Downtown (40 page)

“You okay?” she said. “You came steaming through here like a bat out of torment.”

“Fine,” I said. “Just way past deadline on the guide. Can you keep the screaming crowd at bay?”

“You betcha,” Sister said. “This dog can hunt.”

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Sister might look like a Mary Quant poster girl, but the South Georgia wiregrass regularly booby-trapped her speech.

I had to grin, and felt a little better. A little.

“Thanks,” I said, and bent to the piled up cutlines and subheads. And I learned, really for the first time, something that I had not known before: work could save me. Work would save me.

I did not look up, and I did not think about Brad Hunt until my door opened abruptly hours later and I looked up to see Luke Geary standing in it, and the miserable lunch at the Top of Peachtree came flooding back over me. I blinked away sudden tears, and swallowed past a huge, cold salt lump at the base of my throat.

“You busy?” Luke said.

The tears and the salt lump made me angry; if anyone was hurting from the noon encounter, it should be Brad, not me.

He was the betrayer, the ambusher, not I. I took it out on Luke, thinking even as I spoke that perhaps I should have gotten angrier at him earlier. It seemed important to me that somebody pay for the ugliness of that lunch besides the victim. I would not think of myself as anything else.

“Whatever the hell made you think I was busy? Could it possibly have been the sign and the closed door?” I said furiously.

“Ah,” he said, as if something had come clear to him, but he did not speak. He stood for a moment, leaning on the door, looking boneless and lazy, as he always did.

“The
Life
thing,” he said presently. “I’m still on your list.”

“It will no doubt grieve you deeply to learn that I have not thought about you or the
Life
thing for a substantial number of hours,” I snapped.

“Good,” he said. “Because I came to take you over to Paschal’s. Ramsey Lewis just came in town. John and ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 322

some of the others are going to be there. I thought you might…want to show the flag a little.”

“Oh, sure. Go waltzing right into La Carrousel when that damned photograph is about to hit the stands, let everybody get a good look at little whitey turncoat—”

“Smoky, there is a very good chance that not everybody in the universe reads
Life
,” Luke said. “Most of those guys stopped fooling with the popular media years ago. But if there’s the slightest chance you think they’re going to think you’ve joined the Klan or something, you ought to go meet a few of them and let them get to know you a little. You may need some contacts among them one day. After they meet you, it won’t be a problem. I promise that. You’ll be with me, and I know a lot of them, and John knows the rest, and…it just won’t be a problem. It’s the least I can do—”

“Oh, well, thanks, Lucas, but I don’t think I want to be your duty date for the prom,” I said. “Don’t worry about it, okay?”

“It’s not a duty date,” he said. “I thought while we were at it I’d make a serious pass at you. While the cat’s away, and all that. Warm you up with a little Ramsey Lewis, ply you with drink, invoke the spirit of the young heroes of the movement, and then, while your delicate senses are reel-ing—kapow. As they say.”

“No thanks. As they say.”

But I felt the corners of my mouth quirk. Damn him, he was unconscionable, outrageous….

“King’s going to be there.”

And prescient. As long as I had been in Atlanta, I had yearned to meet Martin Luther King Jr. He was, to me, a hero of epic dimensions. But there seemed no way that I ever would. I could not imagine that our paths would simply cross.

“You don’t know that.”

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“Yeah. I do know that. I know that for a fact.”

I sat looking at him, and he looked back, grinning slightly.

“Make a good photo-essay for somebody,” he said thoughtfully. “King and his lieutenants kicking back. Heroes at play. I thought I’d take along a camera. Of course, somebody would have to write it, and to do that, they’d have to be there—”

“You are beyond shame,” I said, finally and unwillingly smiling a little, and got up and fished my purse from the bottom drawer, to go into the ladies’ room and fix my face.

“But not beyond reach,” he said, ambling after me as I went out of the office. “I may not be a pushover, but I can be had. You, for instance, could have me if you played your cards right.”

The pain of lunchtime; the enormity of what we had done to each other, Brad and I; the violent wrenching away of the fragile new safety; the sheer humiliation, took me suddenly, along with the held-back tears. They spewed up into my throat and hung there. I took a deep breath, and willed them back savagely. I literally willed the sickening pain away, willed my mind and heart white and empty. Emptiness came.

