Lost in the City

LOST IN THE CITY

When the telephone rang about three o’clock that morning, she sat bolt upright in her bed, as if a giant hand had reached through the ceiling and snatched her up. The man sleeping beside her did not stir until the seventh ring, and then only to ask “What? What?” of nothing in particular before returning to sleep. She first sat on the side of the bed and began to hope: a wrong number, or Gail, drunk, in from an evening of bar-hopping, calling to talk about a man. She then sat in the dark on the floor in front of the nightstand. If it was true what her mother had once told her, then nothing rang the telephone like death in the middle of the night.

On the fifteenth ring, she picked up the telephone and said nothing.

“Ms. Walsh? Ms. Lydia Walsh?” a woman said.

“Yes.”

“We are very sorry to call at such a time, but your mother died twenty minutes ago.” The woman was waiting. “Ms. Walsh?”

“Yes. I’ll be there soon as I can,” Lydia said.

“Very well. We, the entire staff here at George Washington, are very sorry. Your mother was an exemplary patient,” the woman said. “We will expect you very soon.”

“Listen,” Lydia said. “Don’t…don’t put that sheet over her face until I get there, okay? I don’t want to walk in and see that sheet over her.”

“Very well,” the woman said. “We will expect you soon. And again, we at George Washington are very sorry.”

Lydia hung up the telephone. She continued sitting on the floor and watched the clock that could tell her the time in the dark. The minute numbers on the clock moved ahead one, two, and then three more minutes. Twenty minutes ago, what had she been dreaming? Try to remember, she told herself, for all of it must go in the diary: On the night of June 29th, I was dreaming such-and-such and such-and-such when my mother passed away. Try to remember where you were.

She tapped the base of the brass lamp once and the bulb’s lowest setting came on. The man in the bed was naked, as was she. There was a foreign smell about herself and she realized that it was his cologne, a popular and very expensive concoction that many of the men she knew wore because someone in their world had decided that the smell conveyed power and success. She thought she had been dreaming of Antibes and the naked Texan on the beach when her mother died, but the more she thought the more it seemed that Antibes had actually been on her mind when she came the first time hours ago.

What is his name? she asked herself of the sleeping man. From a nightstand drawer she took one of the three appointment books she kept in the town house. On the June 29 page there were the initials JL scrawled across all the hours after eight in the evening. She remembered they had met at Trader Vic’s for dinner after she had come from the hospital, and then they had come to her place. But what had she called him all those hours? She flipped back through the pages: “Gyn-nw dia” on the 22nd morning; “B Kaufman — Sen Fin” lunch on the 20th; “Taylor — Amer. Con Life Bst” at two on the 19th afternoon. Finally, on the evening of the 15th, she found “Dinner and?????? with Jack Lawrence, Amer. Bankers….”

“He’s pretty light-skinned, ain’t he?” her mother had said of the first boy she had ever slept with, though all her mother knew at that time was that the boy had taken her to a movie and Mile Long for a steak sandwich. “Does he come from a sickly family?” her mother had asked. She told her diary about the evening the boy busted her cherry: “The movie was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He told me that I was the most beautiful girl at Dunbar, but when he walked me back home after the ‘dirty deed’ was done, he acted like he didn’t know me anymore.”

She shook Jack Lawrence from Amer. Bankers, who was not light-skinned but the color of dark honey. He grabbed her hand and squeezed it so hard she thought she heard her bones cracking — in his sleep he had perceived some threat to himself. She screamed and he woke up, his hand still holding hers and his head turning about to find out where in the world he was. He released her and she rubbed her hand. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” she said.

“Sorry…sorry,” he said. “I must have been dreaming.” The way he said “dreaming” prompted more details about him: Something he called fate had plucked him from the streets of Harlem and sent him to Horace Mann prep, then sent him to Dartmouth, then sent him to Harvard Law. At their first dinner, he had said of the place where she had gone, “I would have gone to Yale Law, but there was something I didn’t like about the white guy that interviewed me.” “You okay?” he said now. He was still lying down.

“I’ll be all right. I have to go,” Lydia said. “My mother has died and I have to go to her.”

