Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said. “I’ve been missing him. I’ve been worried about him.”

  “I was going to,” Luke said. “He asked about you. I was thinking over a proposition he made me, and I wanted to decide about it before I told you.”

  The back of my neck prickled slightly.

  “What proposition?” I asked, keeping my voice level.

  “They want to start over on the photographs for the book, do all new stuff. He thought I might want to take it on. It would mean about six weeks or two months around the country, shooting, and then another month or so in New York, editing. The pay’s good.”

  “So what did you decide?” I said in the level, pleasant, silly voice.

  He tilted his head back so that he was looking at me upside down and grinned.

  “I decided I didn’t want to do it. The pay’s not that good. I don’t like New York. I was afraid if I left you’d move somebody like Buzzy into the apartment. And I just can’t work up a hard-on about Civil Rights anymore. It just feels like the heat’s gone out of it. The Christmas thing kind of did me in; it felt like the last gasp of something—passion, or purpose, or just plain sense. I don’t know what I mean. The movement isn’t over, I know. But like I told you before, it’s not really where the heat is now.”

  “You mean it’s in the war,” Hank said.

  “Yeah,” Luke said. “I guess that is what I mean.”

  He’s going, I thought. Sooner or later, probably sooner, Luke is going to go shoot that damned war. It isn’t going to be long at all. Desolation swamped me.

  “Let’s get this miserable soufflé out of sight. It’s depressing me,” I said to Teddy, and scrambled to my feet and began gathering up plates and glasses. Luke reached out and touched my leg as I passed him.

  “You okay, babe?” he said.

  “I wish you’d told me,” I said. Idiotically, I felt as if I was going to cry.

  In the kitchen, Teddy scraped plates as I filled the minuscule sink with hot water.

  “You two going to get married?” she said casually, not looking at me.

  “Oh, Teddy, I don’t know,” I said. “We haven’t really talked about it. Things were just so good the way they were, I didn’t want to think about changing them….”

  She looked at me over her shoulder, but said nothing. I looked down at the soapy water. I had spoken in the past tense. Teddy would not have missed that.

  I knew then that things had changed, and I had not let myself see it. Not in the way we felt about each other; I was so sensitive to Luke’s feelings that I would know almost before he did if there had been any lessening of the thing between us. It was I who had changed. Up to now, I had been content, as he was, to go on as we were, to live in the moment, let who and what and where we were fill me up, complete me. But sometime during the Christmas holidays that had changed. I found myself looking ahead now, wondering what would come next, wondering when he would tell me that he wanted to go to the war, or wherever the next siren call tugged him; wondering how he would tell me.

  Wondering what he would say about coming back.

  We had agreed that when either of us felt the need to change something we would say so, and he had not said. And I knew that the need had been born in him, and was growing, like a seed. But I also knew that a need had been born in me, too, a need for permanence, promises, reassurance—and I had not said. I had been, for some time, needy, anxious, clinging. He had been preoccupied, restless. I had put it down to the emptiness left by Tom and especially John Howard’s leaving, and the worry over Matt. Maybe Luke had too.

  But I could not think that anymore. I realized that for the past few weeks I had felt as if I were living in a dead place in the air, living on a flimsy bridge hung between two great tectonic plates, living in a white corridor with no doors at either end. I missed all of us and what we had been. I missed the old Downtown as a child might miss an absent mother. Most of all I missed Matt.

  For the first time since we had been together, I rolled over on my side when Luke finished his shower and came to bed that night, and feigned sleep. But I did not sleep for a long time.

  On January 30, the news came of the Tet Offensive. The nation, having been lulled by positive Pentagon reports that victory was within reach, took in the massive troop losses on both sides, and the grinding difficulty the combined allied force encountered trying to push back the North Vietnamese from Saigon and the heart of allied territory. Antiwar opinion flared like wild-fire through the country.

  Luke was wild to go to war.

  “Go,” I said over and over. “I want you to go. You should go. It’s the only possible thing for you to do, careerwise. And you won’t ever be satisfied until you do. You don’t want to look back twenty years from now and regret that you didn’t go shoot this war, and I don’t want to look back and see that I’m the reason you didn’t. I couldn’t stand that. Let’s start right now thinking who might send you.”

