Pete Hamill - Forever

Healey calls.

“Believe this? In ten minutes, I’m heading for the fucking HAMPTONS with this mark! In a limo! He asked me if I played TENNIS and I told him I had a bad back caused by the lack of FUCKING. He laughed, the runt, unable to listen to the truth. He says we can SPITBALL the script out there…. For the money he’s paying me, I could spitball KING LEAR! ”

Cormac wishes him luck, urges upon him the slogan of Fiorello La Guardia—patience and fortitude—and asks him to call when he returns.

“We can spend some of this BLOOD money!” Healey says, and hangs up.

Forty minutes later, Elizabeth calls.

“Willie will see you on Monday night,” she says. “I told him you were bringing the thing to some expert, for cleaning, that you had some ideas for the newspaper. It’s all set. I’ll be in Boston, Patrick at some ball game, Willie awaits you. About seven-thirty.”

“I’ll be there,” Cormac says.

“You are a prick,” she says, and hangs up.

Cormac glances at the sword, wrapped in a towel. Soledad is upstairs in her own tight and noisy solitude. Cormac wanders to the bookcase and takes down a volume of Dürer drawings. There are the horsemen, the four of them, wielding a pitchfork, a measuring scale, a bow with arrow, and a sword. The man with the sword wears the pointed cap of the fool.

Cormac thinks: Have I seen my last snowfall? My last spring? And have I walked for the final time through a summer afternoon?

A chill wind blows north on Sunday evening. Cormac leaves the 6 train at 110th Street and walks east. The streets are emptied by the cold. Police cruisers move slowly along the avenue, suburban eyes studying the city profiles. They peer at Cormac too, a white man probably searching for a connection. Before him are tenements, bodegas, a shuttered church. But other images rise from the pavements. He sees the African faces of old comrades. He sees hills that were scraped away. He sees the subway tunnels being chopped out of earth and granite. He thinks: I’m making a long circle home.

He sees an old brown-skinned man staring from the top of a stoop. He doesn’t see Cormac. He is staring into the past. A man who was an infant when Cormac was already old. Does the brown-skinned man dream of palm fronds rattling on a tranquil shore? No: Cormac is sure he dreams of a lovely woman who is now long gone.

This morning, as on every ninth of September, he walked to the river to drop a rose into the flowing waters. A rose for his mother. He wonders now if any of his flowers have ever reached the dark Atlantic, where they might catch a current bound for the Irish Sea. No matter, perhaps: With any luck he will see them all soon, in the place of emerald light. He imagines Kongo somewhere in the city, wonders where he sleeps, or if he sleeps at all, wonders where Kongo has been while he has lived his own long life in Manhattan. In this neighborhood, in this East Harlem, here in El Barrio, many people would understand the existence of a babalawo.

Now Cormac arrives in a dark street of darker tenements. The iron calligraphy of fire escapes. Lights glowing beyond curtains. New lampposts with hard bright burning light. Cars jam the curbs. Two men work on a double-parked Chevy, each wearing woolen gloves. A few kids run past hills of stuffed trash bags (where did all the garbage cans go?), darting from one tenement doorway to the next.

Here is the building. Number 378. No stoop. Just a door on street level, with clear glass to reveal anybody waiting in ambush, and then a second door with stairs beyond. Cormac enters the vestibule and sees rows of mailboxes and bells. He rings 4-A. Top floor. A buzz comes back, and he enters with a click. The stairs resemble those of a hundred other tenements that were old the year they were built. A banister scabby with layers of paint, the pentimento of the poor. Walls chipped and painted and dirtied and painted and battered and painted. Up one flight. The joined odors of meals, of sauces and roasts and chicken, seeping through closed doors (as they no longer drift into the streets), along with soundtracks from sit-coms and telenovelas and baseball, and the flooding vowels of Spanish warring with the consonants of English. The word PUTO spray-painted on a wall, and a reply, in a different hand, with an arrow pointing, saying SU NOMBRE.

