One Last Lunch

by Erica Heller

  So I will stretch the rules and, once we have hugged Mara and Lorenzo goodbye—for they, too, will have been resurrected for this lunch—I will teleport Mum to Taos, New Mexico, where I live. She loved people who carved their own path, so she will be happy to see that I have found a place in the world unconnected to either of my families: a majestic landscape and a culture with a complex depth of history. The two-foot-thick adobe walls of my house will remind her of Ireland, and the hundred-mile view to the west, across ranked horizons of extinct volcanoes, will remind her of the ocean.

  I will sit down at the antique Mason & Hamlin piano that I have learned to play in the last five years, with its ivory keys and carved legs, and play her my favorite Chopin nocturne, dotted with mistakes as usual—but maybe with fewer than usual, because her presence will suffuse me and stop my mind from thinking, and I will be nothing but heart and fingers playing. I will describe to her the pleasure of learning a skill for my own enjoyment only, with no measure for judgment other than feeling myself get better. I will tell her that my sister has taken up pottery and sculpting in clay and show her the bowls Anjelica has given me. Mum will, maybe, get a glimmering of the future she will never reach, in which she might take up some similar pursuit, something in which—unlike in her ballet career—striving for perfection is an absurdity.

  She will recover a future, and I will recover a past. I’m hoping that these fleeting hours with my mother will bring back the warm, intimate memories that my consciousness suppressed as too painful to keep. I never dared attempt to unbury them, not wanting to second-guess my own forgetting. But if they don’t come, I won’t mind. Now, once she has scattered again, I will know her scent, the ripples of her voice, the expressions of her face. I will know the color of her eyes, their depth, the way the light in them plays on her thoughts.

  If you had asked me a few years ago to have lunch with my mother, I might not have said yes. I’m not sure I could have borne it: to hold her and have her ripped away from me a second time. But now I am content with the luck of my life: proud of the son I’ve raised, the books I’ve written, the house I designed, the pattern of my days. I feel lucky even that Mum died when she did—because if she had lived, I would not have the wealth of family she left me. And in her absence, I feel an identity with her that I would be unable to feel if I’d known her as a living woman, with personality and moods and grievances. I feel in a strange way as if I’m carrying on her life, which was so violently interrupted—as if I’m finishing it for her. She is my lodestone. She is also the unicorn I follow and will never catch, led always on by flashes of her beauty as she vanishes again and again into the mist.

  Allegra Huston is the author of Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found and the novel Say My Name, as well as articles for many publications in the US and UK. An editor for more than thirty years, she is also the founder of the publishing company Twice 5 Miles Guides: The Stuff Nobody Teaches You, for which she wrote How to Work with a Writer and co-wrote How to Read for an Audience. She lives in Taos, New Mexico. Please visit allegrahuston.com for details of books and workshops.

  — 23 —

  LEE CLOW (COLLABORATOR, FRIEND) AND STEVE JOBS

  I’M LEE CLOW.

  FORMER CREATIVE DIRECTOR OF CHIATDAY, AND NOW FOUNDER AND CHAIRMAN OF THE MEDIA ARTS LAB (THE ADVERTISING AGENCY CREATED FOR STEVE JOB’S APPLE COMPUTER).

  I KNEW STEVE SINCE 1980; WHEN WE FIRST MET HE WAS TWENTY-FIVE.

  I WORKED FOR STEVE FROM THE EARLY DAYS, WHEN WE INTRODUCED THE COMPUTER CALLED MACINTOSH, TO STEVE’S RETURN TO APPLE IN 1997, WHEN HE LITERALLY SAVED THE COMPANY.

  AND WE WENT ON TO INTRODUCE TECHNOLOGY THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING.

  INCLUDING LUNCH.

  “LUNCH WITH STEVE JOBS”

  WE’D SIT AT MY FAVORITE TABLE IN THE BACK OF CHAYA VENICE. WE’D HAVE SUSHI AND A BOTTLE OF SANTA MARGHERITA PINOT GRIGIO.

  IT SURE WOULD BE GREAT TO SEE HIM AGAIN.

