One Last Lunch

by Erica Heller

“You’d find Philip Roth living with your mother. His fault, the schmuck.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “There are some things no boy should have to see.”

  A change of subject seemed in order. “How’d you get this job, leading middle-aged guys through Hell?”

  “My entire life was an audition for this job.”

  “What’s Virgil doing?”

  “He went back to try his luck again; he made some good films in Japan. Balzac had the job for a while. They need an unbeliever who can tell a story.”

  “You can come back?”

  “Once every thousand times around the sun.”

  “Do you have a wife, too?”

  “Mary McCarthy. Edmund Wilson’s ex. You never met her.”

  “Yeah, but I read her. That famous line about Lillian Hellman—‘Every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the.” ’ ”

  “On The Dick Cavett Show. It got her sued.”

  “She seems like she could give you a run for your money.”

  “She’s got a mouth on her. But she’s a hot lay.”

  “This is not your usual taste in ladies, Pop.”

  “Hell is here to teach you what you failed to learn in life.”

  “Like relations with women?”

  “I came up short, as I am told and told again. Also being sweet to children.”

  “You could be sweet.”

  “Don’t shit me just to spare my feelings, Daniel. I’m dead.”

  “Okay. You were an awful, scary monster, but you could be sweet sometimes.”

  “When you arrive, you have to watch your whole life on film. Every painful scene, with nothing you can do to make it any better. The movie’s made, and now it’s in the theaters. Above the screen they write: ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’ That’s when you know you’re dead for real.”

  “Your whole life? Like, every time you take a leak?”

  “Just the highlights, but still it takes five years, eight hours a night. You’re never quite the same.”

  “So not quite as bad as being stuck in a hot room with bad décor and two women you can’t screw?”

  “Oh, worse than that. Look at Philip.”

  “He always looked like that.”

  “I’m telling you so you know,” he snapped. “Maybe your last reel won’t be as hard to take as mine.”

  The pickles came, in a stainless-steel container on a plate. They were deliciously salty, neither too crisp nor too soft.

  “So what do you do all day?”

  “Nothing ever happens here in Hell. One day is pretty much the same as the next. The only source of interest is what happens in the world, where things can still be fixed. Everything we see, there’s nothing we can do or say about it. I would have warned you not to trust that crooked business partner of yours, and that other putz who started the magazine just so he could shtup his friends’ wives in hotel rooms. And you remember when I got into your dream and told you not to be afraid to get divorced.”

  “Adam laughed when I told him. He said, ‘Pop was never afraid to get divorced.’ ”

  Pop chuckled, cocked his head to one side, and smiled an evil smile that somehow included us both.

  “Sometimes when we’re together and saying bad things it seems like you’re there with us.”

  “I am, but that’s you boys talking, make no mistake.”

  “So you can’t act or communicate with us?”

  “No. Mostly all I can do is watch helplessly. The wall is very thin, and you can only see through it from this side. Sometimes, when I want a closer view, I come as a dragonfly or a bluebottle.”

  “So when we went to marriage counseling with the Magic Mama—”

  “The time you nearly got sideswiped by that crazy broad who dropped her brassiere straps for you?”

  “And the Mama made me do a dance with my wife and said, ‘Turn around and look over your left shoulder for your father and your grandfather. . . .’ ”

  “And give us back the burden of Russian Jewish history.” He began to giggle.

  “Please don’t tell me you were both there,” I said.

  Pop lost it, throwing back his head and roaring like a jackass. “We might have played along,” he said, “if we hadn’t been laughing so hard.” He wiped his eye. “She said, ‘Those poor men, they had to leave Russia, everything they knew, and come to a strange land. Oy! Oy!’ ” He was in stitches and couldn’t go on.

  “I tried to tell her, no one in my family has ever expressed the slightest regret at having to leave Russia.”

  “Your grandfather practically had to be carted out.” Pop put on the old country accent: “What is this mishegas? Why is he standing still for it?”

  “How humiliating! How am I going to make love to my lady with you old bastards watching me?”

