One Last Lunch

by Erica Heller

  However, in that moment, on that perfect California day, he was, unaccountably, very much alive and on the phone in the persona of an Indian man who wanted me to buy a two-wheeled vehicle. Something shifted, and I felt a sense of excitement tingle my belly; a grin crept across my face.

  “Yellow moped, Robin?” I asked.

  “Who is this Robin? My name is Ahmed.”

  “Ahmed?”

  “Yes, sir, that is me,” he said. “Ahmed Abigmistake.”

  I laughed out loud.

  He dropped the hilarious accent and said in his natural voice, which always hinted at mischief, “I know this is weird, but say you don’t care.”

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  “Great! Question . . . are your teeth bored?” he asked.

  It took me a second to catch up. “Uh, yeah, I could eat,” I said.

  “I will come to you. I want to take a hike at Las Trampas and eat a burrito from El Balazo. With sour cream, black beans, and spicy salsa. Get it to go. I’ll be there at one on the dot.”

  “One on the dot,” I echoed.

  Robin said, “Are we telepathetic or what?”

  I laughed. “I don’t know what the hell we are.”

  “It’s okay! Bring Baylumps!” Robin said, using his pet name for our old hound. And then he was gone.

  Baylie and I were stationed in the car in the driveway, drooling at the smell of Mexican food that wafted from the bag on the seat beside me when, at one o’clock, a black Lincoln Town Car came down the street and stopped in front of our house. The passenger door opened, and Robin Williams popped out—in the flesh. He did a shuffle ball change step and finished with a ta-daaa. He was wearing a gray T-shirt, green cargo pants, and the irresistibly impish grin on his face that I, and the world, had missed since he’d been gone. He ran over, yanked open the rear door of my car, and jumped in next to Baylie.

  The dog squealed with joy and licked Robin’s face. Robin clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Good to see me, huh? Let’s go!”

  I started the car and turned to back out of the driveway. The Lincoln was gone. We drove the short trip to the park in silence, and when pavement gave way to gravel and houses to rolling hills, I took a left into the empty parking lot of Las Trampas Regional Wilderness.

  Disembarking, Robin surveyed the relatively steep switchback and suggested we eat when we reached the top of the hill. I gave him a water bottle and stashed the food in my old red backpack, and we started hiking at a comfortable pace. We walked in silence, but for the sounds of our exhalations, footsteps scuffing dirt, and a light breeze disturbing the foliage. Cresting the ridge in about twenty minutes, we found a shady spot under a coastal oak and sat down to eat. Robin tore the silver foil off his burrito and I did the same with mine, and we ate like savages, agreeing that the grilled chicken and the chips and salsa from El Balazo were perfection. Baylie sat nearby and got his share, of course, and things were comfortable and relaxed. When the feast was over, I put the refuse in my backpack and, under a cloudless sky, we headed south along the ridge trail.

  Robin took a long sip of water and burped loudly—a good, long, multilayered belch.

  “Good tone,” I said. “Nice finish.”

  “Food is good. . . . I miss food. Except for one thing that I used to like that I can’t eat anymore, not because I’m dead but because something bad happened.”

  “Do tell,” I prompted.

  “Well,” he began, “I was at Juilliard in New York in ’74, about this time of year. I was in the student union, last night of the term, nursing a beer and listening to the music, and Stevie Wonder came on the jukebox singing ‘Blame it on the Sun.’ ”

  “Beautiful ballad,” I said. “He played all the instruments on that.”

  “Uh-huh, so when the song came on, this girl grooved up to me. She was maybe five-two, straight brown hair almost to her shoulders and kind eyes tucked into a nice face. Which was good, because that’s the kind of face I have, except my eyes are mauve.” He fluttered his lashes.

  I fluttered back. “Her figure?” I asked.

  He lifted an eyebrow. “Half Barbie, half Gumby. Gumby on the jeans half—no hips, flat ass. All Barbie under the peasant blouse.”

  “I remember those,” I said wistfully.

  “I remember hers,” Robin continued. “Kathy . . . she asked me to dance.”

