Forever

by Pete Hamill

  “You don’t look upset now.”

  “I’m not.”

  She looks directly at Cormac, her eyes lustrous and black in the restaurant’s yellow light.

  “You’re a nice man.”

  “You’re a good woman.”

  “Not so good.”

  “And I’m not so nice.”

  Her face darkens in an embarrassed way and she twirls the glass toward the waiter. He comes and takes it away. The steak is gone. She looks sated. Then starts to get up, murmuring about the ladies’ room.

  “Go to the front door,” Cormac explains. “Make a left, then down the short flight of stairs.”

  “All that to get to the ladies’ room?”

  “It used to be a speakeasy, Delfina. They never changed the layout.”

  She gets up and walks through the crowded dining room. Older women look at older men who are looking at Delfina. Then turn to look at her themselves. Cormac remembers Ginger Everett turning heads in this room and singing “Bluebird of Happiness” for the crowd in a thin little voice; but Ginger never came close to weeping over quantum physics. When Delfina makes her return (the table cleared of plates, a fresh wine waiting), a lot of eyes fall upon Cormac too. His eyes are on Delfina’s belly, under the black sheath. He rises and makes an effort at moving her chair, but she’s too quick.

  “You were staring at my belly,” she says, leaning forward with elbows on the table.

  “I want to see what’s there.”

  She glances behind her to see if she can be heard. She can’t. “First I want some chocolate cake.”

  The waiter comes over. Cormac orders two coffees, one chocolate cake, and two forks. The waiter glides away. Then, on the far side of the room, a woman starts shouting at a man. She’s about fifty, with blue-rinsed hair and real pearl earrings. She’s a little drunk, and at first her words are indistinct in the general din of the restaurant. Then the room hushes, and they can hear what she’s shouting at the large white-haired man across the table from her. He starts patiently wiping his eyeglasses with a handkerchief.

  “Go over and talk to her, Harry, why don’t yuh?” the woman shouts. “Just go over and tell her you want to fuck her, Harry, why don’t yuh?”

  Delfina’s face shifts. There’s a flicker of a smile and then a tense freezing of her features as she realizes the woman is talking about her. Other diners look at the woman, then at Delfina.

  “Go over, Harry, offer her money. Isn’t that what you ushally do? How much to look at a tit, Harry? Five hundred? Is that your ushual rate? And her snatch? How much for that, Harry? Five grand? Go ahead, ask her.”

  Three waiters surround the table, blocking the woman and her man, Harry.

  “Jesus Christ…” Delfina says darkly. “It’s always the same old shit.”

  They hear the high-pitched voice from behind the fence of waiters. Cormac glimpses Harry fumbling for cash. “Go ahead, Harry, she’d prob’ly love it, you old fool.”

  “Hey,” a beefy man shouts. “Pipe down, willya? I’m tryin’ ta eat!” A dozen other diners applaud.

  “Eat shit!” the woman yells at all of them. “Eat shit and die!”

  Harry gets up now. He’s very large, very old, and very embarrassed. The waiters are trying to move the woman gently toward the door. She now looks about seventy.

  “What is this?” she yells. “The bum’s rush? When Meyer was alive, you wooden dare pull this shit.”

  Other diners now try to look normal. Then Harry moves through the diners to the table where Delfina seems to be shrinking and Cormac is preparing for an assault. The old man bows in a stiff, old-hoodlum way. Cormac relaxes.

  “Folks,” Harry says, “I’d like to apologize to yiz, bot’ of yiz. My wife is def’nitely out of order. She’s a little cuckoo.”

  He turns and moves toward the door, where the waiters are draping a coat on his wife’s shoulders. The murmur of the room returns in a relieved way.

  “Just another romantic dinner in the Big Apple,” Cormac says.

  “Yeah.” Delfina chews the inside of her mouth. “Let’s skip the cake and coffee.”

  She still seems mortified. Other diners continue glancing at her, as much to see her reaction as to judge the provocation for another woman’s rage. She squirms in her seat. Cormac realizes that the only other Latinos in the room are the busboys.

  “There was a time,” Delfina whispers, “when I used to wish I was flat-assed and flat-chested. Just so I wouldn’t be bothered so much. Then I realized T and A gave me some kind of power over men. Then it became a bother again. Like tonight. Sometimes I wish I was a hundred years old and everything like that was behind me.”