  Lee Clow is Chairman, TBWAMedia Arts Lab and has been making “advertising” for more than fifty years. He started at ChiatDay when there were ten people and two accounts and has been there ever since. He prefers to think of what we do as Media Art. No better example of Lee’s impact in the industry than his thirty-year-plus partnership with Steve Jobs. They created the now famous work for the rebirth of Apple in 1997. It recognized those who “think different.” And, during the past twenty years, Apple has changed everything. Since he began with ChiatDay and its humble beginnings in a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, the agency has grown to be one of the ten largest global networks and is without dispute one of the most innovative and awarded agency networks in the world. Lee Clow is a member of the One Club Hall of Fame, the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, and the Museum of Modern Art’s Advertising Hall of Fame, and he has received the Clio’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2013 Lee was made the third Lion of St. Mark at Cannes.

  — 24 —

  “You have malaria,” I tell him in a low, comforting voice. “You have a high fever. Look at my face. Don’t you recognize a Jones when you see one?”

  KAYLIE JONES (DAUGHTER) AND JAMES JONES

  I push aside the flap of the hospital tent, carrying a backpack over my shoulder, and I am hit with the smell of old blood and perspiration. The not-so-badly wounded soldiers are restless in sleep, those who can sleep. Some stare out vacantly, groaning from time to time. I walk slowly down the aisle between the cots. They’re still wearing their filthy, stinking combat fatigues and boots, as if they’re expecting to have to run for cover at any moment. They don’t see me because I don’t belong in their fever dreams, only in my father’s.

  I find him in the before-last cot on the left, lying back with his arms folded behind his head, one knee bent toward the ceiling. I recognize the pose before the young face that looks ancient and drawn under the head bandage. His slim, almost too-slight body is alien to me. He was a featherweight boxer in his regiment before the war, not broad-shouldered and muscular, as I remember him from later in life.

  I crouch beside him, look into his feverish, startled eyes, and murmur, “I am your Athena, born whole from your mind. Don’t be afraid.”

  “What the fuck—!” he cries, ready to defend himself, his hands flying out in fists from behind his head. He smells of sweat and old cigarettes, but the smell is familiar. As a little girl I would go to my parents’ bedroom late at night, frightened by a nightmare, and hear my father mumbling urgently in his sleep, warning someone to watch out! He’d awaken with a start as soon as I stepped into the room, a sixth sense born of the war. I’d crawl up and snuggle in between my parents, and he smelled like this.

  Now, I gently grasp his right hand, the closest. My touch seems to calm him, and he doesn’t pull away. “You have malaria,” I tell him in a low, comforting voice. “You have a high fever. Look at my face. Don’t you recognize a Jones when you see one?”

  “How did you—?” He carefully, gently, brings his left hand to his head and feels the bandage, wincing, blinking rapidly as if to clear his mind.

  “You’re having a fever dream. I’m old now. I’m fifty-eight. In my timeline, you’ve been dead for many years. Just try to think of it as one of those sci-fi stories you like to read. We call it SF now. Or speculative fiction.”

  “Spec . . . what in the fuck—” He looks closely at my face, inspecting every detail, and the fiery glow of fear in his eyes begins to dim. “Your eyes are just like my sister Mary Ann’s.”

  “So are yours. I have your eyes and your chin. But I look a lot like my mother, too. When you meet her, you’ll know right away.”

  Somewhere behind me a soldier shouts in his sleep, “Move! Move, goddamn it, you son of a bitch!”

  “What . . . what’s your name?” he asks with suspicion.

  “Kaylie Ann Jones.”

  “I never heard that name before. How do you spell it?”

  “It is my godmother’s Hebrew name. You looked it up in a phonetic dictionary to find the corre
ct spelling. K-A-Y-L-I-E.”

  His eyes go out of focus as he considers this, thinking hard. When he was thinking hard when I was a girl, his left eye would cross slightly, just like this.

  “It smells awful in here. Let’s go outside. I brought you a picnic lunch.” I lift the backpack from the floor, so he can see it.

  “Lunch? It’s the middle of the goddamn night.”

  “It’s lunchtime where I am.”

  He says uncertainly, “But . . . are you real?”

  “I exist, just, not yet.”

