Rumors from the Lost World (12 page)

“The baby is, Lydia!” Robin had shouted. “No, Mommy! No, Daddy!”

“Two hundred thousand years. Remember that,” one of her clients said the next day. It was the amount of time it took radioactive waste to decompose to a safe level. Lydia stabbed her notepad with her pen. She worked for a foundation with a grant to find out whether monogamy has a future. With a narrow oily face and ears flush against his head as though greased back with Vitalis, her client talked about nothing but radioactivity, cancer, and corporate criminals. “Are there any other kind?” he mumbled on the way out.

After the interview, overcome by fall fever, she arranged a long lunch break, caught the bus to the zoo, and hurried to the small mammal house, her favorite refuge. Special lighting and sound-proof cubicles tricked furry animals into uncharacteristic daylight activity. She could enter moonlit lives oblivious to her trances. In semidarkness the three-banded armadillo, the bush baby, and the sugar glider would go about their nocturnal affairs. She could drift, let the past possess her, sit outside on a bench and write letters she would never mail. I won't pretend to be someone I'm not, she would vow. I won't see myself in too many eyes. But she also might slip into a trance and imagine the glass paperweight falling to the floor and breaking. Snow everywhere.

The building was closed.
To replase brokunglas,
read the sign. The wind was still high, though, and the day as sweet-scented as cinnamon. Winter seemed impossible. Groups of children in bright ski sweaters were chattering. Small mammals on field trips, Lydia thought, walking to the conservatory, where workmen were putting the finishing touches on a pine-scented Christmas display, a world of artificial snow and filtered light. This Christmas, she promised, we'll decorate a big tree. Silver tinsel, frosted snowy lights. We can eat ourselves silly and figure out the movies together.

Giant dinosaur fern.
A minute later, in the hot-house stuffiness of the tropical room, she stroked the full-lipped leaves of a rubber plant. Bruce doesn't want to stay, but he doesn't want to give me up.
Tongue fem.
She shook her head, flicking away sweat, nauseated by her insight. This can't be happening, she thought.
Curtain fern.
There must be some way to make it all stop. Claustrophobia wrapped itself around her like a vine; she rushed from the green-stained dome to the curb. She wasn't certain the oncoming bus would stop for her, but it did. Once inside, she fished out some change. The scowling driver, slumped low in his seat, eyes bloodshot, jerked the bus forward, slapping her against the coinbox.

Before Bruce left, he helped her move their things south to her mother's house in Hyde Park. “Without me around,” he said, “you'll be safe as a rock. Ice cream every night while I'm slaving away on the mad, gone streets.” Then, with a backpack full of clothes and a small suitcase of books and notes, he hoisted Robin, smooched Lydia and left, insisting against her wishes that he could hump it to the train. Alone, she continued the late-night walks they had taken together. Whistle clutched in sweaty fingers, she asserted her right to exist, refusing to heed her mother's warnings. Why should she change her habits simply because she was terrified? She never walked far, maybe down the block to the Medici for a coffee or to the I.C. underpass. Its faded mural, barely visible in the dark, dared her to walk along the viaduct, the way she had done all over the city with Bruce, to another mural on the ghetto side of the University of Chicago campus. “You ever hear of the phoenix, Lyd?” Bruce would say. “That's what these murals are. You ever hear of
The Wall of Dignity?
We've got to publicize that stuff so it can rise from the ashes.” In Hyde Park, they'd leave Robin with her mother and walk from
Alewives and Mercury Fish
on 55th to
Rebirth
on 60th. Bruce vowed more than once that he wanted a wife as devoted to the search for truth and social justice as he was. She took such vows as threats and forced herself to accompany him, no matter what the neighborhood was like, no matter the hour.

Her lakefront walks in the city near her office and the museums took her away from the pressure of people, of storefront displays, the pressure to buy something, eat something, say something to an occasional passing acquaintance. Her restricted evening walks also turned her inward. How cozy it might be to live alone again, she would think, have a flower and a bowl of fruit for company, lock the door and pretend nobody's home when the phone rings.

“Lydia,” Robin said at breakfast, “you're not paying attention.”

“Yes, I am. You were telling about your painting. About the dog that isn't there.” Lydia smiled. “Picture of the Missing Dog.”

