Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Out of nowhere the blackness struck again, a swift rush of such lightlessness and despair that I could only close my eyes against it and hold my breath.

  Oh, God, don’t, the thought came, spontaneous and terrible. Don’t. I haven’t done it again. I’m not going to, not anytime soon…

  The blackness ebbed and I opened my eyes and looked at him. I knew that he had noticed nothing.

  “We said we’d wait—” I whispered.

  “And so we will, if we have to. But this is just in case…we can’t. I want to show you how good it can be, Smoky. I want you to forget about that other.”

  I tried to smile, but the memory of the blackness was like dark water over me.

  “But if I wanted to wait until we were married? Would that be so awful?” I said finally.

  “I guess not. Not if you really wanted to. I thought, the other night, down there…I thought you wanted it, too.”

  “I did. I really did. I do. It’s just that—you’d have to be raised Catholic to understand it, Brad. I know I don’t go to church now, and I don’t want to make a point of it, but all those years of being told no, wait, don’t, it’s a sin, you’ll be punished—it’s hard. I didn’t know how hard it was going to be.”

  He raised his hand. “If that’s what makes you comfortable, Smokes, that’s what we’ll do. Jesus, and I thought the sexual revolution was here. But will you take the pills anyway? Just so you’ll be used to them when the time comes? Pom says sometimes you have to change dosages or brands before you get ’em right. He says when you’ve finished this batch, come see him before you get the prescription filled. You ought to have an OBGYN anyway, and he’s going to be one of the best.”

  “Yes, all right,” I said, thinking I’d rather die than have one of Brad’s dancing school friends poking and prodding around in that secret darkness, where, it seemed now, God waited like a coiled snake.

  “Good girl. Want some chocolate mousse?” he said.

  “Why not?” I said, smiling, looking at my bracelet and feeling in my palm the shape of the pill vial, like an amulet.

  Like a stone.

  I lay awake a long time that night. There was a huge, sullen white moon, and it seemed to me that I could feel the hot weight of it on my body. The air-conditioner labored and the green glow of the digital clock bathed the bedside table. In it, I could see the little bottle of birth control pills. There was, now, one less pill in it. I lay waiting for the enormity of swallowing it to crash down over me, for the black emptiness that seemed, obscurely, to be the voice of the Church, perhaps the very forbidding voice of God, but it did not come. It did not matter. I had felt it twice now, both times in conjunction with making love to Brad Hunt, and it had made its point.

  In all my years in the Church, in all my endless years of parochial education, I had never taken seriously the nun’s dictum that sinners were swiftly and directly punished for their sins. I thought, if I thought of it at all, that they meant that sooner or later, you would suffer the consequences of this sinful act or that, and invariably come to repent them. I had not imagined that the Church spoke directly and terribly in your heart at the moment of your sin, much less at the mere contemplation of it.

  I still did not think so, not rationally. It was too simplistic, too pat. I would have heard about it, my friends would have spoken of it. Surely there were, among their number, greater sinners than I. But I did not know what the terrible, empty despair meant, and down in the place inside me where no rationality lived, the Catholic place, it frightened me. I lay awake a long time thinking of it.

  I would have liked to ask someone what it meant, but could think of no one, not in Atlanta, this newest and most pragmatic of cities. Not among the sunlit people who were now my people. And then I thought, Sister Joan. I can ask Sister Joan. If it happens again, that’s what I’ll do.

  The morning after Brad left for Huntsville, Matt called me into his office.

  “Brad called me last night,” he said, without preliminaries. “He’s worried about you doing the black deejay piece. He doesn’t think it’s quite seemly, and he thinks it might even be dangerous. He’s worried about all the rioting. Thinks the deejays are going to go on a rampage, I guess.”

  He tilted back in his desk chair and peered at me over the wire-rimmed glasses. He looked especially rumpled this morning, as if he had been doing more in his clothes during the night than sleeping. His long fingers played restlessly with the ever-present pile of coins and the watch.

  I was literally dumbfounded. I could feel the heat rise in my face and knew that the red stain was climbing behind it.

  “I can’t believe he’d do a thing like that,” I said finally.

