Pete Hamill - Forever

That night, he enters the Delfina Summer. She is the essential ele ment, humid and loamy, with her long thin legs in odd contrast to the thick pliancy of her flesh. They meet without plans, without agendas. If he speaks about architecture, she counters with the language of flowers. Surely, she says, roses must whisper in words that are different from those of chrysanthemums. But trees, he says, are like buildings, rooted in earth, rising against blank skies. Trees provide shelter, the way buildings do. Some trees are brilliant with colors, he says, and others stark with abandonment and old age.

Yes, she says, I see what you mean. And stares for a beat at the abandonment in his face.

They keep a cool, respectful distance from each other too, which makes the moments of intimacy even more fevered. In between, it’s as if each were wary of domesticating the time they share. They have no compact, no agreement about rules. If they meet on Monday, they will not meet on Tuesday or Wednesday, unless some urgency grips her and she must see him. He has his friends, like Healey; she has hers, whose names and faces he does not know. What matters is what happens when they are together. The music of the present tense. They make love in the Studio, on the couch, on the bed, on the old model’s stand, in the jacuzzi, and once on top of the piano, giggling all the way. They make love in full morning light or in the luminous glow of towers; and once, in a rush, in the dusky woods near Grant’s Tomb. On some weekday nights, she sleeps with him, fresh clothes packed for an early-morning meeting at her job in the North Tower. She sleeps deeply, breathes shallowly, has a whisper of a sated snore; she is without need then for companion or accomplice, only warmth. In the morning, she never says goodbye. They speak little about the flesh and not at all about love, which Cormac thinks is why she is with him. After the first tentative weeks, they stop performing and shift into being. They dine together in restaurants, visit museums, go to see shows or movies, as he shows her a New York she has seldom seen. She comes to listen when he sits in with Bobby Simmons. He takes her to one breakfast with Healey, who approves of her in capital letters, while she says later that Healey should be committed. Eventually, on every day that they are together, and without concern for clocks, they make love. Life’s small dessert. Always in his place, never in hers. She makes clear without saying a word that she is entering his life but that he is not yet entering hers.

She reads the New York Times each morning now and has added the Wall Street Journal because of her new job, but she doesn’t dice up the newspapers for subject matter at dinner. The saga of the missing intern in Washington does interest her, with its script of younger woman and older man, and she wonders why the police don’t deal with the suspect congressman the way they would deal with a bodega owner in the Bronx. “He’d be in a cell long ago,” she says. “But hey, this is America, man….” She says she can’t look at the president on television because he reminds her of snotty rich kids she’d see in restaurants when she was at Hunter, sending back the wine. She wonders whether stem cell research can cure the woman in her building uptown who shakes with Parkinson’s. She wishes the navy would stop using Vieques for target practice, but the Middle East, where bombs are now exploding in pizza parlors, could be in a different solar system. “I just don’t get it,” she says. “It’s gotta be me.” Some people, she adds, are just driven crazy by God and there’s nothing that can be done. The election in Peru is good news for Reynoso & Ryan because they have some business in Lima, but in general politics, domestic or foreign, she finds an emptiness, a series of speeches and explosions. “How many of these god-damned politicians ever heard ‘Oye Como Va’?”

Sometimes she speaks of her job as if she’s witnessing a daily soap opera. She describes Reynoso, the flamboyant partner, and his vice president, Sarita, a Colombian who is twenty years older and thirty pounds heavier than Reynoso, and mad for the man. At least twice a day, she gives Delfina dirty looks, as if her blouse is too frail or her sweater too tight. “She’d like me better,” Delfina says, “if I dressed like a nun.” There are sixteen people working in the office and all of them wonder about Ryan, the permanently absent partner who is always calling in from distant hotel rooms. Reynoso jokes about deliveries from Bogotá or schemes for paying off union leaders in Yucatán. Delfina punctuates her accounts by saying that capitalism is a bitch. Then glides away into other realms.

“Do you believe in God?” Cormac asks her at a show of religious tapestries at the Metropolitan.

“I believe in gods,” she answers. “Plural.”

And that draws him closer to her, as a dozen gods move through him from the Irish mist, and he wonders if they could ever merge with the sun-soaked gods of the Caribbean. There could be a tapestry of gods as profuse as flowers.

They talk about monotheism, and how it has led to so many slaughters. He wonders out loud why that single God is always so cruel.

“Because he wants love, man,” she says, “and he can’t get it. Look at all the commandments. They all say, Love me or die. What a weird message! God insists that you love him. He says, If you don’t love me, I’ll punish you with boils and plagues and locusts. I will burn you in Hell. His vanity is endless. Love me, he says, love me, love me, love me. He’s supposed to be the most powerful dude in the universe, El Señor, the Father of us all, and he comes across as a huge pain in the ass.”

She laughs when she says these things, which means she is serious.

“Hey, why can’t he be indifferent? ” she goes on. “Why does he give such a big rat’s ass about getting people to love him? He’s like some kind of rapper. You know, Love me, baby, or I’ll throw you under a truck.”

Cormac smiles.

“I mean, the real gods are not so jealous, man, not so vain,” she says. “They have weaknesses, like everybody else. And they have real jobs. They have to take care of water and fire and the sky and the stars. Some of them have powers, but not all powers. Not everything wrapped up in one vain dude. I mean, they’re too busy, man, to demand love from each and every person on the planet…. They got the whole damn universe to take care of.”

And then she smiles in a secret way.

She can change the subject so effortlessly that he often doesn’t notice until later that she has moved on. She’s like a musician, hearing some riff and then doing variations on the theme, or introducing some completely new idea, while never going out of tempo, out of time. The macho vanity of God can lead to a discussion of the New Testament as poetry, an epic poem about a young man who thinks he is God too, and then ends up on a cross and discovers that he’s just a man, that he’s not God at all, that he will die for his delusion (and his vanity); which is why he says, God, why hast thou forsaken me?

And then she goes on to discuss poets, to talk about Rubén Darío and Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, all of whom she has read in Spanish, some of whom she has memorized. Such talk comes like a river that has been blocked for too many years, halted when she left Hunter, halted by marriage, a child, death, anguish; and he is thrilled when she speaks Spanish, when she drops a bucket into deep waters and draws a dozen lines of poetry from her bottomless well of vowels.

She is sometimes baffled by him. One sweltering Saturday, she wants to show him Orchard Beach, along the shores of the Bronx, where conga players drum into the night. “You gotta hear these guys, Cormac,” she says. “They’ll shake up your gonads.” He can’t go, and can’t explain why. She wants to see a show at the Brooklyn Museum. He’s busy, and she goes alone. She arrives one evening with CDs from J&R Music by Benny More and Tito Rodriguez. She plays them and begins to dance while he sits and watches, shouting, “Come on, man, you can’t hear this music and sit. ”