Lydia was hungry enough to take a bite from the steering wheel but too frightened to park more than a block from the restaurant where she was to meet her friend Natasha, a familiar face from as far back as high school, and another woman. “A consciousness-raising event,” Natasha had said. “We'll get drunk and eat whatever we want.” It took Lydia almost half an hour to find a parking space; the Near North was full of creeps. Just last month, some girl from the Bible school was raped and stuffed in an alley dumpster behind Second City. Jim Belushi on stage, impersonating a pervert, and that poor girl only a hundred yards away. Even the wrong kind of glance or an unintended nudge on a well-lit comer could be lethal. Hadn't she read that every third person on the Chicago streets carried a gun?

Bruce would have stopped anywhere and hunched over like a grunt, oblivious to shadows, slapping the pocket where he carried a small spray can of drugstore burglar repellent. “Vietnam, Lyd. It's all the Nam.” But Lydia stared exhausted into the glassy tabletop, ignoring the conversation, remembering a large sunlit calliope under oak trees she and Bruce rode on together somewhere. Where had they been, New Orleans on vacation, Milwaukee in search of graffiti?

Full of the jargon of a recent transformation to New Age connoisseur, Natasha was in constant motion, her black page-boy hair flipping about and her dark button eyes gleaming translucently as she quickly studied almost everyone in the restaurant. Hanging fems swung cozy above her head in nets of macrame. The lake was wet in the moonlight, Lydia thought, and frowned. Does that make any sense?

Rock music pounded into her forehead. Her internal word-buzz made response impossible.
Always under surveillance,
some half-conscious voice whispered. “Isn't it nifty,” said Natasha, “for women to get together and astral-project?” “Yes, that's certainly
nifty,”
said Pam, a thin bony woman with narrow lips. Natasha's cheeks colored; her eyes lighted on Lydia, then skimmed an exhibit of photos hung above each booth. The snapshots were fashionably scrawled with dark crayon and heavy pencil. “We've got to create ourselves by
talking,”
Pam said. “Language isn't a structure of ideas or regulations to be followed. One thing doesn't have to lead to another. We've got to stand outside our condition and say what needs to be said.” “What I'd like to do,” Lydia replied, “is put everybody in a comfortable box, with cotton and newspaper, and keep the boxes in a safe fireproof place.”

Pam pursed her lips, an eyebrow cocked to hold back a sardonic thin-faced reply. “I know a place that can do that for you,” she finally said, leaning a little forward, her voice measured. “It's called a mausoleum.” Stopping twice to flirt, a waitress swung her wraparound red skirt like a dancer, defdy avoiding a hand that yearned for her waist, and sashayed to the table with more wine. Lydia stared at her dessert spoon, irritation crawling into her forehead and nestling there, pinching the place where Natasha said everyone had a third eye. Her whole life sounded absurd, like one of her mother's movies or small talk about Rush Week and European summers at the only college ball she ever attended, all the girls dressed in gold or silver strapless formals, their bustlines tinted by shadows and soft lights. Lydia had walked away from her date. At her apartment she had plunged into jeans and listened to Mahler all evening, so intimidated and outraged by the ball and each perfectly-placed kiss curl or corsage that she was barely able to be civil and apologize the next day to her date. I could be one of Bruce's soap operas, she thought. Botched marriage, wretched job, phone calls to New York.

“Muhammed Ali got beat,” Bruce said on the phone. “Steve McQueen was so shriveled with cancer he looked pregnant.” She wanted to sip a mug of steaming coffee and savor the morning's normal dreariness: typewriters clacking, the low hum of voices through paper-thin partitions. “What do you do, read old newspapers?” she asked. “What does any of that stuff have to do with you?” She stared from her tiny window overlooking the Loop, gnawing on Bruce's remarks for signs of malice or spite. “Look, Lydia, come see me for Christmas. I want you here. New York is Andy Warhol, Chicago is Norman Rockwell. Come eat some Campbell's Soup.” Shoppers in the street, dressed in rusk and autumn greens, held down skirts and finger-brushed hair in a losing batde with a brisk wind. “I love you, Lyd. Come east, come swim like a dolphin.”

