Read Online Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon - Free Book Online Page A

darling husband sitting in a booth halfway back along the south wall, behind a tan-and-brown curtain of beaded strands that managed, in its sparsity, to leave nothing and everything to the imagination. Archy Stallings, dog of dogs, his thick Mingus fingers all up in a sticky compound of injera and the business of a long-headed rust-brown young bitch with the wondrous huge eyes of some nocturnal mammal. Elsabet Getachew, the Queen of Sheba, coiled on her side of the table like a soft and sinister intention. Across from her, Archy took off his horn-rims, polished their lenses with a soft cloth. That was all she saw; though it did not quite qualify as innocent, it was, in all fairness, not much. Afterward she could not be sure how or why she conceived the idea of marching back to the curtained booth and dumping a nice cold Styrofoam cupful of frothy regret onto her darling husband’s head. “Idea” was not even the right word; she seemed at that instant to define herself as the woman who was going to do that thing, to be the sea in which that action was the one and only fish.
    Throughout her pregnancy, attacks of fatigue had alternated with bouts of bodily exaltation, but as she marched, rolling with the weight of the baby well distributed along the engineering of her bones, over to the fifth booth from the back, Gwen felt positively indomitable. She flung aside the beaded strands with a left hand that could splinter pine planks and reduce cinder block to gray dust. Strings snapped. Hundreds of brown and tan beads rattled down, darting and pinging and scattering in whorls, mapping, like particles in a cloud chamber, the flow of qigong from her black-belt hand.
    In fact, Gwen disbelieved in qi and in 97 percent of the claims that people in the kung fu world made about it, those stories of people who could lift Acuras and avert bullets and bust the heads of mighty armies by virtue of their ability to control the magic flow. Ninety-seven percent was more or less the degree to which Gwen disbelieved in everything that people represented, attested to, or tried to put over on you. And despite midwives’ latter-day reputation as a bunch of New Age witches, with their crystals and their alpha-state gong CDs and their tinctures of black and blue cohosh root, most midwives were skeptical by training, Gwen more skeptical than most. Nonetheless, she felt something coursing through her and around her, mapped by the flying beads. She glowered down at the bastard who had somehow managed to conceal his bulk behind her 3 percent blind spot and sneak into her life.
    As soon as Gwen appeared alongside the booth, Archy seemed to cotton all at once on to the whole scenario—wife, discovery, beads, size-large suff —with the instantaneous understanding common to unfaithful men. In the space of that instant, his eyes widened, apologizing, protesting, as wooden beads rained around him and eighteen ounces of ice-cold Ethiopian beverage were upended onto his head.
    “Damn,” he said as the milk-white stuff streamed down his glasses and alongside his nose into his collar. He did not lose his temper, raise his voice, jump out of the way, or even shake himself like the dog he was. He just sat there dripping, suffering the punishment, as if doing so were a form of uxorious indulgence, the price that must be paid for having a wife who was not merely pregnant but, apparently, out of her mind. “I was only talking to the girl.”
    “Excuse me,” said Elsabet Getachew with her husky accent, attempting with head lowered to slide out of the booth. Her hair was a glory of tendrils for the snaring of husbands. She smelled violently of the kitchen, of nuts and oils and crushed handfuls of orange spice. Gwen interposed herself between the woman and freedom, glad to be huge and impassable. She waited until the young woman looked up, daring her to meet the wifely gaze: a wall, a dam, the arm of a government. The girl looked up. In those ibex eyes, Gwen saw