Pete Hamill - Forever

They go down a flight of carpeted stairs to the next level, filing along a cream-colored banister, finished in matte enamel like all the other woodwork; moving past two Bonnards and a Vuillard. Remembering the ghastly Meissoniers in the homes of the rich a century ago, all those heroic Frenchmen dying in the fields of the empire, facing the naked Egyptian maidens of Alta-Tadema across the room, poised to be seduced by Islam. At the foot of the stairs, a Matisse from the Fauve period. Green shadows, yellow cheekbones. The guests now all chatting, glancing at the paintings. Cormac glimpses a corridor with many enameled doors, some surely leading to still other doors. And here are more paintings. Cormac feels like a burglar casing a target. Raffles without the mask. Peggy from the art gallery tugs the sleeve of the retired diplomat and nods at a Kokoschka self-portrait, rippling with muscular impasto.

They pass the closed doors and into another large living room, designed as a refuge from winter, filled now by people whose chatter anticipates the coming summer. Tonight must be the last dinner party until after Labor Day. He notes the Persian rugs on oak floors that are perfectly tongued and grooved. Tall, deep fireplace, leather chairs, orderly bookcases (including bindings designed by Stanford White, whose presence never leaves New York), art books piled on tables, muted lamps, three original wash drawings by Delacroix, a Hopper evocation of a desolate beach, and on one wall, a portrait of Elizabeth Warren, ivory-skinned in Madame X gown and lighting, by one of those painters who still aspire to be Sargent. No Jeff Koons. No Schnabel. Not even the usual Marilyn or Mao from Warhol. Conservative taste everywhere, but confident, sure of quality.

On a grand Steinway, original sheet music awaits someone’s loving gaze, as the keys await caressing fingers. The paper is browning and slightly ragged. Gershwin. “Someone to Watch Over Me.” Images of the Brill Building: seven pianos on each floor; Joe Liebling’s telephone booth Indians working the golden lobby. On top of the piano, laid upon doilies, are family photographs in Tiffany frames. The new Tiffany. Cormac pauses as the other guests back up before entering the dining room, while others search for place cards. Cormac sees Elizabeth and her husband in Positano. In the Yucatán. On the Riviera, and on a market street in what appears to be Bangkok. On yachts. On matched motorcycles. On horseback. There they are with both Bushes, Clinton, Reagan, Princess Di. In the city room of a newspaper. In a secret garden.

Into the wood-paneled dining room now. Chased mirrors. A single perfectly lit drawing by Rubens. All of them bending, leaning, examining place cards. The gleam of plates and yellow roses in a fluted silver bowl.

Delfina.

Where are you at this very moment?

Warren is at one end of the long polished table, Elizabeth at the other, facing him with all the others between them, as in a thousand New Yorker cartoons. Cormac is to her left. The black wife of a black banker is to Cormac’s left. Ochre-skinned, plump, bejeweled, and nervous. A woman in her fifties. She and Cormac exchange hellos and a handshake. She wonders why Donna doesn’t just pack up and leave Gracie Mansion. And is it true that the mayor has moved in with two gay guys? She read that in the Post, so she isn’t sure it’s true. She has a marvelous smile. Her husband is down at the far end beside Warren. His name is Criswell, white-haired, slight trace of Jamaican accent when he was introduced to Cormac. To Elizabeth’s right is Max James, and he flatters her with questions about her opinions on the economy and who might win the election for mayor. To the right of James are Peggy from Soho, Brownlee the anchorman, a woman whose name Cormac didn’t get but surely the wife of one of the men, wearing the blank look that comes from the double slumber of the marriage bed. Then Ridley, the John Jay double, and a single woman with streaked blond hair, same age as Elizabeth. Probably the same gym. Wearing a just-divorced look and a tan from two weeks at Canyon Ranch. Boy, girl, boy, girl.

Waiters arrive now with salad, with succulent tomatoes, cheese crisp or runny, while a steward expertly offers wine. There’s a thin clinking of glass, the touching of forks to plates. Cormac doesn’t need to turn over a blue-patterned plate to know that it’s delft, most of it from the early nineteenth century, passed down to this table from some outpost of the Warren diaspora. Rills of laughter from the far end, in the same tone as the pinging of glass. The voice of a man who sounds as if he has swallowed a banjo. Warren brushing his hair with his fingers. Max asking Elizabeth about dot-commers. Silverware from Tiffany. Heavy and confident. The old Tiffany. Napkins folded into bishops’ miters. And here’s the food. The culinary neutrality of veal.

Warren addresses them all: “Can somebody please tell me what this whole globalization thing is all about? I see them in Seattle. I see them in Genoa. At war against Starbucks, it looks to me. But I just don’t know what the hell they want .”

“They want to spread poverty and pestilence to every corner of the earth, starting with us,” says the former ambassador to Prague. “They want to democratize misery.”

“Oh, that’s pretty drastic, don’t you think, Larry?” says Elizabeth. “Most of them seem fairly decent sorts.”

“Yes, and they want a hippie paradise,” says the former ambassador to Prague. “You know, small is beautiful, everybody eating roots on five square feet of land in some malarial forest. Everybody wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt and begging God, of course, to provide. It’s pure sentimental rot. And as the Nazis taught us, sentimentality can kill millions.”

“But they do have a certain nostalgic charm,” says Peggy from Soho. “It’s right out of Haight-Ashbury.”

“We know what they’re against, Peggy,” Warren says. “But what are they for? ”

At tables like these, generation after generation, Cormac has heard variations on the same question. What did the Africans want? What did the South want? What did the Irish want and the Italians and the Jews? And, of course, what did women want? He glances back toward the living room and is startled by a gigantic Lucian Freud painting of an immobilized man and a fat naked woman. He missed it coming in to find his place card. The only painting that is not by a traditional painter. Raw and brutal. Cormac flashes on the year when he focused all of his own painting on ugliness. To destroy all bullshit notions of beauty. Is the painted man knitting? Is the man a man? What does Lucian Freud want?

And as the courses arrive, and plates are exchanged, and silverware removed, all under the watchful eye of Patrick, he remembers those great groaning boards of the nineteenth century and the men and women whose motto was: We eat, therefore we are. The era of the 25,000-calorie meal. Tonight, Cormac thinks, the guests of the Warrens are unwittingly doing what their obscene social ancestors did: behaving like the people who provoked the French Revolution. The style is low-key, and Elizabeth seems relaxed, casual, understated, confident. After all, Renay the florist comes each week to fill the house with delicious aromas, and Patrick assures a perfect flow of movement at the table. Light, fresh calamari salad. Veal roast. Potatoes. Frozen soufflé. Cormac thinks: We’re in the era of cholesterol, blood sugar, and coronary heart disease. But they still use newspapers to provide conversation at dinner. They don’t argue about what Horace Greeley said anymore, of course; he is a statue in City Hall Park, keeping a bilious eye on J&R Music; they discuss Tom Friedman’s column in the Times, or Safire, or Maureen Dowd. They laugh at some dreadful bulletin in Page Six of the Post, about people they know, or a column by Stanley Crouch in the News, about people they will never know. Once Dana or Bennett, Pulitzer or Hearst inflamed these dining tables, igniting the flames of outraged invective. They rasped about Walter Lippmann or Dorothy Thompson and wanted to abolish the First Amendment. In their presence, Cormac acquired the habit that he maintains here tonight: saying nothing memorable. He doesn’t want attention. He wants to be a blur. An observing blur. In the past, he didn’t want to be remembered by such people. He wanted to remember. Still does.