In the summer and fall we branch out onto the wraparound rooftop garden that initially sold us on the place. But this room has become home. When he published his first book, ten years ago, we added the huge skylight that runs the length of the ceiling. When I published mine, the following summer, we remodeled the bath and added the big Jacuzzi. It took me a year to collect the palms and ferns in it. Now it is not uncommon for us to lie in bed or in the Jacuzzi in the jungly dark and watch the moon on the face of the buildings uptown. Sometimes, in winter, we can watch the snow fall past the beautiful profile of the Chrysler Building. It is a magical thing. This room is the heart of us and our marriage. Wherever in the world our work takes us, either of us, this is where we fly to when the work is over, like children at the end of their day.
“Tell me why you need me to go with you,” I say, looking into his face. He is wearing a white lather beard, and I reach up to pop a bubble or two.
“I don’t really know. I just feel like you need to come this time. This will be the fourth or fifth time I’ve been back, and you never have. I guess I’m sort of proud of myself. But it feels like more than that. I just need you.”
We have the rule about honoring need because both of us know the real and savage hunger under the word, and we cannot use it lightly. It is a consciously made rule; all the ones that form the fragile tissue of our marriage are consciously made. The tissue holds us firm; we trust it. We have woven it together. We have friends who still, I know, think this marriage will not last, but he and I both know that the web will hold. Under it is love. That has held through everything, and will.
“Then of course I’ll come,” I say. We can and often have walked away from each other’s wants, but never the needs.
And so I come with him, on the last weekend in May, to Atlanta where he will receive an honorary doctoral degree at Emory University.
It is a sultry, thundery weekend. The city is hot. I have forgotten these early hot spells. The graduation ceremony is planned for outside, but chairs are set up in the great gymnasium just in case. We do not know until the morning of the ceremony where we will be, but the muttering showers retreat long enough, finally, so that it is outside, surrounded by flowers and vivid new green, that I watch him incline his head to receive the beautiful satin doctoral hood, and take from President Meade the degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa. Tears of pride stand in my eyes, and I wish again that our son, Toby, was here to see this ceremony. But he is far away on the coast of Oregon, my tall child with eyes, as a young man of this city told me mine were, long ago, the color of rain. He is an architect and a self-professed tree-hugger, and in the midst of a project that will both use and spare the great Oregon pines and spruces.
“Take lots of pictures,” he says when he calls before we leave. “You know he’ll never put that hood on again.”
Toby: where did we get him? We are both so inalterably urban. But from the start he was a creature of earth and sky and water. We spent long summers shivering in rented houses beside Northern waters so that Toby could keep his first loves.
It is, somewhat to my surprise, a nice weekend. The old Druid Hills section of Atlanta is not one I used to be familiar with; there is nothing in the wooded hills and the old dowager houses to pull cruelly at me. Even the city that we ride through on the freeway coming in does not pull at me. There is nothing of that great, beetling skyline that I know. It could be any of the cities I have worked in and out of these long years; I have racketed through a great many of them in taxicabs.
The Friday night reception and dinner is pleasant; the academic world is the same everywhere, and we are both at home in it. Both our names and work are known to the people who attend, and that is pleasant, too. I am feeling, on the whole, rather mellow as we stand on the steps of the Emory guest house on Saturday afternoon, waiting for the taxicab that will take us to the airport to go home. Only later will I realize that the feeling is one of relief, of well-being at having escaped something I had expected to hurt me, and which, after all, did not.
“I still don’t have much sense that this is Atlanta, do you?” he says as we stand there.
I shake my head, no. I have no sense of that, either. No sense, during the whole twenty-four hours just past, that this is the city I loved so totally and passionately more than a quarter-century ago, that I left so easily four years after that. I have come into it and through it, and now I am going out of it again, and I still cannot feel Atlanta. For some reason this makes me uneasy, restless.
Something feels unfinished.
Luke did go to the war, of course.
He came back from Memphis the night after we all gathered in the little park, back with Martin Luther King Jr.’s body and the silent, anguished people who had been around him at the Lorraine Motel. I will never forget John Howard’s face then. I thought that he looked like a dead man walking.
Luke’s were the most vivid of the images to come out of that terrible time in Atlanta. You saw them everywhere; you see them still: black and white, young and old, civil rights heroes and Dr. King’s cherished little people, celebrities and politicians and movie stars. Luke shot them all up close and in their faces, as we say today. Every newspaper and magazine in the country carried those faces. They are in many books still in print. His name is under them all.
“You will shoot their faces,” I had said to him that day on Pumphouse Hill, and he did that. It has always been what he does. Faces, faces. Lucas Geary’s faces. All eye and image, that is Luke.
Two days after the funeral he left for San Francisco to catch up with the First Cav in the Mekong Delta.
“I’ll be back,” he said all through the night before he left, while he held me and I cried. I cried all night, until I thought I would never cry again; that there were no tears left in me, and never would be.
“I’ll be back. I’ll be back. Wait here for me. I’ll be back.”
