Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  When the others had left I sat in his Eames chair and looked at him. He looked back, studying me. His eyes were rimmed with red, I could see now, and there was an almost imperceptible trembling in his hands. But the rest of him shone as if he had just been cast in new gold.

  “Two things,” he said. “YMOG this time is Culver’s son-in-law. You’ll hate him. He’s the worst dickhead I ever met. Do it right. Lick the dickhead’s boots if you have to. I want Culver to think he’s won the whole nine yards.”

  I nodded, hypnotized. I would lick many boots for this man, I knew.

  “Second thing. Starting with June you’re the new assistant managing editor with as much pay raise as we can get you. It probably won’t be much. You’ll be back on Focus full-time, and I want you to go on with that little black girl with the voice. Luella what’s-her-name. Don’t talk about that, either; by the time it runs it’ll be way too late for Culver to yell about that or anything else. I’m going to call SCLC and get Dr. King to suggest a new liaison for Focus. You’ve done a good job, Smoky, and I’m proud of you. I probably won’t tell you that again until nineteen seventy.”

  “I love you, Matt,” I said, my lips wobbling like they do when you have just come from the dentist and the novocaine has not yet worn off. I could taste salt.

  He looked at me for a long moment, and then shook his head slightly.

  “Ol’ Smoky,” he said. “Be careful who you love. They’ll be part of you always. Even after the love is long dead, the fuckers’ll be part of you.”

  “I hope so,” I said, and went out with the others to bust my butt for Matt Comfort.

  Somehow we did not talk much about it among ourselves. Maybe it was because we were afraid to break the new bubble of elation that contained us all, but I don’t think so. There was a powerful feeling around all of us in those first new days of Matt’s return, a sense of deep, quiet power, a conspiratorial happiness. We knew that, upstairs, the chamber buzzed and thrummed like a hive of bees with the news of Matt’s vanquishing, but few of them came into the camp of the vanquished, and we were not often required to act humble and sorrowful. With the cessation of the Cup Wars and the issuing of the fateful interoffice memo, Culver Carnes retreated into his thirteenth floor lair. We did not see him in our offices again. We worked, prodigiously, and we smiled at each other, and we smiled at the closed door of Matt’s office. The red light that meant his telephone was occupied glowed steadily all day. It was still glowing when most of us left in the evening. Hank, who often stayed late riding herd on the day-to-day business of the magazine while Matt poured his honey over the wires from Atlanta to Texas and Oklahoma and New York, said that it glowed late into the nights. He said also that Matt drank a great deal of coffee and smoked incessantly, but that he was not drinking at all.

  “There’s no way I wouldn’t know,” he said.

  Only once did we really speak of the transformation, and that was the day it happened. Luke and I and Hank rode down on the elevator together at the end of the day, and Luke said to Hank, “So what happened?”

  “I still don’t know,” Hank said. “I took the memo over to his place after I couldn’t raise him on the phone and pushed it under his door. It was after midnight. I knew he was in there. I could hear the stereo. And then I went home and went to bed. When I came in this morning, there he was. That’s as much as I can tell you.”

  After that, the tide of the spring turned abruptly toward joy. It was as if the city and the world swung themselves into synchronization with the elation that bore us along like a great wave. On March 12, Eugene McCarthy captured an astounding 42 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, running as a peace candidate. On March 16, Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. Two days later he opened his campaign by announcing that if he was elected, he would actively seek a peace settlement. In our giddiness, we cheered McCarthy and Kennedy alike. It seemed to me, crazily, that both, like us, were invincible.

  On March 17, when they were dyeing the river green and getting sodden drunk on green beer back in Corkie, Matt came out of his office grinning incandescently and said that he had a fucking great nibble out of Oklahoma and to stay tuned. Then he went back in and closed his door.

  On March 21, Francis Brewton paid us a long and fragrant visit and sold us his entire stock of antique periodicals, and on March 22, Mr. Tommy T. Bliss came and stood on his head in the lobby to celebrate Henry Aaron’s first home run, in a preseason exhibition game with Pittsburgh. We were delirious with joy. There could not, Matt said, be better auguries.