  “Yep. Right adamant about it, he was,” Matt said. “Said little black kids in day care was one thing, but black musicians and their camp followers in a motel on Stewart Avenue was another. Camp followers; been a long time since I’ve heard that. Seemed to think there was going to be right much…ah, controlled substance use among the conventioneers. Can’t imagine why he’d think a thing like that.”

  “He had no right,” I said. My mouth was numb.

  “He seemed to think he had every right. Is there something you’re not telling us, Smoky? Are congratulations in order here?”

  He grinned.

  I shook my head silently.

  Matt’s smile faded and he leaned back in the chair and put his small feet on his desk, and laced his fingers behind his head.

  “Thing is, he could be right. The country’s in a shitty mood. Everybody’s mad, and the young Negroes are the maddest of all. I’ve heard a rumor that the Panthers will be back in town, and if they are, you can bet your ass they’ll be at that convention. It’s too good to pass up. And they’re packin’, baby. I don’t need you anywhere around any fucking guns. We’ve got the war thing, too; ever since Dr. King joined that March in April, the war has gotten to be a big Negro thing. And the mess in Newark and Detroit…we pretty much forget about rioting and violence down here, because our particular focus is Dr. King and the nonviolent business, and Atlanta never did give much of a shit about what was going on anywhere else. But you can bet the deejays are going to bring it in here. And drugs, sure there’ll be drugs. Every kind you ever heard of. These guys invented drugs. I hadn’t really thought all that through when I assigned this convention for Focus.”

  “And it was Brad who was so kind as to point all this out to you?” I asked incredulously. I had never heard Brad concern himself with events outside the city.

  “No. Matter of fact, it was Luke. He’s concerned about taking you along. He knows the smell of things as well as anybody I know. He’s not really worried about any of it except the Panthers. Nobody really knows what these mothers’ll do after they stormed the California assembly toting rifles last spring. I don’t feel like messing around with those cats.”

  “Matt, you promised me Focus,” I said, foolish tears beginning to well up in my eyes. I did not know why I was so insistent. I should have been alarmed at his words, and indeed, a part of me was. But a larger part felt betrayed, and furiously angry. How dare Brad do this to me? How dare Luke?

  “I promised before I thought, Smoky,” he said. “I’m not a fool; I know better than to send my people where there’s danger. I ought to cancel the whole business. Thing is, the convention PR people have already announced that we’ll be doing an in-depth photo-essay. We’d look like assholes if we reneged. Like we were cowards. I called John Howard on this, and he said he didn’t think there was any danger involved. There’s going to be too much media there, and most of these guys—they’re musicians, they’re lovers—they just aren’t political. The Panthers are, of course, if it’s true they’re back in town. But he doesn’t think there’ll be any trouble from them. I gather he knows the ones who’re apt to be there, and he says their whole thing nowadays is to show people how much better their way is than the old nonviolent way. He thinks they’d be the last ones to start trouble. Real bad PR.
”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying you can go, and I’m probably a fool to let you. But you work well with Luke, and Howard likes your style. The day care story was a fine piece of work.”

  I looked at him, beginning to grin.

  “Thank you, Matt.”

  “You’re welcome, Smoky. Now git. And tell Hank I want him in here.”

  I paused in the doorway and looked back at him, but he was already bent over his desk. Then he lifted his head, bared his teeth at me like a wizened wolf, and gave three raucous blats on the taxi horn.

  “Don’t go shining your behind yet,” he said.

  “I won’t,” I said, and left his office, heart high.

  From the outset, it was clear that the meeting of black disc jockeys was not much of a convention, and the story was probably nonexistent. When we pulled up to the Santa Fe Plaza Motel at dusk on a hot, still Friday evening of the Labor Day weekend, we might have been pulling into a tourist court in the Florida wiregrass in the early 1950s. There were not many cars in the spaces behind the motel, where the sad, straggling urban woods threatened to take back the weedy asphalt parking lot. I could see few at the adjoining motels, either. They lay like tarnished, badly strung necklaces on either side of Stewart Avenue. The avenue itself was tarnished, far past its prime and slightly menacing in the motionless twilight. Pawnshops, nude dancing clubs, convenience stores, package stores, aluminum bus stops, phone booths with the phones torn out, mom and pop groceries—Stewart Avenue was, simply, banal and badly used. It lacked the gut-wrenching drama of the horrific ghettos to the east, and had none of the sheen of affluence that lay on the neighborhoods to the northwest. There was a continual stream of traffic along it, and along the broken sidewalks beside it, but it was aimless, desultory. None of the faces I saw was white.

