Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Buzzy was short and square and so hirsute that black chest and arm hairs crawled from his shirt apertures as if they were trying to escape. He had a low forehead and a piratical Sicilian nose, and he had been one of the first of Atlanta’s young bachelors, as he called himself, to adopt the collar-brushing hair and mustache of the flower children. He looked, said Matt, whom he worshiped and emulated as nearly as possible, and who detested and regularly insulted him, like a hairy telephone booth. Buzzy worked nominally for his father, who also insulted him but made up for it with an enormous, unlimited allowance and more playthings than Howard Hughes had. But in actuality Buzzy spent his time trying to screw every wellborn Atlanta debutante he came within range of, and trying to be Matt Comfort. He was conceited in the profound way only the adored only son of an Italian mama can be, glaringly conspicuous in his manner and dress and consumption of goods and services, and underfoot at Downtown so often that Culver Carnes thought for a while that Matt had hired him. That was Buzzy’s finest hour.

  He just happened to come into restaurants where we were lunching, just happened to be at the openings of the new clubs and lounges that we were invited to, just happened to have talked his father into setting him up in the penthouse apartment at the Howell House, where Matt lived in far less splendor on a lower floor. He had, it was said, a round, satin-covered bed with a mirror over it, a new XKE Jaguar every year, a powerful inboard motor boat berthed up on Lake Lanier that he had named the Downtown II, and an endless stash of liquor and recreational drugs in both apartment and boat. Many of Atlanta’s prettiest girls dated him—once. No one, debutante or girl Friday, dated him much more than that. There was talk about Buzzy DiCiccio, vague and gray as smoke: that he had no boundaries, went too far, had sinister friends in dark shirts and white suits with no visible means of support who hung around him, had a strange, canted streak of cruelty, a darkness in him. To know him casually was to think him simply a rich buffoon who aspired to preppiedom and who could not be insulted or driven away. To know him a little better was to know you were very wrong about that. Everyone I knew who knew Buzzy was just a shade afraid of him under the contempt. Everyone but Matt.

  He came around the side of the house grinning and swaggering. He wore tartan swim trunks and a blue oxford cloth shirt loose over it, both abysmally wrinkled. He wore tinted round wire-rimmed sunglasses. He wore, as Matt often did, Bass Weejuns without socks. The only difference that I could see was that a small gold cross or pendant of some sort glinted in the mat of black hair on his chest, and gold and diamonds winked from his short, hairy fingers.

  At his side, honey hair cascading over her face, eyelet cover-up only marginally covering a minute black swimsuit, sauntered Alicia, hip shot and lazy.

  “Well, he’s finally succeeded in being you, Matt,” Hank grinned. “Right down to the accessories.”

  “Bite my ass,” Matt said. He did not move on his chaise, but I could sense that his small body had stiffened like a terrier’s on point.

  “Sorry we’re late,” Buzzy shouted, “but I couldn’t get this girl out of the shower.”

  “Buzzy, you are such a fool,” Alicia said in her wispy voice, and he grinned ferally.

  “I hope you got plenty of booze, Oliver,” he said to Oliver Fairchild, who inclined his head politely toward him. “This pretty thing has plumb wore me out.”

  Among his other less than endearing traits, Buzzy continually affected what he thought to be a Southern accent. It gave his offensive words about Alicia a cast of slow, thick sleaziness. I am sure that I saw Teddy’s father flinch ever so slightly.

  “Plenty, plenty,” Oliver Fairchild said. “Let me get you something. Let’s see, I’ve got gin and tonic, and—”

  “A double one of those for me,” Buzzy said, looking to see what Matt was drinking. “And another for this little gal here.”

  “I don’t believe I care for anything,” Alicia said, and coiled herself down like a cat in the sun on the grass next to Matt’s chaise.

  “Hello, boss,” she said.

  “Alicia,” Matt said, and nodded. He drank down the rest of his drink.

  “I take it you know Buzzy,” he said to Oliver Fairchild. “His daddy sells lots of cars.”