I waited, and took a long, tentative breath. Emptiness held.

All right, then. I would make my own safety.

“Lucas Geary,” I said, “we are going to start with several—several—drinks at an oasis of my choice. Not a cheap one. And then we are going to go to the Coach and Six and I am going to have wine and double lamb chops and maybe two desserts. And then I am going to have a stinger, a white crème de menthe one. And after that maybe—maybe—we will go and listen to Ramsey Lewis until the last cent you will ever have is gone. And we will leave only when it is. Do you read me?”

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 324

“Loud and clear,” he said. “Go fix your face. Your lipstick is all over it. I’ll meet you at the car.”

I went into the ladies’ room and fixed my face and added a great squirt of Ma Griffe, something I usually forgot to do.

I started out and then went back and squirted a jet of it down into my bra, just where the swell of my breasts started. It felt cold, silken, sensuous.

“Really last chance,” I said to the Blessed Virgin, but she said nothing, and I ran out of the ladies’ room and onto the elevator and rode down to meet Luke Geary in the dying day.

We did indeed have several drinks, or at least I did, at the Top of Peachtree. I wanted to get back what it had always been to me; I wanted to lose the ugliness of the lunch hour and reclaim the lovely, lavender twilight full of laughter and sovereignty that it had always meant. After the drinks, I did.

When you have a choice between laughter and wounding, ferocious pain, laughter will always win. It is when laughter is not an option that pain will kill you. I think that Luke Geary saved something very real in me that night, because he kept me laughing. The liquor helped.

He sat across from me, looking as threadbare and disheveled as if he had passed the night in a mission for the indigent; unlike Matt, his disorder did not include expensive clothes and careful barbering. But somehow he looked fine to me that night, arresting, comforting. Luke was never handsome, but he was as appealing to look upon as a raw-boned Irish setter puppy. It was a completely misleading appearance, belying his complexity and cynicism and the odd distance in him. But I took pleasure in it, as I did the cold gin and tonics that he kept coming, one after another.

I noticed somewhere

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along the way that he was drinking beer, and not a lot of that, but it did not matter to me. On this night I did not feel that I had to impress Lucas Geary with my gentility, restraint, or anything else.

He told me funny stories about himself, stories about his boyhood and the people he had encountered and photographed since he had left Sewanee. He had graduated from college the year I had; that surprised me, faintly. He must be almost exactly my age. I had thought he was older.

“You’ve been around enough for several lifetimes already,”

I said, after listening to his adventures photographing the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi and Alabama and now Georgia. He made all of them scurrilously funny. No one, freedom rider or klansman, escaped the honeyed acid of his tongue.

“Only after school,” he said. “Before that I was the prover-bial fly in amber. You ain’t seen amber till you’ve seen Baltimore and Sewanee, Tennessee.”

“How did a good Irish Catholic boy end up at Sewanee?”

I said. I slurred it a little, I think.

“Scholarship,” he said. “I applied for every scholarship they knew about in the guidance office in high school. That was the biggest one, and when I won it, my father suddenly developed an Anglican turn of mind. He’d given up on me playing football for Notre Dame, but I think he still had something at Georgetown in mind. But Sewanee’s stipend was too good to turn down. It was fine with me; I was real taken with the Fugitives at that time—you know, the Agrarian Manifesto—and Andrew Lytle was teaching at Sewanee then. It was while I was there that I found out about photography.”

“Was your family very poor?” I said, feeling that I could say anything, in this envelope of glowing intoxication, to Luke Geary.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 326

“No. They were very rich. They still are,” he said matter-of-factly.

I goggled silently at him. I had always assumed he was a child of poverty, and had clawed his way up out of it via his camera.

“It’s the clothes,” he grinned. “Plus the fact that I guess I look like po’ white trash. Daddy said I did once; said I looked like I had chronic hookworms. After that there didn’t seem any sense in ties and starched collars. I loved it when the flower chirrun came along. Now we all look the same. Don’t judge a man by his clothes, Smoky.”