  He stopped walking, closed his eyes, and began to dance with an imaginary partner. He started singing the chorus of the tune, “I’ll blame it on the sun, the sun that didn’t shine . . .”

  I joined in, “I’ll blame it on the wind and the trees . . .”

  Robin gave me a mischievous grin, threw down his water bottle, grabbed my hand, pulled me close, and, cheek to cheek, we danced and sang together, “I’ll blame it on the time, that never was enough, I’ll blame it on the tide and sea . . . but my hearrrt blaaaames it on meeee.”

  Robin bowed, stepped back, and grabbed his water bottle. We walked on.

  “So after a few more tunes,” he continued, “we went back to my room where my single bed awaited. You’re a very stylish dancer, by the way.”

  “I’m not going back to your dorm room in this or any other world,” I replied. “But Kathy did, and . . .” I beckoned him on.

  “Well, for all of my solo practice, I was still a rank amateur at the finer points of sex, but Kathy, to my surprise and utter delight, had some heat in those Gumby hips and an ardent desire to perform what I perceived to be mouth-to-cock resuscitation, though the patient was very much alive and well at the time.”

  I let out a “Hah!”

  Robin threw his hand up in the air and shouted, “Can Ah preach it like Ah feel it?”

  “Amen!” I responded.

  “Damn right,” said the preacher, then Robin was back.

  Softly, almost reverently, he said, “Seven, maybe seven-and-a-half seconds later, I’m in love.”

  I belly-laughed, almost pulled an intercostal.

  “She spent the night,” he went on, wiping a little sweat off his brow. “In the morning, as I daydreamed of a summer filled with CPR and sleepovers, Kathy told me that she had helped animate a short film that was going to be shown in two weeks at a small film festival and she was going and wouldn’t it be great if I came along, and by the way it’s in Switzerland.”

  “What’d you say?” I asked.

  “I said I have a passport and three hundred and eighty-four dollars. I’m in.”

  “Very cool,” I said.

  “So a couple weeks and one flight later we’re in Switzerland with backpacks, green cotton sleeping bags, and a matching green Michelin guide. We went to see the film the day we landed.”

  “Was it good?”

  “No idea, but we walked to a park, got into my sleeping bag in broad daylight, and celebrated. My penis was as animated as the film. Afterward, we sat and watched a lady tell her dog in German”—Robin stiffened his body and said in a commandant way—“ ‘Rex, setz dich hin.’ The dog sat down. I loved that. Rex, setz dich hin. Baylumps would have said, ‘Huh?’ ”

  We laughed and wound our way down the trail to an area where some cows were grazing and stopped to watch them.

  I said, “Baylumps, setz dich hin.” He wagged his tail and looked at the cows with his tongue hanging out. “Baylumps, sit,” I said, and he automatically did, without taking his eyes off the heifers.

  Robin laughed and went on. “We hitchhiked through the Swiss Alps down into Italy and over to Genoa. Then we caught a ride all the way into France past Nice with an old Italian guy in a watermelon truck, who spoke no English but had a big gapped-toothed smile and, inexplicably—or explicably in Italian that we didn’t understand—dropped us off by the side of the road in the very late evening in what felt like the middle of nowhere.”

  We stopped on the path under some trees and had a drink. I gave Baylie a couple of smoky-smelling treats I had in my shorts pocket.

  “I like today, Cam,” Robin said. “L
as Trampas, being with you and Baylumps, telling stories, saying ‘setz dich hin, Rex.’ ”

  I looked at him, and our eyes locked. I opened my mouth to tell him just how much I liked it, too, but, choking back a rush of emotion, all that came out was “I . . .”

  Robin held me in his gaze and let the moment pass.

  We walked on, and he continued. “It was a warm night, so we decided to sleep under the stars, and we walked a bit off the road and settled down . . . right near a damp, swampy area with a lot of mosquitoes—an entire French Foreign Legion of bombardiers!” He waved his arms and swatted the air and ducked imaginary attackers. “Buzzing and diving and biting and stinging . . . it was the worst night of the trip.

