Forever

by Pete Hamill

  She needs him in some way that she has not spelled out. He needs her to get to his father’s sword, and to the places that the sword will take him. In a room on a high floor of the Millennium, they make love. She is awkward, in the way that some models are permanently awkward, as if thrown back to the gawky, breastless girls they once were, when no boys could see beyond the braces glittering in their mouths. She wears her passion as if it were rouge.

  “You’re what I thought you’d be,” she says when they are done. “Just marvelous.”

  He thinks of Delfina, who never gives him a review. She is out there beyond the window of the hotel, across the plaza, on the eighty-fourth floor of the North Tower. He wishes he could enter the air, do some marvelous dance high above the city, as light and graceful as Fred Astaire. Dance for Delfina. Dance to her. And let the harbor winds cleanse his shame.

  In the neutral space of the hotel room, Elizabeth Warren talks about schedules and assignments and duties, about a trip to Angola and Rwanda with a land mine committee, and how she needs shots for malaria. She talks about some fund-raising events in the Hamptons, talking as if she has endless time before she gets around to telling Cormac what she wants. Her summer is a schedule, rigorously shaped, not a life. He doesn’t say anything about what he wants from her: the sword. She smiles in a cool way, assembles her few things, checks her hair, and then goes. Cormac lights a cigarette and gazes off at the towers. “Mea culpa,” he says out loud. “Mea maxima culpa.”

  Delfina calls before daylight on a morning in the third week of August. Her voice is quick, almost abrupt, and thin with tension.

  “I’m on my way to the D.R.,” she says. “My father’s dying.”

  She has seldom mentioned him in their time together. He was, she said once, handsome. At least in her small-girl’s memory. He played piano in various bands around Santo Domingo. “He’s not as good as you are,” she said, and smiled. He was married at least twice after her mother left him for the healing snows of New York.

  “I don’t even know him,” she says. “That’s why I have to go. To ask him some questions.”

  Something dark and uneasy is in her voice, and she knows it.

  “My aunt Lourdes called around midnight,” she says, forcing herself out of the darkness. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Kennedy. I wish you were with me.”

  “Me too.” He pauses. “Call me when you get time,” Cormac says. “Call collect. But only if you can.”

  “I will.”

  The hardness seeps out of her voice now. He can hear the blur of public announcements in the background.

  “I hope all goes well. For you. For him too.”

  “I hope so too. For him. You always think you have all the time in the world to find out the things that really matter to you. Then you get a phone call in the middle of the night, and you’re talking about days or hours. Life is weird, sometimes.”

  “It sure is.”

  “And Cormac? We’ll have dinner in my place as soon as I get back. For the first time…”

  “Of course. Just do what you’ve got to do down there.”

  “Okay.”

  “Vaya con Dios.”

  Then she’s gone. He lies on the couch for a while and then picks up the remote control and clicks on New York 1 for the time and weather. Temperatures in the high eighties. No wind. He needs to go out into the city. In August, he thinks, I can even wear shorts.

  She doesn’t call that night, or the day after. And on the following morning, he walks down Broadway with Healey, who is unhappy in a new way. Without warning, Mary’s coffee shop has closed. The building is being rehabbed, with money obviously raised before the dot-com collapse. The pipes and planks of rigging climb three stories above the sidewalk, throwing the front of the coffee shop into darkness, and a team of Mexicans is adding one new floor of rigging to another. The interior of the coffee shop is dark. The Miss Subways posters are still there, but gone are all those waitresses who called them sweetheart in the New York mornings.

  “They’re gonna take everything we love right out of the world, Cormac,” says Healey, his walk slower, his face rippling with emotion. “They’ll put a fucking Starbucks in here, wait and see. With waitresses right out of Area Code 800. Women from NOWHERE. Wactresses, waiting for the BIG BREAK, not waitresses.”

