Downtown (23 page)

“She sure could,” Matt said. “All at one time, probably.”

Something cold and argumentative had crept into his voice, and Hank said, “Matt, tell Mr. Fairchild about the piece you’ve got Tom Gordon and Luke off on.”

Matt was silent for a moment, and I thought he was going to argue with or speak sharply to Hank, but then he laughed and said, “Great save, Cantwell. Well, Oliver, it’s this…”

and I sat up to listen, once more, because I thought the story was going to be one of the most exciting and valuable ones we would run in
Downtown
.

Lucas Geary had been in San Francisco back in January for the much-ballyhooed Human Be-In held in the Haight-Ashbury district. To me, a continent away in a city so self-absorbed by its own trajectory that news from the Outside seemed to reach it, like blown smoke, months later, the Be-In had seemed only another of the raucous and somehow exotic commotions stirred up by the legendary San Francisco hippies, who for sheer theater put our own Tight Squeeze denizens in the shade. But Lucas had come back moved and somehow changed by it, and had brought with him photographs that were stunning in their particularity and portent.

“It’s different; it’s the start of something else entirely,” he told us at a staff meeting. Lucas was never articulate with words. But the photographs touched Matt; he seemed to extrapolate from them what Lucas was trying to say. It was always his best gift, that ability to leap, to make connections.

We all felt the power of those black-and-white images, but Matt knew it for what it was.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 180

A day or two later he announced a story idea, and we could tell he was enormously excited about it. He was fairly humming with energy, fiddling with the change from his pockets and his watch until Teddy finally reached over and took them away from him.

He wanted to send Lucas and Tom Gordon around the country, to the great urban centers, to see, as he said, what was going on with the young. They would find the pockets of activity and unrest, the enclaves in major cities like the Haight in San Francisco and Tight Squeeze in Atlanta, and do a photo-essay on them. He wanted to call it the Children’s Crusade because so many of the young were very young indeed, and it was his intention that only the images and Tom’s art direction of them would carry the message. There would, perhaps, be a few captions, nothing more. The story was in the young faces. He thought it would have value and pertin-ence for
Downtown
’s readers; send a message to the city.

Culver had not thought so, but Matt had dangled the prospect of major national advertising in support, and Culver had capitulated.

“I had to promise him his choice of the next three YMOGs, though,” Matt said. “Smoky, be warned.”

Oliver Fairchild Senior and Junior looked at each other, and then, gravely, at Matt.

“Interesting,” Teddy’s father said. “And what message do you think these…ah, hippies…out there in California and in Boston and Washington and so forth might have for us down here? Except for that little nest around Tenth Street, we don’t see much of ’em. Seems to me our kids are all, you know, going to school and getting summer jobs or off at camp, things like that.”

Teddy closed her eyes and Hank Cantwell and I looked at each other. He hadn’t a clue, then, Teddy’s father. Nor, for that matter, did her brother. In their world, in 181 / DOWNTOWN

Buckhead, in the Northwest, that was precisely what the young of the great houses were doing. The world outside the boundaries of Buckhead did not, for them, exist.

Matt looked for a long moment at Oliver Fairchild, and then shrugged and reached for his fresh drink and downed half of it.

“They’re what we’re going to have next, Oliver,” he said.

“They’re the future. Seems to me we ought to spend a little time with them.”

“Surely, not here,” Oliver Fairchild murmured, smiling.

“This is a pretty simple little old world down here, when you get right down to it.”

“It’s going to change. All of it is,” Matt said mildly, but there was a glitter in the eyes behind the glasses. I thought of Rachel Vaughn and her defiant, pitiful little wheel of birth control pills, in the IHOP bathroom. I thought of John Howard’s ruined face. I looked from Matt Comfort to the Fairchilds, father and son, and to Brad. All three were regarding Matt with grave, courteous interest, their faces attentive and interested. And yet, nothing he had said had changed them.

That’s the difference, I thought suddenly. They change him. Somehow, when he is with the rich and powerful of Buckhead, the people who live in these big houses and belong to the clubs, who make the policies and the rules, he is changed by them. He becomes, just slightly, someone else.

But they don’t. He does not change them.

And then I thought, if he can’t, nothing can. Nothing will.

It was a disquieting thought.

