Forever (51 page)

The former ambassador to Prague puts a cigarette out in a flowerpot, thus licensing the owner of the Soho art gallery to do the same. Brownlee the anchorman doesn’t smoke. Anchormen never smoke. Patrick arrives on the terrace.

“Ladies and gentlemen, dinner is served….”

He bows, sweeps an arm toward the interior, and Elizabeth leads the way. Cormac now realizes that the Sargent must be a portrait of a descendant of Bridget Riley. Taller, grander, more at ease. But the same color of hair. Same neck. Same audacious defiance in the eyes. A daughter of Tony Warren, perhaps. He had three children, according to the charts in the Archive, at least one of them a son, before he came to New York to die in the American Revolution. To die, that is, thinks Cormac, at my hands. Had to be late Sargent, just before he left London, sick of painting
paugh-traits,
as he said, around the time he began subverting his subjects instead of serving them. Painting them as they were instead of as they wished to be. Like Velázquez. Cormac thinks: It’s her, all right. Some kind of Riley. A granddaughter, perhaps. Or great-granddaughter. Of course.

They go down a flight of carpeted stairs to the next level, filing along a cream-colored banister, finished in matte enamel like all the other woodwork; moving past two Bonnards and a Vuillard. Remembering the ghastly Meissoniers in the homes of the rich a century ago, all those heroic Frenchmen dying in the fields of the empire, facing the naked Egyptian maidens of Alta-Tadema across the room, poised to be seduced by Islam. At the foot of the stairs, a Matisse from the Fauve period. Green shadows, yellow cheekbones. The guests now all chatting, glancing at the paintings. Cormac glimpses a corridor with many enameled doors, some surely leading to still other doors. And here are more paintings. Cormac feels like a burglar casing a target. Raffles without the mask. Peggy from the art gallery tugs the sleeve of the retired diplomat and nods at a Kokoschka self-portrait, rippling with muscular impasto.

They pass the closed doors and into another large living room, designed as a refuge from winter, filled now by people whose chatter anticipates the coming summer. Tonight must be the last dinner party until after Labor Day. He notes the Persian rugs on oak floors that are perfectly tongued and grooved. Tall, deep fireplace, leather chairs, orderly bookcases (including bindings designed by Stanford White, whose presence never leaves New York), art books piled on tables, muted lamps, three original wash drawings by Delacroix, a Hopper evocation of a desolate beach, and on one wall, a portrait of Elizabeth Warren, ivory-skinned in Madame X gown and lighting, by one of those painters who still aspire to be Sargent. No Jeff Koons. No Schnabel. Not even the usual Marilyn or Mao from Warhol. Conservative taste everywhere, but confident, sure of quality.

On a grand Steinway, original sheet music awaits someone’s loving gaze, as the keys await caressing fingers. The paper is browning and slightly ragged. Gershwin. “Someone to Watch Over Me.” Images of the Brill Building: seven pianos on each floor; Joe Liebling’s telephone booth Indians working the golden lobby. On top of the piano, laid upon doilies, are family photographs in Tiffany frames. The new Tiffany. Cormac pauses as the other guests back up before entering the dining room, while others search for place cards. Cormac sees Elizabeth and her husband in Positano. In the Yucatán. On the Riviera, and on a market street in what appears to be Bangkok. On yachts. On matched motorcycles. On horseback. There they are with both Bushes, Clinton, Reagan, Princess Di. In the city room of a newspaper. In a secret garden.

Into the wood-paneled dining room now. Chased mirrors. A single perfectly lit drawing by Rubens. All of them bending, leaning, examining place cards. The gleam of plates and yellow roses in a fluted silver bowl.

Delfina.

Where are you at this very moment?

Warren is at one end of the long polished table, Elizabeth at the other, facing him with all the others between them, as in a thousand
New Yorker
cartoons. Cormac is to her left. The black wife of a black banker is to Cormac’s left. Ochre-skinned, plump, bejeweled, and nervous. A woman in her fifties. She and Cormac exchange hellos and a handshake. She wonders why Donna doesn’t just pack up and leave Gracie Mansion. And is it true that the mayor has moved in with two gay guys? She read that in the
Post,
so she isn’t sure it’s true. She has a marvelous smile. Her husband is down at the far end beside Warren. His name is Criswell, white-haired, slight trace of Jamaican accent when he was introduced to Cormac. To Elizabeth’s right is Max James, and he flatters her with questions about her opinions on the economy and who might win the election for mayor. To the right of James are Peggy from Soho, Brownlee the anchorman, a woman whose name Cormac didn’t get but surely the wife of one of the men, wearing the blank look that comes from the double slumber of the marriage bed. Then Ridley, the John Jay double, and a single woman with streaked blond hair, same age as Elizabeth. Probably the same gym. Wearing a just-divorced look and a tan from two weeks at Canyon Ranch. Boy, girl, boy, girl.

