Pete Hamill - Forever

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.”

“I mean—”

“Good-bye, Healey!”

She walks briskly away. Two other waitresses are giggling, and when Millie reaches them, she starts telling the story. The coffee shop is again filled with the sound of murmuring voices and clattering china. Cormac sees the waitresses in dumbshow.

“You ever notice,” Healey says, “that Millie’s got a beautiful ass?” “A BLOW JOB!”

Millie’s voice.

Reaching the punch line.

Healey’s eyes widen.

“PUT IT ON MY CHECK!” he instantly bellows down the full length of the coffee shop.

Shouts. Applause. Fists pounding on counters.

Cormac doesn’t care if Healey ever writes another word.

The telephone keeps her present in his life as he waits for their night at the theater. Sometimes they speak twice in a day, at noon and at night. She talks about how she hates working at the drugstore, and he says she must find another job where she can use her brains, just look in the Times and go for the interviews and fill out the forms. She says she has no references, except Rite Aid. He says just be straight. Tell them you were raising a baby. Silence for a beat. Then more talk about where she’d want to work and how she could use Spanish and how bilingual secretaries are in demand. Then she tells him she is taking a day off from Rite Aid to apply for three jobs. One in a bank on Forty-eighth Street. Another at a dotcom outfit on Greene Street. Another in a law firm in the World Trade Center. He wishes her luck but says she should be careful about the dot-commers, there is a collapse under way.

“Hey,” she says, “are you what they call a mentor?”

On Saturday morning, she calls and her voice is bubbling and high-pitched.

“I got it,” she says. “I got the job! The one at the World Trade Center! An outfit named Reynoso and Ryan—they hired me. I got home last night and the message was on my machine and… I start Monday, can you believe it? Can you fucking believe it?”

She comes downtown and they celebrate in Chinatown at a place called Oriental Gardens on Elizabeth Street. They order leek soup and dim sum and rice with vegetables and separate mounds of cool shrimp and hot chicken. Her mood shifts from girlish excitement to nervousness to determination, each shift reflected in the way she uses her chopsticks. When Cormac can eat no more, she continues. Her eyes sparkle. Her breasts move under her black T-shirt. She is like a prisoner released from jail.

“Thank you, Cormac,” she says, and reaches across the table and squeezes his right hand. “If it wasn’t for you…”

“Stop,” he says. “This is all you. You did it. I didn’t.”

She sips green tea. He wants to ask her to come home with him, to plunge with him into the dark nest of Duane Street. To begin. She senses this too. But then glances at her wristwatch.

“I’d better run,” she says. “I’ve got to buy some clothes. Or at least clothes for Monday morning.”

She asks the waiter to wrap what is left of the food. He pays the bill with cash. They go out together into bright sunshine. They walk together toward Canal Street, passing the old police station marked 1881. The year of the gunfight at the OK Corral and the year Henry James published Portrait of a Lady . He thinks: What a marvelous country.