He shook his head, and shrugged. I could feel the movement against my shoulder.
“Nothing there,” he said. “I was looking to get Lowndes back, I guess. But that’s gone, too….”
There was a longer silence, and then he said, “When you gon’ tell me why Matt Comfort is flying me down here and feeding me champagne and putting me up at the Regency? Not that I care, long as his voucher’s good.”
But he smiled, and I knew that he did care.
“Let’s go back to the apartment,” Luke said over the wind. “We’ll tell you all about it then.”
We did, laughing and interrupting ourselves in our eagerness to savor it again, to watch John savor it. He smiled as we talked, grinned outright at the saga of the Cup Wars, and was laughing with us when we outlined the shape of the triumphant night ahead of us. We were sitting on Luke’s tiny balcony, like a ship’s deck again, its prow thrust out into the luminous green of the new leaves and the motionless snowfall of the dogwood. Across the street the little park shimmered in a surf of pink, red, and white azaleas. Stiff, formal tulips bobbed and bowed along the steep driveway of the widow’s house and Luke’s carriage house. John had taken off his coat and loosened his tie and we were all drinking wine.
“Long way from Pumphouse Hill,” he had grinned at us when we first sat down.
Now he stretched and shook his head and said, “It’s sure gonna be worth the trip down here to meet the chicken parts king of the entire Southwest and get Culver Carnes’s goat at the same time. Y’all sure Matt can pull this off?”
“It’s a done deal,” I crowed. “Tonight’s just the…the celebratory parade. The last hurrah. You, of course, are the clincher. The ‘strong black presence’ that ol’ Cody Bubba requires. So see that you act strong and black.”
“Shit. You mean I can’t chat with him about my squash game and my mutual funds?”
“No, but you can tell him about choppin’ your daddy’s cotton.”
“I’ll tell him about my daddy’s squash game and mutual funds. Daddy don’t know from cotton except swabs. Come on, Smoky, if I’m going to be a token I at least ought to get some fun out of it.”
“You could sing ‘Old Man River,’” Luke said, and we all laughed.
“I’ve got to go get dressed,” I said. “Is there anybody you want to call while you wait, John?”
He looked out over the pastel sea of trees and flowers and shook his head.
“I don’t think so, not this trip, Smokes,” he said. “Maybe next time. Thanks, anyway.”
I stood looking at him, feeling the laughter seep out of the moment, and then turned and went into the bedroom. As I turned on the shower I heard him yell, “Hey, Smoky!”
“Yes?” I shouted back.
“Wear that red dress. You know, the one you wore the night we did the presentation at the Top of Peachtree before? The Andre dress? Wear that.”
“I always heard y’all were fools for red,” I yelled, and they laughed again, and I pulled out the red linen sheath I had worn three seasons ago, on another night of luminous triumph, and hung it in the tiny bathroom to unwrinkle in the steam while I showered.
And so we went, in our cheeky joy and finery, down Peachtree Road once more in the lucent twilight, the air so sweet that I thought I could never breathe enough of it, to sit with the city at our feet and wait for Matt to bring our deliverance to us.
They were all there when we came up on the elevator. Doug Maloof had partitioned the bar off from the restaurant with a folding leatherette partition, and Tony’s piano was stationed against it, banked in spring flowers. Tony himself was at the piano, noodling soft rock and show tunes and grinning hugely, and the staff of Downtown sat together at a long table before the wall of windows that looked North over the heart of the city. They were dressed as for a party, in bright spring silks and crisp summer-weight suits, and all the women wore corsages of little blue daisy-like flowers. The men had single flowers in their buttonholes.
“Doug gave them to us,” Teddy smiled. “They’re as near as he and the florist could come to Texas bluebonnets. Isn’t it a fabulous idea?”
