Telegraph Avenue (39 page)

As she crossed the floor to the poster of Lee rampant, another door swung open, nearly smacking Gwen in the face. It was the door behind which lay a half bath with a PVC stall shower, one that boomed like a drum whenever Gwen rotated herself inside it.

“Oh, I’m—Oh,
hi!
”

It was Valletta Moore. Though she was ravaged by time, smoke, and a ponderous hand with the makeup brush, there was no mistaking her. A pinup photo of the woman in her heyday, clipped from an old
Ebony
, hung on the wall of Gwen’s father’s basement workshop back in Mitchellville, where, taking pride of place among the tools on their hooks and the screws in their baby-food jars, it had troubled Gwen’s adolescence with all the ways in which Valletta Moore—tall, light-skinned, with planetary breasts—differed from Gwen, while evidently constituting her father’s ideal of black womanhood.

Even without the stiletto heels that, in the picture on her father’s wall, had launched Valletta like Saturn V rockets into the stratosphere of her Afro, the woman was tall, a couple of inches under six feet. Had to be at least fifty but showing, with the help of a skirt that seemed to have been made by taking a few passes with a black
ACE
bandage around her hips and upper thighs, enough leg to string with telephone wire, carry startling messages to the world. Hair pulled back tight and glossy against her head, lips shining with purple paint. Her madly green eyes, in the instant before they vanished behind a pair of big Dolce & Gabbanas, betrayed an unmistakable half-canine look of guilty surprise. Caught, Gwen thought, in the act.

Valletta Moore put her head down, shouldered a large red plastic handbag, and with a cool nod, slid past Gwen. In a blasphemous pair of heeled pumps, she went clicking across the sacrosanct floor of the dojo. The officious swagger in her gait might have been some flavor of self-possession or the cool skedaddle of a shoplifter making for the door. In either case, the streamer of toilet paper that trailed from the waistband of her tiny skirt like the banner of an advertising airplane pretty much spoiled the effect.

“Oh! Um. Miss—Ms. Moore.”

The woman stopped, and in the instant of her hesitation, the clatter of her exit echoed in the empty studio. She started to turn back to Gwen, then reconsidered. She shouldered the bag again, walked away with no reply.

“Go on, then, Valletta. Fly that flag,” Gwen said. “Always good to have some extra toilet paper on you. You never know.”

A taut-fleshed, claw-fingered, but elegant hand emerged from Valletta’s front of haughtiness like a stagehand sent backstage to retrieve a leading lady’s tumbled wig. The hand felt around behind with a frantic helplessness that touched Gwen enough to impel her forward to help. Valletta whipped around and jumped back when she saw what Gwen was up to.

“Hi,” Gwen said, dangling the strip of toilet paper between three fingers from about the height of her right shoulder, as if she expected a yo-yo to materialize on the other end of it.

“Look at that,” said Valletta Moore with a hint of accusation and reproach.

Like boxers or circling cocks, they appraised each other. Their respective cryonic targeting arrays were brought online and deployed. Where their gazes met, great snowbanks heaved up between them. The air chimed with the crack of ice.

“Any other way I can help you?” Gwen said. “Does Mrs. Jew know you’re here?”

Valletta Moore took in the spectacle of Gwen’s belly, squinting one eye as though staring along the edge of a plank to gauge its trueness. “Who you supposed to be?”

“Who’m I
supposed
to be? Like I’m trick-or-treating?”

Gwen caught a whiff of the other woman’s perfume, something dense and somehow reminiscent of the smell of Froot Loops, maybe Poison. She recalled having detected a whiff of it, like the pressure of an incipient migraine behind the eyeballs, her first night in the secret room. If Valletta Moore was not herself a former pupil of Mrs. Jew, then Gwen reasoned that maybe Archy’s father had returned to the Bruce Lee Institute, seeking refuge and shelter in the hands of his old teacher, departing just before Gwen showed up.

Great. It had been shameful enough fleeing to the dingy spider hole, behind the hidden door, when she could at least imagine herself to be following, as Master Jew had given her to understand, in the footsteps of fugitive lamas and persecuted practitioners of Falun Gong. But maybe all this time she had been filing herself alongside a squirrelly old no-account basehead and his washed-up ex-ex-girlfriend in a drawer marked, everlastingly,
Fail!

“How’d you get in here?” Gwen said.

“I have a key.”

“I heard there was only one extra key.”

When Valletta snapped open her handbag to fish out and brandish her own key to the door of the institute, Gwen glimpsed against the red satin lining a hole in the universe that was exactly the shape of a large handgun, just sitting there absorbing all light on the visible spectrum.

“How’d you get a key?” Gwen said steadily, though her heart swam in her chest, kicking like the boy who inhabited her. “You take lessons here?”

She glanced across the studio to the glass cabinet where Mrs. Jew had amassed a gold-brass conurbation of trophies ranked in dusty skylines. Generations of insect citizens had abandoned their husks and limbs in its necropolitan streets. Propped along the back of the topmost shelf, a half-dozen framed black-and-white photographs depicted Mrs. Jew with some of her most successful colleagues and students, among them the future Kato, looking grave as a mycologist in a white gi, and a handsome brother in a tall natural, bent down to get his smiling face alongside that of his tiny
sifu
, a man whom Gwen had long since identified as Archy’s father, Luther Stallings. She first learned of the Bruce Lee Institute from Archy, who recommended it solely on the basis of the sheepish nostalgia that informed many of his recommendations, back in the fall of 2000, after somebody told her that martial arts might help with the lingering stiffness that getting rear-ended by a Grand Wagoneer had left in her knees and lower back.

“You used to be a student here, too?”

The “too” hung there, unglossed, a pin to hold the map threads strung by Gwen as she worked her way from the woman standing in front of her; to the photograph of Luther Stallings in the trophy case; to his estranged son, a memory of him crying in the bathroom at their wedding, relieved and crushed because his daddy, conforming perfectly to Archy’s expectations but not, alas, to his hopes, had failed to show; to stories she had heard from Archy about crack houses and court appearances and, long ago, a naked woman shaving her legs in the bathroom of a Danish modern bachelor pad in El Cerrito.

“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 piña 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.

I
n 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.