Downtown (59 page)

when Matt arrived with Cody Bubba Remington. It would, I knew also, be the best that money could buy.

John went around the table, shaking hands with everyone.

I slid into a seat at the end of the table beside Luke. I looked down the long table, letting my eyes go slightly out of focus, trying to see the familiar faces just anew, as if I had not looked on them for a long time, had just returned to them from a far time and place. I felt a great turning in my breast, not quite tears, not quite joy, perhaps merely and purely love. Comfort’s People. My people. For more than a year now my community. My eyes went to the gentle brown hawk’s face beside Matt’s simian one in the mural, the face that was missing from this table. Tom Gordon’s face. Tears did sting, then. Be careful who you love, Matt had said.

They’ll be part of you always…

Beside me, Luke followed my gaze.

“I know,” he said, and squeezed my hand.

“I wish he could be here,” I said. “Wouldn’t he love this, though?”

“He would. We’ll call him in the morning and tell him all about it.”

“Oh, yes! Oh, let’s do.”

Across the room Luella Hatfield sat on the piano stool beside Tony, her head close to his as they bent over a sheet of music. Hank and Teddy had fetched her from Spelman.

I knew that she and Tony would be going over the words and music to “Downtown.” She wore a pretty chemise of yellow silk and had a corsage of the little blue flowers pinned in her sleek chignon, and looked vivid and much older, far more assured than when I had last seen her at the concert in Sisters’ Chapel. I wondered what she had made of that night, if she had been a part of the brief spurt of idiot violence or if it had somehow missed her. I hoped so. I loathed the thought of Boy Slattery’s casual hate touching this ardent, golden child.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 478

She looked up then and saw me looking at her, and smiled shyly, and I got up and went over and hugged her. John Howard came behind me, and kissed her on the cheek, and she beamed up at us both.

“Well, I hear you’re on your way,” John said to her, and her smile widened, displaying huge dimples. I looked at him curiously.

“She’s been picked to sing with the Atlanta Symphony Chorus, and she’s doing a solo at her debut in the summer season,” he said. “And there’s some heavy-duty talent scouting her from some of the record companies. I hear things about her all the way up there in New York.”

“Who you been talking to?” she mumbled, ducking her head.

“I have my spies,” he said. “We’re gonna lose you sure as shootin’.”

“Not until I finish at Spelman, nossir,” she said. “And I’m not forgetting who made that scholarship possible. I’m not ever gon’ forget that, Mr. Howard. When Mr. Comfort asked me to sing for y’all and told me you were gon’ to be here, I told him I’d come sing for you till this time tomorrow, if you wanted me to. I really did tell him that.”

“I’m grateful to you, Luella,” John said, inclining his head gravely to her. “I wish someday you would sing for me until this time tomorrow.”

“You say the word,” she said. “We’ll sing all the old songs.”

“You got it,” he said.

There was a small stirring at the bar then, and I turned to look at it, and then at the table. Everyone had fallen silent, and was looking toward the door. My heart gave a great leap, and my breath caught in my throat.

“They’re coming,” Doug Maloof called softly, and we heard the elevator bell chime, and I flew back to my seat, heart hammering, and slid in between Luke and 479 / DOWNTOWN

John. We all looked at each other and grinned, huge, incandescent grins. The room shimmered and swayed.

At the piano, Tony crashed into “Downtown”:
When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always
go…

downtown!

When you’ve got worries, all the noise and the hurry seem to
help, I know…

downtown!

Two figures appeared in the door and stopped. We stood as if a common chord had jerked us upright. Luella Hatfield threw her sleek head back and picked the song up, and the notes rose rich and golden until they bobbed and swam at the very ceiling:

Listen to the music of the traffic in the city,
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty,
How can you lose? The lights are much brighter there,
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares…

The two figures stood arm in arm, very still, Matt in his new blue suit, grinning until his mouth seemed to split his pointed face, cheeks burning red, eyes glittering behind the swoop of red hair. The other man was only slightly taller but half a hundred pounds heavier, dressed in white, his face burnt dark with the sun, his head crowned with a great white Stetson. His mouth, too, was stretched in a smile. They smiled, and smiled, and they stood there, arms joined, looking at us and the room and the girl singing and the city spread out below, just blooming into light.

