Downtown (61 page)

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.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 494

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.”

495 / DOWNTOWN

“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.”

And so we walk to the revolving glass doors of the building that houses the Top of Peachtree, locked and empty now, and tap on the glass until the young guard sees us and comes to let us in. I remembered the building as being tall, but it is dwarfed now by the monoliths around it.

“The old mural, huh?” the guard says. He has on bell-bottom jeans and a ponytail; we have come full circle. “Yeah, I see it almost every day. I’ve always wondered about it. Y’all artists or collectors or something?”

“The lady’s in it,” my husband says, grinning.

“No kidding,” the young guard says, examining my face as if to assess its mural-worthiness. “You were some kind of celebrity, huh? You still live here?”

“No. New York,” I say.

“Ah. Local girl makes good. Well, if the boss says you can go up, I guess you can. I’ll open the express elevator for you.

Watch your step up there, there’s stuff piled all over the floors and the lights are off. There ought to be ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 496

plenty of natural light, though. I’m afraid you’ll find that your face is plenty dirty.”

“I’ll bet,” I say, and he puts a key into a keyhole on the elevator panel in the lobby that I remember and yet, somehow, do not, and presently the elevator comes rumbling down for us.

We are silent as we rise. I remember the mirrored elevator walls, but they do not give me back the same people that they did, and it is off-putting. The same thing is true when we step out into the lobby of the old restaurant. I remember the green carpeting and the quilted peach walls, even the springy feel of the carpet underfoot, but it is as if I remember pictures from an old book. Still without speaking I follow him through the long space where once there were white-clothed tables overlooking the great sweep of the city and now there are piles of lumber and insulation and acoustical tiles and debris, and the window walls look out into the blind eyes of the taller buildings all around. Dust felts everything, thick and pearly gray. It is very hot and very quiet. There is no furniture of any kind in the long room except two or three tables pushed into a far corner and stacked one atop the other, and, covered with a dusty tarpau-lin, the shape of a grand piano.

Tony’s piano, almost certainly. I walk by it without looking.

We go around the corner into the bar area and there we all are. There is the mural, on the wall over the padded leather counter that once served as the bar, looking half the size it once did in the huge, empty space, so faded and grimed that it is almost impossible to make out the faces in it. But I know where we all are in the mural, know our posi-tions in this small firmament, and so, once my eyes get accustomed to the dim light filtering through the dirty plate glass, I see us once again. I go to the window wall 497 / DOWNTOWN

and sit down on the ledge and look at the mural, and he comes and sits beside me and looks, too.

I start at the left and work to the right. Hank first, looking very much like Hank still does, and Teddy, looking too like Teddy now. I don’t think that they will change until they are very old, if then. Then Sueanne, looking matronly and nurturing in her dark shirtwaist, and Sister, the perennial University of Georgia cheerleader in her perky head-band and ironed hair. She is now, I know, one of the top trial attorneys in the city. I am next, looking only small and round and very, very young, and rather idiotically happy. I was afraid of what I would see on that face when we first entered, but what I see is mainly nothing at all except the overweening youth, and so I am able to move my eyes past it. Alicia Crowley is next, looking as old-fashioned as a Gibson Girl in her boots and fishnet stockings and fall of honey hair and beauty. Then Matt, the vulpine face sharp and grinning ferally, the red hair burning like live lava on his head. Of all the faces his is nearly a caricature; Matt was always the darling of editorial cartoonists. Beside him, on his other side, Tom Gordon.

Tom, dead of AIDS now these past eight years.

I am still and the room is silent. I feel, see, hear nothing.

And then, just for a split second, it is as if someone has jerked open the door of a soundproof room and life crashes in. I smell the mingled odors of fresh-cut flowers and fruit garnish on the bar and the hot hors d’oeuvres from the silver trays; I feel the chill of the air-conditioning and the press of people around me; I hear laughter and the chink of ice and the sound of Tony’s piano as we walk in: “When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go…downtown…”

The door slams shut and I am back in dust and silence and emptiness. The mural is only that: an old painted wall, faded, dirty, set now for destruction.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 498

I lower my head so that he won’t see me cry. He is often impatient with my easy tears, but now he only reaches over and wipes them away with his thumb.

“Was this a bad idea after all?” he says.

I shake my head and swallow the tears.

“Not really. In a way it was a good idea,” I say. “From now on I’ll see him like he is in this mural when I think about him, and not…that back there in that hospital room. That’s what I’ve been seeing all these years. It’s going to be good to substitute this for that. It’s just that…oh, Lord, you know.

There were always so few of us, and the best of us are dead.

It hardly seems fair, does it?”