  “Oh, we leave you be for that. I was never one for dirty pictures. She’s a pretty lady, your lady. The last one, too, that little Italian girl, she was sweet. You do all right, kid.”

  “Shiksas, give me shiksas every time.”

  “Mine’s always entertaining, if not always kind.”

  I wanted to hear more about married life with Mary McCarthy, but the waiter came and served us our plates from a great height, his eyes averted. The salami was the perfection of salami, just a little dry, wrinkled on the outside. The rye bread was still warm, the mustard Ba-Tampte. I was transported back to his kitchen table on the South Side.

  “Food’s pretty good here, don’t you think?”

  “Mmmm. I would have thought bread and water, or pig swill.”

  “This is the Elysium, and the heroes need their lower chakras taken care of. Down below, it’s not so nice.”

  “So there are hot sulfur baths full of naked investment bankers and politicians, like in the New Yorker cartoons? And demons making a trumpet of their ass? Can we go?”

  “You want schadenfreude? You should learn to resist it; it’s not good for you.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that, but there was no point in persisting. “So if you’re Virgil, you get to go wherever you want. What’s Heaven like?”

  “Just as you’d imagine: nice but dull, like a college town. I go to see my mother. Remember Father Kim?”

  “Yeah. Nice guy. But dull. And not too bright.”

  “He has a poker game on Thursday nights. I used to go, but frankly it’s not much of a challenge. It’s more fun down here with Delmore Schwartz and Isaac Rosenfeld.”

  “You guys patch everything up here in the afterlife? They forgive you for the pictures you drew of them in books?”

  “Oh sure. They were already dead; they didn’t care. That was all a big joke, really.”

  “Mom didn’t think it was so funny.”

  “Your mother,” he said, and then thought better of it. “Allan Bloom rides a motorcycle.”

  “Has he established the new Bloomusalem?”

  “Wears black leather, shaved his head, grew a little flavor-saver on his lower lip. Drives the boys crazy.”

  “So a fully actualized Allan Bloom.”

  “He wants to be the Ghost Rider when Johnny Storm retires; he’s up your way every weekend, driving fast on twisty roads.”

  “If you can’t be Michael Jordan . . .”

  “I wanted to be Michael Jordan. Only other person I ever wanted to be.”

  “On a page, you could jam. Can I meet my grandfather? Is he really so terrifying? What’s he do when he’s not hanging out with you making fun of me?”

  “Devil’s plumber. They call him when the toilets back up. He was always good at making the best of a bad job.”

  “People take a shit, here in Hell?”

  “They use a lot of it downstairs.”

  “So, Pop, to what do I owe the honor of this lunch here on the edge of the Pit? I mean, it’s really great to see you, but I’ve never had a conversation with you when you didn’t have a clear purpose. So what is it?”

  “I’ve always t
ried to help you. No, really, I have. But I didn’t know how. That’s one thing I learned from watching the movie of my life. I’d try to wise you up, and you couldn’t hear it, coming from me.”

  “I have made mistakes and later thought, ‘Why didn’t I listen to my old man when he tried to tell me?’ ”

  “So you see it, too. Good. It’s my fault, and I’m sorry. I want to tell you how proud I am you’ve made a go of your pottery. It really is beautiful, and look at you in all those catalogs and stores. I see how happy you are when you’re making things.”

  “When I was eighteen, you said, ‘At least you’ll always have a pot to piss in,’ and reminded me that Potters’ Field is where they bury you when you die broke.”

  “I knew you’d remember. I like a joke too much sometimes, and I feel bad. If you’d gone to art school, you’d have an easy professor’s job. You wouldn’t have to scrape to pay the bills the way you do.”

  “Yes, but if I’d gotten it on a silver platter without the key step of defying you, maybe I wouldn’t have wanted it so much.”

  “You’re cutting me more slack than I deserve again. Tell me, do I have your attention? Have I persuaded you I have only your best interest at heart?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “I’ll give it to you straight: you have unfulfilled ambitions to be a writer, and you are not getting any younger.”

  He waited. Slowly I raised my hand, like a basketball player who has given a foul. He held me in his eye.

