Like some of his other friends over the years, Cormac enjoys Healey’s company too much to tell him the story of his life, even part of it. The rule behind most New York friendships is “don’t ask, don’t tell.” If Healey doesn’t ask, Cormac will not tell. Healey never asks. He’s the last of the old-style bohemians, the author of three good plays that had long runs off Broadway in the early 1960s, which meant he was shaped by the 1950s, when the worst sin of all was to name names. He’s a reformed drunk who now walks twenty-seven blocks, in rain, snow, or summer heat, to meet Cormac for their weekly breakfast. He’s also very loud, which is why the waitresses place them near the coffee shop’s outfield wall. Healey is loud because in the battle for the Chosin Reservoir in 1951, he lost half his hearing when a Chinese mortar exploded fifteen feet away from his left eardrum. “I’ve got a good ear for dialogue,” he used to say. “I just wish I had two.” He doesn’t write anymore, but he lives decently on royalties, since one of his plays is always being performed somewhere. He retired from writing when his stupendous young second wife ran off with a bass player. He now claims that he wrote all of his plays for her and after she left, whenever he tried to write, her face always appeared over his desk. The result was fury and sorrow, followed by paralysis and too much drinking. He stopped writing first, and then stopped drinking. The writing did not come back. He and Cormac have been friends for eleven years, and Healey has never mentioned anything about Cormac’s unchanged features, the absence of marks of age. It’s as if the playwright listens to Cormac but doesn’t see him. He has never been to Cormac’s house, nor has Cormac been to his. They sometimes meet in bars, where Healey drinks great quantities of Diet Pepsi, or here at Mary’s for breakfast.
Now Healey is making his entrance again, huge and wide-eyed, dressed in a plaid Irish hat, his anorak dripping with the morning rain. His shoes make a squishing sound as he passes alarmed customers. When he reaches the table, smiling with his mouthful of yellow teeth, he heaves his soaked shoulder bag to Cormac’s side of the banquette. He rips off the anorak and hangs it on a wall hook and leaves the hat on top of his head.
“Jesus Christ, what a filthy morning!” he bellows. “And there’s nothing left to look forward to now when you wake up! Kathie Lee is gone! No more slave labor in Thailand to worry about! Jesus Christ, no more infernos on cruise ships! What will we do without her, man? What will keep the pulse of the metropolis pulsing after breakfast? We’re doomed, man! Kathie Lee is history!”
Cormac suggests (as Healey sits down heavily, making the banquette wheeze) that maybe there’d be some Kathie Lee videos he could buy. Kathie Lee’s Greatest Hits. The Golden Age of Kathie Lee.
“No, no. No, they can’t do that, man! What made her so great—what made her an artist, man—is it was LIVE! No script! It was happening right there in front of your fucking eyes, man. That’s why she’s such a great artist, you dig?”
A waitress named Millie comes over. Everybody named Dotty, Penny, Ginger, and Bridget has passed into history, and here must be the last Millie left in Manhattan. Mary’s Café is that kind of place; nobody is ever named Heather and everybody knows about Miss Subways. Millie is fifty, heavy, with a wicked mouth on her when she wants to be wicked. Cormac cherishes her.
“What’s yours, hon?” she says, meaning both of them.
“The usual,” Healey says.
“Let’s see: scramble three, crisp bacon, whole wheat toast, coffee, no milk, fake sugar.”
“As always, you got it perfect, Millie.”
“You the same?”
“Why not?” Cormac says.
“He actually likes oatmeal,” Healey says. “It’s an Irish thing.”
“Our oatmeal tastes like cement,” Millie says.
“That’s why he likes it.”
“I’ll take the egg,” Cormac says. “Four minutes, rye toast.” “You got it, sweetheart,” Millie says, and hurries away.
“I love waitresses who call me ‘sweetheart,’ ” Cormac says.
“So marry her.”
“Why ruin a romance?”
Healey takes the News and the Post from his bag, the headlines filled with RUDY and DONNA, the latest chapter in the pathetic saga of the mayor in love.
“You read the papers yet? I mean, watching Rudy manage women is like watching an ostrich shit.”
Cormac laughs. Millie comes back with a basket of rolls, Danish, butter and marmalade, and a tall white plastic pot of coffee. Healey and Cormac start eating out of the basket. Healey taps the tabloids.
“I gotta terrible confession to make,” he says. “I’m starting to feel sorry for that Giuliani. I mean, his whole life story changed in the last year. Cancer! His wife splits! A new broad shows up! He drops out of the Senate race! He goes walking with the new broad, along with a bunch of photographers, and he doesn’t even realize he looks like a fucking idiot. Then they make his father for a hoodlum in the thirties! Doing time. Breaking heads. Stuff from sixty fucking years ago! Fact is, you weren’t doing time in the thirties, you were some kind of pussy, man. I want to go across the street to City Hall, see Giuliani, put an arm around him, and say, Come on, Rudy, LET’S GO GET A BLOW JOB!!”
At that point, Millie arrives with the eggs and bacon.
“Whad you say?” she says, pulling the plates closer to her ample breasts, as if holding them hostage.
“Aw, gee, Millie, sorry, pardon my French, man.”
“Don’t call me ‘man,’ Healey. I’m a girl.”
“Of course, man.”
She puts down the plates and wrinkles her brow, staring at Healey.
“What were you talking about, anyway?”
“The mayor, of course. I’m telling this Irish hoople I’m feeling sorry for the mayor these days—”
“Careful, he’ll have ya indicted.”
“And I was saying how I’d like to just put my arms around him, I swear…” Here his voice cracks into a counterfeit sob. “And just say to him, RUDY, LET’S GO GET A BLOW JOB!”
The coffee shop goes dead silent. Millie looks at Healey for a second and then laughs out loud and whacks Healey’s hat with her hand, sending it flying toward the kitchen.
“You’re RIGHT!” she says. “You’re absolutely RIGHT! That’s what he NEEDS!”
“I mean, can’t you see it?”
“I don’t wanna see it.”