  Suddenly the waiter is there with the cake and the coffee, and a half smile on his face.

  “Sorry about all that,” he says. “She gets stewed on two high-balls, that one. She doesn’t want to know Meyer is dead, and she’s old. Dessert is on the house.”

  He hurries away. Delfina looks at the cake, then at Cormac, smiles, and lifts a fork.

  “What the hell, Cormac! We earned it.”

  They attack the cake in a fever of release, and Cormac struggles to imagine her at Hunter, lost in the abstractions of physics, a place where she didn’t have to think about being thinner or smaller or less beautiful. She makes “um” sounds now as she eats the cake. Um. Um-um. Um. Women ate this way after escaping from the Five Points too.

  “By the way,” she says, “who is Meyer?”

  “His last name was Lansky and he was the smartest gangster who ever lived. I’ll tell you all about him one of these days.”

  “Not tonight?” she says, the tip of her tongue flicking chocolate off her upper lip.

  “No,” Cormac says. “Not tonight.”

  93.

  She steps into the bright darkness of the Studio and gazes at the skylight. She makes the same small gasping sound he heard in the theater. She moves forward and stands very still. Looking through the panes of the skylight.

  “Up there,” she says. “Way up there? The eighty-fourth floor? That’s my office.”

  She looks amazed.

  “I can see you from there,” she says, and turns to him. Her teeth are very white, her skin receding into the obscure light. “Anyway, I can see your roof.”

  She looks up at him, and he puts a hand on her waist, and she eases into him like a partner in a slow dance. Slowly, he kisses her brow, her cheek, her lips. Her breasts are hard against his chest. He can feel her belly pressing against his own. He inhales the soapy smell of her wiry African hair.

  In the dark bedroom, a floor below the Studio, they lie together for a long while, her body pressed against his, her head on his chest. Her breathing slows into comfort, and his follows. She is wordless, and he feels that speaking would be an intrusion. He hears the ticking of a clock that sounds like the drip of a water tap. Away off, the city murmurs through the thick drapes. Finally she rises on one elbow and gazes at him, holding the sheet to her body.

  “Who are you, anyway?” she says.

  “I was thinking the same thing about you.”

  She giggles, then sits up, Cormac thinking: Don’t go, not yet.

  “Where’s the john?” she says.

  She demands the tour and he gives it to her, the two of them barefoot in terry-cloth bathrobes, Cormac flicking on lamps as they pad across scattered rugs and polished plank. She looks smaller now, without shoes, engulfed by the robe. She examines the first floor as if it were a museum, her eyes moving over the long rows of tall bookshelves, the paintings, the African masks, the yellow vellum lampshades and Moroccan rugs. He hopes she doesn’t say Have you read all these books? She doesn’t. Her feet splay on the hardwood floors as she touches the polished top of the dining table, the brocaded Mexican fabrics of the chairs, the silver candelabra. They can both hear rain now spattering the four windows on the Duane Street end, the second stage of an early storm, coming in hard off the harbor. She stops to examine herself in a large white-an
d-gold mirror, a hand going to her rain-exploded hair, which now looks like a black wiry halo. He stands behind her, his own flesh pale beside her. He wraps his arms around her and then fumbles with the knot of the robe until it opens.

  He sees his own pale hand gently holding a dark-skinned breast, and her head leaning back into him, lips parted, and his hand moving down to her belly.

  To the twin spirals.

  They are there. Traced lightly, delicately on her skin, facing each other like enraptured sea serpents.

  His heart bumps and bumps and he is sure she must hear it and feel it. They are here: She is the dark lady with the spirals. His fingertips trace their outlines, their wide bottoms vanishing into the thick black vee of her pubic hair. She pushes back into him, and must feel his hardening.

  “Are they disgusting to you?” she says.

  “They’re beautiful,” he says.

  “Hold me tight,” she says.

  Later, rising from the floor, she tightens the robe and walks to the kitchen. He is relieved: She doesn’t review her own performance. Or his. She opens the refrigerator, which holds a bowl of fresh green grapes and some oranges, picks a crisp grape, munches it, grabs a handful, then takes a bottle of water and closes the door. She finishes the grapes, takes an amused swig from the bottle, sloshes the water in her mouth, swallows. Then she moves slightly to her left, peering down the corridor like a cat who has arrived in a new place: alert, poised, wary of danger.

