Downtown (16 page)

I felt a great wash of fatigue, the first I could remember feeling since the day I left Corkie.

“Merry Christmas to you, too, Pa,” I said.

He snorted, and picked up my Rich’s shopping bag full of exquisitely wrapped packages.

“I won’t be askin’ how you earned the money to pay for these,” he said.

My temper flared. This was past his annoyance with my haircut and skirt length. This was unfair.

“Yeah, maybe you’d better not,” I said. “What’s the matter with you, Pa? What are you so mad at?”

“I’m wonderin’ why you had to move out of the Church’s Home the minute my back is turned, is what,”

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he said. “And not to tell us about it, but to let us call there and find out you’ve been gone for two weeks. Who is this Teddy Fairchild person that you’re living with, pray tell? Is it a he or a she?”

“It’s a she,” I said, cursing myself for not telling them immediately. But I had been so happy, and I knew what they would have said.

“She’s a very nice girl; she works for the magazine and is a good friend of Matt’s…Mr. Comfort’s, and she’s from a very old Atlanta family, just the kind of friend you’d want me to have. I’ve already met her mother and father. And I’m only paying a few dollars more than I did at Our Lady, and it’s a nice, safe apartment where a lot of other young people live—”

“And is she a good Catholic girl, like at Our Lady?” My father smiled at me slyly. I was suddenly so tired of it all, all the anger and the crazy, ritualized games and innuendo and insularity, and the eternal niggling Catholicism, that I could have simply gone back into the bus terminal and sat there, staring blindly at the wall, until the next bus left for Atlanta.

“No. As a matter of fact she’s a mediocre Episcopalian girl, not at all like at Our Lady, and you’d better be glad of that,”

I snapped. “Some of the girls at Our Lady would have curled your hair. The first one I met, as a matter of fact, was on the pill.”

“Don’t you be lyin’ to me!” my father roared.

“I’m not lying to you!” I cried. “Don’t you be yelling at me.”

“You have turned into someone I don’t know,” my father said bitterly, and that set the tone for the rest of the day, and the next one. My mother said little to me, and my brothers stared and retreated to Perkins’s Pub and did not come home until early Christmas morning. When first Brad and then Hank and Tom called to say

123 / DOWNTOWN

Merry Christmas, my mother wept silently in the kitchen until it was time to go to Mass and my father roared something indistinct—for by then he was very drunk—about the kind of people I was running around with up there, and passed out in the rump-sprung recliner in front of the TV, where Lawrence Welk was exhorting him to have himself a merry little Christmas. I laid out my Rich’s gifts in a row on the kitchen table and retreated to the little cubicle where I had spent twenty-six years’ worth of nights under this roof, and sat in bristling misery in my red suit, thinking that my father was right. I had, indeed, turned into someone they did not know. It had not taken much.

When I left that barren, bitter house on the morning after Christmas I knew on some level that I would not come back again. I had already moved an irrevocably long way from Corkie.

Brad’s parents’ open house was the twin of the one Teddy’s parents had given, except that more people were drunker earlier and Mrs. Hunt declared open war on me with practically her first sentence. She stood in her flamboyant, patently

“done” drawing room wearing ice blue satin cut very low, her silver-blond hair drawn straight back from her beautifully modeled face—Brad’s face—and assessed me with cold, level eyes, and did not smile, as Brad’s father had done, when Brad introduced me. She simply stared. In spite of myself, I felt the flush beginning.

“Your house is lovely, Mrs. Hunt,” I said, not caring, this time, that Corkie oozed out of every word.

“It does do, doesn’t it?” she said languidly. Her voice was a peculiar deep growl, and her Southern accent was very thick and slow. I thought that it was probably the ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 124

epitome of taste and class in her set, but to my ears, accustomed to the lilt of Corkie, it was flat and unpleasant.

“What an amazin’ dress, darlin’,” she added, and looked me up and down, with a smile. It was a lazy smile, and fully as unpleasant as her voice.

I looked down at myself involuntarily. Teddy had gone shopping with me the day before at J.P. Allen and had talked me into the dress, a black sheath cut low and straight across, with spaghetti straps and a short, rhinestone-buttoned jacket.

