Telegraph Avenue

“You ready for this?” Aviva said.

“I am so ready for this,” Gwen said.

“Yeah?” Alerted, curious. “Know something I don’t?”

“Not so far,” Gwen said, sweet as pie. “But it’s only been ten years.”

“Huh,” Aviva said, bullshit sniffer set as ever to a brutally low ppm.

Gwen tried to go wide-eyed and innocent, feeling, of all things, strong and positive and—but for the lack of six little coconut milk pancakes, steaming and flecked with green onion, nestled in their paper cradle—surprisingly ready.

“I’m just going to try to, you know, maintain my dignity in this matter,” she said. “I don’t intend to embarrass myself ever again.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Aviva said. “ ’Kay, then. I guess we should probably head on up.”

Gwen checked her watch. “Let’s give him a minute.”

“Give who a minute?”

“Moby,” Gwen said, and then she saw the big man stutter-stepping leftward to avoid collision with an elderly black couple helping each other out the front door, a human lean-to, temporary shelter against the day.

She had called Moby right after the fateful shower, her last ever at the Bruce Lee Institute, during the course of which, caught in the brainstorm breeze of all those negatively charged ions, Gwen had found herself imbued with the spirit of Candygirl Clark.

“All your little self-deprecating pregnant-lady fat jokes to the side,” Moby had told her over the phone, “I really only represent whales.”

“Yeah, I know that,” Gwen had said. “But Chimes General doesn’t.”

“Did they suggest y’all bring a lawyer along?”

“No, on the contrary, technically, it’s just an informational thing. But that’s what makes it such a good idea. Look, Moby, you don’t even have to say anything. Just sit there with, like, your necktie, your briefcase, all big and intimidating like you are.”

“No shit. You think I look intimidating?”

“You definitely have the potential.”

“To be badass?”

“Like, a form of badass.”

“The intimidation fac-tah!”

“Sure.”

Admittedly, she felt a doubt then, hearing the eagerness kindle in Moby’s voice along with that horrible Electric Boogaloo accent, but today was not about doubt, second-guessing, hesitation. Today was about doing what one had to do while approximating, to the best of one’s own and Mr. Robert’s abilities, the condition of flyness.

And here the man showed up wearing brown Birkenstock sandals with his baggiest navy suit over black socks.

“Good Lord,” Aviva said.

“Whoa.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“I was trying for a certain intimidation factor,” Gwen said. “Frankly, I had not counted on the Birkenstocks.”

“Gwen!”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s fine?”

“He just needs to sit there. To be there, physically, taking up that much lawyer space in the room.”

“Okay,” Aviva said, meaning it was not okay. “I’m confused. When Garth Newgrange threatens us with a multimillion-dollar lawsuit that not only could put us out of business but also could leave us both totally fucking bankrupt, you won’t even talk to a lawyer.”

“Garth has no grounds for a suit. His baby was fine, Lydia was fine.”

“Then for this thing,” deaf as Mr. Robert when she needed to be, “you bring in a guy, the venue of his last trial was SeaWorld.”

“Ladies,” said Moby with the most terrible suavity imaginable. Gwen felt another tremor of uncertainty. On the way up in the elevator, however, Moby assumed a surprisingly professional demeanor, speaking low and fast, buoyant and aswim in his own expertise.

“I spoke to the general counsel,” he told the partners. “She said that even though a formal complaint has been brought, it’s not like it’s, you know, can’t be expunged. Written in stone. The board has discretion, and they have authority to toss the thing out as long as we can satisfy Lazar and give them a reason to let it drop. Maybe they keep you, Gwen, on probation for six months, a year. Then everything goes back to normal.”

“‘Give them a reason,’” Gwen said. “What kind of reason did legal affairs have in mind? How’m I supposed to ‘satisfy’ Lazar?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Gwen, you know what you have to do,” Aviva said.

“What?”

Aviva didn’t say anything, didn’t feel she needed to say anything, smug as ever in the telepathic power of her self-evident correctness. Gwen refused this time, knowing the secret word was “apologize,” but staring right back at Aviva as the elevator opened at the fourth floor for a ghost, closed, carried on.

“Apologize,” Aviva said at last, giving it a slight hint of the imperative.

“‘Apologize?’” Gwen feigned a degree of shock at the revelation. “To Lazar? For what?”

“For nothing. It’s a meaningless, empty formula: ‘I’m sorry.’ Literally? It means you are in pain, you are sore. But nobody knows that, and nobody means to say that. They’re just words, Gwen. It’s a token, a little box on somebody else’s checklist, you take your pencil and you go…” She ticked off a little checkmark in midair. “You just mouth the words, take your medicine, and we can all—”

“Take my medicine,” Gwen said, breaking out another package of ironizing quote marks, her supply maybe starting to run low. “Okay, sure, hey, they’re doctors, right? As long as they don’t try to administer it rectally—”

The doors opened on the sixth floor, and Gwen shut up. They briefly became quite lost, looking for the conference room, wandering through an intricacy of corridors and sub-lobbies until they ran into Lazar himself, wiping his mouth on the back of his sleeve, turning from a drinking fountain halfway along a blue-carpeted branch corridor behind Personnel. He was in a light blue button-down shirt with a square-tip knit necktie and a pair of blue twill trousers so tight that his bicyclist thighs hoisted the cuffs to floodwater levels.

“I’m sorry it got this far,” Aviva told him.

“I’m sure you are,” he said, pointedly avoiding eye contact with Gwen. He opened the door to the conference room and stood aside to let them pass.

As they made the introductions, Gwen saw that she had lucked out: the midwifery review board as currently constituted was three OBs, all of them men. She knew and had worked with all three over the years, and her relations with them, like Aviva’s, were in each case at least cordial and, in the case of Dr. Bernstein, who was chairing the proceedings, warm. Bernstein had referred dozens of patients to Birth Partners, and Gwen at various times had formed the distinct impression that old Aryeh Bernstein was macking, in that pass-the-time doctorly way, on Aviva. But none of that formed the basis of Gwen’s luck.

3 WHITE MALE OBS, Aviva wrote on the topmost sheet of one of the legal pads that the hospital stenographer had distributed to the partners when they sat down. VS. 1 BLACK MIDWIFE = TOTALLY FAIR.

“Totally,” Gwen said aloud, though she wasn’t entirely sure where to place Dr. Soleymanzadeh on the whiteness scale.

The stenographer, a formidable older Filipina who was also tape-recording the proceedings, frowned, then typed seven letters into the transcript. Bernstein started, caught off guard by the tap of the keys, obviously fearing maybe that things were starting without him.

“Okay, then,” he said, with a nod to Soleymanzadeh and Leery on his left and right. “Ms. Jaffe, Ms. Shanks.