One Last Lunch

by Erica Heller

  But I didn’t really want to meet my dead mother for drinks either, truth be told.

  On the other hand, her pseudonym, Amanda Cross, author of fourteen mystery novels involving Professor Kate Fansler, was in many ways my mother’s foil. No, Amanda Cross was more than that. She was the manifestation—and creator—of what Carolyn yearned to be: a WASP author writing about an elegant, slim, decidedly childless WASP academic who was an amateur detective, contentedly married, after some persuasion, to a partner whose name and ring she did not accept.

  It followed, then, that Amanda Cross would agree to come to lunch with me. She did.

  She suggested that we meet on the Upper West Side and that I should pick the place. I proposed lunch at the Utopia, a coffee shop near the Seventy-Second Street IRT, one of the rare holdouts from my childhood in the area. I was in the mood for eggs over medium with a buttered English muffin. Fried eggs are never as satisfying when I make them at home, perhaps because of the prospect of having to clean the frying pan.

  On its Amsterdam Avenue frontage, the Utopia now declared itself a “Restaurant” but it had changed little inside. Although I was early, Amanda Cross was already there, in a booth along the edge. She saw me and raised a hand in greeting, an odd gesture with no flexion in the wrist. Rather like the queen, I thought. Carolyn was the same age as the queen and, until she grew out her curly hair and pinned it back—and grew herself out a bit as well—they had looked somewhat alike and had carried the same kind of purse.

  Amanda Cross stood up, and we offered each other a peremptory hug, our kisses glancing off each other’s cheeks—her skin was as soft as my mother’s. Settling down in the booth, we both spoke at once—“You’re looking well”; “It’s very nice of you to come.”

  Service is on the mark at the Utopia. Amanda Cross ordered a BLT on white toast and an iced tea, while I ordered my eggs, English muffin, and coffee. It’s funny how one can grow nostalgic about lousy coffee with free refills.

  Let me interject here that, as you may have noted, I find it necessary to refer to Amanda Cross by her full name. My mother—she of the absolutes—had told me when I was in fifth grade and obliged to read Tom Sawyer, long before I knew of Amanda Cross, that “you cannot refer to Mark Twain as ‘Twain’!” I took this as an admonition about all pseudonyms.

  For years, I took all my mother’s declarations as gospel. They carried such conviction. It was decades before it dawned on me that they should at the very least be run through a filtering process, if not disregarded entirely. (I also took the words of my father, Jim Heilbrun, to heart, but he was less prone to declarations and admonitions. Our morning, evening, and weekend caregiver when we three children were young, he once stated emphatically, as he and I read from Minute Sketches of Great Composers, that he disliked Mahler’s music. So I abjured Mahler, admittedly not a tricky task. Years later I found him preparing to record a live Mahler program on WQXR. My father had changed his mind but had forgotten to tell me.)

  Our lunch arrived. Some coffee shops don’t manage “over medium,” preferring the efficiency of sunny-side up or the routine of over easy, but the Utopia’s over mediums were delicious.

  “How have you been?” I asked Amanda Cross as she negotiated her BLT. She was backlit by sun from the front window, so it was hard to make out her face too closely.

  “You know how I’ve been,” she said. “Shall we call it limbo? And by the way, you don’t type nearly as fast as Carolyn did.”

  So Amanda Cross knew that I’d been trying to write a book by her. I’d wondered about that. It’s hard to tell with pseudonyms. Perhaps she’d read that New York magazine article, published some weeks after Carolyn’s death, in which I told the journalist that Carolyn had agreed to embark on a coauthored Amanda Cross with me.

  It was when Carolyn and I were at that dive bar. “I’ve come to the end of my writing life,” she said after we’d taken a few swallows of our cocktails and had agreed that the weather was far too humid. I wanted to think it simply another of her declarations that I could now, with acquired facility, set aside. Yet it had the ring of consequence, of defeat, about it. She had pulled out her compact and was blotting her face, damp from her walk to our rendezvous.

  Now I looked up from my eggs. “It’s funny. The scent of her face powder lingered in her study for months after she died.”

  “You sound like a James M. Cain novel,” said Amanda Cross.