I had thought the dress was both too short and too tight, not to mention too low cut, but she had pointed out that I had the small, curved figure to wear it (
petite
was the word she used) and that she knew for a fact that Brad loved women in black. And the sale price was good, so I bought it, and thought, when I left that evening, shoulders and bosom gleaming white, single pearl earrings borrowed from Teddy my only jewelry, that I looked as sophisticated as it was possible for me to look.

Marylou Hunt made me feel, with one sentence, that I should have been working a street corner in Tight Squeeze.

“Bradley, darlin’,” she said to the square, red-faced man standing beside her, “this is Brad’s new little friend. Bridget, isn’t it?”

“No,” I said. “It’s even better than that. Smoky. Smoky O’Donnell. I’m from Savannah. There are a lot of us down there, you know, or perhaps you didn’t. They call our neighborhood Corkie because so many of us came straight from County Cork.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “The docks. I did know. Well, Brad, sweetie, you all come on in and have some eggnog. I’m sure everybody is going to want to meet…Smoky.”

Her voice was still low and languid, but somehow it rang in the crowded room, and people turned to look at Brad and me.

125 / DOWNTOWN

“As a matter of fact, Mother, I think not,” Brad said, smiling at her with a smile made of glittering ice. I thought suddenly that he looked exactly like her when his eyes were cold with anger.

“I think we’ll get on over to T.J.’s,” Brad said. “It’s a little cold in here, besides being a little stuffy. Odd combination, don’t you think? Not very attractive. Dad, see you in the morning. Maybe we can get in some golf.”

And before his father could speak, Brad had turned me by my shoulder and walked me back out onto the veranda of his parents’ great white brick house. Behind us, Mrs. Hunt was saying something in a light, amused tone, but I had seen her face as her son spoke to her. It was frozen in ice-sheathed rage.

I looked up at Brad, thinking to see something of the same on his face, but he was laughing, silently.

“That’s one for me,” he said. “She won’t forgive me for saying that in front of her friends. It’ll be a week before she speaks to me again.”

“Is it a game with you?” I said. “Because if it is, I don’t think much of it. You must have known she’d react to me that way. It embarrassed me, Brad.”

“I’m sorry if it did,” he said, and he did look contrite. “I didn’t think it would, somehow; she’s just so awful, and so transparent with it. Everybody in that room was on your side. But I’ll try to think before I let her near you again. In fact, I’ll see that she’s not. I don’t want to hurt you, Smoky.”

And he bent and kissed me on the top of my head, very softly.

“You didn’t,” I said.

Brad’s friend T.J. lived with two other young men in a rented carriage house behind a vast gray stone Tudor pile somewhere in Buckhead. I had little sense, yet, of where I was in its maze of wandering northside streets. The New Year’s Eve party was in full swing when we arrived.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 126

After the bone-chilling two or three minutes in Brad’s mother’s drawing room, the low-beamed living room with its blazing fire and Christmas decorations still glittering looked ineffably warm and welcoming, and I plunged in behind Brad as you would into a tub of hot water after breaking through the skin of a frozen lake.

I still remember it as one of the best parties I have ever been to. The room was full of young people, none much older than I and certainly no older than Brad and his former roommate T.J., who were in their early thirties. All of them were laughing and drinking and eating hors d’oeuvres and dancing to Frank Sinatra and the Beach Boys and Petula Clark, and all of them seemed somehow of a piece. The men wore dark suits and short, carefully brushed hair and polished shoes and the women wore smart, short sheaths like mine, or perhaps velvet pants and tunics, and had shining, swinging bobs and large, dangling earrings, and everyone seemed to know everyone else. At first that felt off-putting to me, but in the space of half an hour I had been enveloped in the surf of carefree uniformity that prevailed, totally submerged in the tide of the party.

It turned out that few of the people in the room had met before that evening. It was the first sense I had of the vast subculture that was emerging in the city: the newly arrived, ambitious, attractive out-of-towners. Except for Brad and T.J.

and one or two others, no one I met that evening was an Atlantan. They came from towns and cities all over the South, and all were thrumming with the excitement of living in Atlanta, and all had come because “This is where it’s happening. This is where it’s at.”

Everybody knew Matt. Everybody knew
Downtown
.

