One Last Lunch

by Erica Heller

  He holds out his empty wineglass. I refill it again. His hand is still shaking, but it’s getting steadier.

  “Here, try this Camembert. It goes great with the wine.”

  I spread some caviar on a sliver of bread for myself, relishing the taste, the great pops of flavor as the little balls explode in my mouth.

  He picks up the bottle and inspects the label in the dim golden light of the globe. Two soldiers guarding the perimeter walk by, cupping their smokes in closed fists and talking in low voices. Jap cocksuckers cut off their dicks and balls. . . .

  He listens, alert, suddenly pale and frightened.

  “Château Margaux 1921,” I say, drawing him back. “Think of it as a late twenty-first birthday present.”

  He chews the bread and Camembert thoughtfully. Then he reaches for the plate of bacon. “You’re not really here, are you?” he says, his mouth full. “But this sure as shit tastes real. Gimme more of that there cheese. And more wine. Why din’t you bring real booze? Like whiskey?”

  Out of my magical backpack I whip out a bottle of White Label, which is what the Colonel drinks in The Thin Red Line. My dad downs the wine, then takes the whiskey bottle, nods approvingly at the label, turns the twist top with a satisfying crack, and upturns the bottle into his mouth, guzzling in a very undignified manner.

  I cut a square of Pont l’Évêque and spread it on some bread and lift it to my mouth. This is my favorite stinky cheese in the world, but I have a hard time swallowing, as if something is stuck in my throat. He wipes his lips delicately with a towelette, scratches at his beard, and looks at me askance, with a wince. “You know what I was thinking about when you showed up? I was thinking about islands. And hills. Endless hills and islands and jungles, all the way to Japan. What’s the chances of any of us making it till the end? It’s all up to fuckin’ chance. A lottery. No reason why. My mother used to beat me over the head with her Bible for playing with myself. I don’t believe in God no more. Those that do, good for them. If it helps them, good. But in my opinion, there’s no reason why the guy next to me got it full in the face and I just got a scratch.”

  “The reason why is that you’re the one who’s going to write about it.”

  “No one would believe it,” he says with a grim, sullen laugh, shaking his head. “No one will want to know what it’s really like.” This is the nihilist in him, the one who really doesn’t care if he lives or dies. This is why he drinks. Well, this, and because his dad the dentist became the town drunk and shot himself in the mouth and my father feels guilty about that, too. The other side of him is pure romantic. He believes in the heroic. And he’ll make heroes out of twisted, flawed, ordinary, uncivilized men. These two sides of him will fight each other for the rest of his life.

  “They called World War I the war to end all wars. Horseshit. The wars’ll keep on comin’. The only thing that matters to me is the old outfit. I got to get back.”

  “It’s not even going to be your old outfit anymore. It’s already changing. Dead, wounded, transferred out. Replaced, by green recruits.”

  “Some of them are still up there,” he says, his chin jutting out in defiance. “There’s a rumor we’re heading to New Georgia next.” Then he adds, “It’s easier being dead.”

  “That thought will always tug at you, but there will be so much goodness, too. So much light. All those places you’ve dreamed of seeing, you will see them. You’re going to be a writer.”

  “It won’t matter one goddamn bit,” he growls.

  “You’re never going to think your writing matters one goddamn bit. You’re never going to believe it matters, even while you’re writing it all down. You won’t be doing it for posterity.”

  “Yeah. Fuck posterity,” he says morosely, swigging from the bottle.

  “You’re feeling sorry for yourself. Cut it out.”

  His head jerks back as if I’ve slapped him. This, he also used to say to me. I’m just giving him a taste of his own medicine.

  “Got any smokes?” he asks.

  “Lucky Strikes or Camels?”

  “Camels.”

  I whip an unopened pack of Camels and a disposable lighter out of the backpack and hand them to him. He cups the flame and cigarette in his fists and lights up quickly. Puts the pack and the lighter in his front pocket and pats them, somehow reassured.

