Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Luke sprang to his feet and put his arm around her.

  “Help me get her into the bedroom,” he said. I supported her on the other side, and we raised her to her feet. There was a dark blot of blood on the sofa where she had been sitting. The enormity and reality of it hit me then. I began to tremble, too, a fine, silvery fluttering in my arms and legs. I could scarcely support Alicia’s long, knobbly length. And yet, she weighed practically nothing. It was like carrying a bundle of dried twigs.

  We got her down on the bed and Luke propped her feet up with pillows and packed blankets around her.

  “Give her some more whiskey,” he said, “and put a towel under her. I’ll be right back.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To make a phone call.”

  “Luke, no! You heard what she said, Buzzy will…do something to her if she tells people, and if she sees a doctor she’ll have to tell; they’ll know. Jesus, you can’t be going to call Matt!”

  “No. I know what to do. Get the whiskey, Smokes.”

  I got the glass and went back to Alicia, straining to make out what he was saying on the telephone, but I could only hear the sound of his voice, low and urgent, not his words. The whiskey dribbled out of Alicia’s mouth and she lay with her head turned into the pillow and her eyes closed. I thought she looked as if she were dead, and kept putting the back of my hand to her mouth to see if I could feel breath on it. I could, light, stringy breathing. I was terribly, terribly afraid. Under the fear anger rode, cold and mature.

  Luke came back and sat on the other side of the waterbed and took her wrist in his. He looked at me a couple of times, but mostly he stared at a point beyond me, at the wall. I could not read his face. I started once to ask him who he had called, but he simply shook his head, and I did not ask again.

  After what seemed a very long time, there was another ring at the door, and he rose and went into the living room and came back, followed by John Howard. John looked remote and elegant in a blue three-piece suit and a white shirt, and I wondered what Thanksgiving celebration Luke had called him from. He nodded to me, but did not speak. He and Luke lifted Alicia off the bed and walked her, stumbling and muttering, into the living room. Luke picked up her coat, but her knees buckled and she slumped toward the floor. John Howard picked her up in his arms and Luke covered her with a blanket and they started for the door.

  “We’re taking her to John’s doctor friend,” Luke said over his shoulder. “He’s waiting for us at his clinic. You remember, he came when we called him about your friend that night at the motel. He can help her; he’s a good doctor. And he sure isn’t going to talk. Be back when we can.”

  “Wait, I’m coming with you,” I said, but he shook his head.

  “The fewer white faces the better, babe,” he said. “You’d only be a hindrance tonight. Wait here and I’ll call you and tell you what we need to do. That’ll help more than anything.”

  And they were gone out the door.

  I meant to straighten the apartment, wash some dishes, clean the blood off the sofa, put away the food we had brought home with us, maybe make some soup or something Alicia might be able to eat, but in the end I did nothing. I sat on the sofa and stared into the fire and drank the rest of the whiskey in the glass I had filled for her, and thought of nothing at all that I can remember. I knew that the great wind of anger waiting deep inside me would come out soon, and with it grief and outrage at the sheer, awful wrongness of this thing, but it could not get through the white stillness in me yet. Eventually I fell asleep on the sofa. It was very late, near morning, really, when the phone rang again and I heard Luke’s voice.

  Alicia had a bad sepsis. The doctor had had to do a D&C, and did not know yet if more surgery would be necessary. He did not think so. He had pumped Alicia full of intravenous antibiotics and fluids, and she would rest there in the clinic until midday, when he could tell whether the antibiotics were working. The doctor and his nurse would stay with her. So would John Howard. They were sending Luke home.

  He was so white and exhausted when he got there that I simply drew him into bed and held him. I said only, “You’re sure the doctor isn’t going to tell?”

  “No. He’s done a lot of this, cleaned up after bad abortions. You can imagine he’d get a lot of it in the projects. He does some, too; good surgery, careful stuff, for women who need it. He’s illegal, so of course he’s not going to report it. Not all his patients are black, by a long shot.”

  “He’s a good man,” I murmured into Luke’s neck.

