Free Downtown by Anne Rivers Siddons

eyes, and then opened them and turned the knob and went in. Still smiling, I stood in the small lobby and looked around for the people who would soon shape my world, hearing my heart in my ears and feeling it in my throat.
    There was no one there. I could hear, off behind one of a row of closed red-lacquer doors, people laughing, and someone who seemed to be singing, but there was no sign of anyone. The lobby was so crowded that it was hard to take it in at first glance. A blue sofa piled so high with coats and cartons of glossy magazines and books and records that they spilled over onto the tweed carpet sat against one wall, and red tub chairs similarly laden were grouped around it.
    A coat rack held more coats, and, in front of the sofa, there was a coffee table on which sat a real stuffed coyote or timber wolf—it was so scruffy it was impossible to tell precisely what it was. On the coyote’s head was a Mexican sombrero.
    Three steel desks stretching toward the back of the lobby held signs that had women’s names on them, and typewriters, and in-boxes overflowing with papers. Two tall windows gave onto the jumbled rooftops of the city, shimmering with light. After the windows the individual offices ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 56
    began. There were names on these doors, too, but I could not read them. From the ceiling hung a miniature outhouse with a sign on it that said “Southern Comfort.” I simply stood there, not knowing what I should do next.
    From behind one of the floor-length drapes at the first window an arm with its hand formed into a claw emerged slowly. I stared at it in silence. The fingers opened and closed like a spider flexing its legs, and the arm stretched farther from behind the drape, and then its owner followed. He was a tall, swarthy young man with thick black hair falling over hooded brown eyes, and he had a dark hawk’s face and the most elegant body I had ever seen. His shoulders were wide and square and his long waist tapered in a narrow vee toward lean hips and long legs. He wore a soft, beautiful gray tweed coat and lighter gray flannel trousers and a white oxford cloth button-down shirt. His tie was askew.
    “Speak,” he commanded solemnly. His voice was soft and deep.
    “Mr. Comfort, please,” I said. I could hear it as plainly as he must: my faint Irish brogue, almost vanquished by now, had so thickened with nerves as to make my speech almost unintelligible.
    A slow, very white grin broke his brown face.
    “Well, darlin’, and who might you be, then?” he said, in a perfect parody of Corkie. “Sure, and ’tis shamrocks you’ll be sellin’ us this fine mornin’.”
    The people I had heard but not seen came out of the last office in the row and stood looking at me. My chest caught fire.
    “I’m Ashley O’Donnell,” I said faintly, thinking as I said it how silly and contrived the name sounded, like something from a comic book for teenage girls. The fire spread to my cheeks and forehead.
    “I work here,” I whispered.

    57 / DOWNTOWN
    Hank Cantwell broke out of the small crowed and caught me up and swung me around, my feet bumping against his shins.
    “Well, old Holy Smoke,” he yelled excuberantly, and set me down, and they moved in then, crowding around me.
    Over their murmurs of greeting I heard for the second time the rich music of Matt Comfort’s voice, demanding “Is it her?
    The once and future Smoky O’Donnell? Bring her in here and let me get a look at her, by God!”
    “This is your new senior editor, Smoky O’Donnell,” Hank said to the people around me, and they smiled and said, “Hi, Smoky,” and “Welcome, Smoky O’Donnell,” and “Glad to have you on board,” and other things like that, and walked behind me as Hank ushered me into the last office in the row.
    And so my time with Comfort’s People began.
    After I had known him for a while, I realized that Matt Comfort could have had no other office than the precise one he had; that given another he