American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  The room smelled of some perfume that I couldn’t readily identify—but it was intensely floral and reminded me in a flash of recall of something one of my elementary school teachers used to wear. It was a venerable scent. It was the scent of an older woman with sensible shoes.

  I crept to the bedroom, not knowing what I would find there, afraid to open the door that had been left slightly ajar. Had Byron picked someone up? Did he go out and bring a woman back to our apartment? A mature woman? Was the Falcon Crest matriarch Angela Channing having an affair with my twenty-six-year-old husband?

  I held my breath. I pushed open the door. There was my husband, shirtless in the bed (and I assume naked under the sheet, since this is how he normally slept), and next to him—I will just say it. You will be kind, I hope. There, lying next to him, was my grandmother—my mother’s mother—my Nanna-Lou. Not in the flesh. In a special surrogate form especially prepared by my husband Byron. He’d enlarged the face of my grandmother from the picture he’d taken such a liking to, and had pasted it over the face of the blow-up doll he must have gotten at some porn shop.

  He was asleep. He was smiling in his sleep. My grandmother was still awake. She was smiling, too. She was smiling and staring at the ceiling of our bedroom, as if she were reliving in happy remembrance the at first romantic, then disgustingly carnal night she had just spent with my husband, her own grandson-in-law.

  “Byron,” I said. “Byron?”

  Two more invocations of my husband’s name roused him from what I assumed was blissful post-coital sleep. But the smile disappeared in a heartbeat. My husband stammered. No words came.

  I had plenty of words I could have said, but all that came out was, “You’re beyond sick.” Then I fled to spend the rest of the night with a friend.

  When I returned later that morning, Byron had prepared his explanation. “I know that you will find this hard to believe, but I have fallen helplessly in love with your Nanna-Lou.”

  “Byron, you stupid fuck, she isn’t that beautiful young woman anymore. You’ve created a wild fantasy for yourself, because I’m apparently no longer good enough for you.”

  “That isn’t true.”

  “You got intimate with a blow-up doll, Byron. A blow-up doll with my grandmother’s face on it.”

  “I only kissed and caressed it. I swear!”

  “It’s still sick. Nanna-Lou is seventy-eight years old. What would she say if she ever found out that you’ve been getting off on thinking about going to bed with her ever since you saw her picture in that photo album?”

  “Well, here’s the thing, baby. I think I want to drive out to Rochester next weekend and see her.”

  “You are rubber-room insane.”

  “Hear me out.” Byron sat me down on the sofa. He still hadn’t removed the dishes from the dining room table.

  “Did you pretend that she came to dinner?” I asked, glancing over at the table. “Did you actually put food on a second plate and pour a second glass of Chablis?”

  Byron nodded. “She wasn’t all that hungry—or thirsty. I finished everything for her. She gently corrected my table manners and reminded me to chew my food more slowly. I think, baby—I think it might help if I spent some time with her. With how she is right now. You know, old. I think it would help me to let go of my fantasy—come to realize that it will never—can never be. Sometimes fantasies are only unfulfilled wishes that quickly dissolve away in the bright light of circumstantial reality.”

  “How long did it take you to come up with that?”

  “Let’s go see her. She doesn’t have to know about any of this.”

  “You better hope to God she never finds out.”

  The next Saturday Byron and I packed the Excel. I made a gift basket of some of my favorite scented glycerin soaps, and we drove to Rochester. My grandmother had lived for many years in Yorba Linda, California. But she moved back to Minnesota after my grandfather died. She also wanted to be near the Mayo Clinic. She said that whenever her sciatica flared up it gave her peace of mind to know that the best doctors in the world were located only a few blocks away.