Waiters arrive now with salad, with succulent tomatoes, cheese crisp or runny, while a steward expertly offers wine. There’s a thin clinking of glass, the touching of forks to plates. Cormac doesn’t need to turn over a blue-patterned plate to know that it’s delft, most of it from the early nineteenth century, passed down to this table from some outpost of the Warren diaspora. Rills of laughter from the far end, in the same tone as the pinging of glass. The voice of a man who sounds as if he has swallowed a banjo. Warren brushing his hair with his fingers. Max asking Elizabeth about dot-commers. Silverware from Tiffany. Heavy and confident. The
old
Tiffany. Napkins folded into bishops’ miters. And here’s the food. The culinary neutrality of veal.

Warren addresses them all: “Can somebody please tell me what this whole globalization thing is all about? I see them in Seattle. I see them in Genoa. At war against Starbucks, it looks to me. But I just don’t know what the hell they
want
.”

“They want to spread poverty and pestilence to every corner of the earth, starting with us,” says the former ambassador to Prague. “They want to democratize misery.”

“Oh, that’s pretty drastic, don’t you think, Larry?” says Elizabeth. “Most of them seem fairly decent sorts.”

“Yes, and they want a hippie paradise,” says the former ambassador to Prague. “You know, small is beautiful, everybody eating roots on five square feet of land in some malarial forest. Everybody wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt and begging God, of course, to provide. It’s pure sentimental rot. And as the Nazis taught us, sentimentality can kill millions.”

“But they
do
have a certain nostalgic charm,” says Peggy from Soho. “It’s right out of Haight-Ashbury.”

“We know what they’re against, Peggy,” Warren says. “But what are they
for?
”

At tables like these, generation after generation, Cormac has heard variations on the same question. What did the Africans want? What did the South want? What did the Irish want and the Italians and the Jews? And, of course, what did women want? He glances back toward the living room and is startled by a gigantic Lucian Freud painting of an immobilized man and a fat naked woman. He missed it coming in to find his place card. The only painting that is not by a traditional painter. Raw and brutal. Cormac flashes on the year when he focused all of his own painting on ugliness. To destroy all bullshit notions of beauty. Is the painted man knitting? Is the man a man? What does Lucian Freud want?

And as the courses arrive, and plates are exchanged, and silverware removed, all under the watchful eye of Patrick, he remembers those great groaning boards of the nineteenth century and the men and women whose motto was: We eat, therefore we are. The era of the 25,000-calorie meal. Tonight, Cormac thinks, the guests of the Warrens are unwittingly doing what their obscene social ancestors did: behaving like the people who provoked the French Revolution. The style is low-key, and Elizabeth seems relaxed, casual, understated, confident. After all, Renay the florist comes each week to fill the house with delicious aromas, and Patrick assures a perfect flow of movement at the table. Light, fresh calamari salad. Veal roast. Potatoes. Frozen soufflé. Cormac thinks: We’re in the era of cholesterol, blood sugar, and coronary heart disease. But they still use newspapers to provide conversation at dinner. They don’t argue about what Horace Greeley said anymore, of course; he is a statue in City Hall Park, keeping a bilious eye on J&R Music; they discuss Tom Friedman’s column in the
Times,
or Safire, or Maureen Dowd. They laugh at some dreadful bulletin in Page Six of the
Post,
about people they know, or a column by Stanley Crouch in the
News,
about people they will never know. Once Dana or Bennett, Pulitzer or Hearst inflamed these dining tables, igniting the flames of outraged invective. They rasped about Walter Lippmann or Dorothy Thompson and wanted to abolish the First Amendment. In their presence, Cormac acquired the habit that he maintains here tonight: saying nothing memorable. He doesn’t want attention. He wants to be a blur. An observing blur. In the past, he didn’t want to be remembered by such people. He wanted to remember. Still does.

