Pete Hamill - Forever

“Steak,” she says, grinding her jaws in an exaggerated way. “Steak, steak, steak.”

“I guess you want steak.”

“With cottage fries and tomatoes and onions and then some amazing dessert.”

“I’ll have the same,” Cormac says. “I can walk it off tomorrow.”

She looks at him in an amused way, as if she has other ideas about working off the calories. The waiter arrives with the wine. Cormac orders. Every table is now full and there are people standing near the door.

“What a great place this is,” she says.

“Used to be a speakeasy.”

“A what?”

He has forgotten how young she is, and explains about Prohibition and what speakeasies were and how the modern Mob was invented in places like this. She finds the notion of Prohibition hard to understand.

“You mean they banned all drinking? Like with drugs today?”

“Yes, and with the same kind of success.”

“Holy shit.”

“That’s what New York said too.”

They touch glasses, and she sips, then twirls the glass by the stem.

“That’s good .” Her tongue passing over her upper lip. “Here’s to the end of Prohibition.”

She glances around, her brow furrowing. A chill washes over her.

“Listen,” she says, “I’m sorry I got so upset back there in the theater.”

“What was that all about?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Sure you do.”

“Yeah. I do.”

A pause. The diners are murmuring, laughing, leafing through Playbill s for the names of actors.

“It just, I mean, the whole thing, the play, the subject, it just reminded me of what I threw away,” she says. “At Hunter, I was a whiz at physics. I don’t know why. It sure didn’t come from genes. I just got it from the beginning, it was a kind of center of things for me. And the professor knew I got it. He paid me a lot of attention. Too much attention. I was just a kid, eighteen. But I guess he never had a Latina in his class who got it the way I got it. Physics was for Jewish kids or Chinese kids or Korean kids. Not for kids from the D.R. But I got it. And I thought, Hey, maybe I’ll major in this, keep learning, keep growing, go to graduate school, MIT or Cal-Tech, discover some new principle, the way Bohr did and Heisenberg did. I knew about these guys, from my teacher. Shit, I had a photograph of Einstein on the wall of my room in Queens. You know, the one where he’s sticking out his tongue? You know that one?”

“Sure.”

“Well, I guess you knew this was coming, right? I got involved with the professor. It’s such a cliché. Student Falls for Professor. Puh-leeze. But, anyway, I did. By then I was nineteen. He was forty-two. And married. Hey: Are you married?”

“No.”

“But you’ve been married?”

“Yes.”

“So you know it’s never easy, I guess. Not for anybody.” A pause. “Anyway, I came on to him just before the end of the term. I didn’t have a plan or anything. I just felt, hey, I’ve got to have him. The details don’t matter. We saw each other all that summer. He rented a house on the Jersey shore for his wife and two kids and went down after class on Friday and came back Sunday night. Sometimes he had to take his boy to Yankee Stadium, or the Planetarium, or something, but the rest of the time we were together. He kept teaching me about physics, making my head explode, and he did his best in bed. Until finally his wife caught on. She made him choose. And he chose her, okay?” She sips the rest of her wine. “Oh, well, fuck it. Fuck him. Too.”

“Did he kill physics for you?”

The salads arrive. She eats and talks.

“No. I went back in the fall and took courses with another professor. One that my guy recommended, a nice old Austrian. And in a way, the Austrian helped me get over my guy, just by challenging me to be better, to go deeper and deeper. I finished my course with him. He told me in that Austrian accent that I had a great future. And then I threw it away.”

Another pause. Cormac waits.

“I just felt, this is all wrong. I’m in a world where I don’t belong. It’s only gonna hurt me. I’ve gotta get out. What did I think I was, anyway? That’s what they always ask in the street. What did I think I was, white? Ghetto bullshit always wins. I walked away. I found my man, had my baby, all that sad song I already told you.” She looks up and smiles in a wounded way. “When I met you, I was the only cashier in the history of Rite Aid who understood quantum theory.”

“Can you use it in the new job?”

“No, it’s a law firm, import-export, NAFTA, all that. My Spanish helps with calls to Monterrey.” She grins. “But the guys there are pretty good guys. Reynoso is a Mexican who came here in 1968, after all his friends were shot in some massacre. He went to Columbia, gave up Marx, became a business major, then took a law degree. He can be very funny.”

“What about Ryan?”

“I don’t even know if he exists,” she says. “He’s always off in Europe or someplace, making deals. Or that’s what Reynoso says.”

She smiles in a pleased way, all regret about physics now vanished. The salad plates are carried away by a Mexican busboy (“Mil gracias, joven,” she says); the steak arrives. She seems grateful for the interruption and begins slicing meat.

“Oh, wow—this is good .”

She glances around the room, and then giggles.

“Why do I feel like I’m in New Jersey?”

“Because New Jersey is here at all these other tables?”

“What do you think their lives are like?” she says. Cormac can’t tell her that since the night he washed up on its shores after killing the Earl of Warren, he has never been in New Jersey.

“Nasty, brutish, and long.”

She smiles, chews, swallows. He realizes she hasn’t used “fuck” all evening long. The noise of the diners is rising.

“So, anyway, that’s why I was upset.”

“You don’t look upset now.”

“I’m not.”

She looks directly at Cormac, her eyes lustrous and black in the restaurant’s yellow light.

“You’re a nice man.”

“You’re a good woman.”

“Not so good.”

“And I’m not so nice.”

Her face darkens in an embarrassed way and she twirls the glass toward the waiter. He comes and takes it away. The steak is gone. She looks sated. Then starts to get up, murmuring about the ladies’ room.

“Go to the front door,” Cormac explains. “Make a left, then down the short flight of stairs.”

“All that to get to the ladies’ room?”

“It used to be a speakeasy, Delfina. They never changed the layout.”

She gets up and walks through the crowded dining room. Older women look at older men who are looking at Delfina. Then turn to look at her themselves. Cormac remembers Ginger Everett turning heads in this room and singing “Bluebird of Happiness” for the crowd in a thin little voice; but Ginger never came close to weeping over quantum physics. When Delfina makes her return (the table cleared of plates, a fresh wine waiting), a lot of eyes fall upon Cormac too. His eyes are on Delfina’s belly, under the black sheath. He rises and makes an effort at moving her chair, but she’s too quick.

“You were staring at my belly,” she says, leaning forward with elbows on the table.

“I want to see what’s there.”

She glances behind her to see if she can be heard. She can’t. “First I want some chocolate cake.”

The waiter comes over. Cormac orders two coffees, one chocolate cake, and two forks. The waiter glides away. Then, on the far side of the room, a woman starts shouting at a man. She’s about fifty, with blue-rinsed hair and real pearl earrings. She’s a little drunk, and at first her words are indistinct in the general din of the restaurant. Then the room hushes, and they can hear what she’s shouting at the large white-haired man across the table from her. He starts patiently wiping his eyeglasses with a handkerchief.