Another flight. On each landing a sealed door where once a dumbwaiter hung from ropes. Now dumbwaiter floats in the Sea of Lost Words. The last flight. A closed green door, with 4-A neatly lettered on its face.

He knocks.

The door opens. He sees no face, no light: a darkness.

And then the sound of a fat wooden stick hitting a block of wood.

Klok-klok, klok-klok-klok.

And the lights explode, and Delfina is standing there, all golden and shining, with her wide white grin, and behind her there’s a band, and they smash into the music, four musicians jammed into the kitchen, a man on timbales, an old man with a gourd, a kid bent over a tall conga drum, a bearded young man playing flute, the music loud and full of joy. And from other rooms come smiling men and laughing women, and Cormac sees a table against a wall, heaped with food, and a bucket full of ice and canned beer, and the music drives and now more people are coming in the door with more platters of food, neighbors celebrating a stranger, and Delfina grabs each of his hands and says: “Oye, como va?”

For that’s what they’re playing; that’s the tune the musicians sing, the words full of flirtation and bravado, all of them beaming at the success of the surprise, at Cormac’s astonished face, at the many fine women, at the children who start dancing, at the great exuberant release of the music.

And now Delfina takes Cormac and she begins to dance with him. To move him with her hands: a touch, a nudge, a shift of the wrist. And then she adds the staccato of her shoes against the floor, the abrupt bump of a hip. And he surrenders to the music and surrenders to her. His hands come up, and he feels the music in his hips and his waist and his legs, in his shoulders and hands, he feels the music pushing him, driving him, he feels it invade him, he feels himself taking small precise steps in the narrow space of the kitchen, crowded with dancers, feels the music in his bones and in his flesh: he cuts left, then right; he laughs and whirls; and gazes at Delfina, at this golden woman, at her fathomless eyes, at her urgent grin, at her body showing him the way, her body telling him how and where to move, her body telling him when to pause and when to explode, her body setting all the moves.

And then the band finishes and shifts into a bolero and she pulls him close and puts her hands on the back of his neck.

“Happy birthday, mi amor .”

He pushes his face through her hair to kiss her skull. He feels her breasts and belly against him, as someone dims the lights, and then Delfina, still dancing, is introducing him to her friends and her neighbors. This is Elba. Mariano. Rosa. Gerson. Meet Cormac. Hey, glad you’re here, happy birthday, man. This is José. Marisol. Pancho, a crazy Mexican from the second floor. Hola, cómo está … This is my friend Cormac. Chucho. María Elena. Doris. Ramona. You better be nice to this girl, man. Yes, Cormac says. Claro que sí.

They are dancing in every room of the railroad flat, and Delfina gives him a tour, still dancing with him, leading him, moving him. Hey, meet Miguelito. This is Cormac. My lonesome gringo. The rooms are laid out like those of every other railroad flat in history: first the kitchen, with its table, refrigerator, shelves, and sink, the furniture pushed against walls to make room for the band, the windows open to the night, and a door leading to the bathroom; then two tiny bedrooms, which give way to a living room that overlooks the street, a room filled with a large bed, an armchair, a television set. Four couples are dancing in the open space beside the bed. To the right of the bed is the only room in the flat with a door. The door is closed. Delfina pauses, kisses Cormac on the cheek, but says nothing under the force of the driving merengue that follows the bolero. She makes more introductions, while he puts a map of the flat into his head. The first bedroom holds a desk, computer, and printer, with five or six small Mexican mirrors, a map of Hispaniola, a wall of books. The second bedroom is all books. On the walls above the bookcases there are rows of primitive masks; small tin hands with eyes painted on the palms; framed browning nineteenth-century photographs of bejeweled women and mustached men squinting in the harsh Caribbean light; a poster from the Museo del Barrio for a show of Taíno art. It’s a smaller version of Cormac’s own eclectic piece of New York. He tells her it’s beautiful.