Forever (55 page)
T
he 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 him 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.
He crosses to the park side, walking south, once more in possession of the sword but robbed of elation by what he did to get it. He thinks: I should be rushing home, to examine this old weapon in all of its details, to feels its old power. But I don’t want to go home. Not yet. I want to walk off the details of this night. The mixture of shame, pity, and treachery. To shove them, as I’ve shoved so many other things, into the past. Then he tells himself that such matters must recede before the demands of the old vows. “Now I have the sword,” he says out loud. And then, to himself, Delfina exists for me, as vivid as dawn. If I can join those narratives, I’ll be free. May all gods grant me benediction.
A cold wind blows from the west, and he wishes Delfina were waiting for him on Duane Street instead of brooding on death and fathers under the forest rains of the Dominican Republic. Wind-dried leaves rattle down from the trees of the park, the autumnal sound denser in the darkness that lies beyond the low stone walls. Taxis move downtown on Fifth Avenue. The cased sword feels heavier, his body more weary. He goes to the curb, hails a taxi, and gets in. He names his destination for the Pakistani driver. Then sits back, the sword in its case on his lap. The window to his left is open to the night air.
He watches pedestrians walking in couples along Fifth Avenue, and the glittering blur up ahead, and the lights very bright on the Empire State Building.
The taxi stops for a light at Fifty-ninth Street, with the Sherry-Netherland to his left. Then a figure draws up beside the taxi. A black bicycle rider. His head bare, gazing off to the left. The head turns. The black man smiles.
“Hello, Cor-mac,” he says.
It’s Kongo.
“See you soon,” he says in Yoruba. And then turns the ten-speed against west-bound traffic into a side street where the taxi cannot follow.
“Kongo!”
Cormac calls after him. “Stop, Kongo! Wait!”
He starts to thrust money at the taxi driver, to open the door. But Kongo has vanished into the night.
A
cross the day, Cormac polishes the sword. He uses sandpaper and
emery cloth and a burin to pry time’s corrosion out of the etched spirals. He oils the steel. He sands again. On the CD player, he listens to Ben Webster and Duke Ellington, trying to bring their love and polish to his task. The phone call he wants to receive does not come. He takes a break, laying the sword on a towel, and goes out into the emptied streets.
He spends an hour at J&R Music World, buying a cell phone, asking a surly clerk to explain its workings. Later, he can add its number to the message on the answering machine, so that Delfina can find him if he’s out. He sits for a shoe shine in the almost empty concourse under the towers, glancing at the tabloids, speaking Spanish with the bootblack, all about how the Yankees are sure to win, then wondering to himself how many pairs of shoes he has worn across the years. Six hundred pairs? A thousand? He remembers the time when all shoes had the same shape, blunt, rough, all-purpose boots, until some ingenious cobbler changed everything by designing shoes for the left and the right foot. And how many pairs of new socks has he pulled over his wide Irish feet and then thrown out as rags?
He walks north on Church Street, and at Chambers Street turns right to a barbershop. Two barbers. No customers. He asks for a trim, and the questions come again in his head: How many pounds of hair have been trimmed from my head? Thousands? More? The barber is seventy-two years old and from Cuba. His name is Albor, and he has been cutting hair, he says, since he was seventeen. Cormac asks how many tons of hair he has chopped off human heads and chins. He laughs out loud. “I star’ thinkin’ abou’ things like that, ’
mano
,” he says, “I go nuts.”
In the afternoon, Cormac plays piano for an hour, noodling Ellington, playing a jokey piece of Satie. His fingers feel oiled from use. Then he works again on the sword, smoothing pitted steel, using steel wool now, digging gently, running fingertips over the blade. On the day he took the sword, he saw Kongo. All streams converge in one river. Now he traces the spirals, thinking of Delfina. With her spirals, she is never nude. Two paintings of her are upstairs in the studio, one with spirals, one without; she asked for the painting without the tattooed markings. “I want to see what I used to look like,” she said. He has the paintings, but she remains somewhere in the Dominican Republic. Call me,
mujer.
