One Last Lunch

by Erica Heller

  So, in contemplating lunch with him now, my first question would have to be: Will he show? Does contempt and a lifetime of blistering anger and misguided disappointment carry on beyond the grave? Well, it’s my fantasy, my realistic one, so let’s assume he does in fact appear.

  It’s winter. We choose the new Union Square Café because of how much he’d loved the old one. I arrive early, nervous, with beads of sweat trickling down my back. After surrendering my coat, I spot my father at a table inside, talking animatedly to Danny Meyer. Dad is already eating. A long raft of empty oysters stretches across the table beside his empty martini glass. (He’d always had this annoying custom of starting to eat before I arrived, regardless of how early I did.) We greet each other without embraces. He looks good; tanned, healthy, and he’s dressed impeccably. His customary tiny pack of Stim-U-Dents, his signature, sits near his elbow. He tells me to order, and I do. There is awkward silence. “So your marriage was a real mess, eh?” he has to ask, to which I nod sorrowfully. He laughs softly. Even now that fact strangely pleases him. We chatter about nothing, my building, my friends, my writing, but he is somewhere else, distracted. I order and my food is brought quickly, but I have little appetite. I leave my beautiful butter roasted monkfish pretty much untouched.

  Carl Bernstein, lunching at a nearby table, comes over to greet my father. He stands there for fifteen minutes, engrossed in their conversation, with his back turned, never having been introduced to me. Annoyed, I eventually introduce myself. As he heads back to his table, I summon, with great courage, the nerve to ask Dad the only question that has ever really mattered to me. “Did you ever love me?” I inquire, knowing this is the last chance I will ever have to possibly find out.

  Just then, a waiter brings us a complimentary dessert from the always magnanimous Danny Meyer; my absolute favorite, the 19th Street Banana Tart, with macadamia, honey-vanilla ice cream. I have been dreaming of having this for days.

  The waiter sets it directly in front of my father and he dives right in, leaving me just a few sticky crumbs, in a matter of moments. “You don’t need this,” he offers, his explanation for appropriating it and gobbling it up alone, like some starved, ferocious bear in a Turnbull & Asser shirt. Steeling myself, I once again prepare to force myself to ask the most difficult question of the most difficult person I have ever known.

  “Dad, come on, we’re here. We have this last bit of time together to unscramble old animosities and make peace. Don’t you want that, deep down?” He stares at me, dumbly. “Have you ever loved me?” I finally summon the courage to ask again.

  He laughs a bit ruefully and says, a bit sternly: “You know I don’t have discussions like that. If you asked me here to argue . . .” And those are his final words on the subject. The waiter brings the bill, and my father slaps down a mountain of cash and rises to leave. I am still flustered. “But you left all your literary properties to us [to me and my brother]. You must think something of me,” I blurt out, while slipping into my winter coat and darting after him out the door. He says nothing. Instead, staring down at his shoes, he shakes his head with what seems to be impatience with a side order of despair. Outside it has begun to snow lightly. Standing beside him, shivering a little, I ask, “So, how do you get back from here to where you’re going?”

  “I take a taxi,” he answers, hailing one and preparing to jump inside. Before he can, I stubbornly plant a dry kiss on his cheek.

  “Let’s see,” I say, looking around me, as the snow is coming down harder, “how will I get home?”

  He’s already inside his cab, but the window’s rolled down. He says, “There’s a bus stop at the end of the block,” rolls up his window, and is gone in the heavy profusion of swirling snow.

  Death is irrevocable, but our fantasies are not. We can bend and shape them as we choose, again and again, polychromatically, as the years gallop by. We can change them one thousand times to suit a purpose, fill an emotional chasm, provide a powerful, poignant, and logical outcome.

  Without question, ours has not been the happy or healing lunch I’d so longed for, the informative, loving, sentimental, long overdue rapprochement. But realistically, it’s the only lunch the two of us could ever have. Sadly, to change anything at all, even imperceptibly, would require ten thousand lunches.

  And two completely different people.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Any acknowledgments here must begin with my extraordinary agent, Laurie Fox. (And Anne Serling, who kindly steered me to her.) I never met an agent more supportive and encouraging than Laurie. Her exuberance for this project and her willingness, no insistence, on throwing herself into it 10,000%, continues to astound me. Work with her, sit back, and then just let the fireworks begin. She isn’t an agent. She’s an experience.

  There are no words that I can properly assemble here to adequately thank all the brave, committed, imaginative contributors to this book, as well as those whose lunches didn’t quite make it. The task for everyone was not an easy one and was often painful, sorrowful, freighted with the burden of dredging up memories perhaps better left undisturbed. (Mine among them.) But everyone persevered. Even the merry, fun-filled lunches were tinged with a bittersweet tristesse, because, of course, there would be no more of them. But in each case, every lunch, we learned just a little something about the departed luncheon companion we might never have otherwise known. I hoped for these priceless nuggets at the project’s outset, and lo and behold, they materialized. Also, for better or worse, each contributor did, in a sense, get to have one more lunch, with their imagination.

  On then to the cavalcade of names; the loving friends, the strangers, the numberless battalion of unselfish souls who took the time to connect me with many of the writers featured here. Thank you.

  My special thanks, then, go to David Cashion, Jamison Stoltz, Cynthia Tocman, Sue Held, Leslie Citron, Sara Giller, Mildred Marmur, Charlie Piccirillo, Rhonda Racz, Joe Winogradoff, Mary Bisbee-Beek, Ronald Blumer, Monda Wooten, Maija Veide, Emily Farrell, Carolyn Feigelson, Peter Shapiro, Iris Johnson, Ivy Heller, Joyce Lapinsky Lewis, Margot Olshan, Rikki West, Alicia Tan, Sarah Robbins, James Kim, and Enzo.

  Noel Coward, that brilliant rapscallion, wrote that: “You live and learn. Then you die and forget it all.”

  As these lunches show, it is then up to the living to go on learning.