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.