Call now. Call tonight. Call soon. Call.
He carries the sword to the Studio, lays it on the low table beside the couch. He gazes at the two portraits of Delfina, thinking: If I have time, I can fix the eyelashes. I can make her painted flesh seem to breathe. I can make a viewer hear her voice.
He thinks about Kongo, out there in the city. Visiting from the eighteenth century. He sleeps. And dreams of Willie Mays, racing in the outfield grass of the Polo Grounds, his back to Cormac, his back to Jimmy Walker, home from European exile, sitting beside Cormac in a box, the three of them blended in the timelessness of dream. Willie’s back is to the world, running and running and running. The centerfield wall keeps receding. And Willie Mays runs toward eternity.
When he awakes, the Studio is dark. The towers glitter against a mauve sky. He lies there for a long moment, and then sees the room fill with versions of himself: shadowy figures, faces barely visible but all looking like his own. He is bearded and he is clean-shaven, he wears waxed mustaches or long sideburns, his hair is down to his shoulders, or cut to a balding pate: the disguises of a shadowy man. He wears the suit made for him on the
Fury
by Mr. Partridge, and the rough clothes he wore laying cobblestones or digging the subway or catching rivets high on the Woolworth Building. There he is in the worsted suit he wore for two decades while working at the
Herald
. There he is in a suit and vest he wore to so many other newspapers. There he is in a blacksmith’s leather apron and a painter’s smock. One of him wears a Five Points derby and another a hoodlum’s stovepipe hat, a plain cloth cap or a thirties gray fedora. All the Cormac O’Connors stare at him, and at the object gleaming on the low table.
The sword.
The sword glows now in the dimness, as if soaking up all the free-floating illumination of the city. It points north.
He reaches for the sword. Grips it. And all the versions of himself vanish.
He steps into the dark open space, plants his feet, then thrusts with the sword. Then cuts back with the sword. Then slashes with the sword. And then does it again, faster. And then faster. Feeling the power surging through his arm. Surging to his shoulder. Surging through his heart and guts.
On his evening walk, he searches the blank streets for Kongo but does not find him. He feels observed, as if the windows with their closed shades are watching him and tracking his movements. Did Wordsworth feel observed by trees and meadows? He pauses for a stoplight and laughs. Is anyone else in this city thinking at this moment of William Wordsworth? Maybe. Up near Columbia, in housing provided to faculty by the university. Somewhere in the city, almost every subject is being pondered by someone.
He sees a young Muslim woman in black, her head covered and her handsome face bared, crossing Astor Place, passing the liquor store, heading west toward NYU. How did she find her way here? Where is her family? What language does she dream in?
Cormac dreams sometimes in Irish, and in Yoruba, and in German or Yiddish. He thinks: Dead languages live in my head at all hours. He walks north on Fourth Avenue, remembering vanished bookstores, and the many volumes he discovered in their dusty bins, books that are now on the shelves of Duane Street. He flashes on Cicero’s
Murder Trials,
describing the stuff of tabloids in elegant Latin. And then thinking: I must make a will.
He passes a synagogue and remembers the way he has memorialized his mother’s death every fifty years. On January 17, 1737, the day she fell into Irish mud under the black coach. Across his American years, he has visited synagogues to bond himself forever to her and to Noah’s lost daughters. In all those years, he was a man without faith in a single God, blind to the Torah, filled with Celtic mists and Celtic goddesses. But still he retreated to those ever-larger rooms, to the places of her secret faith, in which he whispered kaddish. In 1787, and in 1837, and in 1887, and in 1937, and in 1987. Every fifty years. Not world enough, but with more time than most other men. Whispered her name in Hebrew, learned slowly from one old Brazilian rabbi. Whispered prayers in bookish Yiddish, absorbed from the exiled socialists of Kleindeutschland. Yiddish was one of the secret rivers of blood and history. And each time he prayed, he yearned for a cloak of many colors.
Here where Kongo has arrived at last to be his Virgil, to lead him to the secret city of emerald light.
For the first time in many years, he doesn’t want to go.