“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Which Bill Tweed would answer with another question: What are you gonna do about it?
He sees a light blinking on the answering machine. He plays the lone message.
“It’s me,” Delfina says, her voice wavering across the miles. “I had a terrible time getting through to you. Sorry, mi vida. Everything’s okay with me, but they don’t think my father can last the night. I’ll let you know as soon as I can come home. Check the e-mail too. Love ya.”
That’s all. The crisp message of someone using someone else’s telephone, at long-distance rates. A voice that’s at once concrete and vague, but alive.
And then he feels a green worm move in his heart. Suppose this is a game? Suppose she is lying? Suppose she never left New York? Just because the woman in the Trade Center concourse was not Delfina, that doesn’t mean she’s not somewhere else in the city. He calls her number. In English and Spanish, she says she has gone on a short trip out of town, on family business, and should be home by Labor Day, please leave a message. Cormac relaxes and curses himself for an adolescent fool. But the worm still gnaws. He glances at the clock. Almost six. He calls her office and asks for Mr. Reynoso. “Sorry, he’s out of town until after Labor Day. Would you like to leave a message?” No, he says, I’ll call after the holiday.
He checks e-mail, but there are no messages from Delfina, and he thinks: I’d better read Stendhal tonight. I’m too old for this shit.
109.
The doorman looks at Cormac as if he’s a jewel thief. Standing in the vestibule, the doorman is like a remnant of the Hapsburg Empire, all gold braid and buttons on a field of royal blue, and in the great tradition of doormen, he has adopted the haughty manners of his masters. He fixes his hooded eyes on Cormac while he calls the penthouse. The clock behind him says 8:15. Back turned, he murmurs into the house phone, then hangs up.
“Penthouse,” he says. “Take a right to the elevator.”
“Thanks.”
Cormac is carrying a draftsman’s case, purchased from Pearl’s Paint on Lispenard Street, and the man in the elevator looks at the case first, then at Cormac. If he suspects the case hides a shotgun, he says nothing. He punches PH. Up they go in silence. Cormac flashes on Delfina, in a Caribbean town he will never see. He hears the disappointment in her recorded voice, and the sound of hard rain. Now he feels for a quick beat that he’s once more betraying her. He tells himself, I imagine her betrayal while I enact my own.
The elevator stops, the door opens and Elizabeth Warren is smiling at him.
“Come in, come in,” she says, full of practiced brightness and formality, played for the elevator operator. The door clicks shut behind him and he stands the draftsman’s case against a small table, which also holds a bowl of keys.
“Is there a rifle in that thing?” she says, smiling.
“Not even a round of ammunition. I promised a friend I’d loan it to him. He’s an artist, lives over on Second Avenue.”
“Is he any good?”
“Not bad.”
They walk down the hall, past the many cream-colored doors, including the room where the swords hang together on a wall.
“Patrick arranged some soup for us, and sandwiches,” she says. “We almost never eat heavy in the evenings, except when William is entertaining. He’ll be gone a few more days in Israel, getting a tour of the terrorist outposts.” She says this with a certain sarcasm. “Patrick has tickets to a baseball game—and the maids are off tonight.”
Ground rules established firmly and casually, she gestures at a small table in the corner: soup bowls, silverware, a silver tureen for the soup. Sandwiches neatly piled on a plate, the crusts pared from the bread.
“I told you we’d have to rough it,” she says. She’s wearing a loose, flowing Mexican skirt, white peasant blouse, low shoes: a Frida Kahlo sketch for someone other than Frida Kahlo.
“It looks perfect,” Cormac says.
“Let’s sit before the soup goes cold.”
She talks about Israel, and how Willie actually admires Ariel Sharon and hopes to urge him to meet with Arafat; and how depressed she was about the scattered killings in Northern Ireland; and quotes the old line about how peace comes dropping slow. The land mine problem is urgent. “There are children dying all over the world,” she says. “In Afghanistan there are two million buried mines, and the Russians have been gone for twelve years.” The problem, she says, is the idiots from the Taliban. Has he seen the footage of the way they destroyed the two immense statues of Buddha? Dreadful, dreadful. Then she switches to national politics and the economy, the president and his men, the ripple effect of the economic collapse on Mexico and England, and eventually the world. Speaking with intelligence and a certain journalistic precision. Cormac feels sludge seeping into his brain.
The soup is a variation on sopa de tortilla, without the avocados or the chicharrón. At least one of the cooks must be Mexican. The sandwiches are tomato and mozzarella, almost certainly the reduced-fat variation of the cheese. Elizabeth places herself so that the lamplight emphasizes her cheekbones and the elegant column of her neck.
“I told my husband you were coming here tonight,” she says. “Just so you don’t feel strange when you see him next.”
“Any objections?”
“No. He said to tell you that they could use Major Deegan in Tel Aviv.”
She smiles, and they are into the dance. Cormac knows all the patterns, far better than Elizabeth does, but the steps are always slightly different. Here Yo-Yo Ma plays cello on a CD full of the tango. He sees what she doesn’t: Valentino and George Raft and the hoarse cigarette voice of Agustín Lara at an upright piano. His eyes roam over the paintings. He loosens his tie. She holds his hand. The CD ends. A moment of silence.
“Come,” she says.
Later, in a small dim room behind her office, she falls limp and soft and silent for a long while.
“Were you thinking of someone else?” she says.
“Yes,” he says, telling her the truth.
“Poor woman,” she says, with a hint of bitterness. “To have missed this.”
“Who were you thinking about?”
“My husband.”
This is a new step in the ancient dance.
“I love him,” she says. “I want to be with him the rest of my life.”
“Tell me the ‘but.’ ”
She smiles and turns her head to the wallpaper.
“I’d rather not.”
He sits up. She follows, back against a bare wall, knees drawn up. Her face now is exhausted and drained, her hair blowsy.
“I have a question,” he says.
“Ask it.”
“What do you want from me?”
She’s quiet for a long moment, sorting out words, staring at her long fingers as they form a little steeple. There’s a twitch in her cheeks.
“Intimacy, I suppose.”
The word breaks something in her. She starts to weep. Her hands fall hopelessly to the bed, her knees move toward Cormac, her porcelain shell cracks. He feels pity make its treacherous entrance. He holds her tight for a long time, and she dozes, as he eases away from her, and then she falls into sleep. He lets her thin body relax into the pillow. He covers her with a down comforter and lifts hair from her brow. Intimacy. Another one of those big words that James Joyce said always get us in so much trouble.
The night man is on the door when Cormac comes down at twenty minutes after twelve and says good night in a firm voice. The night man nods in an uncertain way, and Cormac keeps walking with the draftsman’s case in his hand, heavier now than when he arrived. He strolls into the chilly blue air.