One Last Lunch

by Erica Heller

  I’d had hangovers before, of course. Many of them much worse. But hangovers were frequent, indeed typical, consequences of evenings with Christopher, and these had their own special characteristics. Because Christopher was generous with drinks and kept a well-stocked bar, not only was ample, and perhaps even excessive, consumption typical, but also an arguably ill-advised mixing of various distillations and fermentations of the juice of the grape and the grain could be hard to avoid. On most occasions, I made no effort to avoid it, knowing full well the probable consequences. But Hitchens-induced hangovers tended, at least for me, to be strikingly free from the ghoulish specters of regret, recrimination, and remorse that haunt so many other mornings after.

  Less than a week after our extended introduction I received my first invitation to a dinner at Christopher’s home. The first of many, it solidified what was an already rapidly developing friendship.

  Many years later, only a week or so before he was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer (as he pointed out, “What’s most significant about stage four is that there is no stage five,”) after a terrible incident in New York, he once again demonstrated his enormous friendship at another key lunch meeting. I was undergoing an emotional crisis over a disastrous romantic entanglement with a severely disturbed woman, and I reached out to him on the phone for counsel and comfort. I explained my situation, and he told me that he had just arrived in Chicago to begin a book tour but that I should give him a few minutes and he would call me back. Evidently he could tell from the briefest call that my poor little brain was struggling to deal with an assault of, literally, mania from the lady I was breaking up with.

  I needed help. I needed a friend. I hadn’t said anything of the kind, at least explicitly, but he certainly seemed to get the message clearly enough. A few minutes later, he rang back and told me that he was canceling his next event, would be flying back to Washington that night, and that I should meet him for lunch (where else?) at the Bombay Club the next day.

  “No wives and daughters this time,” he averred. “Just us boys.” In any event, he spent four hours with me, patiently listening to my whining, offering wise observations and largely very good advice, and generally talking me down off an emotional precipice.

  He’d always taken an interest in my relations with women, for whatever reason, and one of his nicknames for me—“Mount Ibish”—was a play on both my vast bulk (for much of the time I knew him I weighed between four and five hundred pounds, though I’m now half that size, and he liked to say, “You came by that honestly”) and a sly double entendre given that I wasn’t exactly starved for attention. Now, for the first time, it had gotten me into a rather deep hole, and he was kind enough to want to help me out of it, which he certainly did.

  He even paid for the meal, beyond having already done that in several ways, by canceling his event in order to babysit my wounded ego, changing his travel arrangements, and in several other obvious and not-so-obvious ways. It was particularly touching because while Christopher had a very generous streak, as I’ve noted, he also took money very seriously. He was more than willing to lend cash, but he wanted to be paid back, and I took care to never borrow any from him. Though he would have gladly lent it, I’d seen unpaid debts come, at least to some extent, between him and other mutual friends, and I didn’t want that to happen to us.

  Now, today, the platters of steaming food kept coming at us with great rapidity, and, up to the task, we quickly demolished them, all the while still drinking our respective quaffs. (Christopher was especially besotted with Johnnie Walker Black, which he said he had deliberately cultivated a particular liking for because it was both very good and universally available, including in most war zones and throughout the Islamic world—with a couple of rare exceptions.)

  At first, being a perennial guest at his home, I suspected that his apathy regarding red wine held, or at least powerfully articulated, opinions possibly based on some overwhelming economic realities. Great wine can be very pricey, and most people can drink a lot more of it much more easily and carelessly than they can knock back Scotch, for example. Financial ruin could have been a foreseeable consequence hosting so many people so frequently and with such emphasis on keeping the company well lubricated, if he’d ditched the boosterism of plonk. Over time, however, it became clear to me that he deeply believed in this opinion. I began to suspect that constant cigarette smoking had, perhaps, blunted my friend’s taste buds to the point that “the house plonk” really was sort of indistinguishable from a complex Bordeaux, a subtle Pinot Noir, or a profound Priorat.

