Downtown (22 page)

They might feel like letting go of more money.”

They all looked at Brad. His father narrowed his eyes, and his mother simply stared.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 170

“Interesting,” Ben Cameron said. “Except that a PR campaign of that magnitude would cost a mint, and PR smells like PR no matter how you pretty it up.”

“Well, you know, it depends on who presents it,” Brad said mildly. “You know John Howard, don’t you? From Selma; he’s over at Morehouse now, I think.”

“Oh, yes, I know John. Good man,” Ben Cameron said.

“Been a help to me in ways not many people know about.

What about him?”

“I see an ongoing feature in
Downtown
, full-color, several pages a month, with Focus as the subject and a new task force tackling a new problem area every month. I see John Howard as the spokesperson for both the black community—because let’s face it, that’s where the problems are going to be—and sort of the official host of the series. Smoky here would write it, because she knows Howard and she’s good, and a photographer named Lucas Geary would shoot it every month. You know, Focus on day care, Focus on decent housing, Focus on working conditions for city workers, Focus on health care for the elderly, Focus on Grady Hospital, Focus on street gangs—”

“I know,” Ben Cameron nodded.

“All shot by the hottest young photographer in the country, the one who did that shot of Howard getting his head bashed in on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was a hell of a shot, ran all over the place. Geary’s got carte blanche with all the big magazines now, and Matt Comfort’s got him pretty much in the bag at
Downtown
, don’t ask me how.”

“I don’t ask how Matt does anything,” Ben Cameron laughed.

“It could be some of the best writing and photography coming out of the South, or the country, for that matter,”

Brad said. “Far out of the PR category. The fact that it’s officially sponsored, so to speak, doesn’t bother me a bit.”

171 / DOWNTOWN

“No, just think of Agee and Walker Evans and Dorothy Stead for the WPA,” I said, forgetting my shyness and whose house I was in.

“Good point,” the mayor said. “But how do you know any of them would agree to do it?”

“Well, Matt would do it if Culver told him to,” Brad said, smiling. “And Geary would jump at it, and so would Smoky, and I think John Howard would do it for Geary. And I think I could promise that the business community would, for the most part, like to be seen as part of the solution, not the problem. I volunteer here and now to sort of stand for the construction people. I’ll bet Evan and George would agree to offer some resources from their shops. It could have a lot of impact, and even Boy would think twice if his hunting and poker buddies were on deck working with the Negro community.”

There was a silence. Ben Cameron stared at Brad, nodding slowly, his gray eyes far away. The other two men looked at each other, then at Ben, and nodded, too. Ben’s father said nothing, but his face was slowly purpling, and the veins on the backs of his hands were engorging. Marylou Hunt was so still that she might have turned to stone. She did not even blink. But white lines ran like a bolt of lightning from the corners of her mouth to her chin, and there were white patches on her cheeks and around her eyes.

“It wouldn’t hurt to have a little chat with Culver in the morning,” Ben said. “What about it, Smoky? You think it would work? You think we could pull it off?”

“I think Mr. Carnes would love to do it, for you,” I said.

“I think Mr. Comfort would love to do it, even if it was Mr.

Carnes’s idea. I don’t know about John Howard, but I believe Lucas would like it, and I would absolutely adore it. I would.”

“Then we’ll check it out,” Ben Cameron said, getting ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 172

to his feet. “Good thinking, Brad. Thanks for the idea and the offer to stand for construction. I take it there won’t be any family…feeling…about your involvement.”

He smiled at Brad’s father and mother. It was an easy smile, but a knowing one.

“We’ll do what we can, of course, if everyone else is in,”

Mr. Hunt said stiffly. I could see a pulse beating in his temple.

“What a strange little idea, Brad,” Marylou Hunt said, ice in her voice. “However did you come up with it?”

She looked at me. I looked back.

“I had help,” Brad said, and his mother smiled, the animal’s smile. He gave it back to her.

“I’ll bet you did,” she said.

“Well, we’ll be going on,” Brad said. “I’m going to cook for Smoky tonight. She doesn’t think I’ve got a domestic bone in my body.”

“I’d like to see that,” Ben Cameron smiled, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Make sure he wears an apron, Smoky, and don’t let him con you into doing dishes.”

