“I’m going to fix my face,” I said. “Order me some potato pancakes with sour cream and coffee, will you? Did I tell you that I came here with a girl from Our Lady my first day in town, and she took off with some guys and left me by myself?”
“No. It must have made quite an impression on you, to be abandoned at the IHOP,” Brad smiled.
“What made the real impression on me was that she had birth control pills in her purse. I saw them in the ladies’ room, before she got mad at me and left,” I said.
He looked at me pleasantly, obviously waiting for me to go on and tell him the startling thing that had so impressed me. I made a small, helpless gesture with my hands.
“I just…in Corkie, nobody takes them,” I said. “I’d never even really heard of anybody who did. The Pope…I’d just never seen any.”
I let my hands fall.
“Lots of girls in Atlanta have them, I guess,” he said mildly. “Not that they…sleep around all that much, but you know, in case. It’s better to take care of yourself than to trust some stupid guy to do it, you know.”
I had not thought of it that way before.
“I guess so,” I said, and got up and went into the ladies’ room. It was as dim and grubby as I remembered, and for a moment Rachel’s brave, slatternly presence was overwhelmingly vivid to me, so much so that I whirled around from the spotted mirror. But there was no one there but me, and my underwater-looking image. I wondered where Rachel was, what she was doing on this first morning of the New Year. No one at Our Lady had seen her again by the time I moved out.
When I sat back down in our booth, newly powdered and lipsticked and combed, our food was steaming in front of us, and Brad was pouring cream into his coffee. He smiled at me and raised his cup, and I raised mine to him.
“Happy New Year, Smoky O’Donnell,” he said. “I hope it will be everything you ever dreamed it would, and more.”
And it almost was. At least in the beginning weeks of 1967, I could not have imagined wanting to live in any other time and place, any other way. Downtown became, for me, a perfect biosphere, providing everything I needed to survive and flourish. In all that time, nothing outside its venue was ever completely real to me. It gave me shelter, warmth, laughter, companionship, friendship beyond any I had ever imagined, exhilaration, a deep sense of moving smoothly in the precise groove I was born for, and the patina of heady specialness that is, of course, what the young most avidly seek. It was why we poured in droves into Atlanta in those cusp years; Atlanta was a town that dealt in specialness. It was still new enough and small enough to celebrate the modest gifts brought to it, and large enough to need them.
There was an electronic sign in front of a large apartment complex that Teddy and I passed going to and from downtown every day; on it flashed, on and off, day and night, the precise number of souls living in the Atlanta metropolitan area. When we drove by it on the day in early 1967 that it passed one million, I began, abruptly and without warning, to cry. A million. A million people, eccentric and particular and kicking, living in this city that was now my city, too. And it was a city; nobody could argue with all those numbers. Take that, New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. Take that, Birmingham and Charlotte and Jacksonville. Take that, Corkie.
After that, the sign in front of the Darlington Apartments became to me as the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock to Gatsby: talisman and totem and pure panacea. When I think of the city now, from wherever I happen to be, I see in my mind two things first. I see that sign, and I see the dancer in the glass cage over Peachtree Street. As afterimages, they have, I think, a singular enchantment.
Also in those weeks, there was Brad. Ours was by then a full-fledged relationship, an involvement that was, for me and I think for him, close to total, though for some reason I shied away from thinking of it as a love affair. But it was more than just dating; I knew that, too. We saw each other perhaps twice or three times a week: always once on weekends, to do something formal and planned and structured, such as dinner and a play or concert, or a movie with friends of his with a late supper afterward. At other times he might come with us for drinks after work with Matt and the staff at the Top of Peachtree and once or twice at the Commerce Club, or he would have lunch if he happened to be downtown. He often was. His office was at the firm’s headquarters over in the industrial area near Georgia Tech, but he came in town several times a week to take customers and prospects to lunch, or attend meetings. Brad was the front man for the firm, the one whose persona was adjudged best by his father for dealing with the public. At the time I met him, he belonged to a dozen boards and committees and organizations. If he disliked it, he never spoke of it. He was totally a man of his time and place, and Atlanta was unquestionably his frog pond. Nobody doubted he would be one of its premier merchant princes one day. He was born, Matt teased me and Brad, to be an YMOG.