  “Really, though. Whenever I found myself in her study afterward, I could still smell the face powder. It stayed for weeks and weeks. Then one day it simply wasn’t there.”

  “How’s the Amanda Cross coming?”

  “Slow progress.”

  That last time at the bar. Carolyn, having declared the end of her writing life, was fiddling with her martini olives, stabbed together on a cocktail pick. The bartender, a sweet woman who remembered us from visit to visit, had not bothered to cue up any music yet. The place was empty, save for my mother and me. A long and narrow aquarium, which served as a divider between the bar and the haphazard upholstered seating where we were, bubbled away. An artfully broken Bacardi bottle was nestled on the graveled bottom, with a little aerating deep-sea diver anchored nearby, ceaselessly ready to explore it. A small, whiskered gray fish suctioned algae off the glass.

  “Of course it’s not over,” I insisted. “Think of all the things there are to write about!”

  “I proposed a book to my editor and she turned it down,” said Carolyn. She had sounded more emotional about the weather. She munched an olive.

  “Well, let’s write an Amanda Cross together!”

  “Okay.”

  Her ready acquiescence to my whiskey-soaked suggestion astonished me.

  My eggs and muffin devoured, I looked up at Amanda Cross. “I guess she knew she was going to kill herself in a few weeks. She wasn’t really committing to any other project.” The waiter came by to refill my coffee.

  “Who knows, Marg.”

  Only my parents and one gym teacher had ever called me Marg, such an unimaginative nickname.

  Amanda Cross was looking at me, a solemn stare from the shadows that I found unsettling. I was not up to the task of matching her gaze, so I resorted to my iPhone, faceup on the table next to me. With sidelong glances and one roving finger, I idly checked the time, texts, Facebook, Twitter, and the status of an Amazon order.

  “Explain Twitter to me.”

  “Well, you share anything you want. It used to be limited to a hundred and forty characters of text, but now it’s double that.”

  “What on earth does one say? I suppose it’s like a postcard.”

  “Then everyone who follows you—”

  “Like lemmings?”

  “—can see it.”

  “ ‘Having wonderful trip. Wish you were here. Weather fine.’’’

  “Well, not really like postcards . . .”

  “P.S. I love you.” She quietly half-sang the line from Johnny Mercer’s song.

  “ ‘The journey is over. Love to all. Carolyn.’ ” I said the words of my mother’s suicide note as if reading from a list. “That fits really easily on Twitter. I’ve seen it there. Also in Spanish: ‘El viage ha terminado. Amor para todos.’ ”

  With a red plastic straw, Amanda Cross was shifting the diminishing ice in her glass. Rattle, rattle, rattle.

  I persisted. “She could have gone on a bit longer, don’t you think?”

  “Sure. Two hundred and eighty characters, you say?”

  “I mean in the note itself. On her letterhead. Left on the bureau in the foyer. I thought maybe there’d be a follow-up letter from her in the mail. One to each of us—her kids; Jim, who was out of town when she killed herself—but there wasn’t.”

  “Well, you never know with the post office. It may yet arrive.”

  That made us both chuckle. I leaned back with actual delight, and the booth creaked. A memory caught hold of me.

  “Remember the laundromat that summer in Oxford?�
��

  “St. Bernard’s Road, 1973.”

  “We’d taken our laundry to a place on Walton Street—remember?—and we were on a bench inside near the front waiting for the dryer to finish—”

  “We leaned back against the wall—”

  “—and it leaned back with us—”

  “Into the liquor store next door!”

  “Wine and Spirits!” I briefly clutched her wrist across the table and felt it stiffen.

  “Remember how the proprietor glanced up?”

  “Unfazed! I don’t think we were the first to come through that wall.”

  “Then we sat back up, into the laundromat.”

  “—where nobody noticed what had happened!”

  We were both laughing now.

  The waiter placed the check between my mother and me on the table.

  I grinned and stretched in my seat. The booth creaked again, and we both laughed again. Carolyn took off her glasses and wiped them on a napkin. “I remember how we used to get lost on highways—”

  Funny, our urge to turn a solitary memory into a pattern of recurring moments. “Yes! That time in Connecticut! Where were we going?” I was actually scratching my head, trying to recall.