  But that clearly wasn’t true, because I had seen him demonstrate that his palate was actually in remarkably fine working order, at least when it came to certain flavors. At the beginning of the meal, as always, he had ordered a double Johnnie Walker Black with a tiny splash of water. His first sip sent him into paroxysms of outrage: “What the fuck is this?” he bellowed. “It’s . . . it’s fucking lemonade!” The waiter, the bartender, and then the manager were imperiously summoned, in that order, to discover how and why an excellent and innocent Scotch was being forced to impersonate some “fucking kiddies’ lemonade.” A brief investigation determined that the little splash had come from a pitcher of filtered water. All DC residents know that, if you can possibly avoid it, Washington tap water is strictly undrinkable—unless one likes to quaff lashings of chlorine and God knows what else.

  Hitchens not only shared this view but took it a step further: he would also cook with only bottled or strongly filtered water. At the bottom of this benighted pitcher, which was rapidly being recast as a veritable anus mundi, was discovered a lone, thin, and entirely forlorn slice of lemon. That villainous shard of fruit, it was universally agreed, must have been the interloper and culprit. In other words, one thin sliver of lemon had imparted the merest hint of flavor to almost a gallon of water, less than a tablespoon of which had then been poured into a double Scotch. From that, and with just one sip, the whiskey was declared to have been so adulterated as to become, in effect, “lemonade.” That’s a great many things, both good and bad. But it is not a crippled palate in action.

  The men’s room at the Bombay Club is all the way in the back of the restaurant on the right-hand side. I walk through the front door, past the bar, across the dining room, and into the men’s room. In spite of everything else about this strikingly uncanny afternoon, I am still taken aback by the fact that, while everything is perfectly in place for a normal lunch service—even though this is, I somehow feel certain, a Saturday, and they normally only serve dinner on Saturdays—there are no other customers at all. All the tables are perfectly set, but no one else is there. As far as I can tell, only the Turkish manager and the Moroccan waiter are present, though I do see a light faintly glowing in the kitchen. Other than that, the place is eerily deserted. I don’t mention this when I return to the table.

  Much of our discussion is, naturally, about politics. We revisit old agreements, most passionately about the evils of religious politics in almost every form and guise. But we also revisit old disagreements, most notably the 2003 invasion of Iraq. We agree that Obama mishandled Syria dreadfully by ceding the field to Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah, and therefore also to Al Qaeda. We also agree that current circumstances are, if anything, worse in Syria rather than better.

  But we also discuss art, films, and literature. An old fan of Bob Dylan, he nonetheless scoffs at his winning the Nobel Prize for literature. “How many Dylan songs could you really not live without, under any circumstance?” he asks me pointedly. I reel off a long list, most of which he dismisses. A few, he allows, are masterpieces. But he thinks the oeuvre as a whole is overrated and that a more critical second look at Dylan’s catalog is warranted. Moreover, he reels off a list of his own: American fiction writers who much more richly deserve a Nobel literature prize than Bob Dylan.

  Soaking up the juices of our once-mountainous plates of food, we dragged our triangles of excellent naan through what little food was lef
t. We agree that it’s amusing that the Nobel committee appears surprised that Dylan would snub the ceremony and seem so utterly disinterested in the award. “Who the fuck did they think they were dealing with?” he chortles, gleefully. “Did they sleep through the sixties?” He says he hasn’t seen any recent films, and as far as I can tell, the same applies to the most recent novels. He appears to be aware of recent things, but not, perhaps, with the kind of detail that close reading would require. In that sense, it’s a little different than talking to the old Hitch, at least about new things, but it’s hard to put one’s finger on precisely how or why.

  After a few more hours of drinking, talking, and continuing to nibble, he tells me our time is up. He won’t discuss it any further, and he won’t use any other phrase. “Time to shove off, I’m afraid,” he insists. I offer to pay, or at least to split the bill, but he won’t hear of it. The Turkish maître d’, who’s been lurking helpfully by the side of the patio for most of the afternoon and providing us with typically excellent but unusually attentive service, pointedly tells me, “Your money’s no good here, sir.” It occurs to me I’ve heard that phrase somewhere before, but I can’t quite place it.

