Just after he left a man called George Barber called me from Look magazine and asked me if I would like to do a small piece for them on Andre, just a brief, personal update. He had found the Focus piece very moving, he said, and Andre still haunted him.
“You mean a photo-essay?” I said. “Is Lucas Geary shooting it for you?”
“No. An opinion piece. Geary’s first rate, but it’s your words we want,” George Barber said. “We can’t pay you much, but we’ll give you a nice fat byline.”
I was in Matt’s office so fast that I stumbled on his rug.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s a nice offer, but I just can’t afford to let you do outside work right now. Culver’s going around telling everybody about his prize girl reporter, and he’d have my ass if your byline turned up in Look.”
“But…” I whispered incredulously. “You’ve always said it reflected well on us if staff members did national stuff—”
“That was when we needed the ink,” he said, looking down at the clutter on his desk and not at me. “We don’t need it now. They need us, or they wouldn’t be calling you.”
He looked mussed, pale, papery-skinned, tired. The chestnut fire on his head was peculiarly ashen, dried. The fingers that fiddled with the pile of coins and the watch trembled. I was almost, for an instant, more alarmed than I was angry, but only almost. Disappointment and rage flared through me like wildfire.
“You’re punishing me for something and I don’t know what it is!” I cried softly.
“I’m not punishing you,” he said irritably. “I can’t spare you. We’ve been shining our behinds with show-off stuff so long that the meat and potatoes of the magazine is backed up. In fact, I’m pulling you off Focus for a while to concentrate on YMOG and a new thing Culver’s got going. He’s asked specifically for you on it. It’s a monthly roundup of chamber of commerce doings in the five-county metro area. It’s going to take a lot of time setting up a format. I’m asking Claire Degan at the AJC to take over Focus for a few months.”
I stared at him, my head buzzing.
“Why are you doing this?”
“I told you—”
“Why are you doing this?”
“All right, goddammit,” he shouted. “Since you ask, it seems that you’ve fucked Downtown as well as Lucas Geary, the way you’ve been carrying on. I’ve gotten some bad heat from Culver about you. Apparently you two are being less than discreet in some very public places, and it’s getting back to the chamber. I don’t care who you screw, Smoky, but you can’t do it in public and expect nobody to notice…”
I could not even speak. I simply stared at him. Then I whispered, “We have never—”
“Somebody saw you doing it in the parking lot at the Lion’s Head the other night,” he said, and picked up his papers as if to dismiss me.
I remembered it then. We had stopped off after a movie at the little English pub, one of the first of a score that had sprung up in Atlanta like mushrooms after rain, for drinks before the fire. The firelight and the brandy did their magical work; we could not seem to keep our hands off each other. The long, dark room was largely deserted, but still, we had a rather wobbly rule that we would not paw each other too much in public. Sexual revolution or not, it was distasteful to both of us, not what we were about. When it became obvious that we could not stay apart much longer, Luke tossed some crumpled bills onto the table and we left.
The potholed parking lot behind the building was long and unlit, and overhung with trees. At its end, where the Morgan sat, there were no other cars and the blackness was almost total. When he walked around to open the passenger door for me he simply stayed there, leaning against the car, and pulled me against him, and before either of us really knew what we were about, we had slumped into the passenger seat, me on his lap, and the dirty deed, as Sister called it, was done.
“Lord,” I said, shaking my head to clear it and pulling my skirt down. “Now that’s tacky, in case you ever wondered. Do you think anybody saw us?”
“No,” he said, starting the car. “There’s nobody around. But I wish there had been. Who’d ever believe that was possible in the front seat of a Morgan?”
But someone must have. I thought of sharp bird’s eyes in the dark, like anthracite under a black beehive; mincing stiletto heels on broken gravel, a fussy sweater drawn tight around a plump body against the chilly night. I would never know. I would always wonder, but I would never know.
I said nothing, only looked at him.
“I got the word to tell you to back off that stuff,” he said coldly. “I trust you can do it.”
