Telegraph Avenue (60 page)

Gwen only nodded.

Lazar seemed to hesitate, on the point of saying something more. But he just jotted a few notes in her file and walked out.

“I’m sorry,” Julie said, “I didn’t kill him.”

“That’s all right,” Gwen said. “There’s time. I think there’s time. I wish my mom were here.”

She started to cry about her mom a little bit. She said she missed her father and her brothers, all of them back in D.C. and Philly. Julie gave her a tissue, then a second. His father came in holding a rattling cup of ice.

“Aviva’ll be here as soon as she can,” he announced. “Probably any minute. Also, I brought ice.”

“Bless you,” Gwen said.

He handed her the plastic cup, and she crunched thoughtfully. Eyes aswim, staring at Julie in a way that made him worry he might start to cry, too. She was feeling sorry either for herself, having a baby three thousand miles from her family, or for him.

“You know where to look for Titus?” she said at last, around a mouthful of ice.

“Maybe,” Julie said, drafting a thesis almost immediately. “Maybe I might.”

“Go on and find him, then,” she said. “This baby is going to want his brother.”

“I
don’t know you,” said the little old Chinese lady. “Why I would know your friend?”

“No reason,” Julie said. “But—”

“He’s my student?”

“No. But like I said. He keeps his bike here. So I—”

“You think I’m deaf?”

“No.”

“Because you talking so loud.”

“I—”

“Deaf, old, Chinese, and stupid. That what you think?”

“No.” Julie took a deep breath.
Start again.
“Hello,” he said. He held out his hand. “My name is Julius Jaffe.” He took out the cards from his wallet, shuffled through them. Found one, an old one, that identified him as
OCCULT RESEARCHER
. Passed it to her. She read the proffered text, frowned, took another look at him, betraying neither skepticism nor interest.

“My friend Titus,” he said, “hid his bicycle behind your Dumpster, in the, uh, honeysuckle bush? He has to hide it there because, okay, when he was living in Mrs. Wiggins’s house? Around the corner on Forty-second? Stuff kept happening to his bike. I guess there’s a lot of people living there?”

“Miss Wiggins.” He could tell that she knew which house he meant. “Okay.”

“Like one time somebody took it and, like, rode it. And they broke it. And another time somebody sold it to buy drugs, and Titus had to steal it back. So he started hiding it back there because, I mean, there’s so much honeysuckle. You can’t see it. And because I am
looking
for him, to tell him that his baby
brother
is being born right
now
—”

“Loudness,” she cautioned him. “Volume.”

“I was going to see if he’s at Mrs. Wiggins’s. So I looked, and his bike is in the bushes. But then I thought, I don’t know. That maybe he might be here.”

“Here?” She shook her head, looking closer to smiling than he had yet seen her. “Not here.”

“I mean, you don’t
know
. He could have sneaked in. Titus has skills.”

“Look at me, occult investigator,” she said. “You think because I am old, stupid, deaf, and Chinese, some boy can sneak and hide in my house and I don’t know it?”

“No,” he guessed.

“You must be a really lousy occult investigator.”

“Kind of.”

“I think ghosts are laughing at you.”

“Probably.”

“No ghost here,” she said. “Your friend went to his house. Go look there, tell him, ‘Little brother is coming.’ ”

“Yeah, but what about,” lowering his voice, glancing up and down Telegraph, “that room you have?”

“No room.”

“No, the, like, secret bedroom? The door that’s hidden behind a poster of Bruce Lee? Where Gwen was staying. Gwen Shanks.”

She blinked and handed him back his card. “No ghost. No ghost room. Good luck. Goodbye.”

Julie thought about trying to slip past this annoying old person. Run upstairs, take a look for himself in the room that was behind the Bruce Lee door. He turned away, dropped his board to the sidewalk, stepped onto the deck. Hesitating, trying out a different kind of move.

“Oh, uh, you taught Luther Stallings, right?” he said. “From the movies. My friend, Titus? He’s Luther Stallings’s grandson.”

She came out in her gray gi and black sandals, skinny and featherweight with the walk of a younger person. “Let me see this ghost bicycle,” she said.

Julie led her around the side of the building to the parking area. They crunched across the gravel over to the Dumpster. He pushed aside tangles of honeysuckle, covered in flowers like a scattering of buttered popcorn. The heavy fragrance of the flowers mingled with the rancid atmosphere of the Dumpster. Before Julie could help or prevent her, she grabbed the handlebars of Titus’s bicycle, tugged it out of the tangling vines with surprising ease. She seemed to regard the bike’s presence as something of an offense, but there was also, Julie thought, a touch of puzzlement; even, possibly, of wonder. She looked sidelong at a small, square window at the top of the building—it
was
open, though there was no obvious way to climb up to it—then back down at the bicycle.

