Downtown (10 page)

Into the silence I said, “He said tell Mr. Comfort he thought they had the Lutherans sewed up,” and Tom and Charlie exploded into laughter. Matt Comfort came out to hear what was so funny and began to laugh, too. He gave me a brief hug around my shoulders and I joined in the laughter, lightly, pretending that I had known all along it was funny. I sensed that it pleased them that I should be ironic and quick. I would remember that.

I spent the rest of the morning upstairs meeting the chamber staff—with a few exceptions a sunless lot who acknowledged me coolly—and then Hank took me to lunch.

It was a small, dim French restaurant called ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 72

Emile’s a couple of blocks away from the Commerce Building, and it seemed to be full of men drinking cocktails and laughing, all of whom seemed to know Hank. At one corner table on the upper level a bushy-browed bulldog of a man with thick spectacles nodded and smiled, and I whispered breathlessly, when we had passed, “Was that—?”

Hank grinned. “Ralph McGill. Yeah, Pappy comes here a good bit, especially on chicken-liver day. That’s kind of the unofficial
Constitution
table.”

“You really know him?”

“Well, Matt knows him, and he knows who we all are.

You’re not going to ask him for his autograph, are you? He’s awfully shy.”

“Don’t be an ass. But I wish I could. He’s a real hero, Hank. Lord, though, my father would have a conniption if he knew I was even under the same roof with Rastus McGill.

I wish he could see me now.”

“You better be glad he can’t,” Hank said, and we sat down to lunch in the first French restaurant I had ever been in, to order, for the first time in my life, sauteed chicken livers on toast with sherry and mushrooms. I thought they were probably an acquired taste.

Hank asked me if I wanted wine, and I simply looked at him, and he laughed.

“I forgot,” he said. “They don’t call you Holy Smoke for nothing. I’m so used to eating lunch with Matt and the rest of the gang that I forget everybody doesn’t have two martinis and wine with lunch. It’s kind of nice to give it a rest.”

“Do you all drink a lot?” I asked. I had heard of two-martini lunches, of course, but until now had assumed they were the stuff of bad novels about Madison Avenue.

He looked surprised, and then said, “I guess maybe we do. I don’t think about it all that much. We’re usually 73 / DOWNTOWN

all together, talking and laughing, or there’s some visiting muckety-muck from out of town that we’re entertaining, and it just seems the natural thing to do. Almost everybody does it, at least when Matt’s buying, and he usually is. He can drink more than anybody I ever saw and not show it. He’ll go back after one of these lunches and put together an issue that will win another award, or get on the phone and set up an interview with somebody virtually nobody else could get, or sell twelve full-page four-color ads right under Jack Greenburg’s nose. It’s incredible. If the rest of us drank that much we’d be passed out under our desks.”

“He must be rich,” I said, thinking what five days a week of lunches like that for the whole staff must cost.

“God, no. It’s kind of a local legend that when he got here he had exactly fourteen dollars in his pocket. He lived at the Y for six months. Tom Gordon still does; he’s going through a messy divorce and he barely has the clothes on his back left. Nobody on the staff has any money except Teddy, whose daddy owns the biggest real estate company in town, and Sister, whose daddy owns South Georgia. Alicia has a dynamite apartment, but I’m fairly sure she doesn’t pay for it.

Matt lives in two rooms at the Howell House that the chamber pays for, along with paying for his car. The rest of us have roommates or live in one room. Matt likes to say that he’s going to pay us half the salary we had wherever we worked before, and work us twice as long. Didn’t he tell you that? I think he charges the lunches and everything else to the chamber.”

Matt Comfort had indeed told me that about the pay and the hours, and it had charmed me, made me want to work twice as hard for him.

“Boy, he really must rate with the chamber,” I said. “I mean, to charge stuff like that, and talk to Mr. Carnes ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 74

the way he did this morning. That almost scared me, Hank.

I thought Mr. Carnes was his boss.”

“Well, he is, but it’s a funny relationship,” Hank said, frowning. “It’s kind of a game with them, the insults and the yelling. Culver really resents Matt’s smart-ass, seat-of-the-pants way of doing things and the fact that all of us on the magazine get away with bloody murder, are kind of local heroes. The whole chamber staff hates and envies us, for that matter. Don’t think you’re going to find any friends up there.

