by Erica Heller
“Wrap it in a napkin,” I said, but he’d already speared the offending appetizer with a fork, moved it to his plate, and was cutting off a piece.
“Back to the joke,” I said. “So, the model asks Trump what he’s waiting for. ‘I’m trying to figure out what’s in it for me,’ he said.”
This got a smile, but not a laugh. “I don’t know why you’re talking about Donald Trump. I wasn’t all that interested in him when I was alive. I’m going to the restroom,” Daddy told me, “and if you encounter the waiter, order another martini for me.”
I nodded and was delighted to see that when he stood and walked, he wasn’t favoring his right leg, the one that had been riddled with cancer.
“I don’t know what Donald Trump has to do with anything,” he said, when he got back. “I am curious though about the state of the republic.”
“Let’s start in with idle chatter,” I said. “Why does an all-powerful God allow suffering?”
“There are dozens of excellent books on the subject, most of which—I daresay—you haven’t bothered to read,” he said. “I don’t want to spend our only lunch together in twenty-five years mulling over the problem of pain,” he added, cutting into the noodle in his soup with the side of a large, stainless-steel spoon. Then he brought the steaming wonton to his mouth, blew across the surface, and swallowed.
I held my peace.
“You’re not going to ask me for money again,” he said, and took a pull on his martini.
Again, I said nothing.
“There’s no cash in heaven.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I heard. You can’t take it with you.”
“Well, if you’re not broke, why did you arrange this lunch?” he asked. “Don’t tell me it’s for that book that Heller girl is putting together.”
“Erica’s her name,” I said, “and that’s certainly the genesis of this lunch, but that’s not why I set it up.”
“Okay,” he said, and used a knife to separate out one of the barbecued spare ribs. This he dipped in hot mustard and took a bite. His eyes filled with tears. He took three long pulls on his water glass, then another slug of gin.
“Are the ribs as good as they used to be?” I asked.
Daddy nodded, took another bite, put down the rib, and wiped his lips with an impossibly thick white napkin. “Heavenly,” he said.
“What’s it like in heaven?” I asked.
“What leads you to conclude that I’m in heaven?” he asked.
“I just assumed,” I said. “You wrote like an angel. No burn scars.”
“Do you honestly suppose that people coming up from hell all look charred, as if they’d been hamburgers taken off the grill too late?” he asked. “And do I catch disappointment in your voice? Were you picturing your poor old father dancing around on a bed of charcoal briquettes, while horse-faced creatures with cloven hoofs lashed at him with bullwhips?”
“Not disappointed,” I said. “Nor surprised. I’m delighted. I loved you. Love you. And by the way, you look great,” I told him, as I finished slurping my soup.
“That’s the thing about the dead,” he said. “We always look the way people remember us.”
“I hadn’t thought it through,” I said, “but you do look a lot like the way I remembered you, only somehow filled in, more corporeal than when alive. And of course, you’re in a suit. At home you were in a crewneck sweater, often torn at one elbow. And wash pants. Remember the ones they sold at the Army Navy store with the patented grow feature, which was a nip they’d taken at the waist, a nip that you could let out?”
“Yeah,” he said, “the only way you could grow was fat.”
“Maybe it’s the gin, but you seem to have a glow about you,” I said.
“I’m down from heaven, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “Of course I’m numinous. I’m not in hell, though I can’t exactly thank you for that. I mean, the stories you detailed in therapy—”
“That’s therapy,” I cut in. “You’re not supposed to be fair in therapy.”
“Nor accurate either?” he asked.
“As a master of fiction,” I said, and this made him blanche. “As a master of fiction,” I said, enjoying the fact that the second reference also made him blush. “John Cheever of all people should understand that accuracy is something we search for, not a series of facts that have been established.” I took a rib.
He remained silent while I chewed and swallowed. “I’m still not a homosexual,” I said. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I’m no longer worried about that,” he said. “That was what they call a projection of me onto you.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Just as my yearning to be a great writer was a projection of me onto you.”
My father began to crane his neck, apparently looking for a waiter.
“I’ve missed you,” I said.
Silence.
“Of course, I’m pleased,” he said, “though not entirely convinced.”
“Sure, I miss you,” I said. “Remember you’d be in your armchair when I came back home at night from a date, and you’d ask if you were a disappointment as a father?”
He nodded. “I was sometimes a chore.”
“Sometimes,” I agreed, “but I was also flattered. And you’d say that you weren’t like an ordinary father, and I’d say that I didn’t mind, because ordinary fathers were crashing bores.”
He smiled, though weakly. “You were always adept when it came to saying what was wanted.”
“I mean it,” I said. “I understand you, because I’m lonely, too. You remember when you took me and my first wife, Lynne, to London, and gave her fifty pounds to go shopping, so that you and I could be alone together?”
He looked vague. “Remind me.”
“You and I walked around the Serpentine in Hyde Park. You weren’t drinking, but you encouraged me to have some silly drink. A plimsole?”
“You mean a shandy,” he said.
