One Last Lunch

by Erica Heller

  I swallow hard. “My letters,” I tell him. “I found them, too.”

  In high school, when I had my first boyfriend, my first kiss at seventeen with a bad boy so glorious I could have inhaled him like a drug, my father came out in boxer shorts and bare chest and big belly, and while my boyfriend blinked at him in astonishment, my father yelled at me. “Where have you been?” he shouted. I gently shoved my boyfriend out the door, his kiss still on my mouth, and told him I’d see him the next day and the next day and forever after. “You will never see that boy again!” my father screamed. He threatened to drive me to school and pick me up to make sure he knew where I was, to put a monitor around my ankle, and then my mother came in and looked exhausted by all of it. “Henry,” she said. “Henry.” She took his arm and led him back to bed.

  Every morning, I called the summer camp where I worked and coughed into the phone and told them I had bronchitis. “Gee, it’s going on so long,” the director said. “Get better soon because the kids are asking for you.” I didn’t care about the money. Then I took all the side streets and walked forty-five minutes to my boyfriend’s house and up to his small blue bedroom, his rumpled bed, his lean lick of a body, the way he loved, loved, loved me. Once, there was a sleepover at the camp and I lied and we slept out on an abandoned ski slope all night long. I came home with forty-five mosquito bites on my feet, but to me, they were badges of honor.

  But back then, I worried that my parents knew. I felt my father watching me, threatening. My mother would snap at me, too, but only because she didn’t want to deal with my father. I couldn’t deal with the stress, with what might happen if my father found out I was sleeping with my boyfriend. “Let’s run away to California,” I begged my boyfriend. He smoothed my hair. “We can’t,” he said.

  I began crying all the time. In my room, at school, with my boyfriend, who now couldn’t deal with the consuming suck of my sorrow, plus he was a hormone-fueled seventeen-year-old, amazed by all the girls who wanted him, who brought him books of poems, who put their hands on his hips. Girls who didn’t have terrifying fathers. Of course, he broke it off with me.

  I had a nervous breakdown, or at least I thought I did. I began crying more, so much, I even worried myself. “Now, you just stop this,” my mother said, and I cried harder.

  “I think I need to see a doctor,” I told my parents. “You talk to us,” my father told me. “No daughter of mine is seeing a shrink.” My mom took me to a social worker, because it sounded less ominous, but my father refused to go with us, and the social worker told her, “I want to see the whole family here.” I wanted to throw my arms about him. I wanted him to be my father. He was hope.

  But when we left the room, my mother said. “Your father will never agree to this. Let’s just forget coming here again. It’s no use.”

  Now, I pick at my fake ricotta cream. It’s silky on my tongue. “Why did you do that with my first boyfriend?” I ask him.

  “I didn’t like that boy. He wasn’t Jewish.”

  “But I loved him. I loved him. And I was only seventeen. I wasn’t going to marry him.”

  “I’m your father, and you listen to me.”

  “No,” I say. “I don’t listen. I didn’t listen.” I tell him that I had kept seeing my boyfriend, even after we had broken it off, off and on, for three years afterward, sneaking away. I told him I saw him in college, that we are still friends. That I slept with him over and over for years until I got out of college. I wait for his shock. He shrugs.

  “I’m dead. What do I care?” he says.

  “I’m your daughter. That’s why you care.”

  I ask him what it’s like being dead, and he shrugs. “I have no real use for it,” he says. “It’s one big stinkeroo. Just like life was.”

  “I don’t think that,” I tell him. I tell him how I married young and then divorced. I told him how I had become engaged and my fiancé had died two weeks before our wedding. I told him about Jeff, my husband, how before we had kids, we sat down and decided to do everything the opposite of how I had been raised.

  My father pushes the steak away. “Who the hell do you think you are?” he asks.

  “Why weren’t you a good father?”

  “Don’t give me any of that,” he says. “Ever think it was you?” I feel as if he slapped me.

