Downtown (39 page)

“Uh-oh. I know what that’s about,” he said. “How’d it go?”

“It went so smoothly that there’s not even a story,” I said.

“Luke didn’t get anything newsworthy. We’re going to do a church soup kitchen instead. So you could have saved yourself a lot of worry.”

“I should have told you I’d talked to Matt,” he said.

“No. You shouldn’t have talked to him at all. This is my life, Brad. I can take care of myself.”

312

313 / DOWNTOWN

“You’re my life now, too, Smoky,” he said. “You can’t blame me if I worry about you sometimes. You’re awfully quick to go in harm’s way.”

“I can’t blame you for worrying, but I can blame you for making me look like a fool with Matt. He and I can decide what’s harmful and what’s not when it comes to my work.”

“Okay,” he said. “Truce. Can we take this up Friday?”

“You bet we can,” I said, slightly mollified, but still determined to clear the air once and for all about my
Downtown
assignments.

“See you then. I love you.”

“Me too,” I said, and felt a warm rush of happiness and the new sense of safety, and thought, well, after all, what’s so awful about a man worrying about his wife-to-be?

Wouldn’t you worry about him, if you thought he was going to do something dangerous?

Only then did I realize that I would not. I could not conceive of Brad in a situation that he could not handle. That, I knew, was where the safety sprang from.

On Thursday afternoon Luke came into my office looking slightly sheepish and grinning the shit-eating grin. I laughed aloud. He looked for all the world like Tom Sawyer caught in a misdeed by Aunt Polly.

“You been whitewashing fences?” I said.

“Whitewashing wouldn’t be a bad idea,” he replied. “I have a feeling a bucket of whitewash would serve me well before long.”

“Why?”

“This,” he said, and pulled a folded piece of paper from his camera bag. He handed it to me and stood silently, arms folded over his chest, as I took it and unfolded it.

All of a sudden the air around my face felt charged and thick, as though there had been a silent explosion. My face and lips tingled with it, and my ears rang. The ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 314

paper was a page proof from
Life
magazine, and the photo on it was an extreme close-up of me and the young black woman in the bathroom of the Santa Fe Plaza Motel, face thrust into furious face, screaming silently at each other.

Her face was full on, and in it you could read years, centuries of corrosive rage and impotence. There was such venom in her contorted mouth and slitted eyes that even here, in my silent, sunny office, I flinched away, feeling again her clawing hands and nails. My own face was in profile, skin very white against her black cheeks, eyes looking pale and ghost-gray and somehow eerie, mouth opened in what I knew to be angry shock but what looked to be spitting vindictiveness. Even in profile, it was undeniably me. Even untitled, the photograph pulsed and shimmered with power and particularity. It was impossible to look away from it.

Some small, clear part of my mind knew that
Life
would run it uncaptioned and full-page bleed. It spoke for itself: the rage of race against race, the swift, menacing new fury of the young. Even in my beginning anger and outrage at Lucas Geary, that same part of my mind applauded
Life
for its editorial sensibility. It was a stunning photograph.

After a very long time I whispered, “Luke, how could you?”

He shook his head, as if he did not himself understand.

“How could I not?” he said.

I sat down heavily in my desk chair and stared from the page proof to him. He was not smiling, but he did not look unduly guilty, or chagrined. He merely looked very focused, and very interested, the old Luke look.

He waited, not speaking.

“It makes me look like a terrible racist,” I said, tears beginning to prickle in my eyes. “Can’t you see that?

315 / DOWNTOWN

You know I’m not. You know I’m not! Oh, Luke, everything that Matt was beginning to let me do, all the Focus work, this makes it all…just a joke!”

He shook his head.

“Not to anybody who knows you. Not to anybody who knows me, or John Howard, or Matt. This photograph isn’t about you, Smoky. Don’t you see that? It’s about now, about the times—”

“Everybody will see it. They’ll see it in Corkie, Brad’s family will see it—”

“Well, from what you say, it ought to earn you big points in Corkie and with Brad’s family,” he said, beginning to grin, and my tears spilled over.

I turned away from him and stood looking blindly out my window. The white-hot September sun glinted off the gold dome of the Capitol. It danced and wavered through the salt blur in my eyes.

