by Pete Hamill
“And the police will call Page Six.”
“You’re a terrible man,” she says.
“I probably am.”
* * *
Hunger eats at him now. He feels some remorse for what he has done to Elizabeth Warren, imagines her alone in a hotel room in Canada, imagines her own hunger. He wonders too about Delfina, and whether she was truly so exhausted that she needed a night alone, or whether she has gone somehow to Reynoso’s apartment, wherever it is, to perform a proper farewell. The green worm will not leave. In the morning, she will be back at her office on the eighty-fourth floor, performing distance and neutrality. And Cormac thinks: Doubt, once felt, never goes away.
He decides to go out to eat, to escape the house. He brings a copy of The Decameron with him, to read at a restaurant table, and breathes deeply of the cool September wind. He walks uptown on Church Street, then cuts over to Varick. The night is damp and warm. SUVs are pulling up to the converted factories of Tribeca, depositing children, dogs, tennis rackets, and worried young couples on the sidewalks. The end of the prolonged Labor Day weekend, two days added to the usual three, or two free days that come with unemployment. The restaurants are filling up, their interiors warm with yellow light. He crosses to Murphy’s at North Moore. Away to the south, the Twin Towers are blazing with light, the offices busy with all those people from Japan and England and Canada and India who don’t add extra days to the Labor Day weekend. He can’t pick out the eighty-fourth floor.
In the bar side of Murphy’s, just inside the front door, a Yankee game plays on the television set over the long polished bar, and the Met game is on the set beside the men’s room. Cormac likes the place, with its mixture of teamsters, telephone workers, defense attorneys, and artists. Every high-backed stool is full, and at the tables people are talking, laughing, yelling into cell phones. All of them are smoking. He wants to smoke too, and decides to wait at the bar until a table is free; two groups are already drinking coffee. The bar is all dark wood and mirrors and a tiled floor out of the twenties, like a painting by John Sloan. Guinness and Harp flow from copper taps. On each table there’s a red carnation in a cut-glass vase. Cormac enjoys the place after the lunch hour, when most people have returned to work and he can read a newspaper in the emptiness and doodle with a crayon on the white paper table coverings. He lights a cigarette, then reaches between two men on stools and orders a Diet Coke. The bartender gives him change from a five-dollar bill. A heavyset man in a denim shirt turns a flushed face to Cormac.
“That shit rots your teeth,” he says, a curl of belligerence in his voice.
“Only if you drink more than one a day.”
“That right?”
“I read it in the Post. It must be true.”
“Are you puttin’ me on?”
“Why would I do that?”
“You got the kind of face, you like puttin’ people on.”
Ah, Christ, one of these people. Looking for trouble. One of the ten thousand others Cormac has met across the years.
“I never realized that about my face,” he says. Saying to himself: Stop. Watch the ball game. He glances at himself in the mirror. “Looks just like another face to me.”
“Yeah—and I’d like to smash it in for you.”
The bartender, sad and somber, leans in.
“Cool it, Frankie.”
“Guy says he read in the Post, your teeth only rot if you drink more than one Diet Coke a day.”
“So?”
“It’s the way he said it.”
“And?”
“I want to smash his face in.”
“Cool it, Frankie.”
Frankie looks at Cormac again. He has a mean, dead look in his eyes, and purses his lips as if savoring the moment.
“Fuckin’ wiseass.”
“Sorry,” Cormac says, sipping the Diet Coke. Now the owner comes over, a stocky Irish American in his forties. A few people at the tables are looking at them, ignoring the ball games and the jokes. Cormac can hear Tim McCarver’s voice analyzing the Yankee game.
“Frankie,” the owner says, “maybe you should walk around the block a couple a times. Go over the firehouse and bullshit awhile.”
“Yeah, after I cream this cocksucker.”
The owner turns to Cormac. “You sure set this idiot off, whatever the fuck you said.”
