Downtown (54 page)

Luke and I had not been out to speak of, except for work, for a long time. The Spelman-Morehouse concert had been the last significant event we had attended. Even Christmas we spent by ourselves, eating the smoked turkey Matt had given us, along with everyone else on the staff, and drinking Rhine wine from the widow. New Year’s Eve we spent at Johnny Escoe’s restaurant on Peachtree Road in the company of raucous, half-drunk strangers, a belated decision made when Luke said, about four o’clock on the dark afternoon of New Year’s Eve, that we ought at least try to kick-start the New Year out of the Slough of Despond. It was a bad mistake. We liked Escoe’s, but we both hated it that evening.

“Never again,” Luke said, when we got home and collapsed gratefully on the floor in front of the fire. “I will never again spend New Year’s Eve anywhere but at home. The Slough of Despond is better any day.”

“It hasn’t been so bad,” I said, curling up with my head in his lap. “It’s been good to just be home with you. That won’t happen again until the next Christmas holidays. And you just can’t imagine how much better this New Year’s Eve is than the last one.”

Even thinking of the cold, bitter holidays at my parents’

house in Corkie the year before was oppressive. I had thought then I would never really go back; now I was not only sure of it, but I knew where, if I were permitted to follow my delirious star, I would go from here. I would go where Luke went. Or rather, stay where he stayed. I realized, as 1967

slid into 1968 and we toasted

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each other with white wine, that despite the darkness than hung over my familiar landscape now, where I wanted us to stay was Atlanta and
Downtown
.

Somehow I was reluctant to ask Luke if that was what he wanted, too. He had not said differently, but the reluctance was peculiarly strong. It was not, I realized, anything I was ready to probe. So far, this new year was for waiting.

Teddy had said Hank would be joining us, but when we got to Colonial Homes I realized that it was more than a casual presence. He was in the kitchen mixing Bloody Marys when we got there, and when he came out to greet us he kissed me on the cheek and Teddy, lightly and with a sweet familiarity, on her lips.

I followed Teddy upstairs when she took our coats.

“You and Hank?” I said, flopping on the twin bed that had been mine. It was pushed close to the other to make a large bed, and the whole was rumpled. I grinned at it, and then at her, and she blushed.

“Well, I guess so,” she said.

“When did all this happen?”

She stood in front of the mirror over her bureau, fiddling with her hair, and then she turned and smiled at me, joy blazing out of her face. My own smile deepened. No one could have failed to smile at Teddy Fairchild on this day.

“It’s been happening all fall, if you hadn’t been blinder than a bat and deafer than a post over Luke. Ever since you and Luke, as a matter of fact. Hank finally decided you were a lost cause and looked around, and there I was. Boy, you bet there I was. I’ve been waiting for him to get over you for a solid year.”

“Lord, Teddy, that’s not so,” I said, honestly shocked.

“Hank Cantwell? Me? He had never said. I had never thought—”

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“Oh, yes. He’s been in love with you since college. I’m not even sure he really knows it, but anybody with half a brain could tell. He never did think Brad was going to last, you could just tell he didn’t. But Luke was a different matter.

He gave up then. It didn’t take me long to move in on him.

Nature abhors a vacuum, you know. I cooked for him, and took him home to Mother and Daddy, and helped him fix up that disaster area of an apartment, and one thing led to another, and…here we are. It’s right, Smoky. I always knew it would be. He is a very, very good man.”

“Yes,” I said, tears stinging my eyes, “he is. And you are a very, very good woman. I love you both. I hope it lasts for three lifetimes.”

“It will,” she said, her face a lit candle, and I hugged her.

One way or another, I thought, Teddy had been in the wilderness a long time.

“Do your parents care that he’s not…you know, Buckhead?

All that stuff?”

“I think my dad may, a little, but he really likes Hank and he’s coming around. It would be silly to worry about whether or not Hank’ll be able to support me in the manner to which, blah, blah. I’ll have enough, one way or another, for us to live almost anyway we want to. Hank’s being stubborn about that, but he’s not stupid. As for Mother, she’s so grateful I’m involved with anybody at all that she’s walking on air. She’s had the Cathedral and the Driving Club reserved for a month.”

