One Last Lunch

by Erica Heller

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “I can’t. Words are inadequate.”

  Imagine that: a description of eternity eludes a writer who had something to say about everything.

  “Forgive me?”

  I didn’t mean to ask that, but as soon as I did, I knew this was why I’d wanted this conversation with Nora. All these years later, I still felt her power, still hoped for her approval.

  “Death is nothing but forgiveness.”

  There’s a moment in a conversation when the exchanges aren’t strategic or social, a moment when two people are, simply and sincerely, saying what they believe to be true. Was this that moment? Was there more to say?

  I felt a spectral presence behind me. Nora brightened. My ability to see the dead extended only a few feet, so it wasn’t until the presence was standing directly beside me that I recognized him: Mike Nichols, looking as suave as ever.

  “Just a minute, Mike,” Nora said, and I realized that she and Mike often had lunch at Michael’s, and our conversation, this once-in-a-lifetime communication with the dead, was far more important to me than it was to Nora. For me, she was a window into eternity; for her, I was a chore. Ms. Ephron simply didn’t dwell on unhappiness.

  I pushed back my chair, stepped aside for Mike Nichols. Nothing, really, had changed. Nora got the last word. Nobody got the last laugh.

  Jesse Kornbluth has been a journalist (Vanity Fair, New York magazine) and an internet executive (Editorial Director of America Online). He is now a novelist and screenwriter (Married Sex), a playwright (The Color of Light), and a cultural concierge (HeadButler.com). He lives in New York.

  — 15 —

  ELWOOD H. SMITH (FORMER STUDENT) AND NANCY BOYER FEINDT

  Lunch at the Martindale Chief Diner By Elwood H. Smith

  I was sitting alone in a classic diner shortly after noon on Route 23, just off the Taconic Parkway, waiting for my spinach, tomato, and cheese omelet. I was studying the clots of cream in my coffee when she appeared. I looked up, and there she was, Mrs. Feindt, sitting across from me, fidgeting with the torn edge of the menu’s yellowed plastic sleeve.

  She smiled at me and looked back down at her menu. I was restless all night long, in anticipation of our luncheon rendezvous. I finally fell asleep and when I awakened, I rolled out of bed and stumbled toward the bathroom door and crossed directly into the Martindale Chief Diner.

  Nancy died in 2003. I visited her at her home in Toledo, Ohio, two weeks before cancer took her life. I sat on an ottoman at her side, holding her hand.

  She was lying in an old leather recliner, puffy from the effects of chemo and heavy drugs, but she was aware of everything: her two fat, lazy cats, the dishes being scrubbed in the kitchen by an old friend. I was thanking her for the umpteenth time for being my mentor, my saving grace, my link to the outside world, when she squeezed my hand and told me I was the most stubborn student she’d ever had.

  I remembered being a model student, eager to learn, a hungry sponge. I soaked up the Skira prints she gave me, works by Daumier, Van Gogh, and Chagall. Eventually, she slipped Picasso and Francis Bacon into the mix. Mrs. Feindt was an endless font of magic. I was enthralled and overwhelmed.

  “I could see great potential,” Nancy said, “but your focused, inquisitive nature constantly wrestled with your mile-wide streak of skepticism and stubbornness.”

  Mrs. Feindt, Alpena High’s new teacher, was as tenacious as I was cautious. In two years, she managed to breach my sturdy wall of resistance, bringing with her riches from worldly experience.

  Throughout my childhood, I studied the great cartoon strips of the forties and fifties.

  I absorbed the characters in Barney Google, Pogo, and Popeye. I studied Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers. Nancy found ways to honor my keen interests, while steadily steering me into unexplored waters.

  Nancy Feindt, my mentor, my old friend, had changed. She was no longer the solid, sturdy woman I’d known over the years. She was, this day, vaporous, almost not there.

  “Just coffee,” she said to the waitress. “Black, please.” Then she looked at me and said, “I can’t stay too long, I shouldn’t be visiting you.”

  “I am so happy to see you, Nancy,” I said, but I was too chipper.