“I hardly think the best of you are dead. But no, it doesn’t seem fair,” he says. “On a lighter note, do you notice that Matt’s face shines like new money on a bear’s behind? All the rest in that mural are faded out, but his looks like somebody just cleaned it. What do you make of that?”

I do notice it then: Matt Comfort’s fox face does indeed gleam out of the dirty mural like the sun. Around it, our faces seem like little moons scrimmed in clouds. It must, I think, be some trick of the light, some quality of the old paint when the artist laid it on.

“He’s got his own holy miracle ray,” I say, smiling.

“More likely the sonofabitch made some poor asshole promise to come up here and clean it off every day in exchange for being YMOG,” he says, and we both laugh, looking at Matt in the mural.

“That was really the end of it, wasn’t it?” I say. “At least, the start of the end. When he went down on the rug that night. After that everything changed—”

“Everything was already changing,” he says. “I refuse to accept Matt Comfort as the definitive metaphor for the collapse of the sixties.”

I smile at him, and look back at the mural.

499 / DOWNTOWN

“But still,” I say, “he was the centerpiece. You have to admit that he was. Just look at him. It was always like that. Him in the middle, holding all the strings while we danced around him. He was the maypole for the whole dance.”

“He was the maypole,” John Howard says, pulling me into the curve of his arm. “But you all were the dance. I brought you down here to see that. He was the maypole, but you were the dance.”

We sit there in the hot gloom for a while longer, and then he says, “Let’s go home.”

“Let’s,” I say, and we get back into the elevator and go down to the street lobby once more.

“Did you guys say good-bye to yourselves?” the young guard grins as he lets us out onto the street.

“I guess we did, at that,” John says.

I am surprised and none too pleased to see that the university cab is waiting at the curb. The driver’s mood has not improved noticeably.

“Now for Hartsfield,” John says, and the driver clashes through the gears and snarls off toward the expressway. It is very hot, and the windows are down; humid air buffets us. On the freeway, well past the blue bowl of the old Braves’

stadium, we hit the first of the afternoon traffic, and slow down almost to a stop. The car’s engine labors and the whole car shudders. The heat is fierce.

“We’d like some air back here, please,” John says, leaning forward over the back of the front seat.

The driver scowls at him in the rearview mirror. John looks back at him levelly, deadpan. The scar gives his face a fine, frozen menace. We call it the Look. It has gotten us excellent tables in restaurants in cities all over the world. The driver drops his eyes and thumbs a button and the windows crawl upward. Cold air roars into

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 500

the cab. To punish us, the driver turns on the radio as loud as it will go and gospel rock moos around us.

I begin to giggle, trying not to laugh aloud.

“I wouldn’t want that face looking at me in my rearview mirror, either,” I say.

“I’m his worst nightmare,” John grins. “A nigger with a doctoral hood.”

I laugh aloud then, and lay my head back against the seat and close my eyes. When I open them again John is shaking my knee and we are careening far too fast around the last long curve toward the Delta terminal.

We are high in the thundery air over the Blue Ridge Mountains before I realize that after we left downtown Atlanta, I never once looked back.

About the Author

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS’s bestselling novels include
Islands; Nora, Nora; Low Country; Up Island; Fault
Lines; Downtown; Hill Towns; Colony; Outer Banks;
King’s Oak; Peachtree Road; Homeplace; Fox’s Earth;
The House Next Door;
and
Heartbreak Hotel
. She is also author of a work of nonfiction,
John Chancellor
Makes Me Cry
. She lives in Charleston, South Carolina.

Visit her website at
www.anneriverssiddons.com
.

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CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS and

DOWNTOWN

“SIDDONS PULLS OUT ALL THE STOPS, including an array of side journeys and escapades as well as a host of engaging characters. She’s in command on her home turf, and her descriptions and dialogue are well-nigh perfect. Seldom have I lost myself so completely in a book as with
Downtown
….

A-plus, with gold stars, Ms. Siddons.”

The State (Columbia, SC)

“SIDDONS EVOKES MUCH OF THE INNOCENCE

OF THE POST-CAMELOT, PRE-WOODSTOCK

SOUTH.”

Atlanta Journal Constitution

“A GOOD SUMMER READ.”

Grand Rapid Press

“SIDDONS’S AFFECTION FOR THE DEEP SOUTH

IS UNMISTAKABLE, her lyrical and exuberant prose as rich and fertile as red Georgia soil.”

Blade Citizen Preview (San Diego)

“AS TRUE IN HER OTHER BESTSELLERS, Siddons’s words speak plainly and easily to women.”

Denver Post

“ENTERTAINING.”

Dallas Morning News

“SIDDONS’S WRITING IS LOVELY…

SPELLBINDING. Reading
Downtown
produces the sense of travel to a distant continent in a distant time.”