“All I said was—”
Frankie stands up, scraping his stool on the floor, puts his glass on the bar, and whirls. Cormac steps to the side, astonished that it’s come to this, and Frankie goes past him, landing on a table with a crash of glasses, ashtrays, plates, and a vase. A woman screams. Blood pumps from Frankie’s forehead. People look at Cormac, and he shrugs, raising his eyebrows in a stage version of bafflement. He thinks: This kind of trouble is all I need. Two waiters and the owner heave and haul, trying to get Frankie to his feet. Cormac steps into the small men’s room. When he returns, Frankie is holding a towel to his head, while the waiters walk him out the door.
“Jesus, what’d you hit him wit’?” says a plump dark-haired woman, her voice filled with awe. She’s wedged into a stool.
“Nothing,” Cormac says. “He swung and he missed.”
His hand trembles as he lights another cigarette. He realizes that he hasn’t had a fight in a saloon in almost sixty years. That is, since the week after Pearl Harbor. Fights in saloons end up in police stations, places he can’t afford to visit. He inhales deeply. The smoke is delicious. The bar turns noisy again, the broken glass swept up, the blood mopped away. The customers resume their noise. A cell phone rings, but it isn’t Cormac’s. The owner comes over.
“Sorry about that,” he says. “He’s usually pretty harmless, Frankie, as big as he is. Works for Verizon, loves the Mets. But he lost his wife, maybe six weeks now? Two months? Whatever. Anyways, he hasn’t been right in the head. They had no kids, except Frankie, and now he’s another lost soul. One of the guys is driving him to Saint Vincent’s.”
“Ah, shit,” Cormac says. “I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault,” the owner says. “You didn’t kill his wife. Life did. Hey, have one on me.”
“Thanks,” Cormac says, and gazes out the window.
Kongo is across the street. He nods, and Cormac leaves his change and hurries to the door.
113.
They embrace on the corner and start walking together toward the river. Kongo is wearing a zipper jacket and jeans, like a million other men in the autumnlike city. Silver is scratched into his hair, and there’s a melancholy look in his eyes. His grave voice is deeper, his accent more refined and English. They talk about how much the city has changed since they were young, how their small shared village became the metropolis. Cormac tells Kongo of the image he sometimes sees from the top of a skyscraper: a huge sculpture, thirteen miles long, two miles wide, the island of Manhattan being shaped by a restless unknown hand, a godlike artist who is never satisfied, forever adding elements here, erasing them there, lusting for perfection.
“On the final day,” Cormac says, “after due warning to the citizens, the god of New York will lift his creation into the sky. It will be thirteen miles high, its base in the harbor, the ultimate skyscraper.”
Kongo laughs.
“You could see that New York from Africa, Kongo.”
“I’ve never stopped seeing New York, Cor-mac.”
He doesn’t explain where he has been, nor does he ask Cormac about his own long life. Kongo inhales the odor of the unseen river, and mentions a river in Gabon that has the same mixture of river and ocean salt. “If you are wounded on its banks,” he says, “the salt will heal you.” Cormac talks about how he has read his way into Africa through a hundred books, absorbing the narrative of slavery and colonization and the bloody struggle of the twentieth century to be free at last; and how he used to listen to the memories of Africans in New York, and lived to see all memory, African, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Polish, English, all memory of injury and insul
t, all nostalgia for lost places and smashed families, all yearning for the past: saw all of it merge into New York.
“I see it every day,” Kongo says.
“It’s harder to see if you live it one year at a time,” Cormac says. “There’s too much of it. Too many faces, too many people, too many deaths and losses.”
Kongo looks at him. “I’m an old man too,” Kongo says. “Just like you. But one thing I’ve learned, after all the bloodshed and disease and horror: Forgetting is more important than remembering.”
“Yes,” Cormac says. “But memory goes on, Kongo. In the end, all men and women say the same thing: I was, therefore I am.”
They are at the river now, on a new path cut along the waterfront for joggers and bicycle riders. A pair of lovers huddle on a bench. A wino sleeps on another. There’s a bicycle chained to a tree. The river is a glossy ebony bar. Lights twinkle on the distant Jersey shore, close enough to touch, yet beyond distance.
“Your frontier,” Kongo says, and chuckles.
“Yes,” Cormac says. “The border.”
