Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “No,” I said dreamily, though I realized suddenly that I was, very hungry. “Don’t let’s go yet. This is so pretty. I never really noticed how pretty stars are over a city. And the frogs sound so nice, and the moss is…wonderful. Don’t you think the moss is wonderful, Luke?”

  Silvery glee, delight, a kind of subterranean, Christmas-morning feeling woke inside me and licked at my consciousness. I felt the soft, velvety air on every inch of my skin.

  “I feel like there’s bubbles in my blood,” I said, giggling. “So do you. I can feel every bubble in your blood, Luke.”

  I ran my hand along his cheek, down his neck and under his shirt along his shoulder. I traced the long line of his arm down to his wrist and over his fingers, one by one. It seemed to me that I could feel every separate atom and platelet of him, every nerve ending, every long fiber of muscle.

  “You’re like an anatomy lesson,” I said, holding his hand up to my mouth and putting my tongue out to touch it. His skin tasted complex and wonderful, somehow like sweet, dried grass with sun on it. “There was a model of a man without his skin in my biology class in high school. You could see how he worked right down to his bones. Can you see how I work down to my bones?”

  He lifted my hand and kissed it, back first, and then the palm. Fire leaped along the veins that ran up my arm. I drew a little shallow breath.

  “Do that again,” I whispered, and he did, to the other hand. More fire, and again, the light shallowness in my breathing. I put my hands out and took his face in them, and held it, feeling the sharp angles and bones under my fingers, feeling the individual hairs of his beard and mustache, at once wiry and silky. I pulled his face down to mine and kissed him, feeling my lips melt and part and merge into his, feeling the fire, sweet and molten, surge deep inside me like lava. He sat stone still for a moment and then pulled me to him hard, and kissed me again and again, until I had no more breath and was all sensation, sensation on every inch of flesh, sensation even at the roots of my hair and the bottoms of my wet bare feet. I could not seem to get close enough to him, could not seem to stop my body moving against his.

  “No, don’t,” I whispered fiercely when he pulled away.

  He held me loosely against the grass, where I had lain back and pulled him down with me, and propped himself on one elbow. His face was large over mine, it shut out the trees and the prickling stars. I could see it very clearly. It was gentle and serious, and I thought he was very beautiful, medieval, with the long lines of his head and the pointed beard and soft mustache. I reached up and traced the line of his eyebrows with the tip of my finger, and then his mouth. He bit my finger gently and then took my hand and ran his tongue over it, as lightly as a butterfly, back and palm and fingers. I made a small sound in my throat and tried to pull him down again, but he resisted.

  “You’re feeling the pot, you know,” he said. His voice was thick, and he cleared his throat.

  “That’s not all I’m feeling,” I said, stretching voluptuously. “Don’t tell me it’s all you’re feeling. I can feel…what you’re feeling.”

  He made a wry face and shifted a little so that he did not press so hard against me.

  “I’ve got no secrets from you, Smokes,” he said.

  “You want to do this, don’t you?” I said into his ear, puffing my breath a little so that it tickled his ear and cheek.

  “Jesus Christ, of course I want to do this,” he said into my hair. “I’ve wanted to do this for longer than you know. But I don’t take advantage of pot first-timers, and I don’t move in on other guys’ territory.”

  “And I thought you were the lover of the Western world,” I said, moving a little so that my body was under his. The parts of my flesh that did not touch his felt cold, hungry, bereft.

  “Oh, I am,” he said. “But I don’t rustle in other guys’ corrals. It’s the only rule I’ve got. Shit, Smoky, stop it.”

  “The other guy’s corral is empty,” I said into his neck.

  I felt his body stiffen slightly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We had a most unloving little scene today at lunch. I walked out on him. I’m not going back.”

  He was silent for a long moment, and then he said, “The Life thing.”

  “Yes.”

  There was another long silence, and then he propped himself up on his elbow again and looked down at me. His face was troubled.