  True to his word, my husband dropped not even the tiniest hint that he had been wrestling with a terrible romantic obsession, said not a word about the fact that he had fallen madly, crazy-ass in love with a woman who, in fact, no longer existed. He came to see, through the course of our visit, that her beauty was different now, and the most beautiful thing about her was her kind and loving heart. I loved my Nanna-Lou. She was a sweet, doting, comical old soul. This is the person whom Byron got to know that afternoon. And my grandmother liked Byron. In fact, she said she had warmed to him at first sight—at our wedding—in spite of the fact that he had obviously gotten himself hammered and had not shown himself in the best light.

  We had meatloaf. And Nanna-Lou had baked an apple strudel. She talked of my grandfather, of my mother and my three uncles, and, thankfully, very little of her co-ed days, when she was the campus catch.

  Shortly before it was time for our drive back to Madison, I excused myself to pick a bouquet of evening primroses from her garden. When I returned, Nanna-Lou and Byron were seated on the sofa, a photo album between them. My grandmother was pointing to a particular photograph. Her eyes were moist and she was touching the corners with a lace handkerchief.

  “His name was Harold Connelly,” she said with whispered reverence. “And I would have married him the minute he asked, but he dropped out of school after only a semester to help out at his father’s farm. Do you see the resemblance?”

  I saw the resemblance. Harold Connelly looked very much like my husband Byron. My skin went cold.

  “I have always wondered what it would have been like if he’d fallen in love with me.”

  I sat down next to my grandmother. She was now sitting between the two of us.

  “Sometimes when I picture Harold,” she said, her words softly and carefully delivered, “he’s making love to me. The wine, the candlelight.” She sighed. Her gaze was fixed upon my husband. It was as if he, for that brief, transcendent moment, had become Harold.

  As Byron and I walked to the car, Nanna-Lou stood behind the screen door watching us. We got in the car. But before Byron could turn the key in the ignition, he turned to me and said, “I just need a minute. There’s something I have to—” He didn’t finish his sentence. He strode up the stone path to my grandmother’s bungalow, climbed the stairs to her porch, opened the screen door and then took her in his arms and kissed her fully upon the lips.

  Then he returned to the car. We drove back to Madison in silence, while I entertained thoughts of divorce—thoughts I am still having to this day. Because my two-timing husband is still having an affair with my grandmother, in his mind.

  But then, Lord only knows what’s going through my Nanna-Lou’s head.

  That hussy homewrecker.

  1986

  LOCKED OUT IN TEXAS

  In June of 1986, a long-forgotten, five-by-eight-foot Remington Rand safe was discovered in an office building under renovation in Doylestown Township in Pennsylvania. A locksmith was hired, the safe was opened, and its contents were revealed before a number of interested onlookers and local historians. Discovered within were various account books and other papers pertaining to the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works, glass photographic plates, copper plate-blocks for printing illustrations of tile designs, and, for those eager for at least something historically idiosyncratic, a few animal bones and birds’ nests.

  The locksmith, a gentleman named William Kroche Jr., had no trouble cracking the safe.

  Likewise, syndicated broadcaster Geraldo Rivera had no problem earlier that year opening up the secret vaults of notorious gangster Al Capone in a live television program appropriately called The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults. What was discovered therein was breathtakingly anticlimactic: several empty bottles. Mr. Rivera surmised that they had once contained bathtub gin.

  On August 19, luggage locker number 227 in the
Spencer Street railway station in Melbourne, Australia, was opened with minimal effort and that which was discovered inside was exactly what police had been looking for the last two weeks: the stolen and ransomed Picasso painting, The Weeping Woman.

  On November 25 of that same year, Fawn Hall, secretary to Lt. Colonel Oliver North, unlocked with a simple turn of the wrist a file cabinet in her boss’s office, so that she could retrieve confidential papers that she would then smuggle out, conveyed within her leather boots.

  Each safe, vault, luggage locker, and file cabinet noted above was opened with relative ease. In keeping with this pattern, you might think that it should be an effortless thing for an old man—entirely naked but for his gym-issue towel, standing in front of his locker in the basement of Town Lake YMCA in Austin, Texas, on the morning of Saturday, December 6 of that same year—to turn the dial of the single-dial Masterlock which dangled before him and gain easy access to his possessions inside.