But Carnes knows Matt is an authentic genius, and whenever we win another award, he takes the credit—he’s the one that hired Matt out of the whole pack. And in a funny way he really loves Matt. He’s not a dummy; he knows quality. He used to have his own public relations firm. What he said this morning is true; we’re all of us okay as long as they know us in New York. And they do. Matt wasn’t boasting there.

“And as for Matt,” he went on, “well, he gets off on pushing Culver to the edge. He knows just how to do it. He’s got this one-man war going against all that pomposity and blandness upstairs. He’s always one step ahead of the pack and one step shy of overstepping. He knows that most of the chamber would just love to see him brought down. He simply flies too high for them. We all do. But the rest of the town absolutely eats him up. And then, I really think he’s fond of Culver, too. It’s complicated.”

“So I don’t have to worry about old Culver baby,” I said.

“Lord, Hank, he looks just like an emperor penguin, doesn’t he?”

Hank put his fork down and looked at me seriously.

“Listen, Smoky,” he said. “Don’t ever underestimate him.

Don’t underestimate any of them upstairs.
Downtown
depends on them; they subsidize us almost totally. We’d be drowning in red ink without them, the way Matt spends editorial money. They pay our salaries.

75 / DOWNTOWN

We can laugh at Culver Carnes, but he can fire us. He could fire Matt, too, come to that. We do the stories the chamber says to do in exchange for doing the stuff we want to do, and they have final say on everything. So far, thank God, Culver knows the good stuff, but he could nix any story he wanted to and we couldn’t do a thing about it. Be as nice to him as you can and do the shit as well as you do the good stuff, and stay out of their way. We’re okay as long as Matt is.”

I thought about what he said. It gave me a heady feeling, the sense of dancing on the edge of an abyss. I realized that I liked it. The Irish always have.

“Is he married?” I said. “Matt, I mean?”

“He was, I think,” Hank said. “He’s not now. I heard there was a wife back in Texas—he really is from Humble, Texas; it’s near Houston, population about three thousand. But so far as any of us know, they divorced before he came here.

No kids that I know of. Nobody else knows anymore than that, except maybe Alicia, and she ain’t talking.”

“He’s sleeping with her, isn’t he?”

“Jesus, how’d you know that? We none of us ever admit by word or deed that we know about it.”

“I don’t know how I knew, I just did,” I said. “You can just tell by the way he talks about her and to her, and the way she is with him.”

“Yeah, well, it’s really not such a big deal,” Hank said.

“There’s a lot of sleeping around in this town. I don’t know why that is, it just is. Maybe it’s all the energy floating around, or the fact that everybody’s young, or something.

Everybody I know, practically, has somebody.”

“What about you?” I said teasingly.

“God, I wouldn’t have time even if I had the money,” he grimaced. “I work six and seven days a week, sometimes ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 76

eighteen hours a day. Sometimes I sleep on the sofa in Matt’s office, when we’re getting an issue to bed. We all do. Besides, now I got you, babe.”

I ignored that. “You mean everybody works seven days a week, eighteen hours a day?” I said. “I don’t think I can do that, Hank. When on earth would I meet anybody, or get to know Atlanta?”

“You’ll do it and you’ll love it, Smokes, just wait and see,”

he said. “
Downtown
—I don’t know. It gets to be your whole life. The people there become your family. You’ll spend all the time you’re not working with them, as well as office hours; you’ll come to really love them. Well, most of them, anyway. It’s really funny, how it happens, but I’ve seen it over and over again. Gradually everything else drops away and there’s just the magazine and all of us. And it’s enough.

There’s more sheer excitement and…and…exuberance, more laughter, more intensity, in that one office than I ever thought there was in the world. In a way, Matt asks it of you. He doesn’t come right out and say it, and I don’t think he does it consciously, but pretty soon you’ll know that he means for you to put it and him and all of us first, before everything, and by then you’ll want to do it.”

“What happens if I don’t?” I said, knowing that, of course, I would. I did already. I had, from the night of Hank’s phone call.

“I know you. You will. But if you don’t, or can’t, well…you just wouldn’t stay. He wouldn’t fire you, but you’d leave.

I’ve seen that happen, too. Not so much with the ad people; they kind of go their own way, and Sueanne is an exception because she’s married and has a family. But there’ve been a few editorial people who didn’t want to be one of Comfort’s People full-time, and sooner or later, they just left.”

