by Pete Hamill
They go into a small room to the side of the bar. The bass player looks at his watch as they enter. He’s dressed in a Brooks Brothers blazer, gray slacks, red tie; Cormac thinks he could easily pass for a banker.
“Cormac, this is Justin Gilbert, great bass player, outta Juilliard, just like Miles,” Simmons says. “Justin, this is Cormac O’Connor, our pianner player for today.”
“Where’s Artie?” the young bass player says.
“Called in wrecked,” Simmons says.
“Fuck,” Justin says, his annoyed face annoying Cormac. He’s twenty-two years old, Cormac thinks, and he acts like he’s Milt Hinton.
“Cormac played with me before,” Simmons says. “Before you were born, Justin. So relax, man.” He grins. “Jazz is the art of improvisation. Don’t they teach you that at Juilliard?”
The bass player sighs. “So what are we gonna play?”
“Duke.”
That’s the rehearsal. They walk out on stage, where Justin’s bass is already leaning against a stool and a boxy grand waits for Cormac. For a moment, Cormac is nervous. He doesn’t care about failing in front of the audience; he just doesn’t want to fail Bobby Simmons. He flexes his fingers. He gazes out at the smoky room and sits down. Then, very slowly, in a blues tempo, he plays an introduction to “Take the ‘A’ Train.” Baaah. Ba, bop, bim, baa bah… Justin waits; Simmons watches and listens. And then the release. Justin’s bass is deep and powerful, as steady as a heartbeat, and here comes Bobby Simmons, attacking the old melody, driving it hard, the notes flying over the piano and the bass, playing the Ellington tune as if nobody has ever played it before, while honoring it as an old New York anthem. The crowd erupts. They yell and stomp feet on the old hotel floor and cheer through the final ride.
Without a break, Cormac moves into “Sophisticated Lady,” slowing the mood into a smoky midnight sound, leaving space for Julian to bow his bass for a long solo, and then drives hard into “C Jam Blues.” Cormac feels released, sweat pouring from him, the past vanished, the morning gone from his brain, his fingers filled with joy.
Then, from the side, a tall black man, even older than Bobby Simmons, comes on stage, his fingers running over a Selmer tenor sax. A few voices shout in recognition from the crowd, and Cormac knows him too: Horse Campbell, an old Texas honker who played with Basie and Jay McShann, old whiskey prince, old lover of all the wrong women. Someone shouts from the dark, “Horse, let’s ride!”
“I heerd you was back,” he shouts to Bobby Simmons, “so I figured I’d come play!”
Simmons grins, Julian looks uneasy, and then Horse starts talking with his horn, challenging Simmons, waiting for the alto man’s reply. Like two men younger than Julian. And the crowd roars as the exchange goes back and forth, call and response, attack and counterattack, Cormac’s left hand synchronizing with Julian’s pounding bass. There’s a huge roar and people standing and even Julian smiles. Then, as if to prove he is no mere Texas honker, Horse starts a hurting, grieving version of “Mood Indigo,” and Bobby Simmons follows, as if saying, That ain’t all, my man, that ain’t all, I been hurtin’ too, a long gah-damned time. The hushed crowd doesn’t clink a glass. They stand again at the end.
Then Cormac plays the first bars of “Perdido” and Horse grins at him, and Simmons grins at Horse, and they go at each other, making fun of old Illinois Jacquet riffs and Flip Phillips riffs, taking the basic riff from twelve different angles, the exhilaration building, the crowd standing, the two old men now younger than anyone in the room.
And then the set is over. Bobby Simmons holds his horn out flat, one hand on the neck, the other on the bell, like a knight presenting a sword to a prince, and he bows to Horse Campbell, who returns the gesture, and then the two men hug. Simmons goes to the microphone.
“Folks, I want to introduce the band,” he says. “On pianner, Cormac O’Connor. Nice to meet you, Cormac. Cormac, this is Horse Campbell; Horse, this is Justin Gilbert. I’m Bobby Simmons…. Oh man, it’s good to be home in New Yawk.”
At the break between sets, Cormac hurries to the telephone and calls Delfina.
“You might want to come down here,” he says. “I’m playing piano in a band.”
“Are you drinking or something?”
“No, I mean it. We play again in twenty minutes.”