A small yacht moves south toward the harbor, lit up like a child’s toy.
“Well, you know why I’m here,” Kongo says.
“I think I do.”
Kongo leans on a rail, gazing at the darkness.
“You have the sword,” he says. “That allows you to settle the affair of your father, to bring it to an end.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve found the woman at last.”
“A wonderful woman.”
Kongo glances at him, as if trying to decode the sentence. And then goes on.
“When you’re finished with the affair of your family,” he says, “you must take her to the cave. To the cave where you were given your… gift.” He speaks like a commander issuing orders, glances at a clock on an old industrial building, then turns back to the river. “You will make love to her in the cave.” A pause. “And then you can cross over.”
His words are at once a promise and a sentence.
“I’ll help get you there,” he says. “You’ve got one week.”
They stand in silence for a long time. Then Kongo turns and walks toward the bicycle that is chained to a tree trunk. He turns a key in the lock.
“Wait, Kongo, don’t go yet.”
“I’m not going. I’ll be here in New York.”
“There are a hundred things I want to talk about with you,” Cormac says.
Kongo shrugs and exhales, as if there’s nothing at all he wants to discuss.
“How do I find you?” Cormac says.
“I’ll be around,” Kongo says in Yoruba. “Don’t worry.”
He smiles and swings onto the bicycle and pedals away to the north. From the blackness of the unceasing river, Cormac hears a foghorn.
I was, he thinks, therefore I am.
114.
There’s an e-mail waiting when he opens the computer the next morning. In this latest edition of the world, e-mail evades the overheard whisper, the visible evidence of flirtation, the eye of the private investigator. Combined with the cell phone, it makes cheating easier, and life more dangerous.
Cormac: I’m at work, and still have a job. Que sorpresa! Can I come by around 12:15? Can’t wait for anything formal. Gotta see you. Love, D
He sends an e-mail back, saying twelve-fifteen is fine, and he’ll order sushi. He lights a cigarette, using a saucer for an ashtray.
She arrives at twelve-ten, breathless after walking from the office to Duane Street, a fine film of sweat on her skin. She’s smartly dressed in a navy blue business suit, smiling and radiant. Her skin is darker from the sun, and tinged with red. She kisses his cheeks and lips and neck, pushes her belly into his, grasping for buttons and belt. He lifts her out of her shoes. Her skirt falls, her jacket, blouse, and bra. They make writhing, gnashing love on the table. And then fall back into panting languor. They laugh, as if they’ve gotten away with something.
Then he turns, slides to the floor, goes to the kitchen, and takes the sushi and sashimi from the refrigerator.
Delfina vanishes into the bathroom with her clothes, washes quickly, combs her hair, dresses, returns to sit down to the platter of food, glancing at the clock. No review. No accounting either.
“Buenas tardes, mi amor,” she says, and smiles.
“Buenas tardes,” he says. Then adds, “How was it?”
Her gaze falls on him, tentative, choosing what she will tell him.
“All right,” she says. “Considering.”
A smile plays on her face. Away off, he can hear a siren from NYU Downtown pushing through lunchtime traffic.
“I knew it was cancer,” she says. “They told me that before I left. But that wasn’t why he died. It was everything else. Cigarettes and rum and heroin and cocaine. Like every poor fucked-up musician who ever lived. But it was women too. Always women.” A pause. A hesitant smile. “I went to the hospital, and the room looked like a beauty parlor. He was dying, all gray and shrunken up, and all the women came to say good-bye. Fat, skinny, young, old.” She chews a piece of maki. “If the cancer didn’t kill him, the perfume would’ve done the job. You’d have thought he was Warren Beatty.” She sips green tea and smiles. “I just slipped into the room, stood with my back to a wall. I counted three former wives. And yeah, four young guys came in and out, his sons by different women, but mostly it was women, all staring at him, with the tubes in his arms, and the Virgen de Altagracia above his head.”
