Now on this street where Cormac met Ginger Everett on a rainy night while Sonny was out of town, here comes Delfina Cintron. Head down, raincoat collar high, cheeks rouged by the wind. She sees him, whispers a hello, takes his arm, and they go in to see Copenhagen. A few men turn to look at her. She removes her coat as they find the seats. She’s wearing a low-cut black sheath and a string of fake pearls and matching fake-pearl earrings and she glows with golden beauty. The houselights dim. She folds her coat over her knees with the Playbill on top. She takes Cormac’s rain-chilled hand. Her own hand is very warm.
“I’m so excited,” she says. “A play! A Broadway play.”
As they watch the first act, he hears her make several gasping sounds. Her hand gets wet and she removes it in an embarrassed way and tamps it dry on her coat. He glances at her. Her face is totally concentrated on this drama about the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and the morality of using their science to build an atomic bomb. The writing, by Michael Frayn, is excellent, but Cormac can’t follow the technical language and imagines Mae West walking in from stage right and causing a riot. At the interval, the lights come up and Delfina’s eyes are welling with tears.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. No. Oh, I don’t know.” They stand to let others pass to the aisle. “I’ll explain later. Do we have time for a smoke?”
The area in front of the theater is packed. Delfina is composed now, coat draped over her shoulders, and they each smoke Marlboro Lights.
“You see, at Hunter, I had this physics class, and—”
Lights begin blinking, ordering them to return to the seats. She stamps out the cigarette.
“We’ll talk later.”
In the dark, she disappears into the play, or into memory, or both. The rest of the audience seems as absorbed as Delfina Cintron. In the last days of the giddy boom, they are actually paying attention to a moral dilemma. At the end, he and Delfina join in the standing ovation and then move slowly back up the aisle toward the street.
“Thank you so much, Cormac,” she says. “That was—it meant a lot to me.”
He tries not to sound like a stiff but does anyway: “I’m just glad you could come with me.”
The lame sentence goes past her. She says: “I could feel things popping in my brain. You know? Like tiny little dead things suddenly coming to life. It was like—if you didn’t use certain muscles for a long time? Then you do, and pop-pop-pop.”
They walk out into the cool street. The rain has stopped. They hurry toward Frankie & Johnny’s on Forty-fourth Street off Eighth Avenue. One flight up. Delfina has never been here before, but Cormac remembers a night when Owney Madden threw a police lieutenant down the stairs for trying to double the payoffs. He and Delfina go up the same flight of stairs, and he’s at eye level with her golden thighs, and now he remembers Madden’s enraged gangster face. The restaurant is filling up with the New Jersey people coming out of the theaters. They check their coats. Men look up when Delfina walks in her street swagger behind a waiter to a table against the wall, with Cormac behind her. She sits down, scraping the chair as she pulls it forward. She wants a glass of wine and Cormac orders a glass of the house red and a large bottle of sparkling water. She lifts the menu.
“Steak,” she says, grinding her jaws in an exaggerated way. “Steak, steak, steak.”
“I guess you want steak.”
“With cottage fries and tomatoes and onions and then some amazing dessert.”
“I’ll have the same,” Cormac says. “I can walk it off tomorrow.”
She looks at him in an amused way, as if she has other ideas about working off the calories. The waiter arrives with the wine. Cormac orders. Every table is now full and there are people standing near the door.
“What a great place this is,” she says.
“Used to be a speakeasy.”
“A what?”
He has forgotten how young she is, and explains about Prohibition and what speakeasies were and how the modern Mob was invented in places like this. She finds the notion of Prohibition hard to understand.
“You mean they banned all drinking? Like with drugs today?”
“Yes, and with the same kind of success.”
“Holy shit.”
“That’s what New York said too.”
They touch glasses, and she sips, then twirls the glass by the stem.
“That’s good.” Her tongue passing over her upper lip. “Here’s to the end of Prohibition.”
She glances around, her brow furrowing. A chill washes over her.
“Listen,” she says, “I’m sorry I got so upset back there in the theater.”
“What was that all about?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Sure you do.”
“Yeah. I do.”
A pause. The diners are murmuring, laughing, leafing through Playbills for the names of actors.
“It just, I mean, the whole thing, the play, the subject, it just reminded me of what I threw away,” she says. “At Hunter, I was a whiz at physics. I don’t know why. It sure didn’t come from genes. I just got it from the beginning, it was a kind of center of things for me. And the professor knew I got it. He paid me a lot of attention. Too much attention. I was just a kid, eighteen. But I guess he never had a Latina in his class who got it the way I got it. Physics was for Jewish kids or Chinese kids or Korean kids. Not for kids from the D.R. But I got it. And I thought, Hey, maybe I’ll major in this, keep learning, keep growing, go to graduate school, MIT or Cal-Tech, discover some new principle, the way Bohr did and Heisenberg did. I knew about these guys, from my teacher. Shit, I had a photograph of Einstein on the wall of my room in Queens. You know, the one where he’s sticking out his tongue? You know that one?”
“Sure.”
“Well, I guess you knew this was coming, right? I got involved with the professor. It’s such a cliché. Student Falls for Professor. Puh-leeze. But, anyway, I did. By then I was nineteen. He was forty-two. And married. Hey: Are you married?”
“No.”
“But you’ve been married?”
“Yes.”
“So you know it’s never easy, I guess. Not for anybody.” A pause. “Anyway, I came on to him just before the end of the term. I didn’t have a plan or anything. I just felt, hey, I’ve got to have him. The details don’t matter. We saw each other all that summer. He rented a house on the Jersey shore for his wife and two kids and went down after class on Friday and came back Sunday night. Sometimes he had to take his boy to Yankee Stadium, or the Planetarium, or something, but the rest of the time we were together. He kept teaching me about physics, making my head explode, and he did his best in bed. Until finally his wife caught on. She made him choose. And he chose her, okay?” She sips the rest of her wine. “Oh, well, fuck it. Fuck him. Too.”
“Did he kill physics for you?”
The salads arrive. She eats and talks.
“No. I went back in the fall and took courses with another professor. One that my guy recommended, a nice old Austrian. And in a way, the Austrian helped me get over my guy, just by challenging me to be better, to go deeper and deeper. I finished my course with him. He told me in that Austrian accent that I had a great future. And then I threw it away.”
Another pause. Cormac waits.
“I just felt, this is all wrong. I’m in a world where I don’t belong. It’s only gonna hurt me. I’ve gotta get out. What did I think I was, anyway? That’s what they always ask in the street. What did I think I was, white? Ghetto bullshit always wins. I walked away. I found my man, had my baby, all that sad song I already told you.” She looks up and smiles in a wounded way. “When I met you, I was the only cashier in the history of Rite Aid who understood quantum theory.”