Dead Lunch

When we meet again for lunch at Swingers in Hollywood he has already been dead for three years. Still, I’d recognize him anywhere. The way he stands. His California slow smile. That stupid T-shirt I always hated, the one that says “Musicians Play Around.” Contrary to the idea people have of the deceased, he seems shockingly, vibrantly alive. He catches my eye across the diner and cocks his head towards a window booth with what strikes me as a little too much swagger for a dead guy.

#

The last time I saw him, he was just a head visible through the rear window of a Malibu taxi, disappearing down the Pacific Palisades hillside in the tiny, mean hours of a rainy dawn. All dark and sad and pitiful. His arm still weeks away from that tattoo with her name on it. Me still a couple of months away from realizing we weren’t ever getting back together. Both of us exactly two years, eight months and twenty-one days away from the night he dies.

“Hey,” he says, nodding for me to slide in opposite him.

“Hey,” I reply. It is all shockingly casual. I put my bag down on the table. He looks up at me with startling intensity.

“Hey,” he says again, with a glimmer of amusement. I blurt something out about this bird I’ve been watching every morning for the past few weeks. It’s a blackbird. A scraggy little thing that pecks about on the fruit tree outside my bedroom window. I tell him it reminds me of him.

“It’s like, if you were a bird. You know? I swear it should be wearing a Ramones T-shirt and a leather jacket.” I wait for him to laugh. I want suddenly, desperately to make him laugh.

“Fucking Ramones,” he says.

#

The waitress brings a couple of menus over. She sets them both down between us without a word and leaves. She seems completely unfazed by him. I guess he seems as alive as I do. There’s a strange humming silence. A feeling like a gap in time. I wait for him to explain himself but he says nothing, absorbed completely in the menu as though he hasn’t eaten in weeks. Or maybe it’s years. I realize I don’t know anything about how the dead deal with food.

#

The waitress returns, and he orders the vegan Cobb salad with a side of turkey bacon. I ask for blueberry pancakes and a large coffee. “You got it,” she says and leaves.

“I was just in the neighborhood,” he says. “Thought I’d swing by.”

I process his utter nonchalance. Then he looks at me, I mean right at me and the feeling of his eyes upon mine enters my bloodstream. His stare sinks into my bones. That’s how I know it’s really him, right here, ordering lunch in Swingers.

“But how can you have been in the neighborhood?” I ask.

He shrugs, like it’s a dumb question. Then asks me why I ordered pancakes for lunch, like it’s the same kind of weird.

The waitress arrives and sets down our food.

“Thank you so much,” he says to her sweetly. “This looks awesome.” She gives him a flirty smile.

He takes a mouthful and winks at me. Then in a rush, still chewing, “So I’m in school. A music school? I teach and I also learn, it’s kind of a development and clearing process. It’s ongoing. But I don’t really like it. It fucking sucks, actually.”

I take a deep breath.

“So, you’re not in heaven, or wherever?”

“Huh?” he says.

“There’s a music school there?” I am trying to sound normal. I am trying to make this conversation as mundane as if we were talking about picking up the laundry or deciding on a movie.

“Kind of,” he says with a smirk. Full of all the secrets of dead people. He taps his fork on the side of his plate and sighs a little. I watch him glance at the clock above the bar. I have a sudden sense of clarity that he has been allowed out to see me, almost as though someone has given him a day pass.

“I guess I just don’t get it,” I say finally. “Are you not actually dead?”

“Oh sweetie, of course I am,” he says in a gentle voice you would use to explain something to a child.

He smiles and I feel a force against my chest, like walking into the wind. He twitches in a kind of strange jazz-like rhythm. As though a rumble of color is moving through him. He is here but also not here. Untouchable. As ungraspable as sunlight. Like a song. Music itself, present but only solid in some other dimension. Light filtering through leaves, the trail of crumb like sand a crab leaves behind. Dissolving.