  Their legs take them south, as if there were concentric rings of time and eventually they’ll find their way to 1947, when Mary’s opened, selling eggs and jelly doughnuts to politicians from City Hall. But it’s all Duane Reade and Staples and Gap, flying the flags of globalization. Stockbrokers move in urgent waves from the subways and PATH trains in the World Trade Center, crossing Church Street, heading for Wall, right up past Brooks Brothers, all of them carrying the Times or the Wall Street Journal, and briefcases full of anxiety. Healey and Cormac watch them as if they are part of a movie, and then wander toward the Twin Towers.

  “If all these business guys are going to their offices,” Healey says, “there must be some room for US.” They turn at a sign marked Cortlandt Street, which is no longer a street but only a marker erected at the plaza. “I mean, there’s gotta be a COFFEE shop, where you can sit down, and make remarks.” Cormac thinks: I lived on this street once, and then they shoveled it into landfill. They find a door and descend on an escalator into the vast concourse of the underground mall, looking at the strained faces on the packed stairs of the up escalator.

  Then, in the concourse, Cormac sees a woman he is certain is Delfina. Coming up out of the N&R trains. There are hundreds of people moving around one another, and he has only a glimpse. It’s her hair. Her skin color. His stomach flips. She’s here, not in the Dominican Republic. She made up a lie. He excuses himself to Healey, then hurries after the woman, calls, “Delfina.” The woman turns. It’s not Delfina.

  He goes back to find Healey in the swirling morning crowds, standing in front of a Florsheim’s shoe store.

  “What’s with YOU?”

  “I thought she was someone else.”

  “That Latin chick?” Healey says.

  He looks at Cormac, who mumbles, and then he shakes his head and says, “Fucked up, man. Fucked up.”

  107.

  Now Cormac feels time expanding, contracting, then expanding once again. His narrative has stalled. Through the pages of the Light, he keeps track of the separate journeys of the Warrens, while Delfina is off on her own journey, about which nobody writes. Elizabeth is photographed in an African village, and then meeting with a U.N. investigator, and then at a hospital. Adopting a “letter to the reader” format not seen since the Hearsts abandoned New York in the 1960s, Warren writes his impressions of Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac and Silvio Berlusconi, their concerns about the missile defense shield, about the threats of terrorism spreading from the streets of Tel Aviv to all of Europe, the problems of immigrants, or the need to create a humane form of globalization. Warren writes, or dictates, articles on peace in Northern Ireland and how it could be a model for peace in the Middle East, each article running with a photograph of Warren shaking hands with the leading politicians. The pieces are tedious, written in the flat prose of a ghostwriter, but from them Cormac knows where Willie Warren has been, if not where he is. He feels like a burglar from the 1950s, studying the society columns to find out whose apartments were empty on Park Avenue.

  Delfina calls collect late in the evening of the second day after she leaves. The connection is bad, with gaps in words, and blurred by a parallel nonstop conversation in Spanish that he can hear from a separate line.

  “I’ve been trying every which way to get a number for you,” he says, trying to be cheerful. “I even called Reynoso and Ryan, but Reynoso is out of town too.”

  “I’m okay,” she says. “My aunt picked me up at the airport and got me here. It’s out in the boonies. I’m calling from a neighbor’s house.” Static and interference. Then: “My father’s still alive. But
quién sabes, mi amor. Hey, I’ll try to find a better phone and call you tomorrow….”

  She doesn’t call.

  Elizabeth does. She’s back in town. Can he come to dinner?

  108.

  It’s the eve of the first weekend in September. On his Thursday walk, taken around noon, he sees the streets emptying, as the city evacuates for Labor Day. Buses groan uptown on Church Street, loaded with passengers for Staten Island and New Jersey. Taxis push their way to Penn Station, Grand Central, or the Port Authority bus terminal, and he sees men and women waiting on corners with black wheeled suitcases, waving frantically for someone, anyone, to stop and take them away.

