Telegraph Avenue

around in suits and ties) that, without his noticing, had vanished as surely as mushrooms under the passing boot of Super Mario, father and son both impressed, and on a number of levels, by Valletta Moore, for her kung fu skills, for that orange outfit with midriff cutouts and the orange hip boots, for a touch of the doe- or even cross-eyed in her hard-ass glare, most of all impressed by the ineluctable cool of Luther Stallings in his prime, the way he underplayed every scene as if confident that he could meet its needs without resorting to words, the liner notes for the forthcoming DVD boxed edition of the trilogy (packed now in the back of the Toronado) explaining that, on the first day of shooting, Stallings (author of said liner notes) had borrowed a pen from the director (who later went on to direct hundreds of episodes of Trapper John, M.D., Knight Rider, and Walker, Texas Ranger) and crossed out 63 percent of his lines, violating every code and bylaw of the trade, possessing the gift, rife among failed geniuses (though you would find no such observation in the liner notes), of a strong sense of his own limitations, coupled with the championship kung fu, the snap and the acrobatics of it, its kinship to certain dance moves of James Brown—the Popcorn, for example—its message of bodily liberation from the harsh doom of physics, “so awesome,” as the son expressed it, noting several times in an approving way that made the father feel a squeeze of compassion for the son, the amazing resemblance between young Luther and Mr. Titus Joyner, so that when the movie was over, the father, closing the laptop, took an awesome Stallings-worthy leap of his own, plying the son with questions more pointed than usual about his friendship with young Mr. Joyner, and a story emerged, a tale, as the father perceived it, of unrequited love such as teenage boys often undergo in each other’s company, with all the emotion on Julie’s side, the father aware as the conversation progressed that he was woefully unprepared for this, not the gay part, that was whatever it was, but for the world of hurt and heartache (homo or hetero) into which his son had so rapidly passed, and his heart went all the way out to the boy, giving up that line of inquiry and affording his son an opening to turn the tables with the question “So what happened to him, anyway?,” inaugurating a long, close interrogation as to the post-Strutter career of Luther Stallings, the exact nature of his relationship to his son, his present whereabouts, if known, Nat lavishing on each question the scant information he possessed, recognizing not without disapproval, and fuck the heartache, that his son was in the early stages of a full-blown obsession, which was why when Aviva came home, giving off an air-conditioner smell of the hospital, and slumped her bag on the bedroom floor, she found them geeking out on the interwebs (as Julie put it) about Archy Stallings’s father, watching his collected works in three-minute clips and having a better time than she’d had with either of them in a long time, and for a second she looked hurt and angry, but then that gave way to bittersweetness as Aviva dropped between them on the bed, looking more defeated than either of them had seen her in a long time, and by means of this modest dogpile, they attempted to ensure their mutual comfort as the parrot, tired of flying, came down in a cedar tree in People’s Park, where it established a lookout over a small party of feral teenagers who carried on for quite a while, darkness at last rewarding its vigil with half a lemon, the husks and pits of a number of avocados, and an entire tomato, which it consumed with a measured ferocity, then crept for the night into a shallow but adequate knothole, in which it passed the next two days before seeking out fresher fare and settling, after further wanderings, in the untended and paradisiacal backyard of a foreclosed house near Juan’s Mexican, where other birds long ago had raided a loquat tree and then dropped or shat out the pits, reared by time and neglect to a fine establishment of loquat trees frequented heavily by the legendary flock of North Berkeley parrots, the Leaf Men of that neighborhood, far from the heartaches and sorrows of Telegraph Avenue.

IV. Return to Forever

A change of state. Molecules in transition, liquid to vapor. A Chinatown dollar-store teacup flying a dragon kite of steam.

“No more sleep!” said Irene Jew. With a whoosh, the window shade abandoned its post, and sunshine surged through the breach. “Time to get up. Big day!”

Gwen opened her eyes. Dust motes drew paisleys across the dazzle: molecules in transition. And Gwen just another molecule, a big fat molecule, tumbling random through space.

“Big day,” she ironized. “Woo-hoo.”