“Teddy! Is it that far along?”

“No. Not to anybody but Mother. But it could happen, I guess. I don’t want to think any further ahead than now—”

“I know,” I said. “I feel that way, too.”

“You want to talk about that?”

“I don’t think so. Not right now. After a drink, maybe.”

439 / DOWNTOWN

When we went back downstairs Luke and Hank were sprawled in front of the television set, and a frantic preppy in a pre-freak brush cut was starting the pregame countdown, or whatever it was called. Hank looked up at me as I came into the room.

Is it okay? he said silently, with his lifted eyebrows and a small, questioning smile.

“Okay for you, Hank Cantwell,” I said aloud, and went over and kissed his mouse-fur hair. I noticed that it was thinning just a little, on the very top of his head. Somehow that wrung my heart.

“You be happy,” I whispered in his ear. He reached back and squeezed my hand.

“You be, too,” he whispered back.

At halftime we ate the collapsed soufflé and drank the wine Luke and I had brought, and we talked of Matt. It had not been a good January. After Tom Gordon left, Matt spent more and more time out of the office, spending longer and longer at lunches that we no longer attended; coming in smelling of whiskey and almost, but not quite, lurching when he walked; saying curtly that someone had to court the assholes that bought the double-page spreads, make the speeches that kept Culver Carnes happy, guide the chattering flock of freelancers who were doing, now, as the magazine grew larger, more and more of the editorial assignments.

When he was in the office, he spent the time with his door closed. We had long known that he kept a bottle of Cutty Sark in his credenza; now, Sister reported worriedly, she fished his empties out of the wastebasket every two or three days. The work of the magazine went forward; Matt had not, so far, stinted on that, but it went forward in solitary segments, and without much of the cartwheeling seat-of-the-pants joy that we were used to. We still went out for lunch together and sat under our mural at the Top of Peachtree and Tony still launched into

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 440

“Downtown” when we entered, but we entered, now, without Matt, and the song, already bittersweet to me, gained a new poignance, as if Tony were trying, with its chords, to conjure the old Matt Comfort whose anthem it was. The new Matt had no music in him. The lights, for him, no longer seemed brighter downtown.

“Is it Tom, do you think?” Teddy said, giving up on the soufflé and drinking wine. “I know I miss him awfully. I can’t even stand to look in his office and see the new guy, and he’s a nice guy. He’s a good art director. He’s trying so hard to be one of us. But it should be Tom in there—”

“Partly,” Hank said. “It’s partly Tom, and partly Alicia.

Partly John Howard, I think, though Matt was never all that close to him. It’s mostly the fact that the unit got broken.

For some reason that just outrages and appalls him. He could have made the new guy one of us in a day; poor bastard came here full of Comfort legends and the old
Downtown
magic, and what does he get? Closed doors and whispering and so much gloom we might be an actuarial office. Probably wishes he’d stayed in advertising. I’m trying to bring him into the gang, but there’s not much gang to bring him into.

I wish you guys would open up to him a little.”

The new guy was Whit Wilkerson, a talented young art director recruited from a hot new advertising agency. He was funny, unpretentious, street smart, sweet-tempered. Tom Gordon had picked him as his successor, and he was doing a fine job at editorial art direction. But you could tell he was lost and disappointed.
Downtown
had promised him, tacitly, Matt Comfort and Comfort’s People, and he had gotten a morose recluse of an editor and a silent staff who kept their doors closed and talked, when they did, in hushed monotones. I had meant to do something about making friends with Whit; I think we all

441 / DOWNTOWN

had. But I had simply not had the energy. Now I promised myself that on the very next day I would take him to lunch and ask the others to join us, and we would make him laugh and reassure him that the arctic winter emanating from Matt’s office would end. That it always did.

I hoped I could reassure myself as well.

“Speaking of John Howard, have you heard from him?”

Hank said to Luke. Luke was lying on his back with his feet propped on the sofa and a can of beer balanced on his chest.

He did not lift his head. I looked at the top of it, thinking how I loved the small whorl on the crown where a cowlick was concealed in the thick tangle of red curls. I traced it, in my mind, with my fingertips, as I had a hundred times before.