  “You’re still carrying that Japanese soldier’s wallet in your pocket, too, aren’t you? You’re going to keep it for the rest of your life. You’re going to pull it out and weep over it from time to time, looking at the pictures. You showed them to me once.”

  “I just cain’t bring myself to throw it out,” he says, as if this is a sign of weakness.

  “You know how you believe that one day we’re going to find other planets circling suns, other planets that could sustain life?”

  “Everybody laughs at me for sayin’ that.”

  “Well, astronomers are going to find the first exoplanets in 1992. Two of them, actually. They circle a pulsar star called PSR 1257+12.”

  “PSR 1257+12? Are you shittin’ me?”

  “And since then they’ve found over two thousand more. I know you don’t believe in God. Certainly not the God your mother believed in. But doesn’t this give you hope for mankind? That we don’t know or understand the Order of Things but that it has to be way bigger than just us?”

  “I’ll be damned,” he muses. “Is that really true?”

  “It’s really true. And the United States will be the first to land men to the moon. You woke us up in the middle of night to watch the lunar landing, and you cried.”

  He’s sipping slowly now from the neck of the whiskey bottle, almost serene, slumping back against the Jeep’s tire and running his left hand lazily over the zigzag pattern in the Navajo rug.

  “I know this is all in my head and I’m making this shit up but I’ll be goddamned if this rug doesn’t feel real. I’d love to have a rug like this.”

  “And you will. You had several in your office upstairs, in Paris. You have to survive.”

  I pull the skin off a slice of sauçisson sec and lay it on a piece of baguette with some Pont l’Évêque on top and hand it to him. The silvery light from the sky casts shadows on his face, accentuating the deep hollows of his cheeks and eyes. He looks like some twisted version of his older self. He looks like he did on the day he died. Until I saw his heart monitor flatline I had never believed for a moment that he would die. There was so much I’d never asked him, so much I didn’t know, and had not cared to know, at sixteen.

  Afterward, I started reading his novels. I started at the beginning and read through them all, trying to understand why he died and what I was supposed to do now.

  “Even if they send me back,” he concedes, “even if they send me back Stateside for surgery, they’re just gonna reassign me to another outfit, probably send me to Europe for the fuckin’ invasion.”

  “After you go AWOL Stateside for the third or fourth time, they’re going to send you to an army psychiatrist. When the doctor asks you what’s bothering you, you’re going to laugh bitterly in his face. ‘I’m done killing for you assholes.’ That’s what you’re going to say. The psychiatrist’s report says that you were mentally unstable.”

  This makes him laugh uproariously, the deep, guttural howl that I remember.

  “You’ll get an honorable discharge. And when your first book comes out, it’s going to change the way people see the army. You’re going to be famous.”

  “I don’t give a shit about being famous.” He lights another cigarette. “So tell me what I’m gonna write about.”

  “That’s not my job. That’s your job. But I can tell you this: your books are the ones the soldiers will read. When they get home all fucked up at the end of this, when it’s all over and they go home and try to be normal and go back to work and get married and have kids, and when they lie there shaking and screaming in their sleep and contemplating killing themselves because they can’t stand t
he thought that they survived and left their friends behind, one day their kids will ask them what it was like, they’re going to hand them your books, and they’re going to say, This is what it was like. There’s no one else. You’re the one. You have to live. The only way the old outfit is going to survive is through your books. You’ll keep them alive forever.”

  The last thing in my backpack is a piece of paper, which I unfold and tilt toward the golden light of my little Paris lithophane from Limoges. I read a section aloud to him.

  “If the home we never write to, and the oaths we never keep,

  And all we know most distant and most dear,

  Across the snoring barrack-room return to break our sleep,

  Can you blame us if we soak ourselves in beer?

  When the drunken comrade mutters and the great guard-lantern gutters

  And the horror of our fall is written plain,

  Every secret, self-revealing on the aching white-washed ceiling,

  Do you wonder that we drug ourselves from pain?

  We’re poor little lambs who’ve lost our way,

  Baa! Baa! Baa!

