Pete Hamill - Forever

Delfina begins to relax with him. To make bad jokes. To drop the street language. To be at once younger and older. She makes no moves at all toward permanence. Time is provisional. Perhaps they will meet tomorrow. Perhaps after work she will come to his bed. Perhaps she will not. She loves the bookshelves in his loft and borrows a book about Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, the Benefactor, who tortured and killed some of her relatives in the Dominican Republic. Then she talks about the mayor’s long year of tabloid agony, and how if Donna, the mayor’s wife, were Dominican, she’d have cut off his thing and thrown herself on the mercy of the court.

She avoids asking now about his past. And she never mentions the future. She has a new job and wants to do well, but the job, like Cormac, is part of the present tense. Along with food, drink, and bed.

When he’s alone, he realizes that she is living one narrative and he is living another. He doesn’t mention Elizabeth Warren. And he is not certain what Delfina’s hidden narrative contains. His own contains too many secrets.

The butler is tall, dark-haired, about forty. He nods at Cormac’s name, takes a drink order, and says, “They’re all out on the terrace, Mister O’Connor.” A landsman, the accent pure Belfast. No sentence from the North is ever declarative; every statement contains the possibility of some other way of seeing the same set of facts. Like Yiddish, a language that contains escape. In his nod, and the slight smile, Cormac senses an acknowledgment of old conspiracies. Across a long, quietly lit room he sees glass doors with silhouettes moving behind them against the darkening sky. Then Elizabeth Warren is coming to greet him.

“Oh, Cormac, welcome, welcome.”

Dressed in a black Armani frock, knee-length with a scoop neck, short sleeves. Her lean, flawless arms. A sudden glitter of diamonds from her earrings. Cartier, of course. And those shoes Cormac saw in a story in the Times . Manolo something. Her tan darker in the muted light.

“Did Patrick take your drink order?”

“He did.”

She grasps each of his hands in greeting, her own hands cool, then leads him toward the balcony. They’re on the top floor of a triplex, high above Fifth Avenue, a few blocks north of the Frick. A story on the Internet told him that the Warrens occupy sixteen rooms here, but the place has a sense of planned, cultivated intimacy. He glances in passing around this wide sitting room that opens to the deep terrace and wonders if the terrace counts as a room. Off to the right: a huge silvery Sargent portrait of a redhaired woman in a full silk gown; Sargent, as always, makes the silk whisper. Luscious paint, buttery skin. Two Corots. Real ones. A Degas view of a racecourse. A wall of leathery books, tooled morocco, complete works and matching sets. Cormac remembers a party forty years earlier, a few blocks from this place, where the ex-chorus-girl wife of a real estate operator gazed at a similar wall of collected works and argued with a friend: “That can’t be Thackeray. Thackeray is green .”

Then Willie Warren himself comes forward and Elizabeth introduces them. He smiles in a tentative way, lifts a tumbler of scotch in salute, brushes at his untended hair with the other hand. Dark business suit. Violet tie. His face is fleshy, sweaty, but not yet fat. He has a pleasant smile.

“Ah, yes, Mister O’Connor. You’re a kind of historian, I take it. I’ve heard so much about you from Elizabeth. Welcome.”

A small tuxedoed Latino man arrives with Cormac’s cut-glass tumbler of ice water, the cold base wrapped in a cloth napkin.

“Thanks for having me,” Cormac says to Warren. “And by the way, this morning’s paper was terrific.”

“Well, that’s refreshing to hear. Usually people come to me with some kind of complaint, bitch, bitch, bitch, the usual New York thing—and I have to keep saying, ‘I’m just the publisher! ’ ” He laughs. “But please, tell my editor, will you? Oh, Mister James, here’s a fan. ”

And then it’s like an anthology of a thousand other New York dinner parties: drinks, remarks, and rehearsed wit, mixed with testing, auditioning, seducing. Warren introduces Cormac to Max James, his small, intense editor. Thinning gray hair. A bitter slash of mouth. Cormac says he was a copy boy at the Post in the three months before Dolly Schiff sold it to Rupert Murdoch (a lie, of course), and James says it’s much more fun running a paper for Warren—a tabloid in a broadsheet dress—than hanging around the bowels of the New York Times, where he worked for twenty-three years. Nobody mentions the story in New York magazine the year before, the article that said Max James left the Times for Warren’s rowdier broadsheet because he’d been told he was completely out of the running for the top editor’s job. “He’s too much of a prick,” said one anonymous source. “Even for the Times .” They chat now about Punch and Mort and Rupert and the problems that all of them are having and how the papers would be in a lot better shape if the Mets would start playing the way they did the year before, since nobody likes reading about losers. But Cormac can see the editor’s eyes wandering, longing to talk to the other guests, to Someone Important, instead of wasting time (at Warren’s command) with this unknown. Cormac wishes Healey could appear at his side, with his genius for disruption. And then Elizabeth is there to take him away.

“Come, you must meet the others,” she says.

She introduces Cormac to a few guests. Casually, smiling, then slipping away. Cormac exchanges polite nods, pleased-to-meet-yous. Men sipping. Ice clinking. He hears Billie Holiday singing from the inside room: “He’s Funny That Way.” Across the park, the tall broad-shouldered buildings of Central Park West are forming a black wall pierced with diamonds. The plump Dakota. Rosemary’s terrible baby. John Lennon lying in his blood. “Just glad I’m living…” The sky over New Jersey is orange streaked with purple. An airliner heads north before the right turn to LaGuardia, using the black line of the river as a guide. Much lower, helicopters beat toward Thirtieth Street. Cormac can see the Twin Towers in the distance, flashes on Delfina, the spirals, turns back into the party, remembering when all of this was fields and sky.

He shakes hands with a small pinched investment banker who reminds him of John Jay when he came back to New York after the signing of the peace treaty in Paris. The treaty that brought independence from the British. Jay in turn reminded him of the little dance teacher who used to come to Hughson’s to marvel at the Africans. Jay and his dreadful wife, her large pointed bosom always at attention… The investment banker’s name is Ridley. He has no interest in Cormac, of course, and why should he? He shakes hands and keeps talking. He’s saying that anybody with a tenth of a brain could have foreseen the death of the dot-coms. “But nobody wanted to face it,” he says. “They thought they could have capitalism without profits.”

“They were putting money in the NASDAQ without even knowing what the initials stood for,” says a tall, smiling man whose teeth are very white against his tanned skin. His name is Farragut and Cormac knows from the Post business pages that he’s in real estate. “By the way, what do they stand for?”

They all laugh.

“Everybody made mistakes,” says a balding, heavyset man named Sterman. He works for some vague foundation. The National Institute of Some Kind of Policy. A major fund-raiser for the Democratic party. “Even Clinton. He should have blocked that goddamned suit against Bill Gates. Microsoft was the El Dorado, the real thing, a technology outfit with real profits. It made a thousand other people think they could hit the same jackpot. When that asshole judge found Microsoft guilty, the gold rush ended.”