Pete Hamill - Forever

“I never met anyone rich before,” she says, and giggles.

“I’m not rich.”

“Come on: A place like this costs a mint.”

“Not when I got it,” he says. “It was just a dump then.”

Hoping she doesn’t ask what year. Hoping she doesn’t ask where he got the money. She doesn’t. She leans back against a bookcase full of large volumes on Mexico and Italy and other places he has never seen. She takes another gulp of water. For a long silent moment, he can feel her staring at him, can feel shapeless questions traveling in the air between them. Cormac thinks: If she asks, I might even answer.

And then to himself, and to her, he says, “I’m alive.”

That night he dreams of swimming in a vast sea, his body making wide spirals in the water, curving, turning, the forms remaining in his wake. When he finishes cutting spirals with his body, they glow against the dark waters. Something comes from beneath him, bumping, pushing him.

He awakes in sweat and tears.

The clock tells him that it’s 8:48. She’s gone into the gray morning. He is not surprised. He is, in fact, relieved. There is nothing more clumsy than the talk on the morning after the first night before. He turns in the bed, inhaling the mixed scents of her body. He pulls a pillow close to his chest. He hears church bells ringing beyond the drapes.

He walks south on Broadway in the Sunday-morning quiet, passing shuttered stores and tourists with unfolded maps and white shoes. At the Battery, he goes to the final iron railing, where he can hear the languid slapping of the sea. Images of Delfina move through him. A warm breeze brings him the salt of the harbor. He watches a Nigerian tanker heading for the open sea. A squadron of gulls wheels above the tanker, completes a swift reconnaissance, and angles away toward Governor’s Island.

They are there, Cormac thinks. The spirals are there. I’ve traced them with my tongue.

His heart quickens and he turns from the harbor and walks toward South Street, where he can sit at a breakfast table and see the masts of a sailing ship.

She calls him about six. She is shy at first, holding back, uttering banalities, talking around what happened between them. Then he hears her inhaling a cigarette. She is abruptly more direct.

“My tattoos didn��t disgust you?” she says.

“Not at all. They’re kind of beautiful.”

She laughs. “Kind of.”

“Like sea serpents. Or snakes in a Hindu temple.”

“I’ve never seen a sea serpent. Or a Hindu temple.”

“Neither have I. But I’ve got a book down the hall—”

“I want you to show it to me. Soon.”

“Soon.”

She pauses, and her voice flattens.

“I got them to make myself disgusting.”

Cormac says nothing.

“I wanted to scare men away,” she says, taking a deep drag, exhaling slowly. “I’d fucked too many of them and didn’t want to fuck another. And I thought, Shit, even if I want to give in, you know, some night with too much to drink, or too filled up with loneliness, or anger, or hatred, I thought, If I can scare them with something, their cocks will die.” She likes using the hard, blunt Anglo-Saxon words, talking “street,” letting Cormac know which version of Delfina Cintron is now talking. “It was like wearing a sign that said, ‘Beware of the cunt.’ ”

Cormac wants to laugh, but doesn’t. In her way, she’s letting him know that she will take sex when she chooses to have it, but she will not be hurt. He listens to the words beyond the hardness.

“Who did them for you?” he asks.

“Some guy uptown,” she says. “Way uptown. Like on the top of the island. I can’t even remember his name. Black dude. Blacker than any black man I ever saw, talks in some African accent? Like the guys peddle incense around Bloomingdale’s? One of those guys. Maybe sixty years old. Maybe older.”

Cormac imagines the face of the tattoo artist. The face of Kongo. His skin tingles.

“Did he have a set of designs?”

“Yeah, the usual stuff. You know, Malcolm X, and words in Chinese, crosses, stars, skulls, the stuff these goddamned basketball players wear all over themselves like graffiti.”

“And yours?”

“He just sketched it on paper,” she says. He knows her hand is moving in air, making a sketch. “It looked simple and scary at the same time. It was me that told him to make it go all the way down to my bush.” She chuckles sadly. “I had to go to him four times, he called them four treatments, like he was a doctor, a million little needles. He did half of one, you know, looped around my belly button, and it hurt so much I wanted to give up, and then thought, Shit, this will look ridiculous all by itself, like shaving half your head. So I had him finish the job. To get the bottoms where I wanted them, I had to shave. In a way, that turned me on, but it didn’t do anything for the old man. Between the tattoo and the shave, I itched for a month.”

She laughs.

“They sure didn’t work with you,” she says, almost solemnly. “I mean, didn’t scare you off.” A pause. “I’m glad.” A longer pause. “Until last night, I hadn’t fucked anyone in almost two years.”

At dusk, he takes the bike for his Wordsworth. He pedals up the West Side and turns right into Soho, heading for Crosby Street to avoid the Sunday tourists on Broadway. He will see Delfina on Wednesday. He will cook. She will pose for his charcoaled hand. He does not try to imagine that night. He pedals across the immediate space in front of him. It’s dark when he reaches Houston Street, and he wonders where all the black bicycle riders went. One summer, they were all gone, never to be seen again. He did not again see the man who answered his Yoruba with Ashanti.

But he knows that other figures and things and odors are gone too. The shopping-bag ladies were everywhere for six years, pushing their packed supermarket wagons into frozen doorways, talking steadily in streams of scrambled nouns, sorting through tiny bags of socks or knitting needles or empty envelopes; and then they were gone. To shelters or asylums or the Potter’s Field on Hart Island. There were jugglers on certain corners, drawing crowds on summer nights, their faces familiar for a dozen years, and then they were gone too. One year, there were no more cooking odors from the tenements of the Lower East Side, and no more clotheslines on the rooftops or in the backyards. The familiar city vanished; the new city emerged; and in each new city, Cormac was new too.

He moves now into what he once knew as Kleindeutschland, where Germans were everywhere, and he worked for a year setting type at a German newspaper. Most of the older Germans were the children of those who left in 1848 and the relatives who kept coming after the first wave settled: socialists and engineers and mechanics and doctors, all of them creating their own version of America, making deals with Tammany, using the system that they didn’t invent while trying to make it more orderly. They too had started in the Five Points, but kept moving north and east until they had forged a neighborhood that most were certain would last forever. Little Germany.

Right there on Stanton Street, where the Quisqueya la Bella bodega now offers fresh mango and papaya, was the saloon of Peter Reuter. All the newspapermen went in the evening to drink there after the edition was locked up. Writers, reporters, men still smelling of melted lead from the composing room; and here too came the poets and painters and mad architects, the inflamed or disillusioned socialists, the anarchists and syndicalists, to drink lager or ale, to consume great barrels of sausage, and to sing the old songs at midnight. That’s where he went on the night in 1904 after writing his story for the Sun about the burning of the General Slocum . Nobody remembered it anymore, but the sinking of the General Slocum in the East River was the worst disaster in New York history. Everybody on board was heading for an annual excursion to Long Island. All Germans, most out of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, many of them children. A fire started, then exploded, then the ship was burning and moving, the fire hoses rotted, the women and children diving away from the fire into the June waters, unable to swim, and then the ship sank in the violent waters of Hell Gate. More than a thousand died, and the funerals went on for a week and when it was over the Germans all left Kleindeutschland. They went to Yorkville and tried to forget, and the Jews from Central Europe moved in and started the legend of the Lower East Side. That night in Peter Reuter’s saloon, with death throbbing in the streets around him, Cormac couldn’t wipe the horror from his mind, not even when he slept with a blowsy red-haired woman from Bavaria.