Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  But somehow, on that strange golden day, nothing that Brad’s mother did seemed to touch me. I ate lunch, lay in the sun, made polite conversation, swam, went home and changed and came back to meet the senior Hunts in the Cloister’s lounge, went down the elegant little shop-lined hallway and in to dinner, nodded to a great many people and spoke with some, ate wonderfully well, and drank a great deal of wine in a hermetically sealed, impenetrable bubble of power and well-being.

  It was not until we were walking out of the dining room and down another long corridor to the lounge for a nightcap that I saw our reflections in an ornate mirror over a little mahogany side table, Marylou Hunt’s and mine, and realized why.

  I was not looking in the mirror, merely looking idly about while Marylou and I waited for Brad and his father to catch up with us. But I raised my head and saw in its depths a woman so beautiful, so starkly and powerfully commanding, that I gave a small, silent gasp. Only after I had stared at the image for a long second did I realize that I was looking at the image of Marylou Hunt, who stood behind me, and that she was staring, not at herself, but at the image of me in the mirror, and on her unguarded face was not the barely concealed contempt that I had fancied I had seen all afternoon, but naked, hungry envy. It was a primitive expression; powerful, somehow pure. It was more than the animosity of a mother toward a younger rival for her son’s affections. It was somehow murderous, all-consuming, and yet so nakedly vulnerable that I shut my eyes involuntarily.

  When I opened them she had looked away, and her face was back in the chiseled ivory mask that it always wore, overlaid now with a careful wash of sheer gold from her morning’s perfectly calibrated sunning. Her eyelids were shaded a delicate pewter, and her wonderful, deep blue eyes were fringed with long, silky lashes, and her deep red lipstick had burnished gold overtones that echoed the serene gilt of her hair. She was as whole and perfect as a Fabergé egg, or a Chinese porcelain, and as incomparably beautiful. She wore wide-legged white silk palazzo pants cinched with a gold mesh belt, and the sheer artifice of her at that moment was breathtaking.

  But I had seen that other face, and everything changed in that moment. I saw myself in front of her, juxtaposed against her, flushed with wine and red-cheeked with sun and wind, black hair an unruly tangle of curls from the humid night wind, red linen slightly rumpled, shoulders and neck and bosom glowing with heat and sunburn, eyes sparkling from alcohol and a kind of reckless triumph. I was raw and unfinished beside her, but totally and unconquerably young.

  That was my power. Only that, but it was for that moment enough. I could run nearly naked on a hot, windy beach and plunge without care into a running diamond sea; roll on the sand and fling my arms wide to the sun and still be what I was, that she could never again be: young. Her beauty was a triumph of wonderful bone and great art and much, much money, but it was a fragile triumph, needing to be tended and lacquered and shaded and guarded. My beauty was nothing next to hers, but I had the vitality and spontaneity and the supple flesh and the sheen of youth, and it was, to her, a terrible weapon.

  I stood still, staring into the mirror, my head ringing with the realization of it. And then joy flooded in, swift and exultant. I would use it, then; she could not touch me. I had won everything, I saw in that moment, everything that she wanted: her son, the big old house down the beach, the right of succession to the life she led in her big Buckhead house. I knew that I had won them. I did not stop to think whether I wanted them. I simply stood in the dim hallway of that consummately elegant old hotel and rejoiced in the power I had that night. That it was fleeting; that I would as surely lose it as she had lost it; that it was a small and cruel power, did not occur to me in that moment. All that did was that I had come into enemy territory feeling helpless and vulnerable and had found, after all, that I had come armed.

  When Brad and his father reached us, I took his arm and said, “I don’t think I want a drink, after all. I’d really like to just go back and go to bed. We were up awfully early, and tomorrow’s big day.”

  I laid my head lightly on Brad’s shoulder when I said “bed,” and smiled at Marylou and his father.

  She flushed.

  “I told the Thorntons we’d see them in the bar after dinner, Brad,” she said, looking narrowly at her son. “Lucy’s with them. Her divorce was final last week, and they thought a little rest would be good for her. She’s awfully anxious to see you.”