  “I was so pleased when you accepted this assignment, and when you kept avoiding it and finding other things to do, I got a busman’s holiday so I could help you.”

  “I certainly am all set for material.”

  “All those years covering the statehouse and writing apple pie features, you’ve got muscles, kid. What you need is a deadline. Go home and sit down at your keys and don’t get up until you’re done. Write it while it’s hot. You know how.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And this is the easy one. When you’re done, you’d better write that other thing you’ve been meaning to write.”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t yes me!” and suddenly he was my terrifying male parent, Moses down from Sinai discovering the Israelites in idolatry. “We’re in Hell! It cost me a lot of favors to get you down here! Don’t do it for me! Do it for you! Don’t you see?” His voice rose to that pitch and then cracked. “When you’re dead, it’s too late!”

  I put my hand on top of his. I have his hands. “Yes, Pop. For me.”

  “All right, let’s get out of here. Philip! Put this on my tab.”

  Daniel Bellow, the youngest son of the novelist Saul Bellow, was born in Chicago in 1964 and educated in the finest schools. He worked as a newspaper reporter and editor in New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont, and when that petered out, he went back to his original passion, making porcelain pottery. His studio is in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where he also teaches high school ceramics, writes an occasional column for the Berkshire Eagle, and raises large dogs. He has two children, Stella and Benjamin.

  — 7 —

  “It’s in the nature of stars to glow warmer as they grow older.” —Philosopher/scientist James Lovelock, ninety-nine years old, speaking of the sun, on BBC Radio Four, January 1, 2019

  CARINTHIA WEST (FRIEND) AND DAVID BOWIE

  “Hey, Rinthy, I’m over here.” David waves from a corner table laid for two, on the patio of a small trattoria in Portofino, right at the end of the quay. He is sitting alone, waiting for me. He looks much as I’d imagined him, in black slacks, a white shirt, with a pale blue sweater slung insouciantly over his shoulders. His face seems older, thinner, and more elegant somehow, but not as ancient as the Methuselah character he once played in The Hunger, a film with Catherine Deneuve. I had visited him on the London set when he played the first of several practical jokes on me, by pretending to be his own father. “David asked me to look after you,” wheezed the virtually bald old man. His makeup was so unbelievably convincing that I shook his gnarled hand until I realized that the rest of the cast and crew were cracking up with laughter. I’d been privileged to be one of a handful of female friends acquired, not through work, show business, or romance but because of my friendship with his longtime personal assistant and closest friend, Corinne (aka Coco). Coco and I had shared some hilarious travel adventures together as well as an apartment in LA, and a friend of Coco’s was almost always automatically a friend of David’s and trusted by his inner circle. “Rinthy” was David’s pet nickname for me. He liked to personalize his friendships by a name no one else would know but him. I always figured it was part of the private uniqueness that was David. Not the public Man Who Fell to Earth David, or the Ziggy Stardust David, or the Thin White Duke David; just David.

  I would never dare to call him Dave, though, so when a mysterious postcard summoned me here, to this tiny part of Portofino’s harbor, all it said, in David’s spidery hand, was “Rinthy—see you at the Italian café for unfinished business. Dave,” with a fast-approaching date and time, I was nonplussed but thrilled at the thought of seeing him again. Previously, always respectful of his privacy unless summoned to a concert, film set, or holiday, this time I thought, “I will go to him.” The front of the postcard was a faded pastel of a boat, drawn by hand and surrounded by sea. David had owned a beautiful yacht, the Deneb Star. Once, it was around 1981, I was one of several friends he invited to spend a week cruising down the Amalfi Coast, taking in small seaside towns and secluded beaches, with a dozen crew to attend to our every need. We moored at bustling Italian ports like Portofino, sampling the small tourist shops and designer boutiques that lined the quay, or simply sunned and swam, but like myself, David always got antsy just sitting on his yacht, and he would find every excuse to go on shore—a packet of Marlboros, a Herald Tribune, or to make a phone call from the local post office—for we were sailing in a time long before mobile telephones and WiFi and emails and satellites, still sending postcards from each port we visited.

