Mark Dunn - American Decameron

Is being incredibly pissed and really, really weirded out proper grounds for divorce?

It all started with the death of my great-aunt Rue, who departed unmarried and childless but in possession of a house filled with scrapbooks, photo albums, and family keepsakes. Aunt Rue never threw anything out because she felt that she was the keeper of the family flame — the official archivist for her branch of my family, never perhaps considering the fact that once she died, people would have to come together and somehow divide up (or discard) the tons of family memorabilia (mostly crap) she had accumulated over her eighty long, very acquisitive years on earth.

Aunt Rue lived in Mankato, Minnesota. We all — her four surviving siblings, all the nieces and nephews, and a few of us great-nieces and nephews — gathered and grieved for about ten minutes and then rolled up our sleeves and got down to the real reason for our visit to this warehouse-with-a-bed-and-toilet: excavation. I inherited all of her photo albums. Nobody else wanted them. Aunt Rue wasn’t a bad photographer, but she didn’t edit. I thought Byron was going to kill me when I drove up in the Excel with twenty photo albums on board, all containing pictures of people Byron has never met, with the exception of my seventy-eight-year-old grandmother, whom he had met only once, at our wedding.

But he was pretty cool with it. More than cool, actually. Byron was fascinated with this voluminous photographic record of multiple generations of one Minnesota family. We spent a whole Saturday night getting stoned while he asked me the names of nearly everyone in the pictures, eventually becoming quite proficient at identifying the subjects himself.

He was especially taken with my grandmother.

Let’s just give that statement a little breathing room.

Let’s just circle around that statement and poke it a little and see if it’s as dangerous, as potentially marriage-shatteringly cataclysmic here at the outset as it would later prove to be.

Lingering over her photograph — one of those eight-by-ten studio portraits (I forget the occasion, the college cotillion or something) — he said, and I would not make this up: “She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“Excuse me. Maybe you haven’t noticed that your reportedly beautiful wife is still in the room.”

“And now I know where you got every little thing about that face of yours that’s always turned me on. That gently sloping nose. Those smoldering eyes.”

“You can’t say hair, Byron,” I said, pointing at the picture. “Nobody’s done their hair like that since Gloria Swanson.”

“I’m having a transcendent moment. Don’t ruin it. Look at her. How many boyfriends did she have in school?”

“I don’t know. I just know that she met my grandfather at the university. That’s who she wound up with”

“How did he get so lucky?”

“I’m not sure that I’m enjoying this conversation, Byron.”

“I’m just saying — look, all I’m saying—”

“Is that you have the hots for my grandmother. Although you didn’t even hint at this possibility when you met her at our wedding.”

“I don’t remember meeting her at the wedding. Did you introduce me before the ceremony, when I was hung over from the bachelor party, or after the ceremony, when I was brain-fucked on champagne and weed?”

“Help me find a place for all these photo albums. They’re dusty, and I don’t want to have to take another Allerest.”

“I want this picture.” Byron removed the glamour studio portrait of my twenty-year-old grandmother from the album.

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Can I hang it on the wall? Don’t people have pictures of their grandmothers up on their wall?”

I eyed Byron suspiciously, but didn’t say anything.

A couple of weeks later I had to drive to Milwaukee to attend a bridal shower for one of my college suite-mates. Because I would be gone the weekend, I left some healthy food choices in the fridge. In my absence, my husband will usually eat only Whoppers and multiple Happy Meals, or fill up on crap at one of the many Madtown brewpubs where he likes to hang out with his friends from the radio station. Byron is such a typical “Madison man” it’s frightening: he’ll spend an hour Bonzo’ing President Reagan with his equally Republican-loathing, liberal NPR cronies, and then, masculated by beer, he’ll shift gears and devote the rest of the evening to trying to out-macho his he-men companions by talking Packers and venison Brats and memorable moments in the annals of female conquest.

But not this weekend. This weekend Byron stayed home and entertained my grandmother.

How do I tell this without throwing up a little in my mouth?

I left Milwaukee early. One of my ex-boyfriends showed up. Not at the shower, but later that night at the motel, not only to see me but to visit with all of the women he had balled during that scorched-earth period of my sophomore year when he must have been keeping tally on some wall somewhere. Reliving it all creeped me out and I split a few hours earlier than I’d planned to. I was supposed to be home by Sunday afternoon; instead, I got home early Sunday morning — a little after two in the morning to be exact.

There were lights on.

Good, I thought; Byron’s still up. I can score some points by telling him that, faced with the prospect of spending time with a man who now makes my skin crawl, I came home to my husband instead. I opened the front door of the apartment. There were candles on the dining room table that had burned themselves down to the point of gutter-glow. I checked my impulse to call out his name. There were two plates on the table, two wine glasses with a little puddle of wine in each. It looked like someone had used our apartment for a romantic evening out of the Rock Hudson/Doris Day playbook.

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.