  And it would be a simple and easy thing if the old man, whose name was Lester Henderson, could remember the numbers of the combination in their proper order.

  But he could not.

  As hard as he tried.

  The numbers had been there in his head not twenty minutes earlier, when he had put his gym clothes and shoes inside the locker and locked it up and padded barefoot and bare-bodied to the showers. And the numbers had also been there three afternoons before when he had come to the Y—just as he had come today—to lift dumbbells, to punch the boxing bag, and to toss the old-fashioned medicine ball about. All these things he could still do, though there were now things that he could not—things that his wife of forty-nine years, whose name was Audrey Henderson, would no longer permit him to do. Lester could no longer cut the grass, for example, after Audrey had found him standing motionless one day in the yard, the motor of the mower still whirring, either lost in thought, or thinking, more troublingly, of nothing at all.

  He could no longer light the backyard grill and attend the flame after it flared up one day and singed his cook’s apron.

  And he could no longer drive. This was the hardest prohibition to accept. He had started driving when he was thirteen; he had driven the pickup truck on his father’s ranch north of Waxahachie. He had taught all three of his own sons to drive.

  On some days Lester understood fully why his wife felt it necessary to take these things away from him. He wasn’t as sharp as he used to be, he had to admit, and much more forgetful as of late. On other days, however, Lester Henderson raged against his wife for relegating him to a kind of second adolescence—one with restrictions and curfews, and marked by a humiliating lack of trust.

  Audrey had driven her husband to the YMCA that morning. He had told her that his friend Charlie would be there. The two men usually worked out on the Nautilus machines and sparred with the boxing gloves and then went for a trot around Town Lake, which was actually a dammed section of the Colorado River overlooked by the skyscrapers of downtown Austin on the north side. But this particular Saturday Charlie would not be there. Lester knew this, but he lied so that his wife would let him come to the YMCA that morning while she shopped. There was very little that she and their grown children allowed him to do for himself these days. At the gym, he could be his own man. He could be the young man that he once was, working his muscles and expanding his lungs. Lester felt invigorated, revitalized there. He didn’t feel like the doddering, forgetful person he had become. Not the Alzheimer’s victim that everyone else knew him to be.

  The numbers had left his head. They had been there only minutes before; he had turned the dial in the correct access sequence—clockwise to the first number and then counter-clockwise past the first number to the second and then clockwise again to the third number. It had always been so simple for him that he could almost do it without thinking.

  But now he was forced to think about it quite a bit. The first number was thirty-six…he was sure of this much. But the second and third numbers remained elusive.

  The locker room was nearly empty. It was late morning. The early risers had finished their crack-of-dawn workouts and gone home. The young men who came in the afternoon after sleeping off their carousing from the night before had yet to arrive. There was a man at the end of the row of lockers, but he seemed in a hurry to dress and leave, and Lester was reluctant to bother him. There were classes going on upstairs—aerobics and abdominal intensives. He could go up there and find someone, let them know that he was having trouble with his lock, but the towel was small and left a good part of him fully exposed. His was an old man’s body, drooping and flaccid and covered with wrinkles in spite of his best efforts to tighten up à la the eternally youthful Jack LaLanne. This wouldn’t work at all.

  The only thing that potentially could work was to sit and think and perhaps the numbers would eventually come back to him. Or he could sit and wait for one of the young YMCA employees to come by—one of the young men who gathered up the used towels and wiped down the exercise machines.

  Lester sat. He wondered if he would have to stop coming to the gym. It was important to lock up his clothes. Clothes often got stolen from unlocked lockers. He liked to shower at the gym. The shower at home was over the bathtub. Sometimes he would forget to put down the non-slip bathtub mat and his wife would make a comment. She would say that she was going to start doing it for him, because she didn’t want him to fall and break his hip.