“Did you tell Luke to back off, too?” I said furiously.
“Luke isn’t the one who looks like a slut.”
“I’m not doing a damned thing that you and every other guy on this magazine doesn’t do practically every other night,” I cried. “What’s the matter with you?”
“That’s enough. I’ve said what I had to say. Get caught humping again and I can’t save your ass,” he said, and got up and came around the desk. “No, don’t say another word. The whole office probably heard you, including motor mouth out there. Close the door when you leave.”
I did, slamming it so hard that heads appeared in doorways all the way down the line. At the front desk Mary Kay Crimp smiled creamily and picked up her ringing phone.
“Good afternoon, Downtown magazine,” she sing-songed. “How may I help you?”
“By eating a shit sandwich,” I muttered under my ragged breath as I went into my office. It was the worst thing I could think of to say; I always cringed when Matt said it, but I laughed, too, then. I was not laughing now. Impotent tears were pressing close under my anger.
I told Luke about it when he got back that weekend.
“You ought to quit,” he said.
I waited, but he did not say anything more. He was unpacking his camera bags in the darkroom and drinking a beer. He was keyed up and distracted at once. I knew something in the Chicago shoot had affected him powerfully. I would ask him when the strange mood had passed. Meanwhile, I had expected more from him about the scene with Matt than “You ought to quit.” But he did not say more.
“I thought you’d be madder at him,” I said finally, when he was done in the darkroom and had showered and we were sitting down to a late dinner.
“I’m plenty mad at him. He’s a prick. He doesn’t care whether we screw at noon in the middle of Five Points. It’s what I said, he’s getting at you because you’re with me. Somebody probably did see us, but that’s the kind of thing he’d think was funny. He knows better than to say anything to me about it.”
“You’re not going to say anything to him, are you?”
“No. It’s your fight. You’re the one who needs to settle it.”
“But he could fire me—”
“He’d be stupider than I think is possible even for him, but yeah, he could. So what? Go work for Look.”
“You really think I could work for a national magazine? Be that kind of writer?”
“They’re already asking for you, Smokes. I wish you’d told this Barber guy yes and told Matt to stick it. I’d be very surprised if he fired you.”
I shook my head. “I just can’t take the chance right now—”
“You mean because of me? Of us?”
“No. Well, maybe…. I just don’t want things to change yet, Luke. I want us to go on—”
“We will go on. But I can’t have you letting me hold you back from the kind of work you should be doing. I’d leave, if I thought you were doing that.”
“Would you really? Would you really leave me now?”
He sighed. “No. I wouldn’t. Whatever else, it’s not time to change things. You’re right. But you need to know that one day the time will come for you to leave, because it will be time to make your move, and I don’t think you can stay with Matt Comfort and do it. Don’t worry about leaving me behind; I’m nothing if not mobile. I can go where you go.”
Toward the end of the next week Matt called me into his office and motioned to me to shut the door.
“I’m putting you back on Focus,” he said.
I said nothing, looking at him, waiting.
A little smile jerked the corners of his mouth. It was the first time I had seen him smile in a very long time. I smiled back, tentatively.
“John Howard won’t work with anybody else,” he said. “I got a snotty little letter from him this morning that said he would be forced to withdraw from the project if the team was broken up. I had to give Claire Degan her choice of the next three sandwich features. Y’all better make this next one good.”
“What is this one?” I said efficiently. I was not going to thank him, or shout with exultation as I wanted to.
“He’s got some little black country gal with a world-class voice, wants to do something on how she’s been working as a maid for a white lady and trying to be a singer. She was at Selma, used to be one of the Freedom Singers. John’s gotten her a tutor and a place at AU to live, and thinks a piece in the magazine could get some tuition money for her. I think he’s right. We need to focus on some individuals, and it would be good to get the arts in on it. He says you know the girl.”
