Pete Hamill - Forever

Now Cormac pauses on the corner. In Tompkins Square Park, there’s a monument to the victims of the General Slocum, but nobody in the neighborhood knows what it’s commemorating. Now merengue music plays from an unseen radio. Now, on stoops and on sidewalks, kids strut and pose and curse. He hears Delfina’s voice: Same old ghetto bullshit.

The telephone rings around midnight. Cormac picks it up, drops his voice, thinking it’s Delfina, whispers hello.

“How seductive… ARE YOU AWAKE?”

Healey.

“I am now.”

“I just opened the MAIL ten days late. And there’s an INVITE to the Metropolitan Museum. Tomorrow night. Some kind of a NEW YORK ART SHOW! And all the biggies, the MIGHTY ASSHOLES OF THE PLANET, will be there. Go with me. It should be a million LAUGHS.”

“What time?” “Seven-THIRTY!”

“I’ll see you on the steps.”

Cormac comes up out of the Lexington Avenue subway at Eighty- sixth Street and walks west toward the park into a dazzle of silver light. The sidewalk is like pewter, tarnished only by the shadows of men and women whose faces are obscured and formless. The sun is behind them. There are silvery reflections on windows, and the upper stories of apartment houses are drained of color by the light. He came here one afternoon long ago in a carriage drawn by two horses, sitting beside Bill Tweed. There were a few rutted dirt roads then and some stands of trees and much scrub. In his wheezy baritone Bill Tweed spoke with excitement about what was coming: streets and apartment houses and a great green park and perhaps even a museum for the city of New York. “It will change before we’re buried,” he said, and laughed. “There won’t be a live rabbit left on the island.” As on so many other things, the Boss was right. He just didn’t live to see it happen.

There’s a milling crowd on the steps of the Metropolitan, made of tourists and visitors from New Jersey and a slew of photographers dressed in formal wear. A huge banner proclaims the name of the show: Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825–1861, and Cormac smiles. Thinking: I’m the only person here who actually lived in that lost city. The photographers stand in a tuxedoed pack at the foot of the stairs, waiting for the heavy doors of arriving limousines to open and for their inhabitants to emerge into the sheet lightning of electronic flash. As he climbs the broad stairs on the far right, dressed in his twenty-seven-year-old tuxedo and wearing his fake plain-glass spectacles, his patent-leather shoes glistening and his hair brushed straight back, Cormac can see Madonna getting out of a stretch limo as if she had arrived at the Academy Awards. Ordinary singer, fair dancer, but a marvelous act. Ahead of him, Healey is standing with some tourists just short of the top step. His tuxedo looks thirty-two years old. He hands Cormac a ticket.

“You see, failure is a fucking COMFORT, pal,” Healey says, waving a huge hand at the crowd and gesturing toward poor Madonna and the engulfing photographers. A few people back away from Healey’s bulky loudness. In the excited din, Cormac hears scraps of French and German. “You’re a certified failure, nobody blinds you with those goddamned FLASHBULBS! Nobody asks you to spell your fucking NAME! Nobody asks you whether you like the show, even if you haven’t SEEN IT! They don’t give a shit. You’re a nobody. They don’t care if you LIVE OR DIE.”

More photographers are inside the main hall, and a few reporters scribbling notes, and several hundred people in what used to be called evening wear. There’s another eruption of flashbulbs as Madonna comes into the museum, smiling broadly, dressed modestly, moving past Cormac and Healey in the direction of the galleries, and then behind her comes Lauren Bacall. She looks at them through hooded eyes and smiles.

“Healey, you big ape,” she says with a growl. “Where’s that play you promised me twenty years ago?”

“It’s coming, Betty, it’s ALMOST DONE! I swear to Yahweh!” She laughs and gives him a shove and keeps moving. At these rituals, celebrities have one basic tactic: smile and keep moving. A young woman photographer confronts Healey with a notebook in hand.

“Excuse me, sir,” she says. “Can you tell me your name?”

“I don’t HAVE a name! I’m a nobody .”

“Come on, man—”

Then more white lights explode and the photographer turns away and the rumbling crowd sounds grow louder, with several hundred voices bouncing off glazed marble. Walking in the door are the people Cormac has come to see: William Hancock Warren and his wife, Elizabeth. Warren’s tuxedo is rumpled and he needs a haircut and keeps brushing at his hair while chatting amiably with the reporters. As he listens to a question, the mouth moves into an amused smile. From where Cormac is standing on the fringe of the crowd, he can’t hear a word. But Warren seems relaxed, holding Elizabeth’s hand lightly, and when he says something, the reporters smile too. He is charming them. His wife says nothing to anyone.

“This is hard to BELIEVE,” Healey says. “I mean, this isn’t Vladimir Putin, or Seamus Heaney, or PUFFY FUCKING COMBS! This is a real estate guy that owns a paper!”

“That’s why they like him,” Cormac says. “Especially the free-lancers. He could put them all on the payroll and never miss a meal.”

Then Warren turns toward another shower of flash and sees the mayor come in, police bodyguards behind him wearing dark blue suits and buttons in their ears. The mayor looks hunched and tired. But the mayor’s brain tells the mayor to smile. He smiles. His brain tells him to embrace Warren. He embraces Warren. The embrace is digitally immortalized by the photographers, though only Warren’s newspaper will ever consider running the picture. Elizabeth slips her hand out of her husband’s grip and backs away, a smile fixed on her face. A look of melancholy passes across her face, as if she has long ago grown weary of photographs.

“Shit, look who’s here,” Healey says, gesturing toward a small ruddy man with thinning white hair who has come in with a fat woman, right behind the mayor. “This butterball owes me MONEY!” The fat man is a literary agent named Brookner. Sometimes known as Legs, for the speed of his movements in the William Morris mailroom in the 1950s. He had enriched himself with 10 percent of some fabulous paydays, but now in the years of his wealth and respectability, when he even has a foundation named after himself and the wing of a mediumsized hospital in Sarasota, Legs Brookner insists on being called Irving.

“LEGS!” Healey bellows, and goes off in big-shouldered pursuit. Cormac watches Elizabeth Warren, who is chatting with an elderly woman while her husband and the mayor turn to embrace the arriving governor.

Cormac moves around casually, drawing Elizabeth Warren in his mind. She’s indeed a beauty of a classic English type. Smooth cream-colored skin. Lean, athletic body sheathed in a black Valentino frock. Oval head, with a well-defined jaw. Her dark burnt-sienna hair is pulled back tightly off the clean plane of her brow, and she wears a silver stud in the lobe of each small, slightly protruding ear. There’s a hint of blush on her high cheekbones. She has heavy eyebrows, widely spaced hazel eyes deepened by makeup, and her mouth is wide when she smiles. As Cormac drifts closer, he notices one crooked bicuspid among the otherwise perfect white teeth. All of this rests on a long regal neck, rising off narrow shoulders and emphasized by a silver necklace holding a single lustrous opal. Sargent might have used her as “Madame X.”

Then Warren and the mayor and the governor move forward, the mayor pointing at nothing to give the photographers a bit of fraudulent action, and Elizabeth moves too, smiling and shaking hands with the wife of the governor. Cormac hangs behind; the eyes of two sets of political bodyguards are now scanning him, along with other visitors. He sees the Warrens and the politicians merge with the crowd of several hundred people and tries to move in casually behind them, but they vanish into the blur of black tuxedos.