  “He’s a goddamned saint,” Luke murmured back, and was asleep almost before the words were out of his mouth.

  Alicia did well on the antibiotics, and could be discharged a day later provided she had somewhere to go and nursing care for a week. She did not; she had no more days left at the motel, and so Luke and John brought her back to the carriage house and we put her to bed, taking turns sleeping on the sofa and in Luke’s filthy old sleeping bag before the fire. She drank the soup and juice we brought her, and took the pills, and let me give her a sponge bath and comb her hair, but she did not talk much. She slept, and slept, and slept.

  I went back to work the following Monday morning, and left Luke in charge of her. I did not know quite why, but I was so angry with Matt that I simply could not talk to him. I hid in my office for two days with the doors shut, feigning backed-up work. Hank and Sister and Teddy looked at me in puzzlement, but I don’t think Matt noticed. He had come back from the holiday weekend taciturn and remote once more. His door was as firmly closed as mine was.

  By the end of the week Alicia was much better. Thin to bone, pale as a cave fish, but with a faint wash of color along her elegant cheekbones, and the sheen restored to her hair. She washed the clothes Luke had bundled hastily into her bags at the motel, after paying her last night’s rent, and pressed them, and said that the next weekend she was going to get another motel room until she could find a job.

  “I can’t impose on you all anymore,” she said. “I owe you everything. I’ll never forget it. But I can’t stay here.”

  Luke and I together only had enough money, after our own expenses, to pay for a few days’ lodging for her.

  “What are you going to do for money until you find a job?” Luke said. “Can your family help?”

  She merely laughed. It was not a mirthful sound.

  “What I’m going to do is go talk to Matt,” she said. “He said I could have my job back if I wanted it. If he wasn’t just talking, it’ll solve a lot of problems.”

  “You really want to do that?” Luke said.

  She lifted her shoulders and let them fall in a slight, eloquent shrug, and smiled faintly. The old, enigmatic Alicia was back; she seemed untouched by the past awful week. But I knew she wasn’t, could not be.

  “I’d rather do anything else in the world,” she said. “But I can’t think of anything.”

  She came into the office that afternoon, looking otherworldly and altogether stunning in her new thinness and the strange luminosity that illness gave her skin. She wore a black miniskirt I had not seen, and black heels. Her legs looked a yard long in fine black mesh stockings. She smiled and nodded at everyone like a duchess reviewing her staff, and went into Matt’s office and closed the door.

  She came out half an hour later with her head high and two circles of pure red on her face, saying nothing to anyone, sailing out of the office as if borne on water. That night she moved her things from Luke’s apartment. We had gone to a movie; when we got back, she was gone.

  She left no note. We did not know where she went. Neither of us would have asked Matt for the earth, and he volunteered nothing. His door was closed almost all the time now.

  It was almost a week later that we learned that Matt had called his Playboy PR lady friend and gotten Alicia a job as a bunny at the Atlanta Playboy Club. Hank had seen her there when he took his out-of-town brother for drinks and dinner. Alicia was, he said, the best-looking bunny in the
hutch and had more keyholders clamoring for her services than all the others put together. She fended them all off with her cool little smile and said little to them, Hank reported. If she had seen him and his brother in the room she showed no sign. She was not assigned to their table.

  “I guess it solves her problem,” I said to Luke that night. “But I hate the very thought of it. It’s just…not right. There’s something awfully, awfully wrong about it. I’m not sure what I mean. She didn’t have to take it if she hadn’t wanted it.”

  “She had to,” Luke said briefly, in the tone of voice that meant he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Don’t kid yourself. What else can the Alicias do?”

  “He said she could come back to the magazine—”

  “He’s full of shit. He wasn’t going to take her back after Buzzy. I don’t know which of them I’d rather kill first.”

  I dropped it, but the image of Alicia Crowley in black satin tights and mesh stockings, folding her long legs into the bunny dip and stepping deftly away from the hands reaching for her tail, was a terrible one to me. I could not seem to lose it. I thought of it often, and of the slanted, beautiful eyes above the black satin. In my mind’s eye, they were lifeless. I wondered if Matt still went there, and if he did, if Alicia brought him his drinks.