  “Well, I certainly know his father,” Oliver Fairchild said, smiling at Buzzy. “See him at the Commerce Club sometimes. He’s always talking about his boy, real proud of you, he is. Glad to meet you, Buzzy.”

  “Oliver,” Buzzy said, nodding carelessly. But his swarthy face reddened.

  We drank in the sort of silence that Buzzy habitually engendered for a small space of time, and then Buzzy said, “I was just with Ben Cameron, Matt, and he told me about the new series you’re doing. The Focus thing. Fine idea; I told him so. Told him what I’ll tell you: that’s right up my alley. I want to be a part of that baby. I’ve got some dynamite ideas; I’ll tell you over lunch or dinner one night next week. I could take one of the committees off your hands—”

  “We’re not very far along with it, Buzzy,” Matt said.

  I looked at him, my heart beginning to beat faster.

  “Are we going to do it, then?” I said. “I mean, are you thinking about it?”

  Matt looked at me silently.

  “Don’t I take care of you, Smoky?” Brad said.

  I looked at him; he was smiling carelessly, lounging in his chair, but there was something steely in his face. Matt turned his eyes to Brad, but he still did not speak.

  “Yeah, we’re going to do it,” he said finally. “As you probably already know. Ben Cameron went to see Culver and Dr. King the same day, and it was a done deal before I even knew about it. Ben insisted on you and Geary, and King insisted on John Howard, and Culver almost wet his knickers agreeing. It’s going to be a monthly series, the Focus Report. The first one is going to cover day care; you’ll get on it in the next week or so, when Lucas is back. I’m not even going to ask how you managed that one, Smoky, although it does appear your boyfriend had a little something to do with it.”

  He smiled at Brad. It was not a smile you’d particularly want to see again. I blushed red and hot. I knew how it must seem to him: the two major stories I had done so far had been at the behest of someone else. I thought that I would pay for Focus.

  “Just a suggestion to Ben the other day, when Smoky and I were at the house,” Brad smiled lazily. “He was there trying to soften my old man up to do something about Boy. It was nothing more than you and I have talked about one time or another, Matt; trying to get Focus to do something concrete, get some real teeth. I didn’t push Smoky on Ben. She and he hit it off immediately.”

  “I’ll bet,” Alicia murmured.

  “Actually, it’s a good idea, and Ben got it through to Culver when it would have taken me a year,” Matt said, and I sighed in relief. He could be fair; I forgot that sometimes. Fair and generous. I was surprised only because I knew that he did not like Brad. He tolerated him when he joined us for drinks or lunch, but he did not treat him with the affectionate, careless jibing that he accorded his staff. Brad knew it and I knew it. Brad professed not to understand it, but I did: I was one of his people, even when he was annoyed with me, as he often was. Matt did not easily allow anyone to lay a claim to one of Comfort’s People.

  “I’m really doing it?” I said.

  “You really are. After, of course, you’ve finished the guide and your YMOG every month.”

  “All right, look, tell me what I’m going to be doing for it,” Buzzy said. “Cameron all but insisted. How about this? We could use a different one of Dad’s demonstrators every month to…to deliver food baskets down in the projects, or something. Yeah, Dad would love that, and we’d get hell’s own amount of free air time—”

  Hank made a stifled snorting sound and took a hasty gulp of his drink, and Teddy got up abruptly, murmuring something about helping her mother. Alicia smiled sweetly at Buzzy and then at Matt. Matt stared at Buzzy, and then said, “That’s the shittiest idea I ever heard in
my life, Buzzy. But—” and he held up a hand to Buzzy’s purpling face, “I appreciate the thought. Tell you what: want to be the next YMOG? Smoky could interview you one night this week, or more, if it takes it. Take her to dinner; we’ll pay for it. Run you in the July issue, with the flag on the cover—”

  “Well, I could probably work that in,” Buzzy said casually, his face suffusing with red pride. “I’ll call you, Smoky.”

  “Do,” I said. My punishment for the Focus piece, I knew, had begun.

  In the middle of the next week Hank and I went out to the airport after work to meet Tom Gordon, who was flying in from Washington. Lucas. Geary was staying on over the long weekend with his family in Baltimore. I don’t know why that surprised me, but it did. I had somehow never thought of Lucas as having parents, a hometown, an everyday arena in a particular time and place. He seemed to exist, to me, only within the realm of my comprehension. I said as much to Hank, and he laughed.

