Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Unlike me, Luke did not seem to change at all. Luke was so inalterably Luke that Luke in love was indistinguishable from Luke not in love. In the office he did everything he always had: he lounged on office floors and shot lazy, lewd photographs of female underpants; he baited Sister and bantered with Hank and went to lunch with Matt and let him pick up the check; he grinned ostentatiously at Culver Carnes and photographed Culver’s stiff, furious, retreating behind when he steamed out of the office on yet another unsuccessful mission to catch the Caped Cupholder Crusader in the act; he signed Culver’s name to several more luncheon checks for Francis Brewton and the lank, wild-eyed young gospel preacher on the corner of Spring and Peachtree Streets; he borrowed endless dimes from petty cash for stamps and coffee and candy bars, and never paid them back.

  But at night, and on weekends, he was solely and wholly with me.

  How could I have known anything like it existed? Not many people get in a lifetime what I had with Luke in those first few weeks, I don’t think. Or perhaps they do, and handle it better. But I don’t see how a great many could, and get the world’s work done. It was more a tribute to Luke and his insistence on workaday normalcy that I got mine done, than to my own powers of concentration. I was, in those days, purely drunk on sensation.

  We made love all over the place and a great deal of the time. In Luke’s dim little bedroom on the rolling waterbed; in the big living room before the fire, on the smoky blankets; in his tiny kitchen; once in his bathtub; outside on the frost-silvered grass beside the little pool, under the cold radiance of a great white moon. We made fast, silent love or slow, shouting love, or every shade and experience of love in between. Each time I learned a new and shuddering dimension of sensation, and almost always, we laughed. To make love with Luke Geary was to dive down, to sink, to drown, and to rise again in joy. In those few weeks I had become almost entirely a creature of flesh and abandon. He had only to touch my arm in the office and look at me, and my knees went slack and I had to stiffen my muscles against the need simply to close my door and lie down with him. I had only to say his name, “Luke,” and if we were in the apartment, he stopped what he was doing and came to me and we came together. My limbs were always loose and heavy with either wanting or completion in that time, and my eyelids felt perpetually heavy and at half-mast. Sometimes I thought that smoke must come off me like steam off hot water on a cold day.

  “I’m going to have to stay away from the office for a while,” he said on a very early occasion, when we had come so close to doing it on the elevator going down after work that we were both white faced and shaking when the doors opened and disgorged us into the home-bound crowd in the lobby. “If I don’t they’re going to start turning the hose on us, and Culver will catch us screwing on the Xerox machine or something, and you’ll lose your job and I’ll forget how to take pictures. Matt’s already pissed enough with us. I’ll look in once or twice a week, but there’s no sense in making things worse for you. He’s being an asshole about it, but it’s you who’ll take the heat if we get too—what would Culver say? indiscriminate—around the office.”

  “Is Matt really mad at me?” I said in honest consternation. I had not noticed. But then, I had not noticed much of anything at all, except Luke.

  “Yeah, he is. I think he’ll get over it if I make myself scarce and spend a little time with him one or two nights a week, but for now I’d work twice as hard if I were you, and show him your mind isn’t entirely in your crotch…or mine.”

  “He’s not being fair.”

  “Who ever accused Matt of being fair?”

  “What does he think, that I lured you away from him? Broke up a set? Doesn’t he have anybody to play with after school?”

  “I don’t think he’s thinking, Smokes. He’s always had a special man friend to run around with; you know he doesn’t make friends of his women. The Playboy chick is for late nights. I was the Huck Finn to his Tom Sawyer, and now I’ve defected. Since he doesn’t like women worth a damn except to screw, it’s you he’ll blame for breaking up his buddy act. Only he won’t think of it like that; he’ll think he’s being righteously indignant because you’re diluting the integrity of the Downtown unit, or some sanctimonious shit like that. Give him some time and space. He’ll fall back in with Hank and Tom, and everything will ease off.”

  And so he stayed away from the magazine for the most part, and I missed him as though there was a hole in the universe, but it did seem easier to get my work done, and most of the teasing and grumbling slowed and stopped.

  In the new clarity I looked around me and saw with surprise that there had been erosions in the infrastructure that supported us all. So fast; they had happened so fast. Out in the world, in that vast place that had always seemed to me a grassy, naked plain outside the fertile biosphere of Atlanta and Downtown, the little tremors had been coming fast and thick, and they felt ominously to me, sensitized as I was now to nuance, like foreshocks for something huge and cataclysmic. I thought of Tom Gordon, and what he had said to Hank and me the night he had come home from his trip with Luke. And yet, the fissures were not of themselves particularly telling. In San Francisco, the disenchanted flower children who had staged the World’s First Human Be-In last January held a mass funeral for “Hippie, the devoted son of Mass Media,” and began to leave the city in droves. But then, they always were a mercurial subculture, flocking like birds, flowing lemminglike away on a whim.

  In Mississippi, a federal jury investigating the murder of three Civil Rights workers acquitted eight codefendants and failed to reach a decision on three others. But that, after all, was Mississippi.