  He slowly and with great effort pulls his legs over the side of the cot and sits up, hunching, getting his bearings. He lets go of my hand and reaches down to rub his ankle.

  He sits there, thinking.

  Finally, he sighs and pulls himself up to standing with the help of my arm, his knees still wobbly. He’s limping quite severely, I notice, as we head toward the tent’s back flap.

  “Your twisted ankle from high school football is all messed up. You have torn ligaments, and your ankle is swollen to twice its size and you wrapped it. You don’t want to tell them because it seems like so little, compared to the others.” I nod back over my shoulder toward the cots filled with the not-so-badly wounded soldiers. The most seriously wounded have already been evacuated by air or hospital ship. The ones who are still here have been deemed fit to return to combat.

  Outside there is a blackout, no lights, no fires, but the moon is in its last quarter and a tropic sky full of stars casts a silver glow over the shadowy landscape. The air is so thick and warm it feels like we’re slogging through broth. The clearing, which is in the rear and relatively safe now, was once covered in tall grass and is surrounded by the black presence of mountains. Looming in the darkness are the even darker shapes of machines of war—Jeeps, machine guns, stacks of mortars—and soldiers moving about, holding their rifles at the ready, but they don’t see us, for we are alone in this fever dream.

  By the wheel of a parked Jeep I pull a small, tightly woven Navajo blanket out of the backpack and unfold it on the flattened grass. A little beauty is what he needs in this hellhole of churned-up earth and chewed-up trees and men. He sits down on the blanket and rests his back against the Jeep’s wheel, and I drop cross-legged, facing him.

  Out of my backpack comes the little Limoges lithophane candleholder on its saucer, an anniversary gift from my late husband. I light the votive candle, and three-dimensional scenes of Paris magically appear as a dark bas-relief on the gold-lit porcelain dome—the Pont Alexandre III, the Opéra, the Seine with a barge, and Notre-Dame, almost the view from our house on Île Saint-Louis. He stares at the images, mystified.

  “I never seen anything like that in my whole fuckin’ life.”

  I hold it up and turn the globe slowly on its saucer. “This is where we’re going to live, right here, in Paris, in a house on the quai overlooking the Seine.” I give him the little golden light to hold, but his hand is shaking so badly the globe jiggles in its saucer and makes a clinking sound. He sets it down between us.

  Mosquitoes loud and mean as fighter jets move in squadrons all around us. But they don’t bother us. At the edge of the field lies the jungle, huge, thick, impenetrable. He stares out toward the thick canopy of alien trees, his face tight with pain. I know he’s thinking about the Japanese soldier he killed in hand-to-hand combat just two days ago, in that very jungle. They were afraid to fire their weapons, afraid to alert other enemies, both.

  “That Japanese soldier came at you with his bayonet while you were taking a shit. The Asian woman with the baby in the photo, she’s not his wife. She’s a prostitute from the Philippines. I had the writing translated by a professional. You know he would’ve killed you if you hadn’t killed him—”

  “He was starving to death! I could see his skeleton through his skin!” He looks sick, his face gray in the dim light. “He was just some kid, poor as shit, just like me.” And suddenly my dad is blind with rage, his eyes filled with tears that refuse to fall.

  “Look here, I brought you some of the delicacies you’ve read about in Hemingway.” I pull out a baguette, still warm from the oven, and place it on the blanket, along with a dozen oysters from New Orleans laid out in a circle on a tray of ice, with a little silver container of vinegar and shallot mignonette in the middle; a whole square of Pont l’Évêque cheese and a little round Camembert from Normandy; a sauçisson sec from the Ardèche; a tin of Beluga caviar from the Caspian Sea; and a plate of American bacon, not too cooked, not too greasy, which is one of his favorite things in the world, and which, from the summer I turned ten until he died, three months before my seventeenth birthday, he could not eat because salt was bad for his congestive heart failure. And the pièce de résistance: a bottle of Château Margaux 1921—the year of his birth—and one stemmed crystal wineglass. I fish in a side pocket for my stout Swiss Army knife and open the corkscrew and uncork the wine. Then, with the short, razor-sharp blade I cut the bread into slices, and the sauçisson, and the cheese.

