Forever (56 page)

111.

O
n the morning of Labor Day, he uses the cell phone to call Healey.

“Where ARE you?” Healey shouts. “In Central Booking?”

Cormac explains that he’s on a bench in City Hall Park, facing the Woolworth Building. That accounts for the background noise.

“You mean you GOT one? You got one of those goddamned YELL phones?”

“Guilty with an explanation,” Cormac says. “As with everything in this life. A Labor Day sale at J and R…”

“I don’t want to HEAR it! What about lunch, comrade?”

They meet in a coffee shop on Twenty-third Street off Seventh Avenue and sit in a booth in the back, engulfed by orange plastic. The Greek owners and waiters all know Healey, and laugh with him as his voice booms around the place.

“They like me ’cause I speak Greek with them,” he says. “In the second year at my high school, the Jesuits offered me a choice: Greek or German. Along with four years of Latin. I took Greek instead of German because I hated the fucking NAZIS, little knowing that I’d end up working with them in the theater.”

But he’s happy about other things. The check from Legs Brookner actually cleared at the bank. The producer is off in the south of France, and they will meet again in two weeks.

“It’s a SCORE. Any Hollywood score is a good score. Just as long as they never make the MOVIE!”

The word “movie” makes heads turn in three booths jammed with unemployed dot-commers. For years, most young people told you they were working on movie scripts. Then they talked about start-ups. Now they are back to movie scripts.

“Don’t think about it!” Healey yells at the young people. “Movies are the worst work in the world. I mean, there’s a movie playing down the block that’s all about FARTS! Learn honest trades. Be carpenters. Repair plumbing. Take the FIREMAN’S test! Be HAPPY!”

The three booths break into applause. Healey gives Cormac a look that says: Am I nuts or are they?

The e-mail is waiting when Cormac gets home. From Delfina. Across the miles.

Cormac, querido: I’m writing this in a cyber cafe. I’ve been upset since talking to you—upset with myself, not with you—and now I want to talk some truth. About me. And about us. I felt in your voice that you were jealous somehow, maybe about Mr. Reynoso.

The truth is that my father was really dying, and is now dead. But the truth gets more complicated. When I went to see Mr. Reynoso to get some time off, he was very understanding. Not only did he give me the time I needed, he paid for the round-trip ticket to Santo Domingo. I wanted you to come but somehow I knew you couldn’t. I mean, you can’t even go to Brooklyn. So I went to the airport alone, in a car service from East Harlem.

When I got there, who’s in first class? Mr. Reynoso. When I see him, I’m irritated. This was, like, too neat, too easy. He said he had some business in Santo Domingo, that this was a real coincidence, etc. I thought, Man, you’re so full of shit. But once we got there, he was a model citizen. A car was waiting, and after he got off at his hotel, he sent the car off to the hills with me in it, to go to my aunt Lourdes’s house.

A day passed, then another, as I meet all my endless relatives and my father is lying there in the hospital. On the third night, I come to the hospital, and Mr. Reynoso is there. He’s checking up on the nurses, the doctors, the care, making sure money isn’t the problem. He was doing this very low-key, not playing a big shot. I was touched. When he asked me to go to dinner, I said yes.

That was a mistake. You know how it goes. One thing led to another. I slept with him in his suite at the hotel, and cried all the way home in the limo. I cried over my own weakness. I cried for you. Or to say it more clearly, I cried for us.

Until coming here, I had this idea in my head, you know, not spelled out, not anything I could say to you, but there—that we might be together for a long time. And yet that night I knew I couldn’t tell you the truth about what happened with Mr. Reynoso. You might never trust me again. You might think of me as a weak and trivial person. You might throw up your hands and take a walk.

But I also knew something else. There are things about me you don’t know. Some of them are very important. I keep them hidden, because I don’t know how you would react to them. I’m not ashamed of them. I just don’t know if you—if anyone—could understand them. This trip has reminded me that the two of us just might not be a true fit. I don’t know, even now, sitting in this fucking cyber cafe at 10:30 on a Saturday night.