“That’s right,” I said. “A shandy. And then you said that you sometimes experienced a species of loneliness so intense that it felt like intestinal flu. This was during one of the most successful phases of your career. And I thought how odd it was that a man so much admired could be so lonely.”
He was peering around now and seemed to have stopped listening.
“I didn’t know the kind of loneliness you were talking about then,” I said, “but I do now. I often feel that lonely myself.”
He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, but he didn’t look at all sorry.
“Your writing has kept other people from being lonely. I’ve met women who saw you speak forty years ago and are still vibrating. They were in the back of the auditorium and you were at the podium. You said that good prose could cure a sinus headache or athlete’s foot, and the woman in question would never afterward have a single doubt about her life or work. I only wish you’d given me that sort of encouragement.”
He smiled vaguely. “Did I say that about athlete’s foot?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “You can look it up in the biography.”
“I haven’t read it,” he said.
“It’s a masterpiece,” I said.
“I’m glad,” he said. “I’ll take your word for it.”
Our waiter appeared, took our order for more martinis, and another man came to the table with a chafing dish. He took off the cover and gave us each some lobster Cantonese. Daddy insisted I take the big claw. The waiter looked at us for some sign of approval, and we both nodded and watched politely, while he put the scoops of white rice on our plates.
We both leaned forward and ate in silence for a time.
“So, what’s the problem?” he asked.
I gulped down some more martini, cleared my throat, and began: “We have an orangutan in the White House. Trump! People are afraid the world is going to end,” I said. “There’s a lot of talk about the Rapture, which alarms me.”
“
What’s the matter with Benjamin Hale?” he said.
“He cries enough to fill a pail
“Oh, what’s the matter Benjamin Hale?
“He cries enough to float a whale.”
I sensed that our time was almost up and signaled to the waiter, who brought the chit, and I asserted the authority of the living by putting my platinum American Express card in the fake-leather pocket designed to receive it.
“I remember that poem,” I said. “But you have to believe me when I tell you that there’s lots of trouble down here. People more naturally cheerful than I am are losing sleep.”
The waiter came back, and I added the 20 percent tip, signed, and put my card back in my wallet.
“I don’t know if this will shed any light,” he said, “but they’ve closed purgatory. Freed up a lot of space, which we are in need of, especially if they decide dogs have souls. It’s going to be so crowded, nobody will be able to lie down.”
“But why don’t you need purgatory anymore? Wasn’t that mostly a Catholic thing?”
“It was,” he said. “But they found that the time spent watching the TV news was painful enough, and in just the right way. They found that when they came up with a soul that owed time in purgatory, he or she had already suffered eons in front of the screen.”
“Interesting,” I said.
“So that’s my answer,” he said. “If you think the world is going to end, then turn off the television.”
“So, I should tell my friends that if they turn off the TV, the world won’t end?”
He pulled out his chair, stood, and grinned. “The world might end. I don’t know. I went to heaven, not to Delphi. What I do know, though, is that if you turn off the TV, you’ll have a better time until it does end. Which is enough, don’t you think?”
“I guess,” I said.
By now, we were standing in the street, about to part.
He shrugged and beamed. “We should do this again soon,” he said. “I’ve really missed the lobster Cantonese.”
Benjamin Cheever has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, and Runner’s World. He illustrated craven moral flexibility well before it was in vogue by contributing to the Reader’s Digest and the Nation within the same five-year period. He’s published four novels and three nonfiction books. He has taught at Bennington College and the New School for Social Research, and lives in Pleasantville, New York.
— 10 —
“You’re no longer alive, but you’re definitely immortal.”
SARA MOULTON (PROTÉGÉE, FRIEND) AND JULIA CHILD
We worked out all the details over a Ouija board. Julia would meet me for lunch at the Summer Shack in Cambridge, just five minutes by car from the house on Irving Street where she and Paul had lived for decades. It was her choice—she’d always been a huge fan of Chef Jasper White—but I was happy to go along with it. Our reservation was for noon. By 11:55, I was sitting in a booth waiting for her. At the stroke of 12:00, the clock by the register in the front of the restaurant started tolling. As the last gong faded away, Julia started fading in on the other side of the booth.
She was smiling, of course. “Dearie, how wonderful to see you,” she said, in that famous strangled foghorn of a voice. “I’m so glad you found the time to meet with me.”
I was just as delighted to see her. “Oh, come now, Julia. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
She looked terrific—much better, in fact, than in her bent-frame later years. She held herself erect, and even though she was sitting, I had a feeling that she was once again every inch of six foot two. She was wearing a simple blue shirt covered by a green cardigan, a black skirt, and some “sensible” shoes. Her gaze was direct, her skin clear, her energy high. Come to think of it, she looked very much as she had when we’d met in 1979, when the grand dame was a mere sixty-seven years old. Given that I myself was now sixty-five, I felt a new appreciation for her legendary vitality.
I had a thousand questions for her. “Julia, what’s it like on the other side?” I said. “Are you happy there? Do you get to see Paul?”
“I’ll tell you one thing right off the bat,” she said. “The Germans had it right—in heaven there is no beer. Even worse, there is no wine. I promise I’ll answer all your questions, but first let’s put in at least a part of our order.”
