Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  He maneuvered us against the side, so that he had purchase on the bottom of the pool, holding me above the surface. If he had let go I would have gone completely under; he was inches taller than I. But he did not let go. He moved against me in the dark, warm water, murmuring things that I knew on my skin and in my mouth, instead of hearing with my ears, rocking gently, rocking.

  “I shouldn’t,” he said into my wet hair. “I didn’t mean this yet—”

  “Yes,” I said fiercely. “I want this now. I do, Brad—”

  “How long has it been since…the last time, Smokes?” he whispered, not stopping the rocking. I was nearly mad with it.

  “Never…I thought you knew that—”

  “No, I mean…since your last period. I don’t have anything with me—”

  “It’s okay,” I said, feeling my nails biting into his back. “It’s okay. It was just a few days ago—”

  “Ah, God!” he cried softly, and went into me.

  At first I could not get a deep breath, and when I could, I thought that the pain would rob me of my voice. With the pain came a silent explosion of fear and despair so black and profound that it felt, simply, apocalyptic. When I could cry out, it sounded like the mewling of a kitten.

  “Stop! Oh, Brad, stop—”

  The pain stopped abruptly and he hung on the side of the pool beside me, gasping for breath.

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry, Smoky! Jesus, I should have been gentler, I should have gone slower…. Are you hurt? Did I hurt you bad?”

  “No, no, it’s all right,” I whispered, but even in the pool I could feel sweat pouring off my face, and the tingling around my mouth that meant the blood had drained away from it. I had never felt anything like it before, neither the pain nor the blackness. I put my hands up to my face and began to cry.

  He pulled me gently up out of the pool and found a big towel and cradled me in it, drying me gently and whispering to me. He was so contrite and so worried that I tried to reassure him, but I could not stop the ridiculous blubbering.

  He rocked me against him until some of the weeping stopped.

  “It won’t be like that again,” he said. “There are ways, things I can do…. I rushed you. I should have thought…. Next time will be a whole different thing. We have all the time in the world, Smokes. I’ll get you some pills, and then we won’t have anything at all to worry about.”

  “It wasn’t you,” I said, sniffling, trying to hold on to him. “It wasn’t you. I’m all right, it doesn’t hurt now. But Brad…I can’t do that again. I just can’t. Not until…not right away—”

  “I know. I said we wouldn’t, until you have the pills and there’s the right time and place to take it slow. It’s my fault—”

  “No. It’s not you. It’s…I’m sorry. This sounds so damned Catholic. But…I think it’s the Church. Right at the time we were—right when it happened—it was like every muscle in my body turned to iron, and something in my head just screamed No! No! Do this and you are—I don’t know—lost. Just…lost—”

  I began to cry again. I sounded demented, even to myself.

  He took in a long breath and let it out softly.

  “I had no idea you felt that strongly about the Church, Smoky,” he said.

  “I didn’t, either,” I said. “I don’t. I haven’t thought about the Church since I left home. I haven’t even been to church. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I wanted you to do that—”

  “It’s all been too much,” he said, pressing my face into his bare, wet shoulder. “My mother’s been at you since day one, and then Grandma, and this afternoon, and that business at dinner, and the goddamned party hanging over both of us—you just panicked. You’re tired, and I pushed you too fast. We’ll cool it, sweetie, for now. Until Christmas. We’ll just…take cold showers and keep our hands off each other and think pure thoughts, and then see where we are when you have the ring and it’s all settled. That okay with you? Would that help?”

  “Yes,” I said, kissing his shoulder and tasting salt and chlorine. “Yes, it would. I’m sorry. I just feel like a…you know, a tease—”

  “Nobody was ever less one,” he said. “But I want you to start on the pills, anyway. I think they take awhile to work. Come on. Let’s get you to bed. Tomorrow we’ll start over, fresh. I’ll even get down on my knees and propose to you.”

  We dressed and went quietly up the dark stairs and down the hall to my room. He opened the door for me, and switched on my bedside lamp, but did not come in.