“Oh, Cynthia, I’m very sorry.”

My name is Cynthia and I come from Washington, she chanted in her head. What was that from? Jumping rope or playing hopscotch? He does not even know my name on the very night my mother has died, she thought, wanting him out of her bed and out of her house. “You can get some sleep,” she said. “Make sure the door is locked when you leave.”

He yawned. “Yeah, I’m beat,” he said. The way he said “beat” brought more details about him. He turned over and pulled the sheet up to his shoulders. Even now, she thought that they were nice shoulders.

“I can’t believe I’m walkin the same paths that my Lord walked,” her mother had said that second day in Israel, standing at the Church of Gethsemane. Lydia had presented the trip to her mother on her sixty-fifth birthday and had even paid the way for Georgia Evans, her mother’s best friend. Lydia had not wanted to go, but her mother had insisted. “Oh, Lydia,” her mother had said, “what would the Holy Land mean to me without you bein there with me?”

Georgia, lazy, far less religious that her mother, had complained about all the hills. “How did Jesus get any preachin done goin up and down these hills?” she said the second day. Georgia would drink all the water she carried, then want more from Lydia and her mother. “I never done so much walkin in all my life. Never drunk so much water either.” On the third day, after the Via Dolorosa, Georgia was unable to go on and spent the next days moping about the hotel. “I never thought all I’d get to see of the Holy Land was a big old hotel. Must be a sin in that somewhere.”

My mother lies moldering…

She tapped the base of the lamp three times and the bulb went through the rest of the settings, then the room went dark. In the living room, she knew she needed some coke. One line, she said to herself, one line and no more. This fur and no further. With the gold razor blade, she spread out the cocaine on the black marble tray, then inhaled a line of two inches or so through the crystal straw Gail Saunders had brought back from Bonn. “I hereby make this oath, this pledge, this whatever,” Gail said the night of her return. “I’ll sleep with no more white men. They make you feel like you should be grateful.”

In the shower, Lydia held her face as close as she could to the nozzle. After she had finished, she soaped herself again. “Best get his smell off me,” she said to the water. “Or else when I walk in there, they’ll know I’ve been fucking. The nurses and doctors will look at me and they’ll say, ‘Why, Ms. Walsh, your mother lies moldering and you’ve been fucking.’”

“Forgive me, Father, for I have been fucking,” she said to the mirror as she toweled off. The exhaust fan made a low humming sound, barely audible even in the quiet of the night. But though the repair people had been there four times, it was still too loud for her. “No sound,” she had said to the second repairman. “Absolutely no sound whatsoever. Can you manage that?” She did not want to go back to her bedroom, to her closet, so she dressed in the clothes she had returned home in the evening before. They, the clothes, were scattered about the living room, where Amer. Bankers had taken her the first time and where Antibes had entered her head. That first Sunday in Antibes, she had done as the natives did and gone naked on the beach, and a stranger, the naked Texan reading Ayn Rand, had said in the most exquisite French that her breasts were perfect. Je m’appelle Lydia et j’babite a Washington.

She called a Capitol cab, because that was the company her mother had always used. “Trust Capitol to get you there and back in one piece,” her mother had said. “Don’t trust D.C. National or Empire.” Lydia opened the front door and listened to the night sounds. She felt the coke was wearing off. Way off to the left, through the thick leaves of June, she thought she saw the sun inching up, but she knew how deceptive the light in Washington could be. Once, as a girl, she had traveled with her mother’s church through most of the night to an edge-of-the-world mountain town in Virginia, where the church members had held Easter sunrise services as the sun came up over the mountains. “We proclaim,” the preacher had said, “that Jesus has risen.” “We proclaim it so,” the congregation had said, huddled in blankets and covered with dew. “We proclaim it so.”

She did another line of cocaine. Her town house was in an enclosed area in Southwest protected by a guard in his tiny house at the entrance. Generally, the guard would call to tell her that a cab was coming to her door, but she felt she might want to go out to the entrance and meet the cab. But then, as the coke flowed through her, she relaxed and thought it best for him to come and get her. “Ten dollar tip,” she said to the marble tray and raised her eyebrows up and down several times. Before closing the crystal canister that contained the drug, she put some in a plastic packet with the small gold spoon she kept in the canister. “Who knows what evil lurks in a hospital,” she said, laughing.