  “Not tonight, Ma,” he said, ruffling my hair. “Smoky’s right. She’s had a long, hard day.”

  “Well, then, I’ll tell her you’ll see her for tennis in the morning,” his mother said. In the dimness her blue eyes flashed. “She said she hoped you’d give her a game. Remember how you two used to play tennis all day long down here?”

  “Ma,” Brad said, smiling, “In the morning I’m going to sleep until noon at the very least, and then I’m taking Smoky sailing. Tell Lucy I’ll see her at Mama Hunt’s party. Or if not there, I’ll catch up with her back home.”

  Marylou Hunt lifted her carved chin.

  “I thought at the very least you might give me a hand with the party arrangements in the morning,” she said. “I’ve got that whole lounge to get into shape, and the flowers to be brought—”

  “Since when have I ever helped you with that party?” he grinned. “What has the Cloister got a florist and a staff for? Let up, Ma. Smoky’s going to think you’re a nag, and she’s already gotten a broadside from Mama Hunt.”

  Marylou smiled silkily.

  “I do hope she wasn’t too awful, Smoky,” she said. “She has a terrible tongue. I tried to get Brad to put you up in one of the cottages, but oh, no, it had to be that old wreck—”

  “The old wreck is looking pretty good,” Brad said. “And Grandma was positively taken with Smoky. They hit it off like gangbusters, didn’t you, Smokes?”

  “She’s really something,” I said.

  “Yeah, her last words as we left for lunch had to do with, ah, Smoky’s remarkable reproductive potential,” Brad smiled. He watched his mother.

  Two hectic red spots appeared on her cheeks.

  “It would be hard to miss that, wouldn’t it?” she said, and turned and walked down the hall. Brad’s father looked at us, shrugged helplessly, turned his red palms out, and trudged off after her.

  Brad chuckled softly.

  “That was rotten,” I said, leaning back against him. I could feel the soft, steady thrum of the lazy power in me, like a tiny engine. I thought that he could probably feel it too, under his blue blazer.

  “Not nearly rotten enough,” he said, and I could feel him laugh softly. “She asks for it. Over and over, she asks for it.”

  “Well, she gets it,” I said. “You ready?”

  We decided to walk home down the beach. I went into the ladies’ room and took off my panty hose and put them in my purse, and Brad tossed a folded bill to the parking valet and asked him to garage his car, and we walked through the silent, torch-lit gardens over to the beach club and down the terrace steps and out onto the sand, to the edge of the water. Behind us, on the upper pool terrace, colored lights uplit the great oaks, and the strains of soft rock drifted gently, but the wind was off the sea, strong and fresh, and we could not hear the music clearly. We took off our shoes and walked in the edge of the surf. It was sun warm, birth-warm. After a few minutes the cluster of lights faded, and except for a few lone yellow-lit windows in the big, far-apart houses, the night was almost totally dark. There was no moon at all, and a faint silver peppering of stars hardly showed through the scrim of high cloud. The sea itself seemed to give off light, a spectral, colorless light that was more like the sea’s breath. I could hear the splash of Brad’s feet beside me, and feel the warmth of his hand on mine, and the soft exhalation of his body heat, but I could hardly make him out at all. The night was soft and thick and black and warm as velvet, silky on my skin, smelling of iodine and salt and crape myrtle and that ineffable, skin-prickling saline emanation that says “ocea
n” to me whenever I smell it, hundreds of miles inland. It always moves me close to tears, so visceral, so old and tidal is its pull. I have often thought that it is the first smell we know, the amniotic smell of our first, secret sea.

  After a while, Brad said, “You’re handling the Hunt women awfully well. I’d say today and tonight were yours on knockouts.”

  “Well, it strikes me that you could get a little tired of fighting after a while,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t have to fight long. Grandma’s already on your side. Mother will be, too, when you’re…you know, part of her world. When she knows you’re a longterm thing. And you are, you know. If you want to be.”