  He knew that I was upset, though.

  “Christ, it would be absolute shit going off and knowing you were back here with all this stuff going on at Downtown—or not going on—and me not here with you,” he said once.

  “There’s no point in my telling you I wouldn’t miss you and worry about you, but you have to believe that it’s more important to me for you to go than to stay with me,” I said, meaning it. “If you do go, you might get your stupid head shot off. If you don’t, it would kill the part of you that’s the photographer. And that’s the part I love the most. I knew you’d go sooner or later. Do it and come on home.”

  “I do love you, Smokes,” he said softly, and began to look around for someone to assign him to cover the war before it ended.

  Life and Look both had men, as they said, in country, and did not need any more coverage, though they would be glad to have whatever he sent back if he went on his own.

  “Cheap bastards,” Luke said, and scouted the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution. Both said they were using wire service material, but would keep him in mind.

  “Cheaper bastards,” Luke said, and went to try his hand with Matt.

  But Matt was not even remotely interested. Luke took him out for a night on the town to soften him up, and put the idea to him, and Matt dismissed it with a grandiloquent wave of his hand.

  “Downtown needs a war feature like a rooster needs socks,” he said. “Order us another and let me tell you what I’ve got going.”

  It took him two more doubles, Luke said later, to spell out his grand plan of action regarding the Cup Wars. When he was done, Luke had to carry him home to bed like a child stricken suddenly with sleep.

  All through February and into the tender, luminous early spring, the Cup Wars raged. The first strike of the new offensive started on a relatively small scale: one morning the statue of Henry Grady, which presided over the traffic island at the intersection of Broad and Marietta Streets, where our offices sat, was festooned with rattling strings of yellow cup holders. By noon Willie, the chamber’s grave, decorous handyman, had retrieved them, and by twelve-oh-one Culver Carnes was in the office, his face a mask of restrained fury, asking for Matt. But Matt had not shown. He had called in around ten and said that he had a breakfast meeting with a former member of John Kennedy’s cabinet and was hopeful of an interview. They were not to be disturbed.

  “Tell him to call me the minute you hear from him,” Culver Carnes said tightly to Cecelia Henley. But Matt did not call in. It was mid-afternoon before he appeared, looking as if he had slept in his clothing again, as if he might not have eaten for days. But his eyes, behind the round glasses, glittered with a kind of feverish glee, and his face was flushed. He smiled a lot. He would not say where he had been.

  At five he blatted us into his office with the taxi horn and motioned to us to be quiet. He poured paper cups of Cutty Sark all around and took a great swallow from his, shuddered pleasurably, tossed the wing of chestnut hair off his forehead, and got Culver Carnes on
the phone.

  “Understand you were looking for me, boss,” he said amiably.

  A furious jumble of sound issued from the phone. Matt grinned ferally all around and held the phone out from his ear; it spit ducklike quackings for a full minute. It was impossible not to laugh. He shushed us gleefully.

  At last he answered, “Yeah, well, it wasn’t my folks. And I know you’re not intimating it was me, are you, boss? Because I can prove where I was, if I have to. Of course you’re going to look as paranoid as hell if you ask me to. But I’ll be happy to…. No, that’s okay. But while I’ve got you, let me tell you that I’m changing my routine for a while. This is just so you’ll know. I’m going to be out of the office a lot during the day for a couple of weeks, maybe three. Yeah, I’m lining up a new section on the area arts, a much larger kind of guide thing, looking to bring in at least three times as much revenue. I’m going to have to see the arts leaders in the entire five-county metro area, though, and you know there’s not anybody who can sell ’em like I can. Hank’s going to hold things down here, and if you need me you can always get me through him. He’ll know where I am. I’ll be in and out, and I’ll be working most nights, to catch up on office stuff. You can always find me down here at night if you want to hang around. I figure I’ll have it nailed down in say, three weeks. Four at the outside. It’s going to be worth it, Culver. It could double our circulation. Smoky will be doing it, with Luke Geary…”

  There was more babble from the phone, but the heat had gone out of it. When Matt replaced the receiver in the cradle, he was grinning like a child who has succeeded in fooling his teacher. Glee fairly radiated off him. He all but clapped his hands.

