Mark Dunn - American Decameron

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.

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.