  “I can’t remember. You were supposed to be navigating, but then you collapsed in giggles with the map. That set me off, too, and I had to pull over.”

  “On a breakdown lane outside of Torrington. Or was it Waterbury?”

  “Well, I must go.”

  “To Connecticut?”

  She smiled indulgently. “You know what I mean, Marg. It’s been fun.”

  “I’ll get this,” I said, standing up with her and surveying the bill to do the math for the tip. “Shall we?”

  She was gone.

  I left a twenty on the table and meant to move the coffee mug to hold the check and money in place, but I moved a small, flat circular hinged case instead. I opened it. The face powder was entirely rubbed away from the center, but there was a nice rim of it all around the edge. It smelled like heaven.

  Margaret Heilbrun has been an archivist, curator of manuscripts, library director, and magazine and freelance editor in New York City. She has curated exhibits as well as published on topics relating to the city’s history. She now lives in a former railroad passenger depot in western Massachusetts.

  — 20 —

  “It was my idea to light my guitar on fire. . . . Nobody else’s.”

  JOE LEWIS (ACQUAINTANCE) AND JIMI HENDRIX

  Lunch with Jimi? How could I ever have thought that possible? He’d been gone a long time; then again, our whole connection had always seemed strangely otherworldly to me.

  Amazingly enough, I almost forgot the first time I met Jimi. It was 1967; I was fourteen and studying rhythm guitar with Hal Waters. I began hanging around this little smoky basement dive called Steve Paul’s Scene on Forty-Sixth Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan a few nights a week to watch Hal. On one particular night, I heard there was going to be a jam session, and rumor had it Jimi Hendrix was going to play. Damn! Jimi Hendrix was God. There is no contemporary equivalent to the position he held in the music world. He played the guitar upside down and backward. Axis Bold as Love is one of the only records I ever actually bought.

  That night, the Buddy Guy Trio was the headline act and a great performer. But, Buddy was no Hendrix. No comparison. Hal played an acoustic second set, I sat in with him on “Water Boy,” and then BAM! The backroom door opened. Out walked Jimi, and surprisingly, he joined us onstage, dropping right into the groove. About halfway through the song, he leaned over, quietly asking me, “Am I playing too loud?”

  I was fourteen years old and suddenly playing with Jimi Hendrix, and he asked me if he was playing too loud!

  After Hal’s set, roadies rearranged the stage, tweaked the massive columns of Marshall amplifiers and house drum gear in preparation for the jam session. The scene immediately packed with some of the best musicians in town. They started with a scorching up-tempo twelve-bar blues. But when Jimi stepped up, the music exploded in his presence; and his solo was so loud it shook your dental fillings loose. He didn’t just play the guitar; he became the guitar.

  That night, Jimi had transported us somewhere into the cosmos and then suddenly, he blacked out and fell off the stage. Quickly, the house bouncers untangled him from the crowd and carried him to a small round table in the back corner. I thought, here’s my chance, slowly threaded my way over to his table, pulled up a chair, and in no time, we were face-to-face. He was slouched down and leaning heavily to the side with his hair and face picking up colors from the room’s psychedelic lighting. I got down closer to the table and said, “Jimi, can you tell me just one secret of the universe?” His eyes were blurred and crossed, but he managed to raise up a bit and looked me squarely in the face. He began to speak, and then vomited all over me.

  I was fourteen years old, and Jimi Hendrix had just vomited on me.

  His handlers rushed over, cleaned him up, and spirited him out of the club. Occasionally after that, when he was in town, precocious, music-possessed kid that I was, we’d bump into each other at parties, in one of the rock clubs, or performance venues like the Fillmore East, Nite Owl, or Cafe Wha?. When we did, he’d always give me a nod, a wink, or a slap on the back. On September 17, 1970, Jimi Hendrix died—three years after that jam session at the Steve Paul’s Scene. Since then, rarely a day goes by that I don’t think about something Jimi, especially his music; a potent elixir that continues to improve as the years pass.

