Downtown (58 page)

“What is it?” Matt yelled over to Doremus, the week-night bartender.

“Says he’s stopping the bombing of North Vietnam except in the DMZ,” Doremus yelled back. “And he ain’t going to run again.”

We sat stunned for a moment, and then Teddy began to clap. After a moment we all joined her, clapping and cheering and laughing and whistling. All except Luke.

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“Shit,” he howled. “I’ll never get to the goddamned war before it’s over! Shit!”

Still laughing, we rose and poured our champagne over his head, one by one.

On the afternoon of April 3, I went with Luke to pick up John Howard at the airport. It was one of those spring days that lures photographers outside in droves: so clear that you could see every delicate vein in the lacquered new leaves; so soft that you felt the air on newly bared arms like velvet; so suffused with every shade of green that it seemed that your very blood ran green, in harmony. The sun was warm at mid-afternoon, and Luke put the top down on the Morgan for the first time since October. The drive out the expressway was like swimming in foaming light.

I was giddy with sun and the air and the prospect of seeing John. The coming evening loomed like a radiant iceberg over everything. It was possible not to think of it, but it was not possible not to know that the grand shape of it was there.

Passing the stadium a sudden sweet gust of wisteria washed over us from some tiny lawn in the warren of old houses behind it, and I closed my eyes and took a deep breath and smiled. It was the very scent of childhood springs and home, and though I wanted neither of those two things now, still, it enchanted as only sudden scents can do.

“This minute, just right this second, is absolutely perfect,”

I said to Luke, stretching my arms over my head and arching my back. The driver of a passing big rig yelled something cheerfully and admiringly obscene, and I laughed aloud with joy and the power of my young body. I felt, for a moment, as I had last summer at the Cloister, when I realized for the first time what a formidable weapon sheer youth is.

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“I simply can’t imagine being old,” I said.

“You’re not going to live to be old if you don’t stop sticking your tits out at truck drivers,” Luke said mildly, but when I looked at him from behind my sunglasses, he was grinning.

His freckled arms were bare, too, and the wind whipped his sun-struck red hair around his head. He had stuck a plastic daisy in the ear piece of his glasses, and he looked about thirteen.

“Tom and Huck, running away from Aunt Polly,” I said, and squeezed his arm. “Oh, Luke, I can’t wait to see John!

I can’t wait until tonight! I can’t wait to get everything all settled and tell everybody!”

“My mama would say you’re wishing your life away,” Luke said.

“No, just the next few hours of it.”

We parked the car in the short-term lot and went into the terminal and down the concourse to wait for Delta flight 459 from La Guardia. It was a turnaround flight, and the passenger lobby was full of people who looked exactly like passengers for New York. They were well-dressed and im-passive, scanning newspapers and magazines, lining up for the telephone. Most of them were men. There was only one other woman near us, a square, blue-rinsed matron in a flowered silk Lilly, inspecting the crowd as if for vermin.

“Buckhead grandmama come to pick up the grand-kiddies from Manhattan,” I whispered to Luke. “The chauffeur is circling outside.”

The flight was late, and John was one of the last to de-plane. I had been peering anxiously as passenger after passenger filed out of the arrival gate, all of them looking somehow stunned, like people coming out of a darkened movie theater, none of them John. And then he was there, tall in a gray suit with a vest that I had never seen and a blue oxford cloth shirt and a striped tie, his narrow head 471 / DOWNTOWN

turning slightly from left to right, looking for us. I smiled involuntarily. His presence smote the air. Everyone in the crowd waiting to board stared at him. It was impossible not to. He looked so totally collected within his taut skin, and so gravely and imperturbably correct, that I wondered for a moment why I had ever thought he was, could be, my friend.

And then he saw us, and the sharp-planed face broke into a small smile. I felt my own smile grow.

“Oh, Luke, he looks wonderful,” I said, and started forward to meet him. Behind me, the square Buckhead grandmother said something indistinguishable and unmistakable, not bothering to lower her voice. I stopped and looked at her over my shoulder, gave her a brilliant smile, and rushed at John Howard shrieking in delight. When I reached him I threw my arms around him so hard that he stumbled backward, and then he swung me around in the air, laughing aloud. I hugged him, smelling new oxford cloth and warm skin and some bitter, green-y aftershave.