  “If Lucas Geary falls in an empty forest, will he make a sound?”

  “If Lucas Geary did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him,” I added, laughing, too.

  Rush hour traffic was bad that evening, and we were half an hour late getting to the airport. Hank had told Tom to meet him outside the Delta Airlines baggage claim, and when we pulled up, he was there, leaning against a concrete pillar with his coat over his shoulder and his shirtsleeves rolled up his dark arms, staring at the ground. His black hair fell over his eyes, and there was fatigue in every line of his tall, loose body, but he still looked as elegant and attenuated as a fashion sketch in Esquire. As I always did when I had not seen him for a while, I thought what a spectacularly handsome man he was. I felt the familiar small tug of shyness, of diffidence, that the sheer physical impact of Tom could produce in me. He was as dear to me, now, as any friend I had, but it was not possible to look upon him and wonder, sometimes, what those arms would feel like around you, how that mouth would feel…

  I shook my head slightly in annoyance, and Hank touched the horn, and Tom looked up and smiled his quick white smile, and was simply Tom again, funny and eccentric and sweet. I felt a rush of affection for him that had nothing to do with his arms and mouth.

  “Going my way, sailor?” I leered out the window, and he reached in and kissed me on the forehead and threw his bag in the backseat and climbed in.

  “You bet I am,” he said. “You two look better to me than anything I’ve seen in the last two weeks.”

  “Bad trip?” Hank said, maneuvering the car out into the stream of Atlanta-bound traffic.

  “Not so good,” Tom said, and I looked around at him in surprise. Tom was an inveterate travel enthusiast; his office was full of maps and guide books and airline schedules, and he often dropped such wistful bits of arcana as, “Do you know what you’d hit first if you sailed straight out from Saint Simon’s Island?”

  “What?” one of us would say. “England? Ireland?”

  “Madagascar.”

  His face was slack and his eyes were closed wearily. I thought suddenly that he would look like that when he was very old, or ill: handsome, distinguished, but depleted. Empty.

  “Tell,” I said.

  “Not yet. First I’d like to go to Harry’s and have about eight beers and a steak sandwich. Lucas has had us living off stuff like lox and bagels and gefilte fish. I’ve been dreaming about Harry’s. Y’all got time?”

  “Sure,” Hank said. I nodded.

  “I thought Lucas was Catholic, if he was anything,” Hank said.

  “He is. Go figure,” Tom said.

  We drove in the soft twilight to Harry’s, on Spring Street, and went inside the dark, low building and found a booth. From outside you could hear, faintly, the swish of traffic outbound to the suburbs, and an occasional blaring horn, but inside, in the high, corrallike wooden booths there was only light from the guttering candles and the pink and green jukebox, and the sound of soft voices from other booths, and country music. The table-tops and the backs and sides of the booths were so crosshatched with carvings—initials, names, dates, phrases—that they were like some kind of living moss, a fur of lives frozen forever on the tundras of Harry’s tabletops. I ordered a steak sandwich and a Coke and Hank and Tom had beers, and we sat back and sighed. It was a womblike darkness, warm and elemental. I liked Harry’s. It was a rest from the places we usually went.

  Harry’s made a proper steak sandwich, with black-grilled filets, smothered in onions and doused with steak sauce. They sounded awful and tasted wonderful. When we had finished and ordered coffee, Hank looked at Tom, and said, “So?”

  Tom puffed out his cheeks and exhaled slowly, and said, “So. I don’t know. It…wasn’t what I thought. Out there, I mean. The youth culture, the ones who hold the be-ins, the ones who make such great editorial photographs. They don’t seem to be about anything, except dressing up and smoking pot. Drugs; Hank, I didn’t know there were so many drugs out there. Nobody is…straight. Virtually all of ’em are stoned, on LSD, or banana peels, or Mellow Yellow, or whatever is new and cheap this week. It’s this kind of mishmash of drugs and music and sex—my God, the sex, they do it everywhere, with anybody, all the time—and astrology, the I Ching, incense, slogans: Make love, not war. Turn on, tune in, drop out. Power to the people. And the rhetoric. They call it freedom, or license, love, community—but it’s nothing. They don’t do anything. It’s not anything.”

