Pete Hamill - Forever

And he gets up, clumpy, stiff, awkward, and she laughs and says, “Man, you’re gonna be a project! We gotta go to Jimmy’s, up in the Bronx! Right now, Cormac! Get dressed!”

And he says, “Uh, no, well, I, why don’t we try that some other time?”

And plays piano along with the Latin CDs. While Delfina dances alone.

But she is revealing herself in fragments, and so is he. They are like two archaeologists, examining unearthed shards and trying to make them whole through imagination. When he’s alone, longing for her abundant presence, he speaks to her in the emptiness: “To tell the truth, Delfina, my life has no shape at all. There are no straight lines. I have this strange life, but it’s not, in the end, strange at all. There is no plot. There is only luck and chance.”

The Delfina Summer was not a neat sequence of day following night following day. Her part of the summer was condensed, edited together in his mind by his need for a story. But he still took his naps and went for his walks. He made entries in his notebooks. He listened to Ben Webster and Sinatra, Coltrane and Miles. He felt a need to read again the books that had enriched his life, and so he took down Don Quixote and read it in three days, and was filled with sadness. “Don’t listen to them, old knight,” he said to the emptiness. “They are not windmills. They are dragons.” And wondered what Quixote would make of the Woolworth Building and the Twin Towers. He laughed through Dante’s Inferno, imagining John Gotti leaning over the poet’s shoulder in his northern exile, saying, Da lawyizz. Put in about da lawyizz! He wanted to stand in applause for the shamelessness of Bleak House, the sight of Dickens demanding from his audience what Fosse used to call a Big Mitt Number. At one point Dickens has a man die of spontaneous combustion, exploding into fragments, into ash and dust. Sinvergüenza, he said. Shameless. And as delicious as a great extravagant meal.

And through the Delfina Summer, he still sat each Tuesday morning with Healey in Mary’s marvelous coffee shop, the city gilded with July or August, and heard his tale of a possible Hollywood miracle, and how the fabulous goniff Legs Brookner, for reasons of guilt or avarice, was offering him a twenty-thousand-dollar advance to turn his second play into a screenplay. “He’s gonna make me SOMEBODY again! Can you imagine?” Cormac could imagine, and they talked about ways to update the old play, or whether it should be done as a period piece, and what Healey would do with the immense fortune that might be coming his way. “Maybe I’ll move to Kabul and watch the Taliban shoot statues!”

One Tuesday morning, Healey walked in waving the Daily News . “Did you see THIS? The FBI just discovered that someone robbed four hundred and forty-nine guns from FBI headquarters, and one hundred and eighty-four laptops! One of the laptops has CLASSIFIED information on it! Is this the GREATEST? I mean, I LOVE this country! If you gotta have the secret police, then make sure they are INCOMPETENT!”

Cormac also saw Elizabeth Warren.

They meet twice for lunch, each time in a hotel. Each time she is in town from Southampton on a shopping trip, or to see friends from Europe. The first meeting is in the Grand in Soho, sandwiches in the restaurant, where she nods at acquaintances, and talks about politics and Africa and the forgiveness of debt. That day she sounds like a one-woman seminar and never once mentions what she really wants from him. Three weeks later, it’s room service at the Millennium, facing the World Trade Center across Church Street. She talks about Downtown as if it were another country, and he tells her some of its history, and who lived where, and how Matthew Brady had two separate studios on Broadway where he photographed everybody from Walt Whitman to Abraham Lincoln. He talks to delay; she listens but doesn’t listen. He hopes he is boring. And feels as if he is doing an audition.

She needs him in some way that she has not spelled out. He needs her to get to his father’s sword, and to the places that the sword will take him. In a room on a high floor of the Millennium, they make love. She is awkward, in the way that some models are permanently awkward, as if thrown back to the gawky, breastless girls they once were, when no boys could see beyond the braces glittering in their mouths. She wears her passion as if it were rouge.

“You’re what I thought you’d be,” she says when they are done. “Just marvelous.”

He thinks of Delfina, who never gives him a review. She is out there beyond the window of the hotel, across the plaza, on the eighty-fourth floor of the North Tower. He wishes he could enter the air, do some marvelous dance high above the city, as light and graceful as Fred Astaire. Dance for Delfina. Dance to her. And let the harbor winds cleanse his shame.

In the neutral space of the hotel room, Elizabeth Warren talks about schedules and assignments and duties, about a trip to Angola and Rwanda with a land mine committee, and how she needs shots for malaria. She talks about some fund-raising events in the Hamptons, talking as if she has endless time before she gets around to telling Cormac what she wants. Her summer is a schedule, rigorously shaped, not a life. He doesn’t say anything about what he wants from her: the sword. She smiles in a cool way, assembles her few things, checks her hair, and then goes. Cormac lights a cigarette and gazes off at the towers. “Mea culpa ,” he says out loud. “Mea maxima culpa.”

Delfina calls before daylight on a morning in the third week of August. Her voice is quick, almost abrupt, and thin with tension.

“I’m on my way to the D.R.,” she says. “My father’s dying.”

She has seldom mentioned him in their time together. He was, she said once, handsome. At least in her small-girl’s memory. He played piano in various bands around Santo Domingo. “He’s not as good as you are,” she said, and smiled. He was married at least twice after her mother left him for the healing snows of New York.

“I don’t even know him,” she says. “That’s why I have to go. To ask him some questions.”

Something dark and uneasy is in her voice, and she knows it.

“My aunt Lourdes called around midnight,” she says, forcing herself out of the darkness. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

“Where are you now?”

“Kennedy. I wish you were with me.”

“Me too.” He pauses. “Call me when you get time,” Cormac says. “Call collect. But only if you can.”

“I will.”

The hardness seeps out of her voice now. He can hear the blur of public announcements in the background.

“I hope all goes well. For you. For him too.”

“I hope so too. For him. You always think you have all the time in the world to find out the things that really matter to you. Then you get a phone call in the middle of the night, and you’re talking about days or hours. Life is weird, sometimes.”

“It sure is.”

“And Cormac? We’ll have dinner in my place as soon as I get back. For the first time…”

“Of course. Just do what you’ve got to do down there.”

“Okay.”

“Vaya con Dios.”

Then she’s gone. He lies on the couch for a while and then picks up the remote control and clicks on New York 1 for the time and weather. Temperatures in the high eighties. No wind. He needs to go out into the city. In August, he thinks, I can even wear shorts.

She doesn’t call that night, or the day after. And on the following morning, he walks down Broadway with Healey, who is unhappy in a new way. Without warning, Mary’s coffee shop has closed. The building is being rehabbed, with money obviously raised before the dot-com collapse. The pipes and planks of rigging climb three stories above the sidewalk, throwing the front of the coffee shop into darkness, and a team of Mexicans is adding one new floor of rigging to another. The interior of the coffee shop is dark. The Miss Subways posters are still there, but gone are all those waitresses who called them sweetheart in the New York mornings.