Downtown (38 page)

Matt was laughing so hard that he could only point at Tom Gordon, who sat slumped in a canvas deck chair on the little stern deck, looking like a collapsed runner from ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 304

Marathon, drinking beer and grinning broadly. Matt was usually the perpetrator of the best jokes; I don’t think I had ever seen him so helpless with laughter. It was infectious.

Teddy and I began to laugh, too, even before Hank spoke.

“We got lost,” Hank said, wiping his eyes. “Tom was driving and Matt was navigating, which as every fool knows is precisely backward, and the directions Matt got from Culver just didn’t seem to make any sense, so we stopped at this little filling station way the hell out in the country, and this midget comes out.”

“I don’t believe this,” I said, beginning to laugh harder.

“Swear to God. I was in the backseat,” Hank said. “So anyway, Tom tells the midget they’re looking for the Holiday Marina, and the midget says that’s easy, just turn around and go way on back the way we came, till we see a signpost laying on the ground, says Marina—somebody knocked it down this weekend and they haven’t put it back up yet. So Tom thanks the midget and turns around and starts back off down the road and the midget yells after him, ‘It’s a long way, now.’ So we drive and drive, and we don’t see any sign laying on the ground, and then before we know it we’re back at the Interstate. So we turn around again, and finally…finally, almost back at the filling station, not fifty yards from it, we see the sign. Matt wants to go in and cuss the midget out, because you could have spit on that sign from where he was standing, and he told us it was a long, long way. But Tom says, ‘Naw, Matt, let it go. I guess that is a long way to a midget.’”

It should not have been funny, but it was. Teddy whooped and I doubled over, clutching my stomach. As soon as one of us stopped laughing, another would say, “Guess it is a long way for a midget.” I knew even as I gasped helplessly for air that we would repeat it to each 305 / DOWNTOWN

other as long as we were together. It was a long time before we could stop laughing enough to get the houseboat underway.

It was a small group. Matt had an edict that few outsiders came along on these excursions, not even husbands and wives, and few did. They were mostly pure Comfort People, and the ones of us who were not wholly drawn into that usually did not appear. Sueanne rarely did, and none of the advertising staff. Sister often did but she was not present today. She was visiting her gout-ridden land-baron daddy this weekend, I knew. Sister would pay for that with merciless teasing from Matt tomorrow.

Alicia was not present, either. No one asked why. Buzzy had his own expensive toy berthed at the lake and usually spent holiday weekends on it with whoever was current in his life and bed. Alicia still was. I wondered if Matt thought about her, Alicia with her honey-satin hair and skin and long, smooth legs, only a lake away. I knew that he had another friend, as Hank put it, now, a sleek, supercharged brunette who handled public relations for the local Playboy Club.

“Nothing so crass as a bunny for Matt,” Hank said. “But I hear she was promoted straight from the hutch. He’s the best I ever saw at having his cake and eating it too. You should pardon the expression.”

“It would be hard to top Alicia,” I said, and winced.

“You should also pardon the expression.”

And we laughed together. But they had been a couple for a long time, and she had been at the very epicenter of Comfort’s People. I thought Matt must feel her absence, even if he did not lament it.

When I went into the dim, cool main cabin to dump the food in the galley and change, I found Luke Geary sprawled on one of the long, royal blue sofas, fiddling ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 306

with his cameras. He wore faded old plaid madras trunks with a Baltimore Orioles T-shirt over them, and his long, knobbly limbs were so freckled that he looked tanned to a burnished copper. His legs stuck out before him into the room, and I saw that his left ankle was a lunar relief map of shiny white scars and cratered keloidal tissue. I winced inad-vertently.

He saw it, and smiled.

“It gets me into more sacks than you could imagine,” he said. “I go barefoot whenever possible. Are you moved to lustful pity, Smoky, or perhaps pitiful lust?”

“I’m moved to ask you to move it,” I said. Then I flopped down beside him on the sofa.

“Did you get any good stuff from the other night?”

“A little, I think. I’ll show you some contacts tomorrow,”

he said. “And I want you to sign a release; your back is in some of them. But I doubt Matt will want to use them.

