Pete Hamill - Forever

“You’re a perfect companion,” she said one morning, with a flicker of irony on her face and a taste of France in her accent. “Busy and quiet. Literate, funny, strange, and free of disease. You’re what I need and I hope I’m what you need too.”

“You’ll never know how much I need you,” he said, trying to match the lightness of her tone.

“For God’s sake,” she said, “don’t tell me.”

He certainly didn’t tell the countess that at first he thought of her as an escape. In her company, or alone in his room on the top floor, he escaped the miasma. His flesh had revived with water and the aroma of soap and lavender, and so he also escaped into her body. As he savored her ironies, her private codes, he also understood that with the Countess de Chardon he would be free of any delusion of domesticity. He suspected that she knew what he was thinking, and accepted it, even welcomed it. They just never spoke about the details.

“Human beings want to know too much about each other,” she said. “And that’s why there are so many lies.”

She did tell him some of her own story. She was then thirty-two years old. Or so she said. She was born in Port-au-Prince and was a creole refugee from the uprising on Hispaniola that had driven so many of her class to the United States. Or so she said. If her tale was true, she must have come from the side of the island called Haiti, ruled for so long by the French. But Cormac didn’t know if any part of the Chardon story was true. And it didn’t matter. Many people came to New York with a script, one that allowed them to begin again, to be other than the unhappy persons they’d been in the places they’d left behind. In his own way, Cormac himself was one of them. But Cormac did sense that the countess had seen much horror. Only those who had lived with appalling horror could fully understand the consolations of living flesh. And she did speak excellent French.

When she first saw him unpack his drawings, she was joyful. At Christmas, she bought him a new easel, brushes, paint, and paper. And so that he would not feel like a kept man, she commissioned him to do some drawings that she would use as decoration in the nine rooms of her nine young women. These were nine views of her own vulva, and one view each of the vulvae of the other women. They were drawn in black and red chalk in a Renaissance style on tinted paper and designed in such a way that a casual viewer would not instantly recognize the subjects. They could have been flowers. The countess posed gladly, her knees drawn up, her rosy buttocks high on silken cushions. She had Cormac draw her before the bath and after, before sex and later. The first four drawings were framed by her dark brown silky pubic hair. Then she shaved off all of her hair, and the final five were as bald and naked as drawings of fruit or orchids. Once she was overcome by the sound of chalk on paper and could wait no longer and reached deliriously for the focus of his attention.

The other women were not so enthusiastic about the project but did what the countess ordered, and in the closed space of his studio room often lost their reluctance. Pampinea was universally plump. Fiammetta was shy and lean, lying back with her eyes closed, and kept asking Cormac to tell her it was pretty. Filomena was ashamed of her thick beardlike hair and squirmed to hide it from his sight. Emilia was a large girl with a small buried vulva and an almost invisible button. It always hurts, she whispered. Every man hurts me. Every one of them. In Cormac’s drawing, her lips seemed to whimper. All stared at the finished drawings as if trying to understand something about themselves.

For Cormac, those were the months when there was no water anywhere in New York except in that house, the secret garden of the Countess de Chardon. And water became part of life itself. It was prelude. It was culmination. It was a reward for concentrated work. Or it made work possible. Clear, warm water was a source of entertainment and luxury and sex. In a way, Cormac told himself, I’m a kind of novel for the countess, as she is for me, and water is the connecting device of the tale. The heat departed in cool October, and then, shuddering with winter cold, they would leave the bath and dry themselves and then lie upon the vast white bed. She was lover, mother, teacher.

She taught him, among other things, the joy of fasting. She would stop all sexual play on a certain date and remain aloofly celibate for ten days or two weeks. She would let her desire build slowly, deny it, welcome it, deny it again, until there was some enormous need that always started in her imagination, in some dark cave of denial. He matched her fasting and then erupted with her in a shared paroxysm of flesh and water.

She never once used the word love and said nothing about the two of them forging a private pact. He didn’t even sleep with her through the nights. “Nothing,” she said, “is more horrible than seeing each other after a night of sleep.” She didn’t have any form of conventional jealousy, certainly not about the flesh. And definitely not his flesh. As long as they began each evening with the bath, just she and Cormac, she didn’t even mind if he made love to the other women. It was simply understood, without being said, that he would not develop any emotions for them beyond the simple needs of the flesh. And shared talk. And the details of food and books and music.

“You’re always humming tunes,” she said. “You should learn to play an instrument.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the piano. We have one downstairs, you know.”

He laughed. “If I play it, the customers will revolt, and so will you.”

“The rooms are sealed,” she said. “There’s no one here until the lunch hour. And nobody can hear if you close the door.”

“And who would teach me?” “I would,” she said.

And so she began teaching him the fundamentals, explaining the keys and the correct position of his hands, and then scales and the mysterious notations of music sheets. You need three fingers to make a chord, she said. Your fingers have specific targets, she said, those keys, and you must hit the keys cleanly. He kept hitting between keys, clanging them too hard, and she cried out in mock horror, laughed, and made him try again. She explained about flats and sharps, and how chords were major, minor, or dominant. She showed him the language of music too, and he realized that he had first heard Irish and Yoruba and French as sounds without meaning and then slowly broken them down into individual words, which were here called notes. He told himself that music was a language like any other, and he would learn it.

“Time is everything in music,” she said, demonstrating with a booted foot the way to maintain tempo.

“In life too.”

“Please, cheri, it’s too early for philosophy.”

The tempo of his days was also shifting. He could not always appear beside her at the piano at eleven in the morning. His duties to the Evening Post often had him running from one event to another, and the work had greater urgency now because a Scotsman named James Gordon Bennett was bringing something new to the newspaper trade. He had founded the Herald and, after some false starts, was beginning to find readers. He published the sort of details that Cormac put in his notes and failed to get into the Evening Post . Instead of burying tales of mayhem and horror in the back of the paper, Bennett put them on the front page, which all other journals devoted to advertising. He used crude woodcuts as illustrations. He broke the neutral tone of the writing. As his sales increased, particularly after his accounts of the murder of a prostitute named Helen Jewett, the other editors dismissed him as a cheap vulgarian. But the Evening Post was now selling eight thousand copies each day, delivered to the desks of businessmen, while Bennett was selling thirty-five thousand, peddled on the streets by boys. The Evening Post began to run more tales of murders than before, discreetly, of course, and still buried in the rear of the newspaper. That meant more work for Cormac O’Connor. He moved around the town with a mask pulled across his lower face to reduce the miasma, checking with policemen and lowlifes for stories, humming the tunes that he was taught by the Countess de Chardon.