Free Downtown by Anne Rivers Siddons Page B

and forearms smudged with ink. But even the few times I saw him in old clothes or a bathing suit, he still had more pure style than anyone I have ever known. In the panache-starved South of his day, he was Merlin and Huck Finn and Casanova rolled into one small body, and I don’t think there was anyone who ever met him who did not come away from the meeting convinced that he was tall.
    Holding me by the arm, he scowled at the sofa and said,
    “Goddammit, get up, Gordon, and let this lady sit ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 60
    down. You too Stubbs. Alicia, dear heart, run get us all some fresh coffee, will you, darling? The rest of you guys go on back to work, unless Patterson just fired the lost of you. I ain’t your mother.”
    The tall, hawk-faced young man grinned and unfolded himself from the sofa, followed by a stocky, bearded man in sunglasses. A stunning young woman in a muted plaid wool mini and red tights on her endless legs stood up from one of the Eames chairs and gave Matt Comfort and me both an unreadable look and glided out of the office, trailing clouds of silky ash-blond hair and Joy perfume. I would have bet her duties, whatever they were, did not ordinarily include fetching coffee for the new girl. Except for Hank and a com-pact, snub-nosed girl in a navy A-line skirt and white turtleneck, the rest of the people in the office—young men, all of them—got up and straggled out, grumbling good-naturedly.
    Hank patted the sofa and I sat down on the edge of it. It was low, and I could find no place to put my knees that did not hike my rolled-up skirt indecently up my thighs. I put my purse in my lap and dropped my knees as far as they would go, and Matt Comfort laughed and tossed me an afghan from the arm of the sofa.
    “God bless miniskirts,” he said. “I had the sofa legs shortened when it was obvious they were more than a passing fad. Well, let’s see. The lazy sonofabitch on your left is Tom Gordon, our art director. That there behind those Foster Grants is Charlie Stubbs, our other senior editor. He’s just back today from his honeymoon; we won’t know till he takes his glasses off if he had a good time or not. Hank you know. This precious muffin here is Teddy Fairchild, who handles production. Look upon her with abject terror.”
    The chunky girl smiled and murmured hello. She wore little makeup and had her brown hair pulled back with a hair band, and she had a nice smile that crinkled her 61 / DOWNTOWN
    brown eyes and her nose. I smiled back. The blonde came back with a tray of coffee and put it down on the coffee table and sank down onto the floor beside Matt Comfort’s chair all in one sinuous motion. She brushed the long, shining curtain of hair out of her eyes with the back of one slender hand and waggled the fingers of the other toward Tom Gordon, who was fishing a Viceroy out of a pack. He handed her one, and she put it between her pink lips and waited while he produced a lighter.
    “This is Alicia Crowley, otherwise known as Tondelayo,”
    Matt Comfort said. “She’s a terrible secretary, but everybody upstairs at the Chamber wants to get in her pants, so we keep her around for insurance.”
    “Don’t you wish,” Alicia Crowley said. Her voice was tiny and breathy, like Jackie Kennedy’s. I knew two things about her in that instant, absolutely and without question, though I did not know how I knew: that she would never be an ally of mine and that Matt Comfort was sleeping with her.
    “This is the whole staff, except for our receptionist and editorial secretary and the ad salesmen and our comptroller, who’s off somewhere comptrolling,” Matt Comfort said.
    “Most of the editorial and graphic stuff we freelance out. That gang that just left are some of them; from the Constitution .
    They’re good reporters and some of them are good writers in general, and they hang around here all the time because Gene Patterson won’t let them sit around over there and drink coffee and smoke