I do want to be with you. Forever. When I get home, I’ll try to explain everything. All about who I really am. And maybe for once, you’ll tell me about yourself. Then we can decide. If it’s good-bye, I understand. With all my love, Delfina

Cormac prints out the letter, reads it again, full of a deep, aching sadness. He walks around the rooms, looking at the places where she has been with him, at tables, in bed, on the model’s stand, along the packed shelves of books, in the kitchen. He sees her peering into the refrigerator that first night, trying to read his character from juice and water and fruit. And then thinks: Jesus Christ, I love her.

He sits down and writes a reply to her e-mail address, hoping she’ll open it somehow and somewhere.

Delfina, mi amor. Received your letter and want you more than ever. Let me know when you are coming back. Bring clothes and appetite, and we’ll talk for as long as we need. Much love, C

He speaks out loud in a voice full of amazement and sorrow.

“I love her,” he says. “I love her.”

112.

T
uesday, and a sense of imminence in the air. The sky is gray and
bleak. In the streets, there are a few lonesome joggers and dog walkers, engulfed in solitude. Cormac walks to the Battery and back, nodding at the firemen in their ancient house on Liberty Street, passing the old
New York Post
building on West Street where he worked his last shifts on night rewrite. It’s a condo now, filled with young businesspeople and students from NYU.

At the Battery, whitecaps rise on the surly harbor. A freighter plods toward the Atlantic. Seagulls move in widening arcs. The sky is a smear, vacant of horsemen. He hears the voice of Mary Morrigan:
Something bad is coming.

He writes a will. He types a long detailed note to Delfina explaining which books and paintings are valuable. He gives her the name of his lawyer. He explains how to sell what she doesn’t want. The note becomes a letter of thirty-six pages. On Tuesday, he goes to the lawyer’s office near Foley Square, signs the will, and has the letter attached and sealed, as a kind of codicil.

While copies are being made, Cormac gazes out the window of the lawyer’s office. Down on the sidewalk, dressed in black, his arms folded across his chest, is Kongo. He doesn’t even try to open the window.

Delfina calls from the airport around eight o’clock on Wednesday night. She sounds drained.

“I want to come to your house,” she says. “But it’s been a long day. I’m tired and dirty and—”

“Tomorrow night is fine.”

“You sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then come to my house tomorrow night,” she says. “I brought some things from the D.R.”

“Great.”

“And Cormac? Thanks for that e-mail. I know I’m a god-damned fool for telling you anything, but it made me feel better.”

He hears his voice lower. “It’s great to hear your voice.”

A pause. “Yours too.”

Twenty minutes later, there’s another call. Elizabeth Warren. Cool, but not cold. She tells him she’s in Ottawa at a three-day conference.

“But that’s not why I called,” she says, her voice rising into anger. “I called to tell you what you already know. You’re a god-damned thief.”

“Let me explain—”

“What can you explain? You’re a thief, Cormac. My husband comes home this weekend and I want that sword back on its hook!”

“I’ll bring it to Willie myself.”

“That’s no good.”

A wire of hysteria enters her voice.

“My husband owns that sword!”

He lowers his own voice, thinking: Don’t argue.

“Elizabeth, those spirals were cut into that blade by my own flesh and blood, back in Ireland,” Cormac says. “More than two hundred and fifty years ago. I’ve been looking for it a long time now….”

“Please, no fairy tales.”

“I’ve been cleaning it, polishing it.”

“It’s not your property. It’s Willie’s.”

“I know, and I’ll return it to him when—”

He hears a sob.

“How could you have done that to me the other night?” A pause. “I trusted you.” A longer pause. “I—I said things I would never say to—”

“I know.”

“I wanted one simple thing from you. Intimacy. Just that, just simple intimacy, some hope that for an hour or a minute, we—” She stops. “And all you had in mind was theft.”

She’s right, of course, but he can’t explain. He thinks: I can’t explain almost anything.

“I’ll call you when I get back,” she says. “If you don’t bring the sword, I’ll call the police.”

“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.