  I rise, and we embrace warmly. I notice the stain of curry on his shirt. Three lingering kisses on each cheek punctuate the afternoon, and with many affectionate remarks and mutual appreciation I turn and walk toward the Farragut West Metro station to take the train home. About ten seconds after I start walking away I realize that, for some inexplicable reason, I haven’t asked him the most important question of all. How could it possibly have slipped my mind? I spin around to trot back a couple of hundred yards and rectify the oversight. But he’s gone. The maître d’ is gone. The tables and chairs are gone. The lights are off. The door is locked. And there is no sign that the Bombay Club was ever open for lunch that Saturday.

  Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. He is a weekly columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and the National (UAE) and a regular contributor to many other US and Middle Eastern publications. Many of Ibish’s articles are archived on www.ibishblog.com. Ibish previously served as a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, executive director of the Foundation for Arab-American Leadership, and communications director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. He has a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

  — 22 —

  “She will recover a future, and I will recover a past.”

  ALLEGRA HUSTON (DAUGHTER) AND ENRICA “RICKI” SOMA

  San Lorenzo, on Beauchamp Place in London, was my mother’s favorite restaurant long before it became the favored lunch spot of the famous. I will be early, and as I wait for her, I will see a few people I recognize. With my unsteady sense of facial recognition, I won’t know at first whether these are friends, acquaintances, or just faces from movies and magazines. My mother, when she enters this bright, sunlit room, will be one of them. She will look as familiar to me as the royals and movie stars, and as much a stranger. I will recognize her only from photographs. I don’t know the sound of my mother’s voice or the music of her laugh. I don’t know my mother’s face in three dimensions. In the few memories I have of her, she is not looking at me. I see her from the side, driving a car, but it’s her hand on the gearshift that has my attention. And again her hand, as we run for a train. In these memories, I can have been no more than four years old.

  I have no sense of my mother’s face in movement. Warm people have mobile expressions, changing from moment to moment—and from the love of the friends who survived her, I know she was warm.

  But perhaps I will recognize what she smells like. Smell is, they say, the sense most closely associated with memory. As I sit at our table, nervously picking at a rosetta of bread, I will be hoping that her scent has been stored in some primitive part of my brain so that, when I stand up to embrace her, all sense of strangeness will dissolve. I’m fairly certain that she will be wearing Shalimar.

  She has no photos by which to identify me. She will laugh when I explain that she recognized me because I look like my father in drag. I know that my mother found the marks of age beautiful: I have a few of the objects she collected, things that are cracked and stained, faded and frayed. Will she find the lines and sags of my fifty-three-year-old face beautiful, or will they make her sad to see them? My father once told me that one of the rudest insults of age is seeing your children grow old.

  Her own face, at thirty-nine, will be at the height of its extraordinary beauty. As a young woman, she looked sad and out of time, her face too dramatic for her years. In time, she grew into it; it no longer overwhelms her. It has acquired fun and lightness and kindness. At last, she is grounded.

  My mother was born Enrica Soma, the daughter of Italian immigrants. Her father owned a restaurant in New York, Tony’s, where he entertained customers by standing on his head and singing operatic arias. (My mother’s scrapbook, which I have, contains an illustrated clipping from the New York Times.) When she was eighteen, she appeared on the cover of Life magazine only because she was so beautiful. The caption was “Young Ballerina”; she danced for Balanchine at the New York City Ballet and was already a soloist. I’ve often wondered why she didn’t send me to ballet class; four wasn’t too young to start. I will ask her.

