One Last Lunch

by Erica Heller

  My father peers at me. “Such a big family. Rather unexpected.”

  “I know . . . I have sort of become the matriarch of the family. We are all quite close and spend holidays together, etc. . . .”

  I can see he’s not really paying attention. He was never much of a family man.

  “Are you liking the Boeuf à la Bourg, Borgon . . . gonne?” I struggle to pronounce it properly; he corrects me.

  “Yes, it’s very tasty.”

  Does he really like the stew, or is he just being polite? I am never sure with him. He once wrote that I needed more confidence and clarity. Has nothing changed?

  I try a different tack. “I saw tapes of you on The Dick Cavett Show. You were great.”

  “Yes, he was fun. Of course, they paid you nothing, well, practically nothing. I had to insist on getting more. He gave it to me. Out of his own pocket, I think. I reckon he knew how strapped we were for cash. Bit embarrassing.”

  “I was surprised to hear you tell that story of when Philip and I came to visit you in Italy.” (Philip, the son of J. P. Donleavy, was my high school boyfriend.)

  He laughs. “Oh yes. I was trying to be the progressive parent and put you in the same room so you could sleep together. And then afterward you told me that you weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend. And I felt so stupid.”

  “But we were boyfriend and girlfriend; we just weren’t fucking, because . . .” And then I stop. Do I really want to go into the saga of my vaginismus and how for many years my vagina was too tight to even get a tampon up it?

  “Because?”

  “Oh nothing,” I say. “We just remember things differently.”

  “Well, anyway, the story really was about me, not you.”

  Wasn’t everything? I think to myself.

  “About me not being much of a parent, I mean.”

  I pour us each another glass of wine. The bottle is almost finished. I should have got another one, but at thirty-four dollars a pop, it seemed extravagant. I feel the need to turn the conversation more positive. I tell him how much I admire his writing, something I never told him while he was alive. I let him know that the diaries he had written in his later years, which he felt contained some of his best and most honest writing—although my mother insisted every word in them was a lie, including “and” and “but”—were finally published.

  “Were they a scandal?” he asks.

  The diaries contained some salacious revelations.

  “Unfortunately, they were kind of ignored in the US. They came out after 9/11. . . .”

  “What’s that?”

  What could I tell him? “You don’t want to know. But the book did okay in England. The British press went to town on all the S-and-M stuff.”

  “Big surprise! Was Kathleen mortified?”

  “You don’t want to know about that, either.” Kathleen had died before the diaries were published. “But we did manage to turn them into a one-man play that was performed at Stratford and later in London.”

  He perked up. “Who played me? Wait, let me guess. Jeremy Irons?” I shake my head. “Albert Finney?” I shake my head again. “He’s too fat, anyway.” He ponders and does that characteristic thing he does of pulling on his ear when he is thinking.

  “What about Cecil Day-Lewis’s son, what’s his name? They lived with Kingsley Amis while Cecil was dying?”

  “Daniel Day-Lewis,” I offer.

  “Exactly. I saw him in a National Youth Theatre production. He had talent. He’s probably the right age by now, or he could be aged.”

  “Actually, he’s recently retired.”

  “Okay, I give up!”

  “Corin Redgrave . . . ,” I say hesitantly, knowing that he will probably not be met with approval.

  “That’s an odd choice.”

  “I thought so, too, but Richard Nelson, who adapted and directed the diaries, was very insistent. He had worked with Corin before and had done a play about Oscar Wilde with him.”

  “You know I had Oscar Wilde’s rooms at Oxford,” my father interrupts.

  “I know. So I thought that was a good omen. And Corin turned out to be terrific. He got great reviews. He had a wig made and lost weight. I designed the outfit he wore. I’m a costume designer, you know.”

  “Hmph, fancy that. I had a very unique style, you know. I hope you didn’t take too many liberties.”

  “Do you remember that navy blue, double-breasted Tommy Nutter suit you had, with the red piping?”

  “Good choice! That was a bespoke suit. I wore it a lot in the sixties.”