  We’re little black sheep who’ve gone astray,

  Baa—aa—aa!

  Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,

  Damned from here to Eternity,

  God ha’ mercy on such as we,

  Baa! Yah! Bah!”

  “Kipling,” he says gruffly. “What a bunch of phony horseshit. He was never in no army.”

  “My point exactly.”

  “Am I going to remember this?”

  “No. This is a fever dream. But you damn well better remember that you have to get the fuck out.”

  “You swear like a buckass private, you know that?” he says with a twisted grin.

  “That’s because I’m a buckass private’s daughter. Everything you taught me, every lesson that hurt like hell—like when you read me Stuart Little and cried at the end. I begged you to tell me Stuart finds the sparrow he’s in love with, and you said, ‘Probably not.’ Why the hell did you have to say that? My whole sense of the world came from you, and sometimes I wish I didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t know what?”

  The truth, of course. The shitty, ugly truth. “That Stuart Little may not find the sparrow, but he goes to look for her anyway.”

  This is the kind of heroism he believes in.

  We sit for a while in a heavy but companionable silence. He has drunk half the bottle of whiskey, and his eyes are starting to close.

  “On your feet, soldier,” I say with a shaky smile. He would say this to me when I fell down roller-skating and skinned my knee.

  I offer my hand to help him to his feet. He takes it, and rises, swaying slightly.

  “Well,” he says when we reach the hospital tent, “I’ll be seeing you, I guess.”

  I nod, swallowing back tears. I remember so clearly the day I found him sitting at our dining room table in Paris with the Japanese soldier’s wallet in his hands. I was quite young, because when he was sitting our heads were about level. Tears streamed down his face, and I had no words to help him. I laid my small hand on his wide shoulder and just stood beside him in silence until he turned his eyes to me. In that moment, our gazes locked, and in his eyes I saw his helpless sorrow, and I knew I would have given all I had in the world to comfort him.

  Kaylie Jones is the author of five novels, including A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, adapted as a Merchant-Ivory film. Her memoir, Lies My Mother Never Told Me, was published by William Morrow. Kaylie chairs the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, a ten-thousand-dollar annual writing award, and teaches in two university MFA programs.

  — 25 —

  “Baby, baby.” He wipes my tears with the end of a balled-up tissue, like he did when I was little. “Precious bane. Don’t cry. Your waffle will get salty.”

  RF JURJEVICS (NON-BINARY CHILD) AND JURIS JURJEVICS

  We meet at the Highway Diner, my father and I.

  The Highway Diner has not been the Highway Diner as we knew and loved it for over a decade now, but when I drive up, there it is. And there he is, standing on the minuscule front porch, right by the Hartford Courant box.

  It’s not quite been two weeks. My throat is closing. My heart is breaking. I’m running before I realize it. He opens his arms.

  I can’t speak, just embrace. He’s all there, right there, smelling like the cedar blocks my stepmother tucked into his closet. Smelling like him.

  “It’s you!” he says, as though he’s surprised.

  “Shut up and hug me.” I’m crying into his shoulder. There’s no possible way I can let go.

  “I’m going to hug you for the next century,” I tell him.

  “I guess I’ll have to wear you into the restaurant, then.”

  This gets me to laugh. I let him go, slowly. “After you.”

  He walks over the threshold with an ease I haven’t seen in I don’t know how long. His legs move as fluidly as they did when I was a small child and we went walking, me high on his shoulders. He’s buoyant, almost.

  Inside, the Highway Diner is intact, as we left it years ago, before it closed. The old counter is back with its line of wobbly red stools; the Formica tables are back, too, also red, their spider-vein cracks patched over with packing tape.

  “Same old place,” my father says.

  I cannot say anything.

  We sit at our favorite booth, the one directly under the window facing Route 7. I’m in shock at all of it—the stack of jam packets, the sticky menus, things I haven’t seen in years. Even the old cigarette vending machine is there, right between the doors to the bathrooms.

