Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  The Cup Wars ended that day, but we were all frightened. The film incident was over the line; it had all gone too far. The sense of that was strong. None of us had the least doubt that Culver Carnes was right and Matt was behind it, but no one was quite sure how he had accomplished it.

  “Well, anybody can go to a restaurant supply house and buy yellow plastic cup holders,” Luke said, grinning. He was the only one of us who did not seem unduly disturbed by the tenor of things. “And it would take Matt about three seconds to make a buddy for life of that Cro-Magnon Pinkerton Culver hired. For all we know he’s got an absolute network of buddies among the nighttime security guys around town. Hell, maybe he even wears combat fatigues and crawls through vents in blackface. One thing’s for sure, Carnes will never know and neither will we.”

  Days passed and Matt did not come back into the office. Hank, bone-weary from trying to carry on the work of the magazine and fend off Matt’s callers, tried in vain to track him down.

  “I can’t keep this pace up,” he said at lunch over his desk one day. “I’m not getting but three or four hours’ sleep a night. Neither is Teddy. Neither are most of y’all. I’ve got all the advertisers on my back, and the sales department is acting like every day’s a half-holiday. We’re going to come out a week late this month, for the first time in a year, and it’s going to look like my fault, and it goddamned well ain’t. If he doesn’t get his ass back in here, I don’t know what’s going to happen to the magazine.”

  “You ought to quit and leave him with it,” Luke said, reaching for the uneaten half of Hank’s sandwich. “He’s not helping you. He’s making you look bad. You know damned well he’s somewhere drunk. The papers would hire you in a minute; any of the bureaus would.”

  Hank looked at him wearily, and shook his head silently.

  “Smoky should, too,” Luke said. “I’ve told her over and over, the national folks aren’t going to keep asking her forever. She needs to get out of here if she’s going to make her mark. It’s obvious Comfort’s not going to help her out anymore than he is any of the rest of you.”

  I looked at him and then at Hank, and all of a sudden I saw what Hank had meant by the silent shaking of his head. He meant that he could not leave the magazine. That it was, to him, a singularly good magazine, his own magazine—home—and more than that: it was a living thing, an entity in and of itself, apart from Matt Comfort, apart from Comfort’s People, apart from any and all of us. Downtown simply was. Without Matt and us, it would not be.

  “I just can’t leave Downtown, Luke,” I said. “Not until I know it’s going to be okay. I sure don’t know that now.”

  Luke smiled at me, but he shook his head.

  Hank grinned, the first full grin I had seen on his tired face in a long time.

  “I think you just became a journalist, Holy Smokes,” he said.

  Two days later, on March ninth, Luke got his assignment to go to war.

  He came quietly into the apartment after a late meeting at the Atlanta Constitution. I had known he was going there, but not why. Somehow it did not occur to me that it could have been a war assignment, but I knew, the instant I saw his face, that it was.

  My heart gave a great, fishlike flop and then seemed to close up shop deep inside me.

  “You got it,” I said. I was surprised that the words sounded normal.

  “Yeah.”

  He came over to where I was reading on the sofa and took the book out of my hands and sat down beside me. He took my hands in his and pressed them to his mouth, first one and then the other, and bit the knuckles gently. I had a hard time trying to keep from jerking them away, from beginning to cry, from jumping up and running…anywhere. Far away. Very fast. Anywhere. Nononononono my mind wailed idiotically.

  “Where? When?” my voice said calmly.

  “They’ve changed their minds and now they want to do a thing on a First Cav company that left a week ago. The angle is that it might well be one of the last, if not the last, bunch deployed out of Benning, the way the war’s going. They want to follow them through the first phase of whatever action they get. It shouldn’t take long. They rotate those guys out of there fast. No longer than a couple of weeks, for me.”

  “So you’d be going with them. Wherever they go. Cavalry. That’s foot stuff, isn’t it?”