There’s just not enough. John knows a black minister in Mechanicsville who’s set up a soup kitchen in the church basement, and it sounds like it might work. I’m going to go look at it this week. We’ve got time. Andre will carry us a long way.”

He paused, and then looked at me.

“You okay? No shiners? No fat lip?”

“Nope. But I wondered what you’d heard about Rachel.

Or if you had. I called Our Lady Saturday, but Sister Joan wasn’t in and I didn’t want to talk about Rachel with the other sister…I forget her name. She could have run the In-quisition single-handed.”

“Rachel split,” he said briefly, and I stared at him.

“John’s doctor friend went to pick her up and our gracious host Mr. Playboy said that she suddenly felt better and left.

John said he couldn’t imagine how she got out of there, there’s no bus line near, and he couldn’t see any of that bunch calling her a cab, or paying for one.”

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“Oh, Lord, we’re going to have to try and find her—”

“Let it go, Smoky,” he said, turning back to the cameras.

“You did what you could. You’d never find her; you wouldn’t know where to look, and you couldn’t do anything for her if you did, if she didn’t want you to.”

“She’s sick, Luke—”

“She’s an addict, Smoky. She’ll get clean or she won’t.

You don’t figure in that stuff. Believe me. I’ve seen too much of it. It’s all over Atlanta, if you know where to look.”

“Maybe we ought to do something on that for Focus,” I said. “It could be awfully powerful.”

“Culver Carnes would shit bricks,” he said. “There’s no percentage in druggies. Community outreach ain’t going to cut it there. What, you want to do a photo-essay on a junkie kissing a car?”

I was silent. Then I said, “Maybe that’s just what Atlanta ought to see.”

“Forget it,” he said, stretching until each separate vertebra in his spine popped. “This is my day off. Pop a beer and come lie in the sun and let me shoot your body. I came up here to shoot oiled female flesh, not talk about the underbelly of this great country. Go suit up and I’ll put you in
Cosmo
.”

Suddenly I was tired of grimness and crusades. I wanted sun and laughter and music and food and the flatout, breakneck, no-holds-barred being of simply what I was: young. I jumped up off the sofa and sashayed into the big bedroom at the back of the boat, hips swaying.

“Get that little Hawkie-Browneye ready, buster,” I called back, and Matt, who had been fiddling with the controls of the boat, turned the key and it roared into life and gave a mighty backward lunge, and somebody dropped the arm down on Teddy’s portable and the ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 308

Doors bellowed out “Light My Fire” and we were off across the lake and into that golden day.

I remember it chiefly as a string of vignettes: a small, secret cove in green-black pines that Tom Gordon knew about, where we dropped anchor and plunged, one after another, into water so clear and cold in its depths that it was like swimming in ginger ale, trailing bubbles; lying on the deck as supine as a beached fish, stunned with sun and beer, feeling the boat rock under me as it bobbed at its anchor and seeing only the red of the sun through my closed eyelids, listening to the drumbeat of the music, sun-weight as heavy as another body on every inch of my skin; eating prodigiously and choking with laughter at something Matt and Hank had going; swimming again, this time in a satiny wrapping of alcohol and too much sun, going far down in the silent green underwater and thinking that if I wanted, I never had to come up; coming out of the water, finally, with the sting gone out of the sun and the light turning, for the first time that year, to the thick gold of the coming autumn, and twilight drawing on, pulling on Luke Geary’s sweatshirt against the first chill of evening.

By the time we started home, the boat wallowing sedately across the gunmetal lake, the sun had gone, and most of us were frankly tight. It did not seem to matter. I was nearly comatose with contentment and affection for Comfort’s People.

I climbed the little ladder up to the tarpaper roof of the houseboat to clear my head a bit, and found Luke sprawled on his back on a towel, a straw planter’s hat over his face.

“Can I join you?” I said.

He patted the towel and I plopped down beside him and lay back and closed my eyes. Wind poured over my drying skin; I could feel it everywhere, even on my closed 309 / DOWNTOWN

eyelids and in my hair. The air smelled of sun on pine and the fishy breath of clean lake water, and the boat rocked and chugged steadily, and all my consciousness seemed to draw out of my body and into my mind. For a moment I lay there all mind, all perception, existing only in the space behind my closed eyes.

