Telegraph Avenue

day. “And half I don’t know what.”

“Who was that?” man wanted to know.

Nothing but questions ever rising from that quarter, man shaking them up in the cup of his fist like a handful of dice every time he walked into a room that was furnished with his son. You like Rice Krispies? English muffins? Baseball? Star Wars? Peaches? The ladies? Mos Def? Cats? Dogs? Mentos? Monkeys? Nobody ever taught you to brush your teeth when you wake up in the morning? Did that shirt used to be white? How you spend so much time playing that damn game? What would happen if you read an actual Marvel motherfucking comic book one time? You ever hear of washing a dish? Listen to Duke Ellington? Do you know who Billy Strayhorn was? Aw, shit, are you trying to break my heart? Letting fly the dice. In that regard, the man offered little in the way of novelty; Titus felt himself to be a vortex around which the questions of adults routinely came to circle, like that wheel of plastic he had seen one night on the Discovery Channel, out there past Hawaii someplace, great big endless turning of plastic bags and pop bottles. Every conversation a quiz, a debriefing, an interrogation, a catechism. Every sentence fitted at the end with its whiplash curl, a hook to snare him. And every single one of those questions, at bottom, nothing but rhetorical, admitting of and needing no reply.

“Who was who?” Titus said.

Take it in, feed it right on back at them.

“You were talking to somebody, sounded like a woman. Was it Gwen?”

“Who’s Gwen?”

“Boy, you know who Gwen is. My wife.”

Titus produced an elaborate shrug, three-part, multilayered like a Vulcan chessboard. “I guess.”

“You guess.”

“She was here.”

At this news, his father got hollow-eyed, his big old Yogi Bear cheeks going all slack. Standing there by the bedroom door where his wife had stood a few minutes ago. Tying and retying an unsuccessful bow in the sash of his playboy bathrobe. Man took in the socks littering the hallway floor, the stink of male habitation in the house. He closed his eyes, working on must be like two, three hours of sleep, eye sockets purple with fatigue. No doubt picturing the devastation in the kitchen, the trash heaps in the living room, the skinny little underpantsed white boy tangled up out there in that crusty old sleeping bag. Reconstructing in his mind the likely path of her visit. Understanding how disgusted she had been by it all. Running through the whole scenario like the flashback at the end of a detective film that shows the murder as it must have gone down, everybody sitting around the parlor or the conservatory or whatever, under the framed butterflies and the stuffed tiger heads, while the detective laid it all out. She was standing right there; you needed only to wake up and you would have seen her. But you did not wake up, did you, Mr. Stallings? He dragged one hand across his face slowly and with intent, like he was hoping to erase its features. He opened his eyes.

“Fuck me,” he said. “Look at this shit.”

He kicked on down the hallway, trailing that lemon Pledge smell he had, almost but not quite brushing against Titus as he went by. When he came into the living room, what he discovered there seemed not only to confirm but to deepen or dwarf his worst fears.

“What she want to be coming here today,” he said, his voice barely loud enough to hear. For once it did not sound like a question.

So Titus didn’t answer. Not—this time—because he made it a point of pride to spurn or duck his father’s and all the pointless questions of the adult world, but because what was he going to say? Mention had been made of a body pillow, but Titus understood that a body pillow explained nothing, was only what Hitchcock called a MacGuffin. The swell of the woman, the arc of the brother who deformed her, the serious way she had of speaking to Titus, looking at him not boy-you-best-get-yourself-together serious, like Julie’s mom, but scientist serious, skeptical, fascinated by what she saw. How was he going to put any of that into words?

His father said, “Jaffe, get up.”

Julie sat up at once, pink nipples like a pit bull pup’s, not a hair on him anywhere except for, under his left arm, if you knew about it, one coarse wire like an eyebrow whisker, about which it was not unknown for Titus to tease him. Julie blinked, focusing on the man, cross-eyed and hungover on the vapors of his last dream of the night.

“Gwen was here,” the man told him.

Julie nodded, then saw that something more was wanted. He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he tried.

“Not asking you. Titus says Gwen was here. Just now.” He turned to Titus. “In this room?” Titus nodded again. “In the kitchen?”

“Had a drink of water from the sink.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Archy said. He looked back at Julie. “So you didn’t see her, then?”

“I was asleep,” Julie said.

“Yeah, I was asleep, too. Only one wasn’t asleep was my boy Titus, here, and as usual, he don’t have too much to say on the subject.”

Titus got that a criticism was intended by this last remark, although he did not consider it to be so. You could damn yourself with silence but never so effectively as by running your mouth. He hung back as his father approached the disordered and, at best, to be honest (owing to the poor quality of the original film stock, subpar camerawork, third-rate video transfers, routine yet crazy story lines, and wooden dialogue), broken evidence of Luther Stallings’s having, at one time, shone forth from the screens of ghetto grindhouses. At first the man seemed not to notice the DVDs, preoccupied instead by the crumpled napkins, the twenty-four-ounce cups, the greasy packages of leftover food. With the hopeless energy of someone trying to save worthless knickknacks from an impending wildfire, he gathered up the cheese-edged clamshell packages, the used forks and straw wrappers, and all the other refuse the boys had left out last night when, at three-thirty A.M., man still not home from a gig in the city, they finally switched off the television and went to sleep. Stacked it all precariously in his arms as if there were a chance that the wife might return any second.

“Fuck me,” he said again. He stomped into the kitchen, growling once when he comprehended the full disastrousness thereof. Banged around under the sink until he found a garbage bag, tumbled into it all the garbage he was holding. Folding anger up into himself like a hurricane gathering seawater, he swept through the kitchen picking up trash. Came stomping back into the living room, fat ghetto Santa with the soul patch, slinging his Hefty sack.

“I cannot believe you little motherfuckers left my damn house looking like this,” he said, accurately but without justice, since in so leaving it, they had only been following the principles of housekeeping as laid down after his wife’s departure by the man himself. The dire state of the kitchen was as much his fault as anyone’s. “Can’t believe she came this morning.” As if, say, she came yesterday or tomorrow, whole place would have been done up shiny and correct, and today was some freak of the housekeeping schedule. “House looking like a garage full of crackheads. She should of— Wait. Hold up.”

Now the cover of Night Man, one of the DVDs that Titus and Julie had rented from Videots on College Avenue last night, seemed to catch the man’s eye, to register for the first time. He picked up the case, turned it over, read the hype, scholarship, and bullshit written there.

“‘Quentin Tarantino Presents,’” he said. “Huh.”

As he made a study of the DVD box, his stance widened, his posture grew straighter. The anger making landfall, moving inland. Feeding on itself, was Titus’s impression—and he was schooled in the repertoires of anger. Rifling through the other DVD cases scattered up and down the table. Tarantino was right: Night Man was the best thing in the Stallings filmography, a straight bank heist, cops and robbers, light on the cheese, scored by Charles Stepney, shot by Richard Kline, who shot Soylent Green and some other cool movies of the day, one of the Planet of the Apes movies. Cheap, rough, and uneven, it made plain and proclaimed for all time the truth of Luther Stallings’s physical grace in 1975, the beauty of his winged nostrils, the lowdown way he smiled, the fatal architecture of his hands.

Man said, “What is this shit?”

Titus was about to say “It’s your father” but, at the last instant, realized it might sound like he was saying