“Yes, I do,” I said pleasantly. Then I shouted, “Yes! Oh, Matt, yes! What a good idea, what a wonderful story, oh yes—”
The small smile widened into the old, wonderful, world-lighting Matt Comfort grin. He threw the shock of hair off his forehead and laughed aloud. It was one of the best sounds I have ever heard. Matt was back.
He grabbed the taxi horn and gave three sharp blats on it. Doors popped open and faces emerged from them, smiling. There was laughter where there had been none for days and days.
Matt grabbed me up and waltzed me out of his office and down the aisle. My head was exactly even with his, and he held my eyes with his as we capered and whirled. I could see why no woman seemed able to resist this mercurial little scrap of a man. The power of his smile and his eyes was enormous.
“‘Hey there, toots, put on your dancin’ boots, and come dance with me,’” he bellowed. “Top of Peachtree in five minutes flat. Everybody. All of you. Chop chop. Nobody leaves till I say they leave. Mary Kay, dear heart, you will be a precious muffin and stay here and cover our asses, won’t you?”
“Mr. Comfort, I can’t—” Mary Kay Crimp said, flinching away from Matt and the taxi horn.
“Well, then, tell Culver when you call him that I said to BMA,” Matt said, still whirling me around. “He’ll know what I mean.”
We were still laughing, all of us, when the office door swung shut behind us. Mary Kay Crimp was indeed reaching for the telephone, her face swelled up like a turkey gobbler’s. Not one of us cared.
Matt was back.
Thanksgiving weekend was bright and very cold. Neither Luke nor I went home. We would, we told each other, do something about meeting the respective families later, maybe at Christmas. Or maybe not. Everyone else had scattered; Hank to his brother’s family, Sueanne and Sister to their own, Tom Gordon to New Orleans to visit friends. Matt was having dinner with “the Playboy family” at the club. It was held, Luke said gravely, for those bunnies who could not, for one reason or another, go home for the holidays.
“Hard to get those tails on Delta in tourist,” he said, and we both collapsed in laughter. The idea of Matt Comfort eating turkey and cranberry sauce with “the Playboy family” was almost too ludicrous to contemplate.
We went, late in the afternoon, to have dinner with Teddy and her family. When we got back, around nine, the moon was so huge and white and magical that we bundled into jackets and scarves and walked. Traffic was light and the wind whispered along the corridors of midtown, and it was like wading in liquid diamonds: cold, pure radiance. I could not remember that the entire winter last year had been this cold, but I did not mind.
We walked a little way into Tight Squeeze. It was practically deserted. The litter of the street people eddied in the wind; homemade cigarette butts, faded banners hawking the Maharishi Yogi and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Peter Max posters for myriad rock concerts; posters proclaiming “Make Love, Not War,” “Do Your Own Thing,” “If It Moves, Fondle It.” But except for a few bundled figures scurrying along the sidewalks, there were no street people.
“I walked here the first day I was in Atlanta, just about one year ago,” I told Luke, “and the street was wall-to-wall freaks, and you had to jump over used condoms. Not a freak or a condom in sight tonight, though. ‘The times, they are a’changin.’”
“More likely it’s the weather,” Luke said. He aimed his camera at a torn banner whipping across the deserted, lunar street; “Power to the People,” it read. He put the camera away and we walked on.
“Nothing worse than a fair-weather freak,” Luke said. “Where did you think you’d be this Thanksgiving, when you were here that first day?”
“I didn’t have any idea. Probably still at the Church’s Home, trying to sneak in late past the sisters. Still wondering what it was like to lose your virginity.”
“You’ve come a longer way than I think you know,” Luke said.
Back in the carriage house we built a fire and made coffee. Luke sprawled on the sofa and I was in the kitchen slicing the half pecan pie Teddy’s mother had sent home with us when I heard the doorbell. I stopped, listening. No one ever rang this late unless we were expecting them.