  I remember a summer, when I was sixteen and I wanted to go home from the Cape because I hated the beach, the sting of the salty air, the way the sand breaded me like a cutlet. I hated being away from my boyfriend, and my father told me I had to stay with him and my mom at the ocean. I had lashed out. “Why?” I asked. And when he said, “Because I’m your father,” I said, “Oh, really? Who is my best friend? What is my favorite class in school? What books do I read? Some father.” And then I took my things and slapped out of the cottage. And as I left, my mother cried, “Don’t leave me alone with him.” I saw her face, pleading, like I was the only hope she had left.

  My father now puts down his fork. “Your mother didn’t love me. I knew that,” he says. “But if I didn’t have you, then I had nothing. You had to stay. For me and to prove something to your mom.”

  I had run from the cabin and walked along the beach. I had no idea which direction the train station was, and I had no money, but I had my thumb, and people hitched back then. I was young and pretty, and I was wearing a tank top and shorts to show off my long browned legs. I could get a ride. I could fend for myself.

  He came for me in the car, crying. I had never seen my father cry. “Get in,” he begged, his voice knotted with grief, and I did. He started talking almost immediately, more than he ever had told me. He said he hated his own father, who wouldn’t pay for him to go to law school or med school even though he had the money, how he was never loved, not even by his mother or his brothers. He was sobbing so hard I put an arm around him, even though I didn’t want to. He was gulping tears, and I said I would go back to the cottage with him, and when we did, the first thing I saw was my mother’s face. Her disappointment that I was back. “If you weren’t here, I would have divorced him,” she said. I heard the longing in her voice, the surprise that she couldn’t get what she had wanted.

  “Did you ever love me?” I ask my father now. I don’t remember being taken anywhere by him. I don’t remember hearing I love you, I’m proud of you. He never told me I was pretty or smart or fun to be around. Instead he called me “an animal” when I burped or farted. He looked at me with disgust.

  “Of course I loved you,” my father says. “What did you think?” I think how girls who grow up without fathers don’t know how to have relationships with men. I think of my friend Judy, who was a daddy’s girl, and how her father always hugged me when he saw me. He always asked about my classes, my family. Once, he bought Judy a baby blue cashmere sweater, and he must have seen the yearning in my face, because he bought one for me, too. My parents made me return it. “We’re not taking charity,” my mother said. Judy’s father never returned the sweater, and every time I was over at their house, I wore it, even in the summer.

  I used to dream that Judy’s father would adopt me and my parents would let him. “Bye,” they’d say with a wave. “Have a fun life.”

  This is what I remember. One time he took me on a roller coaster. I screamed the whole time.

  When I was a little girl, I had bad dreams. I would sleep beside my mom, comforted, and one day she came to me and said, “Your father is hurt that you sleep beside me, but not beside him.” I was six years old and terrified. I had to sleep in my father’s bed, separated from my mom’s by an end table. I was careful not to touch him, not to let him touch me. In the morning, he got out of bed naked, and I stared at his penis. He saw me and snapped, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for looking?” In kindergarten, I drew paper dolls of my family, everyone naked, my father with a long sock-shape between his legs that touched his knees. The teacher called my mother. “She has a big imagination,” my mother said.

  I never would sl
eep with him again.

  “The letters,” I say again. My father beckons the waiter for more water. Months before he died I felt confused. My father never called me at college. Never wrote me. So I wrote him. Two long letters that I watercolored designs on the edges. I don’t know why, but I wrote that I loved him. I told him about my life, my boyfriends, my dreams, as if it might change things. It was a totally pretend letter, but I thought it might make him really see me.

  But when he died, I found the letters in his dresser, still sealed. He had never even bothered to open either one of them. “Why not?” I ask, and now I’m practically crying. “Why did you keep them if you weren’t going to read them? Why the fuck not?”

  “Watch your filthy mouth,” he says.

  We’re finishing our meal, or rather he is. I haven’t been able to eat. “Do you miss me?” I ask, and I know my voice is a plea.

  He calls for the waiter, the check.

  I reach for the bill, and my father takes it from me. “I earn good money,” I tell him. “I’m a novelist.”

  “And I’m your father and I’m paying.”

