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?
NINE
Ever After
116.
A chill wind blows north on Sunday evening. Cormac leaves the 6 train at 110th Street and walks east. The streets are emptied by the cold. Police cruisers move slowly along the avenue, suburban eyes studying the city profiles. They peer at Cormac too, a white man probably searching for a connection. Before him are tenements, bodegas, a shuttered church. But other images rise from the pavements. He sees the African faces of old comrades. He sees hills that were scraped away. He sees the subway tunnels being chopped out of earth and granite. He thinks: I’m making a long circle home.
He sees an old brown-skinned man staring from the top of a stoop. He doesn’t see Cormac. He is staring into the past. A man who was an infant when Cormac was already old. Does the brown-skinned man dream of palm fronds rattling on a tranquil shore? No: Cormac is sure he dreams of a lovely woman who is now long gone.
This morning, as on every ninth of September, he walked to the river to drop a rose into the flowing waters. A rose for his mother. He wonders now if any of his flowers have ever reached the dark Atlantic, where they might catch a current bound for the Irish Sea. No matter, perhaps: With any luck he will see them all soon, in the place of emerald light. He imagines Kongo somewhere in the city, wonders where he sleeps, or if he sleeps at all, wonders where Kongo has been while he has lived his own long life in Manhattan. In this neighborhood, in this East Harlem, here in El Barrio, many people would understand the existence of a babalawo.
Now Cormac arrives in a dark street of darker tenements. The iron calligraphy of fire escapes. Lights glowing beyond curtains. New lampposts with hard bright burning light. Cars jam the curbs. Two men work on a double-parked Chevy, each wearing woolen gloves. A few kids run past hills of stuffed trash bags (where did all the garbage cans go?), darting from one tenement doorway to the next.
Here is the building. Number 378. No stoop. Just a door on street level, with clear glass to reveal anybody waiting in ambush, and then a second door with stairs beyond. Cormac enters the vestibule and sees rows of mailboxes and bells. He rings 4-A. Top floor. A buzz comes back, and he enters with a click. The stairs resemble those of a hundred other tenements that were old the year they were built. A banister scabby with layers of paint, the pentimento of the poor. Walls chipped and painted and dirtied and painted and battered and painted. Up one flight. The joined odors of meals, of sauces and roasts and chicken, seeping through closed doors (as they no longer drift into the streets), along with soundtracks from sit-coms and telenovelas and baseball, and the flooding vowels of Spanish warring with the consonants of English. The word PUTO spray-painted on a wall, and a reply, in a different hand, with an arrow pointing, saying SU NOMBRE.
Another flight. On each landing a sealed door where once a dumbwaiter hung from ropes. Now dumbwaiter floats in the Sea of Lost Words. The last flight. A closed green door, with 4-A neatly lettered on its face.