I heard Luke’s voice, and another one, frail and child-like, and then Luke called, “Come in here, Smoky,” and I went, still holding the pie. Alicia Crowley sat on the sofa, her head down on her chest, looking up at us through strands of honey hair. It was so matted and limp that I almost did not recognize her. Nothing else about her was familiar, either, except the beautiful blue maxi coat she had gotten for Christmas last year. I remembered that we had all speculated that Matt had given it to her, but Alicia never said. The coat was spotted, and one of its military brass buttons was gone. Alicia was shivering so hard that the sofa shook with it. At first I thought it was because she was cold, for she wore no gloves and only shower clogs on her narrow blue-white feet. But the shivering was worse than mere cold; it was profound, seemed to rack her entire body. Her face was dead white, but two hectic circles of red burned on her cheeks. She wore no makeup, and her lips were chafed and bitten raw. She looked ghastly.
Luke dropped a quilt around her shoulders and said, “She came in a taxi. I’m going out and pay him. Get her some brandy or something and see if you can warm her up. I don’t think she can talk. Something’s bad wrong.”
He went quickly out the door and I dropped down on the sofa beside Alicia and put my arm around her. She looked at me with eyes that were glittering and opaque, hot-looking eyes. They filled with tears, and she dropped her head again.
“Tell me what’s the matter,” I said. “We’ll help you, but you have to tell us. Did something happen with Buzzy? Did he hurt you?”
She shook her head and tried to speak, but could not. I filled a glass half full of bourbon and held it to her lips, and she got some down. The rest went down the front of the coat.
“I’m sick,” she whispered finally, the words chattering past her teeth. “I’m real sick, and I can’t go to a doctor, and I’m scared to death.”
Luke came back in and knelt in front of her, and took her hands.
“Tell us,” he said. “There isn’t anything so bad that we can’t fix it. Tell us, babe.”
She leaned against the sofa back and closed her eyes.
“I got pregnant,” she whispered after a long time. “I thought everybody would have guessed. When I told Buzzy he had a fit. He said it wasn’t his, but of course it was, and he knew it. Finally he gave me some money, this huge wad of bills, and told me to be on a street corner in Tight Squeeze at five-thirty a few mornin
gs ago, that it would be taken care of. He said…he said not to come back to his place, not to try to get in touch with him. And he said if I told anybody where the…the doctor was, or what had happened…something would happen to me. It’s illegal, you know. Having an abortion is illegal. Can you imagine Buzzy worrying about that?”
She laughed, and it turned into a sob, and I tightened my arm around her and looked at Luke. His eyes were slits, and the skin around his nose and mouth was white.
“So I waited in the dark on the street corner, and this humongous limousine pulled up and the driver said my name, and I got in, and we drove and drove…. I think we drove to Tennessee somewhere. I didn’t pay any attention to the road signs. I was scared to death. The limousine had shades over all the windows and a panel behind the driver I couldn’t see through. He never said another word to me until we were back in Atlanta.
“He dropped me off at this place, it was awful, down in the Negro part of town, although the doctor and nurse were white, and they…did the abortion. It hurt like nothing I could have imagined. They didn’t give me anything. When I left, the doctor gave me some antibiotics and pain pills and told me that if I had any symptoms, I should get to a doctor here real fast, but that if I told where I had been I would be awfully sorry. And I knew he was telling the truth. Buzzy…Buzzy could do that. When we got back here the limousine dropped me off at the TraveLodge Motel over on Spring Street. Buzzy had paid two weeks on a room. I knew I was going to have to do something about getting my job back, or getting another one, and finding somewhere to stay, but somehow I just couldn’t go to Matt right then. I looked so bad, and I felt awful, and I didn’t know what Buzzy might have told him. And then I got really sick, with fever, and chills, and bleeding, and I knew that I had an infection, but I was just too scared to go to a doctor. I don’t know any doctors. I’ve never been sick…”
Her voice faded out as if she were simply too exhausted to go on. She lay against the back of the sofa, eyes shut, and I thought for a moment she had dropped off to sleep. Then she made a great effort and whispered, “Please help me. I think I might be dying.”
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