Pete Hamill - Forever

“Do you want to talk about the husband?” Cormac says. “Your husband?”

“No,” she says, chewing the fettucine. “Not really…”

“ Ni modo. It doesn’t matter.”

She finishes the pasta, pokes at the salad. Cormac is still only halfway through his burger. She stares at her plate, then rests her chin on her thumbs, her elbows on the edge of the table. The rain has ended. The backyard is alive with dripping sounds. She looks at him in a frank, deliberate way, then turns away.

“He was a junkie,” she says. She sips the rum drink without enthusiasm, as he lays aside the rest of the burger.

“I didn’t know that when I met him, of course. I was nineteen. He was thirty. I was a student at Hunter, thinking about teaching history.”

She pronounces it “heestory.”

“Then mad for physics…”

She chews the inside of her lip again, as if arranging the words.

“He… he saw me in the street, just like you did. And he followed me, just like you. And he hung around and waited for me….”

“Just like me.”

“Just like you.”

She smiles in a sad way and turns to watch the raindrops dripping down the wall, and when she turns back, her eyes are brimming.

“I went out with him, okay? To discos and parties, because it was exciting, because I had been studying since I was ten, because I was bored, because I wanted something that I didn’t even know I wanted. I went out with him because I was tired of being En Punto Cintron. Because I wanted to sleep late. All the usual stupid reasons. And then I got pregnant. My mother was hysterical. She thought I would lose my chance, you know? My big American chance. To graduate from college, to have a life. And she was right, of course. I mean, look where I’m working. Selling Bufferin and condoms to kids who think they can make me blush. Anyway, we got married. His name was Enrique, but his street name was Block, like he owned the block. The block was 117th Street, near Second Avenue, in El Barrio. His block. He was a Puerto Rican and made a lot of jokes about Dominicans. Most of them dirty. About Dominican women, and the special way they were supposed to like sex. He tried that a few times and got mad when I wouldn’t let him do it that way, and he would yell at me: ‘You’re Dominican!’ Like I was betraying my country!” She smiles. “A real schmuck.” The smile fades. “Me too. But he was nice for a few months. Then he started coming home late and then not at all and then he stopped working and you know, it was the same old story, the same old New York shit.”

The waiter arrives again, his irritation gone as he performs for a tip. He turns on an acting-class smile and tries being gracious. They order coffee. Delfina says she’s finished with her drink too. The ice cubes have melted. A second waiter leads a party of six to another table, wielding a large towel. They are laughing and loud.

“You don’t want to hear all this, do you?” Delfina says.

“Only if you want to tell it.”

She is quiet for a long time. The other table settles down. Mozart begins to play from the restaurant’s sound system. The Sonata No. 1 in C Major. But through the dripping wall behind them they can hear the bass line of another movie soundtrack and the muffled sound of explosions. Buildings blowing up. Shouts. The combination triggers something in her, releases a flood of words.

“I had a daughter,” Delfina says, talking as much to herself as to Cormac. “She was so beautiful. Carolina, her name was, same as my mother. My mother came to take care of me while I was pregnant because Enrique now, he was on the streets all the time, selling crack, shooting smack. I would see him, with the baby in my arms, and he would laugh and walk away. As thin as a fucking nail, he was now. Pardon my language. Hanging with all the crack zombies. My mother wanted me to come home to the house in Queens. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t face my friends again. All those kids I knew. The ones I left behind when I went to college. The problem was, when I got into Hunter, I acted like I was hot shit. And here I was two years later, another welfare mother. It was so… I don’t know—shameful? So I stayed on 117th Street. The more the goddamned zombies hit on me, the hotter I made myself look. And then I beat them off. If a friend of Enrique’s hit on me, I would say stuff like, ‘Your dick’s smaller than Block’s, cabrón, and his is a peanut.’ Hoping it got back to Enrique. Finally I got a job in a record store on Columbus Avenue, Tower Records, and my mother would baby-sit for me, coming all the way on the train, two trains, from Queens. All the time telling me, ‘Come home, m’hija, come home.’ All the time telling me, ‘We can go back to the D.R., we can go someplace else. You can go back to school. Get your degree. Start over.’ While I hugged the baby and went downtown to work in the record store.”

The coffee arrives, steaming in the chill spring air.

“It went on like that,” Delfina says. “Almost a year,” she says. “Until the fire.”

Cormac’s heart trembles. He knows what is coming, all the way from the dark streets of the past, all the way from the Five Points. He touches her hand and her flesh is cold as sorrow. She eases her hand away.

“They both died,” she says in a remote tone. “My mother and my daughter. And two other people on the floor upstairs. It was in the Daily News, on New York One. I always thought Enrique set it, and so did the cops, but they couldn’t prove it, and it didn’t matter anymore because by then he had the virus. The motherfucker was gonna die. I prayed it wouldn’t be quick.”

She sips her coffee, part tough slum kid, part grieving adult. She makes a face as if the coffee were bitter.

“I don’t remember much after the fire,” she says. “I was crazy for a long time. I made love to a lot of guys one year and then shut down like a nun.”

Neither speaks for several minutes, as the rain drips. He can think of no words that will not sound like horseshit. Laughter skitters around the backyard. More customers arrive, fresh from the movie house. Chairs scrape on brick. Tables fill. Cormac’s coffee is cold when he sips it and he signals for fresh cups. She looks directly at him now.

“Does it bother you when I say I slept with a lot of guys?”

“No. It’s a kind of consolation sometimes.”

“I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of a whore.”

“I could never think that.”

“It was part of the craziness,” she says. “Every day was different. On Monday, I wanted to die, to get the virus too, and just fucking die. Sometimes I saw myself on the Brooklyn Bridge, going over the side, or jumping out of the fucking Twin Towers. On Tuesday, I wanted to make another baby, get another Carolina, and start all over, and do it right this time, and watch her crawl and watch her walk and hear her talk and—”

“Stop,” Cormac says, remembering another woman, long ago, who longed for the same repaired life and spoke about it in French. “You don’t need to justify anything, Delfina. Not to me. Not to anyone. You got through it. You’re here. You’re eating food. You look beautiful.”

Now Cormac can hear the Sonata No. 9 in D Major. Filling the air, melding together the chatter of other tables. The music throws a wisp of another room and another century into his mind, and he forces himself to look at Delfina and hold her hand. Here. Now.

“I’m sorry to put all this in your head,” she says, her hand warming in the hand of Cormac. “I should go home.”

“Not yet. Please.”

She nestles against him, her fine wiry African hair unspooling against his face. He can feel one of her breasts against his arm. With one hand, he touches her hair, his fingers plunging into its springy fineness until he briefly feels the curve of the back of her skull, her skin as warm as blood.