Telegraph Avenue

fearing that her partner knew what she was doing.

“I do remember that,” Aviva said. “I’m not sure those were the exact words, but Dr. Lazar did say something about us practicing voodoo.”

Bernstein looked at Lazar. “Paul?”

“How is voodoo racist?” Lazar said. “I just meant, like, you know, all that bullshit new age aromatherapy crap.”

“If you meant ‘aromatherapy,’” said Moby, going with it, ready to help Gwen press the advantage, “why did you say ‘voodoo’?”

“Why, indeed?” Gwen said.

“Maybe we ought to get general counsel in here,” Moby said.

“I really don’t think—” Bernstein began.

“I wish I had done a better job of controlling my temper,” Gwen said. “I truly do. I have devoted my entire professional life, my entire life period, to maintaining a consistently calm demeanor. I have always fought successfully to rise above. But when people start getting into that kind of rhetoric, that kind of hate speech, I’m sorry—in my view, I have an obligation to stand up to it.”

“We all do,” Moby said.

“Of course,” Bernstein said. “Gwen, nobody expects you to put up with that kind of talk. Paul, I have to say, I’m very surprised by this.”

“I’m sure,” said Leery, “that it was all a big misunderstanding of some kind. A misjudgment.”

“It was the end of his shift,” Soleymanzadeh said. “Clearly, the man was tired.”

Gwen saw that Aviva was chewing on a fingernail, a habit she reviled in herself and had struggled for years to defeat. She looked like she was feeling ill, about to get up and walk out of the room.

“Okay, here’s what I’d like to propose,” Bernstein said. “I’m going to say we review this, in light of what we’ve just heard. Take the matter under advisement for the time being, and—”

“I’m sorry,” said Lazar from behind his hands. “All right?” He lowered his hands, and the imprint they left in the sallow flesh of his cheeks glowed red for an instant like the residue of rage, then faded. “I was tired, just fried, and pissed off. I mean, you tell me I’m an asshole, okay, that’s not going to be news to me, right? Not to anybody in this room, maybe. But I’m an equal-opportunity asshole. I’m an asshole to everyone, black, white, blue, green.” Somehow, imperfectly, as if calling on rumor and hearsay and long-forgotten lore, he worked his features into something that meant to resemble a smile. “Ary, help me out here.”

“You have an edge,” Bernstein suggested.

“That’s what I’m saying. I totally have an edge. And that’s why, look, Ms. Shanks. Gwen. I’m sorry for what I said. Okay?”

Everyone turned to look at Gwen, ready for her to accept Lazar’s bullshit apology—that weary old dodge, I’m not a racist, I hate everybody equally!—and more important, ready for her to go on, break down, give in, and apologize right back. Just bat Aviva’s meaningless tennis ball of language over the net. Check the little box on Paul Lazar’s list.

“Nice try,” Gwen said. She picked up the legal pad on which she had jotted not a single note. “Aryeh, Dr. Soleymanzadeh. Dr. Leery. I appreciate your time.”

“Ms. Shanks,” Leery said, sounding woeful.

“Gwen, for God’s sake,” Aviva said, and then, to the doctors, with remarkable sincerity and warmth of tone, “she’s sorry, too. We both are. Our good relationship with Chimes is important to us. Personally and professionally.” As she came out with the second adverb, she underscored it on her own pad with four scratched words: COST OF DOING BUSINESS!

“No, Aviva,” Gwen said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I’m not sorry. Must be a black thing, huh, Paul?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Doctors, I look forward to hearing not only what you but also the EEOC have to say about all this. Now,” Gwen said with a wave to Moby, on a roll, talking mostly to herself, “if you’ll excuse me.”

Thus, feeling something very close to fly, and doing what she had to do, Gwen went to see about taking back her house.

“Mr. Stallings,” wrote A. O. Scott in his New York Times review of Strutter Kicks It Old-School, “has not only redeemed himself, he has also redeemed the genre of American cinema known so crudely as blaxploitation, and let us hope that this marvelous new film lays in its grave that ignoble moniker for all time.”

That was only one of the clippings. There were positive reviews from Time, Ebony, and Entertainment Weekly. Cover stories in People and Esquire. Quotations from these articles and reviews had been excerpted to run in print ads and on the packaging of the DVD, useful exclamations like BOLD! and TERRIFIC! and A NONSTOP ACTION-PACKED THRILL RIDE! Across the film’s poster, above a full-length image of Candygirl Clark and Cleon Strutter leaning together, each of them three quarters turned to the camera, her left shoulder against his right shoulder, giant letters proclaimed TWO THUMBS UP!!! EBERT & ROEPER.

“It looks so real,” Titus said.

That was not true at all, but he sounded like he meant it. Everything had been collaged using text, drawings, graphics cut from the pages of real newspapers and magazines, and computer-printed text that attempted with moderate success to match the fonts of the original publications. Leafing through this homemade archive, Julie felt an ache in his chest, though he wasn’t sure whether it was for the crude sincerity of the archive’s fakeness or for the faked and heartfelt sincerity of Titus, saying it all looked real.

“Totally,” Julie agreed.

The bin also contained seven drafts, six of them handwritten in slanting longhand on prison stationery, of the film’s script; a thin sheaf of old head shots of Luther Stallings when he was Luther Stallings, poker face but with that Strutter twinkle in the eye, beautiful and young. Synopses and diagrams done mostly by hand. A red folder tabbed BUDGET that held official-looking spreadsheets, and a blue one tabbed LOCATIONS that bulged with dozens of four-by-six photographs of Chinatown, East Oakland, the museum, and the interior of a restaurant that Julie recognized as the Merritt bakery.

A leather-grained pasteboard portfolio divulged a stack of storyboards for the film, strips of cartooned panels, executed in a style perhaps half a step above stick figure, that had been Scotch-taped to panels cut from pizza boxes. The greatest treasure and the pitiable heart of the whole archive was undoubtedly the poster, so large that it had to be folded in half to fit into the portfolio. It had been executed in colored pencil, no doubt over a long period of time, the colors laid down faint but smooth and even, as if rubbed with a tissue, giving everything the appropriate mistiness of a dream. The posed figures of Strutter and Candygirl were awkward, leggy even for Valletta Moore, and you could tell by the dead eyes and smiles that the faces had been copied, pretty accurately, from photos.

“Jailhouse artist,” said Archy’s dad, sounding apologetic and regarding the poster with a critical expression. He smiled; there was the twinkle from the ancient head shot. It reminded Julie of Archy, and then he thought of Titus, standing on the sidewalk outside the Bruce Lee Institute, scheming this whole adventure. “But I got to say, I think it looks pretty good.”

“Where you going to get the money to make it?” Titus said. “To make it for real, I mean.”

“Here and there.” Luther tried to come off as playful, having a secret, then seemed to worry that he might sound like he was full of shit. “You heard of Gibson Goode?”

Naturally, they had, Titus talking about rushing records, Grammy Awards, Julie basically grasping that the ex-quarterback had bent his wealth, legend, and magic on the destruction of Nat Jaffe and Brokeland Records.

“Some of it’s derivating from him, payment for services rendered. Some of it, I’m going to be relying on cash flow from another source of funds, a local businessman. A, uh, a former associate, you know, an old homey of mine, always been reliable. Between what he’s willing to part with and what Goode already committed to, all told…” Luther tapped the red folder with a finger. “I figure I can make this movie for, like, call it a hundred K. And that’s about what I’m hoping to raise.”

Luther’s fingers, his hands, amazed Julie. The backs of them were red-brown, fading to gold at the meridians where they met the palms. The fingers were slender, long and fluid, but you did not question their storied lethality.