One Last Lunch

by Erica Heller

  “Shall we order?” Leonard said, greedily scanning the menu of familiar dishes.

  “Sure,” I answered. He may have died in 2016, but as Leonard used to say, Greece was where the magic happens, and so it felt like the most natural thing in the world to see him here with fishing boats bobbing behind him.

  My sister-in-law came to our table, and Leonard rattled off a voluminous series of dishes and wine.

  The first plates arrived within minutes, laid down on the white cloth with the quick efficiency of a card dealer. The plate of taramosalata, its pale pink color subtly suggesting that this Greek restaurant was of a higher quality to those serving overly bright concoctions, was placed beside a plate of white tzatziki, a black olive on top. Warm pita bread sat in a basket. Next to it was a Greek salad, its slab of feta set atop glistening red tomatoes.

  Leonard stared at the untouched food.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” I asked.

  “Well, I haven’t tasted this for a while,” he answered.

  “What do they feed you where you are now?”

  “Ambrosia.”

  “Ah,” I said. ‘The food of the gods.”

  “But I prefer this,” said Leonard. “I’m glad you brought me here.”

  “I didn’t bring you.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t be here right now if it wasn’t for you.”

  “You sure?” I asked, surprised that I had the power to conjure him up from another realm.

  “That’s the way it works.”

  My sister-in-law returned with a bottle of Metoxi, one of the finest bottles of wine that they had, and poured us each a glass. “Drink,” she said. “Eat.”

  As if he’d been waiting for her orders, Leonard tore off a piece of pita bread, dipped it into the taramosalata, and took a large hungry bite. He then washed it down with a glass of the white wine made by the monks of Mount Athos. A wolfish grin spread across his face.

  “I miss this,” he said.

  “What’s the story you used to tell about living in London when you were young and depressed?”

  “Before I became old and depressed?” Leonard said, still smiling. He popped the black olive in his mouth and chewed it as if it were the size of a plum. “It was one of those gloomy, overcast days. I went into a bank to change some money and spotted a teller wearing sunglasses. I liked his excessive optimism and asked where he was from. When he told me Greece, I booked a ticket the following day. A little while later, I wrote to your parents inviting them to Hydra.”

  “My parents always said you found Greece for us.”

  “I didn’t find it. It was always there.”

  We’d arrived when I was a baby. In my mother’s mind it was Leonard who did the summoning. Fifty odd years later and here I was, still returning to Greece.

  “The funny thing is my wife was born in this village and we now live in London. I suppose neither would have happened without you. I’m not the reason you’re here. You’re the reason I’m here,” I told him.

  “I’m pleased to have contributed.”

  “What’s it like where you are?”

  “It’s a bit like Greece. It must have been very special in the beginning, but it’s crowded now and much like everywhere else. People are still searching for something, even after there’s nothing to search for. But the light is very beautiful.”

  More food arrived, and this time my sister-in-law was helped by her husband, Theo, who looked annoyed at being pulled away from the grill. They brought us lamb, potatoes, giant beans in tomato, beets in yogurt, grilled eggplant, and octopus.

  “What fish do you have today?” Leonard asked Theo.

  Theo said he had fresh snapper, sardines, and small anchovies.

  “I do like sardines,” said Leonard, considering. “I’ll have everything.”

  We tucked into the food, poured more wine, and eventually I asked, “Have you run into my father, by any chance?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Not really?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Did you wonder why I wasn’t at his funeral?”

  Leonard had been there. I’d seen the newspaper photos of him holding aloft my dead father, Irving Layton, Leonard’s poetic mentor and his closest friend.

  Leonard was one of the pallbearers. I was not.

  I still found it odd to think of myself as the son who had failed to attend his own father’s funeral. It sounded so dreadful and final, as if I was making an unavoidable statement when, in fact, I’d only been supporting my brother’s decision to stay away. One loyalty had clashed with another, which I suppose was statement enough. But I’d taken some of my father’s ashes and spread them in the very sea that lapped beside us.

  “You see that, my boy? That’s how it ends,” my father would have told Leonard, and Leonard might have answered in the same words he’d once used on another occasion: “This life is designed to overthrow you. No one ever masters it.”

  Leonard, once he started eating, had an almost inexhaustible appetite. One dish followed another, including the fish, and watching Leonard eat, I pictured him and my father still on Leonard’s patio in Hydra, cracking open poems, speaking of war and romance, the two of them discussing people who were long dead as if they were still alive, while occasionally treating those who were actually seated next to them as if they were ghosts. This was a habit of my father’s, a man who was unafraid of death but obsessed with immortality.

  Finally the table was cleared to make room for a plate of honey-soaked baklava.

  The last time we’d sat at a restaurant together, Leonard had insisted on paying the bill, becoming so agitated at any suggestion otherwise that he began to strike his forehead with the open palm of his hand. He never wanted anyone else to pick up the tab, but he had nothing to pay with now.

  “I’m getting up now,” said Leonard. “And I’m not coming back.”

  The finality of those words saddened me, but I knew they were true.

  “I guess I’ve never had a chance to thank you. For all of this,” I said, nodding in the direction of the sea and sky.

