Downtown (50 page)

403 / DOWNTOWN

Neither of us would have asked Matt for the earth, and he volunteered nothing. His door was closed almost all the time now.

It was almost a week later that we learned that Matt had called his Playboy PR lady friend and gotten Alicia a job as a bunny at the Atlanta Playboy Club. Hank had seen her there when he took his out-of-town brother for drinks and dinner. Alicia was, he said, the best-looking bunny in the hutch and had more keyholders clamoring for her services than all the others put together. She fended them all off with her cool little smile and said little to them, Hank reported.

If she had seen him and his brother in the room she showed no sign. She was not assigned to their table.

“I guess it solves her problem,” I said to Luke that night.

“But I hate the very thought of it. It’s just…not right. There’s something awfully, awfully wrong about it. I’m not sure what I mean. She didn’t have to take it if she hadn’t wanted it.”

“She had to,” Luke said briefly, in the tone of voice that meant he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Don’t kid yourself. What else can the Alicias do?”

“He said she could come back to the magazine—”

“He’s full of shit. He wasn’t going to take her back after Buzzy. I don’t know which of them I’d rather kill first.”

I dropped it, but the image of Alicia Crowley in black satin tights and mesh stockings, folding her long legs into the bunny dip and stepping deftly away from the hands reaching for her tail, was a terrible one to me. I could not seem to lose it. I thought of it often, and of the slanted, beautiful eyes above the black satin. In my mind’s eye, they were lifeless. I wondered if Matt still went there, and if he did, if Alicia brought him his drinks.

The thought was, somehow, insupportable. But Matt never said.

14

W
HENEVER I THINK BACK TO THAT SUSPENDED TIME between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1967, I think of Matt and
Downtown
as a sort of juggling act. I have the notion that the magazine then was a gilded sphere that contained all of us on the staff and our habitat: the city, the ethos of the times, the people who swirled around us and formed our tribe, our clan. Matt was the juggler. He had, for some reason, stumbled, and the sphere had wobbled and skewed dangerously on the end of its pole, and indeed had spilled out one of us. I knew that Alicia was lost to us. And I knew that in his deepest heart Matt thought that Luke and I were, too.

But I think he could have righted himself and kept the sphere spinning smoothly, after a blackly comic series of contortions and near-falls, except that Tom Gordon told us all, on a morning in early December, that he was leaving the first of the year and going to New Orleans to become art director of a new city magazine there. The sphere smacked the earth then, and though we all dashed to pick up the pieces, and worked feverishly to 404

405 / DOWNTOWN

glue them back together, the entity was never again whole and shining.

We were accustomed, once or twice a month, to going across the street and around the corner to a little nameless, hole-in-the-wall cafe that served the sort of breakfasts Matt delighted in.

“Texas breakfasts,” he said more than once. “Not an egg Benedict in the place. Fried in lard and ten miles wide.

Quantity is all.”

The cafe had a big sign on the dingy mirrored wall where the booths were that said, “You are what you eat,” and inevitably Matt would crow “Ah’m an aig,” and Tom Gordon would follow with “Ah’m poke sawsidge,” and Hank would yell, “Ah’m grits an’ redeye.” I was appointed to be oatmeal, because Matt had some idea the Irish ate a lot of that, and dismissed my attempts to tell him about porridge with a sneer. Luke was biscuits, mainly because he said once a biscuit that wasn’t made with hog lard was not a biscuit at all, but a bleached turd. The nameless cafe’s biscuits were most assuredly made with lard. It probably ruined the cholesterol level of a good part of downtown Atlanta before it closed with the decade.

The food charade was funny to no one but us, most especially not the counterman and the waitress, both of whom had been there forever and seen all there was to see of downtown eccentricity. On a scale with Francis Brewton and the street preachers and the old lady who wore a white sheet, togalike, and carried a flashlight which she held aloft like a torch, people who called themselves eggs and pork sausage were small stuff indeed. But somehow the ritual of food-naming never ceased to be hilarious to us. We had just finished the litany, cackling crazily, when Tom told us.

