“Who did them for you?” he asks.
“Some guy uptown,” she says. “Way uptown. Like on the top of the island. I can’t even remember his name. Black dude. Blacker than any black man I ever saw, talks in some African accent? Like the guys peddle incense around Bloomingdale’s? One of those guys. Maybe sixty years old. Maybe older.”
Cormac imagines the face of the tattoo artist. The face of Kongo. His skin tingles.
“Did he have a set of designs?”
“Yeah, the usual stuff. You know, Malcolm X, and words in Chinese, crosses, stars, skulls, the stuff these goddamned basketball players wear all over themselves like graffiti.”
“And yours?”
“He just sketched it on paper,” she says. He knows her hand is moving in air, making a sketch. “It looked simple and scary at the same time. It was me that told him to make it go all the way down to my bush.” She chuckles sadly. “I had to go to him four times, he called them four treatments, like he was a doctor, a million little needles. He did half of one, you know, looped around my belly button, and it hurt so much I wanted to give up, and then thought, Shit, this will look ridiculous all by itself, like shaving half your head. So I had him finish the job. To get the bottoms where I wanted them, I had to shave. In a way, that turned me on, but it didn’t do anything for the old man. Between the tattoo and the shave, I itched for a month.”
She laughs.
“They sure didn’t work with you,” she says, almost solemnly. “I mean, didn’t scare you off.” A pause. “I’m glad.” A longer pause. “Until last night, I hadn’t fucked anyone in almost two years.”
95.
At dusk, he takes the bike for his Wordsworth. He pedals up the West Side and turns right into Soho, heading for Crosby Street to avoid the Sunday tourists on Broadway. He will see Delfina on Wednesday. He will cook. She will pose for his charcoaled hand. He does not try to imagine that night. He pedals across the immediate space in front of him. It’s dark when he reaches Houston Street, and he wonders where all the black bicycle riders went. One summer, they were all gone, never to be seen again. He did not again see the man who answered his Yoruba with Ashanti.
But he knows that other figures and things and odors are gone too. The shopping-bag ladies were everywhere for six years, pushing their packed supermarket wagons into frozen doorways, talking steadily in streams of scrambled nouns, sorting through tiny bags of socks or knitting needles or empty envelopes; and then they were gone. To shelters or asylums or the Potter’s Field on Hart Island. There were jugglers on certain corners, drawing crowds on summer nights, their faces familiar for a dozen years, and then they were gone too. One year, there were no more cooking odors from the tenements of the Lower East Side, and no more clotheslines on the rooftops or in the backyards. The familiar city vanished; the new city emerged; and in each new city, Cormac was new too.
He moves now into what he once knew as Kleindeutschland, where Germans were everywhere, and he worked for a year setting type at a German newspaper. Most of the older Germans were the children of those who left in 1848 and the relatives who kept coming after the first wave settled: socialists and engineers and mechanics and doctors, all of them creating their own version of America, making deals with Tammany, using the system that they didn’t invent while trying to make it more orderly. They too had started in the Five Points, but kept moving north and east until they had forged a neighborhood that most were certain would last forever. Little Germany.
Right there on Stanton Street, where the Quisqueya la Bella bodega now offers fresh mango and papaya, was the saloon of Peter Reuter. All the newspapermen went in the evening to drink there after the edition was locked up. Writers, reporters, men still smelling of melted lead from the composing room; and here too came the poets and painters and mad architects, the inflamed or disillusioned socialists, the anarchists and syndicalists, to drink lager or ale, to consume great barrels of sausage, and to sing the old songs at midnight. That’s where he went on the night in 1904 after writing his story for the Sun about the burning of the General Slocum. Nobody remembered it anymore, but the sinking of the General Slocum in the East River was the worst disaster in New York history. Everybody on board was heading for an annual excursion to Long Island. All Germans, most out of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, many of them children. A fire started, then exploded, then the ship was burning and moving, the fire hoses rotted, the women and children diving away from the fire into the June waters, unable to swim, and then the ship sank in the violent waters of Hell Gate. More than a thousand died, and the funerals went on for a week and when it was over the Germans all left Kleindeutschland. They went to Yorkville and tried to forget, and the Jews from Central Europe moved in and started the legend of the Lower East Side. That night in Peter Reuter’s saloon, with death throbbing in the streets around him, Cormac couldn’t wipe the horror from his mind, not even when he slept with a blowsy red-haired woman from Bavaria.
Now Cormac pauses on the corner. In Tompkins Square Park, there’s a monument to the victims of the General Slocum, but nobody in the neighborhood knows what it’s commemorating. Now merengue music plays from an unseen radio. Now, on stoops and on sidewalks, kids strut and pose and curse. He hears Delfina’s voice: Same old ghetto bullshit.
The telephone rings around midnight. Cormac picks it up, drops his voice, thinking it’s Delfina, whispers hello.
“How seductive… ARE YOU AWAKE?”
Healey.
“I am now.”
“I just opened the MAIL ten days late. And there’s an INVITE to the Metropolitan Museum. Tomorrow night. Some kind of a NEW YORK ART SHOW! And all the biggies, the MIGHTY ASSHOLES OF THE PLANET, will be there. Go with me. It should be a million LAUGHS.”
“What time?” “Seven-THIRTY!”
“I’ll see you on the steps.”
96.
Cormac comes up out of the Lexington Avenue subway at Eighty-sixth Street and walks west toward the park into a dazzle of silver light. The sidewalk is like pewter, tarnished only by the shadows of men and women whose faces are obscured and formless. The sun is behind them. There are silvery reflections on windows, and the upper stories of apartment houses are drained of color by the light. He came here one afternoon long ago in a carriage drawn by two horses, sitting beside Bill Tweed. There were a few rutted dirt roads then and some stands of trees and much scrub. In his wheezy baritone Bill Tweed spoke with excitement about what was coming: streets and apartment houses and a great green park and perhaps even a museum for the city of New York. “It will change before we’re buried,” he said, and laughed. “There won’t be a live rabbit left on the island.” As on so many other things, the Boss was right. He just didn’t live to see it happen.
There’s a milling crowd on the steps of the Metropolitan, made of tourists and visitors from New Jersey and a slew of photographers dressed in formal wear. A huge banner proclaims the name of the show: Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825–1861, and Cormac smiles. Thinking: I’m the only person here who actually lived in that lost city. The photographers stand in a tuxedoed pack at the foot of the stairs, waiting for the heavy doors of arriving limousines to open and for their inhabitants to emerge into the sheet lightning of electronic flash. As he climbs the broad stairs on the far right, dressed in his twenty-seven-year-old tuxedo and wearing his fake plain-glass spectacles, his patent-leather shoes glistening and his hair brushed straight back, Cormac can see Madonna getting out of a stretch limo as if she had arrived at the Academy Awards. Ordinary singer, fair dancer, but a marvelous act. Ahead of him, Healey is standing with some tourists just short of the top step. His tuxedo looks thirty-two years old. He hands Cormac a ticket.