  I pour the wine. He drinks the first glassful down greedily and I refill his glass to the brim.

  “That’s damn good. What about you?” he says. “Ain’t you drinkin’?” His Midwest accent, which he was so proud of, which he never lost in all his years of fancy living among the literati, is stronger suddenly, and so familiar I feel a knot forming in my throat. I have forty-two years’ worth of things to tell him. But if I’m going to follow the Prime Directive like in Star Trek, his favorite show, there is only so much he needs to know.

  “I quit drinking. Twenty-six years ago. Booze almost killed me. Just like it’s eventually going to kill you. I’m older now than you’ll ever be.”

  He nods pensively. “Life ain’t much worth living if you cain’t drink.” He says this with a certain bravado, a cockiness he was apparently famous for in his youth. It dispersed in middle age. The man I knew was kind, wise, patient, but still prone to losing his temper when irritated. When he first joined the army, they gave him an IQ test and his score was off the charts, so they suggested he apply to Officer Candidate School. He did not want to be an officer, and anyway, the upper echelon soon realized that he was not good officer material, as he questioned everything he was ordered to do and talked back to his superiors. By twenty-one, he has already somewhat learned to curtail this impulse, and he can fit in when he wants to, which isn’t often. People still think he’s cocky, but that’s because half the time they can’t understand what he’s saying, or he’s so mad at them for not understanding what he’s saying that he tells them off. I know this both from his books and from listening to him argue with people when I was a kid.

  “Eat the oysters first, before the ice melts. You’re going to get hepatitis from an oyster in your forties and you’ll never eat oysters again.”

  “I’m not gonna make it to forty,” he says calmly. “I’m not gonna make it to twenty-two. Tomorrow I’m going back up to the line.”

  “Tomorrow you have to show the surgeon your ankle.”

  “I’m not leavin’ my old outfit,” he says, his voice suddenly hard. “Not for a fuckin’ twisted ankle.” He’s pretty much demolishing the oysters, pouring the mignonette sauce onto them from the little container and slurping them down, tipping the shells toward his lips with dirty fingers. He doesn’t like dirt or sand, never did.

  I forgot the Ready-Wipes! Out they come from the backpack.

  “Here, wash your hands and face. These are great!” I hand him the plastic packet of towelettes, opening them first because he won’t have a clue. He inspects the packet, curious. He knows Kleenex, so he gets the general idea. He starts pulling out the towelettes, one after another, and rubs them against his face and hands. He has a week’s worth of reddish-gold beard, which he’s proud of. The beards mean combat experience.

  “This is like Ivan’s delirium in The Brother’s Karamazov.” He giggles, almost delightedly. The wine is helping. “When the Devil comes to visit him and tries to convince Ivan t
hat he’s real.” He says Eye-vin.

  “That’s one of my favorite scenes in all of literature,” I tell him. “It’s actually very funny, if you read a good translation. The Devil as a good-for-nothing hanger-on in threadbare fancy clothes. The genius is that he is so fully realized, clothes and all.”

  I’m trying to impress him, yes. I am. Reading was my father’s escape in the prewar army at Schofield Barracks, but even as a small child, books were his only respite from his miserable life at home, a Bible-thumping mother and an alcoholic father who wasn’t violent, only depressed and filled with guilt and remorse. She was the violent one. At four my father rode his tricycle across the parking lot to the public library in his hometown of Robinson, Illinois, and told the librarian he wanted to read books. By the time he was eight he’d read every book in the children’s section. The librarian started to give him adult books, carefully culling them to avoid filling his young mind with images of sex and violence.

  “Remember Vera Newlin from the library?” I ask him, smiling. “I met her. I went to Robinson. She was already very old.”

  He smiles with deep warmth at the memory of the woman who guided his young imagination. “She was tough as a goddamn Sherman tank, that Vera Newlin.”

  I scoop a little heap of caviar onto the knife blade and pile it on top of a thin slice of baguette. “Here, try this. Caviar from Russia.”

  “From Russia, huh?” He pops the whole thing in his mouth and barely chews before swallowing. I start to laugh.

  “Caviar should be eaten more slowly,” I inform him, as if I’m the parent and he’s the child. “It costs a fucking fortune.”