He tells her about meeting Bobby Simmons, gives her the address of the Riff Club, hangs up, turns away. He lights a cigarette. Justin Gilbert comes over to him.
“Listen, I’m sorry for acting like an asshole before,” he says. “You got some chops.”
“Thanks,” Cormac says. “I understand. It’s hard, a new guy, doesn’t know the book. I felt bad….”
“How come I never heard of you?”
“Nobody has,” Cormac says.
“Where’d you go to school?”
“Saloons.”
“Same as them,” Justin says, nodding at Simmons and Horse, who are up on stools at the bar, talking to fans, flirting with women.
“There’s worse places to learn things in,” Cormac says.
“I guess.”
They start the second set with “A Night in Tunisia,” and now Simmons and Horse exchange quotes from Bird and Diz, and the two of them step aside to give Justin a solo, which includes an homage to Charlie Mingus, the young man thanking his elders. Horse is soloing on “Gone with the Wind” when Delfina comes in.
Cormac sees her easing around the side of the large room. She’s wearing a black sweater and black slacks, and her skin glows. A few men and women turn to look at her, but only Cormac can see the spirals. He smiles as she sits at a table beside a pole, and her smile looks dazzling in return.
And then Bobby Simmons nods at Cormac to take his solo. He plunges into it, hugging the melody but playing changes on it too, and folding in a quote from “Manhattan” and then from “Oye Como Va” with his eyes on Delfina. She grins. A few people in the audience smile. And then he’s done, and the whole band now moves in a languid, bluesy manner to the end. There is one final tune: “Flying Home,” roaring and honking and blazing, and then the set is over. The room roars for more. The men bow and then hug. Even Justin Gilbert looks happy.
Cormac hurries to Delfina. She rises from her chair and throws her arms around him.
“Oye, como va yourself,” she says.
They go to Duane Street and make love at dusk and then order Chinese food, and eat, and talk, and make love again. She asks him to play for her. He presents her with a nocturne, as if it were a gift, and then, without singing, he plays the melody of the Fight Song, filling it with small variations on the tune, inserting the years before minstrel shows and ragtime and the twentieth century. She listens intently, curled like a cat in a chair. Finally he gives her his own version of “Oye Como Va,” mixing Tito Puente with Scott Joplin. She gets out of the chair and presses her breasts against his back.
105.
That night, he enters the Delfina Summer. She is the essential element, humid and loamy, with her long thin legs in odd contrast to the thick pliancy of her flesh. They meet without plans, without agendas. If he speaks about architecture, she counters with the language of flowers. Surely, she says, roses must whisper in words that are different from those of chrysanthemums. But trees, he says, are like buildings, rooted in earth, rising against blank skies. Trees provide shelter, the way buildings do. Some trees are brilliant with colors, he says, and others stark with abandonment and old age.
Yes, she says, I see what you mean. And stares for a beat at the abandonment in his face.
They keep a cool, respectful distance from each other too, which makes the moments of intimacy even more fevered. In between, it’s as if each were wary of domesticating the time they share. They have no compact, no agreement about rules. If they meet on Monday, they will not meet on Tuesday or Wednesday, unless some urgency grips her and she must see him. He has his friends, like Healey; she has hers, whose names and faces he does not know. What matters is what happ
ens when they are together. The music of the present tense. They make love in the Studio, on the couch, on the bed, on the old model’s stand, in the jacuzzi, and once on top of the piano, giggling all the way. They make love in full morning light or in the luminous glow of towers; and once, in a rush, in the dusky woods near Grant’s Tomb. On some weekday nights, she sleeps with him, fresh clothes packed for an early-morning meeting at her job in the North Tower. She sleeps deeply, breathes shallowly, has a whisper of a sated snore; she is without need then for companion or accomplice, only warmth. In the morning, she never says goodbye. They speak little about the flesh and not at all about love, which Cormac thinks is why she is with him. After the first tentative weeks, they stop performing and shift into being. They dine together in restaurants, visit museums, go to see shows or movies, as he shows her a New York she has seldom seen. She comes to listen when he sits in with Bobby Simmons. He takes her to one breakfast with Healey, who approves of her in capital letters, while she says later that Healey should be committed. Eventually, on every day that they are together, and without concern for clocks, they make love. Life’s small dessert. Always in his place, never in hers. She makes clear without saying a word that she is entering his life but that he is not yet entering hers.
