Downtown (57 page)

before he turned over and buried his head in his pillow. It was the first time I could remember that we had been unable to give each other solace.

We drank coffee and dressed and left for
Downtown
in near-silence. We moved like people who have lost a lot of blood, heavily and carefully. He kept his hand on my shoulder or back or arm, lightly, but he said little. So did I.

Every time I started to speak, I stopped. There seemed, now, little point. It was as if our entire context had been shattered.

That was worse by far than anything that had gone before.

We heard it the minute the elevator door slid open: the roar of music. It was not the saccharine whine of the Muzak, but the thumping heartbeat of the record Matt had played over and over for almost a year, until Tom Gordon and Hank stole it and threw it out of the eleventh-floor window: “Don’t sleep in the subway darlin’, don’t stand in the pourin’ rain…”

The music filled the hallway and bounced off the dingy acoustical tiles of the corridor ceiling. Luke and I looked at each other and followed it through the open doorway of
Downtown
.

There was no one in the outer office, but all the office doors were open, and the mingled smell of fresh coffee and flowers and furniture polish hit us like a great sound wave.

Desktops gleamed with lemon oil. On each woman’s desk was a green florists’ vase of red roses. The music bellowed and roared. Over it, the Bahamian taxi horn gave three ear-splitting blats, and Sister’s face appeared in Matt’s office door. It shone like a child’s on Christmas morning.

“Y’all get y’all’s butts in here,” she screeched.

I dropped my purse on my desk and ran, my heart threatening to leap from my chest with something that did not, yet, dare to be joy. Luke was right behind me.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 462

Hank said later that Luke running had been a truly amazing sight, like watching a scarecrow sprint.

They were all there, on Matt’s sofa and his chairs, on his rug. Sueanne was sitting on his desk crying and wiping her glasses on her petticoat, and Sister was frugging madly on the little Oriental rug to Petula Clark.

Matt sat with his tiny feet up on his desk, holding the taxi horn and grinning. It was his old grin, the one I had seen the first day I had walked into this office, white and wolfish and world-igniting. His chestnut hair gleamed fire and his pin-striped suit was obviously new, even though it looked as if it had spent years in an attic trunk, and the blue eyes behind the round wire glasses were so crinkled that they were lost in furrowed flesh. The little Gucci loafers gleamed, and there was a red rose behind one ear.

“Sit down, dear hearts, and listen how we’re going to pull this fucker out of the fire,” he said. His voice was the old Matt voice when he was fully engaged, rich and honeyed and just on the brink of sardonic hilarity. There was nothing in it, that I could hear, of the awful cracked, canted glee that had been there for so long. I sat down on Hank’s lap simply because my knees went out from under me.

It was a short speech. Later I wondered, fleetingly, why we all bought it without reservation, but almost by the time it ended we all had, and there was no doubt in any of our minds that Matt’s plan could and would work: he was going to buy the magazine himself. He knew it could be done and he knew how. It was simply a matter of finding a backer, the right one, the one with enough money and sense to know what he had in
Downtown
and leave us alone to run it. He would have a major share and the editorship; that was the deal and it was not negotiable.

“I can do it in a week if I have to,” he said. “You all know I can do it. All I need is a telephone. But we have 463 / DOWNTOWN

some time and I’m going to take it, to find just the right people, so we don’t ever have to go through this shit again.

Don’t glare at me, Teddy, I know where most of the shit came from. I never apologize, so you’ll have to make do with that. All you need to know is that Comfort’s back and one month from now this will be a done deal. I absolutely guarantee that. Anybody who doubts it should leave by that door there.”

For just a fraction of a moment we were all silent. The past weeks hung in the air like a rancid odor. We stared at him and I knew that we were all looking for signs of the mania that had spawned the Cup Wars. But it was not there.

Only Matt Comfort was, Matt Comfort, cool and arrogant and real. Power came off him like smoke.

We broke into cheers and applause. They lasted a long time. When we stopped, he ran us out. “Go on,” he said.

“Get busy. Bust your butts. Don’t talk about this to anybody.

I want to be the one to tell Culver myself. You’ve got your assignments; Sister has the list. I did it last night. Let’s make June the best fucking issue we ever put out. Let him eat his heart out. Smoky, stay for a minute.”