And so the talk goes back and forth, sometimes joined by all the guests, sometimes breaking down to knots of two or three. Globalization and the Middle East and Alaskan oil drilling and stem cell research. Or, in several ways, What do the Palestinians want? Elizabeth is cool and distracted, ushering in each new course with the tinkle of a golden bell, providing paragraph breaks for the chatter. She says little. She does not flirt. Not with Cormac. Not with anyone. Beyond reproach, they’d have said in the corseted gloom of Gramercy Park. He hears someone say, without irony, “Only the strong survive.” And turns his gaze on the Rubens drawing. A muscled man with a warrior’s shield, an imagining of a scene Rubens surely never saw. Cormac thinks: The truth is that the strong don’t always survive. Usually the weak survive and the cowardly and the mediocre. They gather their forces to destroy the strong, because the strong are at the core of their fear. They burned strong Africans at the stake and reduced others to tortured rubble. Cormac used to think of them as the League of Frightened White Men. Some of them are here at this table. Frightened of change. Frightened of the new. Frightened of losing secret powers, privileges, and control. Imagining apocalypse. The kind of people who destroyed Bill Tweed.

Criswell, the black banker, rises to offer a toast. “I’d like to salute our host and his lovely wife,” he says. “They have brought a measure of grace and glamour to our city. They have begun to make it more just, to use what they have to help the process of healing. I don’t want to embarrass them by reciting their accomplishments. Everyone at this table knows them.” Pause. An image of Tomora brushes through Cormac. “But all of us have benefited from their presence, and we thank them for their friendship.” He raises his glass. Max James shouts, “Hear! Hear!” All sip, including Cormac. Then all sit. Warren remains standing.

“If I have one more glass of wine, I’m likely to start believing such kind words, Mister Criswell,” he says. “But I do want to thank all of you for your presence, for your kindness to us these past few years, for your support in what we’re doing at the newspaper—and for what I hope shall be long and enduring friendships. I toast all of you.”

“Hear, hear,” shouts James. Cormac notices Patrick hovering in the adjoining room, hands at his side. In his chilly eyes, the deepest kind of skepticism. Elizabeth tinkles a bell.

“Now,” she says, “some brandy and cigars.”

Cohibas, of course.

Cormac longs for a cigarette.

They all rise and begin to drift and scatter. A few slip away home, their minds already on breakfast meetings. Cormac pauses to look more carefully at the Rubens, at the extraordinary confidence of his hand as it laid down charcoal and washes. Then he strolls down one of the corridors. Some doors are open. He glimpses a mahogany four-poster covered with a handmade quilt. Then Elizabeth is behind him, with Brownlee the anchorman.

“It’s the fourth door on the right,” she says. “If you need the little-boys’ room, Cormac.”

He bows and thanks her. Into the men’s room. A lithograph by Francisco Toledo above the toilet. The master of Oaxaca. Individual Brazilian napkins for drying hands. The Internet story about the Warrens said they had six bathrooms in addition to sixteen rooms. Cormac thinks: I have lived in quarters smaller than this bathroom. Outside again, he faces a drawing by Pascin, delicate and erotic. Another door is open. Elizabeth waves him in. She’s explaining the decor to the anchorman. Each room has a kind of theme, she says, tracing the history of the United States through furniture, art, interior decoration. “My husband’s idea,” she says. “The Warrens have been here a long time.” Yes. Since 1741. Here, for example, are the 1930s, with first editions of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson. Framed sheet music by Rodgers and Hart. Photographs made in Sacramento of Warren’s father and grandfather. All standing by automobiles whose license plates provide the year.

In the next room, through a connecting door, World War One, and a doughboy helmet, and photographs from the AEF, and a framed 78 rpm recording of Enrico Caruso’s version of “Over There.” Cormac thinks of Jack London dying of pills and booze, Carnegie and Frick dying in the same year, while Wilson blathered about war and peace and civilization above the rumble of parades, drums, funerals, and memorials. The anchorman seems touched.

“My grandfather died over there,” he says.

Elizabeth says, “So did mine.”

They pass from the Gold Rush to the Mauve Decade (or the Gilded Age, Elizabeth says, or the Gay Nineties) to Prohibition, a room for each. San Francisco newspaper headlines. Photos of costume parties. Ostrich feathers and a battered hip flask. Flappers by John Held Jr. In each room, a bed, or a couch, or a desk. The anchorman excuses himself, and now Elizabeth directs him to the boys’ room.