by Erica Heller
I store away this nugget of gold for future use, and sensing that at any moment David might vanish as swiftly as he came, I change the subject and remind him of the Hunger incident. David laughs. “Yeah, I used to love to play jokes like that,” he says. “You could really catch people unawares. I loved dressing up as a waiter or a chauffeur and watching how rude people could be to someone they perceived as just there to serve them. Then when they found out it was me, they became all smiles and ingratiation. Sad, really.”
We discuss how precious were the times on Deneb Star and traveling on it. In between tours and making albums or recording, like other stars of the time, it was the only real relaxation—even in those days of no social media . . . yet here we are reflecting in our dream world—no bodyguards or anxious personal assistants. “Did you like my postcard?” David says jauntily. “I drew it of Deneb from this very spot just outside. I thought you’d enjoy that. Or at least puzzle out who sent it from the beyond. One of my little jokes.”
We move on to the subject of art and the precious place that owning and collecting paintings once took in his life: David Bomberg, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Frank Auerbach, German Expressionists, to name a few. I reminded him of a visit the two of us once took with Coco to the studio of Francesco Clemente in New York, and of the day he came with his art dealer to meet the painter Richard Kidd at my family home in Warwickshire. Being an excellent painter himself, it was apparent from both visits how trained and exceptional David’s eye was by the way he looked at other artists. “Yes, that day was a lot of fun, but I am glad that I asked my estate to sell most of my collection at Sotheby’s and let go. Everything about life is in the letting go eventually.” I was surprised by this thought. David never seemed the faintest bit mortal, but then neither did many of us from the sixties and seventies. Our lives had been so haphazard, so idealistic, compared to the “sensible” generations that followed. As if reading my mind, he says, “It’s always been easy for me to make money. I think it’s because I never pursued it. It’s in the pursuing that people make mistakes—that desperate need to consume and collect . . . better to let go. . . . But letting go of everything is not so easy. I still miss my family very much.”
As if on cue, David leans forward and softly sings a few lines in my ear: “Look up here, I’m in heaven, I’ve got scars that can’t be seen, I’ve got drama that can’t be stolen. Everybody knows me now.” And as I hear the sound of his chair scraping back, I feel so grateful to have had these minutes of private time to hear his lyrics straight from his lips, his insights, and, above all, to have his trust. “By the way, I meant to tell you earlier, this place we called the Italian café is called La Dolce Vita.” He grins broadly and winks at me with his left eye, the one that never quite closes, and puts a finger to his lips. As I watch him gradually fade, until nothing more is left of him, I reflect that, sadly, no one will ever again call me “Rinthy.”
But his secrets are safe with me.
Carinthia West is an English photographer and journalist whose writing credits include Marie Claire, Harper’s and Queen, Harper’s Bazaar, Tatler, the LA Weekly, the Independent, the Telegraph, and Saga and US magazines, covering travel, lifestyle, humor, and (her least favorite subject!) the celebrity interview. As a photographer, she has grown up in the presence of, and been friends with, some of the twentieth century’s greatest names from music, film, and society. Anjelica Huston, Mick Jagger, George Harrison, Ronnie Wood, Robin Williams, Paul Getty Jr., Neil Young, Helen Mirren, David Bowie, Paul Simon, Carly Simon, James Taylor, and King Hussein and Queen Noor of Jordan are just a few of those she photographed at casual, private, intimate, and poignant moments in their lives.
— 8 —
“Bill and I are eating our lunch on the new roof. We’re having a naked lunch.”
AVIVA LAYTON (ALMOST FRIEND) AND WILLIAM BURROUGHS
It was in the late fifties when I arrived in Paris from Montreal to be met by the man I was living with, later to become my husband, the Canadian poet Irving Layton. Irving, who was the recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts poetry grant, which enabled us both to travel, greeted me at the airport with an exuberant poem “The Day Aviva Came to Paris” and the news that we were going straight from the airport to have lunch with William Burroughs (whom we’d never met), with a stopover at Shakespeare and Co. I thought I’d died and gone to writers’ heaven. Jet lag? Shower? Breakfast? Who cared? I had arrived in Paris not as a mere tourist but as a privileged insider.