When the others had left I sat in his Eames chair and looked at him. He looked back, studying me. His eyes were rimmed with red, I could see now, and there was an almost imperceptible trembling in his hands. But the rest of him shone as if he had just been cast in new gold.

“Two things,” he said. “YMOG this time is Culver’s son-in-law. You’ll hate him. He’s the worst dickhead I ever met.

Do it right. Lick the dickhead’s boots if you have to. I want Culver to think he’s won the whole nine yards.”

I nodded, hypnotized. I would lick many boots for this man, I knew.

“Second thing. Starting with June you’re the new assistant managing editor with as much pay raise as we can get you.

It probably won’t be much. You’ll be back on Focus ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 464

full-time, and I want you to go on with that little black girl with the voice. Luella what’s-her-name. Don’t talk about that, either; by the time it runs it’ll be way too late for Culver to yell about that or anything else. I’m going to call SCLC

and get Dr. King to suggest a new liaison for Focus. You’ve done a good job, Smoky, and I’m proud of you. I probably won’t tell you that again until nineteen seventy.”

“I love you, Matt,” I said, my lips wobbling like they do when you have just come from the dentist and the novocaine has not yet worn off. I could taste salt.

He looked at me for a long moment, and then shook his head slightly.

“Ol’ Smoky,” he said. “Be careful who you love. They’ll be part of you always. Even after the love is long dead, the fuckers’ll be part of you.”

“I hope so,” I said, and went out with the others to bust my butt for Matt Comfort.

Somehow we did not talk much about it among ourselves.

Maybe it was because we were afraid to break the new bubble of elation that contained us all, but I don’t think so. There was a powerful feeling around all of us in those first new days of Matt’s return, a sense of deep, quiet power, a conspir-atorial happiness. We knew that, upstairs, the chamber buzzed and thrummed like a hive of bees with the news of Matt’s vanquishing, but few of them came into the camp of the vanquished, and we were not often required to act humble and sorrowful. With the cessation of the Cup Wars and the issuing of the fateful interoffice memo, Culver Carnes retreated into his thirteenth floor lair. We did not see him in our offices again. We worked, prodigiously, and we smiled at each other, and we smiled at the closed door of Matt’s office. The red light that meant his telephone was occupied glowed steadily all day. It was still glowing when most of us left in the evening. Hank, who often stayed 465 / DOWNTOWN

late riding herd on the day-to-day business of the magazine while Matt poured his honey over the wires from Atlanta to Texas and Oklahoma and New York, said that it glowed late into the nights. He said also that Matt drank a great deal of coffee and smoked incessantly, but that he was not drinking at all.

“There’s no way I wouldn’t know,” he said.

Only once did we really speak of the transformation, and that was the day it happened. Luke and I and Hank rode down on the elevator together at the end of the day, and Luke said to Hank, “So what happened?”

“I still don’t know,” Hank said. “I took the memo over to his place after I couldn’t raise him on the phone and pushed it under his door. It was after midnight. I knew he was in there. I could hear the stereo. And then I went home and went to bed. When I came in this morning, there he was.

That’s as much as I can tell you.”

After that, the tide of the spring turned abruptly toward joy. It was as if the city and the world swung themselves into synchronization with the elation that bore us along like a great wave. On March 12, Eugene McCarthy captured an astounding 42 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, running as a peace candidate. On March 16, Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. Two days later he opened his campaign by announcing that if he was elected, he would actively seek a peace settlement. In our giddiness, we cheered McCarthy and Kennedy alike. It seemed to me, crazily, that both, like us, were invincible.

On March 17, when they were dyeing the river green and getting sodden drunk on green beer back in Corkie, Matt came out of his office grinning incandescently and said that he had a fucking great nibble out of Oklahoma and to stay tuned. Then he went back in and closed his door.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 466

On March 21, Francis Brewton paid us a long and fragrant visit and sold us his entire stock of antique periodicals, and on March 22, Mr. Tommy T. Bliss came and stood on his head in the lobby to celebrate Henry Aaron’s first home run, in a preseason exhibition game with Pittsburgh. We were delirious with joy. There could not, Matt said, be better au-guries.