On that sixth morning in Israel, Georgia had gone back to her bed after breakfast and seemed unable to move, but she had insisted that Lydia and her mother go on without her. When mother and daughter returned from floating on the Dead Sea, they found Georgia in a lounge chair at the swimming pool, descending into drunkenness, not quite certain who they were or where she was. When Lydia’s mother told her that she was in the Holy Land, the land of Jesus, Georgia said, “Yes. Yes. I been to that place.” Then, after Lydia’s mother slapped her, Georgia asked her friend for forgiveness.

Back in the room the two older women shared, Lydia had tried to reassure a sobbing Georgia. Her mother refused to say anything more to Georgia. “It’s all right,” Lydia said to Georgia as she put her to bed. The old woman kept saying that she was going to die in the Holy Land and Lydia kept telling her that she wouldn’t. They left her and had dinner in the hotel dining room, but her mother only picked at her food.

Georgia was contrite throughout the last six days, and though it was clear to Lydia that the woman’s legs and feet could not manage it, Georgia, uncomplaining, went out each day for the rest of the tour. Each place along the way, in Jericho, in Bethany, in Nazareth, she stayed close to Lydia’s mother, but Cornelia paid her no mind, and it showed on Georgia’s face.

On the living-room wall in Lydia’s town house, among the photographs of places she had visited around the world, between the pictures of her standing before the Kremlin on a winter day and of her in a cavernous room in a Danish castle the guide said was haunted, there was the picture of Lydia and Cornelia and Georgia standing where the tourist bureau said Joseph’s carpentry shop had been, Georgia in her hideous wig standing on one side and her mother in the middle. It was the tenth day of the trip.

She did two more lines of cocaine. “Just a shorty shorty this time, girl,” she said as she spread out the drug. All of this and more I offer to you if you would but bow down and worship me….

She did not know how long the cab driver had been standing in the doorway when he said, “Lady, you call for a cab?” He was an old man who had probably done nothing but work all his life. Father, may I?…What would that old man have said to see her perfect breasts adorning the beach at Antibes? Have you seen the Egyptian pyramids? the naked Texan asked, fingering the pages of Ayn Rand.

“Yes,” she said to the old man, sounding as if there had been a death in the family. “It’s for me. My mother has died.” Immediately, he took off his hat and made the sign of the cross. She stood and put her things, including the packet of cocaine, into the Fendi bag.

“My heart goes out to you, lady,” the cab driver said. “It really does. I know what it’s like to lose a mother. And a father too.” Through the screen door, he looked about the room as if there might be others to whom he should express condolences.

At the door, she could see that he was not just an old man, but an extremely old man. Her father, had he lived, would have been such a man. She closed the door and locked it. The sounds of birds were louder, and she knew the sun was not far off. The old man helped her down the three brick stairs and held the cab door for her. She had wanted to buy a second town house in the area as another investment and have her mother and Georgia live there, but her mother told her that she did not know if she could live among so many white people. “I’m not used to their ways and such like you are, Lydia,” and Lydia had been offended.

The old man drove out of the compound and turned right on G Street. He was looking at her in the rearview mirror. She smelled dead fish from the wharf. At 7th the man turned right again. “I knew folks who lived in Southwest before they threw the colored out and made it for the wealthy,” her mother had said when Lydia told her she had bought a town house there.

“Ma’am, maybe you should tell me where you goin?” the cab driver said.

“Just get me lost in the city,” she said.

“What, ma’am?”

“Just keep on driving and get us lost in the city. I’ll pay you. I have the money.”

“No, ma’am, it ain’t a matter of money. I just thought…. You know, your mother…. And besides, ma’am, I’m a Capitol cabdriver and I ain’t allowed to get lost.”