Her world now consisted of four walls and a lone window at the back of the dojo, secreted behind a knobless door that was in turn concealed behind a life-size, full-length still photograph (slick pecs and abs, flying slippered right foot, teeth gritted in a predatory smile) of the eponym and presiding spirit of the Bruce Lee Institute of Martial Arts. Her life was a bedroll and a blue duffel, a meal in a paper bag, every day adding its sorry page to the history of the homelessness.

The thirty-sixth week was fertile ground for self-pity in the gravid female, and Gwen’s thoughts upon waking struck her as neatly diagnostic.

Master Jew cupped the teacup with its painted mountain landscape in her tiny hands, trained to mend and heal, as well as to deal blows by Lam Sai Wing, who had studied under the great doctor and righter of wrongs Wong Fei Hung. She squatted beside the sleeping mat in her black cotton pants and shapeless white tunic, waiting out her latest hidden guest and source of irritation until, at last, said individual hoisted herself halfway out of the bedroll. Gwen took the cup into the outsize hands that had cupped the tender skulls of a thousand babies and whose lineage of instruction likewise could be traced directly back to the nineteenth century, to a midwife named Juneteenth Jackson, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Gwen’s twice-great-grandmother.

“Hot tap water,” Gwen said. She made a face. Her tone damned not only the idea of drinking hot tap water but all the eventualities that had led her to another lonely reveille in this glorified closet, its sole ornament a Chinese dollar-store Ming vase in which stood a plastic red Gerber daisy that was really a ballpoint pen. To this cut-rate futon with its smell like stale waffles. To this moment at which a cup of hot tap water must—she would not have dared to refuse Master Jew—be drunk. “What I need is a cup of coffee.”

“Coffee make your baby restless,” Master Jew said. “Make him want to run away from home one day.”

Along with the cup of hot water, then, Gwen must evidently accept an implicit criticism of her own flight from home and hearth. A ninety-year-old Chinese master of kung fu, even a female one, was not likely to be all that progressive, you had to figure, when it came to the question of proper relations between husband and wife.

Gwen drank and was amazed, as always, by how good hot tap water actually felt and tasted, how well it suited your throat and gullet going down, how drinking it seemed to loosen some inner string or melt an inner coldness you did not even know that you harbored. Master Jew claimed to be able to cure all kinds of ailments with nothing but a mugwort cigar and the regular consumption of moderately hot water. In the darkness of Gwen’s belly, the son or daughter of her worthless husband gave a flutter kick of gratitude for the drink.

“How’s your back?” said Master Jew.

Gwen reached the fingers of one hand to palpate the muscles at the small of her back. In the past few days, her pregnancy had been finding new, painful uses for the largest knots of muscle on her frame. She woke in the company of charley horses, grandma cramps, stiffness of the joints. She shrugged. “It hurts.”

Master Jew knelt and reached behind Gwen to plunge her fingers into the root system of the lumbar like a gardener with a crocus to transplant. Gwen drew in a sharp breath at the pain, yet the abrupt rough contact of the old woman’s cool, dry, soft-skinned fingers came as a shock to her exiled heart. Gwen loved Master Jew the way one was supposed to love one’s kung fu master: furiously, like a child.

“Better,” Master Jew said.

“A little,” Gwen admitted.

Here was the reason that Gwen had been drawn into and persevered with her studies at the Bruce Lee Institute for so long, training hard for nearly four years until she had earned her black belt: because qigong, like Master Jew, didn’t seem to care if you believed in it or not.

She passed the empty cup back to the old woman, who acknowledged without gesture or word the look of gratitude in Gwen’s eyes. Master Jew also noted a thickening of the young woman’s pretty features, a blurring of her wide gaze. Overnight Gwen appeared to have moved into the climax of her term. The baby was going to arrive so soon, and here was this woman with her life in disorder. Working too hard. Taking care of other mothers-to-be while neglecting her own health. To make matters worse, she had spent the past three nights sleeping in this tiny room, in a hip-pocket world that crackled with male energies. Master Jew hawked up a pill of phlegm and spat it with feline delicacy into a linen handkerchief.