  He tips the waitress the exact right amount because he was an accountant, and then he stands up. “It was nice seeing you,” he says, and I want to hurl myself on him, sobbing, Nice? Nice? What does “nice” mean? Don’t they teach you things in the afterlife? Why didn’t you love me, why wasn’t I enough for you? Why did you have to repeat the pattern your dad did with you? I want to call him a bastard, to tell him good, I’m glad you’re leaving. Go, go. I want to say that maybe we have horrible people in our lives to show us who we never want to be. I want him to say he loves me now, that he’s sorry for how he was, that he regrets everything, especially keeping me silenced so I couldn’t ever tell him how I was hurting.

  Instead, he waves and steps out into the blinding light. “See you,” he says, and I don’t know what that means. I wait until I cannot see him anymore, until it seems like just another day, another restaurant. I remind myself that my husband, Jeff, and I had never ever thought to hit our son Max, had never raised our voices or even snapped at him. We had never chased our son around with a belt. We had never denigrated him or told him to shut up or mocked what he said or kept him from friends. I remind myself that Jeff is affectionate and silly and kind and devoted. My father never changed.

  But I did.

  I motion the waitress and order chocolate cake. I eat it slowly, savoring the sweet, and then I find my cell and text both Max and Jeff. I love you, I say. I just wanted you to know.

  Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You, Is This Tomorrow, Cruel Beautiful World, and eight other novels. A book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and People, she teaches writing online at Stanford and the Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension, as well as working with private clients. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York magazine, Real Simple, and more, and she was the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, as well as being a finalist in the Sundance Screenwriters Lab and the Nickelodeon Fellowships. Reach her at www.carolineleavitt.com.

  — 30 —

  “You look great for a dead guy!”

  ELIZABETH MAILER (DAUGHTER) AND NORMAN MAILER

  On November 10, 2018, eleven years after my father’s death, Dad and I meet at Elephant & Castle, on Eleventh Street and Greenwich Avenue, in the West Village. It’s one of my favorite haunts.

  As I enter the restaurant, I am hugged by its nurturing ambiance: an intimate, warm eatery—long and narrow like a railroad apartment. With cherrywood tables, chairs, floors, and walls. The all-wooden interior gives one that sense of hunkering down inside a treehouse on a cold autumn afternoon. On each end of the restaurant, a great, big white ceramic elephant holds court on a white-tiled window seat with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto Greenwich Avenue on one end of the restaurant and out onto West Eleventh on the other. I’ve always chuckled at the irony of the name, Elephant & Castle: as my own big person vs. the diminutive size of this eatery makes me feel more like an elephant in a teapot than an elephant in a castle.

  I arrive right on the dot of 1:30, as instructed.

  The place is bustling and the tables are mostly full. I look around to see if Dad is already there. He is sitting at the table opposite the espresso machine and coffee station, with the black-framed antique ink print of Freud hanging just above him.

  It takes me about five seconds to spot him; and when I find him, I do a double-take. I expected to see an older man at the table; but instead, Dad has manifest as his younger self.

  I race down the narrow aisle between the tables. I rush to greet him—so eager that I almost trip on the leg of someone else’s chair. Dad jumps up from the table to meet me halfway. We throw our arms around each other. Ah, there’s that bear hug I have missed so much. So invigorating and reassuring. His shirt smells faintly of cigarette smoke. (He smoked back in the early sixties.) I sit down opposite him.

  “Wonderful to see you, darling! You look terrific.”

  Okay, I’ll take “terrific,” I think to myself. “Terrific” sure beats the time he called me “a handsome woman” when I was in my twenties. At the time, I was mortified. I mean, what young woman in her twenties wants to be called handsome?

  “And you look great for a dead guy!” I say.

  He smiles. “How did you expect me to look?”

  We sit. “Well, I expected to see an old man sitting here! Because right before you died, you looked ancient!”

  He laughs. “Gee, thanks, kid.”

  Weirdly, Dad appears today the way he looked when he was in his early forties. But without the boozy, scary, volatile demeanor he had back then. This time, he is sane, calm, and sweet.