  Audrey had started to do too many things for him already. Things like chauffeuring him around. Smaller things like going to the grocery store alone when the two had always gone together. It was something they’d done since they were young newlyweds, pinching pennies and eating buttered spaghetti, and rice and beans. He was an undergraduate at the time, studying accounting at the University of Texas on a small scholastic scholarship.

  Lester laughed mordantly to himself. As a CPA, he had spent his life around numbers. He had arranged them for specific purposes, subjected them to countless mathematical operations, used them as a form of language to tell hundreds of different stories. Numbers comprised the nuts and bolts of his life. His facility with them had provided a good home for his wife and three sons, had put each of his boys through college.

  Now the numbers betrayed him. They left him sitting naked and wet upon a wooden bench facing a locker that would not allow him access because he couldn’t crack the elusive code. His world had become inscrutable—filled with things that had stopped making sense to him. He felt helpless. And he hated feeling helpless, hated feeling dependent.

  Men would soon come into this locker room in large numbers—young men, vibrant men, men with their lives spread out in front of them—they would come and see him in this compromised state and they would pity him and there would be nothing he could do to win back their respect.

  The man at the end of the row had been turned away from Lester but was now clearly looking in his direction. The man’s name was Cleve. Cleve was in his early thirties—just slightly younger, he appeared to Lester, than Lester’s youngest son Jack.

  Cleve closed his locker door and slung his gym bag over his shoulder. He started out of the locker room but then stopped and turned back to focus on Lester again.

  “You having some trouble there?” Cleve asked, casually but not mocking.

  “A little, yes. I can’t seem to get my locker opened.”

  Cleve nodded. “You got it open before you went into the shower, right?”

  Lester nodded. “But it’s giving me trouble now.”

  “Oh.” Cleve walked over and set his gym bag down on the bench. He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. His hair was wet and combed and he smelled like Dial soap. The smell reminded Lester of his sons, who had often come down to dinner from showering after their late afternoon football and basketball practices smelling strongly of deodorant soap and youthful colognes.

  Lester had no trouble remembering the way that things smelled or tasted or felt. Memories of these visceral things had yet to break
faith with him.

  “What’s the number? I’ll try it for you.”

  Lester didn’t answer. Nor did he look up to meet Cleve’s eyes.

  Now Cleve understood.

  “Let me go find Manuel,” he said. “He’s around here somewhere. I’m sure he’s got a bolt cutter.”

  “Much obliged,” said Lester. The words were those of his rancher father. He didn’t know why he said them. They took Lester back to a time long, long ago—a time that he’d been visiting through his memories more and more often.

  Cleve returned five minutes later with Manuel, a man in his late twenties who worked for the YMCA. Manuel was sorry to admit that he didn’t have a bolt cutter because someone had stolen it. The day before yesterday. He had it on his list to buy a new one, but regardless, he couldn’t get to petty-cash until the director came in on Monday. Lester thought that there must be a safe in the office that held the money box—a safe that was just as impenetrable for Manuel as Lester’s locker was for him.

  “You tried the combination in several different ways?” asked Manuel.

  Lester nodded. Cleve took Manuel aside and spoke to him quietly. Manuel nodded in response. His look became sympathetic.

  Lester could easily guess what was being said. Such things were always spoken in whispers and with backs turned. People were always talking about him and giving him that same look. It angered him, and yet, was it not true? He couldn’t get into his locker because his brain had ceased to retain the numbers that access required. It was a very simple fact—a medical, a scientific fact. Like the clean science of numbers. Numbers don’t judge. They just are.

  “Is there someone who’s supposed to come here and get you?” asked Cleve with a hopeful look. The last thing, obviously, that Cleve wanted to hear was that Lester had driven himself—that the keys to his car were also there in the impregnable locker, that special arrangements would have to be made before the problem could be fully resolved.