  In Washington, after more than a hundred thousand young people marched to protest the war in Vietnam, many placed flowers in the soldiers’ gun barrels facing them. Radical elements in the group tried to storm the Pentagon steps and violence broke out. Some thousand demonstrators were arrested. But after all, it was no more than had happened in many besieged Northern cities during the terrible summer of 1967. Only Washington was not North…

  And Alicia Crowley left Downtown. After that, it was not possible to pretend that nothing had changed.

  She had not looked well that early fall. I had not noticed until Teddy mentioned it, but after that I did. She was pale, her glorious tawny sheen gone, and her spill of honey hair seemed dry and lusterless, and sometime over the summer she had lost weight, so that the elegant length of leg and arm became stretches of bone. Matt, who had treated her largely as he might a temporary from the secretarial pool since she took up with Buzzy, teased her a little about emulating Twiggy. Alicia laughed her husky laugh, but there no longer seemed to be secrets and promises in it. Poor Alicia, the one for whom she kept her secrets and made her promises had gone coldly away from her and shut his office and apartment door.

  When Teddy said she thought Alicia must be sick, Luke said no, she was in mourning for her place as Queen Consort. He was lying on his back in front of the fire watching Teddy and me ladling out vegetable soup she had brought from home, and I looked over at him to see if he was being funny. But he wasn’t.

  “Well, she abdicated when she took up with that turd Buzzy,” Teddy said. She had liked Alicia Crowley even less than I, with perhaps more reason. I still remembered Teddy’s embarrassment and pain when she said, on the first night I spent with her in our apartment, “Matt doesn’t stay over.”

  “Not until he dumped her to run off with Luke and John Howard,” I said. Why was I defending Alicia? “She’d never have gone near that creep if she hadn’t been trying to make Matt jealous. Then he takes up with that ice queen from the Playboy Club, for God’s sake, when Alicia is ten times better looking than anything in the bunny hutch. It really wasn’t fair to Alicia. She had her whole life tied up in Matt, not to mention that apartment. I wonder he’s kept her on there.”

  “He’s not totally without honor,” Luke grinned. “He knows he acted like shit to Alicia, even if he’ll never admit it. And she’s still here
because she’s a damned good assistant and a big part of what keeps Culver Carnes out of Matt’s hair. Haven’t you ever noticed that whenever there’s a visiting muckety-muck in town Culver baby finds a reason to trot him by Alicia? I think she goes out with them right regularly, too.”

  “How can she?” Teddy said indignantly. “That’s the same as selling yourself for a great apartment.”

  “What else has she got?” Luke said, and I felt a cold little wind of uneasiness, almost sadness, on the back of my neck. For some reason, my terrible last image of Rachel Vaughn sprang into my mind.

  Alicia did not give the customary two weeks’ notice, and she did not say good-bye. There was no farewell celebration at the Top of Peachtree, where she glowed the brightest of all of us in the dusky mural. She was simply gone when we came in on a Monday morning in October, her little cubicle next to Matt’s antiseptically bare.

  “Buzzy wanted her to quit and cruise with him,” Matt. said crisply when we asked. “It came up right sudden, I gather. He’s spending a couple of months in the Caribbean with some of his, ah, business associates, looking to buy into a casino, I think she said. He was right insistent, I hear. Lucky for Alicia she thinks ol’ Buzzy is hot shit, otherwise I expect she’d be sleeping with the fishes if she turned him down. Get that look off your face, Smoky; I didn’t fire her. She can come back whenever she wants to. I ain’t looking for her, though.”

  The next day Sueanne Hudspeth moved into Alicia’s office and a plump, beehived woman with the avid demeanor of a hungry grackle, sent down by Culver Carnes, took Sueanne’s desk, and the office was a place no one knew. Mary Kay Crimp, as the new woman was improbably but aptly called, was silent and industrious, but Matt’s bellowing and horn-blatting made her flinch and Lucas outraged her so with his invasive camera that a formally written edict banning it came down from Culver Carnes, and we knew then that Mary Kay Crimp was a direct pipeline to him. Somehow she managed to do her work and watch, too. She watched us constantly. Teddy said she could turn her head all the way around on her neck like an owl. Hank maintained the great, lacquered black beehive concealed a periscope. I stayed as far away from her as possible. I knew that it was me and Luke she watched most of all.

  It was as if cloud shadow had fallen over Downtown. The office was silent and very nearly decorous. Not so many visitors streamed in and out. Mr. Tommy T. Bliss did not come to stand on his head for us much anymore, and after one particularly fragmented and malodorous foray into Mary Kay’s territory another edict came down and Francis Brewton did not come, either.