Everyone said, with genuine feeling, “You’re an editor for
Downtown
? Wow. You must be good.”

Within an hour I felt just that—good. At the end of the evening, when we had eaten and drunk and danced a 127 / DOWNTOWN

bit too much, I felt as if I were the newly crowned queen of the city.

“I loved it, I loved it,” I sang to Brad, more than a little high on unaccustomed scotch, as we walked to his car in the deep, velvet black just before the winter dawn. I had my shoes in my hand, oblivious to the icy dew on my stocking feet, and I twirled round and round on the cobbled drive that led to the carriage house.

“I loved it, too,” he said, and took me into his arms, and we stood in the driveway of T.J.’s carriage house kissing, deep, slow, lost kisses that left me loose-jointed and rubber-limbed. When he lifted his head to look down at me I made a noise deep in my throat and pulled his head back down to mine. We kissed some more, and then he pulled abruptly away and shook his head and said, “We’re either going to have to stop this right now, or go somewhere and finish it.

Your call.”

I looked at him in confusion. I had not thought beyond the feeling of his mouth on mine, or his arms and hands on my body. But now I did, and realized that I truly did not know what I wanted. Every inch of my skin and flesh called out to be enfolded in his, but my mind withdrew and looked down at the two of us, and could see no further than where we were.

He shook his head again, briskly, and said, “It’s not fair to ask you to decide. It’s too soon. We’ve had too much to drink. I’m never going to push you, Smoky. But I want you to know that I would have liked to…go much further with this tonight. And that’s not going to change. So be warned that down the road apiece I’m going to ask you to call it again.”

“Well…all right,” I said, my voice hoarse in my throat.

“Just so you know. Okay. Want to go get some breakfast?”

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“Sure,” I said, not wanting, yet, to lose the night, the feeling, the closeness of him.

We drove down Peachtree Street toward downtown looking for someplace open and found ourselves outside the very same International House of Pancakes I had gone to on my first day at Our Lady, with Rachel Vaughn. Inside, much the same mix of disheveled heads and hippies and freaks prevailed, with the addition of a few obviously drunk street people and one or two well-dressed, coffee-seeking couples like Brad and me. Everybody looked rumpled and used up, bleached and haggard in the white fluorescent lights. I caught sight of myself in the dark window wall, and flinched. My hair was a wild tangle, and my mouth was chafed and swollen and ringed with smeared lipstick and beard burn.

Somehow, Brad managed to look, except for a smear of my makeup on his collar, like he was on his way to a Jaycee breakfast.

“I’m going to fix my face,” I said. “Order me some potato pancakes with sour cream and coffee, will you? Did I tell you that I came here with a girl from Our Lady my first day in town, and she took off with some guys and left me by myself?”

“No. It must have made quite an impression on you, to be abandoned at the IHOP,” Brad smiled.

“What made the real impression on me was that she had birth control pills in her purse. I saw them in the ladies’

room, before she got mad at me and left,” I said.

He looked at me pleasantly, obviously waiting for me to go on and tell him the startling thing that had so impressed me. I made a small, helpless gesture with my hands.

“I just…in Corkie, nobody takes them,” I said. “I’d never even really heard of anybody who did. The Pope…I’d just never seen any.”

I let my hands fall.

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“Lots of girls in Atlanta have them, I guess,” he said mildly.

“Not that they…sleep around all that much, but you know, in case. It’s better to take care of yourself than to trust some stupid guy to do it, you know.”

I had not thought of it that way before.

“I guess so,” I said, and got up and went into the ladies’

room. It was as dim and grubby as I remembered, and for a moment Rachel’s brave, slatternly presence was overwhelm-ingly vivid to me, so much so that I whirled around from the spotted mirror. But there was no one there but me, and my underwater-looking image. I wondered where Rachel was, what she was doing on this first morning of the New Year. No one at Our Lady had seen her again by the time I moved out.

When I sat back down in our booth, newly powdered and lipsticked and combed, our food was steaming in front of us, and Brad was pouring cream into his coffee. He smiled at me and raised his cup, and I raised mine to him.

“Happy New Year, Smoky O’Donnell,” he said. “I hope it will be everything you ever dreamed it would, and more.”