Downtown (44 page)

I thought of the
Life
photograph then, and of the permission that I had signed after he had told me it was just routine.

Had that been a game? I did not think it had. I thought that Luke honestly could not imagine I would have any objection to being part of something as powerful and telling as that frozen moment. He had thought that I would see, when I saw the photograph, how necessary it was that it exist and be seen. And I had. Even at my angriest and most shocked, I had seen the necessity for the photograph. It had been one artist in communion with another. He had been communicating with the thing in me that, even now, he saw more clearly than I did.

I thought of something he said this afternoon, too. It was after we had had bagels and cream cheese and lox and wonderful, strong hot coffee spiked with cinnamon that he had gotten from what he called the one decent 355 / DOWNTOWN

deli in Atlanta, and were sitting on the minuscule deck that jutted out into the very treetops above the wooded backyard of the widow’s tall brick house, lost in leaf dapple, dressed only in damp towels. Music was booming softly from his complex sound system; silvery, skittering jazz. He had put on the Swingle Singers doing “Going Baroque” and followed that with the Modern Jazz Quartet’s haunting “No Sun in Venice.”

“I don’t want you to feel hemmed in,” I said. “I don’t want you to feel like I’m making demands on you. I’m not going to do that.”

“You should,” he said. “I’m going to make demands on you. You should make them on me. I know you’ve heard that I’m a great swordsman, or whatever it is you’ve heard about me and women, and that’s true. I love women. I always have. But it’s always one person at a time, and I always try to get the terms defined right at the start. All relationships are not the same; you know right from the start that some are not going to be longterm. At least, I usually know, and I assume the women do, too. And so I say so. When there needs to be an end to things, I say that, too. And I ask my—partner, I guess—to do the same.”

“So where’s the end to this?” I said, feeling my heart squeeze with dread. I could do this, I knew; I could keep this volatile, spinning, shimmeringly physical thing going indefinitely, but I could not do it lightly. Had I been wrong in sensing that he felt that way, too? I had, after all, literally no experience in reading this sort of thing.

“I don’t see an end to it,” he said. “I want to be with you now. I will be with you. When I don’t have to be away on a shoot, where I’ll be is with you. When I can, I’ll take you with me. I’m going out tonight with Matt and John, to hear Ramsey Lewis again, and I’m not going to take you with me because it’s been planned like

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this for a while. But that’s all. After that I want us to be together. I’m going to tell Matt that tonight. All this is presup-posing that you want that, too.”

I nodded. I knew that I did. It was just what I wanted.

Perhaps it had always been what I wanted.

“No making up with Hunt? No running back to Sea Island? No juggling me and dinner at the Driving Club?”

“No. None of that. Okay, so how long do you want us to be together, then?”

“I don’t know. You can’t possibly know, either. Like I said, I don’t see an end. I’ll tell you if I do. I want you to promise the same thing. And if you ever want things to…change, I want to know about that, too.”

I knew what he meant. He meant that he knew that the day might well come when I would want more, when I would want permanence, a long commitment. Wasn’t it what we all wanted, we young women of this time in the world?

Despite all the popular cant about love and freedom, hadn’t all our lives been about that; hadn’t we been drilled and groomed and programmed for just that?

I sat at his side in the early afternoon sun and realized with surprise that I did not want that, and perhaps never had. Maybe, I thought, that was the source of the blackness after all, not the Church, not guilt, not God. Maybe it was the very heaviness of the rest of my life hanging over me. I did not want the rest of my life to be decided now. I wanted only this moment. I wanted this moment to go on endlessly, without the elephantine weight of St. Philip’s Cathedral hanging over me, of the starter house in Brookwood Hills, of the huge pink shadow of the Sea Island house. If I saw anything ahead of me at this moment it was this moment, stretching out to infinity. Work; laughter; music; talk; Matt and his great, mercurial talent and his quicksilver mind and his blatting Bahamian taxi horn; Tom with his gentleness and his

357 / DOWNTOWN

beautiful body and dry sweet smile; Teddy with her staunch, loving heart; Hank with his buoyant constancy; bylines and honors and opening nights and long lunches and blue cocktail hours full of preening and laughter; the bite and shine of
Downtown
; the days and nights of Lucas Geary; his eyes and my voice together, making life-changing wholes: images, words. His and mine. Just now. Just this.

