“Can you use it in the new job?”
“No, it’s a law firm, import-export, NAFTA, all that. My Spanish helps with calls to Monterrey.” She grins. “But the guys there are pretty good guys. Reynoso is a Mexican who came here in 1968, after all his friends were shot in some massacre. He went to Columbia, gave up Marx, became a business major, then took a law degree. He can be very funny.”
“What about Ryan?”
“I don’t even know if he exists,” she says. “He’s always off in Europe or someplace, making deals. Or that’s what Reynoso says.”
She smiles in a pleased way, all regret about physics now vanished. The salad plates are carried away by a Mexican busboy (“Mil gracias, joven,” she says); the steak arrives. She seems grateful for the interruption and begins slicing meat.
“Oh, wow—this is good.”
She glances around the room, and then giggles.
“Why do I feel like I’m in New Jersey?”
“Because New Jersey is here at all these other tables?”
“What do you think their lives are like?” she says. Cormac can’t tell her that since the night he washed up on its shores after killing the Earl of Warren, he has never been in New Jersey.
“Nasty, brutish, and long.”
She smiles, chews, swallows. He realizes she hasn’t used “fuck” all evening long. The noise of the diners is rising.
“So, anyway, that’s why I was upset.”
“You don’t look upset now.”
“I’m not.”
She looks directly at Cormac, her eyes lustrous and black in the restaurant’s yellow light.
“You’re a nice man.”
“You’re a good woman.”
“Not so good.”
“And I’m not so nice.”
Her face darkens in an embarrassed way and she twirls the glass toward the waiter. He comes and takes it away. The steak is gone. She looks sated. Then starts to get up, murmuring about the ladies’ room.
“Go to the front door,” Cormac explains. “Make a left, then down the short flight of stairs.”
“All that to get to the ladies’ room?”
“It used to be a speakeasy, Delfina. They never changed the layout.”
She gets up and walks through the crowded dining room. Older women look at older men who are looking at Delfina. Then turn to look at her themselves. Cormac remembers Ginger Everett turning heads in this room and singing “Bluebird of Happiness” for the crowd in a thin little voice; but Ginger never came close to weeping over quantum physics. When Delfina makes her return (the table cleared of plates, a fresh wine waiting), a lot of eyes fall upon Cormac too. His eyes are on Delfina’s belly, under the black sheath. He rises and makes an effort at moving her chair, but she’s too quick.
“You were staring at my belly,” she says, leaning forward with elbows on the table.
“I want to see what’s there.”
She glances behind her to see if she can be heard. She can’t. “First I want some chocolate cake.”
The waiter comes over. Cormac orders two coffees, one chocolate cake, and two forks. The waiter glides away. Then, on the far side of the room, a woman starts shouting at a man. She’s about fifty, with blue-rinsed hair and real pearl earrings. She’s a little drunk, and at first her words are indistinct in the general din of the restaurant. Then the room hushes, and they can hear what she’s shouting at the large white-haired man across the table from her. He starts patiently wiping his eyeglasses with a handkerchief.
“Go over and talk to her, Harry, why don’t yuh?” the woman shouts. “Just go over and tell her you want to fuck her, Harry, why don’t yuh?”
Delfina’s face shifts. There’s a flicker of a smile and then a tense freezing of her features as she realizes the woman is talking about her. Other diners look at the woman, then at Delfina.
“Go over, Harry, offer her money. Isn’t that what you ushally do? How much to look at a tit, Harry? Five hundred? Is that your ushual rate? And her snatch? How much for that, Harry? Five grand? Go ahead, ask her.”
Three waiters surround the table, blocking the woman and her man, Harry.
“Jesus Christ…” Delfina says darkly. “It’s always the same old shit.”
They hear the high-pitched voice from behind the fence of waiters. Cormac glimpses Harry fumbling for cash. “Go ahead, Harry, she’d prob’ly love it, you old fool.”
“Hey,” a beefy man shouts. “Pipe down, willya? I’m tryin’ ta eat!” A dozen other diners applaud.
“Eat shit!” the woman yells at all of them. “Eat shit and die!”
Harry gets up now. He’s very large, very old, and very embarrassed. The waiters are trying to move the woman gently toward the door. She now looks about seventy.
“What is this?” she yells. “The bum’s rush? When Meyer was alive, you wooden dare pull this shit.”
Other diners now try to look normal. Then Harry moves through the diners to the table where Delfina seems to be shrinking and Cormac is preparing for an assault. The old man bows in a stiff, old-hoodlum way. Cormac relaxes.
“Folks,” Harry says, “I’d like to apologize to yiz, bot’ of yiz. My wife is def’nitely out of order. She’s a little cuckoo.”
He turns and moves toward the door, where the waiters are draping a coat on his wife’s shoulders. The murmur of the room returns in a relieved way.
“Just another romantic dinner in the Big Apple,” Cormac says.
“Yeah.” Delfina chews the inside of her mouth. “Let’s skip the cake and coffee.”
She still seems mortified. Other diners continue glancing at her, as much to see her reaction as to judge the provocation for another woman’s rage. She squirms in her seat. Cormac realizes that the only other Latinos in the room are the busboys.
“There was a time,” Delfina whispers, “when I used to wish I was flat-assed and flat-chested. Just so I wouldn’t be bothered so much. Then I realized T and A gave me some kind of power over men. Then it became a bother again. Like tonight. Sometimes I wish I was a hundred years old and everything like that was behind me.”
Suddenly the waiter is there with the cake and the coffee, and a half smile on his face.
“Sorry about all that,” he says. “She gets stewed on two high-balls, that one. She doesn’t want to know Meyer is dead, and she’s old. Dessert is on the house.”
He hurries away. Delfina looks at the cake, then at Cormac, smiles, and lifts a fork.
“What the hell, Cormac! We earned it.”
They attack the cake in a fever of release, and Cormac struggles to imagine her at Hunter, lost in the abstractions of physics, a place where she didn’t have to think about being thinner or smaller or less beautiful. She makes “um” sounds now as she eats the cake. Um. Um-um. Um. Women ate this way after escaping from the Five Points too.
“By the way,” she says, “who is Meyer?”
“His last name was Lansky and he was the smartest gangster who ever lived. I’ll tell you all about him one of these days.”
“Not tonight?” she says, the tip of her tongue flicking chocolate off her upper lip.
“No,” Cormac says. “Not tonight.”
93.
She steps into the bright darkness of the Studio and gazes at the skylight. She makes the same small gasping sound he heard in the theater. She moves forward and stands very still. Looking through the panes of the skylight.