  “So that’s what’s been eating you all night. I guess I ought to say I’m sorry, Smoky, but I’m not. I mean I’m sorry if it hurt you, but I’m not sorry if it ran him off. If he thinks less of you because of that fucking picture, he doesn’t deserve to touch the ground you walk on. What did he think, that it was unseemly, or something?”

  “Or something. He thought it was exceedingly Irish. He said I didn’t know when to stop, that I didn’t have any sense of boundaries, no limits. He turned into his mama right before my eyes, Luke.”

  Luke began to laugh, softly.

  “I know about the old Irish appellation. In some circles it’s worse than nigger. What a fucking prick,” he said. “He’s right, though. You don’t have any limits. You don’t know when to stop. Got no boundaries at all. You’d be an awful liability at the Driving Club for a former YMOG. But it’s what makes you a writer, Smokes. It’s what I saw in you when I first met you. It’s what Matt saw. Christ, all the time you were with Hunt I used to just chomp my teeth thinking what he and his family were going to turn you into.”

  “What?”

  “A robot. Or no, a little wild thing in a cage. Pretty soon your fur would lose its shine and your eyes would lose light, and you’d forget how to run free even if you ever got out. I think sooner or later I would have just grabbed you and run off with you.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I watched it happen to my sister,” he said. “I watched the Baltimore version of Bradley Hunt the Umpteenth and his family turn a vivid, wild young painter into a nervous woman who does covers for the Junior League follies and drinks too much at the country club. A guy can live that kind of life and still do his own thing, but I’ve never seen the woman who could manage it. I don’t know why the hell the YMOGs are drawn to the wild birds, but they are. You can see the results in country club bars and fancy nuthouses all over the South.”

  I laid my head back on his arm and looked up at him. The big pink house on Sea Island, the neat starter house in Collier Hills, the tow-headed children, the stately white wedding at the Cathedral—they all wheeled over my head and his and spiraled up into the opening in the trees that held the stars, and were gone. They might never have been. Only his face was real now, only his body. I reached again for both of them.

  “I want to stay with you,” I said against his lips. “I want to stay tonight.”

  “You sure it’s over? You sure, Smoky?”

  “I’m sure. I gave him back his bracelet.”

  Then I began to laugh. I felt his lips curve against mine with answering laughter.

  “What’s funny now?”

  “I didn’t give him back his birth control pills.”

  He snorted. “Then come on,” he whispered. “Come on and let’s go inside.”

  He pulled me up off the grass and held me hard against him, and we began to walk back up the path toward the street and the dark house above it, and the carriage house behind that. At the bottom of the steep driveway I stumbled, and he swung me up into his arms as easily as if I had been a child. I put my arms around his neck and kissed his face and hair as he walked, carrying me.

  “Aren’t you afraid this is going to be a rebound…you know?” I whispered in his ear. “Aren’t you afraid that afterward I’m going to think it was the night and the wine and the music and all that, and not you at all?”

  He kissed the top of my head, and traced the line of my breast with his finger. I shivered with the sensation; it set my entire body afire once more. I moved against him under the fire’s touch.

  �
��You probably will,” he said into my hair. “But not for long.”

  The next day, when I finally went back to the apartment, Teddy told me that Brad had called several times from Huntsville to apologize. But by then it was far, far too late.

  12

  HAVE YOU COMPLETELY LOST YOUR MIND? HAVE YOU flipped totally out? Breaking up with Brad and taking up with Luke Geary all in the same day? What were you drinking? Did you take anything?”

  At seven o’clock the following night I was sitting on the sofa in clean pajamas with my wet hair wrapped in a towel, eating ham and potato salad from Teddy’s mother’s kitchen and watching Teddy pace back and forth across the living room, waving her arms as if she were conducting an orchestra. The casement windows were open to the warm September evening and I could hear the sound of car doors opening and closing, and laughter, and music pouring from many phonographs. Saturday night in Colonial Homes.

