Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “I like her,” Lucas Geary said to Matt, slumping down into his nest of coats again. “I want her.”

  “You got her,” Matt said.

  “In a pig’s eye,” I said. It was the thing about them that I disliked most, the men of Downtown all together. In a group, they were capable of treating women, even women of nearly equal rank and ability, as what Matt called chicks. Singly, they almost never did. I was already angry at this boneless red Irishman. I was not going to be passed around like candy. I had seen Matt do it with Sister and Teddy and once or twice even Alicia: a visiting journalist or minor celebrity would come by the office, and Matt would summon one of the women and announce to the visitor that she would have dinner with him and show him the town, courtesy of the magazine, of course, and the woman would smile with clenched teeth and go. He had never done it with me so far, and I was not going to let him start now.

  “Too bad,” Matt said, turning back to the photographs. I saw that beside them lay one of Tom’s page layouts, a double-page bleed spread with large photos and captions. The title read, “The Sunchasers.”

  “Matt’s going to do the spread with new photos,” Tom Gordon said. “We thought you might like to write it. Luke has final say, and he just said. I hope you’ll reconsider. I’d like you to do it, too.”

  “You got me,” I said, my heart rising up singing in my chest. I plopped down cross-legged on the floor beside them. “I’d do them with Josef Mengele. Ichabod Crane here is a bonus.”

  Luke smiled what we all, in time, came to call his shit-eating smile and rolled over onto his stomach and focused the Leica at my face. He shot and shot as I leaned over the photos, studying them and listening to Matt and Tom talk about the photo-essay. We talked for perhaps half an hour, and in all that time he did not speak again. I did not speak to him either. I did not even look at him. But I was acutely aware on every inch of my skin that he was there, tracking me with the third eye of his camera, pulling back, coming in so close that I could almost feel the cold kiss of the Leica on my cheek, on my neck. It seemed an extension of him; it was like having him run his hands over my face just a breath shy of touching it. I felt heat and color rise in my chest and neck.

  Matt rose finally, and so did Tom and I. Lucas Geary still lay on his back, fiddling with his camera. I did not look at him.

  “Thank you, Matt,” I said. “You won’t be sorry you gave it to me.”

  “Thank Luke,” he said. “And you may be. Sorry, I mean.”

  “No. Not in a million years. It’s the kind of story I’ve been dying to do.”

  He laughed. “You know not what you say. Here’s the deal, Smoky. You do the story and get a full byline. After you go out and fly with these guys. I’m talking aerobatics. Immelmanns and barrel rolls and whatever the hell they call those things. Up in the air, junior birdmen, up in the air, upside down. Open cockpit. No chute. I got a guy waiting to take you up at dawn in the morning in a Stearman, if the weather holds. Hank’ll meet you here and take you out to the field; they fly out of Stone Mountain. Luke’ll meet you there. Take a change of clothes. Luke tells me he threw up three times when he went up.”

  The three of them smiled at me.

  “I’ve never thrown up in my life,” I said, and walked out of Matt’s unspeakable office. The trembling started then, but I did not think they could see it.

  I am terrified of heights. I always have been. I do not know where it had its genesis, this humbling, debilitating terror. There is nothing in Corkie higher than three stories. Until I came to Atlanta I had never been in a building taller than five floors. I knew the fear was there, but until I first stepped into the glass cage of an outside elevator in John Portman’s futuristic Regency Hotel, in his fledgling Peachtree Center, I had not realized its extent. I made that trip soaked in cold sweat, eyes squeezed shut, holding on to Hank Cantwell so as not to simply sink to the elevator floor on my rubber legs and howl like an animal. I never rode it again. I took the freight elevator when I had occasion to go to the revolving restaurant on top. Nobody so far but Hank knew about the fear, I had thought, but it was possible that Matt sensed it somehow. I knew that he had an interior radar that was nearly uncanny.

  He knows and he’s punishing me for nagging him for a story, the thought came clear and cold and stony in my mind. He thinks I’ll back out. And if I do I will have shown him that I can’t cut it. This is his price for letting a woman do feature stuff for him. The bastard, I’ll show him. Who the hell does he think he’s messing with?