  “If you are expecting tales from the other side,” she said, “stories of horrific landscapes from Hieronymus Bosch or a schmaltzy heavenly street paved with gold by Thomas Kinkade, you’re at the wrong diner on the wrong day.”

  I reached across the table and placed my hand gently on hers. “I’m not expecting anything, Nancy,” I said. “I’m not even sure this is happening.”

  She smiled and said, “I always knew you’d make it, you know. I think about those days in Alpena with great fondness. My Michigan memories, and those of my happy times in Europe have enriched my life, my afterlife.”

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  “Why are you here? That is the better question,” she said.

  Nancy didn’t wait for an answer.

  “You are here,” she said, “because you need help. I am here because you think you don’t. You do. You are not following your compass. You are near your destination, but you are off course.”

  Nancy was right about my unreliable sense of direction, in my life and in my art. Her voice has always been, I realize at that moment at the diner, an internal guiding light throughout my entire adult life. And now, here she was, ready once again to barrel through my stubbornness, my unwillingness to listen.

  “You think you came up with your latest idea to abandon your trusty pen for a simple graphite pencil in an attempt to reinvigorate your art?” she asked. I looked down and picked at the soggy spinach leaf peering out of my cold, rubbery omelet.

  “Remember the necklace, the one I wore at my seventieth birthday party?” she asked. “You know, the colorful pencil stub necklace Helen Eustis mailed to you after my death?”

  I did remember it. It’s in a drawer somewhere.

  “You didn’t hear it speak to you, but it did!” she said. “You don’t always listen, but you somehow manage to hear important messages when you are ready. The necklace spoke to you just before you began your ‘Death at the Circus’ drawings. You listened then. Open your ears; messages are being sent to you each day like thunderstorms. Open your windows, my stubborn boy, and let in the light, let in the rain.

  I laughed aloud. Here I was, a seventy-seven-year-old man being scolded by his deceased high school teacher. Nancy smiled and said, “Okay, I think we are finally getting somewhere.”

  Nancy was a feisty apparition, I’ll give her that. She reminded me that she had to get back before she was found out. She swallowed the last of her burnt coffee and stood.

  “Find that necklace and hang it close to your drawing table,” she said. “It will speak to you, so open up your stubborn ears and listen. It will guide you back to the true path. In fact, my friend, you have been more or less off-track since you were that small child soaking up the Sunday comics.”

  “You were genuine then. Listen to the necklace, it will lead you back to the truth. Yeah, I know I’m sounding like a new age spiritual guru, here, but trust me, that cheap colored pencil stub necklace is a talisman. Follow it back to the truth.”

  I promised I’d pay close attention to the talisman. BLINK! Nancy Boyer Feindt was gone. I paid the check and drove back home. I could feel the rain on my face.

  Elwood Smith, an internationally acclaimed advertising and editorial illustrator, has also written and illustrated numerous children’s books, two recently for the Creative Company, I’m Not a Pig in Underpants and How to Draw with Your Funny Bone. Elwood currently lives in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, with his companion, Janice Kittner, and his three unruly cats.

  — 16 —

  “And then he was gone. I never even heard the door slam.”

  DAVID BREITHAUPT (FRIEND, COLLEAGUE) AND ALLEN GINSBERG

&n
bsp; It sat on the table, a round, green tangle of green twigs about the size of a strongman’s fist. It was fragrant, and I felt better just for smelling it. But this could only mean one thing.

  He must be around here somewhere.

  I am sitting in Allen’s old kitchen, East Village, New York City, East Twelfth Street, sorting through old cassette tapes, making notes. Reading his spidery writing on the tiny labels makes my eyes sore. It is an art I have mastered at last. Allen left behind a flotilla of material to be organized when he died in 1997, when liver cancer took him away. I started helping his staff catalog the videos and recordings of his yearly readings, back in the early 1980s, for eventual storage at Columbia. It was an annual event, like a harvest, hauling his years’ worth of wisdom to the collegiate archives. They have since moved to Stanford, who apparently had the money to purchase the hoard. In any case, the worker ants are still cataloging.

  I also smell tongue from the Ukrainian deli around the corner on First Avenue, yet another sign. Rimbaud stares from the wall, that portrait of which looks like Verlaine just pissed on his shoes, which he may have.

