Edward Jones - Lost in the City

“Miss Watts,” he said, after he had set the cake in and shut the car’s back door, “we’d like to see you sometime.” He had developed the habit of often speaking about himself in the first person plural. “Maybe dinner, a movie. Something like that. That is, if you aren’t married or keepin company with someone.” He did not falter.

“I’m a free woman in that way, Mr. Williams,” she said. “Dinner or whatever would be nice.”

He walked with her to the driver’s side of the car. “Miss Watts, I hope you’re not the kind of woman who likes a man to sit around and talk a lotta of sweet nothins to a woman, cause we ain’t it.”

“That’s all right, Mr. Williams,” she said, looking for her keys in her pocketbook. “I’ve had my fill of sweet nothings.” She opened the door. “And Mr. Williams, I hope you’re not the kind of man who likes a woman to swoon every time she’s within a mile of him, cause I ain’t it.” She got into her car and handed him a card from the glove compartment.

Having known only prostitutes throughout his time in the world, he was surprised by candor coming from a church woman, and she liked the fact that he was surprised. She said, “I guess this means I don’t have to tip you.”

In the most luxurious hotel in the Bahamas, with the smell of the ocean thick throughout their room, Sam would say that first day, standing in the night dark at the window, “We’re never gonna believe in anything but right now. Not very much of tomorrow. Maybe a little of the tomorrow mornin but no farther than that.”

“A bride doesn’t want to hear that on her wedding night,” Hazel said, coming up to his back and putting her arms around him. She massaged a scar about his stomach, the result of a knife fight with a man in a bar in the Philippines. The keloid scar covered the place where his navel had been. “A bride wants to hear that there will be a million tomorrows. She wants to hear that there will be an always.”

“I know,” he said. “But I could be dead tomorrow, and then what would you do with all them words?”

That afternoon, on the beach, she had drawn a tiny football field in the sand to begin to teach him the game. He had never had any patience with games beyond a bit of poker here and there. But she had a passion for football. It was one of the few sins she had allowed herself, she said, “and I want you to taste it so I don’t go to hell alone.” When the lesson for that day was done, she threw the stick into the ocean. “Now,” she said, “you teach me something.” The sun was at his back and she looked at him with her hand shading her eyes.

“We don’t think we have anything like all them quarterback people,” he said.

“It don’t matter. Anything will do. It don’t matter,” she said, for she had been a bride less than twenty-four hours. “Some trick with a string will do.”

He moved so that his body was enough shade for her and in moving he covered the football field. “We can teach you to defend yourself if two guys come at you at once,” and he held up his fists, ready, coiled, forgetting where he was and to whom he was talking. “I can teach you to put em down flat.”

She laughed. She liked it. She reached over and patted his stomach where the scar was. “Can you teach me how to defend against someone who wants to do that to me?” she said, thinking of the Philippines fight.

“That’s a lesson for another day,” he said, thinking of something else.

That night, in their hotel room, her arms around him as he stood at the window, she said of his words about having only right now, “All right, just don’t talk about it anymore.”

“We won’t,” he said. “We won’t say a word as long as you know that’s what we’re thinkin.” From the day he arrived back in Washington to the night of the conception of his first son, it was ten months and three days.

Not long after Sam and Hazel returned from their honeymoon, the prison people released Samuel Williams. He made his way alone from Lorton Prison to Washington, a city he had not seen for twenty years. He found a room at Hartnett Hall on 21st Street Northwest, and a few days later, with the help of an ex-offenders’ group, he got a job as a short-order cook in a diner on E Street downtown.

Except for a movie now and again and a visit every two weeks or so to see his sister (“I’ll give you one hour on Tuesday,” she told him, “from six to seven. No more, and it might be less, cordin on how I feel”), the job was about all he had of life. He refused to become friends with any of the people he worked with or with the men who roomed in his building. Once or twice a month he paid for a whore, but he never brought her back to his room, choosing instead to pay for a two-hour room at the Buckingham, a place at L and 14th that catered to prostitutes and their johns. “Sheets Changed With Regularly,” a hand-written sign at the desk said.

Once released, Samuel began writing to his son and received no reply for three months. “20 years of happy living isn’t long enough for a motherfucker like you,” Sam finally wrote his father. “Get back to us after you spend 10,000 years in hell.”

Samuel bought a fireproof box for the letters he received from Madeleine. Though he wrote her at least five times a week, she wrote back only once or twice a week. The most current letter from her he always kept on the top of his room’s chest of drawers, dead center, the way some people keep a vase of flowers.

Sam was furious when he learned from Maddie that Madeleine had not only not told Samuel where to go, but that she was writing back to him. And for weeks he refused to talk to her. A reconciliation was arranged by Hazel and Maddie on the Sunday before Mother’s Day, which happened to be Maddie’s birthday. They held a small party for her at Sam and Hazel’s house in Anacostia. Late in the day, Sam stopped Madeleine in the kitchen. She was refilling the pitcher of lemonade and he took the pitcher from her.

“Why would anyone in the world write to the man who killed their own mother?” he said, sliding the pitcher far back on the counter.

“Let’s not get into all this,” she said. “I’m just here to have a good time and to give Maddie a good day.”

Despite something in him that abhored backing down from any position, he had been eager to reconcile because each and every day since his return he was aware of how much he and Madeleine had lost by not being together. So many years, important years, he had told his wife, they had known each other only through hurried, often dutiful, letters and through telephone calls with horrible connections and photographs that often arrived folded despite the “Do Not Fold” instructions written on envelopes. Sometimes, in addition to the times they had on weekends, Sam would pick her up after work and they would eat at some restaurant near her apartment. It had taken them several months before they could speak to each other without considering each and every word, before they could even comfortably hug hello and good-bye.

“I just wish you’d explain to me this need to write to that guy. I mean, this ain’t some kinda fuckin pen pal.”

“I know what he is, Sam.” The others — Maddie, Hazel, Curtis, Bo, and Sam’s new baby — were in the backyard, and Sam and Madeleine could see them through the kitchen window’s curtains. The baby, newly weaned from Hazel’s breast, had just been bottle-fed, and the adults were taking turns trying to get him to burp.

“I don’t think he has anyone else. There’s Maddie, but she could take or leave him, and she usually leaves him,” Madeleine said. With two fingers she wiped condensation from the pitcher. “It’s not like I don’t think about what he did. I just think I remember this father man and some good things he did. Maybe I write because blood is thicker than water.”