  He is handsome in his own way: five-eight with a husky physique, short, dark-brown curly hair, a strong chin, and Paul Newman eyes. He is wearing blue jeans and a navy-blue T-shirt under an orange-and-brown-checkered, tweed jacket, with sable-brown suede elbow patches. This is the jacket he wore often when I was about three years old.

  “I hope you’ll enjoy the lunch here, Dad.”

  “Well, seeing that so many of you in the family eat here so often, I’ve always wondered what all the fuss was about.” Dad grins. “I never joined you for lunch in all those years because I could not interrupt my workday.”

  “Well, I’m glad you made it this time,” I say.

  Mozart, Bach, and Haydn is the favorite background classical music here at Elephant & Castle. But today, appropriately, it is Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (the “Spring” and “Summer” movements). The latter is what was played as the actors come onstage at the start of my father’s play adaptation of The Deer Park, which was performed at the West Village Theater de Lys in the mid-1960s.

  “So, Dad, tell me, what on earth is it like in the Hereafter?” I ask.

  “Well, it’s essentially a blank slate. It’s tabula rasa. It’s very individual. It mirrors the nature of our own personal perceptions and beliefs.”

  “Since you died, your granddaughter Christina has been wondering if you’ve been hangin’ out with Hemingway at a bar in the astral realm,” I say.

  “Oh, yes! You can tell her that she is absolutely correct! And tell her I also hang out with Dostoyevsky, Karl Marx, and Picasso!” He laughs.

  Just then, our waiter, Luis, appears at our table and fills our water glasses. He is a smart, congenial man in his early forties, from Ecuador. He has known me, my sisters and brothers, my cousin, and my aunt for many years. I introduce him to Dad, who chats with him in Spanish. Luis takes our order and heads for the kitchen.

  “Dad, tell me more. What do you do with yourself, once you die and pass into eternity?”

  “Well, from a timeless perspective—because there is no linear time in other dimensions—you have an opportunity, right after death, to review your whole life: You examine all the joys and all the sorrows; the triumphs and the failures; the gifts and the deficits; that which was settled a
nd unsettled; completed and unfinished. You feel all the pain and suffering you ever caused anybody at any point in your life. And when you are ready, you embark on a ritual for purification. Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, I chose to walk, for what felt like endless miles, along corridors of cleansing white fire—to transmute the psychic stain of my own iniquities.”

  After so profound a mini dissertation on the afterlife, there was something very comical about the juxtaposition of purification rituals and today’s soup at Elephant & Castle: a black French lentil soup with andouille sausage and butternut squash, thyme and bay leaf. Gary, the chef, has managed to coax deep flavor from these simple ingredients. Over the years, Dad used to come up with his own soup concoctions in the kitchen of his Brooklyn Heights apartment. Inspired by his service in the army as short-order cook in the mess hall, he threw into the soup pot everything he could get his hands on.

  “Well, enough about me and my soul!” Dad laughs. “How are you?”

  “You know, Dad, I’m in a really good place. I’ve worked very hard on myself for the last thirty-five years—to face my demons, to face myself, to grow and to heal. I’ve opened my heart to love and abundance. I am committed to my truth.”

  “Well, that is a mighty powerful declaration, my dear. I’m very moved by that,” Dad says.

  Luis brings us our soup, and we both dive right in. Suddenly I’m starving.

  “Wow, Bets, this is extraordinary! I’m so happy for you! You’ve worked so hard over the years and you deserve all of it.”

  In my enthusiasm at seeing Dad again, a spoonful of soup misses my mouth; and bits of butternut squash and lentils land on the front of my red chiffon button-down blouse. I wipe up the spill with my napkin.

  Following our soup, our entrées arrive. I’m having the guacamole burger on a brioche bun, with Stilton cheddar, sliced tomato, red onion, and pickle. E&C’s burger is to die for. The burger pairs well with a cup of E&C’s house coffee with half-and-half. A medium Peruvian roast, rich but smooth with caramel notes and no smokiness (which I hate).