  I cannot remember ever being quite that angry before. The anger went a long way in banishing the fine, silvery trembling that had taken control of my entire body. A long way, but not all the way. When I got to the door of my office I leaned against it for a second and wiped the sweat off my forehead with the heel of my hand.

  “Hey, Smoky,” a mellow voice behind me called, and when I jumped and turned, Lucas Geary clicked the shutter of the Leica.

  I went into my office and slammed the door. Through it I could hear him laughing.

  6

  SOMETIME IN THE BLACK EARLY HOURS NEXT MORNING Teddy shook me awake. I had slept poorly and dreamed, just the dreams I might have expected, of darkness and aloneness and falling. I sat up, heart pounding sickly, when she wakened me.

  “What?” I said thickly.

  “Telephone.”

  “Who is it?” I could not imagine who would be calling me at this hour unless something was wrong at home.

  “Some German,” Teddy mumbled indistinctly, and stumbled away toward her bed.

  I was still not fully awake when I picked up the telephone. It stood on a wrought iron table in the upstairs hall outside Teddy’s door. My feet on the bare black linoleum were icy.

  “Hello?”

  “Goot morning, Fräulein,” a rich voice said. “Ziss is von Richthofen. Ve fly at dawn.”

  Even with the execrable accent I knew who it was.

  “Damn you, Lucas Geary,” I said. “I had another hour to sleep.”

  “When von Richthofen awakens, everyone awakens,” he said. “I vill meet you at the aerodrome at zero-six hundred hours.”

  He hung up and I went into the kitchen to heat water for coffee, but there was no coffee in the cupboard. Teddy and I cooked very seldom; it was a house joke that if we had not been invited along on so many freebies, we would have starved. At any given time there might be small swans of twisted silver foil in the refrigerator containing the leftovers from these elegant—to us, at any rate—repasts, but no staples. This morning I found half a desiccated surf and turf and three soggy, orange-glazed shrimp from a new Polynesian restaurant, but no juice and nothing you might fashion a breakfast from. The last of our bread was furry and gray. The single girl’s pet, Teddy called it. I made green tea from a teabag left from a complimentary Chinese lunch and ate the accompanying fortune cookie.

  “You will go far,” the fortune said. I crumpled it up and flung it into the trash can. I sat on the sofa sipping the tea, my feet tucked under me, staring out at the opaque darkness until the tea cooled, and then I went upstairs and took a very long, very hot shower. Even after that, I was still cold, and my heart was beginning a slow, dragging pounding. I was very frightened.

  Matt had said to dress warmly, so I put on two pairs of tights and a pair of socks under my new striped bell-bottoms, and pulled a ribbed turtleneck sweater over my head. Over that I put on a bulky knit cardigan of Teddy’s and my London Fog. I was so bundled up that my arms stuck out like a child’s in its snowsuit, and I trundled uncomfortably out to the curb to wait for Hank, who was picking me up at five-thirty. My heart lifted when I stepped out into wet, thick fog. I could not see my hand in front of my face. Surely, no one would expect a pilot to take up a small, frail biplane in fog. I felt almost gay as I waited for Hank, rakish and daring, a latter-day Amelia Earhart, now that I would not have to fly. We had been having a spell of the balmy April-like weather that Atlanta gets sometimes in late February, and the cool,
wet kiss of the fog felt good on my hot face.

  Presently Hank’s sedate Chamber Chevrolet loomed up out of the fog, and I got in.

  “You have any trouble sleeping?” he said, and I shook my head. He was not smiling. Hank was opposed to this whole affair. He knew my terrible fear of heights, and had, I knew, had words with Matt about my flying. Sister overheard the argument and told me about it.

  “He said you could write it as well from photographs as going up,” she reported, “and Mr. Comfort said he wasn’t asking anything of you he wouldn’t of any other reporter, and Hank said on the contrary, he thought there was a small element of punishment here, and Mr. Comfort said bullshit, he’d make any man go up, and if you were dead set on playing with the guys you’d have to play by the rules. And then Hank said the only thing wrong with that was that Mr. Comfort made up the rules as he went along, and Mr. Comfort said, ‘Bite my ass,’ you know, like he does when he’s really getting mad, and Hank steamed out of there and slammed the door. I never heard him talk like that to Mr. Comfort. Why do you have to do this stupid story, anyway, Smoky? Now everybody’s all uptight, and nobody’s talking to anybody else—”

  “I just do,” I said.

