“I should have told you I’d talked to Matt,” he said.
“No. You shouldn’t have talked to him at all. This is my life, Brad. I can take care of myself.”
“You’re my life now, too, Smoky,” he said. “You can’t blame me if I worry about you sometimes. You’re awfully quick to go in harm’s way.”
“I can’t blame you for worrying, but I can blame you for making me look like a fool with Matt. He and I can decide what’s harmful and what’s not when it comes to my work.”
“Okay,” he said. “Truce. Can we take this up Friday?”
“You bet we can,” I said, slightly mollified, but still determined to clear the air once and for all about my Downtown assignments.
“See you then. I love you.”
“Me too,” I said, and felt a warm rush of happiness and the new sense of safety, and thought, well, after all, what’s so awful about a man worrying about his wife-to-be? Wouldn’t you worry about him, if you thought he was going to do something dangerous?
Only then did I realize that I would not. I could not conceive of Brad in a situation that he could not handle. That, I knew, was where the safety sprang from.
On Thursday afternoon Luke came into my office looking slightly sheepish and grinning the shit-eating grin. I laughed aloud. He looked for all the world like Tom Sawyer caught in a misdeed by Aunt Polly.
“You been whitewashing fences?” I said.
“Whitewashing wouldn’t be a bad idea,” he replied. “I have a feeling a bucket of whitewash would serve me well before long.”
“Why?”
“This,” he said, and pulled a folded piece of paper from his camera bag. He handed it to me and stood silently, arms folded over his chest, as I took it and unfolded it.
All of a sudden the air around my face felt charged and thick, as though there had been a silent explosion. My face and lips tingled with it, and my ears rang. The paper was a page proof from Life magazine, and the photo on it was an extreme close-up of me and the young black woman in the bathroom of the Santa Fe Plaza Motel, face thrust into furious face, screaming silently at each other.
Her face was full on, and in it you could read years, centuries of corrosive rage and impotence. There was such venom in her contorted mouth and slitted eyes that even here, in my silent, sunny office, I flinched away, feeling again her clawing hands and nails. My own face was in profile, skin very white against her black cheeks, eyes looking pale and ghost-gray and somehow eerie, mouth opened in what I knew to be angry shock but what looked to be spitting vindictiveness. Even in profile, it was undeniably me. Even untitled, the photograph pulsed and shimmered with power and particularity. It was impossible to look away from it. Some small, clear part of my mind knew that Life would run it uncaptioned and full-page bleed. It spoke for itself: the rage of race against race, the swift, menacing new fury of the young. Even in my beginning anger and outrage at Lucas Geary, that same part of my mind applauded Life for its editorial sensibility. It was a stunning photograph.
After a very long time I whispered, “Luke, how could you?”
He shook his head, as if he did not himself understand.
“How could I not?” he said.
I sat down heavily in my desk chair and stared from the page proof to him. He was not smiling, but he did not look unduly guilty, or chagrined. He merely looked very focused, and very interested, the old Luke look.
He waited, not speaking.
“It makes me look like a terrible racist,” I said, tears beginning to prickle in my eyes. “Can’t you see that? You know I’m not. You know I’m not! Oh, Luke, everything that Matt was beginning to let me do, all the Focus work, this makes it all…just a joke!”
He shook his head.
“Not to anybody who knows you. Not to anybody who knows me, or John Howard, or Matt. This photograph isn’t about you, Smoky. Don’t you see that? It’s about now, about the times—”
“Everybody will see it. They’ll see it in Corkie, Brad’s family will see it—”
“Well, from what you say, it ought to earn you big points in Corkie and with Brad’s family,” he said, beginning to grin, and my tears spilled over.
I turned away from him and stood looking blindly out my window. The white-hot September sun glinted off the gold dome of the Capitol. It danced and wavered through the salt blur in my eyes.
Behind me he said, “I didn’t think it would hurt you, Smoky. It won’t be captioned; you won’t be identified. They promised that. No names. You did sign a release…”
His voice trailed off, and I knew that he was embarrassed at last. He knew and I knew that I had thought the release merely a formality. But he must have suspected all along what he had in this photograph.