“…and go downtown!” Luella Hatfield’s voice soared.

“Things’ll be great when you’re downtown…”

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 480

Matt inclined his head to us in a small, magisterial bow, and bent slowly from the waist.

“No finer place when you’re downtown,” Luella sang, and we all joined in, shouting our elation back at Matt and Cody Bubba Remington: “Everything’s waiting for you!”

Tony finished on a great, crashing flourish, and we clapped and cheered, and Matt bowed lower and lower, and then, in the silence that still rang with the glorious voice of Luella Hatfield, he went over on his face, onto the rug, taking Cody Bubba Remington down with him, and lay still in a tangle of arms and legs and a crushed white Stetson and the glittering shards of a dream.

Later that night, or rather, early the next morning, we sat on the rock verge of the little pool in the park across from Luke’s apartment, dangling our feet in the water. John Howard and Luke and I had gone there from the Top of Peachtree, not speaking of a destination, just going there as if it had been agreed upon from the start. Teddy and Hank had come later, carrying sacks of steak sandwiches from Harry’s and a six-pack of beer. They had taken Luella Hatfield home to her dormitory at Spelman first. Then they had gone to Harry’s, and then come straight to Luke’s place. They had seen the Morgan parked on the shoulder of the park, and heard our voices down by the pool, and come scrambling and sliding down. We had drunk some of the beer, but no one had eaten the sandwiches. I did not know how long we had been there, only that it was long past midnight. Time had stopped for me when Matt had hit Doug Maloof’s newly cleaned carpet.

Ever since, it had been weirdly telescoped. It might have been days since we left the Top of Peachtree.

481 / DOWNTOWN

The Chicken Parts King of the Entire Southwest was gone as surely as if he had never appeared. He had excused himself and gone to the restroom to straighten up his white suit and mauled Stetson and never came back. Doug Maloof, white-faced with misery, said that he had ordered his car and driver and gone downstairs to wait in the elevator lobby. His Lear jet probably took off from Peachtree-DeKalb airport before we reached Tight Squeeze and midtown.

“You kids go on,” Doug said, looking at our stricken faces and then at Matt, sprawled unconscious on the rug.

“Doremus and I will take him home. We’ve done it before.

We know where he lives.”

And so we had gone on. We walked around Matt and got on the elevator, all of us, and went down and got our cars and left. When we walked past Tony, he said, “I’m real sorry.” He was folding the top down over his piano when the elevator doors opened.

I knew that we must and would talk of it eventually, but we had not yet. There was, after all, nothing to say. I felt emptied out and endlessly tired, floating, unreal. I wanted desperately to climb the long driveway across from the park to the apartment and crawl into the waterbed, but I wanted more not to move. Not to speak. Not to think. Not to be.

The night was fresh and only slightly chilly, and from the dense stand of newly unfurled ferns around the pool the peepers called their silvery call. I had not heard them this spring until tonight. Overhead the stars pricked the sky. In another month, I thought, we will not be able to see them again until fall. And then I thought, but where will I be in the fall, and felt a tear slide slowly down my cheek and into my mouth. I licked it with the tip of my tongue. I felt no grief. I truly and mightily did want to go to sleep, though.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 482

Across from me Teddy gave a sobbing hiccup and scrubbed at her face. She had been crying silently since she and Hank arrived, trying hard not to, stopping, then beginning again.

Hank sat with his arm around her, but he did not try to coax her into stopping. She had his sodden handkerchief clutched in her fist, but I thought that it was useless by now.

“I thought he would do it,” she said finally, her voice rusty and frail, like an old woman’s. “I thought it was just so…possible. Such a possible thing to happen. He always made everything seem possible.”

“Well, where there’s one chicken king there’s probably another,” Luke said, but he said it abstractly, as if his mind were somewhere else. I thought it probably was, but I did not know where. I could always tell when Luke had gone away from me in his head; I could not feel his mind touching mine at those times. I could not feel it now. Come back, I said to him in my head. Stay with me.