  “Where is everybody?” I said, looking around the motel parking lot. “I thought there were at least a couple of thousand deejays at this thing.”

  “Deejays don’t like the light of day,” Luke said, unloading his cameras from John Howard’s trunk. “They’re like vampires. Only howl when the sun has set.”

  “Yeah,” John Howard said, locking the Mustang. “I bet if we went inside we’d find ’em all in their rooms with the lights off and the shades down, lying in coffins.”

  “No,” I giggled, “Hanging from the shower rods upside down, like bats.”

  “They’ll be hanging from the shower rods by tomorrow morning,” John said. “Hung up and hungover.”

  I laughed outright.

  He was different this evening. For one thing, he looked different. He did not wear the Ivy League shirts that were his habitual daytime dress, and he did not wear the ridiculous overalls he had worn on Pumphouse Hill, either. Tonight he wore bell-bottom blue jeans and a shirt of some silky black stuff, open almost to his waist, with a peace medal bumping against his smooth red-brown chest, and something that looked like an African fetish, of feathers and bone, on a leather thong. With the remarkable feral yellow eyes and the slanting scar through his eyebrow, he looked splendid, exotic, dangerous in a seductive way, like a jaguar, or another of the big cats.

  “Lord, John, I wouldn’t get in an elevator with you,” I had said when he picked Luke and me up at the Commerce Building curb in the Mustang.

  “Lawsy, Miss Smoky, I just a po’ darky tryin’ to git along,” he had drawled, scowling at me, but I saw the amusement in his eyes. Since the night in the parking garage after the press party, when I had given him back his mocking banter, I was no longer in awe of him. But I was aware, still, that he had let me in only a very short way, and that I would not likely be allowed further.

  The other difference in him was that he was ever so slightly nervy, just the least bit on edge. It was noticeable only in the barely perceptible increase in the pace of his words and movements, a kind of lithe jitteriness to him, and he laughed more than I had ever known him to do. Of course, I had never really known him any way but the way he appeared in the Focus meetings: grave, pleasant, assured, almost totally detached. Any change leaped out as if he had been boisterous. Laughter and joking about vampires and hangovers was, in John Howard, tantamount almost to hysteria.

  “You look good,” Luke said to me. “Look like you’re ready to swing all night.”

  “I am,” I said, and did a little bump-and-grind in the empty parking lot. I wore skin-tight, low-riding blue jeans with belled bottoms over a pair of Teddy’s see-through vinyl boots and a turtleneck poor-boy sweater, sleeveless and cut high so that a wedge of midriff showed. The sweater was tight enough, Teddy said, to be trashy, and I agreed, but did not change it. I had glued on, ineptly, a pair of dime-store false eyelashes, and had a thick frosting of Carnaby Coral on my mouth, and wooden dangle earrings that almost brushed my shoulders. Lavender granny sunglasses completed the ensemble. I looked, Teddy had said when I left the apartment to meet Luke and John Howard, as tacky as gully dirt.

  “But great,” she added. “Slutty and go-to-hell and absolutely great. I wish Brad could see you.”

  “Yeah, that would just about do it,” I said dryly. I was still angry at him for calling Matt about the story, and determined to tell him so when he called me on Sunday, as he had promised.

  “Do that again,” Luke said now, and I repeated the bump-and-grind and held my hand out to John Howard, and he took it, and we did a few exaggerated, hip-swinging, frug-like steps on the gritty pavement. Luke swung the Leica up and shot.

  “Y’ll are sure enough by-God goners now,” he said, letting the camera bounce off his chest and ambling toward the motel office. “Cross me and I’ll circulate that in Corkie and the SCLC.”

  “Corkie wouldn’t know what it was,” I said.

  “You can see worse than that any night at Paschal’s,” John said. “And you have.”