On March 30, Matt called Luke into his office and asked him if he could get in touch with John Howard in New York.

“Yeah,” Luke said. “I probably can. You want to tell me why?”

“Not especially,” Matt grinned. “But tell him if he’ll come down here for an overnighter in a few days we’ll pay his airfare and put him up. Tell him he can pick the hotel. Tell him all he has to do is eat a dynamite dinner and drink some dynamite champagne and wear a suit instead of a caftan or whatever those things are the Yankee liberals are all running around in now.”

“Dashikis,” Luke grinned. “I doubt if John’s into dashikis yet. I’ll tell him. Anything else?”

“No. Just tell him…I need him, and I’ll be beholden to him,” Matt said. “And that he won’t be sorry. It’s for an honorable cause. Tell him that.”

Luke did tell John Howard that, on the telephone that night, but at first John was reluctant. In the end, though, he agreed.

“How’d you get him to change his mind?” I said, when Luke came back into the living room grinning triumphantly.

“Told him it mattered an awful lot to you and me,” he said.

“And that Culver Carnes would absolutely shit. You know he always did think Culver was an asshole.”

I went to Luke and hugged him.

“I’m so glad he’s coming,” I said into his neck. “I 467 / DOWNTOWN

didn’t realize how much I missed him till I knew he might come back.”

“Me either,” Luke said.

On March 31, Matt came capering out of his office, blatting the taxi horn, and herded us all over to the Top of Peachtree to tell us that deliverance was at hand and to brief us on it. We sat late, while blue dusk fell over the greening city and the downtown lights winked on, drinking champagne and eating hors d’oeuvres and listening to Tony, who played

“Downtown” over and over in an excess of delight at having Matt back. Matt himself only drank coffee and smoked, but he crowed as loudly as the rest of us.

“He’s a Texan, but he’s based in Oklahoma City now,” he told us of our savior-to-be. “I knew him when we both worked on an oil rig off Galveston, both of us about eighteen, I think. I doubt if we weighed a hundred and fifty pounds together. He calls himself Cody Remington, and sometimes—I swear to God—Bubba, but his name’s Duane Heckler. Hell, I don’t care if he calls himself Alexander the Great. It would fit him perfectly. I always knew the little fucker would own the world one day. He’s got the goddamn chicken parts market in the entire Southwest cornered, and he’s looking to get into the media game, as he calls it. He’s got a better cash flow than God. I convinced him he ought to start with a magazine with social conscience as well as fancy national awards. He’s looking to be socially relevant now, he tells me. Well, I guess you would, if you’d made your pile from chicken parts. He requires, and I quote, a strong black presence in any venture. I’m gonna bring him over on the third and set up a presentation right here, under the mural, with storyboards and flip charts and the whole nine yards, and then I’m gon’ wine him and dine him and hit him with the Andre piece and John Howard to boot.

We’ll have a special display with all our awards, and I’m going to get Ben

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 468

Cameron, and maybe even Dr. King, on tape, talking about what assets to the universe we are. I thought I’d get that little Luella gal to come sing ‘Downtown’ for us when I walk him in; you all will all be here under the mural, see, and Tony will hit it when we get off the elevator, and when we come through those doors she’ll start belting it out. I’m going to rent the bar for the night. Just us and Cody Bubba. What do you think?”

“I think ol’ Cody Bubba is a gone goose,” Hank exulted.

“It’s absolutely perfect!” Teddy cried.

“He’ll be begging us to let him buy us,” I said, laughing with sheer joy. It was an inspired scenario. It could not fail to move the chicken parts king of the Southwest.

“Chicken parts?” Luke gasped, doubled over in his tilted-back chair. “Chicken parts? Holy shit!”

“How are you going to pay for all this?” Hank said finally, sobering up a little. He could never quite stop being a managing editor.

“Put it on Culver’s tab, of course,” Matt said matter-of-factly. “By the time the bill comes he’ll have one less magazine to pay for.”

We were still crowing and preening when a commotion around the television set at the far end of the bar broke through our euphoria. We looked over at it just in time to see the lugubrious, Dumbo-eared face of Lyndon Johnson fading from the screen. I had forgotten he had called a special news conference for that evening.