We did not go back to his parents’ house. We did not even speak of it again. Since he lived in the guest house behind the family swimming pool, we did not go there, either; we spent what time we had alone together at Teddy’s and my apartment in Colonial Homes. Because of that, and because of the hours I kept, our physical relationship did not progress any further in nature than it did in the beginning. It became more intense, I suppose, but in essence we were still at the stage of long good-night kisses. I don’t know if that bothered Brad, but it never did me. Often, when I thought about Brad Hunt, I could not separate his image from the amorphous haze of joyous exhilaration that enveloped Downtown. In those early days Brad and the magazine were all a piece of the same thing.
The only cold wind in my Eden was Matt’s refusal to let me do another byline piece for the magazine. My YMOG piece on Brad would not run until March, and in the gray hiatus between then and the holidays he kept me more than busy with captions and subheads and the interminable listings for the entertainment guide. He would give me no reason for it except that he needed me most there.
“But anybody could do that; it’s just a matter of spending hours on the phone and typing,” I argued. “Sister could do it. Alicia could do it.”
“Sister is not a senior editor, and neither is Alicia,” he said, not looking up from the proofs he was reading. “The people who list with us are prime ad prospects. They don’t want a secretary calling them. Don’t bug me about this, Smoky. Pay your dues and then we’ll talk.”
“How long will that be?” I could not seem to let it go.
“How fast can you pay?” he said.
And so the days passed, and I spent them on the telephone, and at the typewriter. And despite the dearth of real assignments, I fell more and more deeply in love with the people at Downtown who were now my family.
I remember an evening when Matt took us all to the Commerce Club for drinks after work. He did this perhaps once a month, when we had put another issue to bed and he was as pleased with us as he ever was. I suppose he might have done it more often, as he had carte blanche from the chamber, who paid his tab. It was one of the perks of his office that helped to make up for his paltry salary. But he kept it as a special treat because, as he said once, he saw no sense in putting weapons in Culver Carnes’s hands. Especially since the booze and the view were better at the Top of Peachtree.
But on this night he was pleased with us, especially since the February issue looked as if it might actually come out within five or six days of its due date. We often, in those days, missed it by a couple of weeks, and on one legendary occasion before I came, the magazine was twenty-three days late coming out. The story is that when Culver Carnes came roaring into Matt’s office threatening a mass firing Matt got on the phone in his presence and sold some overwhelmed soul a twelve-month, full-color ad campaign, inside front cover. That incident, apocryphal or not, gave birth to a favorite magazine epithet: “Great save!”
At any rate, there we were, in that mahogany-paneled, leather and lemon oil-fragrant, Oriental-carpeted holy of holies, sitting in the outer lounge because wo
men were only allowed in the inner sanctum on Thursday evenings, drinking old-fashioneds and basking in Matt’s foolishness and our own wonderfulness. Men whom I had seen in the pages of the newspapers and on local television came in and out and spoke to Matt and Tom and Hank—Charlie, by then, did not often join us—and gave me and Teddy and particularly Alicia courtly nods. We were on our second round of drinks and Matt on his third; he had taken off his watch and dumped it, with the change in his pockets, on the tabletop, and was fidgeting with them while he talked. His voice was rich with humor and ebullience. Something near to electricity rolled off him in waves.
“I’m going to go around the table and ask every one of you what’s the most embarrassing thing you remember,” he said. “The one who did the dumbest thing gets to jump Alicia’s bones.”
“Oh, wow, big deal,” Teddy said.
Alicia tossed her fall of honey hair and made a small face at Matt.