  “It is, yeah. Don’t worry, babe. The reason you get so many good photos coming out of that war is that photographers are notorious chickens. I’m not going to stick my neck out.”

  I simply could not think of anything to say to that. Images flew: virulent green, white mist, red. Splashes of red. Red…

  “So when would you go?”

  “Well, they’re just about getting into ’Nam now. They want me to catch up with them before they go in country. I’ve got a ticket on Delta to San Francisco for day after tomorrow. A MATS flight will take me on from there. I’m not sure about the details yet. They’ll let me know more tomorrow.”

  I got up and went into the kitchen to start dinner. A great, airless white calm had settled down on me, like a mason jar over a lightning bug. I could see, feel, hear, taste, but it seemed to be happening to someone else. I had the very clear notion that if I did everything exactly right, if I peeled the potatoes perfectly, if I brought the water to exactly the right boil, if I made just the right dinner conversation and got the kitchen and dishes spotless after we had eaten, I could make it through until bed-time, and then I could sleep, and it would all go away. All I had to do was be a very, very good girl. All I had to do was not to speak of it, not think of it.

  He followed me into the kitchen and put his arms around me from behind, and pulled me back against him until his chin rested on the top of my head. I could feel that my body was as rigid as a piece of wood in his arms. I was very still.

  “You’re upset. I didn’t want you to be. I thought you wanted this for me—”

  “I did. I do. I’m not upset. But I can’t talk about it now, Luke. Please don’t make me.”

  “We have to talk about it, babe.”

  “No, we don’t. No, we don’t.”

  “You want to go out to dinner? We could call Hank and Teddy, see if they want to do a send-off thing—”

  “Please don’t.”

  We ate our dinner and watched television and read for a bit and finally we got into bed. We made love. He took a shower, and then I did, and we made love again. I did it all perfectly. The ticket to San Francisco, in its smart blue envelope, sat on his bureau like a poison toad. I woke several times during the night, and it seemed to me, when I did, that it pulsed and glowed there like a living thing.

  He drove me to work the next morning and came upstairs with me, to tell Hank about the assignment, he said, and to see if he might want something from him while he was over there. When we got into the office, I still walking perfectly on my fragile bridge over nothingness, it was to find Hank and Teddy slumped in Matt’s Eames chairs, coffee cooling unheeded beside them, staring at a crumpled piece of paper that lay on the floor between them. I could tell, even with the crumpling, that it was an interoffice memo. Hank looked at us mutely, his face a boiled white, and picked it up and uncrumpled it and handed it to me.

  It was from Culver Carnes to the staff of Downtown, and it said, essentially, that he was, with the chamber’s full approval, putting Downtown up for sale. It would be an open sale, strictly according to chamber of commerce policy, with the magazine going to the highest bidder. He had two extremely qualified prospects in negotiation at present, and hoped to have a firm buyer by the fifteenth of April. The staff would be kept on to help out the new corporate editor, whoever that turned out to be, but of course the new owners would want to bring in their own man for that post. Matt Comfort was being apprised of this action under separate cover. He knew that we would want to give the new owners our full cooperation, et cetera. I did not read the rest.

  I passed the memo wordlessly to Luke. It seemed a very long time until he tossed it back do
wn onto the floor. He did not speak, none of us did. There was nothing conceivable to say.

  Another ball of paper hit the floor beside the memo, and I saw, at first uncomprehendingly, that it was the San Francisco ticket in the blue Delta envelope. I looked over at Luke.

  He grinned the old shit-eating grin and shrugged.

  “It ain’t much of a fuckin’ war, anyway,” he said.

  16

  YOU HAVE TO REALIZE THAT IT’S JUST FOR NOW,” LUKE said that night. “I’m going to stay until something is settled one way or another. I want to do that, I have to. But after that, I can’t hang around, Smokes. I want to go to that war. I’m going to find some way to do it.”