“Smoky,” he said, laughing. “God, Smokes…I’m glad to see you. Luke. Hey, Luke…”

Luke hugged him, too, and we started back down the concourse, each of us squeezing one of his arms, talking and laughing. The Buckhead grandmother gave us a long, venomous look as we passed. She moved slightly aside, as if to remove herself from contamination.

“My husband,” I said loudly to her. “Haven’t seen him in months. I just can’t wait to get him home.”

And I gave her a showy leer.

“Jesus Christ, she’s going straight to the phone and call the White Citizens’ Council,” John said in the rich, beautiful voice that I had already almost forgotten. He was grinning broadly.

“Screw her and the White Citizens’ Council,” I said. “Is this all the luggage you brought?”

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“You got a bad mouth on you, girl. I’m going back first thing in the morning,” John said. “Lordy, jetting down to Atlanta for dinner and going straight back is such a
white
thing to do. Usually us po’ blacks stay three weeks once we get somewhere. I almost didn’t know how to act on that airplane.”

“The simple darky shit don’t wash, bro,” Luke grinned at him. “You look like you just made the House of Lords. You look good.”

“Thanks,” John Howard said, “but the simple darky shit is pretty close to the truth in this case. Do you know, that’s the first time I’ve ever been on an airplane?”

“Well, don’t feel bad. Chances are not one of those cats on that plane ever rode a mule,” Luke said, and we went out into the crystal afternoon toward the parking lot. I walked decorously between them until we reached the far curb, but then I clutched both their arms and gave a great skip and swung myself between them, off the earth, like a child.

“Can’t take her anywhere,” Luke said.

On the way back into the city, crammed between them, I simply hung my head back and let the wind take my hair and the sun lie heavy on my closed lids, and listened to them talk, shouting a little over the rush of the sweet wind.

“How is it up there?” Luke said.

“It’s…funny,” John Howard replied. “Queer. I mean, there’s nothing particularly difficult or foreign about it; I know my way around pretty well, I fit in okay, my job’s not all that different from what it was at AU. I like it fine. I like the people I work with. I’ve met some congenial new folks. It’s just that nothing seems real. I can’t seem to plug into what’s important to them up there, and the stuff that was important to me down here just three months ago seems like it happened in another lifetime. The…I don’t know, the fire, the heat…it all seems so artificial now.”

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“You got some new fire going?”

“No. I can’t seem to find anything up there worth it. It’s all the war now, or social protest, or fifty different kinds of drugs, or pure politics. The movement seems almost quaint outside the South, outside Atlanta. I feel like a dinosaur. Or a mercenary, flogging something that somebody paid me to flog. Like my horse got shot out from under me.”

I felt a small chill that had nothing to do with the slanting sun. It struck me suddenly: how many mercenaries were simply people who had had their horses shot out from under them and couldn’t find another? It was a queer insight for a giddy spring day, and it made me uncomfortable.

“It feels a little realer back here,” John said tentatively. “It really does sort of swing into focus now that I’m back here.

I didn’t think it would. Not all the way real, but like something that fit once, that mattered once—”

“Come back,” I said, and he looked over at me and smiled.

I could not see his eyes behind the dark glasses, but I could see the cruel gray slash of the scar clearly in the sunlight.

“Don’t know if I can,” he said. “Don’t know if anybody can, really. Didn’t Thomas Wolfe say you couldn’t?”

“Because of your kid?” Luke said.

“No, not really. I could see him as easily from here as I can from New York, I guess. Probably for longer at a time, too. It’s a matter of money, not distance. I’m not really sure what it is.”

“Juanita?” Luke said casually, and John looked sharply at him. I did not think he was going to answer, but after a moment he did.

He shook his head, and shrugged. I could feel the movement against my shoulder.

“Nothing there,” he said. “I was looking to get Lowndes back, I guess. But that’s gone, too….”

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There was a longer silence, and then he said, “When you gon’ tell me why Matt Comfort is flying me down here and feeding me champagne and putting me up at the Regency?

Not that I care, long as his voucher’s good.”

But he smiled, and I knew that he did care.

“Let’s go back to the apartment,” Luke said over the wind.

“We’ll tell you all about it then.”