  And now, here we were, about to lunch at Robert, a fancy minimalist American restaurant, on the top floor of the Museum of Arts and Design, high above Columbus Circle. It had wide, expansive views of Central Park. It was just a few short blocks from the formally elegant Wellington Hotel on Seventh Avenue, where he used to ensconce himself. With a big smile, we met in the museum’s lobby. “Joe!” he said. Guitar in hand, he was attired in his signature style, sporting a tailored, royal blue velvet jacket edged with gold ribbing and buttons, boisterous silk paisley shirt and scarf, large gold chain belt, with pointy snakeskin boots and a wide-brimmed hat dramatically perched on top of his giant Afro. Jimi never disappointed. Looking around he said, “I love the street sounds of this city!”

  The hues of his vibrant couture accentuated the sleek modernist overtones of the restaurant’s deep purple and maroon décor. We caused quite a stir among the people power-lunching. Just imagine Jimi, the flower-powered-dandy, juxtaposed with the stiff, tieless, single-button executive crowd.

  Arthur, the maître d’ and an old friend, seated us front and center with an uninterrupted view of the park and uptown Manhattan. Almost immediately, a score of men seated close to us started snickering, loudly parsing thinly veiled bigoted comments and primitive innuendos our way. I thought Robert was the perfect setting for us to talk about changes and innovations in music, but this interaction momentarily blurred my vision. Jimi was a lot statelier than I and said with an effortless smirk, “I guess things haven’t changed that much, now, have they?” Arthur was aghast at the table’s behavior and apologized profusely to us after diplomatically excoriating the suits.

  I wanted to laugh, but the menu snagged my attention. Arthur intervened, “Mr. Hendrix, may I suggest, for starters, the Papaya and Goat Cheese Salad—arugula based with Crottin de Chavignol, radishes, and Key lime drizzled vinaigrette; and for your main course, Tiger Shrimp Stew in a rosemary-fennel butter base. And for you, Joe, your usual?” “Yep, Lobster and Steak Frites, black and blue.” Just like Jimi’s music, I thought; seared black on the outside and cold and raw in the middle. Greco di Tufo, a fresh, unoaked white wine freely flowed into Jimi’s glass as I drowned myself in Arnold Palmers. The wine loosened Jimi up; he was notoriously tight-lipped—unless you were female, and then he had the gift of gab—always with guitar in hand. And sure enough, as our meal progressed, he was besieged by female corporate types with iPhones. They gathered around our table after finishing the
ir lunches, asking him if he wouldn’t mind taking a picture with them. They didn’t look old enough even to know who he was; I guessed they sensed, unlike their male counterparts, that he was a very famous somebody. Then he’d flash that famous smile—the broadest grin I’d ever seen.

  It took a while for the amalgam of their flowery and musky perfume base notes to dissipate; then, we became the last patrons in the restaurant on top of the architect Edward Durell Stone’s controversial trapezoidal bonbon, anchoring the southernmost corner of Columbus Circle. An architecturally designed building ahead of its time, hosting a musician the future was still trying to catch up to.

  Jimi was blown away by all the gadgets performers used to generate the sounds he created by twisting the volume or tone switches back and forth with his pinky while playing his Fender Stratocaster, upside down and backward to boot. While gazing devotedly at his guitar perched on our table, he said, “And it was my idea to light my guitar on fire at the Monterey Pop Festival. Nobody else’s.” Just as I’d always thought.

  I had already decided, feeling nostalgic for those long-ago days, not to remind him of how we’d first met. “What do you think about the business of music, Jimi? There are a lot of stories about how your management tried to control you by sabotaging various band configurations, messing with your money and copyrights.” “All true,” Jimi said. “The business was truly evil. Dangerous, backstabbing, and greedy.” I interrupted, “My dad had an office in the Brill Building and published music, as a Black man, during the 1960s in Tin Pan Alley. Even as a child, I knew you could get your legs broken in the music industry.” “Your dad published music in the Brill Building! Damn. Then you know . . .” “Yep,” I said. Jimi carried on, “All I ever wanted to do was make music. I built Electric Lady Studios to capture all the stuff going on in my head. I had plans but never got to implement them. I hated touring and the constant requests for certain compositions; playing the same song over and over. Man, I never understood why people couldn’t just come and hear me play like they did for, you know, Coltrane, Monk, Parker.”