  “I know,” I said, pressing closer into the curve of his body. “I know that. I wouldn’t ask you to stay. I didn’t this time.”

  “Just so you know,” he said. “And just so you know that I’ll come back.”

  We were lying close together in the waterbed. It was early, perhaps only ten o’clock. The night was soft and fresh; we had opened the long French windows and a little green wind poured in, freighted with wet earth and new leaves. I remembered the smell from this time last year: Atlanta in the spring. Only last year, I had been all over the city like a young terrier sniffing rapturously at a new territory. This spring, I had spent too many of the nights like this, huddled with Luke in the tidal refuge of the waterbed. The thought made the tears that had threatened all this terrible day surge up again. I swallowed them. I was, I thought, done with crying. This was past crying anyway.

  “I can’t believe how much has changed in one year,” I said bleakly.

  “Yeah,” he said, tracing the line of my hip with his fingertip. “There’s almost nothing that hasn’t changed. But not everything has.”

  We lay in silence for a while. I felt leaden, enervated. I knew that we both were hungry, must be hungry. We had not eaten dinner, and I could not, for the moment, remember what we had done about lunch. But I did not feel hungry.

  “It’s time for you to move on now, Smokes,” Luke said presently. “You don’t want to stick around and work for some Culver Carnes lookalike. You don’t want to watch what Downtown’s going to turn into without Matt. If you aren’t ready to leave Atlanta, go talk to Seth Emerson at the Newsweek bureau. He’ll hire you in a minute. He told me he would. It’s the Southeastern bureau; you could stay here and still get into virtually everything that’s going on all over the South. He’s got some of his women reporting now.”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m going to stay,” I said dully. “I have to, for a while, anyway. Don’t you see? It would be like walking off and leaving a friend to bleed to death.”

  He sat up swiftly and jerkily, and I knew he was angry, or as angry as Luke ever got. He never moved abruptly any other time.

  “Jesus Christ, Smoky, what’s the matter with you?” he snapped. “It’s over. It’s already bleeding to death. Neither you nor anybody else can stop it. Matt killed it himself. Why do you want to hang around trying to save his ass? He’s fucked you just as royally as he did everybody else on staff. He knew damned well Culver would find some way to pull the plug, even if he couldn’t fire him. You don’t owe him a goddamned thing.”

  “It’s not Matt. It’s Downtown,” I said. But even as I said it, I knew that it was Matt, too. It was too late for me. I loved Matt Comfort. I could not walk away from him.

  I did not understand why Luke couldn’t see that. I did not understand how he could walk away.

  But something deep down and rock-hard within me understood: Luke was all eyes, all images. He could not exist in stasis.

  “You don’t owe anybody anything,” Luke said. “You only owe yourself. Only you. Nobody owes anybody else.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “I do. I always have.”

  “Then why are you here with me?”

  “Because it’s something I owe myself, to be with you.”

  “And when it isn’t?”

  “I’m not going to fight with you,” he said. “You’re strung out and I don’t blame you. You aren’t making sense. We’ll talk more when you feel better.”

  He got up and went into the kitchen. I could hear him foraging in the refrigerator.

  “And when will that be?” I said miserably into the pillow.

  I did cry then, despite my resolve. But they were tired, thin tears, and did nothing to ease the solid block of misery that filled my chest, and so I stopped.

  We ate the cheese omelettes he made, and drank some of the widow’s flowery Rhine wine, and went to bed early, but I don’t think either of us slept much. Instead, we tossed politely on our own sides of the waterbed, each trying not to disturb the other. When I got up, in the first cool gray wash of dawn, I looked back on my way into the bathroom and saw his eyes gleam whitely at me before he turned over and buried his head in his pillow. It was the first time I could remember that we had been unable to give each other solace.

  We drank coffee and dressed and left for Downtown in near-silence. We moved like people who have lost a lot of blood, heavily and carefully. He kept his hand on my shoulder or back or arm, lightly, but he said little. So did I. Every time I started to speak, I stopped. There seemed, now, little point. It was as if our entire context had been shattered. That was worse by far than anything that had gone before.