She has told Cormac about this Virgen, the divine Madonna who intercedes for all Dominicans. Now she is moving into street rhythms, into that language that she dons like a shield. “But it’s not just the wives, who are whispering and praying and crying all around the room. It’s the whores too. They’re showing up from everywhere, and in comes a fat shiny mulata chick with four gold teeth and la Virgen tattooed over her left boob, and she’s bawling. The nurse—skinny, eyeglasses, white uniform—she goes, ‘You gotta leave, m’hija!’ and the mulata chick goes, ‘How can I leave? I’m the only one he ever loved!’
“The nurse busts out laughing. I mean, every fucking whore in Moca is in the room or out in the hall. And I can’t help myself, I start laughing too. My father’s dying, but, Jesus… The nurse grabs the end of the bed to hold herself up, she’s shaking with fucking laughter, and I grab the door frame, and we’re both pissing in our pants.”
She starts to laugh now, remembering.
“But the whore with the gold teeth looks at us like we’re totally insane. She goes, ‘What’s so funny, you hijas de putas? What’s so fucking funny?’ The sons look at each other, and so do the ex-wives, and I’m waiting for the knife to come out of the whore’s panties, and then she looks at my father, as if asking his permission to kill us, and now his eyes are open, and she screams: ’He’s alive! This motherfucker is alive!’ ”
She bends toward Cormac and grips his wrist.
“I mean, he was alive all along, but this crazy whore must’ve thought he was dead, because she spreads her legs and goes down on her knees and starts giving thanks to God. She’s got no panties on, so I was wrong about the knife, and now the four sons are looking at her box, which must terrify them—and she goes, ‘Oh, thank you, God, you are a great fucking man!’
“Now the nurse bounces back, screaming in laughter, and knocks me into the wall! I see my father’s eyes get wider, and now all the other whores are crowding in from the hall to see what all the hollering is about, and it’s like the six train at rush hour. Now a little security guard comes in, gray mustache, big wide eyes, wearing some kind of old UPS uniform—and he starts shouting, ‘Out, out! Everybody out!’ The fat whore with the gold teeth is still on the floor, surrounded by a wall of boobs and miniskirts, and she goes, ‘No, you get out, pendejo! This is a fucking miracle!’ ”
Cormac joins her in slamming the table and laughing. Delfina struggles now to breathe, then calms herself.
“And then he sees me.”
&
nbsp; A pause. She daubs at her eyes with a napkin, wiping away the evidence of laughter.
“He sees me, and he stares at me, and for the first time all of them—the fat whore on the floor, the sons, the nurse, the whole team of other whores and the security guard—they all turn to look at me. Everybody shuts up.
“ ‘Delfina?’ my father says. It’s the first time since I got there that he said a word.
“I go, ‘Sí, Papi.’
“Tears come into his eyes. His fingers curl, long piano-player fingers, calling me to him. I go to his side and take his hand, which is very cold. I lean down close to his ear and say, ‘I love you, Papi.’
“His lips move—they’re blue in the light—but nothing comes out. I massage his hand with both of mine, trying to make his hand and fingers warm. I put my head next to his mouth. And then I hear the words. The words I came to Moca to hear.
“ ‘Lo siento,’ he says. I’m sorry.”
She chews at her lip and shrugs.
“Then he dies. He takes two more breaths and then nothing. He doesn’t look scared, or even relieved. He just stops.”
She stops now too for a moment. Her forefinger is curled in the tiny handle of a teacup. Wiggling it.
“The whores scream and wail. The fat whore tries to get up, to rush to my father, but she can’t do it, she’s too fat. She grabs the leg of a skinny whore like it’s a small tree and tries to pull herself up, but the skinny whore gives her a shove back on her knees. Two of the young men go over to help her, each grabbing a foot, so they can peer at the holy of holies, and they roll her over, so she can get some traction. They lift her like she’s a manatee they found on a beach. The security guard gives up and walks out, leaving the nurse to control the crowd, and I wish you were with me.”
Cormac touches her hand. She turns away, shaking her head slowly.
“The dumb son of a bitch.”
A muscle ripples bitterly in her jaw.
“Everybody loved him, but he couldn’t love anybody back. Not my mother. Not me. Not himself.”
She exhales, gestures with the cup.