  “Did you know that some of your clothing is in a collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum?”

  “That’s bizarre.”

  “A PhD student is doing his thesis on writers and fashion, and you are one of his subjects.”

  “How did my stuff get to the V and A?”

  “Kathleen sent a trunk of papers to the British Library, and at the bottom was a bunch of your clothing. They couldn’t keep it, so they contacted the V and A, and they took it. I think it’s kinda nice that it’s wound up so close to where you used to live in Thurloe Square.”

  My father empties the last of the Burgundy.

  “There’s more champagne, if you want it. Do you want more Boeuf à la . . . ?”

  “No, thanks.”

  I glance at the pot. We’ve barely made a dent. I will be eating beef stew for weeks. I clear our plates, and with great ceremony I bring out a plate covered in a napkin. I whisk away the napkin and reveal a large bar of Toblerone chocolate.

  My father laughs. “You remembered.”

  “Well, it’s not just for you. I like it, too.” We sit there in silence, munching on our triangles of chocolaty almond nougat.

  He glances at his watch. It’s the gold Patek Philippe watch that my mother’s father had given him when they married in 1951. Kathleen had given it to me when he died and then it had been stolen. I was glad to see it again.

  “I should be going,” he said. At parties, he was always among the last to leave, but with me, he would get impatient, ready to move on.

  He gets up to go. He passes my desk and spots my memoir. Fuck. I meant to hide it. Or maybe I left it out on purpose, unconsciously wanting him to see it. See, Dad, I can write, too! On the cover are my father and mother circa 1958, both wearing leopard pants, sitting on a zebra-skin sofa; behind them, a huge black-and-white blow-up of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.

  “I couldn’t resist using that photo. The matching leopard pants were really out there.”

  “Ocelot,” my father corrects me. Shit, I can’t even get the faux fabric right.

  He flips through the book and reads. I hold my breath.

  “Nice blurbs.”

  “Yeah.” I take a gulp of air before I pass out.

  “As I once said to your mother, it’s a miracle you survived us.”

  I am gobsmacked. He’s acknowledging that my childhood was . . . peculiar, different, a nightmare? I nod inanely. This is huge, but I am rendered speechless. Finally I find my voice.

  “It wasn’t so bad. I mean, compared to some other people. You did your best . . . considering.”

  He gives me a grateful smile and a pat.

  “It was a delicious lunch. You’re a good cook.”

  I positively beam. We embrace awkwardly. I watch him as he walks down the hall.

  “Stop!” I shout.

  He turns around. I go back into the loft, grab my book, and run after him.

  “Here, I hope . . . I hope you like it. . . .”

  He looks sadly down at it.

  I say, “It might be a little rough about the early years. . . .”

  “Thanks,” he says. “Nothing would please me more than to read it. But I can’t take anything back with me.”

  He reaches out to hug me again. This time it’s a real one. I feel his body. I feel his essence: the faint smell of cigarette smoke that lingers on his clothing after all these years. He turns
and disappears down the hallway, a ghostly white figure, surrounded by dark gray walls in a halo of light.

  Tracy Tynan is a costume designer and writer living in Los Angeles. Her credits include Choose Me, The Big Easy, Blind Date, Great Balls of Fire, and Tuesdays with Morrie. She is the daughter of renowned theatre critic Kenneth Tynan and novelist Elaine Dundy. Her memoir, Wear and Tear: The Threads of My Life, was published by Scribner in 2016. Each chapter is a personal story based on an item of clothing. The book follows Tynan’s quirky trajectory from clothing-obsessed child to successful costume designer.

  — 45 —

  “Fame is a horrible thing to do to someone.”

  MARK VONNEGUT (SON) AND KURT VONNEGUT

  I talk to Kurt all the time, probably more than when he was alive.

  He’s certainly much easier to deal with.

  Fame is a horrible thing to do to someone.