  “You know when I said that where I am is a bit like Greece? Well, it isn’t. There’s beautiful light everywhere, but no cracks. Do you understand?”

  “I think so.”

  “Enjoy the imperfections while you can. Believe me, you’ll miss them when they’re gone.”

  “Goodbye, Leonard,” I said.

  Leonard picked up his hat and used it to wave goodbye. As he stepped onto the ancient cobblestones, I watched him begin his upward journey toward the crumbling castle that sat over the village like a king’s crown. On the parapets, a Greek flag fluttered briskly in the wind, and beyond that lay the impossibly blue sky that Leonard now belonged to.

  David Layton has had short fiction and articles published and anthologized in various literary journals, newspapers, and magazines, including Penguin, the Daily Telegraph, Condé Nast Traveler, and the Globe and Mail. He is the author of Motion Sickness, a memoir. His latest novel, The Dictator, was published by HarperCollins in May 2017. He teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto.

  — 13 —

  “What did you think of me becoming an actor?” Pa grunted. “I liked you in that movie where you played the boxer.”

  KIRK DOUGLAS (SON) AND HERSCHEL “HARRY” DANIELOVITCH

  The only time I remember eating lunch with my father was in the first grade. I was six years old, and it was 1922. I did a play that people liked. My father was in the audience, but I didn’t know it. He grabbed me after the play and took me to his favorite saloon. He had a drink, and he gave me some loganberry juice. I was very surprised. I never had lunch with him, even at home. I would like to have had a regular lunch with him, because maybe then we could have talked about things we never discussed before.

  Years later, I found out that he was very proud of me. But he never shared that with me. If we could have lunch together now, I would ask him a lot of questio
ns—for example, what did he think about my going to college? He never gave me any money to pay my expenses, but I heard later, much later, that he was thrilled that I had graduated. Maybe if we had lunch together now he would express his pride? That would be very important to me, because I had six sisters; I was the only boy. An only son carried a tremendous burden in those days. When Pa came home each afternoon with his wagon loaded with junk, I often ran after him and jumped on the wagon, climbed up, and sat beside him. He never seemed surprised. He got off the wagon when he reached the corner of our street. He didn’t say anything to me and always gave Bill, our horse, a slap on the rump. Bill trotted down the street with me holding the reins. At the end of the street, he turned up the small hill in front of our house, stopped, and I got off. My mother was waiting to give me lunch. My father went off to the saloon. But, what if . . .

  “Issur!”

  “Yes, Pa?”

  “Come with me.” He gestured gruffly but never slowed down. I waved goodbye to my mother as I followed my father down the street. We stopped at his favorite saloon. I followed Pa and slid next to him on a stool at the bar.

  “Two glasses of vodka.”

  (It’s my fantasy, and I would prefer that to loganberry juice now.)

  The bartender placed two glasses in front of us. Pa sipped his glass, and I sipped mine. Delicious.

  “Pa, what was your life like in Russia?”

  Pa took a deep breath. “Hard.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s a stupid question. If it was easy, I would have stayed there. Why do you think I came to America?” He continued sipping his vodka, slowly.

  We sat in silence. I mustered the courage to ask him another question: “What did you think about me going to college?” I braced myself for a harsh response.

  “I was very proud of you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, very proud.”

  “What did you think of me becoming an actor?”

  Pa grunted. “I liked you in that movie where you played the boxer.”

  “Champion?”

  “Yeah, I shouted at the screen when you were fighting. I wanted you to win.”

  He put down his glass and looked at me. “You are my only son. I had six girls and only one boy—you. I was thrilled to see you succeed.”

  I was so happy I didn’t know what to say. My father was proud of me, what I’d always wanted more than anything from him—a pat on the back. Here at last I had the validation from him I felt I had spent my whole life chasing.

  “Pa—”

  But he didn’t seem to listen; instead, he turned to the waiter and ordered me a great big bowl of vanilla ice cream for dessert. My favorite.

  Maybe it was to stop my questioning.

  I’ll never know.

  Kirk Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch. The archetypal Oscar-winning Hollywood movie star of the postwar era, Kirk Douglas built a career with he-man roles as soldiers, cowboys, and assorted tough guys in more than eighty films. Douglas was also a Tinseltown innovator and rebel, as one of the first A-listers to found his own independent production company. Douglas also effectively ended the 1950s practice of blacklisting Hollywood talent suspected of communist ties when he insisted on crediting famed screenwriter Dalton Trumbo for his script adaptation of 1960’s Spartacus. He began a second career as a writer and focused on the philanthropic efforts of the Douglas Foundation until his death in February 2020.

  — 14 —

  “Who do you work for—her or me?”

  JESSE KORNBLUTH (SITUATIONAL “FRIEND”) AND NORA EPHRON

  I have five thousand “friends” on Facebook, but not really—I actually know just a few hundred of them. And I could say I was Nora Ephron’s “friend” from 1974 to 1982, but I was really just a friend-once-removed—for a few of those years, I was living with a writer who had been dating Carl Bernstein when he met Nora, and Carl, never strong on the one man/one woman thing, asked Nora for dinner, so Nora called her friend and asked if it would be okay for her to go out with Carl, and it was, which cleared the path for the debacle that was Nora and Carl’s marriage and the romance that put me in Nora’s orbit.