  Teddy had to shout over the sound of the Ramsey Lewis album Luke had lent me. She was in her shortie Peter Max nightshirt with her dark hair in huge rollers; Teddy stopped short of orange juice cans, but only just. She looked like a fierce little woman warrior in an Ionesco play, and I smiled. I had been smiling ever since Luke brought me home. I was very happy.

  “I drank about a zillion drinks and then I smoked grass,” I said. “Neither one was very much fun. But the other was…incredible.”

  “Well, that’s it, then. You were high. Surely you can’t think that getting high and screwing is the way it always is. I mean, the way screwing is when you’re not high—”

  “Yes, I can,” I said.

  When I woke that morning, in Luke’s waterbed in the small bedroom off the big living room of the carriage house, I stretched voluptuously with well-being, realized that I was naked, remembered the night before, and whipped myself into a fetal ball, waiting for the blackness to crash down over me like a tidal wave, waiting to drown in shame.

  Nothing happened. Behind my tight-squeezed lids I still felt wonderful. I was aware of small pullings, tightenings, soreness in places I had never felt before, a great, voluptuous soreness between my legs. Even as I felt my face flame, I moved slightly to better feel it. Warmth spread out from it through my legs and stomach like slow fire. I felt myself smile, even with my face pressed into the pillow.

  I put out a hand to touch Luke and found only empty space. Before I could sit up, before I could even assess his absence, I heard his footsteps and looked up at him through the fingers I had clamped over my eyes.

  He stood over the low bed, wearing only a knotted towel, holding a tray. He had been in the shower; I could see droplets of water still clinging to his beard and mustache, and there were damp comb tracks in his thick, water-dark red hair. The furze of fine red-gold hairs on his arms and legs sparkled with water, too, and he smelled of damp towel and soap and hot coffee. He smelled wonderful. He looked wonderful. Why had I ever thought Lucas Geary was too thin? His narrow body was as supple and smooth as the trunk of a young tree. I wanted to touch it. I wanted to run my hand lightly over it, from his wide, sloping shoulders down his torso and legs to his feet; to touch the scarred foot with my fingers; to trace the long bones and skeins of muscle. He had a body like a swimmer’s. I realized that I did not know if he swam or not. I did not, in fact, know what he did at all, except what we had done together in the dark hours just past before, finally, we slept. I felt my face and chest redden, and shut my eyes again. I had been abandoned past anything I had ever imagined.

  “Coffee first, then bagels,” he said, and put the tray down on the floor beside the waterbed and flopped down on it. He reached over and pulled my fingers away from my face and studied it, and then laughed.

  “You have a hickey the size of a chrysanthemum on your neck,” he said. “Stop being coy and sit up and talk to me. Are you embarrassed about last night?”

  I nodded.

  “Did you feel that black shit? Did it hurt?”

  I shook my head.

  “Cat got your tongue? I didn’t think you did. Listen, I bet you think it all happened because you were high, right? And that in the cold light of morning everything is different?”

  I nodded again.

  “Then,” he said, unknotting the towel and drawing me to him very gently, “I think we better do it again. Just to put your mind at ease.”

  And we did. And again, just, as he said, to be absolutely sure. By the time we both lay, sweating and emptied, on the undulating surface of the waterbed, the coffee was stone cold, and I was throbbing in every nerve and sinew with a wild, loose sweetness and laughing with what felt very like elementary, primitive triumph. The laughter started low in my throat like a growl, and my head fell back on his arm with it. I rolled it on my neck luxuriously. I don’t think I will ever feel as utterly and simply female again in my life as I did in that moment on Luke Geary’s waterbed.

  “So what’s your pleasure?” he said, stretching mightily and leaning over to kiss me between my damp breasts. “Breakfast? A shower? A trip to the moon on gossamer wings?”

  “Breakfast,” I said. “I’m starved. And then a shower. And then maybe we could do it again one more time, just to be absolutely sure that it wasn’t…you know, the grass and the booze and everything.”

  “Jesus, I’ve created a monster,” he laughed. “I’m good, but I’m not that good. Could you wait until lunchtime, do you think?”