  On March 30, Matt called Luke into his office and asked him if he could get in touch with John Howard in New York.

  “Yeah,” Luke said. “I probably can. You want to tell me why?”

  “Not especially,” Matt grinned. “But tell him if he’ll come down here for an overnighter in a few days we’ll pay his airfare and put him up. Tell him he can pick the hotel. Tell him all he has to do is eat a dynamite dinner and drink some dynamite champagne and wear a suit instead of a caftan or whatever those things are the Yankee liberals are all running around in now.”

  “Dashikis,” Luke grinned. “I doubt if John’s into dashikis yet. I’ll tell him. Anything else?”

  “No. Just tell him…I need him, and I’ll be beholden to him,” Matt said. “And that he won’t be sorry. It’s for an honorable cause. Tell him that.”

  Luke did tell John Howard that, on the telephone that night, but at first John was reluctant. In the end, though, he agreed.

  “How’d you get him to change his mind?” I said, when Luke came back into the living room grinning triumphantly.

  “Told him it mattered an awful lot to you and me,” he said. “And that Culver Carnes would absolutely shit. You know he always did think Culver was an asshole.”

  I went to Luke and hugged him.

  “I’m so glad he’s coming,” I said into his neck. “I didn’t realize how much I missed him till I knew he might come back.”

  “Me either,” Luke said.

  On March 31, Matt came capering out of his office, blatting the taxi horn, and herded us all over to the Top of Peachtree to tell us that deliverance was at hand and to brief us on it. We sat late, while blue dusk fell over the greening city and the downtown lights winked on, drinking champagne and eating hors d’oeuvres and listening to Tony, who played “Downtown” over and over in an excess of delight at having Matt back. Matt himself only drank coffee and smoked, but he crowed as loudly as the rest of us.

  “He’s a Texan, but he’s based in Oklahoma City now,” he told us of our savior-to-be. “I knew him when we both worked on an oil rig off Galveston, both of us about eighteen, I think. I doubt if we weighed a hundred and fifty pounds together. He calls himself Cody Remington, and sometimes—I swear to God—Bubba, but his name’s Duane Heckler. Hell, I don’t care if he calls himself Alexander the Great. It would fit him perfectly. I always knew the little fucker would own the world one day. He’s got the goddamn chicken parts market in the entire Southwest cornered, and he’s looking to get into the media game, as he calls it. He’s got a better cash flow than God. I convinced him he ought to start with a magazine with social conscience as well as fancy national awards. He’s looking to be socially relevant now, he tells me. Well, I guess you would, if you’d made your pile from chicken parts. He requires, and I quote, a strong black presence in any venture. I’m gonna bring him over on the third and set up a presentation right here, under the mural, with storyboards and flip charts and the whole nine yards, and then I’m gon’ wine him and dine him and hit him with the Andre piece and John Howard to boot. We’ll have a special display with all our awards, and I’m going to get Ben Cameron, and maybe even Dr. King, on tape, talking about what assets to the universe we are. I thought I’d get that little Luella gal to come sing ‘Downtown’ for us when I walk him in; you all will all be here under the mural, see, and Tony will hit it when we get off the elevato
r, and when we come through those doors she’ll start belting it out. I’m going to rent the bar for the night. Just us and Cody Bubba. What do you think?”

  “I think ol’ Cody Bubba is a gone goose,” Hank exulted.

  “It’s absolutely perfect!” Teddy cried.

  “He’ll be begging us to let him buy us,” I said, laughing with sheer joy. It was an inspired scenario. It could not fail to move the chicken parts king of the Southwest.

  “Chicken parts?” Luke gasped, doubled over in his tilted-back chair. “Chicken parts? Holy shit!”

  “How are you going to pay for all this?” Hank said finally, sobering up a little. He could never quite stop being a managing editor.

  “Put it on Culver’s tab, of course,” Matt said matter-of-factly. “By the time the bill comes he’ll have one less magazine to pay for.”