  “What about the radicals?” Hank said. “What about the activists?”

  “Radicals? Activists? Not in that bunch, not in the freaks and heads we went looking for. They’re all too stoned. Any sense we got of radicalism, of activism, centers around the war. That’s going to be mean, children. You can feel it coming, you can feel the anger and the violence building around that baby. Marches, riots, even Dr. King came out against it in New York. That’s the story we probably ought to be following, if we’re going to do anything national on the kids. I don’t think we have a real sense down here how big and bad that war is going to get, and how fast…”

  He paused, and drank off his coffee, and rubbed his eyes hard with his fist.

  “There’s something coming,” he said. “Everything’s changing. Everything is about to blow. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s out there. There’s this song, ‘For What It’s Worth.’ Stephen Sills. It starts out, ‘There’s something happening here/what it is ain’t exactly clear.’ Everybody’s singing it out there. It’s like everybody feels it…”

  The back of my neck felt cool, as if a small wind had kissed it, passing by.

  “What do you mean, Tom?” I said.

  “It’s so vague, just a feeling, but God, it’s a strong one,” he said. “You know, you’ve got this whole youth thing; we all know about that, the funny costumes and the music and all; it’s what Matt sent us out after. But now, suddenly, there’s this whole new counterculture thing springing up, that says that everybody who isn’t them is the enemy, the bad guys. I mean everybody. That’s us, for Christ’s sake. You and me and Hank. Us. And all along we thought we were on the side of the angels. All this rage…

  “And then, the Negroes. It’s not nonviolence now, not anymore, not in the big cities where we’ve been. It’s militance, black power, Black Panthers. Guns. It doesn’t feel good to be in the middle of it out there. They don’t want us, not any of us. Not even the ‘good’ whites, the ones who believe, who marched, who fought—I don’t know where that leaves most of us. Hell, I thought we were just getting used to the nonviolent business, comfortable with that. And now there’s this other. It’s like the movement died before it really got going, and some kind of revolution is being born.”

  “God, it sounds ominous,” Hank said, after a moment. I felt an involuntary shiver shake me, and rubbed the top of my bare arms with my hands. Tom looked at me, and I forced a smile and said, “Harry keeps his air-conditioning too high.”

  “I don’t mean to sound apocalyptic,” Tom said. “I’m probably just tired, and
I know I’m confused. I mean, shit. You’ve got yippies and hippies and lovers and motherfuckers and draft dodgers and bra burners and pot and LSD and Black Panthers and freaks and gays and acid rock—I don’t know what it all means. I can’t take it in, somehow. I think maybe I’m just…past this. Too old.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said vehemently. I knew that he was only thirty-one. But then, perhaps that was, now, too old. I might be, myself. Too old, at twenty-seven.

  “Will you do the story that way?” Hank said. “To reflect that…that dichotomy? It could be good, but you’d have to add a good bit of text—”

  “I don’t know if there is a story out there, not a single one,” Tom said. “If there is, it’s damned sure not what we thought it was. It’s not a children’s crusade. It’s not a crusade of any kind. I think about that Yeats poem, you know, ‘the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’ It’s more like a war. It’s like the whole country is suddenly at war with itself.”

  There was a pause, and then he said, “I’m going to ask Matt to freelance the art direction out. Rethink it, make an editorial piece of it. The photos should be good. Lucas was excited. I just know I can’t do it.”

  There did not seem to be anything left to say. We finished our coffee and drove Tom back downtown to the Y. It was full dark, and all along Spring Street the thick, poignant smell of mimosa drifted into the open windows.

  “I think urban mimosa trees can make themselves invisible,” I said. “You can always smell mimosa in cities in the spring, but you can never see them. It’s like they’re a different species.”

  “It’s how they survive,” Tom said. “If they were visible, some asshole would cut them down and put up parking lots.”