We did, laughing and interrupting ourselves in our eager-ness to savor it again, to watch John savor it. He smiled as we talked, grinned outright at the saga of the Cup Wars, and was laughing with us when we outlined the shape of the triumphant night ahead of us. We were sitting on Luke’s tiny balcony, like a ship’s deck again, its prow thrust out into the luminous green of the new leaves and the motionless snowfall of the dogwood. Across the street the little park shimmered in a surf of pink, red, and white azaleas. Stiff, formal tulips bobbed and bowed along the steep driveway of the widow’s house and Luke’s carriage house. John had taken off his coat and loosened his tie and we were all drinking wine.

“Long way from Pumphouse Hill,” he had grinned at us when we first sat down.

Now he stretched and shook his head and said, “It’s sure gonna be worth the trip down here to meet the chicken parts king of the entire Southwest and get Culver Carnes’s goat at the same time. Y’all sure Matt can pull this off?”

“It’s a done deal,” I crowed. “Tonight’s just the…the celeb-ratory parade. The last hurrah. You, of course, are the clincher. The ‘strong black presence’ that ol’ Cody Bubba requires. So see that you act strong and black.”

“Shit. You mean I can’t chat with him about my squash game and my mutual funds?”

“No, but you can tell him about choppin’ your daddy’s cotton.”

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“I’ll tell him about my daddy’s squash game and mutual funds. Daddy don’t know from cotton except swabs. Come on, Smoky, if I’m going to be a token I at least ought to get some fun out of it.”

“You could sing ‘Old Man River,’” Luke said, and we all laughed.

“I’ve got to go get dressed,” I said. “Is there anybody you want to call while you wait, John?”

He looked out over the pastel sea of trees and flowers and shook his head.

“I don’t think so, not this trip, Smokes,” he said. “Maybe next time. Thanks, anyway.”

I stood looking at him, feeling the laughter seep out of the moment, and then turned and went into the bedroom. As I turned on the shower I heard him yell, “Hey, Smoky!”

“Yes?” I shouted back.

“Wear that red dress. You know, the one you wore the night we did the presentation at the Top of Peachtree before?

The Andre dress? Wear that.”

“I always heard y’all were fools for red,” I yelled, and they laughed again, and I pulled out the red linen sheath I had worn three seasons ago, on another night of luminous triumph, and hung it in the tiny bathroom to unwrinkle in the steam while I showered.

And so we went, in our cheeky joy and finery, down Peachtree Road once more in the lucent twilight, the air so sweet that I thought I could never breathe enough of it, to sit with the city at our feet and wait for Matt to bring our deliverance to us.

They were all there when we came up on the elevator.

Doug Maloof had partitioned the bar off from the restaurant with a folding leatherette partition, and Tony’s piano was stationed against it, banked in spring flowers. Tony himself was at the piano, noodling soft rock and show tunes and grinning hugely, and the staff

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of
Downtown
sat together at a long table before the wall of windows that looked North over the heart of the city. They were dressed as for a party, in bright spring silks and crisp summer-weight suits, and all the women wore corsages of little blue daisy-like flowers. The men had single flowers in their buttonholes.

“Doug gave them to us,” Teddy smiled. “They’re as near as he and the florist could come to Texas bluebonnets. Isn’t it a fabulous idea?”

“It is,” I said, pinning mine on and waving my thanks at Doug Maloof. He beamed at me from behind the bar, where he and Doremus were putting fat green champagne bottles into silver ice buckets. Over their heads the mural gleamed, our own smiling faces seeming to shine out of it like small moons. I thought that Doug must have had them cleaned, or something, just our faces, so that they would dominate the long painting as if spotlights were trained on them. Bless Doug. He had been a wonderful friend to all of us; a surrog-ate father, really. I knew that the news of the magazine’s sale would have cut him to the quick, and that this elaborate palace coup taking place in his bar must delight his heart.

He would talk of it for years to come. He had been one of the first of Matt Comfort’s People; he would be one of us until he died. He had swept and polished and decked and shined his bar until it was fit to receive any royalty, even the Chicken Parts King of the Entire Southwest. There was no surface that did not bear fresh flowers. Even the black-veiled easels that held the presentation boards and our awards were festooned with blossoms. Even the portable recorder that held the tape of endorsing civic voices had a single perfect long-stemmed red rose laid on it. At a small, white-skirted table beside Tony’s piano, hors d’oeuvres waited under heated silver domes. Everyone at the table already had a long-stemmed glass of wine or a cocktail. Doug would, I knew, save the champagne for toasts, 477 / DOWNTOWN