“When will it run?”
“Be on the stands Monday. I brought you this so you could get used to it and…you know, alert anybody it might take by surprise.”
I knew that he meant Brad.
“I guess there’s no doubt that it’s going to run?”
“No. I couldn’t stop it now if I wanted to. And I don’t. Smoky…just look at it. Look at it again, and pretend it isn’t you.”
I simply stared at him. Pretend it was not me? That ugly rictus of rage, not me? But then I thought, that’s Lucas. That’s what he is, that’s how he sees things. He is a camera. Matt was right. He is…dangerous.
I looked back at the proof spread out on my desk and thought, for just an instant, what a spectacular photograph that is.
He saw the thought register, and said, “See?”
“I know it’s good,” I said. “I know it’s powerful. I guess I’d run it too, if I worked for Life. But Luke…this is me. This hurts me. Don’t you care about that?”
He screwed up his eyes as though he were concentrating very hard. “I care a lot if it really hurts you,” he said. “But I can’t see why it would. Everybody who knows you knows you’re not a racist; anything but. Who gives a shit about the rest? You don’t, do you? I didn’t think you’d care—nothing’s going to change, Smoky. It isn’t going to hurt Focus. Christ, if Hunt gets his drawers in an uproar over this he doesn’t deserve you—”
“He’s not going to get his drawers in an uproar,” I shouted angrily. The tears receded. “He’s just going to be madder than hell that you’ve made me look like a damned Ku Klux Klanner! What do you think he is?”
“Good question,” he said mildly. “So I guess you’re pissed, huh?”
“I’m…oh, I don’t know what I am! Go away and leave me alone, Luke. And don’t come near me anymore with that damned camera. I don’t trust you worth…I don’t know what.”
“I never meant for you to feel bad about it, Smoky,” he said, his voice subdued, and started out of the office.
“Has Matt seen it?” I said after him.
“Yeah.”
“What did he say? That I got into trouble after all, and that he told me so?”
“Nope. Just said it sure wasn’t your best side,” Luke said, and shut the door softly behind him. I sat for a long time, staring at the page proof, and then I put it into my top drawer and shut it firmly. I would, I thought, think about it later.
And I did. All that afternoon, and all evening, and until early into the morning hours, I lay thinking about it, the black and white faces burned into the space behind my eyes, wondering whether to show it to Brad, wondering how to behave about it if I did, wondering what, if anything, I should say to them back in Corkie, before the photograph ran. In the end, I crammed it into an envelope and took it with me to the Top of Peachtree to meet Brad for lunch the next day, my eyes burning from lack of sleep, dawdling along the hot, crowded sidewalk in my indecision about whether or not I would show it to him.
In the end I did. Lunch went so wonderfully well that I simply forgot I had ever doubted I would. In the powerful lamp of Brad’s obvious delight in seeing me again, and the tumble of things we had saved to tell each other, and the laughter we shared, and the cold wh
ite wine, and the shrimp salad and lemon mousse and the soft pressure of his knee against mine under the table and the sheer, proprietary pride I felt looking at him across the table—how handsome he was; it was always a small shock when I saw him afresh—I forgot my apprehension of the day before. Just before we rose to leave, I to go back to the office and he to drive back to Huntsville, I said, “Oh, I almost forgot. Look what Lucas Geary has done to me,” and pulled out the page proof and handed it to him. For a long moment, I sat watching him across the table, smiling slightly, waiting for the rueful grin and the snort of annoyance at Lucas. Above him, behind his gleaming blond head, the mural shone in the gray-tinted dusk of the bar, and my own face seemed to look back at me, smiling. Smiling.
He lifted his head from the proof and looked across the table at me. His face had whitened while I was smiling at myself in the mural, and there were scarlet patches on each cheekbone. His lips were bloodless. Even his eyes looked paler, somehow bleached, like lake ice at the end of winter.
“It’s not that bad,” I said, smiling at him.
He did not speak.