I don’t know why I am so surprised about all this. He was never where he was supposed to be and that was always the problem. Perpetually disappearing. Offline. A straight to voicemail kind of guy. A train passing in a tunnel. A shrinking figure rounding the bend. A real expert at keeping things vague.

#

I keep talking, even though my voice is small and shrill and I hate it. “I mean, are there other dead people there? Have you seen anyone you know yet? What about God and angels and stuff?”

He takes a long time to chew and swallow while I wait for him to answer.

“Holy shit,” he says. “You still have to know everything about everything, huh?”

My face burns and I am going to cry. I turn away from him and pretend to look for the waitress. I watch her swipe a long, fake nail across her phone’s screen, bored.

#

I haven’t said anything I want to say. I wrote a whole list. I want to know the giant things, like where he has gone and what it feels like there. But also the smaller things, like whether he misses running down the street in the rain, or the sound of children calling for their mothers. The crackle of the dry brush in the Santa Ana winds. The creaking of the wooden pier when you stand beneath it in the cold sand. The pale, watery mornings of February, or the golden end of an August afternoon. Peanut butter cookie crumbs in a paper bag. Running to the liquor store on the corner at midnight. Those three seconds when you first wake up and you haven’t quite recalled who you are or what might be bad about you, and you just feel a sense of liquid light—a rising feeling like tiny bubbles in a pond.

I want to tell him that lately other men walking by me on the street all seem to have the back of his head. It passes between them, the dark hair, the mole on his neck, the tips of his ears. I want to ask if he knows that sometimes I play his favorite songs really loudly so that he can hear them too. Or if he knows that I kept his photograph under my pillow for months after he died. That I kissed it goodnight and good morning. How terrible I felt when I finally put it away in a box.

#

“How are you, anyway?” he says, leaning forward and taking a sip from my coffee.

“I dunno,” I say. “I can’t complain.”

“Oh, come now.” He grins. “I’ll bet you can complain for weeks.”

“I’m seeing this stupid married guy,” I say in a voice that feels damp with loneliness.

“Huh.” He folds his arms.

I tell him that it’s been going on for a while. That the married guy buys long life milk in bulk, and stacks of toilet paper. The wife wears a lot of red lipstick. That we had sex on their sofa when she was visiting her mom.

“Huh,” he says again. “And how does that make you feel?”

He sounds like the therapist we once saw together in Beverly Hills. Asking open ended, non-judgmental questions that skillfully lead the topic back to me and my feelings.

I shrug, irritated.

“Do you think he’ll leave her?” he asks, sounding more like himself and if I am not mistaken, his eyes have taken on a tight, exasperated look.

“He stocks up on household necessities. They have the kind of relationship that assumes multiple future breakfasts. It feels permanent.”

He nods solemnly.

“You want to scold me, right? Tell me I’m better than that? Tell me I’m just doing it because of what you did to me?”

“Do you love him?”

I think of the stupid married guy. His nervous, guilty eye flicker every time we meet. His cranky little dog. “No,” I say. His cowardice. The way I once watched him blow-dry his hair. “No,” I say again, firmer.

#

“How are your pancakes?” he says, peering over at my plate. “You’re not eating. We could have gone to Gladstones instead. You liked it there, remember?”

I do. It was a gray Malibu day, the sky blown over with clouds. I guess it must have been February or March. I was wearing flip flops and jeans and my feet were cold. We ate clam chowder with little breadsticks, looking out over a steely ocean. It was Oscar night and he’d decided that we were going to have an Oscar party, just the two of us. At the time, he was living in what was essentially a closet attached to some rich guy’s fancy Palisades villa. At night you could hear the waves roaring right up the hillside, heading straight over the expensive manicured terraces and covered sports cars and right into his tiny thumbnail of a studio. He had bought nachos and guacamole from Vons and insisted that we make margaritas which we drank out of his Ikea coffee mugs. Because he was not sober at that time, and like I could stop him. Like anyone could stop him.