“It is,” I said, pinning mine on and waving my thanks at Doug Maloof. He beamed at me from behind the bar, where he and Doremus were putting fat green champagne bottles into silver ice buckets. Over their heads the mural gleamed, our own smiling faces seeming to shine out of it like small moons. I thought that Doug must have had them cleaned, or something, just our faces, so that they would dominate the long painting as if spotlights were trained on them. Bless Doug. He had been a wonderful friend to all of us; a surrogate father, really. I knew that the news of the magazine’s sale would have cut him to the quick, and that this elaborate palace coup taking place in his bar must delight his heart. He would talk of it for years to come. He had been one of the first of Matt Comfort’s People; he would be one of us until he died. He had swept and polished and decked and shined his bar until it was fit to receive any royalty, even the Chicken Parts King of the Entire Southwest. There was no surface that did not bear fresh flowers. Even the black-veiled easels that held the presentation boards and our awards were festooned with blossoms. Even the portable recorder that held the tape of endorsing civic voices had a single perfect long-stemmed red rose laid on it. At a small, white-skirted table beside Tony’s piano, hors d’oeuvres waited under heated silver domes. Everyone at the table already had a long-stemmed glass of wine or a cocktail. Doug would, I knew, save the champagne for toasts, when Matt arrived with Cody Bubba Remington. It would, I knew also, be the best that money could buy.
John went around the table, shaking hands with everyone. I slid into a seat at the end of the table beside Luke. I looked down the long table, letting my eyes go slightly out of focus, trying to see the familiar faces just anew, as if I had not looked on them for a long time, had just returned to them from a far time and place. I felt a great turning in my breast, not quite tears, not quite joy, perhaps merely and purely love. Comfort’s People. My people. For more than a year now my community. My eyes went to the gentle brown hawk’s face beside Matt’s simian one in the mural, the face that was missing from this table. Tom Gordon’s face. Tears did sting, then. Be careful who you love, Matt had said. They’ll be part of you always…
Beside me, Luke followed my gaze.
“I know,” he said, and squeezed my hand.
“I wish he could be here,” I said. “Wouldn’t he love this, though?”
“He would. We’ll call him in the morning and tell him all about it.”
“Oh, yes! Oh, let’s do.”
Across the room Luella Hatfield sat on the piano stool beside Tony, her head close to his as they bent over a sheet of music. Hank and Teddy had fetched her from Spelman. I knew that she and Tony would be going over the words and music to “Downtown.” She wore a pretty chemise of yellow silk and had a corsage of the little blue flowers pinned in her sleek chignon, and looked vivid and much older, far more assured than when I had last seen her at the concert in Sisters’ Chapel. I wondered what she had made of that night, if she had been a part of the brief spurt of idiot violence or if it had somehow missed her. I hoped so. I loathed the thought of Boy Slattery’s casual hate touching this ardent, golden child. She looked up then and saw me looking at her, and smiled shyly, and I got up and went over and hugged her. John Howard came behind me, and kissed her on the cheek, and she beamed up at us both.
“Well, I hear you’re on your way,” John said to her, and her smile widened, displaying huge dimples. I looked at him curiously.
“She’s been picked to sing with the Atlanta Symphony Chorus, and she’s doing a solo at her debut in the summer season,” he said. “And there’s some heavy-duty talent scouting her from some of the record companies. I hear things about her all the way up there in New York.”
“Who you been talking to?” she mumbled, ducking her head.
“I have my spies,” he said. “We’re gonna lose you sure as shootin’.”
>
“Not until I finish at Spelman, nossir,” she said. “And I’m not forgetting who made that scholarship possible. I’m not ever gon’ forget that, Mr. Howard. When Mr. Comfort asked me to sing for y’all and told me you were gon’ to be here, I told him I’d come sing for you till this time tomorrow, if you wanted me to. I really did tell him that.”
“I’m grateful to you, Luella,” John said, inclining his head gravely to her. “I wish someday you would sing for me until this time tomorrow.”
“You say the word,” she said. “We’ll sing all the old songs.”
“You got it,” he said.
There was a small stirring at the bar then, and I turned to look at it, and then at the table. Everyone had fallen silent, and was looking toward the door. My heart gave a great leap, and my breath caught in my throat.
