Telegraph Avenue

kind of distant cement mixer or the MedEvac helicopter landing on its pad over at Children’s Hospital, was in fact the entwined snoring of two boys. Julie Jaffe lay half extruded from Gwen’s old sleeping bag, shirtless and shockingly pale, with little pink guinea-pig nipples. Titus had been neatly interred beneath Archy’s Diff’rent Strokes sleeping bag, only his weird fingery toes and the upper half of his face visible. A glacier of DVD cases slid across the coffee table, Strutter, Ghetto Hitman, Soul Shaker, all those crazy crap-ass movies that Archy’s father had spent the seventies cranking out or being cranked out by. Peeking from under a Styrofoam clamshell from which a couple of french fries poked like the feelers of a large and cautious insect was another disc on whose label she recognized the astonishing Afro of Valletta Moore, along with the barrel and silencer of the .357 she fondled, in that iconic pose from the poster of Nefertiti, forty stories of endless brown leg with a pair of highjacked fuck-me pumps for a ground floor, yellow satin hot-pants jumpsuit for a pediment. The room hung heavy with a fug of puberty, microwave popcorn, and something unidentifiable but horrible.

Julie, in his nocturnal wrestling with her sleeping bag, had crawled so far that she nearly stepped on him when she came into the room. The hollow of his hairless chest, the puzzled knot of his brows, the soft straight hair pasted by night sweat across his bony forehead, all stirred deep memories of the nights when she used to watch him for Aviva and Nat, sing him her grandmother’s grave lullabies. His innocence then struck her, as she recalled it now, as having also been her own: before Nat and Aviva fixed her up with Archy, before the long, gathering disappointment of her professional life.

She preferred not to look at Titus, snoring away under a goofy and tragic mantle blazoned with an image of Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges in matching sweaters. She felt sorry for him, but she did not want to feel sorry for him, and so she let him piss her off. Meanwhile, the mystery smell, it became clear to her pregnant nose, plain as the pall of carnage, was the smell of old hamburger. She made the mistake of looking more closely at the clamshell package on the table. A pink and beaded gray streak of fat dribbled like candle wax down the outside of it and sent a rocket of hot bile arcing from her belly to her mouth.

She would have been willing to bet forty-five dollars that ninjas and Green Berets did not, generally speaking, incorporate vomiting into their operational procedures. The humiliation of that would be too much to bear; Archy had spent, without complaint, a fair amount of time in the early days of her pregnancy handling her various ejecta.

The molecules of oxidized fat seemed to trail her like malodorous pixies as Gwen crept down the hall to the bedroom and opened the bedroom door. The blinds were drawn, but in the window behind Archy’s auntie’s old Marie Antoinette?style dresser, the job had been poorly done, so that they hung at an angle to the windowsill. In the daylight seeping under this hypotenuse, Gwen could see Archy heaped up on the bed, flat on his back. It was a round bed that Archy had brought to the marriage—he called it his secret-agent bed—and with his legs and arms spread in four directions, he reminded her of the naked man by Leonardo da Vinci, squaring the circle or whatever it was. Only Archy was not naked; he had on a pair of Cal basketball shorts. Her objective lay right alongside him, bent double, ignored or perhaps trying to wriggle away. All the other, more conventional pillows had been kicked or flung over the side of the bed and lay in dejected attitudes on the floor. Typically, Archy slept flat on the mattress and employed a pillow only to cover his face when a room was too full of light. He was not going to miss the body pillow at all.

The molecules drifting downwind from the burger-joint packaging in the living room seemed at last to abandon their pursuit of Gwen. She could stand to breathe through her nose again, and what she smelled was her bedroom, her husband, her life. The clove-and-citrus redolence of his aftershave, a Christmasy smell. A smell she had fallen in love with early on. Now it struck her as a tonic, bracing and restorative, steeling her to reach for the pillow, careful, moving slow, holding her breath. She grabbed two feather-fill fistfuls of pillow and began to peel it away from the mattress one patient millimeter at a time.

Archy rolled over onto his side and, with a sharp intake of breath, threw his legs around the body pillow. He pressed his hips against it, took it in his arms, drew it close to him. He embraced it, let his breath out shuddering, sighed once, and began to snore. Gwen froze, horrified, thrilled, and pricked by a sense of betrayal, though whether by her husband or the body pillow, she would not have been able to say.

“Don’t get up yet,” Archy said without opening his eyes. Begging in his sleep. He took another long appreciative sip of unconsciousness, weighing the flavor of it in his mouth, smacking his lips. “Don’t leave me.”

Gwen considered a number of possible rejoinders to this, among them “Too late, motherfucker,” “I’m sorry,” “I won’t, ever again,” and “You are talking to a pillow.”

She let go of the forty-five-dollar pillow without saying a word. She turned and slipped back out of the bedroom. As she looked up from easing the door shut and releasing the doorknob with practiced soundlessness, she saw Titus standing at the other end of the hall, watching her, not quite smirking, not quite looking confused. Those blue-green Luther Stallings eyes, rimed with the unreadable force-field shimmer that veiled the light eyes of black folks.

“I just came to get my special pillow,” Gwen said in a pathetic whisper.

Titus nodded, then seemed to notice that she was not carrying anything.

“I changed my mind,” Gwen said.

She felt a pulse of tightening across her belly that she knew meant dehydration. The boy got out of her way as she moved past him into the kitchen. Standing behind her, he became the only thing that prevented her from backing away in horror at what she discovered there.

“Oh my God,” she said.

The boy concurred with a mirthless snort.

“What did you do?”

“He said you could grind coffee in the blender.”

“Who did?”

“Julie.”

“Did he also say you could shoot Ragu out of a SuperSoaker? Because that’s what it looks like happened in here.”

The boy shrugged.

She soldiered in, holding her breath as if walking into a recently vacated portable toilet, and ran herself a glass of water from the sink. “Now I see why you put the chain on the back door.” She drained off the whole twelve ounces in one greedy draft. “It was for the protection of others.”

“That was Julie, too,” Titus said. “He gets scared.” Again there was not quite a smirk on his face; his expression held too much curiosity for that.

“I know he does,” Gwen said.

Something, some routine tenderness in her tone or aspect of her he had not considered, made him train his curiosity apparatus on her. He measured her circumference and girth. “You got a special pillow for that,” he said, pointing at her abdomen.

“A body pillow.”

“To hold it up when you’re sleeping?”

“I don’t really sleep,” Gwen said. “But especially not without.”

“So, and, that kid in there. That’s, like, my brother.”

Gwen thought about rinsing the lipstick from the rim of the water glass, but in the unlikely event that anyone noticed it among the marinara Pollocks and the termite mounds of plates and pans, the print of her lipstick could serve as a calling card, a silver bullet, a bent joker.

“Or sister,” she said.

“You didn’t have no ultrasound?”

“Any. We asked them not to tell us.”

“You want the surprise.”

“Archy does. I don’t like surprises.” It came out sounding more pointed than she had intended, but not inappropriately so.

“Why don’t you just find out and not tell him?”

“I could do that,” she said.

“What. Aw, you already did,” Titus guessed. “Am I right?”

Gwen took the chain off the back door. “Half brother,” she told Titus before she went out into the rest of her