  “I will not be responsible for my actions if I do,” he said, and kissed me lightly on the forehead, and closed the door behind him.

  I meant to take a long hot bath, but I did not, after all. I just skinned into my nightgown and crawled into bed and turned out the light. Remembering that I had wanted to lie in bed and look at the stars over the sea, I turned on my side to face the window wall, but it was blank, dark. The wind had fallen, and the chintz drapes hung limp against the screens. Only the small ticking of night insects against them broke the thick silence. I slept almost immediately.

  During the night I woke with a sharp, stinging pain between my legs and a dull headache. I got up and went into the bathroom for an aspirin. When I got back into bed, I saw that there was a small, damp blot of blood on the silky, yellowed old percale sheet. I started back to the bathroom for a cold, damp washcloth, to scrub it out, but stopped midway. The hell with it. I did not think that there had been the stains of life and love on these sheets for fifty years, only, perhaps, the thin, sour spillings of medicine and weak tea. Let Mama Hunt make of it what she would.

  I got back into bed and pulled up the sheet and was asleep before my head hit the pillows.

  Teddy was waiting for me when I climbed the last steps of the apartment—gingerly, for the pain between my legs still bit and stung—and dropped down onto the sofa.

  “Well?” she yelped. “Did you?”

  I looked at her for a moment, and then shrugged, and said, “Yeah. I guess I did. Sort of.”

  “Oh, fantastic! Tell about it! How was it!”

  “Teddy…does it always hurt like that?”

  She stared at me, and then began to laugh and make small noises of distress at the same time.

  “Oh, sweetie! I meant did you get engaged! But I guess you did, if you did that…Oh, no! It doesn’t hurt at all after a while. It gets to be wonderful, it really does. But it almost always hurts the first time…. Damn Brad. He shouldn’t have rushed you…but, oh, Smoky! So when will you get your ring? When will you get married?”

  “Christmas, I think, for the ring,” I said. Here, in the city, it seemed simply impossible that she and I should be having this conversation, about rings and weddings. I shook my head.

  “And the wedding? Can I be in it? I demand to be your maid of honor, on pain of death…Oh, Lord, but Marylou will simply shit, isn’t it wonderful?”

  “Brad said something about next June,” I said. “But nothing’s set. Please don’t tell anybody, Teddy. I…I have to get used to the idea first. It all feels so strange. Lord! And then, we have to make all those plans—”

  Fatigue washed over me like tepid water. The plans hung ahead of me like a line of alps on the horizon. I did not see how I could cross them.

  “Oh, all right,” she said. “But I can’t wait to see Matt’s face. Are you sure I can’t tell just a few people?”

  “I’m sure. Really. Please don’t. I’ll tell you when.”

  “You’re the bride,” she said, coming over to hug me. “Sit down. I’ll make coffee. So tell me, how was the party?”

  “Just like your folks’ Christmas party, only with palm trees,” I said.

  10

  AFTER THAT, EVERYTHING WAS DIFFERENT, AND YET IT was not. I still went to work each morning and came home each evening, often very late; I still jockied with Matt for stories with teeth in them and often lost; I still laughed at Tom Gordon’s whimsical foolishness and often noticed, behind it, the new
aloneness in his eyes; I still bantered affectionately with Hank and Teddy and often was submerged in pure joy at my affection for them. I still stepped over Lucas Geary, and more than once stepped on him. I was still inundated, at odd, unguarded moments, with a tidal wave of delight and incredulity at my good fortune for having been cast out of Corkie and into Camelot.

  But I did it all, now, with the subterranean knowledge that I was a semiofficial part of Brad Hunt’s life, and would, in four short months, become an official part of it. And six months after that, would become myself a Hunt. I felt, obscurely, as if a clock had begun to tick.