She reads the New York Times each morning now and has added the Wall Street Journal because of her new job, but she doesn’t dice up the newspapers for subject matter at dinner. The saga of the missing intern in Washington does interest her, with its script of younger woman and older man, and she wonders why the police don’t deal with the suspect congressman the way they would deal with a bodega owner in the Bronx. “He’d be in a cell long ago,” she says. “But hey, this is America, man….” She says she can’t look at the president on television because he reminds her of snotty rich kids she’d see in restaurants when she was at Hunter, sending back the wine. She wonders whether stem cell research can cure the woman in her building uptown who shakes with Parkinson’s. She wishes the navy would stop using Vieques for target practice, but the Middle East, where bombs are now exploding in pizza parlors, could be in a different solar system. “I just don’t get it,” she says. “It’s gotta be me.” Some people, she adds, are just driven crazy by God and there’s nothing that can be done. The election in Peru is good news for Reynoso & Ryan because they have some business in Lima, but in general politics, domestic or foreign, she finds an emptiness, a series of speeches and explosions. “How many of these god-damned politicians ever heard ‘Oye Como Va’?”
Sometimes she speaks of her job as if she’s witnessing a daily soap opera. She describes Reynoso, the flamboyant partner, and his vice president, Sarita, a Colombian who is twenty years older and thirty pounds heavier than Reynoso, and mad for the man. At least twice a day, she gives Delfina dirty looks, as if her blouse is too frail or her sweater too tight. “She’d like me better,” Delfina says, “if I dressed like a nun.” There are sixteen people working in the office and all of them wonder about Ryan, the permanently absent partner who is always calling in from distant hotel rooms. Reynoso jokes about deliveries from Bogotá or schemes for paying off union leaders in Yucatán. Delfina punctuates her accounts by saying that capitalism is a bitch. Then glides away into other realms.
“Do you believe in God?” Cormac asks her at a show of religious tapestries at the Metropolitan.
“I believe in gods,” she answers. “Plural.”
And that draws him closer to her, as a dozen gods move through him from the Irish mist, and he wonders if they could ever merge with the sun-soaked gods of the Caribbean. There could be a tapestry of gods as profuse as flowers.
They talk about monotheism, and how it has led to so many slaughters. He wonders out loud why that single God is always so cruel.
“Because he wants love, man,” she says, “and he can’t get it. Look at all the commandments. They all say, Love me or die. What a weird message! God insists that you love him. He says, If you don’t love me, I’ll punish you with boils and plagues and locusts. I will burn you in Hell. His vanity is endless. Love me, he says, love me, love me, love me. He’s supposed to be the most powerful dude in the universe, El Señor, the Father of us all, and he comes across as a huge pain in the ass.”
She laughs when she says these things, which means she is serious.
“Hey, why can’t he be indifferent?” she goes on. “Why does he give such a big rat’s ass about getting people to love him? He’s like some kind of rapper. You know, Love me, baby, or I’ll throw you under a truck.”
Cormac smiles.
“I mean, the real gods are not so jealous, man, not so vain,” she says. “They have weaknesses, like everybody else. And they have real jobs. They have to take care of water and fire and the sky and the stars. Some of them have powers, but not all powers. Not everything wrapped up in one vain dude. I mean, they’re too busy, man, to demand love from each and every person on the planet…. They got the whole damn universe to take care of.”
And then she smiles in a secret way.
She can change the subject so effortlessly that he often doesn’t notice until later that she has moved on. She’s like a musician, hearing some riff and then doing variations on the theme, or introducing some completely new idea, while never going out of tempo, out of time. The macho vanity of God can lead to a discussion of the New Testament as poetry, an epic poem about a young man who thinks he is God too, and then ends up on a cross and discovers that he’s just a man, that he’s not God at all, that he will die for his delusion (and his vanity); which is why he says, God, why hast thou forsaken me?
And then she goes on to discuss poets, to talk about Rubén Darío and Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, all of whom she has read in Spanish, some of whom she has memorized. Such talk comes like a river that has been blocked for too many years, halted when she left Hunter, halted by marriage, a child, death, anguish; and he is thrilled when she speaks Spanish, when she drops a bucket into deep waters and draws a dozen lines of poetry from her bottomless well of vowels.
