Forever (57 page)

113.

T
hey embrace on the corner and start walking together toward the
river. Kongo is wearing a zipper jacket and jeans, like a million other men in the autumnlike city. Silver is scratched into his hair, and there’s a melancholy look in his eyes. His grave voice is deeper, his accent more refined and English. They talk about how much the city has changed since they were young, how their small shared village became the metropolis. Cormac tells Kongo of the image he sometimes sees from the top of a skyscraper: a huge sculpture, thirteen miles long, two miles wide, the island of Manhattan being shaped by a restless unknown hand, a godlike artist who is never satisfied, forever adding elements here, erasing them there, lusting for perfection.

“On the final day,” Cormac says, “after due warning to the citizens, the god of New York will lift his creation into the sky. It will be thirteen miles high, its base in the harbor, the ultimate skyscraper.”

Kongo laughs.

“You could see
that
New York from Africa, Kongo.”

“I’ve never stopped seeing New York, Cor-mac.”

He doesn’t explain where he has been, nor does he ask Cormac about his own long life. Kongo inhales the odor of the unseen river, and mentions a river in Gabon that has the same mixture of river and ocean salt. “If you are wounded on its banks,” he says, “the salt will heal you.” Cormac talks about how he has read his way into Africa through a hundred books, absorbing the narrative of slavery and colonization and the bloody struggle of the twentieth century to be free at last; and how he used to listen to the memories of Africans in New York, and lived to see all memory, African, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Polish, English, all memory of injury and insult, all nostalgia for lost places and smashed families, all yearning for the past: saw all of it merge into New York.

“I see it every day,” Kongo says.

“It’s harder to see if you live it one year at a time,” Cormac says. “There’s too much of it. Too many faces, too many people, too many deaths and losses.”

Kongo looks at him. “I’m an old man too,” Kongo says. “Just like you. But one thing I’ve learned, after all the bloodshed and disease and horror: Forgetting is more important than remembering.”

“Yes,” Cormac says. “But memory goes on, Kongo. In the end, all men and women say the same thing: I was, therefore I am.”

They are at the river now, on a new path cut along the waterfront for joggers and bicycle riders. A pair of lovers huddle on a bench. A wino sleeps on another. There’s a bicycle chained to a tree. The river is a glossy ebony bar. Lights twinkle on the distant Jersey shore, close enough to touch, yet beyond distance.

“Your frontier,” Kongo says, and chuckles.

“Yes,” Cormac says. “The border.”

A small yacht moves south toward the harbor, lit up like a child’s toy.

“Well, you know why I’m here,” Kongo says.

“I think I do.”

Kongo leans on a rail, gazing at the darkness.

“You have the sword,” he says. “That allows you to settle the affair of your father, to bring it to an end.”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve found the woman at last.”

“A wonderful woman.”

Kongo glances at him, as if trying to decode the sentence. And then goes on.

“When you’re finished with the affair of your family,” he says, “you must take her to the cave. To the cave where you were given your… gift.” He speaks like a commander issuing orders, glances at a clock on an old industrial building, then turns back to the river. “You will make love to her in the cave.” A pause. “And then you can cross over.”

His words are at once a promise and a sentence.

“I’ll help get you there,” he says. “You’ve got one week.”

They stand in silence for a long time. Then Kongo turns and walks toward the bicycle that is chained to a tree trunk. He turns a key in the lock.

“Wait, Kongo, don’t go yet.”

“I’m not going. I’ll be here in New York.”

“There are a hundred things I want to talk about with you,” Cormac says.

Kongo shrugs and exhales, as if there’s nothing at all he wants to discuss.

“How do I find you?” Cormac says.

“I’ll be around,” Kongo says in Yoruba. “Don’t worry.”

He smiles and swings onto the bicycle and pedals away to the north. From the blackness of the unceasing river, Cormac hears a foghorn.

I was, he thinks, therefore I am.

114.

T
here’s an e-mail waiting when he opens the computer the next
morning. In this latest edition of the world, e-mail evades the overheard whisper, the visible evidence of flirtation, the eye of the private investigator. Combined with the cell phone, it makes cheating easier, and life more dangerous.

Cormac: I’m at work, and still have a job. Que sorpresa! Can I come by around 12:15? Can’t wait for anything formal. Gotta see you. Love, D

He sends an e-mail back, saying twelve-fifteen is fine, and he’ll order sushi. He lights a cigarette, using a saucer for an ashtray.

She arrives at twelve-ten, breathless after walking from the office to Duane Street, a fine film of sweat on her skin. She’s smartly dressed in a navy blue business suit, smiling and radiant. Her skin is darker from the sun, and tinged with red. She kisses his cheeks and lips and neck, pushes her belly into his, grasping for buttons and belt. He lifts her out of her shoes. Her skirt falls, her jacket, blouse, and bra. They make writhing, gnashing love on the table. And then fall back into panting languor. They laugh, as if they’ve gotten away with something.