  I could not give a name to the confluence of feelings that swept me when I thought about Brad. Pride, certainly; I could not look at him without feeling that, nor think of all that the name Hunt connoted without it. The mere thought of the lovely, shabby old house on Sea Island made me giddy with joy; it did not seem possible that soon it would be mine. I thought far more about it than the house where Brad and I would live, for I had no idea, yet, what it would be like, or where. Brad had said he would start looking around Buckhead, and when I said that there were some wonderful old houses in Ansley Park that I liked, he smiled.

  “Out of my orbit, but I’ll look,” he said.

  I know that I felt physical desire for him, despite the abortive ending to our first attempt at lovemaking, on Sea Island. He was simply too masculine, too assured, too handsome for me or any woman not to respond to him. The lovemaking would ultimately be wonderful, transcendent. Teddy had said so, and I did not doubt her.

  And he was, I thought, a good man; he felt strongly about the right things. His sympathies were mine. I would always be proud of him. He would be a real factor in the life of the city. In those early, tentative days I did not doubt that I loved him.

  But there was something else, something…Somehow I could not imagine my life after the wedding ceremony at St. Philip’s Cathedral. Try as I might, I could not imagine what my days and nights would be for all the years ahead of me. I could imagine a future centered around Downtown; it was as vivid and palpable to me as if I had already lived it. But somehow I could not bring Brad into it. Try as I might, I could not imagine getting up in our house in Collier Hills or Brookwood Hills—proper starter-house neighborhoods for Brad’s set—and going to work for Matt Comfort’s magazine. The two worlds simply did not seem malleable enough to mix.

  And yet I knew that he wanted me to continue on the staff. He had said as much, over and over. There was no reason I could not be both Smoky O’Donnell and Mrs. Bradley Hunt III. But I kept wanting to ask him, over and over, if he was serious about that. I did not know why.

  I did not ask. I did not talk much with Brad about being engaged or being married the following June. I felt shy about it, almost, for some reason, embarrassed. And he did not push it. We simply went about our lives as we had done before, going out two or three times a week, talking on the phone daily. Teddy did not push it, either. She bit her tongue daily, I knew, but she told no one. For a time after we returned from Sea Island, it was as if we had never been, Brad and I. It was altogether a strange, suspended time, though I do not remember it being an uncomfortable one. Just…suspended.

  In late August he took me to dinner at the Coach and Six, out Peachtree Road toward Buckhead. We sat in a black leather booth and drank daiquiris and ate wonderful, flaky spinach and cheese puffs and perfect lamb chops in little white frilled paper panties, and afterward he gave me a small gold-wrapped box.

  For some reason my heart began to pound. Not yet, my mind said, clearly and silently.

  “What’s this?” I smiled at him.

  “It’s sort of a going away present,” he said. “Dad wants me to go over to Huntsville and bid a job. It’s big one, a complex for some new rocket thing at Redstone Arsenal. I’ve never bid one completely on my own before, and there’ll be a lot of larger firms in the running. It could go on for several weeks. I ought to have the experience if I’m going to take over the company one day, but it’s a hell of a time to have to leave you—”

  “But it’s a big thing for you,” I said, knowing that it was. Brad’s father was reluctant to let go of the reins of the business he had built, and I knew that Brad often chafed about that.

  “I’m so proud,” I went on. “Aren’t you at all excited?”

  “Yeah, I have to admit I am,” he said, and his blue eyes danced in the light of the small shaded table lamp. “I really am. I love this part of the business, and it’s going to be a real fire fight. But I’m going to miss you like crazy. I’ll get home one or two weekends, but it’s not going to be much fun.”

  “Well, it’s not as if it’ll be forever, or very far away,” I said. “Maybe I could come over for a weekend.”

  “Jesus, you’d hate it,” he laughed. “It’s like boot camp, all posturing and testosterone. You’d probably get raped walking to the Coke machine. Stay here and work hard and let me think wet-sheet thoughts about you.”

  I reddened and he laughed and squeezed my hand.

  “Open your present,” he said, and I did.