There was a small silence, like a drawn breath, and then the sun-dappled late afternoon flowed on. From the distant kitchen I could hear the clink of china and silver as Teddy’s mother and her cook and butler put together trays of picnic food to bring out onto the terrace.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 182

“There’s time for one more round,” Oliver Fairchild said, and rose to fetch them.

I stretched, and said, “I think I’ll go get out of this wet suit. Teddy, you coming?”

“Yes,” Teddy said, and at that moment, from the front of the big house, we heard the silvery claxon of an automobile horn. It drifted around through the great banks of rhododen-dron and Cape Jessamine down to the terrace, and rode over the flabby little slappings of the pool water like birdsong.

“Eng-a-land swings like a pendulum do,” sang out the little horn, in the first line of the nonsense song that was on everybody’s lips that spring.

“Shit,” said Matt Comfort. “It’s that asshole Buzzy,” and most of us on the staff groaned.

Leo DiCiccio (“Call me Buzzy”) was the cherished only son of an Italian family from Boston that had migrated South.

Enzo DiCiccio, Buzzy’s father, had made a fortune in used cars. His pennanted dealerships bestrewed the burgeoning Atlanta suburbs like kudzu, and his tight, dark, fistlike face dominated prime-time television hours, braying of cream puffs and deals like your mama would offer you. Everyone knew Enzo DiCiccio in one way or another. Almost no one knew Buzzy. Buzzy spent every waking hour that he could escape his father’s ham-fisted domination trying to remedy that.

Buzzy was short and square and so hirsute that black chest and arm hairs crawled from his shirt apertures as if they were trying to escape. He had a low forehead and a piratical Sicilian nose, and he had been one of the first of Atlanta’s young bachelors, as he called himself, to adopt the collar-brushing hair and mustache of the flower children. He looked, said Matt, whom he worshiped and emulated as nearly as possible, and who detested and

183 / DOWNTOWN

regularly insulted him, like a hairy telephone booth. Buzzy worked nominally for his father, who also insulted him but made up for it with an enormous, unlimited allowance and more playthings than Howard Hughes had. But in actuality Buzzy spent his time trying to screw every wellborn Atlanta debutante he came within range of, and trying to be Matt Comfort. He was conceited in the profound way only the adored only son of an Italian mama can be, glaringly conspicuous in his manner and dress and consumption of goods and services, and underfoot at
Downtown
so often that Culver Carnes thought for a while that Matt had hired him. That was Buzzy’s finest hour.

He just happened to come into restaurants where we were lunching, just happened to be at the openings of the new clubs and lounges that we were invited to, just happened to have talked his father into setting him up in the penthouse apartment at the Howell House, where Matt lived in far less splendor on a lower floor. He had, it was said, a round, satin-covered bed with a mirror over it, a new XKE Jaguar every year, a powerful inboard motor boat berthed up on Lake Lanier that he had named the
Downtown II
, and an endless stash of liquor and recreational drugs in both apartment and boat. Many of Atlanta’s prettiest girls dated him—once. No one, debutante or girl Friday, dated him much more than that. There was talk about Buzzy DiCiccio, vague and gray as smoke: that he had no boundaries, went too far, had sinister friends in dark shirts and white suits with no visible means of support who hung around him, had a strange, canted streak of cruelty, a darkness in him. To know him casually was to think him simply a rich buffoon who aspired to preppiedom and who could not be insulted or driven away. To know him a little better was to know you were very wrong about that. Everyone I knew who knew ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 184

Buzzy was just a shade afraid of him under the contempt.

Everyone but Matt.

He came around the side of the house grinning and swaggering. He wore tartan swim trunks and a blue oxford cloth shirt loose over it, both abysmally wrinkled. He wore tinted round wire-rimmed sunglasses. He wore, as Matt often did, Bass Weejuns without socks. The only difference that I could see was that a small gold cross or pendant of some sort glinted in the mat of black hair on his chest, and gold and diamonds winked from his short, hairy fingers.

At his side, honey hair cascading over her face, eyelet cover-up only marginally covering a minute black swimsuit, sauntered Alicia, hip shot and lazy.

“Well, he’s finally succeeded in being you, Matt,” Hank grinned. “Right down to the accessories.”

