Downtown (24 page)

“All right, look, tell me what I’m going to be doing for it,”

Buzzy said. “Cameron all but insisted. How about this? We could use a different one of Dad’s demonstrators every month to…to deliver food baskets down in the projects, or something. Yeah, Dad would love that, and we’d get hell’s own amount of free air time—”

Hank made a stifled snorting sound and took a hasty gulp of his drink, and Teddy got up abruptly, murmuring something about helping her mother. Alicia smiled sweetly at Buzzy and then at Matt. Matt stared at Buzzy, and then said,

“That’s the shittiest idea I ever heard in my life, Buzzy. But—”

and he held up a hand to Buzzy’s purpling face, “I appreciate the thought. Tell you what: want to be the next YMOG?

Smoky could interview you one night this week, or more, if it takes it. Take her to dinner; we’ll pay for it. Run you in the July issue, with the flag on the cover—”

“Well, I could probably work that in,” Buzzy said casually, his face suffusing with red pride. “I’ll call you, Smoky.”

“Do,” I said. My punishment for the Focus piece, I knew, had begun.

In the middle of the next week Hank and I went out to the airport after work to meet Tom Gordon, who was flying in from Washington. Lucas. Geary was staying on over the long weekend with his family in Baltimore. I don’t know why that surprised me, but it did. I had somehow never thought of Lucas as having parents, a hometown, an everyday arena in a particular time and place. He seemed to exist, to me, only within the realm of my comprehension. I said as much to Hank, and he laughed.

“If Lucas Geary falls in an empty forest, will he make a sound?”

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 188

“If Lucas Geary did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him,” I added, laughing, too.

Rush hour traffic was bad that evening, and we were half an hour late getting to the airport. Hank had told Tom to meet him outside the Delta Airlines baggage claim, and when we pulled up, he was there, leaning against a concrete pillar with his coat over his shoulder and his shirtsleeves rolled up his dark arms, staring at the ground. His black hair fell over his eyes, and there was fatigue in every line of his tall, loose body, but he still looked as elegant and attenuated as a fashion sketch in
Esquire
. As I always did when I had not seen him for a while, I thought what a spectacularly handsome man he was. I felt the familiar small tug of shyness, of diffidence, that the sheer physical impact of Tom could produce in me. He was as dear to me, now, as any friend I had, but it was not possible to look upon him and wonder, sometimes, what those arms would feel like around you, how that mouth would feel…

I shook my head slightly in annoyance, and Hank touched the horn, and Tom looked up and smiled his quick white smile, and was simply Tom again, funny and eccentric and sweet. I felt a rush of affection for him that had nothing to do with his arms and mouth.

“Going my way, sailor?” I leered out the window, and he reached in and kissed me on the forehead and threw his bag in the backseat and climbed in.

“You bet I am,” he said. “You two look better to me than anything I’ve seen in the last two weeks.”

“Bad trip?” Hank said, maneuvering the car out into the stream of Atlanta-bound traffic.

“Not so good,” Tom said, and I looked around at him in surprise. Tom was an inveterate travel enthusiast; his office was full of maps and guide books and airline schedules, and he often dropped such wistful bits of 189 / DOWNTOWN

arcana as, “Do you know what you’d hit first if you sailed straight out from Saint Simon’s Island?”

“What?” one of us would say. “England? Ireland?”

“Madagascar.”

His face was slack and his eyes were closed wearily. I thought suddenly that he would look like that when he was very old, or ill: handsome, distinguished, but depleted.

Empty.

“Tell,” I said.

“Not yet. First I’d like to go to Harry’s and have about eight beers and a steak sandwich. Lucas has had us living off stuff like lox and bagels and gefilte fish. I’ve been dreaming about Harry’s. Y’all got time?”

“Sure,” Hank said. I nodded.

“I thought Lucas was Catholic, if he was anything,” Hank said.

“He is. Go figure,” Tom said.

We drove in the soft twilight to Harry’s, on Spring Street, and went inside the dark, low building and found a booth.

