“You going camping?” he says.
“No, I’ve brought you something that would look strange on the subway.”
He opens the zippers and takes out the sword, which is wrapped in a blue towel. Cormac removes the towel in a ceremonial way and shows Warren the sword. His eyes widen and he leans forward.
“My God,” he says. “It’s beautiful.”
“ ’Tis.”
Cormac offers him the handle and Warren grips it, turns the sword to examine the blade and tip, and then squints at the etched spirals. Holding the sword, he stares at Cormac for a beat.
“Your fellow did a fine job.”
Cormac thinks: The fine job was done by the man who made it.
“He says it was almost certainly made in Ireland in the eighteenth century. By a blacksmith, not an armorer. It could be worth almost anything, depending upon the desire of the buyer. The spirals are Celtic. They’re symbols of immortality.”
With a kind of reverence, Warren lays the sword on the polished top of a captain’s table and sits down in an armchair. Cormac sits facing him. The sword points north.
“Thank you, Cormac, for seeing what I didn’t see,” he says. “I bought it, oh, ten years ago, in a junk shop in Rhinebeck. Hanging in a mess of cobwebs. The owner had no—what is the word? No provenance. No history of the sword. He thought it was made around the time of the Revolution but didn’t really know. I had been collecting other swords, in England, in France, thinking someday I might have time to become an expert, and the size of this one—well, it just seemed to fit with the others.”
Warren sees a piece of decoration or a hobby for old age. Cormac sees the sweat on his father’s brow as he worked at the forge.
“It was good of you to do this, Cormac.” A small smile. “Of course, you could have just asked me for it. You didn’t need to steal it while my wife was asleep.”
So she told him everything, Cormac thinks. And here he is, still mad for her. Or so it seems.
Patrick comes in with a tumbler of water on a tray, ice in a cup on the side. Cormac glances at the fake Sargent portrait of Elizabeth Warren and hears her say the word “intimacy,” the name of a place as far from her as Jupiter.
“Would you like the food now, sir, or—”
“Now, Patrick. That would be fine.”
Patrick bows and goes out. If I kill Warren first, Patrick might hear, might call the police, or race to the street… Now it’s Warren’s turn to glance at the portrait of his wife, as if he has noticed where Cormac’s eyes had drifted. He takes a deep breath, then exhales. Cormac feels shame seeping from him.
“The sword is one thing, Cormac,” Warren says. “But I want to discuss something personal with you. Personal, and painful.”
“And I with you.”
For a second, Warren looks as if they are thinking of the same subject. Then he smiles in an uncertain way. His hands find each other, the fingers opening and closing. The sword is within Cormac’s reach.
“In that case, I’ll go first,” he says. “It’s about my wife.”
“Yes?”
He exhales. “First, a confession. Many weeks ago, I put a private detective on your trail.” He shrugs as if this were a ludicrous decision. Then smiles. “I simply wanted to know who you were. Elizabeth was very impressed with you, with your interests, your way of speaking, your good looks. From the moment she met you at the Met, and more so after our dinner party… So I wanted to know more. Were you married? Or gay? Were you some kind of con man, the sort of predator that always hangs around museum openings with a slick line of bullshit? I wanted to know. I don’t ever want Elizabeth to be hurt. Emotionally or physically.”
He does love her, Cormac thinks. That he does.
“The private detective did discover something very interesting: You don’t exist. You don’t have a driver’s license. You don’t use credit cards. You don’t pay taxes, at least not under the name of Cormac O’Connor. You don’t vote, or subscribe to magazines. You live in a building downtown. He followed you there one night, but your name is not on the bell, or on a lease. And you do have a girlfriend. A beautiful young Latin woman who lives in East Harlem. Otherwise, nothing, nada, zilch.”
“Sorry to have been such an inconvenience.”
“But here you are, sitting in my living room.”
Cormac stares at him. “And why were you really on my trail?” Warren inhales deeply, then exhales slowly, and says, as if uttering a confession, “Because I want you to become my wife’s lover.”
Cormac smothers a smile. It’s absurd. A moment from a daytime soap opera. On cue, Patrick enters with a tray: a small pizza sliced in quarters, plates and silverware and napkins, salt and pepper. Cormac moves the sword to his side of the captain’s table. Patrick places the tray on the table. Bows slightly.
“That will be all, Patrick,” Warren says. “You’re going out, am I right? Well, we can clean up. See you in the morning.”
“Good night, sir. Good night, Mister O’Connor.”
He leaves, the door clicking shut behind him. Warren’s hands knead each other. He stares at Cormac, then looks at the pizza.
“Are you shocked that I’d want you to make love to my wife? Or that I suspect you already have? Or that I still want you to take up with her?”
Too many words. The daytime audience would now go to the refrigerator. But Cormac can feel anguish in those words. His hand trembles as he lifts a slice and lays it on his plate.
“No, I’m not shocked,” Cormac says. “The heart has its reasons….”
Warren smiles in a knowing way. He trims the point off the triangle of pizza. Spears it with a fork. Cormac does the same.
“So you see, your blank résumé doesn’t bother me,” he says. “It’s actually a plus.” A pause. “If I can’t find you, can’t prove you exist, then how can Page Six?” He chuckles, and then his face goes grayer and more troubled. “You see, I have a problem. I can’t, uh—well, let’s say, I can’t…”
He doesn’t finish and starts chewing his small wedge of pizza. Not looking at Cormac. Not looking at anything.
“I have a problem,” he goes on, the voice waxier now. “I love my wife. I think she loves me. But we can’t give each other what we need. I need other women. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. I do know that I must have her in my life, even if we have no children, even if we have to create a public image, a double mask, that’s different from our private lives. The fact is, I need her. And she needs a man who can give her what I can’t. If I had to name that thing, it would be intimacy.”
Her word fills the air as Warren shrugs his shoulders hopelessly, and Cormac feels pity again make its treacherous move, as it did with the man’s wife. For Warren, this conversation might be worse punishment than any swipe with a sword.
“So I want you to know that I don’t mind if you, if she—if she takes a lover and that lover is you. I don’t really mean lover. That’s the euphemism. I mean if she has me for love and you for sex. I told her this. Told her that all I would ask is discretion, which I would guarantee in my own life with her. She could find a small apartment, in a building without a snoopy doorman or nosy neighbors. You could still love your girlfriend as I love Elizabeth. There would be certain, uh, material compensations for you. At the newspaper, where I’m known as a generous boss. But with my wife, it could be…”
Cormac thinks: The rich are all like this, God damn them. Even the best of them. From the end of the Revolution until now, they’ve been certain that money can provide the solution to every human imperfection. The men have whores or mistresses. The women find other cocks. I know: Across the years, I’ve provided my own share of these services.