Telegraph Avenue

“I know you?” Valletta Moore said, clearly doubting it.

“We’ve never met,” Gwen said. “My name is Gwen Shanks. I know who you are.” Knowing it was probably a mistake yet unable to let the woman, pathetic as she might be, have the satisfaction of thinking that Gwen had recognized her famous face from the movies or from, say, a glossy pinup stuck to the wall of a garage workshop twenty years ago, Gwen added, “I’m married to Archy Stallings.”

“What? Get the fuck out.” Valletta Moore pushed up her sunglasses and dazzled Gwen with green. “You are? You and Archy having a baby?”

“No, I’m just incredibly fat.”

“Not really?”

“No,” Gwen confessed. “I’m just feeling sorry for myself.”

“Oh, honey.”

“I mean, wow. Valletta Moore. How are you?”

“How am I?” She seemed to teeter on some edge. “I am doing what I have to do, you know what I’m saying?”

“I ought to by now.”

“And I am trying to stay fly.”

“Oh, you are. Most definitely.”

“Thank you, honey. What are you… You living here now?”

“I was just— No. Right now I’m moving.”

“You and Archy aren’t together?”

“No, ma’am. Not right now. I guess we—”

“You don’t need to say nothing. If that boy has, like, only ten, fifteen percent of what his daddy came equipped with, then you got my full sympathy, and you don’t need to say nothing else.”

“Is he all right? Luther? Is he… in trouble?”

Valletta seemed to try to decide how best to answer. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you, Gwen, but I really have to leave.” She took a step toward Gwen. Leaned in. Swept Gwen up for three seconds in a riot of perfume and hair oil and pina colada–flavored gum. “All right, now. You take care.” Again she adjusted the heavy burden on her right shoulder and started to turn away.

“Are you in trouble?” Gwen said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Stay fly,” said Valletta Moore, hurriedly reversing the terms of her equation. “And do what you got to do.”

Then she was gone. Gwen weighed her parting words, wondering at how a certain warmth kindled in her chest at the sound of them, almost like the flame of nostalgia. They rang a bell; a snatch of lyric, a parting line tossed to the crowd at the end of a live album. A catchphrase. Ah. It must be something that her character said in one of those dreadful movies she was in. Taking the yoke of a plummeting cargo plane, just before leaping from a fire escape to the roof of a passing uptown bus, strapping on for a showdown with a gang of heroin dealers. Or with a hospital review board.

Gwen went into the secret room, and instead of packing up her things and lighting out, as she had planned, she submitted her clothing to harsh inspection, trying to find something that would do for the board. Nothing: She would have to go shopping; there was just enough time for that and a trip to Glama. All the while the words echoed and re-echoed, and finally, in mid-carom, she caught them: Do what you got to do, and stay fly. They were the parting words of Candygirl Clark, the character played by Valletta Moore in the Strutter movies. As she undressed, Gwen wondered whether the phrase was something cooked up by the screenwriter, some Jewish dude trying to think like an ass-kicking soul sister, or if they had started out as an ad lib, something that Valletta used to say for real. She went into the bathroom, wrapped in a towel that strained to girdle her, her hair tucked under a shower cap, and noticed that the lid of the toilet tank had been knocked off-kilter. She looked inside and saw a plastic bag taped to the inside of the tank, slit open, empty. The lid of the tank tolled like a bell as she restored it.

There were all kinds of things wrong with her life, and as they swarmed her, she did an admirable job of identifying and taxonomizing them. As a meteorologist of failure, she had proven her mettle in the teeth of an informational storm. That was how troubles arrived, mourners rushing the bar at a wake. Though they came in funereal flocks, they could be dismissed only one at a time, and that was how she would have to proceed. She ran the water in the shower, letting it get hot, watching her face in the steel mirror until it vanished like San Francisco into a summer fog. She took the water onto the load-bearing points of her body as hot as she could stand, hoping to undo some of the kinks from another night without the body pillow. When she emerged from the bathroom, feeling luminous, giving off steam, she found that the most recent of her troubles had taken it upon itself to find its own way, literally, to the door. To a door, at any rate. Against the bottom of the black-and- white photographic poster of Bruce Lee, propped against the sheet of Lucite that covered it, bent at the center as though to duck and allow Bruce, feet and fists flying, to hurdle it in a single, unending, eternally incomplete bound, lay a large, plump pin-striped body pillow. On the floor beside it lay a square of yellow sales slip on the back of which Julie Jaffe had written, in his antic all-caps hand, DO WHAT YOU GOT TO DO AND STAY FLY.

In the seat by the center door of the 1, a young Latina mother with her hair pulled up into a palm tree atop her head sat yoked by the string of a pair of earbuds to a little boy on her lap, a bud apiece in each left ear. The little boy was holding by its remaining arm what appeared to be a Goliath action figure from the old animated Gargoyles program. Long ago, it had been Goliath’s orotund voice, stony musculature, and leonine coiffure that stirred in little-kid Julie, as he watched Gargoyles on the Disney Channel, what he recalled with poignance as his first conscious erection. The show had since gone off the air, and the little boy probably did not even known who Goliath was, how much tragedy there was in his gargoyle past, in the lives of all the gargoyle race. To him the toy was only an imperfect enigma, at once cool and ruined. His mother probably bought him broken old secondhand toys off of eBay, to save money, or shopped for him amid the desolation of the children’s bins at Goodwill. Or maybe she worked cleaning houses for women who gave away to their servants their children’s old, broken things. The little boy probably thought of Goliath as simply a toy monster. Such bias and ignorance were, after all, the usual portion of monsters. Julie felt a stab of sympathy toward monsters and toward himself, but most of all, he felt sorry for the little boy with his armless plaything and his one earbud. Julie always found ample cause for sorrow in his fellow passengers on the bus.

“Ain’t my grandma,” Titus was saying.

“I know, but still.”

“You saying you would not want to get up in that.”

It was hard to imagine wanting to, but Julie felt no need to say so. Nor did he point out that, for example, a swordswoman wearing a steel brassiere and chain mail, occasionally subject to fits of magical bloodlust, was theoretically awesome in more or less the same way that Valletta Moore was awesome, but if, say, Red Sonja were to turn up on the Number 1 bus, headed for downtown Oakland, the question of whether or not to, quote, get up in that, unquote, would not necessarily feature in Julie’s first series of internal discussions on the matter. And that was leaving aside the whole question of her possibly being somebody’s grandmother.

“Sure,” Julie said presently. “Totally.”

“Faggot.”

“Hate speech.”

As if in reply—a reply uttered in the silent and intricate language they used to transact the secret business that underwrote their friendship—Titus took hold of Julie’s hand and pressed it against the fly of his jeans. They were at the back of a spiffy new Van Hool, segmented and capacious, and there was no one in the seats behind or around them, but the bus was far from empty, and you would not have said that Titus’s move was quite covert. Julie pressed his palm against that straining arc of denim, rocked it back and forth, fingers spread. Titus kept his eyes on Valletta, imagining, Julie understood, that he was up in that. In the rape scene that opened Mayflower Black, Valletta Moore bared breasts that had the graceful architecture of eggplants, paler than the rest of her, nipples fleshy, aureoles far-flung. When she stabbed her white rapist in the throat, improvising a shiv with a shard of broken vinyl LP, rolling off him, you could see, in freeze-frame, there! and there! the tangled shadow of her bush. No doubt Titus was making use of some of that material now. He was not, Julie knew, picturing Julie naked. He was probably not even thinking that it was Julie reaching to unbutton his fly.