  “I think that your mother will be on my side about as soon as your grandmother was on hers,” I said. “I’m not saying it makes a lot of difference, not to me. I can live an astonishingly full life without your mother in it. But I think it would eventually make an enormous difference to you.”

  “You’re wrong,” he said. “I love my mother, I guess, but I don’t like her. What she thinks about my…woman is simply not a factor.”

  “Brad,” I said, still wrapped in the languid, dreaming state in which I had left the hotel, “of course it’s a factor. What do you think all this stuff is about, anyway?”

  He did not answer. He pulled me closer into the curve of his body and we walked slowly, kicking the glittering foam, our arms around each other’s waists. Languor wrapped me like warm water. Marylou Hunt simply did not matter. Very little did, but the sensations of this night.

  “Can you live with all this family business?” Brad said. “I’ll try to keep it apart from us, but some of it will spill over. We’re not an easy family, but I’d try to make us easier to take than we have been.”

  “You haven’t seen a messed-up family until you’ve seen mine,” I said. “I’ve learned to live pretty close inside myself. Families aren’t a major factor with me. I always thought I’d have my own family, and the rest of them could just…work it out.”

  “So when will I meet yours, then?”

  “There is a very good chance that you won’t,” I said, and stopped and turned to face him. “I told you when we first met what they’re like. That isn’t going to change. If we…if we should get together, it would not be a matter of rejoicing to them. On the contrary, the bitterness and resentment would just get thicker. I’ve seen it start to happen already. I don’t plan to go home again, Brad, unless somebody dies, and then it will be alone, and for as short a time as I can decently manage. One thing your mother will not have to contend with is a pack of wild shanty Irishmen.”

  “It’s your call,” he said. “Although I’d give a lot to see my mother tackle your father. What you’ve told me of him anyway. We’ll be virtual orphans, then, if that’s what you want.”

  I knew that he was speaking of marriage, speaking more directly of it than he ever had, and that very soon now I must throw off this delicious torpor, this tiny, effervescent fizzing in my blood, and answer him. Soon, I said to myself, drifting down the night beach in the circle of his arm. Soon. But not just this second.

  Presently we were opposite the big pink house, and started across the beach up to the steps and the lawn. The tide was very far out, so that we walked for some time. At the dune line, just before the whispering stands of sea oats and dune grass began, the sand was as damp and cold as the skin of a snake under my feet. We picked our way through matted sand spurs and small, broken shells to the path that led between the dunes, and then up the sandy marble steps and onto the stiff, dew-cold Bermuda grass of the lawn. When we drew even with the cabana that lay alongside the pool, Brad said, “Let’s sit out awhile. I think there’s some scotch in the cabana that I left there last year, and I’ll put on some music. You’re not ready to go in, are you?”

  His voice was low and rough, as if it caught in his throat.

  “No,” I said, around the breath that was soft and thick in my own throat. “I’m not.”

  “Be right back.”

  He disappeared into the little bougainvillea-clad cabana and I dropped down on a wrought iron chaise and stretched out. It was damp with dew, and my bare legs and feet recoiled from the wet chill. I sat up again, wrapping my arms around my bare legs, and looked up at the house. No lights broke the great sweep of its facade. It was so dark that I could scarcely make out the line of the flat tiled roof against the sky. Even if Brad’s grandmother or her companion or Sarelle were awake and looking out, I thought, they could not see us. We might be the only two people on all the length of this beautiful beach. Alone under the sky, in the wind, beside the sea. I shivered. The entire inside of me, from my throat to the dark, secret core of me, began to tremble, such a small, silvery shivering that it made me think of the beating of hummingbird wings, of moths fluttering in the warm dark. The smell of bougainvillea was heavy and sweet.

  Brad came out of the cabana carrying a bottle, and inside, I heard the mechanism of a record player lift and thump, rustily, and Frank Sinatra began to sing, softly, of April in Paris.

  Brad handed me a glass and said, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” and I took a long, burning swallow of scotch and felt it track its way down the tunnel inside me to where the trembling had settled.

