Forever

by Pete Hamill

  In September he saw her again at last, coming out of the New School on Fifth Avenue, cutting across Fourteenth Street to the north side of the street, then moving west. He followed her like a detective on the trail of a murder suspect, watching the bobbing hair, the rhythmic walk, the long tawny legs (for this time she wore a skirt and blouse), while car horns blared at a double-parked sanitation truck and an ambulance screamed for passage. She hurried into a drugstore, pushing the door sharply before her. A Rite Aid. On the corner. She vanished through that front door. And didn’t come out.

  “So I’ll have the fettucine,” she says, as the rain pounds down. “And a green salad.”

  The waiter returns with a small green pad, exposed to the rain. Cormac orders the pasta and salad for Delfina and a medium burger for himself. The waiter is irritated in a thin, blond way. Imagine: reduced to this. Serving philistine food to philistines. He hurries off.

  “Poor baby,” Delfina says as the waiter vanishes.

  “Life is hard.”

  “Claro que sí,” says Delfina Cintron, her voice almost a whisper.

  And Cormac sees himself staring at the front door of Rite Aid that day, wondering why she has not emerged. Ten minutes went by. Twenty minutes. And then he entered the drugstore in search of her. He glanced down each aisle, as if searching for shampoo or pretzels or mouthwash. She was not there. He saw a fat woman pushing a fat child in a stroller. A grizzled homeless guy was spraying Mitchum deodorant on his neck and wrists. A middle-aged man examined the label on a bottle of Advil.

  He looked toward the front door, and there she was, behind the counter at the cash register. Her brow furrowed as she punched computer keys to ring up a sale. She was wearing a green smock over her street clothes. He drifted closer, paused before candies and chewing gums, and saw her name tag. Delfina. The dolphin. A line of customers waited their turn for her attention. Cormac left, knowing he would return. In search of the dolphin.

  Now she is here before him, under the Cinzano umbrella, in a public place as private as a cave without a ceiling. The wind briefly rises. There’s a spray of rain. They hunch forward to avoid the raindrops, closer than they have yet been. He can smell her hair. Soap and rain. And look upon her unmarked skin. Skin of Arabs and Andalusians, Tainos and Africans. Shiny with dampness and rain. He gazes at her. Thick black eyebrows. Eyes set widely, lined only with her own black eyelashes, not mascara. In Spanish, it would be two words: mas cara. More face. Another face. Like that Mexican wrestler on channel 47: Mil Mascaras. A thousand faces. And beneath the brows, set in their black rims, are eyes so black and liquid it is impossible to penetrate them. Opal eyes. Her nose slopes in a clean curve, tilting abruptly upward at the tip. Wide nostrils. O Africa. Her lips are plump with Africa too, and she has a habit of wetting them with the tip of her tongue. The bone of her chin is firm and hard, with a thin strap of flesh beneath it, either baby fat that has not departed or the beginning of age. She is twenty-eight years old.

  “Why are you alone?” he asks.

  “I’m not alone,” she says, raising an eyebrow. “I’m sitting here with you in the rain.”

  “You know what I mean,” he says. “Why don’t you have a man?”

  “I’ve had men,” she says, and shrugs. “Lots of them. I’ve even had a husband.”

  There is more in her eyes, more words struggling for expression, more images undescribed. They exist in the way she looks down at the table, in the way one hand kneads another on her lap. But she doesn’t go on. The waiter arrives with the food. Cormac doesn’t press her. He didn’t press her when he started going to the drugstore. Once a week. Saying hello. Ordering cigarettes. Or buying toothpaste. Thanking her and calling her by name. Seeing her smile. Watching like a teenager from across the street at closing time, screened by the crowd, discovering that no young man waited for her. In this part of her life, she was alone. He saw her hurrying into the subway. Trudging through piled snow. Bending into bitter winter winds driving hard from the North River. Always alone, bundled in a dark-blue knee-length down-lumpy coat and high-heeled black boots. Until finally he brought her a brightly wrapped book at Christmas and saw astonishment in her eyes. Pablo Neruda. In English and Spanish.