There was nothing in any of it to hurt me. Nothing in all of Lucas Geary that could hurt me as Brad Hunt had hurt me with a half a minute’s worth, yesterday, of words.

“So what else did you do?” Teddy said. “Besides fuck like minks, I mean?”

We laughed longer at that than it warranted. Then I said,

“Oh, Teddy, everything. Nothing. But it was a wonderful day. I think it was the best day I ever spent.”

“Oh, shit,” she said. “You’re going to be absolutely impossible in love. Some people are.”

I had spoken the truth. Luke and I had, essentially, done nothing; and yet I still remember the first day we were together as if it were burned into the cells of my brain. There was a clarity about it like bright water; everything shimmered with import. After lunch we had sat long on the little deck, watching the angle of the sun change in the blue bowl of the sky above us, drinking the half bottle of cold white chablis we had found in his small refrigerator, and talking. We talked as if we had been talking together all our lives; there was no sense of beginning in our conversation. Always, Luke’s and my words to each other have been more like continuations to me. I learned

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 358

more about him and he did about me, and yet, that long, slow afternoon, they did not seem new, but like things we had only, for a little while, forgotten about each other. Under the talk the secret, tickling tug of the new physical wanting lay like a living thing.

“Who is Sonny Pickens?” I said.

“I’m not really sure. One of the new ones, one of the Berkeley bunch that wasn’t around at Selma and Lowndes County. I’ve heard of them, but I’ve never met one. Real sharp. Real angry. Real black. Into black power in a big way; the guns and the leather jackets and the berets and the salute, the whole nine yards. A hundred and eighty degrees away from the movement in the South; nothing nonviolent about these cats. Want to take the reins from the SCLC and even the moderate blacks in SNCC and CORE. Want to throw all the whites, even the most liberal ones, completely out of the loop. I know they’ve been recruiting big time in the North, in the places where the riots have been the worst and the war is heavy. What I don’t know is what guys like Sonny are doing down here. If they’re trying to enlist some of King’s guys they’d do better to let the ones like Juanita have a crack at them. At least she’s got a history with the troops down here. She was a proper little freedom rider and a support sister before she turned militant. And she’s got contacts.”

“John, you mean.”

“Yeah. But they all remember her from Selma and Lowndes. She was one of the best before she went over.”

“You think she’s trying to get John to be a Panther? From what you tell me that’s a losing battle. At least, if he’s all that loyal to Dr. King.”

“He is,” Luke said. “It’s just that…he thinks some things that should be happening aren’t. Or aren’t happening fast enough. Or maybe never will. He’s really vulnerable right now. I wish to hell she’d go on back to 359 / DOWNTOWN

wherever her home base is. I think old Sonny was a bad mistake and she probably knows that. Never should have brought that dude into the epicenter of the movement. She’ll probably take him and go on home now. Get him out of Dodge.”

“I wonder,” I said. “It looked to me like she had more in mind than turning John into a Panther.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, Lord, Luke, don’t be dense. You’ve got eyes. Didn’t you see how she was hanging all over him? Like getting him back into bed.”

“That would be the lesser of several evils,” Luke said.

“Maybe not,” I said thoughtfully.

“Listen, I’ve got some champagne,” he said. “You want some? Let’s drink a little, and then I’m going to go develop some film before John comes by. Can you find something to do, read or listen to music, or something?”

“Or something,” I said, and reached over and ran my fin-gernail down his stomach to the top of the towel.

“I’ll develop fast,” he grinned, and went and got the champagne. It was lovely, silky, tingling stuff, in a beautiful dark green bottle with a red wax seal. I did not know the brand, only that it must be expensive.

“Where’d you get it?” I said.

“My landlady. I fixed her transmission. Or her transition, as she calls it.”

He got up and went into the small darkroom off his minuscule kitchen, taking his glass with him. I dressed and combed my hair and sat, bare feet tucked under me, on the big velvet sofa in his living room, sipping at the champagne left in my glass and looking around the place where he lived.