“You start, Gordon,” he said to Tom, and Tom thought and then said, “It was either the time I was holding a piece of my birthday cake and leaned over to get a drink out of the hose faucet and a chicken came up and grabbed the cake, or the time I was necking with my date out in front of her house way out in the country and her father came running out with his shotgun and I threw the car in reverse and stripped the gears and had to back home fourteen miles with my head hanging out the window. I couldn’t move my neck for three days.”
We collapsed in laughter. It was hard to picture gentle, elegant Tom, with his dark falcon’s face and his worn, beautifully tailored suits, prey to chickens and Three-Stooges pratfalls. He might have owned a pent-house high above midtown Manhattan. But I knew that his family was not far from downright poor, and that in fact he was forever dodging his ex-wife’s creditors and lawyer, and would not have eaten regularly if the magazine had not been accorded so many comp meals. I thought of his sweetness and humor, and felt an arrow of love for him pierce me.
“Teddy,” Matt said.
“When my tights fell off in the middle of a cheer in front of the entire stadium,” said Teddy, who had been a cheerleader at the prestigious Westminster schools.
“That’s the Teddiest thing I ever heard,” Matt said, and Teddy flushed and laughed.
“Hank?”
“When I told my entire seventh-grade class that they were conducting scientific experiments in the boiler room at school because I’d heard some of the guys say that Isobel Carsuncki was selling her body down there,” Hank Cantwell said, and I reached over and hugged him. Hank was, in his heart, still the innocent who could have believed such a thing, and in that bourbon-warmed moment I loved him, too. I loved them all, all of us.
“Sister?”
“Oh, Mr. Comfort, it was awful! Once when I was in the Miss Junior Lowndes County contest I had these falsies, you know? Actually it was Mama who said I needed them; she said it would make my costume fit better, and my posture and all, and so I was doing my baton twirling in front of the judges, and they just popped right out of there and hit the stage and bounced. One of them ended up in a judge’s lap.”
It was a long moment before anyone could speak, we were howling so with merciless laughter.
“Did you win?” I said, ruffling Sister’s hair, that had come loose from the headband she always wore. She was not that much younger than I, but somehow people often ruffled her fair hair.
“Oh, yeah, but it was still embarrassing,” she said.
“Alicia.” Matt looked over at Alicia, who was licking drops of maraschino cherry juice from her fingers. She always begged the cherries from our drinks. She looked back at him sleepily, and the air between them seemed to thicken and shimmer. How on earth could anybody miss what they are to each other? I thought.
“I can’t remember ever being very embarrassed about anything,” she murmured, and we all laughed again, and the men catcalled and whistled. She seemed in that moment as totally female, as exotically beautiful, as any woman I had ever seen, on or off a movie screen. How on earth did that bleak, fallow-dirt little mountain town of hers produce such a creation? What sort of life could she have had, to become what she was? It was as if she had invented herself a moment before, out of the air.
“What about you, Matt?” Hank said, and Matt grinned. “It was just two or three years ago, at the National Chamber convention in New York,” he said. “I was sitting in that garden restaurant thing at the Museum of Modern Art waiting for Culver, and I was drinking a Coke and eating potato chips. This Negro guy sits down across from me, a dignified cat in a three-piece suit, looked like he might be a UN delegate or dictator of an emerging nation. And he’s eating chips and drinking a Coke, too. So we nod, and I go back to my newspaper and he pulls out his, and then I reach for a chip from my bag and he’s got his hand in it, and I glared at him, and he ate the chip and I took one and went back behind my paper, and when I put my hand back in my bag, his was back in there, too. So I thought, Well, hell, I love Dr. King better’n my own papa, but there ain’t no way you’re gonna steal my chips, bubba, and I glared at him and said, ‘Excuse me,’ and jerked the chip bag over to my side. So he looks back at me a minute, and then gets up and walks off. He never did say a word. And when I got up, I saw my full chip bag lying on the ground under my chair.”