“Charlie’s married,” I said.

77 / DOWNTOWN

“And Charlie’s on his way out,” Hank said. “You can see it happening already. Whenever he goes home to Caroline instead of going out for a drink with us after work, or spends weekends with her instead of down here, Matt gets kind of quiet. Charlie used to be the closest one of us to Matt; the nearest thing he had to a close man friend. They spent a lot of time together. Now they don’t. And I’ll bet you a week’s salary that in a few months Charlie will find something else that pays better and has better hours, and we’ll give him a huge party at the Top of Peachtree and a going-away present that cost more than he makes in a year, and Charlie will be history.”

I could think of little to say to that. On the face of it, it seemed unreasonable in the extreme to expect the staff, young and attractive as they all were, to forsake all others and cast their lot exclusively with Matt Comfort and his magazine.

On the other hand, I could not imagine wanting anything else.

“Oh, Hank,” I said, “What if I can’t cut it, or I don’t fit in?”

“You will,” he said. “He wouldn’t have hired you if he hadn’t known you would. If all else fails, he’ll simply make it happen.”

On our way out I saw that Mr. McGill was still at the corner table. With him now were a square-jawed, blunt-faced blond man and a tall, thin dark one. They were deep in conversation.

“That was Gene Patterson, the editor of the
Constitution
, and Reese Cleghorne from the Southern Regional Council with Pappy,” Hank said. “You don’t often see them together.

I wonder what’s going on?”

“I feel like I just saw history being made,” I said.

“You probably did,” Hank said. “That’s the thing about Atlanta that knocks me out, Smoky. Almost anywhere you look, on any given day, it is.”

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 78

I worked the rest of the afternoon in Tom Gordon’s office, learning to write photographic captions to fit a specific character count. It was frustrating, exacting work, and Tom was a stickler for captions that fit their spaces exactly. He wanted no gaps and no one-word lines. They were, he said, called widows, and no decent art director would allow them.

By the end of the afternoon I had produced several galleys full of perfect, widowless captions, and was mussed and ink-smeared and aching of eye and head, but glowing from Tom’s grave praise. He was gentle and sweet-tempered, and, in a sly, quiet way, extremely funny. I felt as close to him at the end of that day as I might a companion with whom I had been through some natural calamity.

“You’re a quick study, Smoky,” he said. “Charlie is a disaster with captions.”

I stretched and looked around. Outside the day was ending; a glowing, grape-flushed twilight was falling down on the city, and lights were blooming in windows all around us. I looked at my watch. It was six-thirty, long past the usual five P.M. quitting time. Hank was right about
Downtown
’s hours, I thought. I wondered if I had missed supper at Our Lady, and what time the last 23 Oglethorpe bus ran, and if anyone would think it amiss if I simply got my raincoat and left. The thought made me feel oddly desolate. Our Lady seemed on the other side of the moon.

A great blatting blare broke the silence of the office, and Matt Comfort’s rich bellow followed it.

“Quittin’ time! Top in five minutes!” he bawled.

“What on earth was that noise?” I asked Tom Gordon.

He grimaced.

“Somebody gave him a Bahamian taxi horn,” he said.

79 / DOWNTOWN

“We’ve been trying to steal it, but it keeps turning up. Jack Greenburg is threatening to bring him a ram’s horn, just to vary things a little. Come on, get your coat. We go to the Top of Peachtree around the corner most afternoons for a drink. It’s got a sensational view of the city, and Matt pays.”

“I don’t know…” I had started when Matt put his head into Tom’s office. He had on his coat and tie, but he still looked as if he had been wrestling alligators. The shining sheaf of hair completely obscured one eye.

“Champagne in honor of you tonight, Smoky,” he said. “I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship.”

“Well, the thing is,” I said, feeling stupidly young and prissy, “I already missed supper once, and I’m not sure when the last bus runs, and I think there’s a pretty early curfew on weeknights—”

Matt stared at me, and then said, “Oh, Christ, the goddamned Church’s Home. I forgot. I’ll call Sister Joan and clear you for being late tonight, and Hank or Tom will feed you and take you home, but we’ve got to get you out of there. I’ve got to have you available when I need you. That curfew shit is ridiculous, anyway.”