  The “Italian café” for today’s lunch was shorthand for the restaurant we all liked best, as none of us ever remembered its real name. I knew exactly where to go. How like David to have chosen a place where he had once felt so carefree. The café itself was a bright splash of white, brilliant light, exotic potted plants, colorful tiles on the floor that sometimes turned intimate conversations into virtual shouting matches, so loud was the hubbub of background noise. But the crisp white tablecloths were an instant giveaway: this café had a distinctly chic air that set it high above the other cafés along the quay.

  Patting the seat beside him, David thanks me for coming. I have given up cigarettes, so I am nervous about seeing him after all this time, but I notice that he is now smoking an e-cigarette. He seems calm, occasionally pushing away a strand of reddish hair peeping through gray with his free hand. Slowly, I become adjusted to this new version of David. Zoning in between time frames and trips, highs and lows, triumphs and disasters, loves and hates, he free dives into memories and friends we share, what he calls the “unfinished business” we never had time for on the boat. He wants to know what I have been working on and about certain friends (a polite curiosity always was a great part of David’s charm).

  There is a waiter whom I vaguely remember, who brings us each a menu and a glass of Orvieto, gesticulating that the wine is “on the house,” and curiously, he does not speak or seem surprised to be serving us. We order mountainous plates of Caprese salads to toy with, with mozzarella that would melt in our mouths. A buzz of muted conversation has gone up from the ghostly presence of the passeggeri crowd I perceive to be just outside the restaurant, and I can tell they are aware that “Boweee” is inside, but with a nonchalance long born of iconic stardom, he appears not to notice. His blue eye is turned to me intensely while the brown one seems to dance in dreamlike delight. They change color all the time, the result of a punch from his best friend in a teenage brawl over a girl. He’d been told he
was going to lose his sight, but with true David aplomb, he always credited his friend, now long forgiven, as giving him a kind of “mystique.” Sometimes one eye looks to be an azure blue, the other a dark green or brown demonic dot, and I notice that when we are talking in spiritual terms, the green/blue iris takes on a shimmering light, and when we are being practical, like ordering from the menu, then the darker eye becomes predominant. There is no doubt that this David still has chameleon eyes.

  Right now, he is in an expansive mood. Just to be here—in the sun, by the sea, with one friend to talk to—seems to be enough for him. “Remember that trip to Cornwall?” he questions. “You had that weird boyfriend, what was his name? Earl somebody or other? He had a Rembrandt on the wall in his dining room, but he wouldn’t pay for that pub lunch, and he wanted me to play some festival he was organizing, but when I found out he had a bull’s head buried in the middle of his maze, I backed out? Too weird, even for me!”

  “Yes,” I say, reminding him of the name. “My mother wanted me to marry him, not for snobbish reasons, but because she had once dated his father! That was a lucky escape!” “You’ve had a few,” says David, in an avuncular manner, affectionately patting me on the arm, “God, the English upper classes, they are so eccentric! I could have told you he wasn’t a safe bet for any girl—and that’s me talking!” We laugh a lot at this as we joyfully hack away at our salads, naturally segueing into a discussion about another mutual friend, a performer whom David was very close to. He has a theory about their friendship. “He sees everything through the eyes of physicality, dance, movement, sensuality, and that’s what makes him such a brilliant entertainer, but I think my style is a more cerebral one, perhaps because I studied mime. I love women, as you know, and men, too, sometimes, more as brothers in arms. But I never had the desire to own and conquer, and I believe it made me a better friend and companion to women.” I can’t dispute this theory, as David was only ever the most sensitive of friends to me. He was, by nature, a generous, thoughtful soul. We go on to discuss a mutual female friend as our waiter refills our glasses. She is involved in an abusive relationship, and we both agree it isn’t likely to end well. “The problem I see so often with women,” David observes, “is that they never believe a man when he tells them who he is. If you listen closely, men will always tell you their true natures. The problem lies with women never believing them. They think they can change the man they’re deeply in love with. It’s always a delusion.”