  He dropped down on the lounge beside me and pulled me against him. The hand that rested on my shoulder traced the line of it, down inside my red linen, to where the fresh sunburn felt as if it were glowing. I felt my skin flicker as if a fly had lit there.

  “What are you thinking?” he said.

  “I’m thinking…that I’ve forgotten all about Andre,” I said, surprising myself. “I have. I’ve lost him entirely—”

  He kissed the top of my head.

  “Smoky, you can have Andre and all this, too. Don’t you see that? You don’t have to lose Andre. Keep him, keep all your Andres and your…your YMOGs, and whatever else you want to keep. You can still have this. This house, this island, all of it. I’m not asking you to give anything up when you take this on.”

  I took a deep breath and skewed around so that I could look at him. I could only see the glimmer of teeth, and the white of eyes.

  “Brad, what are we talking about?” I said.

  “You must know that we’re talking about getting married. Do you want me to ask you formally, on my knees? I will. I thought you understood that’s what I’ve been talking about all day.”

  “So…when would you want to do it?” I said. My voice sounded as if it belonged to a stranger.

  He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “I’d like to give you a ring at Christmas and get married in June. And I’d like to come down here for a couple of weeks. I didn’t think I was going to care about the whens and wheres, but all of a sudden I do. That’s the way my crowd has always done it, and that’s the way I want to do it, too. Unless you want something else—”

  “No, no…I don’t care. I mean, I never had any special plans about how I’d do it. I didn’t even know if I would—do you mean, stay here in the house with your grandmother?”

  “Jesus, no,” he laughed. “One of the big cottage suites right on the water, breakfast in bed, lunch in bed, dinner in bed, fresh oysters and champagne at midnight—”

  “Well,” I said, my ears ringing, “That sounds good to me. Christmas sounds fine.”

  We looked at each other, or at least, where each other should be, in the darkness.

  “It sounds as if we’ve been negotiating a merger,” I said, laughing a little and hearing my voice break.

  He got up from the chaise and pulled me up after him. Behind us, in the cabana, I heard a record fall, and then the smoky voices of the Four Freshmen:

  Angel eyes, that old devil-sent,

  they glow unbearably bright….

  Need I say, that my love’s misspent,

  misspent with angel eyes tonight….

  “Dance with me, Smoky,” Brad whispered, and I went wordlessly into his arms, and we swayed together on the dark apron of th
e still pool, its surface throwing back moon-scud and star-pricks, while that most sensuous and limbic of ballads spun out into the soft air. By the time it ended, we were standing still, bodies pressed so hard together that we seemed to be part of each other, and the kisses that had begun on the side of my face and my closed eyelids had turned into such long, deep, seeking, blinded things that I had no breath left, felt nothing but the heat and pressure of his body and his hands on mine, and the simple, crushing need to be separate from him no longer.

  He jerked his head back and took deep, ragged breaths of air.

  “I don’t know if I’m going to make it until Christmas,” he half-gasped, half-laughed. “Does this answer your question about negotiations?”

  I stood still, blinded, body humming all over, as if every inch of me had been scorched that day by the sun.

  “Let’s go swimming,” I said, and could scarcely make out the words in my own ears.

  “Smokes—”

  “Let’s do it,” I said, and stepped back hastily and reached behind me and unzipped my dress and let it fall to the concrete. I stepped out of it, and unfastened my bra and let it fall, and then the little nylon bikini panties that I had bought at J.P. Allen, with Peter Max whorls and stars on them. I stood naked in the dark, burning, shaking, looking at Brad, and then I went to the edge of the pool and let myself down into the dark water. It was like slipping into sun-hot silk, black and enveloping, lapping warm at my breasts and thighs, covering me, as warm as the blood inside me, as dark as the night outside.

  I held up my arms to him.

  “Come in.”

  He made a small, strangled sound, and I heard his clothing rustle and fall, and then he was in front of me, holding me against him, the firm, rubbery feel of flesh against mine all the way down the length of me, nothing held back now, no barriers, cradled in the buoyant water as in other arms. I wrapped my arms and legs around him in the dark water, and held him close, and closed my eyes.