“Weird bike,” she said.

“It’s called a fixie?” Julie said. “No brakes. No gears. You just pedal it. When you want to stop, you have to pedal the other way.”

She climbed on the seat, gripping the handlebars, pedaled forward slushing through the gravel, fingers fluttering to find hand brakes that were not there. She slammed backward on the pedals, stopped, ground forward till she hit sidewalk. For three seconds she wobbled on the bike like a kid fresh from training wheels, a frail knot of bone, tendon, and gray silk. By the fourth second, she had figured out how to pedal backward, weaving away heedless down the sidewalk without looking over her shoulder. She disappeared behind a high fence. Ten seconds later, she reappeared, pedaling forward, and gestured curtly with one hand, master of the fixie now and for all time. “Come on,” she said.

“Come on, where?”

“Miss Wiggins. Look for your friend. Mr. Occult Investigator, scared of ghost house. That’s why you come here first. Talking about some lamebrain idea, a fourteen-year-old boy could sneak into the Bruce Lee Institute and I don’t know about it. You came here because you are afraid to go there. Right or wrong?”

“Right,” Julie said. “Basically. But seriously, Titus does have skills.”

“Insult me one more time,” she said, “I don’t go with you.”

He got on his skateboard and they set off, the lady tearing down the sidewalk with such impossible energy, such abandon, that Julie could not keep up. She stopped and waited for him, gesturing toward her shoulder with her chin. He took hold of it. It was rope and bone.

She towed him down to Forty-second Street and turned the corner. They rode past Mr. Jones’s, the house looking empty and forlorn. On the porch stood the perch where Fifty-Eight used to sit, empty, abandoned. She pedaled on, rolling toward the door of the house where Titus’s auntie moldered like some ancient monarch whose kingdom had gone to lawlessness and ruin. The lady—she’d said to call her Mrs. Jew—hoisted the bike and rolled it up the crumbling front steps of the porch. She pounded on the door, bang! bang!

“Titus,” she told the young man who opened the door, eighteen, nineteen, pop-eyed and heavy-jawed, with a frowsy tangle of chin beard. Shirtless, lean-bellied, his skin blotted with unreadable, uninterpretable tattoos. The elastic of his boxer shorts and an inch of dark blue lozenges on light blue background emerged from the waistband of his knee-length denim shorts.

“Titus,” Mrs. Jew said again.

The young man gardened at his chin beard with two fingers. Julie lingered on the bottom step, feeling exposed and dangerously faggoty in his short shorts and his sleeveless T-shirt. From the open mouth of the house came a steady exhalation of marijuana and a low rumble of television, maybe a football game. There were voices, too. Not angry or hostile. Just voices. People talking, laughing.

“I teach kung fu,” Mrs. Jew said.

“Kung
fu
?”

“Bruce Lee Institute. Around the corner.”

Julie remembered his father telling him once about how when Julie was little and he would go around the neighborhood wearing his little Batman or Spider-Man costume year-round, people used to think he was cute and all. But when he went around the block dressed up like Superman, people would
light up
. Over and above the cuteness of some little dude masquerading around all solemn-face in the gaudy S-suit, there was something about the idea of Superman that made people happy. It was probably like that when you mentioned Bruce Lee.

“Bruce Lee,” the young man said. “He really was a student there?”

“I was his teacher.”

“For real? You?”

“I kick his ass,” said Mrs. Jew. “On a daily basis. ”

“Yo,” the young man called, glancing over his shoulder into the house. “Where Titus at?”

Somebody said something, and the man stepped aside. It was easily accomplished, without violence, subterfuge, or even use of the word “please.” Julie felt ashamed of his trepidation and anxiety, but he did not renounce them as he followed Mrs. Jew into the house. It was old and cramped, maybe kind of charming once upon a time. The fireplace mantel had that medieval feel you saw in a lot of little bungalows. Handsome columns of painted wood held up the ceiling here and there. The living room was all about the television, an old rear-projection number whose sun-dimmed display struggled to contend with the color palette of
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Three teenage boys and two girls on a sectional tartan-plaid sofa repaired with accumulated yards of silver duct tape. On the floor a girl about Julie’s age, in a Catholic-school skirt, and four or five little kids. The girl looked more Latina than black to Julie, and one of the little kids was almost white, with drifts of reddish-brown curls. Across from the plaid sofa, a young man in a wheelchair breathed air from a green steel tank. He laughed into the plastic breathing mask. An empty bag of spicy Cheetos lay on the floor. On the coffee table stood two large bottles of Coke. A pizza box. A plastic tub that once held Trader Joe’s animal crackers. It was messy, dirty, crowded, and there was a miasma of Cheetos, but mostly, it was a bunch of kids sitting around watching a show that Julie also enjoyed. He had been expecting strobe lights, peeling wallpaper, people passed out on the floor, the flash of crack pipes. Twenty-four-hour pounding of woofers. Baleful people, he thought, lurking in the corners of shadowy rooms.