  We were all quiet for a moment. I don’t think any of us knew quite what to say. We had never seen Matt in precisely this mode before.

  Finally Hank said, “I assume you’re serious about the new arts thing? And you really do want me to look out for things for a while? It’s a long time to be without you in the office—”

  “You’re the managing editor,” Matt said happily. “Manage. Teddy’s the production manager. She can produce. I have great faith in you guys. You don’t need me to hold your hands. And yeah, there’s going to be a new arts section, eventually. I think, short range, you can look for some…startling works of art.”

  “Matt, if I take that on, it’s not going to leave me any time for Focus,” I said warily. “The county chamber review is taking up about half my time already.”

  “Oh, Focus is off, for the time being,” Matt said airily. “Culver wants to downplay the quote, black angle, unquote, for a while. The Christmas thing spooked him worse than shit. Don’t worry, we’ll get back to it sooner or later, when I find somebody as good as John Howard to be liaison for me. You’ll have time.”

  I said nothing. I felt hollow and diminished at the thought of losing Focus, but I knew that there was no sense arguing with Matt in this strange, bright, hard new mood. I knew that Luke would not be shooting the new arts section. There was nothing in it that would engage him.

  Matt shooed us out of the office then.

  “Out,” he said. “Go home, all of you. I don’t want anybody working late around here for a while. I’ve got stuff to do at night, and I don’t have time to fiddle around with you guys. If you can’t get it done during the day, take it home. Tell Hank if you need me. Begone.”

  He blatted the taxi horn and we filed out, looking back at him uneasily. He was lifting the Cutty Sark bottle to refill his glass as we closed the door on him, and he almost seemed to give off sparks of an interior hilarity.

  “I think he’s drunk,” Sister said unhappily.

  “I think he’s nuts,” Teddy said.

  “There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that he’s both,” Hank said. “I wonder what the hell he’s up to.”

  For the next few careening weeks, we saw very little of Matt Comfort except replications of that night: at five o’clock, the lifted Cutty Sark bottle, the brilliant smile, the closing office door. He was almost never in the office during the day. Hank almost never knew where he was. He did not call in at intervals and let Hank know where he could be reached, as he had said he would, and Hank could not raise him at his apartment. He thought Matt was there, he said, because he found his car in the underground garage. But there was no reply to his hammering on the door, and none to his repeated phone calls. Just when Hank was about to go to the resident manager, and demand the pass key, Matt would call in, or appear in the office. Maybe, I said once, he was with the Playboy PR person, but Hank said no, they had broken up over the holidays, and she had gone back to the mother hutch in Chicago. Matt was with a TWA stewardess now who had the Atlanta to New York to Rome flight three times a month, and was seldom at home. She slept in when she was, and did not answer her phone. All anyone knew about her was that her name was Maria and she had, as Matt said, an awesome fuselage. Matt Comfort had managed to vanish as thoroughly from the face of the earth as was possible without making an alarmed investigation of his whereabouts necessary. It was a masterful piece of legerdemain.

  There was absolutely no doubt in any of our minds, after a few days, what he was up to.

  The week after the Henry Grady incident, the Citizens and Southern Bank hung an exhibit, in its main lobby across the street from our building, of portraits of civic movers and shakers, painted by the incomparable local artist George Parrish. The morning after the private reception, early workers were startled to find that the portrait of Culver Carnes was festooned with strings of yellow cup holders.

  Soon after that, Culver Carnes’s car was brought down to him from the upper decks of our parking lot by a puzzled attendant who explained to the apoplectic Culver that he had tried to unfasten the slender metal cord that held the dangling train of yellow cup holders to the back bumper, but he could not. It would, he thought, take wire cutters, or maybe even a welder’s torch. Nossir, he sure didn’t have no idea who did it. Not one of them, nossir. She was like that when he found her. Culver Carnes went driving off, white faced, toward a downtown garage, the yellow cup holders clanging merrily behind his new Buick as if he were a newlywed.