From outside you could hear, faintly, the swish of traffic outbound to the suburbs, and an occasional blaring horn, but inside, in the high, corrallike wooden booths there was only light from the guttering candles and the pink and green jukebox, and the sound of soft voices from other booths, and country music. The table-tops and the backs and sides of the booths were so crosshatched with carvings—initials, names, dates, phrases—that they were like some kind of living moss, a fur of lives frozen forever on the tundras of Harry’s tabletops. I ordered a steak sandwich and a Coke and Hank and Tom had beers, and we sat back and sighed. It was a womblike darkness, warm and elemental. I liked Harry’s. It was a rest from the places we usually went.

Harry’s made a proper steak sandwich, with black-grilled filets, smothered in onions and doused with steak ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 190

sauce. They sounded awful and tasted wonderful. When we had finished and ordered coffee, Hank looked at Tom, and said, “So?”

Tom puffed out his cheeks and exhaled slowly, and said,

“So. I don’t know. It…wasn’t what I thought. Out there, I mean. The youth culture, the ones who hold the be-ins, the ones who make such great editorial photographs. They don’t seem to be about anything, except dressing up and smoking pot. Drugs; Hank, I didn’t know there were so many drugs out there. Nobody is…straight. Virtually all of ’em are stoned, on LSD, or banana peels, or Mellow Yellow, or whatever is new and cheap this week. It’s this kind of mishmash of drugs and music and sex—my God, the sex, they do it everywhere, with anybody, all the time—and astrology, the I Ching, incense, slogans: Make love, not war. Turn on, tune in, drop out. Power to the people. And the rhetoric. They call it freedom, or license, love, community—but it’s nothing. They don’t do anything. It’s not anything.”

“What about the radicals?” Hank said. “What about the activists?”

“Radicals? Activists? Not in that bunch, not in the freaks and heads we went looking for. They’re all too stoned. Any sense we got of radicalism, of activism, centers around the war. That’s going to be mean, children. You can feel it coming, you can feel the anger and the violence building around that baby. Marches, riots, even Dr. King came out against it in New York. That’s the story we probably ought to be following, if we’re going to do anything national on the kids. I don’t think we have a real sense down here how big and bad that war is going to get, and how fast…”

He paused, and drank off his coffee, and rubbed his eyes hard with his fist.

“There’s something coming,” he said. “Everything’s 191 / DOWNTOWN

changing. Everything is about to blow. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s out there. There’s this song, ‘For What It’s Worth.’ Stephen Sills. It starts out, ‘There’s something happening here/what it is ain’t exactly clear.’ Everybody’s singing it out there. It’s like everybody feels it…”

The back of my neck felt cool, as if a small wind had kissed it, passing by.

“What do you mean, Tom?” I said.

“It’s so vague, just a feeling, but God, it’s a strong one,”

he said. “You know, you’ve got this whole youth thing; we all know about that, the funny costumes and the music and all; it’s what Matt sent us out after. But now, suddenly, there’s this whole new counterculture thing springing up, that says that everybody who isn’t them is the enemy, the bad guys. I mean everybody. That’s us, for Christ’s sake.

You and me and Hank. Us. And all along we thought we were on the side of the angels. All this rage…

“And then, the Negroes. It’s not nonviolence now, not anymore, not in the big cities where we’ve been. It’s milit-ance, black power, Black Panthers. Guns. It doesn’t feel good to be in the middle of it out there. They don’t want us, not any of us. Not even the ‘good’ whites, the ones who believe, who marched, who fought—I don’t know where that leaves most of us. Hell, I thought we were just getting used to the nonviolent business, comfortable with that. And now there’s this other. It’s like the movement died before it really got going, and some kind of revolution is being born.”

“God, it sounds ominous,” Hank said, after a moment. I felt an involuntary shiver shake me, and rubbed the top of my bare arms with my hands. Tom looked at me, and I forced a smile and said, “Harry keeps his air-conditioning too high.”

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 192

“I don’t mean to sound apocalyptic,” Tom said. “I’m probably just tired, and I know I’m confused. I mean, shit.

You’ve got yippies and hippies and lovers and motherfuckers and draft dodgers and bra burners and pot and LSD and Black Panthers and freaks and gays and acid rock—I don’t know what it all means. I can’t take it in, somehow. I think maybe I’m just…past this. Too old.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said vehemently. I knew that he was only thirty-one. But then, perhaps that was, now, too old. I might be, myself. Too old, at twenty-seven.