She’d no sooner spoken than our waiter, Sal, was at our side. “How can I help you, Julia?” he said.
“Sal!” she said. “Still on the job—and still keeping fit, I see.” It was just like Julia to engage the veteran waiter as a friend. She was the least snobby person I’d ever met.
Sal, a modest man, blushed, but in fact it was true. He worked out religiously and stayed ripped. “How ’bout some wine, Julia?” he said. “A glass of Sancerre, as usual, or would you like to try some of this new California Chardonnay?”
“You know me too well,” Julia said. “The Chardonnay sounds lovely, and it will give me a chance to see what they’re up to in California these days. And some oysters, too. What’s on the menu today?”
Sal ticked ’em off, one by one: Cotuits, Wellfleets, Sandy Necks, and Standish Shores from Massachusetts, Pemaquids and Glidden Points from Maine. Her eyes gleaming, Julia ordered half-a-dozen each of the Wellfleets and the Pemaquids.
As Sal strode off in the direction of the kitchen, Julia folded her hands in front of her and looked back at me. “What’s going on in the food world, dearie?” she said. “I want to know all about it.”
I wasn’t sure where to start, but then I figured I might as well give her the bad news right up front. “Well,” I said, “French cuisine isn’t at the center of the universe anymore. Chris Kimball is as busy as ever, and he tells everyone that the new model is international cuisine. Salt and pepper in every single dish has got to go. Pepper, in particular, is a spice like any other and shouldn’t be added willy-nilly.”
“Nonsense,” huffed Julia. She was clearly offended and sat up even straighter. “What does that even mean—international cuisine? There’s got to be a base—and nothing and no one beats the French.” I replied that I’d begun working alongside Chris on a broadcast for National Public Radio and that we tussled over this question week after week. “Believe me, Julia, I defend the French way every time,” I said.
Truthfully, I had a ton of respect for Chris. He’d been working in the trenches of food magazine publishing for decades, first at Cooks Illustrated, then at Milk Street, both of which he founded. He could be prickly, but he was an empiricist. When it came to cooking a particular recipe, he accepted nothing as given. In effect, every article was a test of the given recipe in a quest to determine whether that way was in fact the best way to make it.
And it’s not like Julia was very different. Jasper still likes to tell the story about what happened during one of his guest appearances on Julia’s show. He chose to complement the dish they’d prepared together with a handful of Vermont Common Crackers purchased from the Vermont Country Store. Julia was shocked. Surely, she believed, a decent cook could whip up a better product at home. With that thesis in mind, Julia assigned a team of cooks the task of reverse engineering the recipe for the common cracker, which has been a staple in New England country stores since 1828. When she and Jasper sampled the final version of the dozens produced and rejected by her team, the two of them agreed that it tasted exactly like . . . the commercial product.
Of course, I loved and subscribed to Julia’s empiricism and her never-ending search for excellence. It was because of my devotion to her method of “boiling” eggs that I ended up meeting her in person.
One day in the late seventies, during the brief period I worked for a catering operation, a colleague and I were boiling and peeling seven hundred eggs. I did it Julia’s way. You didn’t actually boil the eggs. You put them in water and brought them to a near boil, let them sit for twelve minutes, then chilled them in ice water. The result was a cooked egg with an admirably tender white surrounding a yolk tha
t wasn’t marred by the ugly green line that invariably encircles it when you boil eggs the usual way.
Turned out my young associate knew all about Julia’s method. Her mom was a personal friend of Julia’s. After I’d finished regaling this young woman, she asked if I was interested in working with Julia. Was I? Was she kidding? The next day I found myself on the phone with Julia herself. “Oh, dearie, I’ve heard all about you,” she said. “Tell me—do you food style?” Food styling was then in its infancy, but I was familiar with the term and I certainly knew how to land food on a plate in an appetizing way. So I lied and said yes, I was very good at food styling. She hired me on the spot to work on Julia Child and More Company, the series she was then making for public television. I worked behind the scenes there and afterward helped with the food styling for the cookbook that bore the same name. A few years later, JC started appearing on Good Morning America. I’d already moved to New York and volunteered to help Julia on the set of that show. Eventually, the folks at GMA thought it might be a good idea to put me in front of the camera. That gig led to a tryout at a brand-new venture called the Food Channel. I ended up hosting several series there over the course of a decade.
So, what was Julia to me? First a teacher, then a mentor, always a dear friend. I never stopped learning from her.
Back at the Summer Shack, Julia was partly mollified by my flag-waving on behalf of the primacy of French cuisine. “Well, then,” she said. “What else is new?”
“Food bloggers are the new stars,” I said. It was more bad news, but I knew she wanted me to give it to her straight. “A few of them are excellent, but most of them have no training, as you know. You remember their websites? They just repurpose other people’s recipes and take the advertiser’s money.” Julia shook her head but continued listening raptly. “Maybe it all comes down to these new easy-to-use digital cameras. The bloggers shoot every step of the prep,” I continued. “Anyway, they’re the ones with the brands these days, so they’re the ones who get the big cookbook deals.”