“They’re coming,” Doug Maloof called softly, and we heard the elevator bell chime, and I flew back to my seat, heart hammering, and slid in between Luke and John. We all looked at each other and grinned, huge, incandescent grins. The room shimmered and swayed.
At the piano, Tony crashed into “Downtown”:
When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go…
downtown!
When you’ve got worries, all the noise and the hurry seem to help, I know…
downtown!
Two figures appeared in the door and stopped. We stood as if a common chord had jerked us upright. Luella Hatfield threw her sleek head back and picked the song up, and the notes rose rich and golden until they bobbed and swam at the very ceiling:
Listen to the music of the traffic in the city,
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty,
How can you lose? The lights are much brighter there,
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares…
The two figures stood arm in arm, very still, Matt in his new blue suit, grinning until his mouth seemed to split his pointed face, cheeks burning red, eyes glittering behind the swoop of red hair. The other man was only slightly taller but half a hundred pounds heavier, dressed in white, his face burnt dark with the sun, his head crowned with a great white Stetson. His mouth, too, was stretched in a smile. They smiled, and smiled, and they stood there, arms joined, looking at us and the room and the girl singing and the city spread out below, just blooming into light.
“…and go downtown!” Luella Hatfield’s voice soared. “Things’ll be great when you’re downtown…”
Matt inclined his head to us in a small, magisterial bow, and bent slowly from the waist.
“No finer place when you’re downtown,” Luella sang, and we all joined in, shouting our elation back at Matt and Cody Bubba Remington: “Everything’s waiting for you!”
Tony finished on a great, crashing flourish, and we clapped and cheered, and Matt bowed lower and lower, and then, in the silence that still rang with the glorious voice of Luella Hatfield, he went over on his face, onto the rug, taking Cody Bubba Remington down with him, and lay still in a tangle of arms and legs and a crushed white Stetson and the glittering shards of a dream.
Later that night, or rather, early the next morning, we sat on the rock verge of the little pool in the park across from Luke’s apartment, dangling our feet in the water. John Howard and Luke and I had gone there from the Top of Peachtree, not speaking of a destination, just going there as if it had been agreed upon from the start. Teddy and Hank had come later, carrying sacks of steak sandwiches from Harry’s and a six-pack of beer. They had taken Luella Hatfield home to her dormitory at Spelman first. Then they had gone to Harry’s, and then come straight to Luke’s place. They had seen the Morgan parked on the shoulder of the park, and heard our voices down by the pool, and come scrambling and sliding down. We had drunk some of the beer, but no one had eaten the sandwiches. I did not know how long we had been there, only that it was long past midnight. Time had stopped for me when Matt had hit Doug Maloof’s newly cleaned carpet. Ever since, it had been weirdly telescoped. It might have been days since we left the Top of Peachtree.
The Chicken Parts King of the Entire Southwest was gone as surely as if he had never appeared. He had excused himself and gone to the restroom to straighten up his white suit and mauled Stetson and never came back. Doug Maloof, white-faced with misery, said that he had ordered his car and driver and gone downstairs to wait in the elevator lobby. His Lear jet probably took off from Peachtree-DeKalb airport before we reached Tight Squeeze and midtown.
“You kids go on,” Doug said, looking at our stricken faces and then at Matt, sprawled unconscious on the rug. “Doremus and I will take him home. We’ve done it before. We know where he lives.”
And so we had gone on. We walked around Matt and got on the elevator, all of us, and went down and got our cars and left. When we walked past Tony, he said, “I’m real sorry.” He was folding the top down over his piano when the elevator doors opened.
I knew that we must and would talk of it eventually, but we had not yet. There was, after all, nothing to say. I felt emptied out and endlessly tired, floating, unreal. I wanted desperately to climb the long driveway across from the park to the apartment and crawl into the waterbed, but I wanted more not to move. Not to speak. Not to think. Not to be. The night was fresh and only slightly chilly, and from the dense stand of newly unfurled ferns around the pool the peepers called their silvery call. I had not heard them this spring until tonight. Overhead the stars pricked the sky. In another month, I thought, we will not be able to see them again until fall. And then I thought, but where will I be in the fall, and felt a tear slide slowly down my cheek and into my mouth. I licked it with the tip of my tongue. I felt no grief. I truly and mightily did want to go to sleep, though.