Then he turns, slides to the floor, goes to the kitchen, and takes the sushi and sashimi from the refrigerator.

Delfina vanishes into the bathroom with her clothes, washes quickly, combs her hair, dresses, returns to sit down to the platter of food, glancing at the clock. No review. No accounting either.

“Buenas tardes, mi amor,” she says, and smiles.

“Buenas tardes,” he says. Then adds, “How was it?”

Her gaze falls on him, tentative, choosing what she will tell him.

“All right,” she says. “Considering.”

A smile plays on her face. Away off, he can hear a siren from NYU Downtown pushing through lunchtime traffic.

“I knew it was cancer,” she says. “They told me that before I left. But that wasn’t why he died. It was everything else. Cigarettes and rum and heroin and cocaine. Like every poor fucked-up musician who ever lived. But it was women too. Always women.” A pause. A hesitant smile. “I went to the hospital, and the room looked like a beauty parlor. He was dying, all gray and shrunken up, and all the women came to say good-bye. Fat, skinny, young, old.” She chews a piece of maki. “If the cancer didn’t kill him, the perfume would’ve done the job. You’d have thought he was Warren Beatty.” She sips green tea and smiles. “I just slipped into the room, stood with my back to a wall. I counted three former wives. And yeah, four young guys came in and out, his sons by different women, but mostly it was women, all staring at him, with the tubes in his arms, and the Virgen de Altagracia above his head.”

She has told Cormac about this Virgen, the divine Madonna who intercedes for all Dominicans. Now she is moving into street rhythms, into that language that she dons like a shield. “But it’s not just the wives, who are whispering and praying and crying all around the room. It’s the whores too. They’re showing up from everywhere, and in comes a fat shiny
mulata
chick with four gold teeth and la Virgen tattooed over her left boob, and she’s bawling. The nurse—skinny, eyeglasses, white uniform—she goes, ‘You gotta leave,
m’hija!
’ and the
mulata
chick goes, ‘How can I leave?
I’m the only one he ever loved!
’

“The nurse busts out laughing. I mean, every fucking whore in Moca is in the room or out in the hall. And I can’t help myself, I start laughing too. My father’s dying, but, Jesus… The nurse grabs the end of the bed to hold herself up, she’s shaking with fucking laughter, and I grab the door frame, and we’re both pissing in our pants.”

She starts to laugh now, remembering.

“But the whore with the gold teeth looks at us like we’re totally insane. She goes, ‘What’s so funny, you
hijas de putas?
What’s so fucking funny?’ The sons look at each other, and so do the ex-wives, and I’m waiting for the knife to come out of the whore’s panties, and then she looks at my father, as if asking his permission to kill us, and now his eyes are open, and she screams: ’
He’s alive!
This motherfucker is
alive!
’ ”

She bends toward Cormac and grips his wrist.

“I mean, he was alive
all along,
but this crazy whore must’ve thought he was dead, because she spreads her legs and goes down on her knees and starts giving thanks to God. She’s got no panties on, so I was wrong about the knife, and now the four sons are looking at her box, which must terrify them—and she goes,
‘Oh, thank you, God, you are a great fucking man!
’

“Now the nurse bounces back, screaming in laughter, and knocks me into the wall! I see my father’s eyes get wider, and now all the other whores are crowding in from the hall to see what all the hollering is about, and it’s like the six train at rush hour. Now a little security guard comes in, gray mustache, big wide eyes, wearing some kind of old UPS uniform—and he starts shouting, ‘Out, out! Everybody out!’ The fat whore with the gold teeth is still on the floor, surrounded by a wall of boobs and miniskirts, and she goes, ‘No, you get out,
pendejo!
This is a fucking
miracle!
’ ”

Cormac joins her in slamming the table and laughing. Delfina struggles now to breathe, then calms herself.

“And then he sees me.”

A pause. She daubs at her eyes with a napkin, wiping away the evidence of laughter.

“He sees me, and he stares at me, and for the first time all of them—the fat whore on the floor, the sons, the nurse, the whole team of other whores and the security guard—they all turn to look at me. Everybody shuts up.

“ ‘Delfina?’ my father says. It’s the first time since I got there that he said a word.

“I go, ‘Sí, Papi.’

“Tears come into his eyes. His fingers curl, long piano-player fingers, calling me to him. I go to his side and take his hand, which is very cold. I lean down close to his ear and say, ‘I love you, Papi.’

“His lips move—they’re blue in the light—but nothing comes out. I massage his hand with both of mine, trying to make his hand and fingers warm. I put my head next to his mouth. And then I hear the words. The words I came to Moca to hear.

“ ‘Lo siento,’
he says. I’m sorry.”

She chews at her lip and shrugs.

“Then he dies. He takes two more breaths and then nothing. He doesn’t look scared, or even relieved. He just stops.”

She stops now too for a moment. Her forefinger is curled in the tiny handle of a teacup. Wiggling it.