“Bite my ass,” Matt said. He did not move on his chaise, but I could sense that his small body had stiffened like a terrier’s on point.

“Sorry we’re late,” Buzzy shouted, “but I couldn’t get this girl out of the shower.”

“Buzzy, you are such a fool,” Alicia said in her wispy voice, and he grinned ferally.

“I hope you got plenty of booze, Oliver,” he said to Oliver Fairchild, who inclined his head politely toward him. “This pretty thing has plumb wore me out.”

Among his other less than endearing traits, Buzzy continually affected what he thought to be a Southern accent. It gave his offensive words about Alicia a cast of slow, thick sleazi-ness. I am sure that I saw Teddy’s father flinch ever so slightly.

“Plenty, plenty,” Oliver Fairchild said. “Let me get you something. Let’s see, I’ve got gin and tonic, and—”

“A double one of those for me,” Buzzy said, looking to see what Matt was drinking. “And another for this little gal here.”

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“I don’t believe I care for anything,” Alicia said, and coiled herself down like a cat in the sun on the grass next to Matt’s chaise.

“Hello, boss,” she said.

“Alicia,” Matt said, and nodded. He drank down the rest of his drink.

“I take it you know Buzzy,” he said to Oliver Fairchild.

“His daddy sells lots of cars.”

“Well, I certainly know his father,” Oliver Fairchild said, smiling at Buzzy. “See him at the Commerce Club sometimes.

He’s always talking about his boy, real proud of you, he is.

Glad to meet you, Buzzy.”

“Oliver,” Buzzy said, nodding carelessly. But his swarthy face reddened.

We drank in the sort of silence that Buzzy habitually engendered for a small space of time, and then Buzzy said, “I was just with Ben Cameron, Matt, and he told me about the new series you’re doing. The Focus thing. Fine idea; I told him so. Told him what I’ll tell you: that’s right up my alley.

I want to be a part of that baby. I’ve got some dynamite ideas; I’ll tell you over lunch or dinner one night next week.

I could take one of the committees off your hands—”

“We’re not very far along with it, Buzzy,” Matt said.

I looked at him, my heart beginning to beat faster.

“Are we going to do it, then?” I said. “I mean, are you thinking about it?”

Matt looked at me silently.

“Don’t I take care of you, Smoky?” Brad said.

I looked at him; he was smiling carelessly, lounging in his chair, but there was something steely in his face. Matt turned his eyes to Brad, but he still did not speak.

“Yeah, we’re going to do it,” he said finally. “As you probably already know. Ben Cameron went to see Culver and Dr. King the same day, and it was a done deal ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 186

before I even knew about it. Ben insisted on you and Geary, and King insisted on John Howard, and Culver almost wet his knickers agreeing. It’s going to be a monthly series, the Focus Report. The first one is going to cover day care; you’ll get on it in the next week or so, when Lucas is back. I’m not even going to ask how you managed that one, Smoky, although it does appear your boyfriend had a little something to do with it.”

He smiled at Brad. It was not a smile you’d particularly want to see again. I blushed red and hot. I knew how it must seem to him: the two major stories I had done so far had been at the behest of someone else. I thought that I would pay for Focus.

“Just a suggestion to Ben the other day, when Smoky and I were at the house,” Brad smiled lazily. “He was there trying to soften my old man up to do something about Boy. It was nothing more than you and I have talked about one time or another, Matt; trying to get Focus to do something concrete, get some real teeth. I didn’t push Smoky on Ben. She and he hit it off immediately.”

“I’ll bet,” Alicia murmured.

“Actually, it’s a good idea, and Ben got it through to Culver when it would have taken me a year,” Matt said, and I sighed in relief. He could be fair; I forgot that sometimes. Fair and generous. I was surprised only because I knew that he did not like Brad. He tolerated him when he joined us for drinks or lunch, but he did not treat him with the affectionate, careless jibing that he accorded his staff. Brad knew it and I knew it. Brad professed not to understand it, but I did: I was one of his people, even when he was annoyed with me, as he often was. Matt did not easily allow anyone to lay a claim to one of Comfort’s People.

“I’m really doing it?” I said.

“You really are. After, of course, you’ve finished the guide and your YMOG every month.”

187 / DOWNTOWN