  We heard it the minute the elevator door slid open: the roar of music. It was not the saccharine whine of the Muzak, but the thumping heartbeat of the record Matt had played over and over for almost a year, until Tom Gordon and Hank stole it and threw it out of the eleventh-floor window: “Don’t sleep in the subway darlin’, don’t stand in the pourin’ rain…”

  The music filled the hallway and bounced off the dingy acoustical tiles of the corridor ceiling. Luke and I looked at each other and followed it through the open doorway of Downtown.

  There was no one in the outer office, but all the office doors were open, and the mingled smell of fresh coffee and flowers and furniture polish hit us like a great sound wave. Desktops gleamed with lemon oil. On each woman’s desk was a green florists’ vase of red roses. The music bellowed and roared. Over it, the Bahamian taxi horn gave three ear-splitting blats, and Sister’s face appeared in Matt’s office door. It shone like a child’s on Christmas morning.

  “Y’all get y’all’s butts in here,” she screeched.

  I dropped my purse on my desk and ran, my heart threatening to leap from my chest with something that did not, yet, dare to be joy. Luke was right behind me. Hank said later that Luke running had been a truly amazing sight, like watching a scarecrow sprint.

  They were all there, on Matt’s sofa and his chairs, on his rug. Sueanne was sitting on his desk crying and wiping her glasses on her petticoat, and Sister was frugging madly on the little Oriental rug to Petula Clark.

  Matt sat with his tiny feet up on his desk, holding the taxi horn and grinning. It was his old grin, the one I had seen the first day I had walked into this office, white and wolfish and world-igniting. His chestnut hair gleamed fire and his pin-striped suit was obviously new, even though it looked as if it had spent years in an attic trunk, and the blue eyes behind the round wire glasses were so crinkled that they were lost in furrowed flesh. The little Gucci loafers gleamed, and there was a red rose behind one ear.

  “Sit down, dear hearts, and listen how we’re going to pull this fucker out of the fire,” he said. His voice was the old Matt voice when he was fully engaged, rich and honeyed and just on the brink of sardonic hilarity. There was nothing in it, that I could hear, of the awful cracked, canted glee that had been there for so long. I sat down on Hank’s lap simply because my knees went out from under me.

  It was a short speech. Later I wondered, fleetingly, why we all bought it without reservation, but almost by the time it ended we all had, and there was no doubt in any of our minds that Matt’s plan could and would work: he was going to buy the magazine himself. He knew it could be don
e and he knew how. It was simply a matter of finding a backer, the right one, the one with enough money and sense to know what he had in Downtown and leave us alone to run it. He would have a major share and the editorship; that was the deal and it was not negotiable.

  “I can do it in a week if I have to,” he said. “You all know I can do it. All I need is a telephone. But we have some time and I’m going to take it, to find just the right people, so we don’t ever have to go through this shit again. Don’t glare at me, Teddy, I know where most of the shit came from. I never apologize, so you’ll have to make do with that. All you need to know is that Comfort’s back and one month from now this will be a done deal. I absolutely guarantee that. Anybody who doubts it should leave by that door there.”

  For just a fraction of a moment we were all silent. The past weeks hung in the air like a rancid odor. We stared at him and I knew that we were all looking for signs of the mania that had spawned the Cup Wars. But it was not there. Only Matt Comfort was, Matt Comfort, cool and arrogant and real. Power came off him like smoke.

  We broke into cheers and applause. They lasted a long time. When we stopped, he ran us out. “Go on,” he said. “Get busy. Bust your butts. Don’t talk about this to anybody. I want to be the one to tell Culver myself. You’ve got your assignments; Sister has the list. I did it last night. Let’s make June the best fucking issue we ever put out. Let him eat his heart out. Smoky, stay for a minute.”