But I knew, even as I dropped him off at Hartsfield airport and drove away in the Morgan, that he would not. Luke could love me endlessly, and laugh with me, and even be angry both at and with me, but he could not grieve with me. I went back to the apartment behind the widow’s house and garaged the Morgan and took a shower and crawled into the waterbed and slept for the better part of three days. When I awoke at last I showered again and dressed and went to see Seth Emerson at Newsweek. He hired me that day. I did not cry again for Luke Geary.
I moved to a small apartment near downtown. I could walk to work from it. The Newsweek office was nearer uptown; I had little occasion to go near Five Points, and unless I had to, I did not. I do not know what Luke did about his clothes and books and records, or the Morgan. For all I know they are still there, in the pretty little carriage house of the widow, dreaming under dust through the long seasons in the park. I never saw anyone else driving the Morgan around town, but then I did not expect to, anymore that I would have expected to see someone wearing Luke’s clothes.
I did see his credits, though, on the faces that came out of that sad, awful, never-ending war. I think he must have missed much that he would have loved to shoot at home: the riots in the streets after Dr. King died; the assassination of Robert Kennedy; the incredible convention in Chicago; the dreadful, musical-comedy election to the presidency of the United States of Richard Milhous Nixon; the long death by hemorrhage of the Civil Rights nonviolent movement. I never saw his name on the faces that came out of those, only the faces of his war.
I may have missed some of them, though. Seth Emerson was the best imaginable boss; my byline was coming more and more often, from cities all over the South. Under the names of many people, my name.
“…and you will write their names,” Luke had said to me on the same day that I had said to him, “You will shoot their faces.” It had been the second half of my sentence.
We had done that, both of us. We had simply not done it together. After a while it no longer mattered to me. I was, if never again so deliriously happy as I had been in my
first year at Downtown, infinitely content to do what I did. I loved my job with most of my heart. The little bit that was left I simply closed off, as you do an unused room.
I was in New Orleans when Teddy and Hank called to tell me that Matt Comfort was dying. I had had dinner with Tom Gordon and his lover and was planning to come home the next afternoon. Instead, I left at dawn the next morning, on the first flight out of New Orleans to Atlanta. Even as I was doing it I wondered why. Matt Comfort was almost nothing to me by then.
But of course, he had been everything, and that was the answer. I smiled a little as I thought of what he had said: “Be careful who you love. They’ll be part of you always. Even after the love is dead, those fuckers will still be part of you….”
“You always did have to have the last word,” I whispered to him somewhere in the air over Alabama.
Teddy and Hank met me at the airport and we drove straight to Emory University Hospital. Teddy was heavily pregnant with her second child and had been crying. She looked worn and nearly old for the first time since I had known her. Well, we were both over thirty now, I reminded myself. We are the ones we ourselves said we’d never trust. No wonder she’s upset. She and Hank, of us all, were the only ones to have kept in touch with Matt Comfort as he self-destructed spectacularly all over the South.
From them I knew that he had left Atlanta almost exactly when Luke and John Howard did, just after the funeral of Dr. King. He had gone then to Charlotte and started a city magazine there and lost it; to Baton Rouge and done the same thing; to Winston-Salem, to found and edit a magazine for people who wished to sell their houses themselves, and lost that; to St. Petersburg, Florida, where he worked for a time for the Triple A, planning automobile trips for retirees going North. When he had been fired from that job, he had gone to Greensboro, North Carolina, and there hit bottom with the liquor; been fired from the McDonald’s that he managed; gone into AA and gotten sober; found a lady friend there; and been sober for all of five months before they discovered that the headaches and blackouts that had plagued his last year were a malignant tumor in his brain and not the alcohol.
“It just seems so damned unfair,” Teddy wept. “To go through all that and finally get sober and find somebody he really loves, and then to die of a stupid goddamned brain tumor. They were going to get married this fall.”
“Maybe they still can,” I said, but she shook her head.
“His doctor says he won’t last two more days,” she said. “It’s a miracle he’s hung on this long. He refused to marry her anyway, when he found out about the tumor. Said he’d be goddamned if he’d add a widow to his list of victims. She’s with him, though. You’ll like her. She’s tough and she loves him an awful lot. Even like this, she loves him.”
“Well, women always did,” I said, trying to cheer her up.
“You won’t know him,” she said. “I want to warn you now, so it won’t be such a shock. There’s almost literally nothing left of the Matt you knew.”
“Why’d he come back here for treatment?” I said. “Emory must cost the earth. Surely he couldn’t have any money left.”
Hank chuckled.
“He came back because the doctor who’s treating him is the best young oncologist in the South and he’s treating Matt free. He was the first YMOG Matt ever did.”
“Oh, shit, of course he was,” I said, and began to laugh helplessly. We all laughed for a long time, even Teddy. I’m glad. It was a long time before we laughed again.