He was such a racist.

The young man who had greeted them at the door led them all the way to the back of the house, down some ill-sorted steps to an addition. In one of the bunks, a boy not much younger than Julie lay cuddling a Game Boy.

“Titus?” Julie called.

It was a kind of bunkhouse, furnished with a variety of bunk beds of different periods and styles, some made of steel tubing, some of scuffed and gouged wood. Not much light. In the rear corner, on the bottom bunk, under a
Blue’s
Clues
sleeping bag, Julie found Titus. “Hey,” he said.

“What are you doing here?” Titus said from under the comforter, voice muffled but sounding, to Julie’s ear, roughened by weeping. “Man, get the fuck out.”

“Okay,” Julie said, and tears came to his own eyes. He started to turn away but then wiped his face with his arm. The little kid with the Game Boy was staring at him. “I just came to, uh, tell you that I thought you might want to know that Gwen is having the baby. About to. Right now. I mean, she’s in labor. If you come now, you, you know, you could kind of like, be there, or whatever. When your brother’s born.”

Titus didn’t move or speak.

“He got a brother?” said the boy, doubtful.

“Almost,” said Julie. “Titus, come on. We got your bike. Let’s go, don’t miss this. It’s really awesome. Brothers are cool. I wish I had one.” He looked at the boy. “Right, brothers are cool?”

“Not really,” the boy said.

“Could you, maybe, like, could we get a little privacy?”

“Why, so you can suck his dick?”

“Yes, totally,” Julie said without missing a beat, exhilarated by his own daring. “Here.” He took five dollars out of his wallet. “Go buy some candy or something.”

The kid left. Julie sat down on the corner of the bed.

“I know, I mean, I get that you . . .” He took a breath, let it out. “I just wanted to say, if you came back here, you must have been feeling pretty lonely right then. Like, okay, Archy was being an ass and all. But, I mean, this is your brother, it’s a, here’s your chance, you know? To have somebody that loves you and looks up to you. Besides me, I mean, because I know that’s, like, not really such a big deal.”

“Get up,” Mrs. Jew said. “Go to the hospital. Now. Or I will kick your butt. Do you believe me?”

Titus sat up, looked at Julie, then back at Mrs. Jew. Nodded yes.

O
ver. A rest between measures scored for kettledrums. A patch of blue sky between two rolling thunderheads.

G
wen in the birthing bed, between contractions, hating the only friend she had in the world. Hating his aftershave: a compound of unlit cherry cigar and the cardboard pine tree dangling from the rearview of a taxicab. Underneath that smell a deeper rancor, raw bacon gone soft in the heat. Hating the shine of his scalp through crosshatched hair. The whitehead at the wing of his right nostril. The fur on the backs of his fingers. Hating him for not being Archy.

Nat sat upright in a leatherette chair, chin raised, stiff-backed, looking like he was waiting for something freaky to happen, something that would demand more from him than he was prepared to deliver, like maybe any minute Nurse Sally was going to roll some weird Filipino piano into the room, made from sharks’ teeth and tortoiseshells and coir, which he would be expected to play. The expression on his face saying,
Please, Lord, do not let this spectacle become any more revolting than it already is.
Eyelids half-lowered, widening, narrowing again, the poor man trying to find that sweet spot between shut-tight-in-horror and wide-eyed-attentiveness-to-the-miracle-of-birth. Jitter in his legs. Hunch of impatience in his shoulders. Considering that the man had been married to a midwife for seventeen years, Gwen considered it surprising how little he seemed to know, recollect, or be able to intuit about the needs of a woman in labor. The sum of all the birthing wisdom he had managed to acquire was compassed within a cup of ice and the area of the washcloth that he regularly returned to the bathroom to douse with water and wring out in the sink before returning it, blessedly cool, to her forehead.