I thought about the blackness then, and sat up swiftly and opened my eyes. I simply would not allow it here. Not here, not now.

“You’re a Catholic, aren’t you, Luke?” I said after a bit.

“Was,” he said from under the hat, not moving.

“Well, then you still are,” I said. “You don’t just decide not to be one.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“The only answers it had didn’t fit my questions,” he said drowsily.

“Luke did you…have you ever felt anything that you thought might be—I don’t know—the voice of God, or the voice of the Church, or something like that? Something that just came over you all of a sudden when you were…maybe starting to do something you’d always been told not to…and felt completely black, awful, like a kind of death?”

He did not move or answer, and I was suddenly terribly embarrassed.

“No. I don’t think I ever did, not like that,” he said then, and his voice was merely serious and interested, as it often was.

“But I’ve heard the Church can get you like that. I think Graham Greene wrote a good bit about it. What’s the matter, Smokes, you been stealing from the poor box?”

“No,” I said, and was silent. I wished I had never mentioned the blackness. I could not imagine why I had.

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“Sweetie,” Luke said from under the hat, “There’s nothing you could do bad enough for God to light out after you like that. It just ain’t in your makeup. It’s a lot more likely that what you feel is your own good sense telling you not to sleep with YMOGs.”

I gave a silent gasp, or at least I thought it had been silent.

But he raised the hat off his face and looked at me.

“No offense intended,” he said, and smiled sweetly. It really was a singularly sweet smile. There was nothing of his customary lazy malice in it.

Suddenly the heavy memory of the blackness took wings and flew straight out of my mind and into the air and was gone. I knew, without knowing how, that it would not be back. I began to laugh.

From below, Matt’s taxi horn blatted and he bellowed,

“Gather round, chirrun,” and Luke and I looked at each other, he smiling, me laughing, and then we scrambled down the ladder and into the main cabin of the houseboat. Matt sat on the blue sofa, holding up a dripping bottle of champagne. Everyone was circled around him, pinked with sun and walleyed with beer. Matt himself was just a trifle unsteady, and held in his other hand a half-empty tumbler of something deep amber.

“I have in my pocket a handwritten note whose author I will not yet disclose, but whose letterhead says Sixteen-hundred Pennsylvania Avenue, congratulating us on Andre,” he crowed. “An official proclamation from the undersecretary of something or other will follow. Names are named and congratulations tendered, and I can assure you that copies of this document will be circulated to every chamber of commerce in the free world by Culver Carnes, who is doubtless at the Xerox machine as we speak. I would expect maximum media coverage. So I would like to be the first to lift a glass to

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Smoky O’Donnell and Lucas Geary, and say, Well done, guys. Your jobs are safe for another month.”

He popped the cork and the champagne fizzed out over the bottle and down his arm, everyone cheered, and Hank handed out glasses, and I began to cry.

“I love you all,” I sobbed. “I love you every last one.”

Behind me Teddy dropped the phonograph arm down and Petula Clark roared out, “When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go…Downtown!”

At the wheel, Tom Gordon gunned the houseboat and it took off across the sunset lake, wallowing and creaking, churning along with a large pink and gold wake behind it, and we capered and hugged and danced with each other, and we sang:

Listen to the rhythm of the gentle Bossa Nova.

You’ll be dancing with ’em, too, before the night is over, happy
again…

The lights are much brighter there, you can forget all your
troubles, forget all your cares, and go
downtown…where all the lights are bright…

downtown…waiting for you tonight…

downtown…You’re gonna be all right…now!

11

W
HEN WE GOT HOME FROM THE LAKE, BRAD CALLED

from Huntsville to say that he had to come back to Atlanta for the day on the following Friday to consult with his father on estimates, and would like to meet me downtown somewhere for lunch.

“I can’t stay over,” he said, “but at least I can look at you and grope your knees under the table. Unless you’d like to go for a nooner at your place?”

“I’ll meet you at the Top of Peachtree,” I said. “Boy, have I got a bone to pick with you about the black deejay story.”