  The thought was, somehow, insupportable. But Matt never said.

  14

  WHENEVER I THINK BACK TO THAT SUSPENDED TIME between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1967, I think of Matt and Downtown as a sort of juggling act. I have the notion that the magazine then was a gilded sphere that contained all of us on the staff and our habitat: the city, the ethos of the times, the people who swirled around us and formed our tribe, our clan. Matt was the juggler. He had, for some reason, stumbled, and the sphere had wobbled and skewed dangerously on the end of its pole, and indeed had spilled out one of us. I knew that Alicia was lost to us. And I knew that in his deepest heart Matt thought that Luke and I were, too.

  But I think he could have righted himself and kept the sphere spinning smoothly, after a blackly comic series of contortions and near-falls, except that Tom Gordon told us all, on a morning in early December, that he was leaving the first of the year and going to New Orleans to become art director of a new city magazine there. The sphere smacked the earth then, and though we all dashed to pick up the pieces, and worked feverishly to glue them back together, the entity was never again whole and shining.

  We were accustomed, once or twice a month, to going across the street and around the corner to a little nameless, hole-in-the-wall cafe that served the sort of breakfasts Matt delighted in.

  “Texas breakfasts,” he said more than once. “Not an egg Benedict in the place. Fried in lard and ten miles wide. Quantity is all.”

  The cafe had a big sign on the dingy mirrored wall where the booths were that said, “You are what you eat,” and inevitably Matt would crow “Ah’m an aig,” and Tom Gordon would follow with “Ah’m poke sawsidge,” and Hank would yell, “Ah’m grits an’ redeye.” I was appointed to be oatmeal, because Matt had some idea the Irish ate a lot of that, and dismissed my attempts to tell him about porridge with a sneer. Luke was biscuits, mainly because he said once a biscuit that wasn’t made with hog lard was not a biscuit at all, but a bleached turd. The nameless cafe’s biscuits were most assuredly made with lard. It probably ruined the cholesterol level of a good part of downtown Atlanta before it closed with the decade.

  The food charade was funny to no one but us, most especially not the counterman and the waitress, both of whom had been there forever and seen all there was to see of downtown eccentricity. On a scale with Francis Brewton and the street preachers and the old lady who wore a white sheet, togalike, and carried a flashlight which she held aloft like a torch, people who called themselves eggs and pork sausage were small stuff indeed. But somehow the ritual of food-naming never ceased to be hilarious to us. We had just finished the litany, cackling crazily, when Tom told us.

  No one spoke. I heard a swift inhalation of breath and realized that I had made it, and a little soft grunt from Matt that sounded like someone had hit him in the stomach. But no one said anything.

  “I feel like a bastard at a family reunion,” Tom said finally. “Maybe I should have told you first, Matt, and then everybody else, but I wanted to do it when we were all together. I guess I thought it would be easier. For me, I mean. I don’t think I can go through this more than once.”

  “Ah, shit,” Matt said softly, and I saw with incredulity that tears stood in his eyes for an instant. Then he closed them briefly. He looked defeated. Nothing else. Just…defeated. Tom had been the first person he had hired for Downtown. Far under my shock and grief, fear flickered.

  Then he opened his eyes and they were flat and still. I had seen that look before. The round glasses magnified it. It meant that he was angry in the cold, implacable way that was worse by far than the more frequent bellowing rages. After the cold ones, people suffered.

  “I gather you’re going to tell us why?” he asked politely. “It will help when I tell Culver that his prize-winning art director is jumping ship just when the magazine has won every honor in the fucking country. Probably not much, but it will help.”

  Tom looked down at his plate, where the remnants of his breakfast cooled greasily. In the merciless fluorescent light his strong hawk’s face had a greenish cast, as if it had been done in marble. Even then, with awfulness and sorrow settling down over me like a cast net, I thought yet again how wonderful he looked, and how I would miss simply looking at him. Then he looked up, and the black-brown eyes were liquid with tears. My own tears overflowed and slipped down my cheeks. I would miss his sheer goodness more than anything. We all would.