No one spoke. I heard a swift inhalation of breath and realized that I had made it, and a little soft grunt from ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 406

Matt that sounded like someone had hit him in the stomach.

But no one said anything.

“I feel like a bastard at a family reunion,” Tom said finally.

“Maybe I should have told you first, Matt, and then everybody else, but I wanted to do it when we were all together.

I guess I thought it would be easier. For me, I mean. I don’t think I can go through this more than once.”

“Ah, shit,” Matt said softly, and I saw with incredulity that tears stood in his eyes for an instant. Then he closed them briefly. He looked defeated. Nothing else. Just…defeated.

Tom had been the first person he had hired for
Downtown
.

Far under my shock and grief, fear flickered.

Then he opened his eyes and they were flat and still. I had seen that look before. The round glasses magnified it. It meant that he was angry in the cold, implacable way that was worse by far than the more frequent bellowing rages.

After the cold ones, people suffered.

“I gather you’re going to tell us why?” he asked politely.

“It will help when I tell Culver that his prize-winning art director is jumping ship just when the magazine has won every honor in the fucking country. Probably not much, but it will help.”

Tom looked down at his plate, where the remnants of his breakfast cooled greasily. In the merciless fluorescent light his strong hawk’s face had a greenish cast, as if it had been done in marble. Even then, with awfulness and sorrow settling down over me like a cast net, I thought yet again how wonderful he looked, and how I would miss simply looking at him. Then he looked up, and the black-brown eyes were liquid with tears. My own tears overflowed and slipped down my cheeks. I would miss his sheer goodness more than anything. We all would.

“Yeah, I’ll tell you why,” Tom said. “It’s not anything you don’t all know. But I’ll say it if it’ll help. I’m going 407 / DOWNTOWN

for two reasons. One, I just can’t stand any more change. I don’t necessarily mean at the magazine, though that’s going to come, too; it has to. I mean…in the city. In the country.

It’s out there; it’s coming in on us…and I don’t think I can change with it. Something was left out of me; I’ve always thought I should have lived in one of those times when everything stayed the same generation after generation, and you could count on the world, even if it was awful. New Orleans is one of the few places I’ve ever been that feels…timeless. The tempo now is essentially the same as it was a hundred years ago. That sweet old decadent Creole world—nothing can crack it, not in the old parts, not in the Quarter. It changes the world, not the other way around.

You may eventually drown in it, but it isn’t going to blow apart on you. I need that like I need to breathe.”

I stared at him intently, trying to understand, to feel the thing that he was obviously feeling. I remembered how he had talked after his trip around the country with Luke, photographing the peripatetic young. He had hated the trip, been badly unsettled by it. The children’s crusade was set to run in the February issue. Tom would not be here to see it.

I blinked furiously, and swallowed around the cold salt lump in my throat. Still, no one spoke.

He looked down again, took a swallow of his cold coffee, and looked up. His eyes held each of ours, one by one, and then he said, “The other reason is that I’m gay, and I need not to try and live any other way any longer. I’m sick of pretending. I’m past it. I have a friend there…a close one.

We’re going to live together in the Quarter. He’s a painter.

He knew about the magazine starting up, and got me an appointment with the chamber people down there. They know about
Downtown
, of course, and that helped me. What helped most was they don’t seem to give a damn about the gay part. We didn’t talk about it, but you ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 408

could just tell that it didn’t matter. It doesn’t, down there. I don’t have to tell you that Culver would fire me in a New York minute if he found out, no matter how many prizes we won. You know that’s true.”

He looked away, out through the windows to the gray street beyond. The cold weather had held, and the people hurrying past had their heads ducked against the wind, and coat collars pulled up around their ears. I could not imagine what this talk had cost Tom Gordon. He was the most emotionally fastidious man I have ever known.

“Back to work,” Matt said after a while, and we all stood.

One by one we hugged Tom, and when we walked out, Matt walked beside him, his arm through Tom’s. No one looked at anyone else. I think we all would have wept, if we had.