  “Just,” I said, and bit the tip of his shoulder, where the freckles flocked so closely that he looked made of copper.

  “But…Luke?” Teddy said, her brows knit with the effort to understand. “Looks aside, what on earth could he possibly have that’s better than Brad Hunt? Besides, I thought you didn’t much like Luke. He’s always on your case.”

  “Brad…can hurt you,” I said slowly. The effort to talk about Brad tired me. I knew that I could not make her understand. But this was Teddy, and I wanted to try.

  “Brad did hurt me, at lunch yesterday. He did it deliberately, and it hurt a great deal. I think he was sorry afterward, and maybe he didn’t entirely mean what he said, but he did it on purpose, and he meant enough of it. He probably doesn’t do it a lot, but he can do it, and he will. I’d never know, after that, when he was going to do it again. I don’t think Luke would do that. He might do it unintentionally, but he wouldn’t just think about hurting you and then do it. He would never set out to simply hurt somebody. Not me and not anybody else. I really believe that.”

  “Nobody’s that saintly,” Teddy said.

  “I didn’t mean he was saintly. I just meant that it isn’t the way his mind works. He’s entirely up front about things. He doesn’t play games.”

  “Brad wasn’t playing games with you,” Teddy said. “He was going to marry you.”

  “Are you kidding? He was playing one long game with his mother, and I was the prize,” I said. “He may not have been aware that he was, but he was. It had to hurt me sooner or later. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before.”

  “And Luke Geary isn’t a game player?”

  “No,” I said positively. “He isn’t.”

  I thought of the Life photograph then, and of the permission that I had signed after he had told me it was just routine. Had that been a game? I did not think it had. I thought that Luke honestly could not imagine I would have any objection to being part of something as powerful and telling as that frozen moment. He had thought that I would see, when I saw the photograph, how necessary it was that it exist and be seen. And I had. Even at my angriest and most shocked, I had seen the necessity for the photograph. It had been one artist in communion with another. He had been communicating with the thing in me that, even now, he saw more clearly than I did.

  I thought of something he said this afternoon, too. It was after we had had bagels and cream cheese and lox and wonderful, strong hot coffee spiked with cinnamon that he had gotten from what he called the one decent deli in Atlanta, and were sitting on the minuscule deck that jutted out into the v
ery treetops above the wooded backyard of the widow’s tall brick house, lost in leaf dapple, dressed only in damp towels. Music was booming softly from his complex sound system; silvery, skittering jazz. He had put on the Swingle Singers doing “Going Baroque” and followed that with the Modern Jazz Quartet’s haunting “No Sun in Venice.”

  “I don’t want you to feel hemmed in,” I said. “I don’t want you to feel like I’m making demands on you. I’m not going to do that.”

  “You should,” he said. “I’m going to make demands on you. You should make them on me. I know you’ve heard that I’m a great swordsman, or whatever it is you’ve heard about me and women, and that’s true. I love women. I always have. But it’s always one person at a time, and I always try to get the terms defined right at the start. All relationships are not the same; you know right from the start that some are not going to be longterm. At least, I usually know, and I assume the women do, too. And so I say so. When there needs to be an end to things, I say that, too. And I ask my—partner, I guess—to do the same.”

  “So where’s the end to this?” I said, feeling my heart squeeze with dread. I could do this, I knew; I could keep this volatile, spinning, shimmeringly physical thing going indefinitely, but I could not do it lightly. Had I been wrong in sensing that he felt that way, too? I had, after all, literally no experience in reading this sort of thing.

  “I don’t see an end to it,” he said. “I want to be with you now. I will be with you. When I don’t have to be away on a shoot, where I’ll be is with you. When I can, I’ll take you with me. I’m going out tonight with Matt and John, to hear Ramsey Lewis again, and I’m not going to take you with me because it’s been planned like this for a while. But that’s all. After that I want us to be together. I’m going to tell Matt that tonight. All this is presupposing that you want that, too.”

  I nodded. I knew that I did. It was just what I wanted. Perhaps it had always been what I wanted.