  “The next morning, we hitched a ride into the nearest town, St. Laurent-Du-Var, to get some anti-itch cream and breakfast. Outside the market, Kathy and I slathered each other’s bug bites with cortisone cream and ate two yogurts apiece. Mine were strawberry. After we ate, we were heading in single file down this narrow sidewalk and the street was winding and dug up in places from some roadwork. I was stepping around bricks—not bricks, but those old paving stones—and focusing on the sidewalk, and then I turned to ask Kathy if the itch cream was working and . . .”

  He jumped a one-eighty and paused, clearly absorbed in the memory.

  “And?” I prodded.

  “And there was Kathy crawling out of a hole in the road about twenty feet back, and her mouth was all bloody!”

  “Holy shit!” I said.

  “Right! So I ran back and grabbed her face and looked closer, and there was a slice in her upper lip and it was big and gushing blood. She looked pretty stunned and opened her mouth and I could see that her left front tooth was broken in half on an angle and the missing half was gone. She’d stepped or tripped into the hole and smashed her mouth on the stone.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said.

  “Terrible,” Robin repeated, shaking his head. “I barely know this girl. I’m in a foreign country. She’s hurt. She needs help, and I don’t speak the language.” Robin stopped and pointed off in front of us. “Aw . . . there’s the parking lot. We’re back so soon? That’s sad.”

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  Robin took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He turned to me, put his hands on my shoulders, and shook his head, looking very dejected.

  “What happened is I puked up two strawberry yogurts,” he said, with a double dry heave.

  “Oooooh,” I said.

  “Yup. All over Kathy and my self-respect,” he added. “Right there on the rue in St. Laurent-Du-Var in front of anyone who was looking. To the day I died, I couldn’t eat strawberry yogurt.”

  He unscrewed the top of his water bottle. “Fortunately I can, however, still drink water . . . at least I can today.” He tilted his head back and drank the last bit, swallowing with a lip smack and an “ahhhhh.”

  We made our way back to the car, still the only one in the parking lot. Robin opened the back door for Baylie, and the hound joyously hopped in, tail wagging and tongue hanging out. Robin followed.

  Neither of us said a word for the five miles back to my house. I fought the overwhelming impulse to tell him how much he was missed and to acknowledge his pain and apologize for everyone who let him down. Instead, I looked in the rearview mirror every few seconds, just to take in the sight of his peaceful, rascally face and the puckish glint in his smiling eyes. And I savored the utter joy of having shared a perfect burrito, danced to Stevie Wonder, and heard one more wonderful story told by the funniest man I will ever meet.

  Back at my house, the Lincoln was again parked out front. As I turned into the driveway, I glanced at the driver. It was our mail lady, Irene. She wore her white pith helmet down low and stared straight ahead. In the back seat, Robin was hugging Baylumps. He looked up and caught my eye.

  “Thanks for this, Cam,” he said calmly.

  Choking back tears, I managed, “Anytime, Robin.”

  He let himself out of the car and walked to the passenger side of the Lincoln. Irene reached over and opened the door for him, and he climbed in the front seat and fastened his seatbelt. She put it in drive and, just like that, my deceased friend and my mail lady eased down the street and out of sight.

  Irene was back behind the wheel of her mail truck the next day, but I didn’t see or hear from Robin again. On subsequent walks at Las Trampas, I did bring the subject up to Baylumps, who wagged his tail but didn’t say a word.

  Cameron West, PhD, is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple and the novels The Medici Dagger and Futurecard. An avid musician, runner, and dog lover, Cam and his wife, Rikki, live on the central coast of California, where they are currently writing a novel for young adults.

  — 48 —

  “I would like to assure him that he is home, he is safe, he is loved.”

  JAMES GRISSOM (PROTÉGÉ, SUPPLICANT) AND TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

  In the final years of Tennessee Williams’s life, he referred to himself, mordantly, as the Flop King: he simply could not get a break—from producers, from the New York Times, from John Simon, from God, fate, whatever was in the air. Tennessee took some wry comfort in Joe Allen, the restaurant whose walls were festooned with posters of those shows that had closed quickly, and the brick walls, hung with what he called “[his] children.” I would like to meet Tenn here today, with its brick walls much like the brick walls within which we first met in New Orleans, in the company of flops and me, his intrepid Boswell, trusted company.

