Pete Hamill - Forever

“How is the food here?”

“Okay,” Cormac says. “But don’t try anything fancy.” “Maybe pasta, no?”

“Sí.”

“Tu español está mejorando, Señor O’Connor.”

“Ojalá, Señorita Cintron.”

Remembering how he had stopped that August day as she went by. Stunned. Short of breath. His heart pounding. Fourteenth Street jammed with shoppers and junkies, cops and schoolboys, telephone repairmen, cable installers, women with kids in strollers, delivery boys, homeless men in winter coats. Her hair bobbing as she cut a path through the crowd. Then there was a surge of pedestrians, and he lost her. Cursing himself for a goddamned fool. Cursing his slowness, his caution. Looking and looking and looking, then cursing the gods for playing with him. He came again to Fourteenth Street, at the same time, the same corner, arrived day after day for three weeks: hoping to see her in the crowd. To approach her. To try to know if this dark lady was the dark lady, sketched for him long ago in a cave in Inwood. And then thought: Perhaps she was an illusion, a specter created by August heat, by lack of water, or by my own need. She might have been just another ghost in the haunted city.

In September he saw her again at last, coming out of the New School on Fifth Avenue, cutting across Fourteenth Street to the north side of the street, then moving west. He followed her like a detective on the trail of a murder suspect, watching the bobbing hair, the rhythmic walk, the long tawny legs (for this time she wore a skirt and blouse), while car horns blared at a double-parked sanitation truck and an ambulance screamed for passage. She hurried into a drugstore, pushing the door sharply before her. A Rite Aid. On the corner. She vanished through that front door. And didn’t come out.

“So I’ll have the fettucine,” she says, as the rain pounds down. “And a green salad.”

The waiter returns with a small green pad, exposed to the rain. Cormac orders the pasta and salad for Delfina and a medium burger for himself. The waiter is irritated in a thin, blond way. Imagine: reduced to this . Serving philistine food to philistines . He hurries off.

“Poor baby,” Delfina says as the waiter vanishes.

“Life is hard.”

“Claro que sí,” says Delfina Cintron, her voice almost a whisper.

And Cormac sees himself staring at the front door of Rite Aid that day, wondering why she has not emerged. Ten minutes went by. Twenty minutes. And then he entered the drugstore in search of her. He glanced down each aisle, as if searching for shampoo or pretzels or mouthwash. She was not there. He saw a fat woman pushing a fat child in a stroller. A grizzled homeless guy was spraying Mitchum deodorant on his neck and wrists. A middle-aged man examined the label on a bottle of Advil.

He looked toward the front door, and there she was, behind the counter at the cash register. Her brow furrowed as she punched computer keys to ring up a sale. She was wearing a green smock over her street clothes. He drifted closer, paused before candies and chewing gums, and saw her name tag. Delfina. The dolphin. A line of customers waited their turn for her attention. Cormac left, knowing he would return. In search of the dolphin.

Now she is here before him, under the Cinzano umbrella, in a public place as private as a cave without a ceiling. The wind briefly rises. There’s a spray of rain. They hunch forward to avoid the raindrops, closer than they have yet been. He can smell her hair. Soap and rain. And look upon her unmarked skin. Skin of Arabs and Andalusians, Tainos and Africans. Shiny with dampness and rain. He gazes at her. Thick black eyebrows. Eyes set widely, lined only with her own black eyelashes, not mascara. In Spanish, it would be two words: mas cara. More face. Another face. Like that Mexican wrestler on channel 47: Mil Mascaras. A thousand faces. And beneath the brows, set in their black rims, are eyes so black and liquid it is impossible to penetrate them. Opal eyes. Her nose slopes in a clean curve, tilting abruptly upward at the tip. Wide nostrils. O Africa. Her lips are plump with Africa too, and she has a habit of wetting them with the tip of her tongue. The bone of her chin is firm and hard, with a thin strap of flesh beneath it, either baby fat that has not departed or the beginning of age. She is twenty-eight years old.

“Why are you alone?” he asks.

“I’m not alone,” she says, raising an eyebrow. “I’m sitting here with you in the rain.”

“You know what I mean,” he says. “Why don’t you have a man?”

“I’ve had men,” she says, and shrugs. “Lots of them. I’ve even had a husband.”

There is more in her eyes, more words struggling for expression, more images undescribed. They exist in the way she looks down at the table, in the way one hand kneads another on her lap. But she doesn’t go on. The waiter arrives with the food. Cormac doesn’t press her. He didn’t press her when he started going to the drugstore. Once a week. Saying hello. Ordering cigarettes. Or buying toothpaste. Thanking her and calling her by name. Seeing her smile. Watching like a teenager from across the street at closing time, screened by the crowd, discovering that no young man waited for her. In this part of her life, she was alone. He saw her hurrying into the subway. Trudging through piled snow. Bending into bitter winter winds driving hard from the North River. Always alone, bundled in a dark-blue knee-length down-lumpy coat and high-heeled black boots. Until finally he brought her a brightly wrapped book at Christmas and saw astonishment in her eyes. Pablo Neruda. In English and Spanish.

“Mil gracias,” she said that day.

“A usted,” he said.

The day before New Year’s Eve, he asked her to go to a movie. She accepted in a confused way, curious, wanting a diversion, resisting his approach, resisting contact or connection, perhaps men themselves. But accepting. She sat beside him in the dark, very still, very formal. Afterward, she thanked him, refused dinner, shook hands, and went off to the subway. A week later, he waited for her again where no young man yet waited. On that corner on Fourteenth Street. Once more they went to a movie. Then again, and after the third movie, they exchanged telephone numbers. On the phone, she was restrained, and he noticed how she spoke English with a very precise accent, hitting every d and t in words like “damned” and “Connecticut,” and pronouncing the g at the end of words like “talking,” “laughing,” and “eating.”

Now tonight they are having dinner. On each date, she has been guarded, careful, saying nothing of importance. She won’t tell him where she lives and doesn’t ask where he lives. They see a movie and then discuss it over coffee and then she says goodbye at the entrance to the subway. She treats him like an older man, but one in whom she has only marginal interest. And he urges patience upon himself, thinking: Don’t scare her off. Beneath the toughness, she’s capable of being easily scared.

“I feel funny when you stare at me that way,” she says, twirling fettucine on a fork. Her mouth is open, her hand poised with a pasta-laden fork.

“I can’t help it,” Cormac says, smiling casually. “You’re beautiful.”

“No, I’m not. “

“Liar.”

“I mean, I’m okay, I guess. But beautiful, hey, come on. Models, they’re beautiful. Cindy Crawford, yeah, or Naomi Campbell. Or that blond one, Gwyneth Paltrow. Movie stars are beautiful. Not me. I’m too short. I’m too fat. Those girls…”

She finally delivers the pasta to her mouth and eats hungrily, greedily. The rain begins to ease and so does she. At last. She’s from Queens, she says. She has been here since she was ten, when her mother brought her from Santo Domingo, along with a broken heart, forty-four dollars, and one suitcase of clothes. Her father was a piano player. Delfina remembers his dazzling smile and his aroma of Old Spice and little more. She has been told that he married another woman. He was small and skinny, though very handsome. The woman he lives with weighs three hundred pounds and is very ugly. Or so the story was told, on evenings in the kitchens of Queens.