  Above him, the sky is tossing, the clouds scudding and turbulent before the power of an emptying wind. Down at the Battery clouds assemble into a white horse, complete with rider. He thinks: New York 1 should add an Omen Report. With a Portent Index. And a Death Chill Factor. He stares for a long while as the clouds unravel and blow to the east.

  He naps and dreams great shuddering dreams that he can’t remember when he comes awake. Through the skylight, out past the towers, the clouds are now arranged like a stallion. The Black Horseman of famine. And then a shift of wind, and the dying sun colors the horseman red. The Red Horseman of war. Which then bleaches into the Pale Horseman of pestilence and death. Joined to the White Horseman of the afternoon, they warn of strange births and terrible deaths, ruinous storms, conflict and rage, the season of Apocalypse. Are they forming over New York for the first time, or were they drawn by Albrecht Dürer half a millennium ago? Yeats would have read those clouds.

  “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

  Which Bill Tweed would answer with another question: What are you gonna do about it?

  He sees a light blinking on the answering machine. He plays the lone message.

  “It’s me,” Delfina says, her voice wavering across the miles. “I had a terrible time getting through to you. Sorry, mi vida. Everything’s okay with me, but they don’t think my father can last the night. I’ll let you know as soon as I can come home. Check the e-mail too. Love ya.”

  That’s all. The crisp message of someone using someone else’s telephone, at long-distance rates. A voice that’s at once concrete and vague, but alive.

  And then he feels a green worm move in his heart. Suppose this is a game? Suppose she is lying? Suppose she never left New York? Just because the woman in the Trade Center concourse was not Delfina, that doesn’t mean she’s not somewhere else in the city. He calls her number. In English and Spanish, she says she has gone on a short trip out of town, on family business, and should be home by Labor Day, please leave a message. Cormac relaxes and curses himself for an adolescent fool. But the worm still gnaws. He glances at the clock. Almost six. He calls her office and asks for Mr. Reynoso. “Sorry, he’s out of town until after Labor Day. Would you like to leave a message?” No, he says, I’ll call after the holiday.

  He checks e-mail, but there are no messages from Delfina, and he thinks: I’d better read Stendhal tonight. I’m too old for this shit.

  109.

  The doorman looks at Cormac as if he’s a jewel thief. Standing in the vestibule, the doorman is like a remnant of the Hapsburg Empire, all gold braid and buttons on a field of royal blue, and in the great tradition of doormen, he has adopted the haughty manners of his masters. He fixes his hooded eyes on Cormac while he calls the penthouse. The clock behind him says 8:15. Back turned, he murmurs into the house phone, then hangs up.

  “Penthouse,” he says. “Take a right to the elevator.”

  “Thanks.”

  Cormac is carrying a draftsman’s case, purchased from Pearl’s Paint on Lispenard Street, and the man in the elevator looks at the case first, then at Cormac. If he suspects the case hides a shotgun, he says nothing. He punches PH. Up they go in silence. Cormac flashes on Delfina, in a Caribbean town he will never see. He hears the disappointment in her recorded voice, and the sound of hard rain. Now he feels for a quick beat that he’s once more betraying her. He tells himself, I imagine her betrayal while I enact my own.

  The elevator stops, the door opens and Elizabeth Warren is smiling at him.

  “Come in, come in,” she says, full of practiced brightness and formality, played for the elevator operator. The door clicks shut behind him and he stands the draftsman’s case against a small table, which also holds a bowl of keys.

  “Is there a rifle in that thing?” she says, smiling.

  “Not even a round of ammunition. I promised a friend I’d loan it to him. He’s an artist, lives over on Second Avenue.”

  “Is he any good?”

  “Not bad.”

  They walk down the hall, past the many cream-colored doors, including the room where the swords hang together on a wall.

