Pete Hamill - Forever

And then she pulls away.

“I have to go,” she says.

“Wait. Let me pay and I’ll walk you to a cab.”

She touches her napkin to her eyes, quickly, so nobody can see the gesture. Cormac makes a scribbling sign to the waiter, who smiles and nods. Delfina inhales deeply, as if forcing a shift in memory, and then exhales slowly. She turns to Cormac and tries a smile.

“Okay, what about you?”

“What about me?”

“I told you about me. Now you have to tell me about you.”

He stares at the check, peeling off bills and adding the tip for which the waiter has performed so erratically.

“It’s a long story,” he says.

“Try,” she says.

“Where do you want me to start?”

“I don’t know. I know your name. I know you’re some kind of a writer and—did you say you were an artist too? A painter, right?” She pauses. “I know you’re very kind to me, even when I’m a pain in the ass. I know you speak Spanish and French and Italian.”

“And Yiddish. And German. And a little Latin too, mi vida .”

“But the rest of it, I don’t know anything,” she says. “Like how old are you?”

“Old enough to be your ancestor.”

She laughs.

Cormac doesn’t.

Out on the wet sidewalk, he offers to take her home in a taxi. She thanks him and says she’ll find her way. An invisible shield is forming. Delfina Cintron is backing away.

“And listen,” she says, “I’m sorry I told you all that in there, you know, about myself.” Her face turns tougher. “I don’t know what that was all about.”

Flawless bands of red light from the Krispy Kreme store scribble across the wide street and are then ruined by passing taxis. Scarlet bubbles rise from the gutter like blood.

“I’m actually a little ashamed of myself,” she says. “It’s not like me.”

“Enough, Delfina. I’m flattered you said anything, so forget it.” She smiles a thin smile. Cormac wants to lean over and kiss her cheek and starts to put a hand on her shoulder. She turns stiffly, offers her hand instead, and he shakes it.

“I’ll call you,” Cormac says.

She nods in a casual way.

“See you,” she says. “Thanks for dinner.”

Then, looking cool and detached, Delfina Cintron adjusts the strap of her shoulder bag, thrusts her hands in the pockets of her raincoat, and starts walking quickly to the east.

Cormac watches her go, feels the impulse to follow, to shout her name, to take her arm, to feel her warmth: and does nothing. He lights a cigarette, as about fifty customers line up for the late movie. He inhales deeply. All of his life he has switched from smoking to not smoking. Cigars, pipes, and then cigarettes when they arrived, always for nine years at a time, followed by nine years of not smoking at all. Nicotine was the basic drug of the solitary. He loved the aroma when he started again, and hated it when he was finished. Now he’s in the final year of nine years of Marlboro Lights. He’ll be glad when they’re gone. Sometimes he thinks he’d be gladder if he were gone first.

He watches the young people as he smokes, the giggling girls, the macho boys. All Delfina’s age. They seem decent enough, doing what boys and girls have always done, some of them right here on this street. Flirting, lying, inventing themselves and each other. He wishes he could caution them: Listen, young man, that girl you are inventing does not exist; or, Listen, blissed-out girl, that perfect boy is not the one you’re gazing at. Cuidate, jovenes …. A siren splits the air, and he looks left, toward where Jay Gould’s Opera House once stood on the corner of Eighth Avenue and where, in a different time, Fred Astaire took his first dance lessons. Gone now too. Replaced by an ugly white-brick building that had something to do with a union. The ambulance pushes through traffic, siren screaming its useless tantrum, moving up Eighth Avenue. The last of the young people file into the lobby of the multiplex. Not one of them, he thinks, has ever heard of Jay Gould. Was he related to Jay-Z or something? And who was Fred Astaire? Cormac turns and walks east.

He pauses near the Flatiron Building, driven to a sheltering wall by a squall of rain, looking north over the expanse of Madison Square. Once the great boisterous laughing heart of the city, now a placid remainder of a heart bypass. On this night, flattened against the cowcatcher of the Flatiron, he sees again what nobody else can see. Bill Tweed laughing with his friends in the restaurant of the Hoffman House. The old Madison Square Garden, the first one, rickety and frail, rises across the north wall of the square, with its tentlike rooftops like a vision of Samarkand, and then coming down, after Commodore Vanderbilt, its ruthless owner, added a story and a wall collapsed and killed five people. Cormac stood there, making notes for the Herald as the Commodore’s pleasure palace was smashed into splinters and rubble and hauled away; stood there watching the new Garden rising, and Stanford White gazing at it in wonder, for the second Garden was his, his child, his masterwork, his personal pleasure palace too (in the rooms of the seven floors he occupied in the bell tower), and it was the one that would kill him. As always in the city of memory of which Cormac was the only citizen, Stanny is laughing in a triumphant pleasured way. The architect of desire. If only he had met Bill Tweed. What laughter they’d have shared.

Another siren in the night. A car horn blares.

“Move dat ding! Willya move dat goddam cah?”

That voice. That lovely hard demanding urgent New York accent. An accent like a fist. He wants to embrace the shouting man. To hear him talk. To hear that accent born in the Five Points, with Africans and Irishmen working as collaborators, the accent now almost gone, replaced by some weird (to Cormac) rhythm where every declarative sentence ends with a question mark. I was twenty years old? I need a newspaper? He looks for the faceless old New Yorker, but traffic is moving and the man is gone.

The rain eases now. Cormac crosses Broadway. Almost surely Delfina lives in East Harlem and has taken the Lexington Avenue subway uptown. He will take the same line downtown because he always takes the Lex if it’s possible. He loves it more than all the other lines. It was, after all, the first to cut through the city. And besides, he helped build it. And most important, it always makes him think about his father. On this night, his body trembles slightly. Perhaps soon he will see them all again in the Otherworld.

On the platform, a Chinese woman holds shopping bags in each hand. A man dozes on a bench. Three kids with portfolios talk solemnly about the use of encaustic and how you could get the effect on a Mac. Cormac gazes into the darkness of the tunnel.

He whistles a fragment of “Body and Soul” and remembers working with two dozen other men on the final section of the subway. The job was his own choice. Earth, air, fire, water: Who had urged him toward embracing them all? He’d seen too much fire. He’d helped build the aqueducts that brought the Croton water, and worked on the masonry of the reservoir where the Public Library now stands. He’d worked in the air high above the city. It was earth that was missing, deep earth, earth that was dirt, but earth that was granite.

And so he enlisted and came to 195th Street at St. Nicholas Avenue to work with a team of dynamiters, work that almost nobody else wanted. Most of the railroad had been driven through Manhattan using the technique of cut-and-cover. Up the East Side to Forty-second Street and then west to Longacre Square and north again. A trench was dug, the track laid, and then covered with steel grids, dirt, pulverized rock. Simple. A job where you could always see the sky. But at 195th Street they faced a granite ridge that could not be done that way. Here they must cut through rock sixty feet below the surface, mining a tunnel that was fifteen feet high and fifty feet wide. Deep bore, the technique was called. As was done in London.