  On the other side of the doorway hangs Whitman, gazing down, as if keeping an eye on young Arthur. I look at the laundry hanging on lines outside the kitchen window. This could be a view from 1910, a Jacob Riis shot. How the other half lives.

  I hear a cough, and Allen walks in, bespectacled and suspendered. Mildly potbellied and palsied-eye, short beard peppered with gray. Same as when I last saw him with his measured gait, almost as if he were walking in iambic pentameters. He could be anybody’s Jewish uncle.

  “I knew you were here,” I say. “I saw your green stuff sitting here.”

  Allen bows slightly, sits. “Green tea. A gift from Weiwei. Not like what you buy here. Would you like some?”

  “Yes, please.” Allen’s old friend Weiwei, the revolutionary conceptual artist from China, always had the best tea.

  Allen rises and places the kettle on the burner atop the old white stove. His movements are slow and deliberate. Above the stove hangs a large black-and-white cityscape by Berenice Abbott. A Mothers Against Drunk Driving sticker adorns the side of the stove. I smile whenever I see it, thinking of hectic rides Allen had with Neal and Burroughs’s wife Joan Vollmer.

  I wait for the kettle to whistle. It’s strange to see him alive after all these years.

  “How’ve you been?”

  “I’m fine,” I say. “But what about you? Do you have TV in heaven? Do you know what’s going on? The times, they been a-changin’.”

  Allen nods knowingly; he’s chewing something he removed from the fridge. “Tongue. Want some?”

  “No thanks.”

  It still looks like tongue. Gross.

  “Not really heaven. More like a leisure spa at the end of the Bardo. I saw you here and thought I’d say hello.” The Bardo was an after-death state for Buddhists, a journey they took until they reached their final state. I never imagined a leisure spa as an option for the final result. They must have liked Allen.

  “Climate change, Obama, the Twin Towers . . . life has marched on since you’ve gone. . . .”

  “I know.”

  I don’t know how he knows, but it’s probably one of those next-world things. I sip my tea. It’s wonderful.

  “What do we do?”

  “Meditate.”

  “I knew you’d say that.”

  Allen chews. I ask, “How do you eat that shit?” I feel freer with my opinions now that he is living in the next world.

  “Acquired taste. Jewish Eastern European DNA. We eat animal parts.”

  “I don’t know if even enlightenment can save us,” I offer. I don’t want to talk about tongue.

  “Think back. History. We’ve suffered much worse. World wars. Police actions. A blueprint is in place.”

  “Fight, resist, raise a stink?”

  He nods.

  “Sit on the railroad tracks?”

  Again, affirmative.

  “Damn. I thought you’d have an easier answer since you’ve been in the beyond. Like a magic pill or something. Or a ray gun that removes bad people from office.”

  “Tried and true is still the best. Power of the printing press. Don’t forget Trotsky on St. Marks Place.”

  I remember. Trotsky once had a secret printing press in the basement at 77 St. Marks Place, where Auden later lived.

  “Okay,” I say, resigned.

  With his permission, I scrounge in the fridge for something to eat. I pour some oil into a pan and sauté some garlic and ginger. Then I chop off the ends of some bok choy and separate the leaves. I toss them in the pan and put a lid on. It smells fantastic. We are both drinking green tea. There is one slice of cheesecake left. I’m not touching that.

  I remove the lid and sprinkle some low-sodium soy sauce and sesame seeds on top. I serve us both. We eat in silence, lost in our own thoughts.

  “You shall prevail,” he says with a wink. No easy chore with that palsied eye. I wonder if he knew something I didn’t, living in his bardo spa.

  “Gotcha.”

  He puts his dishes in the sink and straightens himself.

  “Good to see you,” he says. “I must be getting back.” I don’t argue; it’s strange seeing him again. It’s sad. It’s happy. Not bittersweet but sad and happy.

  He walks away, eyed by Whitman and Rimbaud. “Keep the tea,” he says. “Oh, and finish the cheesecake.” Before he vanishes, he turns and says, “Remember, the key is in the sunlight.”

