Pete Hamill - Forever

“Please, no fairy tales.”

“I’ve been cleaning it, polishing it.”

“It’s not your property. It’s Willie’s.”

“I know, and I’ll return it to him when—”

He hears a sob.

“How could you have done that to me the other night?” A pause. “I trusted you.” A longer pause. “I—I said things I would never say to—”

“I know.”

“I wanted one simple thing from you. Intimacy. Just that, just simple intimacy, some hope that for an hour or a minute, we—” She stops. “And all you had in mind was theft.”

She’s right, of course, but he can’t explain. He thinks: I can’t explain almost anything.

“I’ll call you when I get back,” she says. “If you don’t bring the sword, I’ll call the police.”

“And the police will call Page Six.”

“You’re a terrible man,” she says.

“I probably am.”

Hunger eats at him now. He feels some remorse for what he has done to Elizabeth Warren, imagines her alone in a hotel room in Canada, imagines her own hunger. He wonders too about Delfina, and whether she was truly so exhausted that she needed a night alone, or whether she has gone somehow to Reynoso’s apartment, wherever it is, to perform a proper farewell. The green worm will not leave. In the morning, she will be back at her office on the eighty-fourth floor, performing distance and neutrality. And Cormac thinks: Doubt, once felt, never goes away.

He decides to go out to eat, to escape the house. He brings a copy of The Decameron with him, to read at a restaurant table, and breathes deeply of the cool September wind. He walks uptown on Church Street, then cuts over to Varick. The night is damp and warm. SUVs are pulling up to the converted factories of Tribeca, depositing children, dogs, tennis rackets, and worried young couples on the sidewalks. The end of the prolonged Labor Day weekend, two days added to the usual three, or two free days that come with unemployment. The restaurants are filling up, their interiors warm with yellow light. He crosses to Murphy’s at North Moore. Away to the south, the Twin Towers are blazing with light, the offices busy with all those people from Japan and England and Canada and India who don’t add extra days to the Labor Day weekend. He can’t pick out the eighty-fourth floor.

In the bar side of Murphy’s, just inside the front door, a Yankee game plays on the television set over the long polished bar, and the Met game is on the set beside the men’s room. Cormac likes the place, with its mixture of teamsters, telephone workers, defense attorneys, and artists. Every high-backed stool is full, and at the tables people are talking, laughing, yelling into cell phones. All of them are smoking. He wants to smoke too, and decides to wait at the bar until a table is free; two groups are already drinking coffee. The bar is all dark wood and mirrors and a tiled floor out of the twenties, like a painting by John Sloan. Guinness and Harp flow from copper taps. On each table there’s a red carnation in a cut-glass vase. Cormac enjoys the place after the lunch hour, when most people have returned to work and he can read a newspaper in the emptiness and doodle with a crayon on the white paper table coverings. He lights a cigarette, then reaches between two men on stools and orders a Diet Coke. The bartender gives him change from a five-dollar bill. A heavyset man in a denim shirt turns a flushed face to Cormac.

“That shit rots your teeth,” he says, a curl of belligerence in his voice.

“Only if you drink more than one a day.”

“That right?”

“I read it in the Post . It must be true.”

“Are you puttin’ me on?”

“Why would I do that?”

“You got the kind of face, you like puttin’ people on.”

Ah, Christ, one of these people. Looking for trouble. One of the ten thousand others Cormac has met across the years.

“I never realized that about my face,” he says. Saying to himself: Stop. Watch the ball game. He glances at himself in the mirror. “Looks just like another face to me.”

“Yeah—and I’d like to smash it in for you.”

The bartender, sad and somber, leans in.

“Cool it, Frankie.”

“Guy says he read in the Post, your teeth only rot if you drink more than one Diet Coke a day.”

“So?”

“It’s the way he said it.”

“And?”

“I want to smash his face in.”

“Cool it, Frankie.”

Frankie looks at Cormac again. He has a mean, dead look in his eyes, and purses his lips as if savoring the moment.

“Fuckin’ wiseass.”

“Sorry,” Cormac says, sipping the Diet Coke. Now the owner comes over, a stocky Irish American in his forties. A few people at the tables are looking at them, ignoring the ball games and the jokes. Cormac can hear Tim McCarver’s voice analyzing the Yankee game.

“Frankie,” the owner says, “maybe you should walk around the block a couple a times. Go over the firehouse and bullshit awhile.”

“Yeah, after I cream this cocksucker.”

The owner turns to Cormac. “You sure set this idiot off, whatever the fuck you said.”

“All I said was—”

Frankie stands up, scraping his stool on the floor, puts his glass on the bar, and whirls. Cormac steps to the side, astonished that it’s come to this, and Frankie goes past him, landing on a table with a crash of glasses, ashtrays, plates, and a vase. A woman screams. Blood pumps from Frankie’s forehead. People look at Cormac, and he shrugs, raising his eyebrows in a stage version of bafflement. He thinks: This kind of trouble is all I need. Two waiters and the owner heave and haul, trying to get Frankie to his feet. Cormac steps into the small men’s room. When he returns, Frankie is holding a towel to his head, while the waiters walk him out the door.

“Jesus, what’d you hit him wit’?” says a plump dark-haired woman, her voice filled with awe. She’s wedged into a stool.

“Nothing,” Cormac says. “He swung and he missed.”

His hand trembles as he lights another cigarette. He realizes that he hasn’t had a fight in a saloon in almost sixty years. That is, since the week after Pearl Harbor. Fights in saloons end up in police stations, places he can’t afford to visit. He inhales deeply. The smoke is delicious. The bar turns noisy again, the broken glass swept up, the blood mopped away. The customers resume their noise. A cell phone rings, but it isn’t Cormac’s. The owner comes over.

“Sorry about that,” he says. “He’s usually pretty harmless, Frankie, as big as he is. Works for Verizon, loves the Mets. But he lost his wife, maybe six weeks now? Two months? Whatever. Anyways, he hasn’t been right in the head. They had no kids, except Frankie, and now he’s another lost soul. One of the guys is driving him to Saint Vincent’s.”

“Ah, shit,” Cormac says. “I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault,” the owner says. “You didn’t kill his wife. Life did. Hey, have one on me.”

“Thanks,” Cormac says, and gazes out the window.

Kongo is across the street. He nods, and Cormac leaves his change and hurries to the door.

They embrace on the corner and start walking together toward the river. Kongo is wearing a zipper jacket and jeans, like a million other men in the autumnlike city. Silver is scratched into his hair, and there’s a melancholy look in his eyes. His grave voice is deeper, his accent more refined and English. They talk about how much the city has changed since they were young, how their small shared village became the metropolis. Cormac tells Kongo of the image he sometimes sees from the top of a skyscraper: a huge sculpture, thirteen miles long, two miles wide, the island of Manhattan being shaped by a restless unknown hand, a godlike artist who is never satisfied, forever adding elements here, erasing them there, lusting for perfection.