Behind me he said, “I didn’t think it would hurt you, Smoky. It won’t be captioned; you won’t be identified. They promised that. No names. You did sign a release…”

His voice trailed off, and I knew that he was embarrassed at last. He knew and I knew that I had thought the release merely a formality. But he must have suspected all along what he had in this photograph.

“When will it run?”

“Be on the stands Monday. I brought you this so you could get used to it and…you know, alert anybody it might take by surprise.”

I knew that he meant Brad.

“I guess there’s no doubt that it’s going to run?”

“No. I couldn’t stop it now if I wanted to. And I don’t.

Smoky…just look at it. Look at it again, and pretend it isn’t you.”

I simply stared at him. Pretend it was not me? That ugly rictus of rage, not me? But then I thought, that’s ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 316

Lucas. That’s what he is, that’s how he sees things. He is a camera. Matt was right. He is…dangerous.

I looked back at the proof spread out on my desk and thought, for just an instant, what a spectacular photograph that is.

He saw the thought register, and said, “See?”

“I know it’s good,” I said. “I know it’s powerful. I guess I’d run it too, if I worked for
Life
. But Luke…this is
me
. This hurts
me
. Don’t you care about that?”

He screwed up his eyes as though he were concentrating very hard. “I care a lot if it really hurts you,” he said. “But I can’t see why it would. Everybody who knows you knows you’re not a racist; anything but. Who gives a shit about the rest? You don’t, do you? I didn’t think you’d care—nothing’s going to change, Smoky. It isn’t going to hurt Focus. Christ, if Hunt gets his drawers in an uproar over this he doesn’t deserve you—”

“He’s not going to get his drawers in an uproar,” I shouted angrily. The tears receded. “He’s just going to be madder than hell that you’ve made me look like a damned Ku Klux Klanner! What do you think he is?”

“Good question,” he said mildly. “So I guess you’re pissed, huh?”

“I’m…oh, I don’t know what I am! Go away and leave me alone, Luke. And don’t come near me anymore with that damned camera. I don’t trust you worth…I don’t know what.”

“I never meant for you to feel bad about it, Smoky,” he said, his voice subdued, and started out of the office.

“Has Matt seen it?” I said after him.

“Yeah.”

“What did he say? That I got into trouble after all, and that he told me so?”

“Nope. Just said it sure wasn’t your best side,” Luke said, and shut the door softly behind him. I sat for a long 317 / DOWNTOWN

time, staring at the page proof, and then I put it into my top drawer and shut it firmly. I would, I thought, think about it later.

And I did. All that afternoon, and all evening, and until early into the morning hours, I lay thinking about it, the black and white faces burned into the space behind my eyes, wondering whether to show it to Brad, wondering how to behave about it if I did, wondering what, if anything, I should say to them back in Corkie, before the photograph ran. In the end, I crammed it into an envelope and took it with me to the Top of Peachtree to meet Brad for lunch the next day, my eyes burning from lack of sleep, dawdling along the hot, crowded sidewalk in my indecision about whether or not I would show it to him.

In the end I did. Lunch went so wonderfully well that I simply forgot I had ever doubted I would. In the powerful lamp of Brad’s obvious delight in seeing me again, and the tumble of things we had saved to tell each other, and the laughter we shared, and the cold white wine, and the shrimp salad and lemon mousse and the soft pressure of his knee against mine under the table and the sheer, proprietary pride I felt looking at him across the table—how handsome he was; it was always a small shock when I saw him afresh—I forgot my apprehension of the day before. Just before we rose to leave, I to go back to the office and he to drive back to Huntsville, I said, “Oh, I almost forgot. Look what Lucas Geary has done to me,” and pulled out the page proof and handed it to him. For a long moment, I sat watching him across the table, smiling slightly, waiting for the rueful grin and the snort of annoyance at Lucas. Above him, behind his gleaming blond head, the mural shone in the gray-tinted dusk of the bar, and my own face seemed to look back at me, smiling. Smiling.

He lifted his head from the proof and looked across the table at me. His face had whitened while I was smiling at ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 318

myself in the mural, and there were scarlet patches on each cheekbone. His lips were bloodless. Even his eyes looked paler, somehow bleached, like lake ice at the end of winter.

“It’s not that bad,” I said, smiling at him.

He did not speak.