  We were still crowing and preening when a commotion around the television set at the far end of the bar broke through our euphoria. We looked over at it just in time to see the lugubrious, Dumbo-eared face of Lyndon Johnson fading from the screen. I had forgotten he had called a special news conference for that evening.

  “What is it?” Matt yelled over to Doremus, the week-night bartender.

  “Says he’s stopping the bombing of North Vietnam except in the DMZ,” Doremus yelled back. “And he ain’t going to run again.”

  We sat stunned for a moment, and then Teddy began to clap. After a moment we all joined her, clapping and cheering and laughing and whistling. All except Luke.

  “Shit,” he howled. “I’ll never get to the goddamned war before it’s over! Shit!”

  Still laughing, we rose and poured our champagne over his head, one by one.

  On the afternoon of April 3, I went with Luke to pick up John Howard at the airport. It was one of those spring days that lures photographers outside in droves: so clear that you could see every delicate vein in the lacquered new leaves; so soft that you felt the air on newly bared arms like velvet; so suffused with every shade of green that it seemed that your very blood ran green, in harmony. The sun was warm at mid-afternoon, and Luke put the top down on the Morgan for the first time since October. The drive out the expressway was like swimming in foaming light.

  I was giddy with sun and the air and the prospect of seeing John. The coming evening loomed like a radiant iceberg over everything. It was possible not to think of it, but it was not possible not to know that the grand shape of it was there. Passing the stadium a sudden sweet gust of wisteria washed over us from some tiny lawn in the warren of old houses behind it, and I closed my eyes and took a deep breath and smiled. It was the very scent of childhood springs and home, and though I wanted neither of those two things now, still, it enchanted as only sudden scents can do.

  “This minute, just right this second, is absolutely perfect,” I said to Luke, stretching my arms over my head and arching my back. The driver of a passing big rig yelled something cheerfully and admiringly obscene, and I laughed aloud with joy and the power of my young body. I felt, for a moment, as I had last summer at the Cloister, when I realized for the first time what a formidable weapon sheer youth is.

  “I simply can’t imagine being old,” I said.

  “You’re not going to live to be old if you don’t stop sticking your tits out at truck drivers,” Luke said mildly, but when I looked at him from behind my sunglasses, he was grinning. His freckled arms were bare, too, and the wind whipped his sun-struck red hair around his head. He had stuck a plastic daisy in the ear piece of his glasses, and he looked about thirteen.

  “Tom and Huck, running away from Aunt Polly,” I said, and squeezed his arm. “Oh, Luke, I can’t wait to see John! I can’t wait until tonight! I can’t wait to get everything all settled and tell everybody!”

  “My mama would say you’re wishing your life away,” Luke said.

  “No, just the next few hours of it.”

  We parked the car in the short-term lot and went into the terminal and down the concourse to wait for Delta flight 459 from La Guardia. It was a turnaround flight, and the passenger lobby was full of people who looked exactly like passengers for New York. They were well-dressed and impassive, scanning newspapers and magazines, lining up for the telephone. Most of them were men. There was only one other woman near us, a square, blue-rinsed matron in a flowered silk Lilly, inspecting the crowd as if for vermin.

  “Buckhead grandmama come to pick up the grand-kiddies from Manhattan,” I whispered to Luke. “The chauffeur is circling outside.”

  The flight was late, and John was one of the last to deplane. I had been peering anxiously as passenger after passenger filed out of the arrival gate, all of them looking somehow stunned, like people coming out of a darkened movie theater, none of them John. And then he was there, tall in a gray suit with a vest that I had never seen and a blue oxford cloth shirt and a striped tie, his narrow head turning slightly from left to right, looking for us. I smiled involuntarily. His presence smote the air. Everyone in the crowd waiting to board stared at him. It was impossible not to. He looked so totally collected within his taut skin, and so gravely and imperturbably correct, that I wondered for a moment why I had ever thought he was, could be, my friend. And then he saw us, and the sharp-planed face broke into a small smile. I felt my own smile grow.