  “This is beautiful,” she says.

  “It’s comfortable,” Cormac says, sounding to himself like a real estate salesman. “I like being here.”

  She looks directly at him, her eyes liquid. “Me too.”

  He leads her up the stairs again to the Studio, to the view of the Woolworth Building and the Twin Towers, all misty in rain. He opens the small refrigerator and she takes an icy bottle of Evian and hands it to him. Now she sees the desk, the computer, the television set, the CD player. The door to the Archive is closed. As is the door to the bathroom and the jacuzzi. Cormac thinks: I could paint you just like this, in that terry-cloth robe.

  “I never met anyone rich before,” she says, and giggles.

  “I’m not rich.”

  “Come on: A place like this costs a mint.”

  “Not when I got it,” he says. “It was just a dump then.”

  Hoping she doesn’t ask what year. Hoping she doesn’t ask where he got the money. She doesn’t. She leans back against a bookcase full of large volumes on Mexico and Italy and other places he has never seen. She takes another gulp of water. For a long silent moment, he can feel her staring at him, can feel shapeless questions traveling in the air between them. Cormac thinks: If she asks, I might even answer.

  And then to himself, and to her, he says, “I’m alive.”

  That night he dreams of swimming in a vast sea, his body making wide spirals in the water, curving, turning, the forms remaining in his wake. When he finishes cutting spirals with his body, they glow against the dark waters. Something comes from beneath him, bumping, pushing him.

  He awakes in sweat and tears.

  The clock tells him that it’s 8:48. She’s gone into the gray morning. He is not surprised. He is, in fact, relieved. There is nothing more clumsy than the talk on the morning after the first night before. He turns in the bed, inhaling the mixed scents of her body. He pulls a pillow close to his chest. He hears church bells ringing beyond the drapes.

  He walks south on Broadway in the Sunday-morning quiet, passing shuttered stores and tourists with unfolded maps and white shoes. At the Battery, he goes to the final iron railing, where he can hear the languid slapping of the sea. Images of Delfina move through him. A warm breeze brings him the salt of the harbor. He watches a Nigerian tanker heading for the open sea. A squadron of gulls wheels above the tanker, completes a swift reconnaissance, and angles away toward Governor’s Island.

  They are there, Cormac thinks. The spirals are there. I’ve traced them with my tongue.

  His heart quickens and he turns from the harbor and walks toward South Street, where he can sit at a breakfast table and see the masts of a sailing ship.

  94.

  She calls him about six. She is shy at first, holding back, uttering banalities, talking around what happened between them. Then he hears her inhaling a cigarette. She is abruptly more direct.

  “My tattoos didn��t disgust you?” she says.

  “Not at all. They’re kind of beautiful.”

  She laughs. “Kind of.”

  “Like sea serpents. Or snakes in a Hindu temple.”

  “I’ve never seen a sea serpent. Or a Hindu temple.”

  “Neither have I. But I’ve got a book down the hall—”

  “I want you to show it to me. Soon.”

  “Soon.”

  She pauses, and her voice flattens.

  “I got them to make myself disgusting.”

  Cormac says nothing.

  “I wanted to scare men away,” she says, taking a deep drag, exhaling slowly. “I’d fucked too many of them and didn’t want to fuck another. And I thought, Shit, even if I want to give in, you know, some night with too much to drink, or too filled up with loneliness, or anger, or hatred, I thought, If I can scare them with something, their cocks will die.” She likes using the hard, blunt Anglo-Saxon words, talking “street,” letting Cormac know which version of Delfina Cintron is now talking. “It was like wearing a sign that said, ‘Beware of the cunt.’ ”

  Cormac wants to laugh, but doesn’t. In her way, she’s letting him know that she will take sex when she chooses to have it, but she will not be hurt. He listens to the words beyond the hardness.

  “Who did them for you?” he asks.

  “Some guy uptown,” she says. “Way uptown. Like on the top of the island. I can’t even remember his name. Black dude. Blacker than any black man I ever saw, talks in some African accent? Like the guys peddle incense around Bloomingdale’s? One of those guys. Maybe sixty years old. Maybe older.”