“He didn’t mean to make me look like a racist,” I said. I was warmed by his obvious anger at Luke, but I did not want a serious quarrel between them.

He still did not speak. But he took a deep breath, as though he meant to, and then let it out again. He was obviously struggling to control himself. I had never seen him so angry. I had never, in fact, seen him angry at all. Not really.

“Don’t be mad at him,” I said. “He’s a photographer; it’s what he does. It’s what he is. He can’t help it. It won’t jeopardize my work. Matt made a joke of it.”

“Did he now.”

It was not a voice I knew. I fell silent, looking warily at him.

“You said,” he said in a precise, dry voice, as if he were reciting from memory, “that there wasn’t a story. That you didn’t get—and I quote—‘anything newsworthy.’ Apparently
Life
magazine didn’t agree with you.”

“Well, I didn’t know Luke was shooting,” I said uncertainly. “He didn’t say anything until he brought me this, yesterday.
Downtown
isn’t running anything—”

“Oh, well, then, everything is all right,” Brad said, and his voice cut me as if it were the lash of a whip. I simply looked at him.

“You’ve been a busy girl, haven’t you, Smoky? Busy, busy, busy. First your picture on the wall of the busiest bar in town, and then why, my goodness me, look ahere! Here’s ol’

Smoky in the flesh, spitting like a cat at a darky in a dopehead motel, close up so all America can see.”

319 / DOWNTOWN

His voice was so like that of Marylou Hunt that I could not speak. He was, at that moment, no one I knew even remotely, no one I had ever known.

“So what’s next, Smokes?” he said, in a ghastly caricature of joviality. “Starting a riot at the Saint Paddy’s Day Parade?

I bet I know. The Blessed Virgin is going to appear to you in the ladies’ room mirror; your typewriter will develop a stigmata—”

“Shut up.”

I could taste tears in my mouth, but I could not feel them running down my face. For the second time in two days, I felt in the air that terrible silent explosion.

His ashen face flushed and he dropped his eyes. It seemed to me simply idiotic that I would notice and admire the way his thick gold-tipped lashes shuttered them, but I did. Part of me did. The other part was frozen, dead.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But there’s something in you that just doesn’t know when to quit, Smoky. You don’t have any…any boundaries; you don’t know what the limits are.”

I was silent, and he raised his eyes. They were slightly wild. I thought that perhaps there was a sheen of tears in them.

“You go too far, Smoky,” he said in the new, cold, level voice. “It’s beyond…courage, or spirit. I don’t know…. It’s so—”

“It’s so Irish. Isn’t that what you were going to say, Brad?”

I said. My voice was very steady. I was amazed at myself. I could feel the tears now, a regular runnel of them on both cheeks. I did not raise my hand to wipe them away.

“You said it. I didn’t. But since you did…” he said, and looked away from me. In profile, he was Marylou Hunt. I wondered why I had never seen it before. All ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 320

that separated them was her long hair and his gilt stubble of beard.

I got up from the table and crumpled the page proof into a loose ball and tossed it into his dessert plate. I slid the gold bracelet off my wrist and laid it on top of the proof.

“For your mother,” I said. “She’s going to love both of them.”

I turned and walked out of the dining room and slipped into the elevator just as the doors were closing. I thought that I heard him call “Smoky!” just as they slid shut, but I was not sure, and in any case, the roaring in my ears made exterior sound suspect. I rode down with a carful of loud, well-fed strangers, eyes fixed on the changing floor numbers, face stiff and hot, ears ringing, and walked back to the office.

By the time I got there, the fierce heat had dried the tears on my face, but it felt soiled and scummed and sore, as if I had been slapped hard on both cheeks, and so I went into the ladies’ room and washed my face and reapplied my makeup.

I gave my face a last quick survey, remembered his poisoned words, whispered “Last chance,” to the Blessed Virgin, and walked out. There was no sign from the Virgin. There was none either, all that afternoon, from Brad. Even as I told myself he would call to apologize and I would refuse to talk to him, I knew that he would not. Marylou would not have.

Neither, now, would her son.

I Scotch-taped a sign on my door that said, “Captions and subheads due 5:00 P.M. Do not disturb,” and shut it. I phoned Sister and asked that she hold my calls and visitors unless Matt needed me for something really important.