When we arrived at the legendary bookstore, the owner, George Whitman, invited us upstairs, which I’d heard was a rare privilege. He ushered us up the rickety wooden ladder to the famous upper room, where he told us to make ourselves at home among the low divans and stacks of books, but only after Irving had checked that his books were prominently displayed (they weren’t) in the downstairs store. There was a window at the end of the room, which looked over a corrugated plastic roof several feet below us.
We lolled on the divans like pashas, while George brought us coffee on a brass tray and sat down to fill us in on our lunch. It turned out that Burroughs was withdrawing from a heavy heroin habit and was being looked after by his friends, among them Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, all of whom were living in a nearby ratbag hotel on rue Git-le-Coeur. We were slated to take over from them at Burroughs’s bedside for two hours, and Allen was going to leave us our lunch of baguettes and cheese, which we’d eat while making sure that Burroughs didn’t make a bolt for it. After our shift had finished, we’d meet Allen at La Coupole, sip absinthe, and generally behave like the literary celebrities we so clearly were.
A few minutes after George left, Irving started grimacing and grabbing his stomach. “I think I need to use the toilet,” he said with a moan. He started swaying around the room like a drunken sailor. “Aviva, I need a toilet. Where is it?” he shouted, his voice strained and urgent. I looked around the room. No toilet. It was obviously downstairs, but Irving was in no shape to negotiate the narrow ladder. By now he’d turned a pale shade of green and was sweating profusely.
It was clear he couldn’t wait a second longer, so he did the only possible thing he could do, which was to hurl himself out the window. First I heard the sickening thud of his body landing on the corrugated roof, followed by an ominously loud cracking sound. Rushing to the window, I saw that the weight of Irving’s plunge had created a ragged hole through which his bottom half had fallen in mid-shit, while his upper half was trapped above. He was wedged tight. There were horrified shrieks from below, where, it turned out, the owners of a chic gallery had been preparing for a vernissage that evening.
Above their shrieks came the sound of George thundering up the ladder. “You filthy pig!” he shouted at the famous Canadian poet whom he’d welcomed so warmly only a short time ago. His pale, thin, rather aristocratic face was suffused—understandably—with rage and disgust.
My memory of the next few minutes has, mercifully, been erased, but I have vague images of venturing out onto the cracked roof to help Irving clamber out and clean himself up as best he could. What I do remember with great clarity, though, is Irving and me trudging through the industrial wasteland of some Parisian suburb, dragging a huge sheet of newly bought corrugated plastic through dreary streets, unable to fit it into either a taxi or a bus and delivering it to the still-enraged George. Gone was the William Burroughs lunch! Gone was the warm welcome at Shakespeare and Co.! Gone was La Coupole! Gone was the best part of our holiday budget! We left Paris shortly afterward for Rome, where we had to stay in a rat-and-cockroach-infested hostel because it was all we could afford.
All of this happened well over fifty years ago, when we were young and beautiful. Irving died at the age of ninety-two, George Whitman at ninety-eight, and William Burroughs at eighty-three. I’m still here, which is why at the ripe old age of eighty-five, I’ve decided to finally give myself the gift of having the lunch with William Burroughs I so ignominiously missed out on. Having once said that
an imaginary world is the one in which he would like to live, I don’t think he’d mind, so this is our lunch. . . .