“He didn’t mean to make me look like a racist,” I said. I was warmed by his obvious anger at Luke, but I did not want a serious quarrel between them.
He still did not speak. But he took a deep breath, as though he meant to, and then let it out again. He was obviously struggling to control himself. I had never seen him so angry. I had never, in fact, seen him angry at all. Not really.
“Don’t be mad at him,” I said. “He’s a photographer; it’s what he does. It’s what he is. He can’t help it. It won’t jeopardize my work. Matt made a joke of it.”
“Did he now.”
It was not a voice I knew. I fell silent, looking warily at him.
“You said,” he said in a precise, dry voice, as if he were reciting from memory, “that there wasn’t a story. That you didn’t get—and I quote—‘anything newsworthy.’ Apparently Life magazine didn’t agree with you.”
“Well, I didn’t know Luke was shooting,” I said uncertainly. “He didn’t say anything until he brought me this, yesterday. Downtown isn’t running anything—”
“Oh, well, then, everything is all right,” Brad said, and his voice cut me as if it were the lash of a whip. I simply looked at him.
“You’ve been a busy girl, haven’t you, Smoky? Busy, busy, busy. First your picture on the wall of the busiest bar in town, and then why, my goodness me, look ahere! Here’s ol’ Smoky in the flesh, spitting like a cat at a darky in a dopehead motel, close up so all America can see.”
His voice was so like that of Marylou Hunt that I could not speak. He was, at that moment, no one I knew even remotely, no one I had ever known.
“So what’s next, Smokes?” he said, in a ghastly caricature of joviality. “Starting a riot at the Saint Paddy’s Day Parade? I bet I know. The Blessed Virgin is going to appear to you in the ladies’ room mirror; your typewriter will develop a stigmata—”
“Shut up.”
I could taste tears in my mouth, but I could not feel them running down my face. For the second time in two days, I felt in the air that terrible silent explosion.
His ashen face flushed and he dropped his eyes. It seemed to me simply idiotic that I would notice and admire the way his thick gold-tipped lashes shuttered them, but I did. Part of me did. The other part was frozen, dead.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But there’s something in you that just doesn’t know when to quit, Smoky. You don’t have any…any boundaries; you don’t know what the limits are.”
I was silent, and he raised his eyes. They were slightly wild. I thought that perhaps there was a sheen of tears in them.
“You go too far, Smoky,” he said in the new, cold, level voice. “It’s beyond…courage, or spirit. I don’t know…. It’s so—”
“It’s so Irish. Isn’t that what you were going to say, Brad?” I said. My voice was very steady. I was amazed at myself. I could feel the tears now, a regular runnel of them on both cheeks. I did not raise my hand to wipe them away.
“You said it. I didn’t. But since you did…” he said, and looked away from me. In profile, he was Marylou Hunt. I wondered why I had never seen it before. All that separated them was her long hair and his gilt stubble of beard.
I got up from the table and crumpled the page proof into a loose ball and tossed it into his dessert plate. I slid the gold bracelet off my wrist and laid it on top of the proof.
“For your mother,” I said. “She’s going to love both of them.”
I turned and walked out of the dining room and slipped into the elevator just as the doors were closing. I thought that I heard him call “Smoky!” just as they slid shut, but I was not sure, and in any case, the roaring in my ears made exterior sound suspect. I rode down with a carful of loud, well-fed strangers, eyes fixed on the changing floor numbers, face stiff and hot, ears ringing, and walked back to the office. By the time I got there, the fierce heat had dried the tears on my face, but it felt soiled and scummed and sore, as if I had been slapped hard on both cheeks, and so I went into the ladies’ room and washed my face and reapplied my makeup. I gave my face a last quick survey, remembered his poisoned words, whispered “Last chance,” to the Blessed Virgin, and walked out. There was no sign from the Virgin. There was none either, all that afternoon, from Brad. Even as I told myself he would call to apologize and I would refuse to talk to him, I knew that he would not. Marylou would not have. Neither, now, would her son.