  “Mil gracias,” she said that day.

  “A usted,” he said.

  The day before New Year’s Eve, he asked her to go to a movie. She accepted in a confused way, curious, wanting a diversion, resisting his approach, resisting contact or connection, perhaps men themselves. But accepting. She sat beside him in the dark, very still, very formal. Afterward, she thanked him, refused dinner, shook hands, and went off to the subway. A week later, he waited for her again where no young man yet waited. On that corner on Fourteenth Street. Once more they went to a movie. Then again, and after the third movie, they exchanged telephone numbers. On the phone, she was restrained, and he noticed how she spoke English with a very precise accent, hitting every d and t in words like “damned” and “Connecticut,” and pronouncing the g at the end of words like “talking,” “laughing,” and “eating.”

  Now tonight they are having dinner. On each date, she has been guarded, careful, saying nothing of importance. She won’t tell him where she lives and doesn’t ask where he lives. They see a movie and then discuss it over coffee and then she says goodbye at the entrance to the subway. She treats him like an older man, but one in whom she has only marginal interest. And he urges patience upon himself, thinking: Don’t scare her off. Beneath the toughness, she’s capable of being easily scared.

  “I feel funny when you stare at me that way,” she says, twirling fettucine on a fork. Her mouth is open, her hand poised with a pasta-laden fork.

  “I can’t help it,” Cormac says, smiling casually. “You’re beautiful.”

  “No, I’m not. “

  “Liar.”

  “I mean, I’m okay, I guess. But beautiful, hey, come on. Models, they’re beautiful. Cindy Crawford, yeah, or Naomi Campbell. Or that blond one, Gwyneth Paltrow. Movie stars are beautiful. Not me. I’m too short. I’m too fat. Those girls…”

  She finally delivers the pasta to her mouth and eats hungrily, greedily. The rain begins to ease and so does she. At last. She’s from Queens, she says. She has been here since she was ten, when her mother brought her from Santo Domingo, along with a broken heart, forty-four dollars, and one suitcase of clothes. Her father was a piano player. Delfina remembers his dazzling smile and his aroma of Old Spice and little more. She has been told that he married another woman. He was small and skinny, though very handsome. The woman he lives with weighs three hundred pounds and is very ugly. Or so the story was told, on evenings in the kitchens of Queens.

  “Do you want to talk about the husband?” Cormac says. “Your husband?”

  “No,” she says, chewing the fettucine. “Not really…”

  “Ni modo. It doesn’t matter.”

  She finishes the pasta, pokes at the salad. Cormac is still only halfway through his burger. She stares at her plate, then rests her chin on her thumbs, her elbows on the edge of the table. The rain has ended. The backyard is alive with dripping sounds. She looks at him in a frank, deliberate way, then turns away.

  “He was a junkie,” she says. She sips the rum drink without enthusiasm, as he lays aside the rest of the burger.

  “I didn’t know that when I met him, of course. I was nineteen. He was thirty. I was a student at Hunter, thinking about teaching history.”

  She pronounces it “heestory.”

  “Then mad for physics…”

  She chews the inside of her lip again, as if arranging the words.

  “He… he saw me in the street, just like you did. And he followed me, just like you. And he hung around and waited for me….”

  “Just like me.”

  “Just like you.”

  She smiles in a sad way and turns to watch the raindrops dripping down the wall, and when she turns back, her eyes are brimming.