She is sometimes baffled by him. One sweltering Saturday, she wants to show him Orchard Beach, along the shores of the Bronx, where conga players drum into the night. “You gotta hear these guys, Cormac,” she says. “They’ll shake up your gonads.” He can’t go, and can’t explain why. She wants to see a show at the Brooklyn Museum. He’s busy, and she goes alone. She arrives one evening with CDs from J&R Music by Benny More and Tito Rodriguez. She plays them and begins to dance while he sits and watches, shouting, “Come on, man, you can’t hear this music and sit.”
And he gets up, clumpy, stiff, awkward, and she laughs and says, “Man, you’re gonna be a project! We gotta go to Jimmy’s, up in the Bronx! Right now, Cormac! Get dressed!”
And he says, “Uh, no, well, I, why don’t we try that some other time?”
And plays piano along with the Latin CDs. While Delfina dances alone.
But she is revealing herself in fragments, and so is he. They are like two archaeologists, examining unearthed shards and trying to make them whole through imagination. When he’s alone, longing for her abundant presence, he speaks to her in the emptiness: “To tell the truth, Delfina, my life has no shape at all. There are no straight lines. I have this strange life, but it’s not, in the end, strange at all. There is no plot. There is only luck and chance.”
106.
The Delfina Summer was not a neat sequence of day following night following day. Her part of the summer was condensed, edited together in his mind by his need for a story. But he still took his naps and went for his walks. He made entries in his notebooks. He listened to Ben Webster and Sinatra, Coltrane and Miles. He felt a need to read again the books that had enriched his life, and so he took down Don Quixote and read it in three days, and was filled with sadness. “Don’t listen to them, old knight,” he said to the emptiness. “They are not windmills. They are dragons.” And wondered what Quixote would make of the Woolworth Building and the Twin Towers. He
laughed through Dante’s Inferno, imagining John Gotti leaning over the poet’s shoulder in his northern exile, saying, Da lawyizz. Put in about da lawyizz! He wanted to stand in applause for the shamelessness of Bleak House, the sight of Dickens demanding from his audience what Fosse used to call a Big Mitt Number. At one point Dickens has a man die of spontaneous combustion, exploding into fragments, into ash and dust. Sinvergüenza, he said. Shameless. And as delicious as a great extravagant meal.
And through the Delfina Summer, he still sat each Tuesday morning with Healey in Mary’s marvelous coffee shop, the city gilded with July or August, and heard his tale of a possible Hollywood miracle, and how the fabulous goniff Legs Brookner, for reasons of guilt or avarice, was offering him a twenty-thousand-dollar advance to turn his second play into a screenplay. “He’s gonna make me SOMEBODY again! Can you imagine?” Cormac could imagine, and they talked about ways to update the old play, or whether it should be done as a period piece, and what Healey would do with the immense fortune that might be coming his way. “Maybe I’ll move to Kabul and watch the Taliban shoot statues!”
One Tuesday morning, Healey walked in waving the Daily News. “Did you see THIS? The FBI just discovered that someone robbed four hundred and forty-nine guns from FBI headquarters, and one hundred and eighty-four laptops! One of the laptops has CLASSIFIED information on it! Is this the GREATEST? I mean, I LOVE this country! If you gotta have the secret police, then make sure they are INCOMPETENT!”
Cormac also saw Elizabeth Warren.
They meet twice for lunch, each time in a hotel. Each time she is in town from Southampton on a shopping trip, or to see friends from Europe. The first meeting is in the Grand in Soho, sandwiches in the restaurant, where she nods at acquaintances, and talks about politics and Africa and the forgiveness of debt. That day she sounds like a one-woman seminar and never once mentions what she really wants from him. Three weeks later, it’s room service at the Millennium, facing the World Trade Center across Church Street. She talks about Downtown as if it were another country, and he tells her some of its history, and who lived where, and how Matthew Brady had two separate studios on Broadway where he photographed everybody from Walt Whitman to Abraham Lincoln. He talks to delay; she listens but doesn’t listen. He hopes he is boring. And feels as if he is doing an audition.