I Scotch-taped a sign on my door that said, “Captions and subheads due 5:00 P.M. Do not disturb,” and shut it. I phoned Sister and asked that she hold my calls and visitors unless Matt needed me for something really important.
“You okay?” she said. “You came steaming through here like a bat out of torment.”
“Fine,” I said. “Just way past deadline on the guide. Can you keep the screaming crowd at bay?”
“You betcha,” Sister said. “This dog can hunt.”
Sister might look like a Mary Quant poster girl, but the South Georgia wiregrass regularly booby-trapped her speech. I had to grin, and felt a little better. A little.
“Thanks,” I said, and bent to the piled up cutlines and subheads. And I learned, really for the first time, something that I had not known before: work could save me. Work would save me.
I did not look up, and I did not think about Brad Hunt until my door opened abruptly hours later and I looked up to see Luke Geary standing in it, and the miserable lunch at the Top of Peachtree came flooding back over me. I blinked away sudden tears, and swallowed past a huge, cold salt lump at the base of my throat.
“You busy?” Luke said.
The tears and the salt lump made me angry; if anyone was hurting from the noon encounter, it should be Brad, not me. He was the betrayer, the ambusher, not I. I took it out on Luke, thinking even as I spoke that perhaps I should have gotten angrier at him earlier. It seemed important to me that somebody pay for the ugliness of that lunch besides the victim. I would not think of myself as anything else.
“Whatever the hell made you think I was busy? Could it possibly have been the sign and the closed door?” I said furiously.
“Ah,” he said, as if something had come clear to him, but he did not speak. He stood for a moment, leaning on the door, looking boneless and lazy, as he always did.
“The Life thing,” he said presently. “I’m still on your list.”
“It will no doubt grieve you deeply to learn that I have not thought about you or the Life thing for a substantial number of hours,” I snapped.
“Good,” he said. “Because I came to take you over to Paschal’s. Ramsey Lewis just came in town. John and some of the others are going to be there. I thought you might…want to show the flag a little.”
“Oh, sure. Go waltzing right into La Carrousel when that damned photograph is about to hit the stands, let everybody get a good look at little whitey turncoat—”
“Smoky, the
re is a very good chance that not everybody in the universe reads Life,” Luke said. “Most of those guys stopped fooling with the popular media years ago. But if there’s the slightest chance you think they’re going to think you’ve joined the Klan or something, you ought to go meet a few of them and let them get to know you a little. You may need some contacts among them one day. After they meet you, it won’t be a problem. I promise that. You’ll be with me, and I know a lot of them, and John knows the rest, and…it just won’t be a problem. It’s the least I can do—”
“Oh, well, thanks, Lucas, but I don’t think I want to be your duty date for the prom,” I said. “Don’t worry about it, okay?”
“It’s not a duty date,” he said. “I thought while we were at it I’d make a serious pass at you. While the cat’s away, and all that. Warm you up with a little Ramsey Lewis, ply you with drink, invoke the spirit of the young heroes of the movement, and then, while your delicate senses are reeling—kapow. As they say.”
“No thanks. As they say.”
But I felt the corners of my mouth quirk. Damn him, he was unconscionable, outrageous….
“King’s going to be there.”
And prescient. As long as I had been in Atlanta, I had yearned to meet Martin Luther King Jr. He was, to me, a hero of epic dimensions. But there seemed no way that I ever would. I could not imagine that our paths would simply cross.
“You don’t know that.”
“Yeah. I do know that. I know that for a fact.”
I sat looking at him, and he looked back, grinning slightly.
“Make a good photo-essay for somebody,” he said thoughtfully. “King and his lieutenants kicking back. Heroes at play. I thought I’d take along a camera. Of course, somebody would have to write it, and to do that, they’d have to be there—”
“You are beyond shame,” I said, finally and unwillingly smiling a little, and got up and fished my purse from the bottom drawer, to go into the ladies’ room and fix my face.
“But not beyond reach,” he said, ambling after me as I went out of the office. “I may not be a pushover, but I can be had. You, for instance, could have me if you played your cards right.”
Downtown Page 30