  Sometimes I see my father going along, handling things beautifully, especially for a vet with PTSD. He didn’t drink himself to death or kill himself or anyone else. He was driving along, doing pretty well, and then there’s a hairpin curve called fame; through the guardrail and over the cliff he goes. If it wasn’t for art, for trying to tell the truth to save his own life, which he noticed made him and others less lonely, he would have ended up gone and I wouldn’t exist. And no one would be asking what it would be like to have lunch with him now. I’ve never known a human who was less interested in food. He never cooked or seemed even a little bit interested in what things tasted like. His biggest concern with a restaurant was whether they’d let him smoke. He got away with stuff because he was famous, like smoking in restaurants. Who wants the job of telling an icon not to smoke?

  I wonder if he’d tell me the truth about things, like doctors telling him he should keep smoking. I don’t wonder that much; I think we both knew when he was lying. Mostly we’d talk about art and beauty and writing—how hard it is to try and how good it feels to get things right. I bought ten acres with my share of the royalties from Slaughterhouse-Five. I wander around sort of gardening the place, bragging a little about how much more land I own than he ever did and how beautiful I’m going to make it, and I thank him for what I learned watching him go from thing to thing to do gardening.

  Dirt—Garden—Dirt.

  I love how he gardened, but he’s easier to deal with now that he watches over me.

  And I amuse the hell out of him.

  Mark Vonnegut has published two books, The Eden Express and Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So. He’s practiced primary care pediatrics for thirty-five years and is now taking care of babies of the babies he took care of when he started. He still writes, paints, and plays music. Life is good.

  — 46 —

  “But there would be laughs, more than anything else on this occasion.”

  RICHARD BAUSCH (FRIEND) AND EUDORA WELTY

  I will have a late lunch with Eudora Welty, I think, and this will be the kind of serious fun you never quite let go of, since I had a late lunch with her for real, twenty-six years ago, at a Fellowship of Southern Writers’ celebration. This was in Chattanooga, Tennessee, during the Tennessee Arts Commission Conference on Southern literature. I was being honored by the Fellowship, receiving the Hillsdale Award for Fiction. There was a brunch, made up of members of the Council and the members of the Fellowship. I went into that brunch feeling the effects of a good deal of socializing the night before, and I was desperately hungry. The first chair I saw was next to Eudora. I sat down, said, “Hello,” quietly, and looked around the room. I saw Walker Percy, George Garrett, Mary Lee Settle, James Dickey, Reynolds Price. At the table with Eudora and me were Peter Taylor, William Styron, Shelby Foote, and Cleanth Brooks.

  I knew Taylor, and Ms. Welty, but these others I had never met, and they were, of course, very high on my list of literary heroes. So I was nervous and knocked the table leg with a knee as I sat down. The water in the glasses wavered slightly. Eudora introduced me to the others, and I asked about her travel and arrival. I was starving. Someone set plates in front of us. Chicken Cordon Bleu. I picked up my fork and knife and set to cut a thick slice, sticking the fork deep into the breast, and in the same moment I realized that there was only one voice speaking in that large room. Someone was speaking a prayer of thanksgiving and an invocation at the podium, and everyone was sitting head bowed, hands in lap, silent. So I tried to lift the knife from the chicken, to sit back myself. The knife wouldn’t come. It was too deeply embedded in the meat. So I had to simply sit back and leave it there, standing up in the chicken breast. Eudora leaned over slightly and murmured to me, “Richard, I believe it’s already killed.”

  The rest of that speech, I had to control my laughter.

  That was Eudora, to me: this quiet but wicked sense of humor. And a gentleness, too. She was eighty-two at the time.

  I believe I would have us meet wherever she was most comfortable, and that would most likely be at a favorite restaurant; she would probably insist, given that we are in this world of allowing us preferences beyond time and space, that it be a favorite place of mine. So I would choose Pasta Italia, in Memphis, Tennessee. A quiet, café-like place, with a wonderful wine list and a big cheese wheel in a barrel as you come in the door.

  I would go alone, and I imagine she would, too.

  I think she would be feeling the slight strain of wanting to be entertaining and charming for this young man she has known only a short time, but with whom she shares several mutual friendships and a love of literature and good writing. I would walk over and kiss her cheek and sit across from her. She would already have her goblet of bourbon in crushed ice. I would order a glass of Barolo.