  “I went out with him, okay? T
o discos and parties, because it was exciting, because I had been studying since I was ten, because I was bored, because I wanted something that I didn’t even know I wanted. I went out with him because I was tired of being En Punto Cintron. Because I wanted to sleep late. All the usual stupid reasons. And then I got pregnant. My mother was hysterical. She thought I would lose my chance, you know? My big American chance. To graduate from college, to have a life. And she was right, of course. I mean, look where I’m working. Selling Bufferin and condoms to kids who think they can make me blush. Anyway, we got married. His name was Enrique, but his street name was Block, like he owned the block. The block was 117th Street, near Second Avenue, in El Barrio. His block. He was a Puerto Rican and made a lot of jokes about Dominicans. Most of them dirty. About Dominican women, and the special way they were supposed to like sex. He tried that a few times and got mad when I wouldn’t let him do it that way, and he would yell at me: ‘You’re Dominican!’ Like I was betraying my country!” She smiles. “A real schmuck.” The smile fades. “Me too. But he was nice for a few months. Then he started coming home late and then not at all and then he stopped working and you know, it was the same old story, the same old New York shit.”

  The waiter arrives again, his irritation gone as he performs for a tip. He turns on an acting-class smile and tries being gracious. They order coffee. Delfina says she’s finished with her drink too. The ice cubes have melted. A second waiter leads a party of six to another table, wielding a large towel. They are laughing and loud.

  “You don’t want to hear all this, do you?” Delfina says.

  “Only if you want to tell it.”

  She is quiet for a long time. The other table settles down. Mozart begins to play from the restaurant’s sound system. The Sonata No. 1 in C Major. But through the dripping wall behind them they can hear the bass line of another movie soundtrack and the muffled sound of explosions. Buildings blowing up. Shouts. The combination triggers something in her, releases a flood of words.

  “I had a daughter,” Delfina says, talking as much to herself as to Cormac. “She was so beautiful. Carolina, her name was, same as my mother. My mother came to take care of me while I was pregnant because Enrique now, he was on the streets all the time, selling crack, shooting smack. I would see him, with the baby in my arms, and he would laugh and walk away. As thin as a fucking nail, he was now. Pardon my language. Hanging with all the crack zombies. My mother wanted me to come home to the house in Queens. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t face my friends again. All those kids I knew. The ones I left behind when I went to college. The problem was, when I got into Hunter, I acted like I was hot shit. And here I was two years later, another welfare mother. It was so… I don’t know—shameful? So I stayed on 117th Street. The more the goddamned zombies hit on me, the hotter I made myself look. And then I beat them off. If a friend of Enrique’s hit on me, I would say stuff like, ‘Your dick’s smaller than Block’s, cabrón, and his is a peanut.’ Hoping it got back to Enrique. Finally I got a job in a record store on Columbus Avenue, Tower Records, and my mother would baby-sit for me, coming all the way on the train, two trains, from Queens. All the time telling me, ‘Come home, m’hija, come home.’ All the time telling me, ‘We can go back to the D.R., we can go someplace else. You can go back to school. Get your degree. Start over.’ While I hugged the baby and went downtown to work in the record store.”

  The coffee arrives, steaming in the chill spring air.

  “It went on like that,” Delfina says. “Almost a year,” she says. “Until the fire.”

  Cormac’s heart trembles. He knows what is coming, all the way from the dark streets of the past, all the way from the Five Points. He touches her hand and her flesh is cold as sorrow. She eases her hand away.

  “They both died,” she says in a remote tone. “My mother and my daughter. And two other people on the floor upstairs. It was in the Daily News, on New York One. I always thought Enrique set it, and so did the cops, but they couldn’t prove it, and it didn’t matter anymore because by then he had the virus. The motherfucker was gonna die. I prayed it wouldn’t be quick.”

  She sips her coffee, part tough slum kid, part grieving adult. She makes a face as if the coffee were bitter.

  “I don’t remember much after the fire,” she says. “I was crazy for a long time. I made love to a lot of guys one year and then shut down like a nun.”

  Neither speaks for several minutes, as the rain drips. He can think of no words that will not sound like horseshit. Laughter skitters around the backyard. More customers arrive, fresh from the movie house. Chairs scrape on brick. Tables fill. Cormac’s coffee is cold when he sips it and he signals for fresh cups. She looks directly at him now.

  “Does it bother you when I say I slept with a lot of guys?”

  “No. It’s a kind of consolation sometimes.”

  “I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of a whore.”

  “I could never think that.”