“Will you do the story that way?” Hank said. “To reflect that…that dichotomy? It could be good, but you’d have to add a good bit of text—”

“I don’t know if there is a story out there, not a single one,”

Tom said. “If there is, it’s damned sure not what we thought it was. It’s not a children’s crusade. It’s not a crusade of any kind. I think about that Yeats poem, you know, ‘the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’ It’s more like a war. It’s like the whole country is suddenly at war with itself.”

There was a pause, and then he said, “I’m going to ask Matt to freelance the art direction out. Rethink it, make an editorial piece of it. The photos should be good. Lucas was excited. I just know I can’t do it.”

There did not seem to be anything left to say. We finished our coffee and drove Tom back downtown to the Y. It was full dark, and all along Spring Street the thick, poignant smell of mimosa drifted into the open windows.

“I think urban mimosa trees can make themselves invisible,”

I said. “You can always smell mimosa in cities in the spring, but you can never see them. It’s like they’re a different species.”

“It’s how they survive,” Tom said. “If they were visible, some asshole would cut them down and put up parking lots.”

193 / DOWNTOWN

We watched him cross the sidewalk and enter the door of the huddled yellow-brown brick building. The light over the door seemed dim and mean, and I thought of the Church’s Home. All of a sudden Tom Gordon seemed the loneliest man alive.

“I want him to be happy,” I said to Hank. “I don’t want him living in this dump. I want things to be better for him.

Whatever he saw on this trip seems to be just eating him alive.”

Hank was silent as he threaded the narrow streets around the bus station, and pulled onto the northeast expressway toward Buckhead. We were halfway to Colonial Homes before he said, “It’s not just what he saw out there, not just the story. He…had somebody in Washington. They broke up.

He told me on the phone last night.”

“Oh, God,” I said. “I’m so sorry. She must be the biggest fool in the world to let him go.”

Hank was silent for another space of time, and then said,

“It wasn’t a she, Smokes. It was a he.”

The air seemed to ring around my head, as if there had been a silent explosion. I felt stunned and stupid, unable to fit thought together.

“Oh,” I said. And then, “But he was married…I mean, he was married, wasn’t he?”

“He was. Legitimately. He tried awfully hard to make it work. It wasn’t until long after they married that he found out.”

“But…wouldn’t you have some idea? Wouldn’t you know somehow?”

“Are you kidding? In the early 1950s, on a farm in the South Georgia wiregrass? Hell, no, you wouldn’t know. He didn’t know. He’s a good man, Smoky. The best I know, maybe. He wouldn’t have married her if he’d had any idea.

She knew before he did, that’s why ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 194

they broke up. She’ll never forgive him, she’ll never give him a moment’s peace. And he’ll take it all, because he thinks he deserves it.”

I felt tears flood up into my eyes, and down over my cheeks. I could not speak past the cold salt lump in my throat.

“Are you going to be able to handle this?” Hank said. “I hope you are. I wouldn’t have told you if I’d thought it would make a difference to you. Tom needs some friends right now.

Tell me how you feel.”

“I feel…” I said, sniffling a little, “I feel like I love him an awful lot and that will never change. And…I feel relieved that everytime I look at him now I don’t have to wonder why he doesn’t find me attractive enough to make a move on me.”

Hank began to laugh, and hugged me with one arm, hard.

“That is such a fine thing to say that I think I’ll buy you a piece of IHOP apple pie,” he said. And he did.

“The thing for you to remember is that you need to be quiet,”

Luke Geary said a few days later. “Today is for looking, for seeing how it is. Let me and John do the talking. Later, if it goes okay, you can go back for some interviews. But you’ll blow it for good and all if you talk much today.”

“Thank you so very much, Matt Comfort,” I said. “Why don’t you not talk and let me shoot your photographs?”

We were in his Morgan, humid wind buffeting our faces, inching our way through early morning traffic over toward the State Capitol. I was annoyed with him. I had thought he would relish the Focus assignment, but he seemed to regard it as puffery, chamber of commerce flackery. He had been different since he returned from the 195 / DOWNTOWN

swing around the country, quieter, nervier, more inward.

Not nearly, as Matt would say, so bone-deep sorry.

He turned to study me from behind the tinted aviator glasses. His carroty hair and beard blew in the wind, and there were patches of peeling sunburn on his nose and forehead. I knew that he would never tan.