  I nod. Of course. How could I forget? And then he is gone. I never even hear the door slam.

  David Breithaupt is a child of the cold war, born into a small, conservative town in the Midwest. His work has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Rumpus, Exquisite Corpse, and the Nervous Breakdown, as well as the anthology, Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader. He has edited Hand on the Doorknob: A Charles Plymell Reader. During the 1980s, he worked as an assistant archivist for Allen Ginsberg. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he helps edit two sports magazines, one dedicated to the Cincinnati Reds and the other to OSU collegiate sports.

  — 17 —

  “I’m fine, Bama. Really fine,” he says. “I don’t want you to worry. It’s all cool.”

  PHYLLIS RAPHAEL (GRANDMOTHER) AND MAX GLEZOS-CHARTOFF

  My grandson Max, who died in 2012 at the age of seven, has agreed to meet me at La Caridad, the Spanish/Chinese restaurant next to my apartment building on the Upper West Side that was his favorite place for a takeout lunch.

  He’s there before I am, waiting on the bench next to the kitchen, dangling his legs. His face lights up when he sees me. Mine does, too. I can feel my heart beating faster, and I wind my arms around him. Alive. So alive. “Oh, Max,” I say. “I’m so glad to see you.”

  I’ve promised myself not to cry and I’m not going to. He looks beautiful. He’s wearing the gray zip-up fleece jacket I’d bought him in the Patagonia store. All the ravages of his illness are gone, and he looks just as he did before the brain tumor made its inroads upon him. His skin is white, and his hair is dark and shiny and wavy. His eyes are their normal shade of gray/green, and the one that was crossed (the first sign of his illness) no longer is. If this is what happens in heaven, it can’t be too bad.

  “So what will it be?” I ask (as if I didn’t know).

  “I’ll order,” he says. “Boneless chicken with yellow rice,” he tells the stone-faced waiter who wears a white short-sleeved shirt and clear glasses and is all business.

  We sit on the bench waiting for our order. The palm of his hand in mine is unbelievably sweet, and I give his hand a quick kiss on the knuckles. The restaurant is full of lunchtime diners: taxi drivers, West Side workers, a pair of lovers, boys from the exclusive Collegiate School around the corner. But I can’t take my eyes off Max. He’s so beautiful.

  “How are you, really?” I ask.

  “I’m fine, Bama. Really fine,” he says. “I don’t wan
t you to worry. It’s all cool,” he says, leaning his shoulder against me.

  “Okay,” I say. “If you say so.”

  “I do,” he says.

  There are a million questions I could ask him, but somehow I don’t want to. Where has he gone? What is it like? Answers will just beget more questions. It’s enough just to be here with him, the two of us together. I’m happy just being with him to share a lunch. I don’t want anything more.

  The bag with our food is set on the counter, and Max jumps up. “I want to pay,” he says.

  This is total Max.

  “Are you sure?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he tells me. “Then you can pay me back.”

  This, too, is Max. I should have known there would be a catch.

  He’s into money. He saved the dollars he wheedled from me, from his step-grandfather—my husband Bob—and from his California grandfather, and his banking skills display the workings of the mind of a future Wall Street power broker.

  One afternoon he and his best friend Nikki tried to sell their paintings in the lobby of their apartment building. The prices were exorbitant, but Max wasn’t worried. He said, “Don’t worry. My grandma will pay.” And I did.

  He produces a grown-up leather wallet, a gift I recognize from his aunt Jen, from the pocket of his jacket, and together we take out two ten-dollar bills. He hands the money to the counter man, who misses the humor of being paid by a seven-year-old with a Ferragamo wallet, and I take the change, and Max takes the warm plastic bag that holds our lunch and carries it close to his chest. Once at my building, he waves to our gateman, who hollers, “How’s it going, Max?” as we ride the elevator upstairs to my apartment. In our formal dining room he takes his customary seat on one of the French chairs at the head of our long pine dining table. I put down the place mats that I brought back from India.

  “I like those,” he says.

  “I know,” I say.

  “No red stuff,” he warns me as I dish out the chicken and yellow rice.