  “It was part of the craziness,” she says. “Every day was different. On Monday, I wanted to die, to get the virus too, and just fucking die. Sometimes I saw myself on the Brooklyn Bridge, going over the side, or jumping out of the fucking Twin Towers. On Tuesday, I wanted to make another baby, get another Carolina, and start all over, and do it right this time, and watch her crawl and watch her walk and hear her talk and—”

  “Stop,” Cormac says, remembering another woman, long ago, who longed for the same repaired life and spoke about it in French. “You don’t need to justify anything, Delfina. Not to me. Not to anyone. You got through it. You’re here. You’re eating food. You look beautiful.”

  Now Cormac can hear the Sonata No. 9 in D Major. Filling the air, melding together the chatter of other tables. The music throws a wisp of another room and another century into his mind, and he forces himself to look at Delfina and hold her hand. Here. Now.

  “I’m sorry to put all this in your head,” she says, her hand warming in the hand of Cormac. “I should go home.”

  “Not yet. Please.”

  She nestles against him, her fine wiry African hair unspooling against his face. He can feel one of her breasts against his arm. With one hand, he touches her hair, his fingers plunging into its springy fineness until he briefly feels the curve of the back of her skull, her skin as warm as blood.

  And then she pulls away.

  “I have to go,” she says.

  “Wait. Let me pay and I’ll walk you to a cab.”

  She touches her napkin to her eyes, quickly, so nobody can see the gesture. Cormac makes a scribbling sign to the waiter, who smiles and nods. Delfina inhales deeply, as if forcing a shift in memory, and then exhales slowly. She turns to Cormac and tries a smile.

  “Okay, what about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “I told you about me. Now you have to tell me about you.”

  He stares at the check, peeling off bills and adding the tip for which the waiter has performed so erratically.

  “It’s a long story,” he says.

  “Try,” she says.

  “Where do you want me to start?”

  “I don’t know. I know your name. I know you’re some kind of a writer and—did you say you were an artist too? A painter, right?” She pauses. “I know you’re very kind to me, even when I’m a pain in the ass. I know you speak Spanish and French and Italian.”

  “And Yiddish. And German. And a little Latin too, mi vida.”

  “But the rest of it, I don’t know anything,” she says. “Like how old are you?”

  “Old enough to be your ancestor.”

  She laughs.

  Cormac doesn’t.

  84.

  Out on the wet sidewalk, he offers to take her home in a taxi. She thanks him and says she’ll find her way. An invisible shield is forming. Delfina Cintron is backing away.

  “And listen,” she says, “I’m sorry I told you all that in there, you know, about myself.” Her face turns tougher. “I
don’t know what that was all about.”

  Flawless bands of red light from the Krispy Kreme store scribble across the wide street and are then ruined by passing taxis. Scarlet bubbles rise from the gutter like blood.

  “I’m actually a little ashamed of myself,” she says. “It’s not like me.”

  “Enough, Delfina. I’m flattered you said anything, so forget it.” She smiles a thin smile. Cormac wants to lean over and kiss her cheek and starts to put a hand on her shoulder. She turns stiffly, offers her hand instead, and he shakes it.

  “I’ll call you,” Cormac says.

  She nods in a casual way.

  “See you,” she says. “Thanks for dinner.”

  Then, looking cool and detached, Delfina Cintron adjusts the strap of her shoulder bag, thrusts her hands in the pockets of her raincoat, and starts walking quickly to the east.

  Cormac watches her go, feels the impulse to follow, to shout her name, to take her arm, to feel her warmth: and does nothing. He lights a cigarette, as about fifty customers line up for the late movie. He inhales deeply. All of his life he has switched from smoking to not smoking. Cigars, pipes, and then cigarettes when they arrived, always for nine years at a time, followed by nine years of not smoking at all. Nicotine was the basic drug of the solitary. He loved the aroma when he started again, and hated it when he was finished. Now he’s in the final year of nine years of Marlboro Lights. He’ll be glad when they’re gone. Sometimes he thinks he’d be gladder if he were gone first.