It was not like any of the singles’ apartments I had been in in Atlanta; it had about it, in the pale afternoon sunlight, a feeling of age and a kind of elegant oddness that struck ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 360

me as exotic, foreign. I remembered then that his landlady the widow had furnished the little house with her own pieces, and that she had been born in Vienna and was said to be wealthy in the fusty, dark, mittel-European way of many Vi-ennese. The carriage house looked it, with its tall glass bookcases and enormous, dark, carved armoires and wing chairs and its many faded, tasseled silk pillows and its large, dark, gilt-framed paintings of deep-bosomed women and bearded men. Bits of decorative china and glass were scattered everywhere, and I knew that they were not Luke’s, but somehow the overall ambience of the place suited him.

The hundreds upon hundreds of books and records and the sound equipment and a few pieces of African sculpture were, I knew, his additions. Oddly, they did not clash with the widow’s things. The place spoke of Luke Geary even with little actual physical evidence of him.

I was stretched out on the sofa listening to
Carmina Burana
and reading Walker Percy when a light rap on the screened door broke into my mindless contentment and I looked up to see John Howard standing just outside it, on the cottage’s doorstep.

“Come in,” I called, and he did, and stood looking at me, squinting his yellow wolf’s eyes against the gloom.

“Hey, Smoky,” he said, as if he was accustomed to finding me alone in Luke’s living room. “Luke around?”

“Processing film,” I said. “He’ll be done in a little while.

Want some champagne? We opened a bottle and didn’t drink much, and it’s just sitting there going flat. It’s lovely stuff. Let me get you a glass.”

“Well…yeah. Thanks. Champagne sounds just right for a September Saturday,” he said, smiling, and I padded out to the kitchen and came back with the bottle and a clean, stemmed glass. It had small flowers etched on the bowl, millefleur, I thought they were called. The widow again.

361 / DOWNTOWN

Luke called a greeting from the closed door of the darkroom and John Howard yelled back affably, and raised his glass to me.

“Cheers, Smoky,” he said. “To Andre. And don’t worry about the
Life
thing. Luke said you were. It’s not going to have any repercussions. Nobody much reads it in my crowd.”

“Little do you know,” I said. “But thanks. John, I loved last night. Meeting Dr. King was something I’ll never forget.

There’s just such—I don’t know—goodness about him. It must mean a lot to work with him. How did you get hooked up with him, anyway?”

He laughed. It was a rich sound, relaxed. He looked elegant and remote sitting across from me in the widow’s wing chair, sipping the champagne. He wore jeans and a neatly pressed blue oxford cloth shirt, the sleeves rolled up on his bronze forearms. It was like having a Remington statue for cocktails.

“I guess you might say I ran away and joined him like you would the circus, because I was mad at my daddy,” he said.

“Tell,” I said.

I knew I would not have said that to John Howard the day before. The woman who did it now was not the girl who had gone to lunch yesterday and watched her future crumble at her feet. I did not know what had changed me, not precisely, anyway. Of course, I had crossed the great Rubicon that had always separated girls from women, at least in Corkie; was now someone who had done what had been known in my parochial circles as the Dirty Deed or the Black Act. I had passed over. I could never again be someone who did not know how it was. But I could not think that was why, suddenly, I felt easy and equal with John Howard.

Nevertheless, I did. Perhaps it was all simply a part of the vivid, crystal-edged day.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 362

“Well, I was just out of law school and trying to decide what I wanted to do with my life,” John said. “I was twenty-six years old and I’d been in school one way or another since I was seven. I’d thought I wanted to preach, but somehow the call I thought I had when I was a teenager had sort of faded out; with everything going on in the early sixties preaching just seemed kind of sideline stuff to me. I don’t think I was ever touched with the fire. And to tell you the truth, I think the ministry was always more a way to get at my dad than a real calling. He really wanted me in one of the professions that made some bucks, wanted me to have what he called a decent life out of the ghetto. I don’t know why he thought I’d end up in the ghetto; none of my family ever even saw one. But anyway, I went on to Howard to law school more to make peace with him than from any burning desire to practice law. And, of course, to put off preaching.