#

I remember that later that same night I found another woman’s hair clip in his bed. A pink one. He created a hugely elaborate lie about it which I pretended to believe. It was easier to swallow his story about the washing machine, or the Honduran leaf blower and how this other woman’s pink hair clip got caught up in his laundry or blown in from the street. I knew all about folding myself up into neat little origami squares, making my voice smaller and smaller, while he stood and bellowed and was everywhere and everything and larger than the sky.

#

“Are you still mad at me?” he says, looking down at me seriously.

Before I can answer he is speaking again. “There was no one to hold my hand.” And the weight of that sadness is so fierce, so agonizing, so immense that it takes form, pulls up a chair beside us, leans its elbows on the table, spills the salt, grabs me by the throat and looks down into my stomach and howls.

“Stop it.” I hear myself saying. “Just stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it.”

I put my forehead down on the table. I can smell cheap plastic and old coffee and grease.

#

The past seems more vivid than anything else and the future seems to have dropped off the edge of the world. I am returning to a memory. A memory I wish I could erase. I am lying on his bed, the green blinds smacking in an ocean wind and he is telling me that when he dies he hopes I will be holding his hand.

“It’s been really fucking awful, you know?” I am shouting now. “You don’t get to just be dead and forgiven. You left and then you were gone and now you’re really gone.”

“And yet, here I am,” he says. Opening his arms out like an entertainer on stage and laughing, but there is an edge to his laughter and it’s steep and hard and full of danger.

#

A silence comes over us. Outside, the afternoon is fading. From the window I can see rain clouds gathering on the skyline, dark river blue behind the palms. A woman parks her huge, white SUV between two trees. She gets out and stands in front of the parking sign for a while, trying to make sense of its complicated instructions. We used to laugh at that. Between Monday and Thursday, Tuesday, Friday and Sunday, every other week in June, this time and that, hovering for hours like it was a math equation. Finally, the woman hurries across and into the cupcake place opposite.

In the back of her car are two kids, bent over electronic devices. They each wear flashing unicorn headbands. I want to be that woman. With her smooth, expensive car picking up fancy cupcakes for her kids after school. I imagine her going home to her smooth, expensive life.

Maybe other smooth, expensive women are coming over for tea, with their children, to eat the cupcakes together. Women who hang up their cashmere and have more shoes than they really need. Shoes that have been places. Like colleges with revered MFA programs and Caribbean penthouses and luxury desert retreats.

#

I look back at him.

“It is what it is,” he says. He used to say that all the time. It was his Zen thing. The phrase he pulled out when he wanted to be spiritually superior, and it made me want to kill him. I tell him this now.

“Well, you’re too late, kiddo,” he says.

“Call me kiddo again and I’ll kill you twice.”

“Ok, Scarface, calm down.” He laughs and then immediately looks sad. “Do you miss me?” he says.

I tell him I miss everything all the time even when I am right in the middle of it. Even stuff that hasn’t happened yet.

“Of course you do,” he says, and starts to laugh—a slow, weird little chuckle that grows and grows out of itself. He sounds crazy, actually, and I wonder if he might be extra crazy now that he is dead. I’ve seen him crazy plenty of times. There was drank three bottles of Captain Morgan crazy, disappearing for three days crazy, shuddering by the car with a crack pipe crazy.

He tells me that it was very sudden. That one minute he was alive, and the next he realized he was dead. That it didn’t hurt. That more than anything, it was just very surreal. “Like being turned inside out,” he says. “Like something you’ve experienced before, but you only remember that once it’s happening again.”

“Like a really big déjà vu?” I ask.

“I guess; you just had to be there?” he says, and we laugh hard.

I think about how much he used to make me laugh. I realize that maybe a lot of what happened was because I can forgive anything for a really good laugh. A relationship, after all, can be many different things. It is possible to be destroyed in tiny poisonous ways and still laugh occasionally.

The night he died, I dreamed that he was standing below my window in the dark street. He was holding a giant striped beach ball and had a little boy right next to him. They were both looking up at me, and I was looking down at them through a thin, petal-blue curtain. There was an understanding. A sense of acknowledgment. That although he was now unseen, he would always be there, too.