  “Oh, Luke, he looks wonderful,” I said, and started forward to meet him. Behind me, the square Buckhead grandmother said something indistinguishable and unmistakable, not bothering to lower her voice. I stopped and looked at her over my shoulder, gave her a brilliant smile, and rushed at John Howard shrieking in delight. When I reached him I threw my arms around him so hard that he stumbled backward, and then he swung me around in the air, laughing aloud. I hugged him, smelling new oxford cloth and warm skin and some bitter, green-y aftershave.

  “Smoky,” he said, laughing. “God, Smokes…I’m glad to see you. Luke. Hey, Luke…”

  Luke hugged him, too, and we started back down the concourse, each of us squeezing one of his arms, talking and laughing. The Buckhead grandmother gave us a long, venomous look as we passed. She moved slightly aside, as if to remove herself from contamination.

  “My husband,” I said loudly to her. “Haven’t seen him in months. I just can’t wait to get him home.”

  And I gave her a showy leer.

  “Jesus Christ, she’s going straight to the phone and call the White Citizens’ Council,” John said in the rich, beautiful voice that I had already almost forgotten. He was grinning broadly.

  “Screw her and the White Citizens’ Council,” I said. “Is this all the luggage you brought?”

  “You got a bad mouth on you, girl. I’m going back first thing in the morning,” John said. “Lordy, jetting down to Atlanta for dinner and going straight back is such a white thing to do. Usually us po’ blacks stay three weeks once we get somewhere. I almost didn’t know how to act on that airplane.”

  “The simple darky shit don’t wash, bro,” Luke grinned at him. “You look like you just made the House of Lords. You look good.”

  “Thanks,” John Howard said, “but the simple darky shit is pretty close to the truth in this case. Do you know, that’s the first time I’ve ever been on an airplane?”

  “Well, don’t feel bad. Chances are not one of those cats on that plane ever rode a mule,” Luke said, and we went out into the crystal afternoon toward the parking lot. I walked decorously between them until we reached the far curb, but then I clutched both their arms and gave a great skip and swung myself between them, off the earth, like a child.

  “Can’t take her anywhere,” Luke said.

  On the way back into the city, crammed between them, I simply hung my head back and let the wind take my hair and the sun lie heavy on my closed lids, and listened to them talk, shouting a little over the rush of the sweet wind.

  “How is it up there?” Luke said.

  “It’s…funny,” John Howard replied. “Queer. I mean, there’s nothing particularly difficult o
r foreign about it; I know my way around pretty well, I fit in okay, my job’s not all that different from what it was at AU. I like it fine. I like the people I work with. I’ve met some congenial new folks. It’s just that nothing seems real. I can’t seem to plug into what’s important to them up there, and the stuff that was important to me down here just three months ago seems like it happened in another lifetime. The…I don’t know, the fire, the heat…it all seems so artificial now.”

  “You got some new fire going?”

  “No. I can’t seem to find anything up there worth it. It’s all the war now, or social protest, or fifty different kinds of drugs, or pure politics. The movement seems almost quaint outside the South, outside Atlanta. I feel like a dinosaur. Or a mercenary, flogging something that somebody paid me to flog. Like my horse got shot out from under me.”

  I felt a small chill that had nothing to do with the slanting sun. It struck me suddenly: how many mercenaries were simply people who had had their horses shot out from under them and couldn’t find another? It was a queer insight for a giddy spring day, and it made me uncomfortable.

  “It feels a little realer back here,” John said tentatively. “It really does sort of swing into focus now that I’m back here. I didn’t think it would. Not all the way real, but like something that fit once, that mattered once—”

  “Come back,” I said, and he looked over at me and smiled. I could not see his eyes behind the dark glasses, but I could see the cruel gray slash of the scar clearly in the sunlight.

  “Don’t know if I can,” he said. “Don’t know if anybody can, really. Didn’t Thomas Wolfe say you couldn’t?”

  “Because of your kid?” Luke said.

  “No, not really. I could see him as easily from here as I can from New York, I guess. Probably for longer at a time, too. It’s a matter of money, not distance. I’m not really sure what it is.”

  “Juanita?” Luke said casually, and John looked sharply at him. I did not think he was going to answer, but after a moment he did.