  That night he hired a Pinkerton guard for the chamber offices.

  He was back in Matt’s office at nine the next morning, but no one could reach Matt.

  “I think he said something about Gwinnett County,” Hank said earnestly, flushed with embarrassment and anger at having to lie for Matt, but hardly able to hold back his laughter all the same. Culver was practically dancing on the rug, like a child who could not wait to go to the bathroom.

  About that time the Polaroid campaign began. Each morning for perhaps a week Culver Carnes would find, in his morning mail, a Polaroid photograph of a local scene with the yellow cup holders prominently featured: decorating Margaret Mitchell’s grave in Oakland Cemetery; adorning the gates to Grant Field at Georgia Tech; hanging rakishly on the cage of Willie B., the famous and dyspeptic gorilla at the Grant Park Zoo; gracing the scrawny neck of the gospel shouter on the corner of Broad and Marietta, who could not remember how they got there and called down biblical curses upon Culver Carnes’s envoy, sent to interrogate him.

  At the same time Culver Carnes was opening his morning mail the local newspapers and radio stations were opening theirs, to find identical shots. In the muddy gray hiatus between news of winter weather and the Braves’ spring training, the media fell upon the Cup Wars with alacrity. Culver Carnes would, at first, speak with no reporters, but of course, someone at the chamber ratted, and the Cup Wars went public with a vengeance. Most televised newscasts ended up with a shot of the day’s Polaroid, and drive-time radio hosts kept the thing going by sponsoring call-in contests to name the culprit. Culver Carnes lost his head and gave one near-demented interview in which he called the whole thing insidious and insubordinate in the extreme, and promised to fire the culprit when apprehended. After a local deejay suggested that someone give him little steel balls to roll in his hands, like Capta
in Queeg in The Caine Mutiny, the chamber board called Culver Carnes in and told him to put a lid on it; he was making himself and the chamber look like asses.

  “Be reasonable, Culver,” Ben Cameron, who was board chairman, was said to have told him. “You can’t fire whoever it is because he’s hanging yellow cup holders all over town and taking Polaroids of them. You say yourself no cup holders are missing. And besides, there’s no law that I know that says it’s illegal to…oh, Christ. What is it with you and these goddamned cup holders? Can’t you just grin and go along with it? He’ll get tired of it in a minute then…whoever it is.”

  Ben is said to have grinned, albeit reluctantly, when he said it.

  “It’s Comfort, of course,” Culver Carnes responded. “He’s lost it, Ben. It’s symptomatic—”

  “It’s actually funnier than hell, Culver, whether it’s Comfort or not,” Ben Cameron said. “Even if you catch him red-handed with a sack of yellow cup holders, you can’t fire him. He has a contract. You’d look like the biggest fool since Boy Slattery. And besides, if it is Comfort, my money says you’ll never catch him in a hundred years. Join him. He’s beat you.”

  The next time the media contacted Culver Carnes he grinned a sick grin and said it was all a prank, and even if it was pretty silly and childish, he appreciated a good joke as much as anyone else.

  The next day, an Academy Award-winning documentary crew, in town to shoot a film on “Atlanta, the City Too Busy to Hate,” found the misty wooded park at Peachtree Battle Avenue, where they planned to shoot the film’s opening sequence, literally cobwebbed with festoons of yellow cup holders strung on every available bush, tree, and crag. It took the crew a full morning to get them down, set shooting back a day, and cost many thousands of dollars. Culver Carnes announced to the reporters who jammed his office that the only decent thing for the chamber to do was pick up the tab for the delay. He gave the cameras a decent, good-guy smile and went back into his office. We learned later that he was on the phone to the chamber membership all afternoon, putting his plan to them. I think he must have known it would be approved. It would bring the chamber a significant cash windfall, and that, after all, was what made the corporate world go round. The business of Atlanta had always been business.