  Inside was a small black velvet jeweler’s box. It was not new; the velvet was worn down to the matte backing in spots, and it smelled faintly of dusting powder and cedar. I opened it. A thin gold bracelet lay on a bed of yellowing white satin, a simple circle of old, pinkish gold, glowing dully in the lamplight. In it were set a row of rubies, so dark that they flashed red only in their hearts. It was old-fashioned and very beautiful.

  “Oh, Brad,” I said, looking up at him. It was obviously a family treasure. I felt for a moment as if I had been given something so intimate and personal that it was forbidden, something stolen, spoils in some sort of war.

  Perhaps, I thought, I had.

  He clasped it around my wrist. I held it up, watching the lamplight dance on the burnished old gold.

  “It’s absolutely beautiful,” I said.

  “It was my great-grandmother Hunt’s,” he said. “There’s a tradition that the newest of the Hunt brides-to-be gets it, until it’s time to pass it along. Mother never especially liked it; it’s been in the safe for a long time. It’s kind of a pre-pre-wedding thing. Not on the level of an engagement ring, but a statement of policy, anyway. The ring is great-grandmother’s, too; rubies and emeralds. You get that at Christmas. There are some terrific diamonds, a necklace and bracelet and earrings, but you don’t get those until the wedding. The family pearls come when the first baby is born.”

  I sat turning my wrist this way and that. I had never even imagined such things as he sat talking of, family jewels that came on state occasions, to mark the passages of life. In Corkie, jewelry was purchased on the installment plan, and ran to the sentimentally religious: crosses with modest diamond chips, and rosaries with pearls. But in Brad’s family, rubies came with understandings, diamonds rained down on weddings, pearls flowed when the babies came.

  Babies…

  “Babies?” I said stupidly to Brad.

  “You know. Wah wah? Diapers? Talcum powder? You do want children, don’t you, Smoky?”

  I had never once since I had met Brad Hunt, from the time he had told me I had eyes the color of rain in Teddy’s parents’ game room to now, when he sat talking of rubies and diamonds and pearls, thought of children. I could not seem to take the words in.

  “What would I do about my job?” I said. Even in my own ringing ears, the words sounded ridiculous.

  “Well, I don’t mean immediately,” he said. “Not for maybe two or three years. I’d want us to get settled in a house first and have time to get used to each other. Wait awhile until we have to lock the bedroom door. You’d work right along until then, of course. But you’d want to be home with them for a while, at least, wouldn’t you? We could get a nurse or a nanny or something later, but right for the first few years, I mean, you’d want to do that, wouldn’t you? You could always do some freelance stuff. Lots of girls…women…I know do that. Snake Cartwright’s wife writes a column for
the Marietta Daily Journal, and she has three kids. Dottie Findlay does catering with her college roommate, and she’s got two. You don’t have to stop working entirely, not ever.”

  I sat still, images darting and pecking at me like birds. Small, tow-headed children capering on the beach at Sea Island. Small black children at rickety tables on a tiny, dismal back porch in Summerhill. A small black child, his face radiant with joy, hugging the bumper of a little English car…

  I was nowhere in the images.

  “Smoky?”

  I shook my head and smiled at him.

  “Of course I want children,” I said. “Every woman does—”

  “But you could still work. You could still write. If it stays important to you,” he said, smiling back at me. “Sometimes things change when children come.”

  “I’ll always want to, Brad,” I said.

  “Then you shall. Now. Look down under the layer of satin.”

  I did, and pulled out a small vial of pills and a folded prescription.

  “A head start on not having any, until we want to,” he grinned. “A head start on things being better for us. I got them from Pom Fowler. He’s doing his residency at Piedmont this year, in OB-GYN. Says take them for a month according to the directions. I thought we might as well do this while I’m gone, so when I get back I can stop taking cold showers every time I think about you. By the time I’m back from Huntsville, we should…be in business.”

  I looked at the pills and the prescription. I looked up at him. In the lamplight he looked so impossibly handsome that it was as if I were seeing him for the first time.

  “I don’t want to wait, Smoky,” he said in a low voice. “I keep thinking about you in that pool. About the way you looked and felt…”