“Oh, I don’t imagine Smoky had dishes in mind.” Marylou Hunt could not keep the venom from her voice.

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “I do windows, but not dishes. Good night, Mr. Cameron, Mr. Tarpley, Mr. Carmichael. Mr. Hunt.

Mrs. Hunt. I hope I’ll see you again soon.”

“Oh, you will,” Brad said, and gave a small wave over his shoulder and walked me off the porch.

Behind me, I heard Marylou Hunt call, softly but sharply,

“Bradley, wait a minute.”

“Later, Ma,” he said, still not turning.

We were through the living room and back out on the veranda before he spoke.

“She hates it when I call her Ma,” he said.

173 / DOWNTOWN

We stayed very late in the little house behind Brad’s parents’

big one. He did indeed cook better-than-average spaghetti for me in the tiny kitchen, and we did indeed sip champagne and eat our dinner on small tables on his pocket veranda, facing the still, stagnant swimming pool. There were crickets, and from somewhere close by the heavy, heartbreaking scent of mimosa blew in lightly. He lit candles and we toasted each other and the spring and the hopeful new Focus series.

Once or twice he leaned over and kissed me softly. It was an enchanted evening, after its ugly start, but somehow I never fully relaxed and let myself slide into it. Marylou Hunt was simply too near. I could not see her, of course, but I could see the lights of what I knew, late in the evening, must be her bedroom, and I could feel her prowling near us with those extraordinary eyes. Brad’s eyes.

“She can’t see us,” he said once, when I pulled away from a long kiss. We were lying stretched out on a chaise beside the pool, and if it had not been for the sheltering trees, I knew that anyone in the house could have watched.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m certain. I used to lie up there in my bedroom next to hers when I was a kid, and try to spy on the grown-ups down by the pool. You can’t do it.”

“She can see the lights, though—”

“So?”

“She’ll know how late I stay.”

He reached over and snuffed out the candle with his thumb and forefinger.

“No she won’t. Though I wouldn’t care if she did.”

I did not think he would care. He was nervy and vividly animated, thrumming with a kind of interior energy, like ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 174

an engine running softly, deep down. It was different from his usual loose-jointed calm, and exciting in a sharp, physical way. In another way, though, there was something just faintly—what was the word I wanted? Not dangerous, surely?—about being with Brad that night. The kisses and caresses we exchanged slid quickly from our usual long, soft, slow ones to something else, swift and hard and so insistent that by the time I finally pulled away, flushed and breathing hard, I was half undressed and we were more than halfway to making love. I sat up, heart hammering with something not far from fear.

“Stop. No. I can’t. Please, Brad—”

“I want it to be tonight, Smoky.”

“No. Not here. Don’t you see? Not right under your mother’s nose, not to…to celebrate some kind of victory over her—”

He sat up, too.

“Is that what you think?”

I knew I had made him angry. But this was not right, not for our first time.

“I’m sorry, but it’s just not the right place.”

He was silent for a time, looking out into the darkness.

Through the trees the lone light still burned.

“Christ, maybe you’re right,” he said finally. “It makes sense. She’s screwed up every other—”

“Every other girl you’ve been interested in?”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

But I thought he had been going to say precisely that. After a moment I got up and straightened my clothing and went inside to wash my face. When I came back out again, he was standing beside the pool, scowling at the light in the big house and tossing his car keys up and down in his hand.

“Bad call on my part,” he said. “Shall we try again, out of the line of fire, so to speak? One day soon?”

175 / DOWNTOWN

I was relieved that he was not angry, and felt a sudden wash of simple happiness and well-being.

“By all means,” I said, and reached up and kissed his cheek.

When we finally drove away from the little pool house, the greenlit dashboard clock read two-thirty A.M. Above us, through the translucent green leaves, Marylou Hunt’s light still burned, like an eye.