  Dad notices it, too.

  “Your first felony,” he says.

  “Wait, what?”

  “Your first felony.” He points to the machine. “I was settling up the tab and I turn back around and you’ve got a pack of Parliaments in your little hands.”

  “I did not!”

  “You did! At three years old, too. I never found out how you did it. You wouldn’t tell me!”

  I cross my arms. “You’re lying.”

  “Okay, okay.” He looks chagrined, but not really. “It was such a good story. I couldn’t resist.”

  A server slides by, her long braid flicking over her shoulder. Before I can speak, my father catches her attention, says, “Two Belgian waffles, please, deluxe—one for me and one for my legal guardian over here.”

  “Still getting mileage out of that one, huh?” I tell him.

  “Yup,” he says, then sighs. “I haven’t had a waffle in about . . . oh, twenty years or so.” His expression is dreamy.

  The server is back astoundingly fast. “Two deluxe,” she says, lifting the plates from her tray. She places one plate in front of Dad, one in front of me. Belgian waffles, the Highway Diner staple. Deluxe. Slathered in whipped cream, topped with strawberries. One little metal creamer of maple syrup on each plate.

  It’s like a magic trick, all of it—his magic trick. I’m staring and staring at him. He can’t be gone; he’s right here. He’s always been right here.

  “Dad.” My voice breaks and I’m crying; maybe I never stopped, I don’t know. My brain is a few steps behind me, hovering there. “Dad.” I want to put my head on the table and wail.

  “Baby, baby.” He wipes my tears with the end of a balled-up tissue, like he did when I was little. “Precious bane. Don’t cry. Your waffle will get salty.” Leaning back, he makes a show of cutting into his. Melted whipped cream sinks into its little squares, mixing with the syrup.

  “A diabetic’s dream,” I say to him, sniffling.

  He stuffs a napkin into the front of his shirt. It’s a favorite, a black tee with INNOCENT BYSTANDER in bold, capital letters—just his humor. I can’t believe he’s here. I can’t believe he’s not here. It’s a strange, if not entirely unfamiliar, conundrum.

  My father takes a bite of waffle big enough for a moose. “I don’t have to worry about that heal
th stuff anymore,” he says, his mouth full. “So there.”

  I watch him enjoying his waffle, without a hint of guilt or worry on his face.

  “Do I have maple syrup in my beard?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  My father makes a show of brushing his entire face with his napkin-bib, then lets it fall back into position to reveal a Cheshire Cat smile. Sight gags have always been his best gags, his method for easing me into relaxation—this time and all the thousands and thousands of times before it. He has always been so much better at being calm than I am, miraculously able to guide me through it.

  As if he can read my thoughts—and hell, perhaps he can now—my father reaches across the table to uncurl my fingers from around my thumb; I’ve gripped them up tight without meaning to, my nervous tell.

  “Dad?”

  “Child?” He gives me a goofy smile, showing off his perfect top teeth, ones he bought himself years ago. Those teeth and my college tuition, on a book contract. A gift I can never repay.

  “Did . . . Did it hurt?”

  He’s chewing another bite of waffle now. “Did what hurt?”

  “When it happened.”

  “Oh—God, no.” He makes a face, waving away the thought. “Not at all.”

  “You’re not lying, right?”

  “I’m not. It really didn’t.”

  “Good.”

  Out the window, a semi flies by, tires ringing on the wet road.

  “I always wondered what it was like to drive one of those,” Dad says.

  “Really? Me, too.”

  He looks at me, beaming that grin, the one that’s half knowing, half baffled. “I guess it’s in your genes,” he says.

  My genes. He is my genes. He’s in my eyes, my hair, the set of my stance, the broadness of my shoulders. I have his wonky eyesight and his detached earlobes, his knack for rhythm, his crummy math skills. He taught me to use a camera. He taught me to flip the bird. He taught me to put on my socks, for god’s sake.

  “What am I going to do?” I ask him, in a small voice. “What am I going to do without you?”