Pete Hamill - Forever

She’s wearing one of those expensive pink jogging suits, and dark violet glasses, and a white cotton beret under which she has bundled her hair. She walks in her lean, ratcheting way on thick white running shoes, looking like Monica Vitti leaving the set of a 1960s movie to go to a gym. She sees Cormac, smiles, and he stands as she reaches the table. She brushes his cheek with a kiss, and he can smell a fragrance—apples?—rising from her skin.

“A ghastly morning,” she says. “It’s like London out there.” “The sun will burn it off in an hour.”

“One hopes.” She gazes around. “How cozy. And I’m famished.”

A waiter brings menus. She takes off the sunglasses to read, folding them and tucking them into a pocket of the jogging suit. Her makeup is so subtly applied that she seems to be wearing none at all. There’s a restrained gloss of pale lipstick on her wide mouth.

“I want one of those gigantic American breakfasts,” she says. “Mounds of pancakes and bacon and sausage. The whole lot. And an OJ. And a steaming mug of coffee. Everything.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“I’m still trying to get over last night,” she says. “We saw this movie about Pearl Harbor, and I exhausted myself laughing. Have you seen it?”

“I’d rather go to jail.”

“Oh, you must see it. It’s so ghastly that you can’t help yourself. My husband, as usual, thought I was crazy. But—”

“How is he?”

The waiter returns with a coffee pot, pours two cups, takes their orders, moves silently away.

“How is he? Oh, he’s what he is. A perfectly kind and loving man. Full of mad idealism.”

She says this like one of those Brits who believe that most Americans are botched Brits.

“He’s doing a good job with the newspaper,” Cormac says. “Isn’t he, though? Excellent. Even I’ve begun to read it.” “That would make a good commercial.”

“Yes, wouldn’t it, though. But in that case, I’d rather go to jail.” The food arrives. She eats with the greedy carelessness of someone who believes she’ll always be thin. And Cormac thinks: Delfina eats as if she will die tomorrow. Elizabeth finishes before Cormac. Talking all the while about the president, and missile defense (“Who exactly are the Americans planning to defend themselves from?”). Then, glancing at the engravings, she goes on about New York, and her discoveries, and the energy of the city, and the good manners of its citizens. “It’s come a long way since Mrs. Trollope was here,” she says. “Have you ever read her book?”

“Yes,” Cormac says (remembering the woman’s pinched, nervous face). “She had an unforgiving eye for human weakness.”

“Exactly. I should do a sequel. ‘Domestic Manners of the New Americans.’ ”

Cormac finishes breakfast. A Mexican busboy takes their plates. Cormac yearns for a cigarette and wonders if nicotine withdrawal has been giving him bad dreams.

“I so wish I could belch,” Elizabeth says. “But the ghost of Mrs. Trollope is intimidating.”

“If anyone notices, I’ll explain you’re an Arab. New Yorkers believe anything you tell them about Arabs. They’ve become what the Irish were in the nineteenth century.”

Her eyes bright with schoolgirlish conspiracy, she covers her mouth with a napkin and smothers a gassy belch. Then laughs.

“I did it, I did it!”

“Excuse me. I have to call Page Six.”

“No, no, not that! ”

She talks then about Page Six and the gossip columns in the Daily News and what wicked fun all of them are, unless you are the subject of their wicked scrutiny. The waiter pours fresh coffee. Then Elizabeth Warren seems to wind down, poking a spoon into the coffee, her elbows on the table. She looks up, her face serious.

“Let me ask you something,” she says.

“Sure.”

She seems embarrassed.

“Are you a free man?”

“I suppose.”

“Don’t suppose. You’re not married, I take it. But do you have a woman?”

A moment of hesitation. “I’m seeing a lot of a woman.”

She smiles in a rueful way.

“God damn it.”

Cormac says nothing.

“Before we moved here,” she says, “one of my friends warned me. All the attractive men, she said, are married, or drunks, or gay.”

She sips her coffee.

“But I’d like to see more of you. You look like a man who can keep a secret. And there’s something you can help me do.”

Cormac does not ask her to define that something.

“And you’re cautious too,” she says. “That always helps.” Now there’s a hint of hardness in her voice and she glances at her watch. “I have to see my husband, alas.”

She gets up, forces a smile, and shakes Cormac’s hand.

“I’d better go,” she says. “The agents of Page Six are everywhere.” She leans close, kisses him on the mouth. Then she turns and walks across the restaurant, hips ratcheting, and goes out to the city.

Before leaving the hotel, he buys a pack of Vantage cigarettes. Out side, the fog has lifted and he uses book matches to light his first cigarette in nine days. He feels a mixture of failure and relief. Then, walking east along the edge of the park, with children now playing in the grass with their fathers or mothers (the nannies all off for the day), and a few stray homeless men scouting benches, he inhales deeply and thinks about Elizabeth Warren. Nicotine, after all, is a clarifying drug. He is groping for clarity.

There’s something about Elizabeth Warren, he thinks (dropping his cigarette butt down a sewer opening), that is not Elizabeth Warren. She faces left when she should be facing right. In one way, she’s the woman she presents to the world: cool and smooth and intelligent. But the woman at breakfast was a flopped tracing of that original, the reverse of what she seems to be, while remaining the same woman. The cool Elizabeth at breakfast revealed someone hotter and darker. Clearly, she’s pulling me, a total stranger, into something that she wants me to do. The lure is familiar: the hidden pleasures between her lean thighs. But she hints at something else. Something about her husband. As if her need has detected my need.

As if she wants help in a killing.

He reaches the Astor Place station and then he sees a man coming up the stairs. His name is Bobby Simmons, and he has skin the color of tea with milk, hair almost white, a hunched stance. He’s carrying a worn saxophone case covered with hotel decals and old clearances from customs. Cormac blocks his way. The old man looks at his face as if he’s being challenged, and then smiles.

“Gahdamn,” Simmons says. “It’s you for sure, ain’t it? Cormac O’Connor himself.”

They embrace as Simmons reaches the street. People move around them, glancing at fresh newspapers, taking Metrocards from their wallets.

“Hello, Bobby,” Cormac says.

“Gahdamn, such a long time.”

Simmons is breathless from climbing the subway stairs and from the seventy-six years he carries on his spare frame.

“I didn’t know you were back from Europe,” Cormac says. “Six weeks now, and damn, the dirty ol’ Apple looks good. Never seen so many good-lookin’ women all at one time.” He grins and starts walking west, Cormac beside him. “I was gone fourteen months, ya know. Paris—mostly Paris—but Copenhagen too, and London, and Prague, and hey, even Dublin, man. With your people. Crazy motherfuckers, your people. They got music comin’ outta they asses. Hey—where you going?”

“Home.”

“No, you ain’t. You comin’ with me. I gotta gig down here on Eleven Street, in…” He glances at his wristwatch. “In three minutes. And I need a piano player.” He pronounces it “pianner,” in the old New York style, and grins when he says the word. “Who says they ain’t a god? You come out of the subway, and there’s the pianner player.”