7

O
N A STILL GREEN WEEKEND IN MAY TEDDY’S PARENTS

invited the staff over for an afternoon of swimming, with a backyard picnic to follow. It was a small ritual that the Fairchilds’ had established in the first year to Teddy’s tenure with
Downtown
, and though Matt grumbled about having to spend a Sunday afternoon stroking Northside egos, the fact was that his was the first car there. Teddy had gone early to help her parents, and Brad picked me up at Colonial Homes. When we got there Matt was sprawled in a chaise by the oval pool with a gin and tonic in his hand, gesticulat-ing as he talked to Oliver Fairchild and Teddy’s brother, Ollie. Or rather, lectured. I recognized the note his rich voice acquired when he was in what Hank called his visionary persona.

“…in another ten years, whether you guys in Buckhead want to acknowledge it or not,” I heard him say, and knew Hank was right. He regularly lectured the Club on their shortsightedness in this matter or their failure to adapt to that trend. Oliver Fairchild nodded 176

177 / DOWNTOWN

thoughtfully, his eyes intent on Matt’s sharp face. I often wondered why the Club put up with it. But they all seemed to hang on Matt’s words. For a poor boy from rural Texas, I thought, it must be a real power trip.

Matt was wearing swimming trunks with an oxford cloth shirt, tails out, over it. Both were so rumpled that they looked as if he had just plucked them out of the clothes dryer. His eyes were shielded behind wire-rimmed sunglasses, and his shock of hair burned in the sun. His thin arms and legs were pale, and he looked altogether like a wizened, freckled child huddled in the deep-cushioned chaise. His feet were narrow and so white they had a bluish undertinge. I thought suddenly that he looked like some sort of tiny amphibian, blinking in the alien sunlight, except for the hair. The hair changed him altogether.

“Hi, Matt,” I said, after I had greeted Mr. Fairchild and Ollie. “I’ve never seen you without clothes before.”

He grinned.

“Hi, Smoky. I can’t wait to say the same to you.”

It was a nice day. After the peripatetic pace of
Downtown’s
daily routine, a day in the sun in this orderly, cloistered wedge of privilege was hypnotic. We swam and sunned lazily, listening to Ollie Fairchild’s portable radio playing jazz softly and sipping the drinks that Teddy’s father kept coming from the little bar under the pavilion at poolside. By five o’clock, when the sting of the high sun began to fade, most of us were somnolent and a little drunk, except for Matt, whose cheeks glowed with color and whose speech was more staccato and ebullient than when we had arrived.

Matt never, I had noticed, got drunk, and the only effect liquor seemed to have on him was to make him more focused, more exuberant, more forceful.

I looked around the small group on the brick pool apron.

I knew that the Fairchilds had included spouses ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 178

and dates in their invitation, but with the exception of Brad, who had come with me and was in any case almost a son of this house, and Charlie Stubbs’s wife, no one had brought anyone else. Charlie and the outland wife had left early, pleading another engagement, and I thought suddenly of what Teddy had said to me on a night when I had first moved into the apartment with her: “We all give up something for the magic.” We had, it seemed, given up a great deal. We had literally, except for Charlie, forsaken all others.

Hank had said we would.

But I haven’t, I thought, and looked across at Brad and smiled. He lifted his glass to me and smiled back, his narrow face under the light, crinkled hair bronze with new sunburn.

Right at this moment, I thought, I have it all, and closed my eyes in a fugue of sun and gin and well-being.

There were two of us who were not present that day. Alicia Crowley had not come with Matt, and Tom Gordon was missing. Tom, I knew, was on a swing across the country with Lucas Geary for an editorial photo-essay dear to Matt’s heart that he had only with difficulty and outright bribery persuaded Culver Carnes to allow him to do, and no one knew where Alicia was. Except Matt, and he wasn’t saying.

“She had plans,” he said, grinning so that you knew what plans he meant you to infer Alicia had. “Alicia has secret and private plans for this weekend. Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on those walls, though?”

All of a sudden I knew, with a flash of the puzzling presci-ence that I sometimes had around him, that he did not know where Alicia was, and was jealous and resentful of the plans that did not include him, even though he rarely saw her after work now, except when Lucas Geary was out of pocket. I did not like Alicia, but neither did I like the way Matt Comfort spoke of her in her absence.

179 / DOWNTOWN

She had given up any private life she might have had for him, and he had ignored her except when it pleased him.

“Well, I imagine she could have her pick of plans,” I said, my eyes still closed to the last of the sun.