It’s a gentle spring day in Paris, and Bill and I are eating our lunch on the new roof. We’re having a naked lunch. Never mind the metaphorical meaning of the title of the book he’ll write a year later—we’re literally buck naked, both our bodies sun-kissed and silky and indescribably perfect. The plastic roof has transformed itself into a glass one, which sparkles in the soft Parisian sunshine. Through the glass we can see the gallery below, its proprietors lifting delicate flutes of champagne to toast us. Irving is sitting by the window, quietly writing another love poem to me; Allen and Peter are noisily making love on one of the divans in the corner while Bill and I are blissfully sipping the nectar of the gods. We drank, we gabbed, we ate, we laughed, all as if we were old friends newly reunited.
And that is my naked lunch with William Burroughs. At last, and well worth waiting for.
Aviva Layton has taught literature in universities, colleges, and arts schools and has reviewed books for newspapers, journals, and radio in both the United States and Canada. She is the author of a novel, Nobody’s Daughter, and several children’s books and has had essays published in four previous anthologies. She currently lives in LA, where she works as a literary editor.
— 9 —
“The world might end. I don’t know. I went to heaven, not to Delphi.”
BENJAMIN CHEEVER (SON) AND JOHN CHEEVER
The promise of barbecued spare ribs routed any misgivings I might have had about seeing my father again, though I hadn’t met with him—outside of dreams—since he went and died on me back in the spring of 1982.
I was surprised and pleased by the eagerness with which he accepted my invitation to lunch at the China Bowl, at its original location, 152-4 West Forty-Fourth Street. This social victory was given considerable heft by the theory that the approval of a parent is all a child needs to make her-or-his entire life a triumph. Though the theory is patently false, it’s wildly defended, and even when said child is fully grown and said parent, a feast for worms.
Besides which it’s fun to socialize with the dead because they know so little about what’s happened since they left.
There’s no WiFi in the afterlife, no newspapers or magazines. It’s a house rule St. Peter implemented after so many worthies had had their heavenly bliss spoiled by a mixed obituary or—what’s much worse—a missing obituary.
If nothing else, heaven is supposed to be just. Which is not how it looked when Judas got thirty pieces of silver and front-page notices around the world.
Iscariot made matters worse, of course, by having his write-up laminated and taking it with him everywhere. “There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” he said.
St. Peter finally had to deputize Samson to beat the shit out of Judas and put the clipping in the recycling.
Damming the current of current events turned out to be a truly heavenly policy. It also swelled the ranks of those interested in the One Last Lunch program. The dead were ignorant and therefore curious, while the quick were in a position to amuse their forefathers and foremothers with floods of trivia. Also, some artifacts were permitted. I heard about one boob who didn’t know Rome, Italy, from Rome, Ohio, but he still astounded Caesar with his iPhone 7. Julius couldn’t believe that it was water resistant.
The trouble with meeting Daddy in 2018 was that I was certain to confirm his most serious complaint about his self-pitying oldest son. “So, you’re happy?” he liked to ask, whenever we came together. “I suppose the old world is running like a clock?” Daddy took my sorrow personally, as if it were a blot on his own copybook.
And in 2018, national politics were making it hard to put on a happy face. Plus, I had a lot of friends who wanted to know what my father might have thought about rumors of the coming Rapture.
I could imagine him rolling his eyes.
I miss Daddy, but if it hadn’t been for the China Bowl, I might have cancelled. That was another great feature of the One Last Lunch program, since you could eat with people who were no more, you could also meet them at eateries that were also gone.
My father was as fickle about his restaurants as he was about his lovers, but my father was faithful to the China Bowl for decades. He liked the acres of white tablecloth, the heavy napkins. He claimed the mirror in the bathroom made him look taller and that he had once been shown to his table by Madame Chiang Kai-shek. This I always doubted, although the empress of China did live in Manhattan until she was 105. There was no arguing with his assertion that the martinis were cold and the mustard was hot.
Toward the end of his life, John Cheever used to lunch at the Four Seasons, though this seemed ridiculous even to himself. “You pay fifty dollars for a piece of lettuce,” he would say. I’m guessing that would be $125 in today’s money.