Lydia rocked, alone on the porch swing, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter by her side, trying to inhabit the present like a richly-papered room with a view. Wind ebbed and flowed. Her mother's old two-story house, nesded in a neighborhood protected by the largest private police force in the country, the University of Chicago cadets, creaked in counterpoint to rusty squeaking chains. She tried to let her thoughts seep into shady spaces between her nerves. Even on the commuter train from Hyde Park to the Loop each morning, her fear of strangers made her absent-minded. What was I thinking? she would wonder, distracted by the smooth electric click of the train, its familiar odor of vinyl and rubber, afterscent of perfume and perspiration. The stations passed with a squeal of brakes, an afterimage of wooden platforms, mile posts clicking past like metronomes.

“Lydia,” Robin said in the kitchen. She was munching on a piece of French bread. “All day I've dealt with nerds, stupids, idiots, morons, imbeciles, dwarfs, and dufuses.” She caught her breath. “Even a turd or two. Let's go somewhere, we can leave a trail of breadcrumbs for the birds to eat all up.” Lydia sipped her coffee. “You've earned a mouthful of soap with that language.” Robin leafed through the magazine on the kitchen table. “How to survive with a man. How to survive without a man. What to do with cellulite. How to know when he's unfaithful. Danger signs of drugs.” She made a face. “Lydia, either you read that junk all evening or spend quality time with your kid. It's a three-minute world, my teacher always says. Is that all the time you're going to give me?” They decided on ice cream. Lydia's mother was dozing in the love seat, her whitened hair sprayed with silver shifting light from an old movie. Standing near her, Lydia became giddy and leaned against the door frame. “Let's go,” Robin said, grabbing her hand. Lydia felt like a refugee, arriving in time for the new era of television, of machines propelled through air by nothing but high-octane fuel, of computers full of private investigations. “It's Humphrey Bogart,” she said. “Shouldn't we stay and watch?”

When they returned, her mother had switched on the ceiling lights, something she rarely did, and stood next to her chair, facing the door, her arms folded across her chest. Through the window, streedight splashed and glimmered among unraked leaves. Humphrey Bogart, trench-coated, walked across the tarmac in the rain. “It's Bruce,” Claire said. “You'd better call.” “Did Bogart kill somebody, Claire?” Robin asked. “What is it?” Lydia said, adrenaline pumping. “He's in the hospital. The number's next to the phone.”

Someone had peppered him with rice and buckshot from a sawed-off shotgun. The aim had been awry, though, and most of the grains of rice didn't even penetrate the skin. But his eyes were bandaged, and there could be some permanent damage. “I know it's late, Lydia,” Bruce said, “but I want you here. There's something weird with my karma. I need you.”

Lydia rocked on the porch in early light until Natasha arrived to take her to the airport. “A sawed-off shotgun, Lydia? I thought those creeps used Saturday-night specials.” She squeezed Lydia's hand. “He sounds fine. A little trauma might do him some good, if you know what I mean. Cool him down, maybe. If you don't watch color TV, you start to think the grass is black.” Lydia drummed her fingers on the leather seatcover of the BMW. She stared at the blue-white sparks of a rocking commuter train beside the highway. “You're talking gibberish. Anyway, it's the flying. All I can think about is that.”

“Well, don't worry. Thousands of planes fly every day. O'Hare's the busiest in the world.” An emergency van streaked past, lights flashing, horn bleeping. “Oh, great,” Lydia said. “Planes fly every day, right? So there's no risk?” She put a cigarette back in its box and chewed her fingernail.

Natasha started talking about EST—Erhard Seminar Training. “Werner asks a really profound question. Suppose you were sent from the planet Mars to Earth to help everyone live better, and suppose you couldn't go home until you succeeded. What would you do?”

At the airport, she stepped into a dream that didn't end until she returned to Chicago. She tried to listen to her heartbeat above the roar of the engine. A baby cried behind her. Each pop song on the earphones took her three minutes closer to a safe landing. Frank Sinatra, Jack Jones, Don Ho. Each cigarette was part of a chain she could hold between her fingers. Coffin nails, holding the plane together as it tunneled into the light of morning. Up, down. Three minutes. She tried chanting, a trick Bruce practiced. I love my life, I love my life, I love my life. I love Robin, I love my mother. I love Bruce.