“Try,” she said. “Try ever so hard.” She took two twenty-dollar bills from her bag, leaned forward and placed them on the seat beside him. “And the more lost you get us, the more you get paid. Or is it, the more loster, or the most lost? There are, you know, Mr. Cab Driver, so many grammatical rules that the grammar people say we must not break.”

“Yes, ma’am, I know. I’ve heard it said.”

He did not know what else to do, so he continued driving. He passed the federal buildings along 7th, then the mall and its museums. In one of the museums white men had allowed her father to make a living pushing a broom, and now she was paid in one year more than her parents had earned in both their lifetimes. Soon, she would pass a point in her life where she would have earned more than all her ancestors put together, all of them, all the way back to Eve.

At New York Avenue, he turned right, then left on 5th Street. He thought that maybe she had been born elsewhere, that she did not know Washington, would not know the streets beyond what the white people called the federal enclave. But in fact, the farther north he went, the more she knew about where they were going. My name is Lydia…. Say it loud….

“You gettin us lost?”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m tryin.”

“All right. Try very hard.” She placed another twenty beside the other two.

They passed where the K Street market once had been. Two pounds of chicken wings for twenty cents. Had she remembered to finally write down her mother’s recipe for that wondrous beef stew somewhere in one of the appointment books? They continued on up 5th Street. Her father had died at 1122 5th Street in a back room on the top floor where they had lived when she was four. It occurred to Lydia that in the world there was now no one from whom she could get that full medical history she had always planned to get. Who now could tell her if there was a history of breast cancer among the women in her family?

“I’m sorry for all this,” her father had said on his death bed to her mother. “I’m very sorry for all this, Cornelia.” They had not known that she was standing in the doorway watching them.

“For what?” her mother said to her father. “What’s there to be sorry about? You do know that I love you. You do know that, don’t you? If you go away with nothin else, go away with that.”

At 5th and Ridge streets, she asked the cab driver, “Hi you doin up there, buddy? You doin okay?”

“Yes, ma’am, just fine, thank you.”

While living at 457 Ridge Street, in the downstairs apartment, they had come to know Georgia, who lived in the upstairs apartment. Georgia would never have children of her own and, except for Lydia, was uncomfortable around other people’s children. Until Lydia, was fourteen, she gave her a doll every Christmas. “Now see, if you pull the string Chatty Cathy will talk to you, honey. Tell Chatty Cathy your name, honey.” “My name is Lydia Walsh and I live in Washington.”

The sun was even higher when he turned right at O Street. In one of the houses on that street her mother lived until Lydia’s last year of law school. She had once brought down from New Haven a professor of linguistics who thought the sun rose and set on her. He had had a kind heart, the professor had, but his love for her had shown through all too clearly, and that was his downfall. For thirty days during the month of her birthday he had sent her the reddest roses she had seen up to then: one on the first day, two on the second day, three on the third, and so on. “How much do professors of linguistics make?” she asked a friend on the twentieth day, looking down at his name on the card that came with the roses. “Does he come from a sickly family?” her mother had asked while the man was in the bathroom.

She wanted more coke and she began to cry. “And first prize, for her particularly beautiful enunciation, goes to….” John Brown lies molderin where my mother lies molderin…. The cab driver thought that her crying meant that maybe it had finally hit her that her mother had died and that soon his passenger would be coming to herself.

At New Jersey Avenue, the cab driver turned left, then right at Rhode Island down past Frazier’s Funeral Home. At a large apartment building on Rhode Island where the Safeway now stood, they had lived on the same floor as a woman who was terrified that her husband would leave her. “So all the time bein scared of him leavin,” her mother told Lydia years later when she thought her daughter was old enough to understand, “she just became his slave. He was a night foreman at a bakery way out in Northeast. I guess some thought he was a handsome man, but I never cared for him. Had what they call that good hair. Night and day she worried that he’d leave her. She begged me and all the other women not to take him from her. She wouldn’t believe that I whatn’t studyin bout him. She worried herself sick and they came and took her away to St. Lizabeths one day. In those days, they gave you twenty-five dollars if you turned in a crazy person. Twenty-five dollars and a pat on the back. Somebody turned her in, but it whatn’t me.”