Before, it was me that was unseen. I was always leaving myself everywhere, watching myself stay behind. Following strangers on the street and pressing my thoughts into their hands. Begging for help without saying a word. It’s really easy to lose your mind when you feel invisible. Ask anyone. Ask anyone who’s watched their boyfriend come off opiates on the kitchen floor.

#

He is staring at me in a strange way, his head turned to the side. Curious. “Don’t let the memories get to you,” he says. “They’ll eat you alive.”

“Screw you,” I say. Because I am remembering another day and somehow he knows it.

We were at my old place, the apartment where the sea came in the window. Exposed bricks. A tree where the hummingbirds would spin and flutter. I was making poached eggs for breakfast and I hadn’t said a word about what I knew, which was this—he’d been seeing some blonde actress. She was a lot older than me and was actually kind of famous, which made it all intensely surreal. The previous night I had opened my laptop and found his email account still up. I had spent hours reading every single message between them, cross-referencing them with my own recollection of days and excuses, and coming up with the same conclusion every single time.

When he got in that night, I said nothing. The next morning, I made poached eggs and still said nothing, but I gave him the best egg. One of the eggs had a broken yolk and stuck to the pan. I gave him the other one, the perfect one. The one that slid intact off the spatula onto the toast like a perfect little yellow planet. I still said nothing about what I knew. But I gave him the best egg like the good little Fifties housewife I am on the inside, and then I watched him eat it.

#

When he left for work, I sat down and looked at all of the silent women inside me. I pulled them out and laid them in front of me in a row like dolls. They stared back at me with their little black buttony eyes of tragedy, like fruit seeds. What do you want anyway? I asked. What the fuck do you all want?

And now, here in the window booth at Swingers, sitting opposite him, I am once again asking myself that question. What the fuck do you want? Only this time, I have the answer. I know how this must go.

I stand up. He is looking at me sadly again. I am sad, too. I feel all the sadness in the world at once like a wet lung. In the years since we were together, I have waited for him everywhere. I waited on Pico, Wilshire, Lincoln, Santa Monica, Cashmere. All the streets, every street, all times, everywhere. I went to all his old places, the studio on 10th Street with the little square yard and the screen door. Then, the pool house. Tiny, leafy, belonging to someone else. I lay on our bed and listened to the sea for a while. I ran my hand across his jackets and put my foot into one of his sneakers. I saw him standing behind me in the mirror laughing, but then he was not there at all. And all I saw was inside the past of someone else’s life.

I thought I might run into him, you know, at least one of him, there are so many. There’s the him in the back alley by the ocean, blowing into the ceramic bird I bought in Nicaragua. The him that’s high all the time, the sad him, the angry him, the lost him, the lying him, the sweet him, the loving him. And the dead him, sitting before me right here in the diner with all the other hims inside of him.

But I am sick of it. Sick of trying to figure it all out. Sick of waiting. Sick of the unending absence of things that are gone. I tell him that I am going to leave now. That I have to walk through the shape of what is left and burst into the world on the other side. He says nothing, but there is a faint grin on his lips.

Do you know how many times you can lose the same person? Forever is the answer. You can keep on losing the same person forever. Until you decide not to.

#

I walk out into the early evening air, dusk rising all around me. The sky is scattered and streaked with lilac. I think, if I look back, I will still see him. A face at the window. A figure in the booth. But I don’t look back. I no longer have to fix this or wait for the ending. Because this is how it ends. I decided so.

There have been all these lies scribbled on my face and for the longest time I thought they were his, and it had been very easy to be so angry about that all the time. Now I know they are mine, or at least now they are mine to erase.

I catch a glimpse of tomorrow in the darkening sky, and the day after that and the day after that and they are all beaming at me. You understand now, don’t you? they say.

And I do. I get it. It’s all mine. Every decision, every last choice. The final frame. Every ending.