  And so Hank and I drove out to the field near the base of Stone Mountain through the swirling fog and said little to each other. When we reached the dark field, the sun had still not risen, and the fog was as thick as ever.

  Lucas Geary was not there, after all, but almost everybody else on the editorial staff was. I saw Matt’s car, and Tom’s. Even Charlie Stubbs, who seldom spent time with us now except during strict office hours, was there. I recognized the new Camaro convertible his wife’s father had given them for a wedding present. In the huddle of figures standing just inside the open, lighted hangar I heard Alicia’s silvery laugh, and my face flushed with anger. So they had all gathered, then, to watch my ordeal. Matt did know about my fear. I supposed that they all did, by now. And they had come to watch the upstart get her just desserts, perhaps even disgrace herself. At that moment I was profoundly sorry for the fog. I would have showed them a thing or two….

  “Well,” I said, walking into the light of the hangar. “My ground crew. What a surprise. How good of you all to get up so early.”

  “Hi, Smoky,” Matt said amiably. He grinned at me. He was as rumpled as if he had slept in all his clothes. They looked as if they were the same ones he had worn the previous day, and I thought maliciously that he had had to crawl out of Alicia’s warm bed fully as early as I had had to get up. But then, he often looked precisely like this in the mornings. Alicia looked fresh and edible in a long cardigan coat of a seafoam green mohair that turned her pale eyes a matching color. Her makeup was perfect. Maybe, I thought, she just varnishes it on and sleeps in it.

  “You ready to fly, Tiger?” Tom Gordon said in his dark, sweet voice.

  “But this fog—”

  “Ground fog,” Matt said, as if he flew dawn patrol every morning of his life. “It’ll burn off by the time you’re strapped in. Your pilot here says all systems are go.”

  He nodded at the man who came out of the shadows toward us, and I said, “Good.”

  My voice was a high, strangled bleat. The fog, I could see, was thinning rapidly, and a clear, pearled light grew in the East.

  My pilot was a sunburned man with a dark, square face and a no-color burr cut through which brown scalp showed. His tan stopped at his neck and wrists; I could see pink flesh beyond the perimeters of his shirt. He looked like a laconic South Georgia farmer, but in fact turned out to be the president of a small aviation company nearby. He gave me a brief nod and shook hands with Matt, cocked an eye at the rapidly thinning fog, and said, in a flat drawl, “Ought to be clear enough by the time I get her suited up. You ready?”

  He looked at me, and I nodded. I could not have spoken. I expected him to spit in the dirt.

  He produced from somewhere in the hangar a large, heavy leather jacket and put it on me, and a leather cap with goggles that fastened under my chin with a strap. He got the strap too tight, but I did not care. Perhaps it would strangle me; at the very least it would preclude much talking. He added a long white silk scarf and told me to tuck it into the jacket, and found thick leather gloves that were too large.

  “Ought to have boots,” he said to Matt over my head, as if I were a monkey dressed for a moon shot, “but I couldn’t find any that would fit her. Okay. If y’all are ready, let’s get to it. I got a ten o’clock meeting in town.”

  He turned and walked around the hangar motioning me to follow, and Hank took me by the shoulder and walked me around behind him. The rest of the staff followed us. Like malicious ducklings, I thought in despair, waddling along behind the pilot, whose name I never got. But at least if he planned to be downtown in three hours, the possibility of imminent death was not on his mind. I repeated to myself, over and over, the little mantra with which I have gotten through many tight spots: in three and a half hours it will be over. I can stand anything for three and a half hours.

  We rounded the hangar and I saw the Stearman, sitting alone in the brightening dawn on the empty runway. If Hank had not been firmly behind me with his hand on my shoulder, I believe I would have simply turned tail and fled in an ignominious fast waddle. The little biplane did not look large enough to lift two adults into the sky and bring them down again. It did not look large enough to sit down in. But there were two seats, one behind another, in a small aperture over and slightly behind the double wings, and they were open to the sky. The morning light streamed through the wings themselves, as if they were made of gauze. For all I knew, they were. The plane was a sparkling blue and yellow. I knew that the Stearman had been an early air corps trainer, but this one looked as if it were brand-new. Slightly comforted, I croaked as much to Hank.