  We would tell stories about our friends, adventures, triumphs, sorrows, losses. The last hard years, without help at times when it just wasn’t there to be had. And the long nights, the dark. But there would be laughs, more than anything else on this occasion. She would remind me of that first time, when I sat next to her at Susan Shreve’s house with my own bourbon on ice, and we realized that we were the only two people in that room drinking whiskey; and I told her that there is a line in her story “Petrified Man” that would work perfectly in Flannery O’Connor’s story “Good Country People.”

  “What line is that?” she said.

  And I said, “When that so-called Bible Salesman is going down the ladder with Hulga’s artificial leg in his case, he should say, ‘If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ ”

  Oh, how we laughed then, and she said, “It would go there. You’re right.”

  And then she said, “You know, I never liked her much.”

  And we laughed again.

  We would talk about that kind of thing, and about the quickness of time, and we would eat pasta al forno, lovely wide folded strips of noodle, with prosciutto and fontina cheese and Béchamel sauce, and I would wonder aloud why she stopped writing stories as she got into her seventies—because I’m still writing them and will never stop until it’s taken from me. And I imagine her saying, “It was taken from me. I couldn’t do it anymore. I never felt I would have time to finish. I didn’t want to leave anything undone.”

  And maybe I would tell her about a woman I knew who kept one closet in her house messy, for fear that if she ever finished with that, she’d die.

  I wouldn’t want the lunch to end.

  And I would take it with me, a memory and a sweet thought; but then, we do have a version of this kind of thing. I can pick up one of her books and look in, and hear the voice again, and no matter when or where I or anybody looks in, there she is.

  Richard Bausch is the author of twelve novels, eight volumes of short stories, and one volume of poetry and prose. He teaches in the writing program at Chapman University in Orange, California.

  — 47 —

  “A man with a thickly accented, high-pitched voice said, ‘Dr. West, I would like you to buy a yellow moped.’ ”

  CAMERON WEST (ACQUAINTANCE)
AND ROBIN WILLIAMS

  The distinctive sound of the postal truck aroused the attention of our golden retriever, Baylie, from his mid-day snooze on the living room couch. I watched the mail lady, Irene, efficiently place the mail in a neighbor’s box, then move to the next house around our cul-de-sac. I was pondering whether her name actually was Irene, or if I just thought it was Irene because the white pith helmet she always wore made me think of Hurricane Irene and how a person wearing a pith helmet looks prepared for anything. My cell phone’s ring interrupted my speculation.

  Not recognizing the phone number, I answered, “I’m hoping this isn’t a sales call.”

  A man with a thickly accented, high-pitched Indian voice said, “Dr. West, I would like you to buy a yellow moped. Canary yellow—like Tweety Bird. Twee-tee bird. Guaranteed to not crash, probably, or to not attract hot women, definitely.”

  “Huh?” I responded, and my jaw actually dropped. I recognized the cartoonish delivery and eerily felt the presence of the owner of the voice. But it couldn’t be.

  “Hello?” the voice said. “Are you there? This is a call for Cameron West from far away, but closer than you think. Muuucchhhh closer, my friend.”

  I felt as though a chain had jumped off a sprocket in my brain onto another gear, and my mental feet were trying to adjust. Robin Williams is on the phone?

  Robin and I became acquainted when, perhaps at the height of his fame, Disney purchased the rights for him to produce and star in a movie based on my memoir First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple. Soon after we met, he shared the thought that, although our lives were very different, we were similar in that both our minds had many rooms. He promised to step gently into mine as he prepared for the role, and he hinted that some of his rooms were much darker than the ones he showed the public, which made him confident he could convincingly portray someone whose mind had been severely damaged by childhood trauma. The depth of Robin’s inner pain was palpable to me, though I couldn’t have guessed its physiological genesis at the time. The film was never made, and Robin’s darkness, misunderstood and misdiagnosed, took him from us way too soon.