut, hauled, and fixed immovably into place, proof against time and earthquakes, under the auspices of the WPA. She remembered feeling grateful to those long-dead men, the planners and the workers, for their foresight, their labor, the heroic absurdity of that granite stair. That was how she felt, whenever he would “ma’am” her, toward the dead grandmother of this boy.

“When you do that, Titus,” she said, softening her tone because she was getting in his face, “when you sneak out of my house like that, you are showing disrespect toward me.”

The boy shook his head, face indented with the thumbprint of a smirk, eyes downcast to show his pity for her.

“What?” Aviva said. “You don’t agree?”

“I ain’t— I’m not saying nothing.”

He took up the study of the backsplash behind the sink, tiled in iridescent rust red and cream. Aviva once hated that tile, then for a decade ignored it, and now felt toward those earth tones the same poignant derision she felt toward much of the surviving evidence of the 1970s. The boy might have been staring longingly at some bleak and lonely peak of snow.

“I don’t even want to be here.” His eyes abandoned their scrutiny of the high cold home of his soul long enough to toss a mocking look in her direction. “No disrespect.”

“Really?” Aviva said, knowing that she had him on that one, wondering what she hoped to gain from prolonging this conversation, asking herself why she couldn’t cut the kid a break. “That isn’t what Julie said. He said you begged him to let you stay with us.”

“What? Nah, he just—I—nah, no, ma’am.”

They were coming more abject and automatic now, those “ma’ams,” and she pressed it, channeling an old, dead Texan woman she had never met, getting her thumbs into the seam she had found.

“That’s what I heard. Stay with the Jaffes, eat all the tempeh you can hold.”

He looked at the plate in front of him with the face of one betrayed. “You put tempeh in the pancakes?”

“Only a little,” Aviva said. “Kidding. Nobody’s going to force you to eat tempeh against your will. So, uh, okay, so where did you go?”

He pushed the suspect plate away and started to stand up.

“I didn’t excuse you, mister.”

Titus nodded; that was indeed the case. He sat back down in the chair and turned to an article in American Cinematographer, a man in a white suit gazing at a wedding-cake riverboat that was stuck on a jungle mountain, she forgot the name of that one. An old back issue Julie had picked up somewhere, the Flea Market, the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse. She got up, rebelted her robe, poured herself a cup of coffee, and sat down across the table from him. Fitzcarraldo. She had seen it at the Telegraph Repertory junior year, right around the time she met Nat, who tore tickets there two nights a week. Eighty-four, ’85, right toward the bitter end for that stuffy old black box. Not long before the night he came to her rescue. Who knew what might have befallen her if he hadn’t come along, with his belated Isro and his unlikely, heart-melting Tidewater accent? Remembering Nat as he was then, the world’s most pretentious high school dropout, coming on to her with some complicated theory about Peter Lorre and a jumbo cup of free popcorn. Simultaneously working at Rather Ripped Records and Pellucidar Books, all long gone. The man like some exiled Habsburg, bred and schooled to unite the crowns of kingdoms lost. At one time she had been able to console herself with his air of heroic obsolescence for the burden, material and emotional, that being married to him imposed upon her. Now the best she could hope for most of the time was to shake her head at him with more amusement than scorn.

“So, okay, you don’t want to be here. Where do you want to be? With your dad?”

The boy appeared to find the article about Fitzcarraldo quite fascinating, or perhaps he had fallen asleep again. Aviva couldn’t see his eyes.

“You and Julie have your last class tonight.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Julie says you want to be a movie director.”

No answer.

“He said you’ve written a screenplay.”

He dipped the tip of his left forefinger—he was a lefty—into the pool of maple syrup that remained on his plate. She resisted the urge to slap his hand, as she would have slapped Julie’s. It took him a while to figure out what he wanted or could permit himself to say.

“That he knows about.”

“You’ve written more than one?”

“Five.”

“Tell me the title of one of them.”

“May I be excused now?”

“Just another minute of torture.”

“Incident at Al-Qufa Bridge.”

“Al-Qufa Bridge? Is it—is it a war story?”

“It’s a, like, adaptation of ‘Incident at Owl Creek Bridge.’ Only in the Gulf War, not the Civil,” he said, catching her endlessly policed racist self red-handed. “By Ambrose Bierce, so it’s in the public domain, so I don’t got to pay no rights.”

“You know, your father, Archy, he served in the Gulf War. In the army.”

No answer.

“Did you know that?”

“Can I go?”

“Go where?” She had a sudden intuition. “Do you know where he lives?”

“Where who lives?”

“Archy. You ride by his house, don’t you? At night. On your bike.”

“I have to use the bathroom.”

He looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time all morning. His eyes were filled with pleading, begging her to put him out of his misery.

“Fine,” she said, and as he darted around her to get out of the Torquemada chamber, she touched his shoulder with a right hand that had kept a thousand children from going too far, too fast. “But hear me out. I don’t want you getting my son into trouble, staying out all night. And don’t you ever lie to me again.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Don’t call me that anymore, please. Aviva will do.”

“Got it,” the boy said. “Now, please, get your fucking hand off me, Aviva.”

She let him go. He started out of the kitchen, then turned back.

“Your boy’s a little dick-sucking faggot,” he said. “Case you were wondering. And that ain’t no lie.”