  “Patrick arranged some soup for us, and sandwiches,” she says. “We almost never eat heavy in the evenings, except when William is entertaining. He’ll be gone a few more days in Israel, getting a tour of the terrorist outposts.” She says this with a certain sarcasm. “Patrick has tickets to a baseball game—and the maids are off tonight.”

  Ground rules established firmly and casually, she gestures at a small table in the corner: soup bowls, silverware, a silver tureen for the soup. Sandwiches neatly piled on a plate, the crusts pared from the bread.

  “I told you we’d have to rough it,” she says. She’s wearing a loose, flowing Mexican skirt, white peasant blouse, low shoes: a Frida Kahlo sketch for someone other than Frida Kahlo.

  “It looks perfect,” Cormac says.

  “Let’s sit before the soup goes cold.”

  She talks about Israel, and how Willie actually admires Ariel Sharon and hopes to urge him to meet with Arafat; and how depressed she was about the scattered killings in Northern Ireland; and quotes the old line about how peace comes dropping slow. The land mine problem is urgent. “There are children dying all over the world,” she says. “In Afghanistan there are two million buried mines, and the Russians have been gone for twelve years.” The problem, she says, is the idiots from the Taliban. Has he seen the footage of the way they destroyed the two immense statues of Buddha? Dreadful, dreadful. Then she switches to national politics and the economy, the president and his men, the ripple effect of the economic collapse on Mexico and England, and eventually the world. Speaking with intelligence and a certain journalistic precision. Cormac feels sludge seeping into his brain.

  The soup is a variation on sopa de tortilla, without the avocados or the chicharrón. At least one of the cooks must be Mexican. The sandwiches are tomato and mozzarella, almost certainly the reduced-fat variation of the cheese. Elizabeth places herself so that the lamplight emphasizes her cheekbones and the elegant column of her neck.

  “I told my husband you were coming here tonight,” she says. “Just so you don’t feel strange when you see him next.”

  “Any objections?”

  “No. He said to tell you that they could use Major Deegan in Tel Aviv.”

  She smiles, and they are into the dance. Cormac knows all the patterns, far better than Elizabeth does, but the steps are always slightly different. Here Yo-Yo Ma plays cello on a CD full of the tango. He sees what she doesn’t: Valentino and George Raft and the hoarse cigarette voice of Agustín Lara at an upright piano. His eyes roam over the paintings. He loosens his tie. She holds his hand. The CD ends. A moment of silence.

  “Come,” she says.

  Later, in a small dim room behind her office, she falls limp and soft and silent for a long while.

  “Were you thinking of someone else?” she says.

  “Yes,” he says, telling her the truth.

  “Poor woman,” she says, with a hint of bitterness. “To have missed this.”

  “Who were you thinking about?”

  “My husband.”

  This is a new step in the ancient dance.

  “I love him,” she says. “I want to be with hi
m the rest of my life.”

  “Tell me the ‘but.’ ”

  She smiles and turns her head to the wallpaper.

  “I’d rather not.”

  He sits up. She follows, back against a bare wall, knees drawn up. Her face now is exhausted and drained, her hair blowsy.

  “I have a question,” he says.

  “Ask it.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  She’s quiet for a long moment, sorting out words, staring at her long fingers as they form a little steeple. There’s a twitch in her cheeks.

  “Intimacy, I suppose.”

  The word breaks something in her. She starts to weep. Her hands fall hopelessly to the bed, her knees move toward Cormac, her porcelain shell cracks. He feels pity make its treacherous entrance. He holds her tight for a long time, and she dozes, as he eases away from her, and then she falls into sleep. He lets her thin body relax into the pillow. He covers her with a down comforter and lifts hair from her brow. Intimacy. Another one of those big words that James Joyce said always get us in so much trouble.

  The night man is on the door when Cormac comes down at twenty minutes after twelve and says good night in a firm voice. The night man nods in an uncertain way, and Cormac keeps walking with the draftsman’s case in his hand, heavier now than when he arrived. He strolls into the chilly blue air.