“The whores scream and wail. The fat whore tries to get up, to rush to my father, but she can’t do it, she’s too fat. She grabs the leg of a skinny whore like it’s a small tree and tries to pull herself up, but the skinny whore gives her a shove back on her knees. Two of the young men go over to help her, each grabbing a foot, so they can peer at the holy of holies, and they roll her over, so she can get some traction. They lift her like she’s a manatee they found on a beach. The security guard gives up and walks out, leaving the nurse to control the crowd, and I wish you were with me.”

Cormac touches her hand. She turns away, shaking her head slowly.

“The dumb son of a bitch.”

A muscle ripples bitterly in her jaw.

“Everybody loved him, but he couldn’t love anybody back. Not my mother. Not me. Not himself.”

She exhales, gestures with the cup.

“I gotta go back to my job.”

Cormac glances at the clock. She has ten minutes to walk to the Trade Center, and mumbles about calling later and picking a time to go to her place. He goes with her to the door. She looks at him.

“It was enough,” she says. “
Lo siento
… It wasn’t ‘I love you.’ It wasn’t even about me. It was about him, and how
he
felt. But what the hell.”

115.

T
hat’s all there is to the great return. Hair, wetness, food, laughter.
Most of all, laughter. And then departure. Staring at the door, Cormac notes that she never once mentioned Reynoso and uttered no words of regret, no request for forgiveness. Cormac smokes a cigarette and wraps the garbage and rinses the plates before stacking them in the dishwasher. He thinks that perhaps this is the style of her generation, common to all who grew pubic hair in the age of AIDS. Don’t risk true intimacy (so desired by Elizabeth Warren). Don’t delude yourself about love. Death could come at any time, and love would only add to the pain.

The computer might be part of it too, he thinks, allowing them to create little folders inside their brains. Each marked with an icon separate from all others, easy to call up or erase. Even if sometimes they cut and paste. After all, the high-speed printing press changed New Yorkers, adding urgency, fear, envy, even solidarity to their daily lives. It gave them Wordsworth and Homer and the
Evening Graphic,
Buffalo Bill and
Moby-Dick
and Jackie Robinson, gangsters and gun molls and the Death House at Sing Sing. Around 1840, New Yorkers started thinking in words on paper, visible or invisible, and acquired the habit of telling stories, and recycling them, and letting them marinate into myth. Human beings weren’t like that before the printing press and the penny paper. Cormac thinks: The computer must be making a similar alteration. Another grand mutation. With any luck, I will not live to see the results.

And yet, for all their differences, and in spite of her silences, he was charged with happiness when Delfina arrived, when he saw her smile, embraced her flesh, ran tip of tongue along the path of her spirals. Making love on a table was comical; but in most cases, in all places, no matter what the position, making love was always comical, in large ways or small. He was sure if she knew the truth about him she would dismiss him as another laughing Irishman with a splinter of ice in his heart.

And on some levels, she’d be right. Cormac hasn’t truly loved a woman in many years. He’s slept with plenty of women, and had deep affection for some of them. To be exact, nine of them, just like his number. But all of them died. That was the curse attached to the gift: You buried everyone you loved.

And after a while, around the middle of Prohibition, he could no longer feel that sense of deep connection, wordless need, and abundant ease that he thought was love. The armature of love seemed to have worn out. And now, astonishingly, it had returned with Delfina Cintron.

That was surely why he’d said nothing about Reynoso. He didn’t want to provoke words that he didn’t want to hear. He didn’t want to prosecute her for an offense he had committed himself. What he had done with Elizabeth was surely worse than what she had done with Reynoso, and after all, they had no contract, had made no vows to each other. He felt shame about Elizabeth; in her e-mail, Delfina expressed rage at her own weakness. That might be all two human beings can do, after the spasm called
el muertito,
the little death. The cliché is true (Cormac thinks), as clichés are usually true: The flesh is weak; each of us falls to its urgent tyranny. He hopes now that she took at least some small pleasure in the suite in Santo Domingo, was released for a minute or an hour from past and present, felt for ten seconds as one can feel after a sumptuous meal. In the end, what happened down there didn’t truly matter. Cormac thinks: I need this young woman. I want her. I love her.

Innocent, with an explanation.

They exchange e-mails. He tells her that on Sunday he celebrates his birthday. She replies that they must celebrate together, at her house. He agrees. She says they will dance. He says he will try.

The sense of imminence returns, a blurry feeling of the end of days. The cleaning woman arrives. Her name is Soledad, and she’s from Colombia, from the region of Macondo. She’s about fifty and lives in Queens and has been in New York for fourteen years. They talk in Spanish.
Qué tal, señor? Muy bien, Soledad, y usted?
She plays the Spanish station with the old boleros and sings along with them in a plaintive voice. While she vacuums and dusts, Cormac places five thousand dollars in an envelope for her. To be delivered later. He does not know what will happen in the coming days, but if he is truly leaving, he does not want to leave behind some dreadful mess. He would say one kind of farewell the way Bill Tweed did: to help someone else live.

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?