  I did not like what we had become, and did not know why we did not simply band together and drive out the cuckoo in the nest as we surely would have done in other days. Matt had never cared about Culver Carnes’s memos and ultimatums before. But now he shut himself into his office and did nothing. One move from him, one prank, one merciless session of teasing, one siege of the taxi horn and he could have routed Mary Kay Crimp, or, if he had chosen, simply charmed her into becoming one of Comfort’s People. But he did neither, and none of us quite dared to undertake an ouster that he did not lead. What Matt did in those days he did in his office with his door closed, or in brisk, no-nonsense meetings, or on the phone. The rest of us took to shutting our office doors, too. Whenever we looked out, there were the bright, avian eyes of Mary Kay Crimp. Watching.

  Later I would say to Luke, “Alicia was the first rupture, wasn’t she?”

  “No,” he said. “You and I were the first.”

  It was not long before I realized that he was right.

  Andre’s story won the honors we had thought it would, followed quickly by a wonderfully photographed spread on the Soup Kitchen. The expected commendation from the blue-ribbon senatorial committee and the attendant media flurry over the personal letters of congratulations Luke and I got from the White House clinched matters. Downtown was named the best city magazine in the country at the association’s autumn banquet. Culver Carnes preened like a tom turkey, letters and phone calls poured in to Matt from the Club, and Matt took Luke and me out to dinner. But it was a perfunctory affair, almost as Luke said later, a duty dance. Matt drank too much and got, for the first time I could remember, frankly drunk, so that we put him, mumbling and lurching, into a taxi and sent him home, feeling like embarrassed servants who had had to put the master to bed after a bad night in the drawing room.

  “I feel about that like Mark Twain’s story about being tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail,” Luke said afterward. “If it hadn’t been for the honor of the thing, I’d just as soon have walked.”

  I laughed, but I had not liked the night, either.

  “What more could he want?” I said. “We’re number one in the country. Everybody from the president on down to the janitor is praising him. It’s more than that stupid Crimp woman; he could get rid of her if he wanted to. What’s the matter with him, Luke?”

  “He misses the old gang, the way we were,” Luke said. “Things changed on him before he could control them and he can’t get back the…the whole, the unit that we used to be. And he can’t seem to go on and make a new one. He misses Alicia.”

  “Too bad,” I said sarcastically. “He’s the one who ran her off.”

  “He’ll always do that, to whoever gets closest to him. I’ve heard about some of the others who did, before,” Luke said soberly. “He can’t help it. I’d love to know what his early life was like. He’s drinking way too much, or at least it’s getting to him like it never used to. That worries me more than anything. He goes out a lot at night by himself, when what’s-her-name at the Playboy Club has to work, and just drinks till it’s time to come home and go to bed. Hank hears about it, and I do, too, a little. They’re really worried about him at the Top. Sometimes Hank goes out with him, but Tom doesn’t, anymore. Hank says he doesn’t talk much, just drinks. Occasionally he’ll have a good night and the old vinegar and shine will be back, but not often. Hank asked me to talk to him, but I don’t know how to reach Matt anymore. When he does go out with a bunch, it’s usually that stupid Playboy crowd. Jesus Christ, can you imagine? Matt Comfort, the big keyholder?”

  “I hate this,” I said in a small voice. I was near tears.

  “It’ll probably pass,” Luke said. “Tom said he went through something like this early on, when the magazine was just getting started. Pulled away from everybody, drank a lot, kept his door closed. It didn’t last very long. Tom says he’s always thought Matt ought to be on lithium or something. We ought to just lie low and wait it out. But you need to learn to put down shallow roots, babe, so you can roll on when you need to. You’ve got too much of yourself invested with Matt. The time will come when you need to move on. It always does. You’re not cut out to stay in Atlanta working for a local magazine.”

  I looked at him in surprise.

  “Where would I go?”

  He smiled. “There ain’t no telling where you’re going, Smokes.”

  “But…with you, right?”

  He reached out and mussed my hair. “We’re too good a team to break up,” he said.

  Luke left in the middle of the next week to go to Chicago for Life, to cover what was purported to be the largest antiwar demonstration so far in the heartland. I was anxious and unhappy about it; antiwar demonstrations did not seem to be bound by the same tacit rules of peace and nonviolence that marked the few protest gatherings I had witnessed around Atlanta. Luke was right; Atlanta was virtually untouched so far about the burgeoning war. I tried hard to be upbeat about his going, though. I had said I would make no demands on him, and I intended not to. But he was so restless and preoccupied before he left that I finally said, “For God’s sake, go on and have a good time at the demonstration. I know your place is where things are happening. I’m not worried about you. It’s not like you were heading for Saigon.”

  “I may need to do that before it’s over, babe,” he said.

  “Well, so do it,” I said, and smiled at him, and he final
ly smiled back at me. I could not have spoken again for the pounding of my heart.

  “Thanks for understanding,” he said. “It just seems like the war is getting awfully real all of a sudden. I need to check it out.”

  “Don’t thank me. I knew you for the no-good ambulance chaser you are when I took up with you,” I said. “You think the action is in the war now, and not in the movement?”

  “It’s not that simple. There’s action still in the movement. But the heat right now is in the war.”

  And I knew what he meant, and did not press it further. But I felt still and cold and small, like a bird when the shadow of the hawk is on the earth, the entire time he was in Chicago.