  “Not from you, bro,” Luke grinned, and we went into the motel to find the convention.

  We found, instead, an empty lobby with burn-scarred Naugahyde furniture and overflowing pedestal ashtrays and a long plastic rubber plant that someone had decorated with round gold foil-wrapped condoms. Behind the desk an enormously fat white man sat, licking his index finger and paging through a cheap Bible. Over his knees was a broken shotgun. On the desk was a small American flag stuck upright in a coffee cup. At our approach the fat man looked up.

  His look of weary inquiry changed to hostility when he saw me. He looked slowly from me to John Howard and then to Lucas Geary. He had small, slitted light eyes and white brows and lashes, and the heavy smell of stale sweat reached out from him to where we stood.

  “Got no vacancies,” he said, staring narrowly at my chest.

  “We don’t want a room,” Luke said in an ineffably gentle drawl. “We’re looking for the convention. The black disc jockeys?”

  “You a disc jockey?” the man said to John Howard. He pronounced it dee-isk jawkey, drawing out the syllables insultingly.

  “No,” John Howard said.

  “Look like one, got up like that,” the man said.

  “We’re here to do a story on the convention for Downtown magazine,” I said in what I supposed to be an authoritative voice. I saw Luke swallow a smile, and knew I was once again sounding like a Junior Leaguer.

  “We have press passes,” I added idiotically.

  “Do you now,” he said, leering and looking pointedly at my breasts and midriff. “You want to show me your…press pass, sweetie?”

  “Are you the manager?” John Howard said pleasantly. His face was still.

  “Night clerk. Manager ain’t here. I’m runnin’ ’er tonight,” the man said. “Somethin’ you wanted…sir?”

  His tone said, “boy.”

  “We’ve got a legitimate appointment to do this story, and I’d appreciate it if you’d tell us where the delegates are,” I said, my face hot. “I’d hate to have to tell my editor we got no cooperation from you.”

  He got up and started around the desk, waddling cu
mbrously.

  “There’s some of ’em down on the end, to the back,” he said into my face. “And a few more upstairs in the rooms by the ice machines. Them’s passed out, I think. Ain’t heard that goddamned caterwaulin’ in a while. The live ones are likely around back. Think I heard ’em throwin’ coconuts at each other whallago. But I tell you one thing, girlie, you ain’t goin’ back there. White girls ain’t gon’ drink and party and I don’t know what all with coloreds while I’m on duty. Two of ’em already gone back there early this afternoon and they ain’t come out, and I ain’t going back there lookin’ for ’em, either. I told the manager wasn’t no good going to come from letting coloreds carry on in this motel—”

  Luke laid down his cameras and ambled up to the desk clerk. He reached out and took the man’s fleshy cheek gently in his hand and twisted it. The man took a deep breath and reached back for the shotgun. John Howard went around the desk as quickly and lightly as a cat, and picked the gun up and held it behind him. I stared.

  “We are from the New York Times,” Luke said softly and merrily into the man’s gobbling, outraged face. “All three of us have identification if you require it, and you should know that there are four or five more of us on the way. If you’d like to change your mind about directing us to the convention delegates, we’ll go on back. Otherwise, I’m going to make one quick phone call and every newspaper and wire service in this country will have a stringer out here before you can change your britches. Your decision, friend.”

  The man wrenched his cheek out of Luke’s grasp and retreated into an inner office and slammed the door. We heard the lock click into place.

  “After you, Harrison Salisbury,” John Howard said, bowing slightly to Luke, and we got halfway down the sour-smelling, smoky hall before we collapsed against the wall in silent, helpless laughter.

  The back wing of the motel, where the fat man had said the convention delegates would be, was hot and dark and smelled powerfully of marijuana and liquor, and seemed to me as abandoned as a newly discovered Egyptian tomb. Walking down the shabby corridor was eerie; I felt the back of my neck prickle, and thought of every bad horror movie I had ever seen. We looked into one filthy, disheveled room after another: tangled bedclothes and strewn underclothing and empty plates and glasses said that life had been here, but the silence and the buzzing of flies said that it had gone. I waited, teeth clenched, to come to the room where the bodies were piled.