Walking west on Forty-Fourth Street, I could see the clothes people around me had on were changing in style, while the cars took on a comforting vintage look, the clangor of horns faded, and the engines had a full-throated roar. I knew the magic was working for sure when I picked out the bowl-shaped sign on the roof. On the street, I saw a brown-haired, smallish gent, in one of those suits from Brooks Brothers that were ingeniously designed to fit no man.
I’m always glad to see the people I love, because I have trouble reconstructing faces. I can summon the way they feel and smell. I can re-create the ring of a voice, but the facial features are a blur. My father could beam at you with such force that it was a surprise, and he was beaming now as he approached me on the sidewalk. I held the restaurant door for him, but he insisted I go in first. He’d lived at a time during which those with the greatest authority always went through a door last. When he went to Russia, he learned that it was safe for males to embrace, so thereafter, we embraced, though awkwardly.
When we got to our table, it wasn’t clear who should sit first, so we both stood ashamed behind our chairs. Finally, and at the same moment, we both gave up and sat down.
“We used to eat here when we came to town to buy you toys,” he said.
“If that’s how you remember it,” I said, not wanting to tumble immediately into a familiar squabble.
“I distinctly recall leaving a racing-car set with the hat check girl, because it was gigantic, almost as big as you were then and far too large to hide under the table. We bought the last one in the store, and they had to take it out of the window.”
“You bought me toys,” I allowed, “but the ostensible purpose of the trip was Christmas shopping, which we did for the entire family. Especially for Mummy.”
The arrival of a waiter reminded my father of those chilled martinis, and we both ordered one. “You remember, of course, that I was sober for the last five years,” he said. “But now it doesn’t matter.”
“Amazing,” I said.
“You did like to buy things out of the window,” I said. “There was a store in Orbetello, near Rome, that had a dollhouse full of pet mice set up in the window, and you bought it on the spot.”
The drinks came, and he sipped carefully from the lip of his glass.
“That’s right,” he said. “I must have offered what seemed like a lot of money, and the man who owned the shop had to shake the thing violently to get the last female mouse out. ‘La donna,’ he explained.”
My father was never one of those tiresome alphas who couldn’t be teased, but when he took another pull on his drink, I could smell the tobacco smoke that had for decades accompanied the astringent taste of gin. He settled in his chair with a confidence since lost to literate American males.
“The state of the nation?” he asked, and I reached wildly for my own martini. I drank deeply, ate all three olives, and put the toothpick in the saucer for my teacup.
“If only you’d wanted to meet me for lunch during the Obama era,” I said.
Of course, he’d think I invented the Trump presidency as an excuse to feel sorry for myself. I considered lying
.
I had lied to him, when I banged up the Studebaker. That falsehood was never discovered since his station wagon had had so many previous collisions that not even his guilt-ridden son could tell in the cold light of morning which one had occurred the night before. I don’t remember much at all about that night, except that I was with a girl, a pretty girl, who had blue jeans with a busted zipper.
She couldn’t close her pants, which turned out not to be a good sign, although we liked each other as friends and all.
That next morning, I told him about the zipper, but not about the ding on his car. Now I was tempted to lie again.
“Let’s order first,” I said, since the waiter was back at our table, this time with a pad and pen.
“Well, that much is easy,” he said. “If we get the family dinner for two, we can have wonton soup, egg rolls, the barbecued spare ribs, and pay extra for the lobster Cantonese.”
Both the waiter and I nodded in mute agreement.
“So, state of the nation?” he asked again.
“Donald Trump gets into an elevator and a gorgeous model gets in with him?” I said. “Have you heard it?”
“If I heard the joke, I’ve forgotten,” he said.
“When the elevator doors close, she puts his hand on her left breast. ‘We’ve got a minute,’ she tells the Donald. ‘Can I please, please give you a blow job?’ ”
Just then, the soup and egg rolls arrived, and my father reached out, touched one of the egg rolls. “Ouch! Hot!” he said, and pulled his hand away.