All of a sudden I wanted to be in bed with him, in a darkened room, the shades drawn, the world shut out, clocks stopped, time stopped. I swallowed and looked away.

“He called Friday,” Luke said, and I looked back at him.

He had not told me he’d heard from John. I started to speak, and then did not.

“Has he worked it out with his wife and kid?” Hank said.

“Nope. He sees the kid twice a month now, but that’s all she’ll let him do. From noon to six on Sundays, twice a month. She still won’t speak to him. She’s not ever going to forgive him Juanita.”

“Not even after what happened at Christmas? She must know that’s torn him up,” I said, anger flaring.

“I don’t think he told her,” Luke said. “I don’t think he got a chance. He’s not going to stay in Detroit. He’s going to New York in a week or two. There’s some kind of Civil Rights project at Columbia that wants him to edit one of a series of books they’re doing, and they’ve offered him a lec-tureship that’ll pay him enough to live on. He’ll be close enough to go see his kid twice a ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 442

month, and this’ll keep him busy for a semester or two. After that, he doesn’t know.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said. “I’ve been missing him.

I’ve been worried about him.”

“I was going to,” Luke said. “He asked about you. I was thinking over a proposition he made me, and I wanted to decide about it before I told you.”

The back of my neck prickled slightly.

“What proposition?” I asked, keeping my voice level.

“They want to start over on the photographs for the book, do all new stuff. He thought I might want to take it on. It would mean about six weeks or two months around the country, shooting, and then another month or so in New York, editing. The pay’s good.”

“So what did you decide?” I said in the level, pleasant, silly voice.

He tilted his head back so that he was looking at me upside down and grinned.

“I decided I didn’t want to do it. The pay’s not that good.

I don’t like New York. I was afraid if I left you’d move somebody like Buzzy into the apartment. And I just can’t work up a hard-on about Civil Rights anymore. It just feels like the heat’s gone out of it. The Christmas thing kind of did me in; it felt like the last gasp of something—passion, or purpose, or just plain sense. I don’t know what I mean. The movement isn’t over, I know. But like I told you before, it’s not really where the heat is now.”

“You mean it’s in the war,” Hank said.

“Yeah,” Luke said. “I guess that is what I mean.”

He’s going, I thought. Sooner or later, probably sooner, Luke is going to go shoot that damned war. It isn’t going to be long at all. Desolation swamped me.

“Let’s get this miserable soufflé out of sight. It’s depressing me,” I said to Teddy, and scrambled to my 443 / DOWNTOWN

feet and began gathering up plates and glasses. Luke reached out and touched my leg as I passed him.

“You okay, babe?” he said.

“I wish you’d told me,” I said. Idiotically, I felt as if I was going to cry.

In the kitchen, Teddy scraped plates as I filled the minuscule sink with hot water.

“You two going to get married?” she said casually, not looking at me.

“Oh, Teddy, I don’t know,” I said. “We haven’t really talked about it. Things were just so good the way they were, I didn’t want to think about changing them….”

She looked at me over her shoulder, but said nothing. I looked down at the soapy water. I had spoken in the past tense. Teddy would not have missed that.

I knew then that things had changed, and I had not let myself see it. Not in the way we felt about each other; I was so sensitive to Luke’s feelings that I would know almost before he did if there had been any lessening of the thing between us. It was I who had changed. Up to now, I had been content, as he was, to go on as we were, to live in the moment, let who and what and where we were fill me up, complete me. But sometime during the Christmas holidays that had changed. I found myself looking ahead now, wondering what would come next, wondering when he would tell me that he wanted to go to the war, or wherever the next siren call tugged him; wondering how he would tell me.

Wondering what he would say about coming back.

We had agreed that when either of us felt the need to change something we would say so, and he had not said.

And I knew that the need had been born in him, and was growing, like a seed. But I also knew that a need had been born in me, too, a need for permanence, promises, reassur-ance—and I had not said. I had been, for some ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 444

time, needy, anxious, clinging. He had been preoccupied, restless. I had put it down to the emptiness left by Tom and especially John Howard’s leaving, and the worry over Matt.