  “Yeah, I’ll tell you why,” Tom said. “It’s not anything you don’t all know. But I’ll say it if it’ll help. I’m going for two reasons. One, I just can’t stand any more change. I don’t necessarily mean at the magazine, though that’s going to come, too; it has to. I mean…in the city. In the country. It’s out there; it’s coming in on us…and I don’t think I can change with it. Something was left out of me; I’ve always thought I should have lived in one of those times when everything stayed the same generation after generation, and you could count on the world, even if it was awful. New Orleans is one of the few places I’ve ever been that feels…timeless. The tempo now is essentially the same as it was a hundred years ago. That sweet old decadent Creole world—nothing can crack it, not in the old parts, not in the Quarter. It changes the world, not the other way around. You may eventually drown in it, but it isn’t going to blow apart on you. I need that like I need to breathe.”

  I stared at him intently, trying to understand, to feel the thing that he was obviously feeling. I remembered how he had talked after his trip around the country with Luke, photographing the peripatetic young. He had hated the trip, been badly unsettled by it. The children’s crusade was set to run in the February issue. Tom would not be here to see it. I blinked furiously, and swallowed around the cold salt lump in my throat. Still, no one spoke.

  He looked down again, took a swallow of his cold coffee, and looked up. His eyes held each of ours, one by one, and then he said, “The other reason is that I’m gay, and I need not to try and live any other way any longer. I’m sick of pretending. I’m past it. I have a friend there…a close one. We’re going to live together in the Quarter. He’s a painter. He knew about the magazine starting up, and got me an appointment with the chamber people down there. They know about Downtown, of course, and that helped me. What helped most was they don’t seem to give a damn about the gay part. We didn’t talk about it, but you could just tell that it didn’t matter. It doesn’t, down there. I don’t have to tell you that Culver would fire me in a New York minute if he found out, no matter how many prizes we won. You know that’s true.”

  He looked away, out through the windows to the gray street beyond. The cold weather had held, and the people hurrying past had their h
eads ducked against the wind, and coat collars pulled up around their ears. I could not imagine what this talk had cost Tom Gordon. He was the most emotionally fastidious man I have ever known.

  “Back to work,” Matt said after a while, and we all stood. One by one we hugged Tom, and when we walked out, Matt walked beside him, his arm through Tom’s. No one looked at anyone else. I think we all would have wept, if we had.

  I did cry that night. Luke and I went to see Bonnie and Clyde and I began to cry at the end, when the two outlaw lovers began their grotesque, jerking dance of death in the bullet-riddled car. I got up and went out of the auditorium and into the ladies’ room and mopped my face with wet tissues, but it didn’t help much. As soon as the tears stopped, they began again. Finally I found my sunglasses in the bottom of my purse and put them on and went back out into the lobby. Luke was leaning against the counter, eating popcorn. When he saw me he came and put his arm around me and led me out onto the icy street.

  “Bad scene, wasn’t it?” he said as we trotted the freezing two blocks to where the Morgan was parked.

  “What? The movie? Yeah, it was. I’m sorry. I can’t seem to quit crying. I think it’s Tom and not Bonnie and Clyde.”

  “That’s what I meant,” he said.

  Back at the apartment, in bed, lying in the curve of Luke’s arm, I began to cry again. He brushed the hair off my face and said, “It’s really the best thing for him, babe.”

  “I know,” I sobbed. “I know it is. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I love him; I want what’s best for him. It’s just that…it seems like he’s going to die, not leave. It feels like somebody just said they were going to die.”

  “Well, Tom’s finally going to start living. We can go see him; we will. I think what you’re feeling is that Downtown—or what we know of it—is going to change. And it will. It won’t be the same without Tom; he was probably the best of us. But it isn’t going to die. There’ll be a new art director and Matt’ll make him part of the team within a week, and we’ll still have Downtown. It’ll just be a little different. Downtown won’t die until Matt lets it.”