  “It is,” the pilot said, not looking back from the propeller he was fiddling with. “Or as good as. I restored her myself, in my basement. She won the best-restored Stearman category in the fly-in in Ottumwa last year.”

  “Wow,” Hank said reverently.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death,” I whispered under my breath, closing my eyes briefly.

  “Well, let’s do it,” said the pilot, and simply lifted me beneath my armpits and swung me up into the second seat as if I were a child. I stared straight ahead as he buckled me in, and fitted a cold metal speaking tube in place. I would, I decided, concentrate on the texture of the metal struts, and the rivets, and the back of the seat ahead of me, and just not look out into the air until we were down again.

  The pilot swung himself up on the wing and into his seat and buckled himself in. Over the speaking tube he said to me, tinnily, “I’m going to take her up and around Stone Mountain, and maybe over it. We’re going to do some simple aerobatics; I don’t have time for much fancy stuff, and besides, your photographer got plenty of those last time. It ought to be a pretty smooth ride. There’s no wind to speak of. If you think you’re going to vomit, for God’s sake lean away from the wind. Tell me first, if you can.”

  “I’m not going to vomit,” I said in the tight little whinny that had become my voice. “But wait, isn’t Lucas Geary supposed to be here? The photographer? I thought the whole point was so he could shoot some more.”

  “Naw,” said the tinny voice. “So far as I can tell, the whole point is to scare the living shit out of you. I tell you, I don’t much like ferrying around little girls, but I like less a man who’ll try to scare one to death just for the fun of it. I’m going to fly us around the other side of the mountain and fiddle around some, and come back and tell your editor we did the whole nine yards. You’ll have to put up with a couple of maneuvers so he can see ’em, but they won’t be the big stuff. And I won’t tell if you don’t. Deal?”

  “Deal,” I said, thinking that if he asked me at that moment I would have married him. I could grit my teeth through a couple of gentle stunts, and then it would be over. I loo
ked down at the staff, standing in the fresh morning, safe on the cool, damp earth and grinning up at me, and jerked my thumb back as I had seen Errol Flynn do in Dawn Patrol.

  Matt’s half-smirk gave way to a full smile, and he jerked his thumb in return. Alicia rolled her eyes and looked away. “Good girl, Smokes,” I saw Hank’s lips say, though I could not hear him.

  Tom Gordon walked to the front of the plane and reached high and grabbed the top blade of the propeller. The pilot nodded, and Tom gave a mighty downward heave that pulled him up off the earth for a moment, and the plane’s engine coughed into life. I pulled down my goggles. The pilot gave Tom a thumb-and-forefinger circle and the plane began to bounce, slowly, down the rough dirt runway. I burrowed deep into my seat and grabbed the bottom of it and closed my eyes. The goggles cut into my face.

  “Thirty more minutes. Just thirty more minutes…”

  We accelerated rapidly, and fled down the runway, bouncing high at intervals like a jackrabbit. For a long second there was only the roar of the engine and the interminable jouncing and what seemed to me great speed, and then, abruptly, we were up.

  For a moment it was much better, and I opened my eyes, thinking, “Well, if this is all there is to it…,” and then the little plane flew straight up and sideways and dropped like a bird shot out of the sky. My stomach rose into my mouth.

  “What was that?” I could not help crying.

  “Little updraft,” came the voice in my ear. “You get ’em in the early mornings this time of year; the sun’s warming the cold ground. Relax. It’s a smooth morning.”

  We did not hit any more updrafts, though the plane wobbled like a bicycle going too slow. The wind in my face was a solid force, and despite the goggles tears stung down my cheeks, drying almost instantly. My ears roared. I felt the cold, but somehow it did not register.

  “You looking? This is something to see,” the pilot said into the tube, and I opened my eyes, to see the great pewter granite bulk of Stone Mountain wheeling up beneath and above us. We were circling about two-thirds of the way up it, flying so close that I could see the scars and striations on its face, and the pockets of scrubby growth, and, just coming into view, Gutzon Borglum’s monolithic equestrian carvings of President Jefferson Davis, General Robert E. Lee, and General Stonewall Jackson. I watched, all fear forgotten, as General Lee’s titanic gray profile streamed past me. I only realized my mouth was open when I felt the frigid air that was burning my throat and chest.