I did cry that night. Luke and I went to see
Bonnie and
Clyde
and I began to cry at the end, when the two outlaw lovers began their grotesque, jerking dance of death in the bullet-riddled car. I got up and went out of the auditorium and into the ladies’ room and mopped my face with wet tissues, but it didn’t help much. As soon as the tears stopped, they began again. Finally I found my sunglasses in the bottom of my purse and put them on and went back out into the lobby. Luke was leaning against the counter, eating popcorn.

When he saw me he came and put his arm around me and led me out onto the icy street.

“Bad scene, wasn’t it?” he said as we trotted the freezing two blocks to where the Morgan was parked.

“What? The movie? Yeah, it was. I’m sorry. I can’t seem to quit crying. I think it’s Tom and not Bonnie and Clyde.”

“That’s what I meant,” he said.

Back at the apartment, in bed, lying in the curve of Luke’s arm, I began to cry again. He brushed the hair off 409 / DOWNTOWN

my face and said, “It’s really the best thing for him, babe.”

“I know,” I sobbed. “I know it is. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I love him; I want what’s best for him. It’s just that…it seems like he’s going to die, not leave. It feels like somebody just said they were going to die.”

“Well, Tom’s finally going to start living. We can go see him; we will. I think what you’re feeling is that
Downtown
—or what we know of it—is going to change. And it will. It won’t be the same without Tom; he was probably the best of us. But it isn’t going to die. There’ll be a new art director and Matt’ll make him part of the team within a week, and we’ll still have
Downtown
. It’ll just be a little different.

Downtown
won’t die until Matt lets it.”

“You think not?”

“I know not. We’re all special people, I think, the ones who are part of it, but he’s what pulls us together, and the…the sum of us won’t scatter unless he pulls out of it.

Can you see Matt pulling out of
Downtown
?”

I could not. But still, the grief I felt for the perfect, soaring, spinning comet that
Downtown
had been when I came to it a year before was real; it was profound. It followed me through the dark-bright days along the path toward Christmas like a sad and faithful beast.

On the surface, not so much changed. Matt was still distracted and distant, but no more so than he had been before Tom told us he was leaving. He was abrupt and curt and often downright churlish, but I remembered that he was often so, to a lesser degree, around holidays. Matt hated holidays, for reasons that no one ever really ascertained.

“It’s because he wants to be God or president,” Teddy grinned ruefully when Matt had snarled at Cecelia ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 410

Henley, the pretty little new receptionist he had hired to replace the vanquished Mary Kay Crimp, about the gigantic, ceiling-brushing Christmas tree she had dragged in on her lunch hour. “He only hates the official holidays. The ones he organizes himself, like the lake last summer, he adores.

Don’t take it personally, Cecelia. He almost blew me out of the water one year when I put a wreath on his door, but he didn’t take it down.”

And he didn’t order the tree out of the office. When we had gotten it decorated it looked very pretty indeed, and was much admired throughout the chamber. In fact, the artificial silver and blue tabletop tree that had skulked in the corner of the chamber lobby upstairs for years, Teddy said, disappeared after Culver Carnes saw ours, and a live one, even larger and more elaborately dressed, went up.

And the great Christmas War began. Whenever we added a bauble the chamber added three. Our mistletoe bunch became, upstairs, garlands and masses of it. Cecelia strung up tinsel; the chamber offices looked like the web of a great silver spider. After a weekend in mid-December, the chamber staff came in on Monday morning to find their tree wearing, in addition to its expensive new baubles, the chamber’s entire complement of cupholders. Culver was in Matt’s office, the door closed, within minutes of the discovery, and we could hear him shouting all the way to the water cooler outside our offices. But in the end nothing came of it. All of us had demonstrably been somewhere else over that weekend; work slowed to a sludgy trickle around Christmas, and no one stayed late or worked on weekends. Matt himself had been in Gatlinburg with the Playboy PR woman, skiing. I have never seen an angrier man than Culver Carnes when finally he left Matt’s office. He was so red of face and short of breath that we could hear him

411 / DOWNTOWN

breathing as far as the elevator lobby. We waited until the bell dinged before we collapsed in grateful laughter.

We never did find out who did the Christmas tree job, though I sometimes thought that Hank and even Matt himself were the culprits in the other coffeecup capers. Matt stoutly denied culpability.