Downtown (56 page)

Join him. He’s beat you.”

The next time the media contacted Culver Carnes he grinned a sick grin and said it was all a prank, and even if it was pretty silly and childish, he appreciated a good joke as much as anyone else.

The next day, an Academy Award-winning documentary crew, in town to shoot a film on “Atlanta, the City Too Busy to Hate,” found the misty wooded park at Peachtree Battle Avenue, where they planned to shoot the film’s opening sequence, literally cobwebbed with festoons of yellow cup holders strung on every available bush, tree, and crag. It took the crew a full morning to get them down, set shooting back a day, and cost many thousands of dollars. Culver Carnes announced to the reporters who jammed his office that the only decent thing for the chamber to do was pick up the tab for the delay. He gave the cameras a decent, good-guy smile and went back into his office. We learned later that he was on the phone to the chamber membership all afternoon, putting his plan to them. I think he must have known it would be approved. It would bring the chamber a significant cash windfall, and that, after all, was what made the corporate world go round. The business of Atlanta had always been business.

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 453 / DOWNTOWN

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 ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 454

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

455 / DOWNTOWN

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

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 456

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

457 / DOWNTOWN

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 down 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

Y
OU 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

458

459 / DOWNTOWN

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 ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 460

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 461 / DOWNTOWN