“Bill and I are eating our lunch on the new roof. We’re having a naked lunch.”
It was in the late fifties when I arrived in Paris from Montreal to be met by the man I was living with, later to become my husband, the Canadian poet Irving Layton. Irving, who was the recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts poetry grant, which enabled us both to travel, greeted me at the airport with an exuberant poem “The Day Aviva Came to Paris” and the news that we were going straight from the airport to have lunch with William Burroughs (whom we’d never met), with a stopover at Shakespeare and Co. I thought I’d died and gone to writers’ heaven. Jet lag? Shower? Breakfast? Who cared? I had arrived in Paris not as a mere tourist but as a privileged insider.
When we arrived at the legendary bookstore, the owner, George Whitman, invited us upstairs, which I’d heard was a rare privilege. He ushered us up the rickety wooden ladder to the famous upper room, where he told us to make ourselves at home among the low divans and stacks of books, but only after Irving had checked that his books were prominently displayed (they weren’t) in the downstairs store. There was a window at the end of the room, which looked over a corrugated plastic roof several feet below us.
We lolled on the divans like pashas, while George brought us coffee on a brass tray and sat down to fill us in on our lunch. It turned out that Burroughs was withdrawing from a heavy heroin habit and was being looked after by his friends, among them Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, all of whom were living in a nearby ratbag hotel on rue Git-le-Coeur. We were slated to take over from them at Burroughs’s bedside for two hours, and Allen was going to leave us our lunch of baguettes and cheese, which we’d eat while making sure that Burroughs didn’t make a bolt for it. After our shift had finished, we’d meet Allen at La Coupole, sip absinthe, and generally behave like the literary celebrities we so clearly were.
A few minutes after George left, Irving started grimacing and grabbing his stomach. “I think I need to use the toilet,” he said with a moan. He started swaying around the room like a drunken sailor. “Aviva, I need a toilet. Where is it?” he shouted, his voice strained and urgent. I looked around the room. No toilet. It was obviously downstairs, but Irving was in no shape to negotiate the narrow ladder. By now he’d turned a pale shade of green and was sweating profusely.
It was clear he couldn’t wait a second longer, so he did the only possible thing he could do, which was to hurl himself out the window. First I heard the sickening thud of his body landing on the corrugated roof, followed by an ominously loud cracking sound. Rushing to the window, I saw that the weight of Irving’s plunge had created a ragged hole through which his bottom half had fallen in mid-shit, while his upper half was trapped above. He was wedged tight. There were horrified shrieks from below, where, it turned out, the owners of a chic gallery had been preparing for a vernissage that evening.
Above their shrieks came the sound of George thundering up the ladder. “You filthy pig!” he shouted at the famous Canadian poet whom he’d welcomed so warmly only a short time ago. His pale, thin, rather aristocratic face was suffused—understandably—with rage and disgust.
My memory of the next few minutes has, mercifully, been erased, but I have vague images of venturing out onto the cracked roof to help Irving clamber out and clean himself up as best he could. What I do remember with great clarity, though, is Irving and me trudging through the industrial wasteland of some Parisian suburb, dragging a huge sheet of newly bought corrugated plastic through dreary streets, unable to fit it into either a taxi or a bus and delivering it to the still-enraged George. Gone was the William Burroughs lunch! Gone was the warm welcome at Shakespeare and Co.! Gone was La Coupole! Gone was the best part of our holiday budget! We left Paris shortly afterward for Rome, where we had to stay in a rat-and-cockroach-infested hostel because it was all we could afford.
All of this happened well over fifty years ago, when we were young and beautiful. Irving died at the age of ninety-two, George Whitman at ninety-eight, and William Burroughs at eighty-three. I’m still here, which is why at the ripe old age of eighty-five, I’ve decided to finally give myself the gift of having the lunch with William Burroughs I so ignominiously missed out on. Having once said that an imaginary world is the one in which he would like to live, I don’t think he’d mind, so this is our lunch. . . .
It’s a gentle spring day in Paris, and Bill and I are eating our lunch on the new roof. We’re having a naked lunch. Never mind the metaphorical meaning of the title of the book he’ll write a year later—we’re literally buck naked, both our bodies sun-kissed and silky and indescribably perfect. The plastic roof has transformed itself into a glass one, which sparkles in the soft Parisian sunshine. Through the glass we can see the gallery below, its proprietors lifting delicate flutes of champagne to toast us. Irving is sitting by the window, quietly writing another love poem to me; Allen and Peter are noisily making love on one of the divans in the corner while Bill and I are blissfully sipping the nectar of the gods. We drank, we gabbed, we ate, we laughed, all as if we were old friends newly reunited.
And that is my naked lunch with William Burroughs. At last, and well worth waiting for.
Aviva Layton has taught literature in universities, colleges, and arts schools and has reviewed books for newspapers, journals, and radio in both the United States and Canada. She is the author of a novel, Nobody’s Daughter, and several children’s books and has had essays published in four previous anthologies. She currently lives in LA, where she works as a literary editor.