Pete Hamill - Forever

“You look well,” M. Breton said to the countess. “Better than I expected after, what? More than five years.”

“Thank you,” she said, but did not return the compliment. M. Breton stared at her.

“How did you find me?” she said.

“I looked. I asked. Someone told me you were in New York, and I thought, She could only be a whore.”

Cormac’s stomach churned. He felt something new: that he was an intruder in the suite of the Countess de Chardon. Who denied the past, and now clearly had one.

“And how was prison?” she said.

“I survived. I’m here. It doesn’t matter.”

Now he turned on Cormac.

“Bring me another cognac,” he said.

Cormac gestured toward the bar. “The bottle’s over there. Help yourself, Monsieur Breton.”

The Frenchman turned to the countess. “Is he the butler?’ “No, he’s my lover,” she said.

Cormac could hear himself breathing now. And the countess breathing. And M. Breton too.

Then M. Breton stared into his drink, laughed, and shook his head.

“Well,” he said, “every cunt must have its servant.”

Cormac stepped before him, anger quickening his pulse.

“You can leave now, my fiddling friend. There’s the door.”

“I don’t think so,” M. Breton said.

The countess stepped between them.

“Cormac, this is my husband.”

That night, as on every night, he retreated to his room down the hall. But now everything was different. No word had passed to him from the countess, but it was clear from her posture, her silence, and her eyes that he must stay away from the suite. This was a complete change. Before the arrival of M. Breton, after food and music and water and bed, they had always kissed good-night and retired to their separate beds for the replenishments of sleep. She wanted it that way, and he came to luxuriate in his own solitude. Alone in his room before sleep, he could read, he could imagine, he could paint, he could hum vagrant melodies. He could think, too, about the strangeness of his life, the long years, the old vows that were printed on him, the names and brief lives of the dead. He could indulge in the secret pleasures of philosophy. He could exercise blankness, wiping away all imagery and all regret.

On the second night, the countess stopped him in the hall and kissed his cheek.

“He’ll stay with me,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

He said, “Fine, no, no, I understand. I don’t mind.”

But, of course, he did mind. Part of it was the impression made upon him by Yves Breton. He was arrogant and vain, convinced, it seemed, of his genius as a violinist and the superior rights that must be granted to him as a result. Who the hell was he to show up after many years and move back into his wife’s bed? Cormac lay in his own bed thinking these things, and felt his anger growing in spite of his attempts to control it with his will. How could she take such a man to her bed? She had never told him everything about her past, and that was all right with Cormac. The past was the past. It could not be changed. If she did not tell him everything about her past, then he had no obligation to reveal his own, even if what he told her was an elaborate lie concocted to hide the truth. She would have laughed at the truth and suggested he take a room in the madhouse. But the past never completely passed, and here came her past, embodied in M. Breton, walking into their present.

He told himself that the countess might only be testing him, creating through this surprise a way to see whether Cormac was indeed free of jealousy. If so, she was playing a silly and dangerous game. Too French by far. He told himself he was not jealous but angry over a breach of manners. And then realized that he was indeed suffering from a slippery attack of jealousy. To his own complete surprise.

His ruminations were interrupted by a knock on the door. He got up quickly and cracked it open.

Fiammetta was there, in a sheer nightgown, holding a candle.

“Madame says you need me,” the girl said.

“Thank you, Fiammetta,” he said. “But I don’t.”

Her face was trembling.

“I can help you sleep,” she said.

“I’ll be all right.”

“Okay, Mister O’Connor. Sleep tight.”

“I’ll try.”

He did not sleep well that night or the next night or the night after that. He plunged into reporting, moving from hearings into the Croton water project to the murder of an apprentice boy on Baxter Street to the burning of a ship at the dock on Coenties Slip. He was cut off from the piano in the closed suite of the Countess de Chardon and put his energies into painting. He did not see M. Breton. He saw the countess on the fourth day after her husband’s arrival in their lives.

“I can explain,” she said. “But not now.”

Jennings was in the doorway of the house on Hudson Street when Cormac arrived. His face looked pale and wasted, his eyes rheumy with horror. He was smoking a thin rum-soaked cigarillo.

“Even you don’t want to see this one, Cormac,” he said, a tremble in his voice. His eyes wandered to the small crowd on the sidewalk, and the horse-drawn carts beyond, and the old black men huddled in the doorways. Jennings clearly wanted to see something banal and comforting and familiar on this morning gray with the threat of rain.

“How bad is it?” Cormac asked.

“Two babies, their brains beaten out of their skulls. A woman shot three times in the face. A man with a bullet in his brow. They think he’s the woman’s son, and the babies belong to him.”

“Oh, God…”

“The babies…” Jennings had lost all his mannerisms. His mouth trembled. “Oh, Jesus, Cormac…”

He seemed about to cry, then clamped the cigarillo in his teeth and slipped a whiskey flask from his jacket pocket.

“Who’s on it?” Cormac said.

“Ford. Who else?”

“I don’t envy his dreams.”

Jennings took a swig from the flask, offered it to Cormac, who declined.

“How do you handle your dreams—without drink?” Jennings said.

“I don’t.”

Cormac patted Jennings on the back and entered the house of the newly dead. A young doctor pushed past him, climbing the stairs to the third floor. Children and adults peered from the partly opened doors, white faces and black. The odors of soup and shit and sewage filled the air. On the second landing a thin mustached cop blocked his way.

“Who are you?” the policeman said.

Cormac showed a press identity card. The cop squinted at it and handed it back.

“It’s pretty bad up there,” he said.

“So I’ve heard.”

“All niggers,” the cop said. “And a lot of opium too.” Cormac moved past him up the stairs. The egglike odor of soft coal now mixed with the stench of shit and blood. Another policeman blocked his way.

“Not now,” he said. “They’re still working.”

“Ask the inspector if he can give his friend Cormac some names.”

They were not friends, but he wanted the names.

“Ask him yourself,” the cop said.

Cormac leaned past him, glimpsing blood on polished plank floors. “Inspector Ford, it’s Cormac O’Connor…. I need some names.”

Ford emerged from another room. His face was pale too, as if the crime were draining blood from the living.

“Come in, Cormac,” he said softly. “I think you know this woman.”

That night, his story written coldly and set in type, his stomach empty to fight off the nausea, he made drawings of Beatriz Machado. He drew her as she was in life. He drew her as a young woman in the bookstore in Lispenard Street. He drew her as she was at Quaco’s funeral, an American in the presence of the oldest Africans. He drew her rich with fat, as she sold corn and oysters and opium from her stall on Broadway. He drew her with charcoal and sepia chalk, pulling her into life from memory, from the river of time. He hummed music as he used line and shadow and volume to make her as she was in life. He hummed the melodies that came from the hands of the countess. He hummed music that had never been written on paper, music that came from gourds and fiddles in a lost year in a vanished century. He worked in a kind of anguished frenzy, sweat pouring from his body.