Across from me Teddy gave a sobbing hiccup and scrubbed at her face. She had been crying silently since she and Hank arrived, trying hard not to, stopping, then beginning again. Hank sat with his arm around her, but he did not try to coax her into stopping. She had his sodden handkerchief clutched in her fist, but I thought that it was useless by now.
“I thought he would do it,” she said finally, her voice rusty and frail, like an old woman’s. “I thought it was just so…possible. Such a possible thing to happen. He always made everything seem possible.”
“Well, where there’s one chicken king there’s probably another,” Luke said, but he said it abstractly, as if his mind were somewhere else. I thought it probably was, but I did not know where. I could always tell when Luke had gone away from me in his head; I could not feel his mind touching mine at those times. I could not feel it now. Come back, I said to him in my head. Stay with me.
“No,” Teddy said. “There’s not going to be another one.”
No one argued with her. We all knew that, for us and for Downtown, there would not be another chicken king.
After another long space, Hank said to John Howard, “So what will you do now? You going on back in the morning? This morning, rather?”
John shrugged. He had not spoken since Teddy and Hank arrived. He had sat with one hand lightly on my back, but had said nothing.
“I think I’m going over to Memphis a little later today,” he said. “Martin’s over there with the sanitation people. Some of the others are there, too; Rosser and Tony, I think. I need to see if I can mend some fences.”
“Smokes?” Hank said. I started to speak, could not, cleared my throat.
“I’m not sure yet,” I said judiciously, as if I were considering it carefully.
“Teddy-o?”
She shook her head mutely and turned it into his neck and he tightened his arm around her.
“Luke?”
I looked up at Luke. I had dreaded this moment, dimly and distantly, ever since we left the Top of Peachtree. I had thought, though, that it would not come until much later. Certainly not this blasted night. I was not ready for it. Don’t leave me, I said to him with my eyes. Don’t leave me.
“I think,” he said,
looking at Hank over my head, “that maybe I’ll go on over to Memphis with John. Just for a day or two. It sounds like it could be interesting. Life could probably use something on it.”
His arm was still around me. He looked down at me, and away. I said nothing. I knew that my voice had shut down along with everything else.
“You ought to stick around,” Hank said after a while. “We can run this thing, you know. If you think about it, why couldn’t we? The new guy’s not going to know anything. Not that much has changed. What’s so different, really? There’s always the Monday morning meeting.”
I began to laugh softly, surprising myself profoundly.
“And the Cup Wars,” I said.
The rest of them joined in, one by one, until we were all choking on laughter, giddy with it.
“And there’s always…” Hank gasped, pausing for breath, and we read the thought and shouted it together into the chilly spring predawn: “There’s always YMOG!”
We were still laughing when we dispersed. And when Luke and I and John Howard got into the Morgan to drive John to the Regency, we were still laughing, and we laughed all the way back downtown.
Epilogue
COME WITH ME,” MY HUSBAND SAYS FROM THE BATHROOM, where he is shaving.
“You don’t need me to do that,” I say. I am doing stomach crunches on the rug in front of the fireplace. It is late May, but New York is having one of its long, cold springs, and I have lit the gas logs. They will not heat the big room, but the fire feels good just here.
“Yeah, I do,” he says. “This time I really do need you.”
And I stop the crunches and pad into the bathroom to look into his face, because we do not use “need” lightly, he and I. It is one of our rules.
I think again, as I walk, how much I love this place. We have lived here, in the top two floors of a small building on West Thirty-ninth Street just off Fifth Avenue, for almost fifteen years. Downstairs are a living room, a kitchen, a small bath and Toby’s old bedroom, and our two vast work places. Up here is one great room that takes up the whole floor, and here we sleep, read, live.
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