  I wrote a piece for Nora at Esquire. I was in the horse-drawn carriage Carl commandeered and overturned after a drunken dinner at Le Cirque. And when Nora left Carl—as any wife might if her husband had an affair while she was pregnant—we both lived in the Apthorp, the baronial apartment building on the Upper West Side. So, okay, “friends.” In the specific, situational, Manhattan meaning of the word.

  And then Nora wrote Heartburn, a novel about a Washington-based political journalist who has an affair while his wife is pregnant.

  The idea to do a piece about Nora’s intensely autobiographical novel was a no-brainer: I’d toss some questions to my friend, and she’d hit two thousand words over the fence. I could have placed that Q&A anywhere, but I was a contract writer at New York magazine in that decade, so I pitched it to Ed Kosner, who assigned it. And then I called Nora.

  Nora said she would only be doing interviews in the cities she toured, and then only on the day she was in those cities—there would be no previews of the book, no glossy press. And then she delivered the line that chilled: “I forbid you to do this piece.”

  Ed Kosner’s reaction: “Who do you work for—her or me?”

  Gee, now that he put it that way . . .

  I called Nora. I said I was doing the piece and that I’d tell everyone that she had declined to be interviewed.

  We never spoke again.

  “Scenes from a Marriage” was published in March 1983. It presented a Nora Ephron radically different from the charmingly opinionated survivor in her book—I’d interviewed many of her friends, and, to my surprise, they’d not only failed to kiss the ring, some had expressed astonishment at the mere existence of Heartburn. (As it happened, my story wasn’t the worst for Nora. Leon Wieseltier, writing under the pseudonym Tristan Vox, took on the morality of the book in Vanity Fair. “Here is Carl Bernstein and adultery; there is Nora Ephron and child abuse,” Wieseltier wrote. “It is no contest.”)

  I didn’t see Nora for twenty years. Then, at the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2004, she turned a corner and there I was. It was a movie moment. She didn’t gasp, but close. Clearly there was no statute of limitations on the crime I’d committed against her.

  Nora Ephron died in 2012. But for her legion of fans, she’s astonishingly present, eternally alive in her writing and her movies. Why, just the other week I read a piece that asked, “What would Nora do?”

  Good question. What would Nora do if, by the magic of literary conjuring, she were yanked back from the beyond to have lunch with me? She wouldn’t be pleased by her companion. But as even her friends will admit, Nora was one of the greatest control freaks on the planet—who but Nora would, in her terminal year, have the presence of mind to befriend the new “It” girl, Lena Dunham, knowing that she could place her account of their friendship in The New Yorker. She might loathe me, but she’d use me to burnish the identity she’d brilliantly created: accessible icon, chatty neighbor, career romantic.

  What could I ask that would get her to go beyond the quips and opinions that made her name? How could I make our lunch matter? More to the point, why did I want it to? Why couldn’t I, as I hoped to do three decades ago, serve up questions she could easily hit out of the park?

  My method as an interviewer is to read everything and write a hundred questions—and then throw all that away and play the moment. But as I walked into Michael’s, the media lunchroom, gloom descended. In the cosmic pecking order, I realized, nothing had changed. We’d be as we were: Nora, born to the A-list, eternally confident, and me, a nail-biter, B-list to the core.

  Ah, there she was, seated at a good table in the front room of the restaurant, like a Dickens ghost, seen only by me. In a lovely memory piece, her son Jacob described her uniform: “Chanel flats and her cream-colored pants and her black-and-white-striped blouse.” That
is exactly how she looked. Unchanged.

  “This is . . . beyond amazing,” I said. “You look great.”

  “You couldn’t think of anyone else?”

  “Like someone from history?

  “I hear Michelangelo was a fascinating guy.”

  “I thought of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, but the deal was that I had to have actually known the person, and you and I had unfinished business, so . . .”

  “I died, Jesse. Our business couldn’t be more finished.”

  “For you.”

  “Oh, dear. You want to unwind the clock, make it right?”

  Whatever I’d had in mind, this wasn’t it. Nora had turned the tables. She was interviewing me.

  “In the sixties, I was a ferocious journalist, fearless, confrontational, exciting to read. In the seventies, I lost my nerve. I trimmed my outrage, I wrote nice profiles. And then you came along. I had to do the piece, but it didn’t have to be so . . . honest.”

  “Oh, is that what it was?”

  “You lived it; I wrote it down. After, I remembered that was what good journalism is. And for the next few decades, that’s how I wrote. So . . . I owe you.”

  “I’m happy to have helped,” she said, though by the way she delivered the line, I wasn’t so sure.

  “I’m curious: What was it like for you to read that piece?”

  “I didn’t read it.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I cried.”

  “Why?”

  “You caught me in the act.”

  “Writing it, I thought: This woman is as scared and insecure as I am.”

  “Or more. I had two small children, and . . .” She caught herself. “Your life worked out. And you’re still living it.”

  “Jealous?”

  “You cannot imagine.”

  “What’s it like . . . over there?”