  That cover resulted in a train ticket to Hollywood, where she was placed in the back row of Life’s photo of the young starlets of 1949, hands crossed over her heart like a doleful Madonna, labeled, strangely, “Rick Soma.” Center front, sitting cross-legged, is the only one of these hopefuls who made it: Marilyn Monroe. My mother never made a feature film. She married the director John Huston and gave birth to her first child at twenty, my brother Tony, and her second, my sister Anjelica, just after her twenty-second birthday. Did she regret the lost career that I believe she never really wanted? Did she wish she had stayed in New York and had kept dancing? I will ask her.

  The name by which everyone knew her was Ricki: a unicorn’s name. I have never met, or heard of, another Ricki. I thought, if I had a daughter, I would name her Enrica Luz, after her two grandmothers, but I would have called her Lulu. I would not have dared to call her Ricki, both because it would feel like sacrilege and because it would have been too heavy a burden for that notional little girl to bear.

  My mother had, I think, grown out of wanting to please her tyrannically demanding father. She had, for the first time, embarked on a love affair with a man who was not more powerful and seen in the world than she is. Her glamorous, glittering husband had sucked out her energy and her talents, and after the children have been raised and the house restored and decorated, he had left her in his wake. Why had she hung on to the marriage? Because she was afraid of her father’s explosive wrath? For the identity of “Mrs. Huston”? My mother lived at the intersection of bohemia and society; might divorce have exiled her from at least some of the places she wanted to be? I will ask her.

  Her husband had fathered a child with another woman, and she had had a child with another man: me. This other man was married. Every man worth having was married then—and my mother had been brought up to look only at men worth having. My father was not her first married lover; indeed, John Huston was married when she met him. And there were others, once the marriage died. But my father was the one whose child she carried, and I know, from reading her letters to him, that this time she was not quite able to keep her yearning, her frustration, or her fury under control. Did she ever wish I would just disappear and never be born? I will ask her. I will not mind—not even a tiny bit—if she says yes. And I will see in her eyes if she is concealing the truth.

  When they opened her safe-deposit box after her death, they found little tags on her most valuable jewelry, with my name and my sister’s name on them. Did Mum have a presentiment that she would die? But then why didn’t she make a will? I will tell her that I’ve been making wills since my early twenties, and I don’t beli
eve it’s tempting fate. I will tell her that my son, her grandson, laughs at me when I say casually that I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. She will be relieved that he is nearly grown, that the pattern is broken: for she, too, lost her mother when she was four.

  Having read my mother’s letters in order to write my memoir, Love Child, I know how she thinks, how intensely she feels, what she finds funny, what tormented her. I brought her joy, but I brought her worry, too. Would this not-technically-illegitimate child carry the stigma that she’d manage to sidestep by not getting divorced? What terror must she have felt at the moment of her death, knowing that she would be leaving this fatherless child motherless, too? Everything about me was a risk, with my own happiness the stakes. My name—which means “happy”—was an amulet. She will want to know if it worked.

  I will want to comfort her. Though for decades I felt like a problem, a misfit, adrift, I will tell her that I have weathered the turbulence and reached calmer waters. After all, I am now fifteen years older than she lived to be. Not yet forty, she was still caught in the tumult, suspended at the moment when the car crash snatched her away.

  We will both order the same thing: prosciutto and figs, veal piccata with lemon risotto and spinach. We will be amused by how quickly we devour our food. I know this because my godmother, seeing how fast I eat, told me that my mother ate quickly, too. I cannot have learned it from her; it must be genetic.

  It will be a rather uproarious lunch. Mum will find that I share her love of wordplay and silliness. We will laugh at all kinds of things: incongruities, idiosyncrasies, foibles—our own and those of people we love. I will catch her up on a number of her close friends and tell her about my own beloved friends. She will be amazed to hear how close I am to my biological father and my brother and sister on that side, and how loved I was by my legal father, her husband, who took me as his daughter when she died; and she will feel, if not exactly vindicated, at least relieved that her gamble paid off so spectacularly, impossibly well. We will talk about books and movies and music and places we love. We will linger over dessert—zabaglione—and cappuccinos. We will not want our time together to end.