  Cormac imagines the face of the tattoo artist. The face of Kongo. His skin tingles.

  “Did he have a set of designs?”

  “Yeah, the usual stuff. You know, Malcolm X, and words in Chinese, crosses, stars, skulls, the stuff these goddamned basketball players wear all over themselves like graffiti.”

  “And yours?”

  “He just sketched it on paper,” she says. He knows her hand is moving in air, making a sketch. “It looked simple and scary at the same time. It was me that told him to make it go all the way down to my bush.” She chuckles sadly. “I had to go to him four times, he called them four treatments, like he was a doctor, a million little needles. He did half of one, you know, looped around my belly button, and it hurt so much I wanted to give up, and then thought, Shit, this will look ridiculous all by itself, like shaving half your head. So I had him finish the job. To get the bottoms where I wanted them, I had to shave. In a way, that turned me on, but it didn’t do anything for the old man. Between the tattoo and the shave, I itched for a month.”

  She laughs.

  “They sure didn’t work with you,” she says, almost solemnly. “I mean, didn’t scare you off.” A pause. “I’m glad.” A longer pause. “Until last night, I hadn’t fucked anyone in almost two years.”

  95.

  At dusk, he takes the bike for his Wordsworth. He pedals up the West Side and turns right into Soho, heading for Crosby Street to avoid the Sunday tourists on Broadway. He will see Delfina on Wednesday. He will cook. She will pose for his charcoaled hand. He does not try to imagine that night. He pedals across the immediate space in front of him. It’s dark when he reaches Houston Street, and he wonders where all the black bicycle riders went. One summer, they were all gone, never to be seen again. He did not again see the man who answered his Yoruba with Ashanti.

  But he knows that other figures and things and odors are gone too. The shopping-bag ladies were everywhere for six years, pushing their packed supermarke
t wagons into frozen doorways, talking steadily in streams of scrambled nouns, sorting through tiny bags of socks or knitting needles or empty envelopes; and then they were gone. To shelters or asylums or the Potter’s Field on Hart Island. There were jugglers on certain corners, drawing crowds on summer nights, their faces familiar for a dozen years, and then they were gone too. One year, there were no more cooking odors from the tenements of the Lower East Side, and no more clotheslines on the rooftops or in the backyards. The familiar city vanished; the new city emerged; and in each new city, Cormac was new too.

  He moves now into what he once knew as Kleindeutschland, where Germans were everywhere, and he worked for a year setting type at a German newspaper. Most of the older Germans were the children of those who left in 1848 and the relatives who kept coming after the first wave settled: socialists and engineers and mechanics and doctors, all of them creating their own version of America, making deals with Tammany, using the system that they didn’t invent while trying to make it more orderly. They too had started in the Five Points, but kept moving north and east until they had forged a neighborhood that most were certain would last forever. Little Germany.

  Right there on Stanton Street, where the Quisqueya la Bella bodega now offers fresh mango and papaya, was the saloon of Peter Reuter. All the newspapermen went in the evening to drink there after the edition was locked up. Writers, reporters, men still smelling of melted lead from the composing room; and here too came the poets and painters and mad architects, the inflamed or disillusioned socialists, the anarchists and syndicalists, to drink lager or ale, to consume great barrels of sausage, and to sing the old songs at midnight. That’s where he went on the night in 1904 after writing his story for the Sun about the burning of the General Slocum. Nobody remembered it anymore, but the sinking of the General Slocum in the East River was the worst disaster in New York history. Everybody on board was heading for an annual excursion to Long Island. All Germans, most out of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, many of them children. A fire started, then exploded, then the ship was burning and moving, the fire hoses rotted, the women and children diving away from the fire into the June waters, unable to swim, and then the ship sank in the violent waters of Hell Gate. More than a thousand died, and the funerals went on for a week and when it was over the Germans all left Kleindeutschland. They went to Yorkville and tried to forget, and the Jews from Central Europe moved in and started the legend of the Lower East Side. That night in Peter Reuter’s saloon, with death throbbing in the streets around him, Cormac couldn’t wipe the horror from his mind, not even when he slept with a blowsy red-haired woman from Bavaria.