  I know that I would arrive first, because everyone tended to arrive first, and I would be seated and Tenn would walk in, boisterous, smiling, his face like moist marzipan, pink and full. “Baby! My favorite table!” A nice Southern lie to cover the rudeness of tardiness. There would be drinks. Tenn might flirt with the waiter by ordering a Negroni or some other cocktail that necessitated a recipe or an instruction or his hand on his arm. I, the designated driver still, would stick to iced tea, the house wine of the South. Food never much interested Tenn, unless Joe Allen could make a perfect pimiento-cheese sandwich with hospital corners on white bread, so he might settle for their perfect guacamole and chips—easy to pick up, easy to ignore, easy to throw down to make a point.

  I know that Tenn would inquire about the theatre: Who was doing good work? Who was succeeding? Who was failing? He would mourn the losses of Edward Albee and Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan, men he loved and trusted and emulated. Tenn would then ask me about the “follies,” the lovely women created by God to make the world and his life better, and he would offer a tribute, lovely and fulsome, to each one of them, because, as he often said, “Anger or loss is what most often leads me to create words, throw them up in the air.” We would spend most of our time talking about Marian Seldes, the actress who vouched for me when Tenn called her from New Orleans in 1982 to ask if I was trustworthy, and of Maureen Stapleton, his “old shoe” and great friend. Tenn would take comfort—cold as it was—in having outlived them, since the death of Anna Magnani had unhinged him. “Loss of an angel,” he had once told me, and would tell me again, “is the ultimate organ failure.”

  The theme of my lunch with Tennessee would have, I think, the same theme as the first: Did he matter? What was the word on the various streets about him, his work, his life? I know that he would delight in hearing about the many revivals, revisions to history, and adulation bestowed through festivals, biographies, emulations. Tenn had begged for me to be his witness late in his life, when he felt he had none, so I would take pleasure in all the many witnesses, not all of them well-meaning, who had rushed to place flowers at his feet. “My cold, dead feet,” he would quip, but he would be thrilled. A sweet thought, a victory, often called for something sweet, and he would bemoan the fact that Joe Allen doesn’t have a “supernaturally large” bread pudding, but he would order something to savor as he thought of his current placement. “When in doubt about your station,” h
e might muse, “just die.”

  I would apologize to Tenn for not taking up his assignment immediately—for waiting too long. I know that he would wave away my apology and tell me that all had ended well. “You were a good witness,” he would say, and I know that I would wonder if that were true, or if he were simply reverting to his innate kindness.

  Deep within the comments Tennessee made to me in our earlier time together, I kept hearing the lament that plagues so many artists, so many people: Why isn’t the work enough to satisfy me? If Tennessee Williams were challenged on the merits of one of his plays, he could defend it as a mother would her children, and his arguments were precise and intelligent, whereas his pleas for good reviews and kind words were disjointed and diffuse. Would the revelation of praise he had received after his death calm him? Satisfy him? Perhaps, but he would want to know, as he always had, if people had been moved; if people had recognized themselves within his works. “Work lasts if work connects,” he had told me, and he would tell me again.

  Tennessee asked me for witnesses, those who would say, loudly and in his presence, that he had mattered, and I would offer him the book I had written, the letters I had received, to show him just how many witnesses he had.

  I would be aware of time passing, running out. Our lunch would be limited. Perhaps I should invest in a Ouija Board, as the poet James Merrill did, and try to contact Tennessee regularly, to re-create our lunches at the Court of Two Sisters, in New Orleans, in the evening, in that dark corner, with one of his special orders. Orders like Pompano en Papillote, an enormous fish baked in a large bag, which then billows and is punctured with a knife or fork, releasing steam and the fragrances of many herbs and seasonings. “It’s a meal and it’s theatre!” Tenn would exclaim.

  Or at Joe Allen, with all the good news of how he was remembered and witnessed. I would apologize to Tenn for letting him down three decades ago, when I failed to quickly honor his assignment to trace those who might have been his witnesses. “Love is so often late,” Tenn had once told me, “but don’t forget it’s love.”