As I fought my way through another day that felt, physically and mentally, like being trapped underwater, my thoughts kept returning to one thing: I miss being able to write. Not that I’ve lost the ability, obviously — I’m doing it right now — but it requires a greater effort than ever before. The slowdown had already started two years ago, when I created this site to catalog memories and document my adjustment (and Crankenstein’s) to a jarring new diagnosis. But I could still complete something like “Be My Baby,” one of the better pieces you’ll find here, in the course of an afternoon, while regularly producing content elsewhere, including a weekly post or two at Cranky.
Now I’m trapped in revision hell with a few of the longer posts I’m itching to finish here, and beyond delinquent with trivial TV movie reviews. The only way to sustain the tone I want for these and other projects is to focus on it completely, to the exclusion of everything else — including meals, exercise, engagement with hobbies and time with Crankenstein. Even just a year ago, my schedule was so much fuller. I’m not sure what suddenly shifted that left my capacity to multitask so drastically reduced, but I can’t bring myself to believe it’s a skill that’s permanently lost. No one should have to choose between housework or writing about Zuma Beach; surely the ability to do both (alongside more meaningful and rewarding assignments) still resides within me.
While I sit here like Edith and Archie at the piano and warble “Those Were the Days,” here’s something I once dashed off in less time than it takes to watch an episode of Eight is Enough. It was an answer to a casual question about my grandfather and there aren’t many words I’d change 11 years later. This is what I want to get back to here, if my brain and hands would cooperate. It was chosen for reasons you’ll understand once the fruits of my basement labor are revealed.
The Mistress
My grandfather’s mistress is a subject I always wanted to discuss with him but there was no way he was going to be honest with me about it. My earliest memories involve his cheating; there was no fun way to bring that up to him. He’d long been a philandering asshole but somehow his marriage survived everything that should’ve killed it until the mid-1980s.
There was the time I was sick and my mom took us to the pharmacy to pick up my prescription, and who should we see leaving the parking lot of the ice cream shop next door but my grandpa — and his mistress. There was the time my grandma decided to kick him out and my mom helped her pack his belongings while I played with a toy in their walk-in closet; full of Grandma and Papa’s clothes when I first took a seat and half-empty by the time they were done.
There was the time a few months later when I was hospitalized and there were many stony-faced family summits about whether Papa would be allowed to visit. Everyone seemed afraid he’d try to bring his mistress but all I really remember is the way they’d hiss the words “she” and “her” about her, as if she were subhuman. He ended up visiting by himself and gave me a toy that my mother and aunt were privately concerned “she” might’ve selected.
My illness brought my grandparents back together. Everyone was afraid I was going to die and my parents were essentially children themselves at the time, so my grandparents felt like they had to anchor the family. Papa moved back home and the phone would ring in the middle of the night and my grandmother forbade him from answering. One night it rang and they ignored it. The next day they found out his mistress was dead.
Did she have a history of mental illness? That’s what I always wanted to know. What else was going on in her life? My guess is she was probably a wreck; who else would’ve thought my grandfather was a prize? I remember thinking, just from those few seconds I saw her in the passenger seat of his car, that she was pretty. I have no idea how old she was; she was probably his age but something about her seemed young, or at least younger than my grandparents. No one ever mentioned her last name so I’ve not been able to research her.
My grandfather was a lazy slob in compression stockings, a compulsive adulterer and gambler who spent his whole life carelessly pissing away every opportunity that was afforded to him by people who’d worked much, much harder than he was ever willing to do.* His family owned numerous businesses, including one that’s still profitable today, yet he once escaped arrest by hiding his winnings in my grandmother’s sickbed and instructing her over the phone in Yiddish — she was upstairs and he was downstairs, a Gentile investigator hovering nearby — not to get out of bed.
He was an unrepentant underachiever who valued nothing in life besides books and skirt-chasing and getting his way. His parents were monsters and I’m sure that had a lot to do with how selfish he ended up being, but I’m not willing to overlook the possibility that he was simply a dick.
Did the mistress really love him? Did he love her? We used to sit in the basement, where he’d go to smoke his pipe away from my asthmatic grandmother, and we’d listen to his records and he’d talk to me about books and encourage me to be a writer. “You can be my biographer!” he’d say, and I’d sit there knowing I was going to tell his story one day. But it wouldn’t be the version he wanted told, it would be the version that clouded the first several years of my life.
I still want to write that story once my grandmother’s gone, but most of it will be based on nothing but conjecture. The details about it that captivate me the most are the ones so specific that I’m not sure I could dance around them without upsetting my aunt and uncle, but at the same time I don’t care. I’ve had two dream projects my whole life and this is one of them.
My grandfather, who used to never come home, being stuck there forever as his MS progressed, physically dependent on a woman who’d previously only stayed because she was financially dependent on him, seems like the kind of fucked-up ending he would’ve appreciated. “Poor Grandma” is how I was instructed to feel, but as I got older my thoughts would return to Papa’s final affair and how it might’ve felt to him to be trapped in a spastic, unreliable body, never far from my grandma’s hostility, perhaps grieving for a woman he was supposed to pretend didn’t exist.
The other, final mystery of her death has to do with the fact that she wasn’t the only person who died. She caused, directly or indirectly, another death at the same time. Had she been so distraught in her final moments that the logical progression of her actions, beyond her own demise, never occurred to her? Had there been circumstances that made her want that other person to die?
When I tell the story it will be accidental and my grandmother won’t be happy about her death. When I tell the story, I’m not even sure she’ll stay with Papa. My favorite ending is Grandma leaving him and remarrying a boring, steady guy named Irving who was everything Papa was not, and my grandfather reflecting on what he lost after she dies, as his children mourn her with their stepfather instead of him.
None of that’s really Investigation Discovery material, but maybe I could make everyone sinister and potentially murderous and sell it to Lifetime.
* “Gambler” and “winnings” were simplifications; he was a bookie, so I suppose his earnings were the vig. And he wasn’t a full-time reprobate, he always held professional jobs and this was an illicit sideline that fed his passions for numbers and gambling. By his late forties, when I came along, those days were behind him, though his fixation on odds and statistics remained. Lastly, he’d want me to clarify that his skirmish with the law ultimately went nowhere; he’d always declared his gambling income, which apparently satisfied whatever inquiry was made. Before my grandmother developed dementia, she confirmed both the Yiddish story and that he declared his gambling income, but I’d like to check one day and see if there are any records of what happened. His bookmaking activities weren’t kosher, regardless of how it was represented on their returns.