“No,” Teddy said. “There’s not going to be another one.”

No one argued with her. We all knew that, for us and for
Downtown
, there would not be another chicken king.

After another long space, Hank said to John Howard, “So what will you do now? You going on back in the morning?

This morning, rather?”

John shrugged. He had not spoken since Teddy and Hank arrived. He had sat with one hand lightly on my back, but had said nothing.

“I think I’m going over to Memphis a little later today,” he said. “Martin’s over there with the sanitation people. Some of the others are there, too; Rosser and Tony, I think. I need to see if I can mend some fences.”

“Smokes?” Hank said. I started to speak, could not, cleared my throat.

“I’m not sure yet,” I said judiciously, as if I were consider-ing it carefully.

483 / DOWNTOWN

“Teddy-o?”

She shook her head mutely and turned it into his neck and he tightened his arm around her.

“Luke?”

I looked up at Luke. I had dreaded this moment, dimly and distantly, ever since we left the Top of Peachtree. I had thought, though, that it would not come until much later.

Certainly not this blasted night. I was not ready for it. Don’t leave me, I said to him with my eyes. Don’t leave me.

“I think,” he said, looking at Hank over my head, “that maybe I’ll go on over to Memphis with John. Just for a day or two. It sounds like it could be interesting.
Life
could probably use something on it.”

His arm was still around me. He looked down at me, and away. I said nothing. I knew that my voice had shut down along with everything else.

“You ought to stick around,” Hank said after a while. “We can run this thing, you know. If you think about it, why couldn’t we? The new guy’s not going to know anything.

Not that much has changed. What’s so different, really?

There’s always the Monday morning meeting.”

I began to laugh softly, surprising myself profoundly.

“And the Cup Wars,” I said.

The rest of them joined in, one by one, until we were all choking on laughter, giddy with it.

“And there’s always…” Hank gasped, pausing for breath, and we read the thought and shouted it together into the chilly spring predawn: “There’s always YMOG!”

We were still laughing when we dispersed. And when Luke and I and John Howard got into the Morgan to drive John to the Regency, we were still laughing, and we laughed all the way back downtown.

Epilogue

C
OME WITH ME,” MY HUSBAND SAYS FROM THE BATHROOM, where he is shaving.

“You don’t need me to do that,” I say. I am doing stomach crunches on the rug in front of the fireplace. It is late May, but New York is having one of its long, cold springs, and I have lit the gas logs. They will not heat the big room, but the fire feels good just here.

“Yeah, I do,” he says. “This time I really do need you.”

And I stop the crunches and pad into the bathroom to look into his face, because we do not use “need” lightly, he and I. It is one of our rules.

I think again, as I walk, how much I love this place. We have lived here, in the top two floors of a small building on West Thirty-ninth Street just off Fifth Avenue, for almost fifteen years. Downstairs are a living room, a kitchen, a small bath and Toby’s old bedroom, and our two vast work places.

Up here is one great room that takes up the whole floor, and here we sleep, read, live.

484

485 / DOWNTOWN

In the summer and fall we branch out onto the wraparound rooftop garden that initially sold us on the place. But this room has become home. When he published his first book, ten years ago, we added the huge skylight that runs the length of the ceiling. When I published mine, the following summer, we remodeled the bath and added the big Jacuzzi. It took me a year to collect the palms and ferns in it. Now it is not uncommon for us to lie in bed or in the Jacuzzi in the jungly dark and watch the moon on the face of the buildings up-town. Sometimes, in winter, we can watch the snow fall past the beautiful profile of the Chrysler Building. It is a magical thing. This room is the heart of us and our marriage.

Wherever in the world our work takes us, either of us, this is where we fly to when the work is over, like children at the end of their day.

“Tell me why you need me to go with you,” I say, looking into his face. He is wearing a white lather beard, and I reach up to pop a bubble or two.

“I don’t really know. I just feel like you need to come this time. This will be the fourth or fifth time I’ve been back, and you never have. I guess I’m sort of proud of myself. But it feels like more than that. I just need you.”