He was in a light coma by the time we walked into his sunny hospital room. He lay in the narrow white bed hooked up to an intravenous drip, tossing a little, breathing slowly and heavily through his mouth. Except for the pointed fox’s chin and the sharp, slack mouth I would not have known him. His face was waxen yellow and vastly swollen, and his eyes swollen shut and blackened, and the glorious red shock of hair was gone, replaced by a great turban of white gauze that made the yellow face seem deep saffron by comparison. He was so thin that his little body scarcely made a rise in the taut coverlet. The young doctor sat in a chair on one side of him, simply sat there, holding his left hand. On the other side of him, a youngish woman with dark hair pulled straight back from a strong, blunt face sat holding the other one. She looked up and smiled a little at Hank and Teddy, but said nothing. Later I would meet her and find that she was Claire Fiedler, the woman Matt was to have married, but for the moment I only smiled at her and went to stand with Teddy and Hank against the far wall. We had a hard time finding space. The room was full of people.
Hank told me about it later, when we went down for coffee. On the first day after Matt’s surgery, when the doctors knew for certain that he would not leave the hospital, a strange thing happened. It was, Hank said, a rather wonderful thing, really. Somehow, he did not know quite how, the word simply went out, as Matt’s word had gone out in the beginning: Comfort is dying. Come.
And for two days there gathered silently in his hospital room a good fifty or sixty people from all over the country. His people, young and old; Comfort’s People. They came, and they simply stood, or sat on the floor or in chairs, watching the rise and fall of his laboring chest, listening to his breath. A crowd of once-young, once-lustrous people who had made it or not, who were okay or not, brought to that room by the common cord of a man who was still stronger, even in his dying, than anyone they had ever known or would, again. There were photographers and journalists and novelists and secretaries and aging YMOGs and shoe-shine people and city leaders, along with a few others so stoned or strung out that they thought they were still in MacArthur Park or the Haight or wherever their reality lay, leaning dreamily against the walls, far away in a better time.
Francis Brewton came on the first day, Hank said, and Mr. Tommy T. Bliss on the second, though he did not stand on his head.
Some of the people wept, but even as they did, they told the old Comfort stories, and they laughed. They drank coffee and they watched him and they all seemed to feel somehow that there was not another place just then that they could possibly be. It was not a quiet crowd. More than once, nurses came to shush them. But Matt’s young doctor would raise his head and stare at the nurses and they went away again, shaking their heads.
When we got back up to Matt’s room from the coffee shop on the afternoon of the third day the man that I would marry was there, standing silently in the space along the wall that we had just vacated, his arms folded, across his chest, watching Matt and listening to him breathe. When we came into the room he lifted his head and looked at me, and I put my hands up to my mouth and stood still in the doorway, and he held his arms out to me and I went into them. I stayed there for nearly half an hour before we spoke a word to each other.
At six o’clock that evening the ragged breathing faltered and stopped. The young doctor pulled off his stethoscope and put his head down on Matt’s still chest and cried. I turned my face into the shoulder behind me and cried, too. Everyone cried a little, but very quietly. We all hugged the woman on the right-hand side of the bed, and then my future husband and I went back to the hotel where he was staying. It was a new one, one of a national chain, on the fringes of the Emory campus. I remember that the air was fresh and cool and the dog-woods were spectacular in the green twilight. It was almost four years to the day since I had seen him.
When he left the next morning I went with him. We both knew that I could not stay in Atlanta.
And now I have come back for the first time since that morning, and am going away again, and I might as well have come and gone to Dayton.
We get into the cab that the university has called for us. It is an old one, one of the university fleet, and the driver is a white man past middle age, an anachronism to us who live in New York City. He is happy about nothing: not the heat, the trip to the airport, us as passengers. He clashes the gears and jerks the cab around corners and keeps up a spleenish running commentary to himself, just under his breath. I know that he watches us in the rearview mirror; I
see his eyes on us. He knows that we are VIPs of some sort, though not which one of us, and I think that perhaps, if he did not know this, he would simply dump us out on a street corner. I am furious with him and long to speak sharply to him, but my husband merely shakes his head. He is quite capable of doing battle with cab drivers and often does, but he is also quite capable of simply going off somewhere in his head and not noticing anything at all, and I think that that is where he is now. So I do not speak.
Presently he leans forward to the driver and says, “Take the Courtland Street exit and head for Five Points. I’ll tell you where after that.”
The cab driver and I both look at him.
“I thought you said Hartsfield,” the driver mutters.
“I changed my mind,” my husband says equably, and the driver jerks the cab across three lanes of traffic and screeches up the Courtland Street ramp.
My husband directs the driver through a maze of streets that I do not recognize and finally bids him stop. When he does, we get out, and all of a sudden I know where we are.
“Oh, no,” I say. “No way. I’m not going up there. I don’t need any damned sentimental journeys.”
“Maybe I do,” he says, and leans in the window of the cab.
“We won’t be more than half an hour,” he says. “If you want to wait for us I’ll pay you for your time.”
The driver scratches off without looking back.
“Be happy in your work,” I mutter after him. “We’ll never see that jerk again.”
“It doesn’t matter. We can get a cab anywhere down here. Come on, Smoky.”
“I really, really do not want to do this,” I say.
“You’ll be glad you did,” he says. “They’re going to gut the whole building next week and put in some kind of county government offices. The guy who owns it told me at lunch; he’s on the Emory board. He’s given us a safe conduct for the guard. Come on. I’m not leaving until we see it.”
Downtown Page 46