“Rich,” I said wonderingly. “Everybody around me turns out to be rich. Lord. First Brad, and then you tell me John Howard’s folks are well off, and now you—I need to get out of here and find some proletariat.”

I slurred that, too, and he laughed again.

“That sort of explains you and John Howard,” I said. “Two little rich boys in the middle of a poor folks’ movement. No wonder you get on so well.”

“Maybe,” he said. “I always thought we got on because we’re both outsiders. I always felt like I was a slum kid who got adopted into a rich family, or something; the way we lived in Baltimore never seemed to fit right. Nothing did until I found cameras and the Civil Rights movement. And John was not only well off, he never really realized he was black. They lived in a white neighborhood, and he went away to a mostly white prep school. His father was adamant about that. His dad was light; he could have passed, John said, but he didn’t want to do that. His practice was among blacks, and he couldn’t have made any money trying to practice among white folks. But John always thought he wanted his only son to pass, because from the time he was born they raised him like he was a white kid. The result was, of

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course, that he never felt like he fit in anywhere. He went to an all-black theological seminary when he was barely seventeen because no white one would take him and then on to Howard Law School because his father insisted on a law degree, and he said it was only in those places that he found out he really was black, and these blacks weren’t exactly run-of-the-mill. He’s still not really used to it. I think it’s one reason he got so deeply into the SCLC and so attached to Dr. King. They made him feel like he truly belonged, somewhere, for the first time in his life. He’ll do anything for them; I think it’s why he put himself in the line of fire so often. He’ll never forget his loyalty to them. When we first met, during the Washington march in nineteen sixty-three, it was like we knew each other from the cradle. Inside two hours we were making jokes about the way we were raised.

Two outsiders trying somehow to pass.”

He paused. Then he said, “It’s why you’re so easy with him, isn’t it? I think it is; I think it’s why he’s comfortable with you. Otherwise he simply wouldn’t be around you.

You’re an outsider, too. And you just never had a thing about Negroes. You can’t, if you’re raised really Irish. I know about that. If you’re brought up with the hard-core Irish thing, there’s just not any time or room to single out the Negroes.

They’re only an incidental part of the bigotry you learn about everything that isn’t Irish.”

I had not thought about this before. Finally I said, “My father hated the Negroes. He thought they were taking jobs that ought to belong to the men in Corkie. He tried to organize a rebellion against them; it eventually got him fired. He never had anything good to say about them after that.”

“Ah, but that was because they took something from an Irishman,” Luke grinned. “He’d have hated the ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 328

Lutherans, if he thought they’d taken Irish jobs. He’d have hated anybody who did that. You have to understand that with the Irish, hating is a reaction against a threat to the Irish.

With your garden-variety Southerner, it’s hating for the blackness that counts. People say that white Southern prejudice is a matter of economics and culture, that whites hate Negroes who threaten their jobs and their little bit of social supremacy. But there ain’t no hate like a rich white Southerner for a nigger, baby.”

Suddenly I was tired of it all.

“White, black, Irish, not Irish, rich, poor,” I said. “The hell with all of it. I’m hungry. I want lamb chops before your money runs out.”

“It’s not going to,” he said. “I’m putting it all on Matt’s tab. Figure he owes you.”

“How can you do that?”

He shrugged.

“I don’t hang around
Downtown
strictly for the honor of shooting photo-essays for Culver Carnes,” he said.

“Then why?”

“Let’s just say Matt finds a way to disguise my occasional, ah, indulgences, in the new business development budget.

Don’t look so shocked, Smoky. Half of what Matt does is trade-off or write-off. He couldn’t run the magazine on the budget the chamber gives him. They know that.”

“Then I’m changing to surf ’n’ turf,” I said.

“Let the good times roll,” Luke said, and he paid the check and we left for the Coach and Six.

We did have lobster, though not the ubiquitous surf ’n’

turf that dominated Atlanta menus then. Luke had broiled stuffed lobster and I had a silken, elegant Thermidor, and white wine like a kiss of air, and something many-layered and chocolate sporting thin shavings 329 / DOWNTOWN