When we had stopped laughing, he looked at me.
“Smoky,” he said.
“Every time an issue comes out and I don’t have a byline,” I said.
I thought I had pushed him too far, because he stopped jiggling and fiddling with his change and watch and stared at me, the cold green stare that I had come to dread. But then he smiled. It was a strange smile.
“Well, we can’t have that, can we?” he said, and the moment broke and the evening flowed on. Presently we left the Commerce Club and everyone went home, or wherever it was that they went at night.
“I didn’t like the looks of that smile,” Teddy said as we waited for her car to come careening down from the multilevel parking lot.
“Well, at least it was a smile,” I said. But I had not liked it, either.
Matt called me into his office the next afternoon, just as I arrived back from lunch with Hank and Teddy at Emile’s. When I entered his office I could not see him for a moment. It was a mess of mind- and eye-boggling magnitude, its usual state at the end of one issue and the beginning of another. Matt was proud of his office, and picky about it as he never was about his clothing, but toward deadline, as time shortened and pressures grew, he forgot about it and allowed it to become the catchall for the staff’s assorted junk, until it reached the stage it was in now. A living example of entropy, Hank called it. I knew that in a day or two Matt would sound the taxi horn and bellow for us to come get our goddamned junk out of his office now and it would go back to its original Architectural Digest stylishness. But for now it looked like the aftermath of an explosion in a shop run by an insane junkman.
“Come in here, dear heart,” he said, and I followed his voice and found him sitting on the floor with Tom Gordon, looking at spread-out photographs. I picked my way over the piles of proofs and ribbons of galleys and assorted coats and parkas and an old blanket that someone had left on the floor and stood over him and Tom, looking down at the photographs.
“Oh, they’re beautiful,” I said. “Are you going to do something with them?”
They were beautiful. They were color shots of antique airplanes in all their aspects, close-ups and in midair, caught in the frozen grace of aerobatics, spidery open biplanes and monoplanes with fragile bones shining through the fabric of their bodies and wings, the wings themselves as attenuated and gossamer as dragonflies’. In some of them men in leather helmets and scarves held up circled thumbs and forefingers and grinned into the teeth of the wind; in others, they were one with the planes, caught in the wild rush of space and motion. From the light, I thought the photos must have been taken near dawn.
“We thought we might use them,” Matt said. “There’s a big chapter of the A
ntique Airplane Association of America here. These guys build and fly these things all over the country. There’s a big fly-in in April. I’d like to do a photo-essay on it.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “It would be wonderful. Who took them?”
Matt grinned and jerked a finger at the pile of coats I had just stepped over. I looked down. A head emerged from them, flaming red and exploding with wiry curls that spilled down a vastly freckled face and made a wild copper beard. The beard split in a cheerfully feral grin, and the narrow blue eyes above it slitted shut with the grin. A child’s snub nose nestled in the drooping red mustache. It was like being ambushed by a jovial jack-o’-lantern. I gave a small shriek and stepped back, but not before the jack-o’-lantern produced a camera from somewhere and shot neatly up my miniskirt.
“Meet Lucas Geary,” Matt said, and Lucas Geary unfolded himself out of the pile of coats and rose to his feet in sections. He was very tall and seemed put together entirely of wire. He put out the hand that did not hold the camera.
“I am pleased to make your acquaintance, whoever you are,” he said. His voice was the musical treble that you heard on every street corner and it every pub in Corkie. Oh, God, I thought. Another Irishman.
“I am Smoky O’Donnell,” I said, “and if you think it’s funny, shooting that thing up my skirt, think again.”
And I reached out and took the camera from him and unloaded it and spilled the film out onto the floor in a long, curling spiral. The camera was battered and dusty, but expensive, a new Leica. A fine instrument. I knew that much by now.
Matt and Tom and Lucas Geary all looked at me for a moment, and began to laugh.
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