ESSAYS
We Walked Slowly Among the Lemon TreesIOWA CITY, IOWA 03 May 2007 |
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My grandfather was a handsome man with a dark complexion, enormous hands and broad shoulders. He played football and lacrosse for the University of Pennsylvania. In the Army he was a great boxer.
His brother owned a nightclub in Brooklyn - Ben Maksik’s Town and Country.
Everybody played there. Judy Garland, Bobby Darrin. Louis Prima. Harry Belafonte.
My grandmother, beautiful all her life, was a model when she met my grandfather. By then she’d been on the cover of Look magazine and The Saturday Evening Post.
I have a clipping from Life magazine framed on my wall – May 22nd, 1944. She and her eight-month-old son are lying on a bed together – he’s smiling at the camera. She has shoulder-length brown hair, a small nose and brown eyes. Beneath the photograph is a caption.
Their homes were immaculate with good art on the walls. They belonged to country clubs where they played golf and tennis. They traveled often and stayed in the best hotels.
They were the kind of people who knew the concierge by name. They loved to be regulars, to be received, to be known. My grandfather carried a money clip and tipped generously.
I remember him lying in the sun wearing small white tanning glasses over his eyes, his skin so dark he might have been from Kerala or Sicily but his blood was Russian.
As a boy, I loved to watch him prepare his pipe. He made a popping noise with his mouth as he drew the flame of his match into the pipe’s bowl. I liked the sweetness of the tobacco smoke and the way he held me on his lap, the smoke swirling around us.
My grandmother drove a Mercedes convertible with the top down, a silk scarf around her throat, a Chanel handbag on the passenger seat beside her.
Both of them dressed beautifully all the time. Their closets were full of bespoke clothing and important labels.
Eventually they moved from an exquisite house in Rancho Santa Fe, California into a large apartment in downtown San Diego. They said they wanted to live somewhere that felt like New York but with warm weather. San Diego is a terribly boring city, and in no way resembles Manhattan. Though they never admitted it, I think they were disappointed. San Diego was a sort of wasteland and the move, their last, was a sharp blow.
The apartment was a modish place on two floors with a rooftop deck and a swimming pool. My grandmother decorated it herself. There was red Italian leather furniture, pen and ink nudes and designer tables.
On staff were doormen and valets.
As they grew older they stopped seeing their friends. They became increasingly insular. My grandmother did what she’d done most of her life; she doted on my grandfather.
They went out to dinner. They went for walks. They read books. They argued about where they’d eaten the best steak, the best bagels.
They no longer played tennis and golf. They stopped traveling. My grandfather began to have trouble walking. My grandmother slipped and fell in their favorite restaurant and cut her leg open on a sharp marble step.
They left the apartment less often. Their world became a miniature. They turned entirely in on themselves, shielding each other from whatever it was they saw out there in the dark – deterioration, weakness, ugliness, loss of dignity. Death.
They had long conversations about restaurants and hotels. What year had it been? Where were they living? Who was the waiter?
Having never been particularly interested in other people’s lives, in their old age, they became even less so. They were entirely self-referential.
I think they were slightly insane before my grandfather became sick with Alzheimer’s disease.
Their isolation, their fiercely closed lives drove them crazy before the dementia. When my grandfather began to ask me the same questions over and over, when he began to call me by my father’s name and ask about my mother as if she were my wife, the change didn’t feel severe - they’d been stubbornly floating away for years.
Their pride was such that at the beginning they refused to acknowledge their failings. On the rare occasions when they left the apartment they continued to drive their car. They let the registration lapse, received parking tickets and didn’t pay them.
Once I visited them with my girlfriend. We met at their apartment, and they insisted on taking us to dinner. My grandmother sat in the passenger seat, we sat in the back and my grandfather drove. When he turned on the windshield wipers to turn left, my girlfriend and I giggled.
But it wasn’t very funny. They were out of control, my grandparents. And they must have felt it, felt themselves hurtling towards what they saw as a very ugly, very undignified and very unfashionable end.
I was living in Los Angeles and would, from time to time, drive down or take the train to visit them. I’d stay in a guest apartment, which the building provided for visitors. There was a gym, a spa, and a small game room, which I never saw anyone use.
My grandmother waited on my grandfather hand and foot. She barely left his side. She defined most of her life by serving him. When I’d come to visit, the three of us would sit in the kitchen and eat breakfast together. During one of my last visits my grandmother became hysterical because she couldn’t toast the bagels the way she knew my grandfather wanted them. She left the stove on and burned the eggs. She had trouble cutting the juice oranges but refused to let me help. Her hands trembled. She couldn’t grip the fruit.
My grandfather sat immobile at the table.
As if in solidarity, their meticulously decorated apartment began to deteriorate. The carpet was worn, appliances failed and weren’t replaced, the air was stale, and the apartment became dingy. It was nothing obvious, but my grandmother was a perfectionist; she was obsessive about her appearance and, by extension, her home.
When I was little she made me sandwiches on thin, delicate slices of bread. She cut carrots in uniform sticks. She garnished the plate with cherry tomatoes. I was always amazed by her ability to make everything pretty. Nothing was out of order.
She always knew when I’d stolen candy from the bowl in the living room.
I visited less often. My grandparents were exhausting, demanding, and, frankly, they were boring. They talked of nothing but themselves. This was true when they were younger but now they’d become absolutely withdrawn. My grandfather had become oppressive. He gained weight. He began to drink. He stopped dressing for the day and instead wore his pajamas.
One summer when they were in Italy, my parents sent him a Missoni bathrobe. I’d never seen him wear it and then all of a sudden it was all he wore. He tied it loosely around his growing belly.
On one trip, my grandfather had fallen asleep in his chair, his chin on his chest, and I coaxed my grandmother out of the apartment and into the hall.
I took her to the game room, grim and windowless, where I taught her to play pool. She was terrible. When she lined up a shot she narrowed her eyes and cocked her head to the side. It was a look I’d never seen on her face – pure determination and focus. She giggled when she missed the ball entirely. It was the most fun we’d ever had together and it reminded me how much I loved her.
Soon she said that she needed to go back; she had to check on my grandfather.
Let’s play another game, I insisted.
But she was too nervous.
I can’t leave him alone, she told me.
My grandfather began to yell at my grandmother. He accused her of having an affair with one of the bellmen and imagined that he’d beaten him up. He wore a white t-shirt under his robe. It was stained. The apartment smelled of urine. So did he.
A nurse came to live with them. She filled their refrigerator with terrible food my grandparents would never have bought themselves– baloney, iceberg lettuce, frosted supermarket cakes, American cheese, Wonderbread, Miracle Whip.
Things began to rot.
The nurse stole from my grandparents.
One of the last times I visited they asked me to make them lunch. I made baloney sandwiches with French’s mustard, some stale potato chips. The lettuce was brown and I had to throw it away.
We ate in the living room, plates on our laps - my grandfather, fat, an oxygen tank at his side, his robe threadbare, said nothing.
None of us did.
Afterwards my grandmother held onto my arm and we walked outside onto the rooftop deck. Her hands were always cool. They were soft and impossibly thin. She squeezed my bare arm with her fingers. We moved very slowly among the lemon trees, my grandmother stopping to point out the fruit, encouraging me to take some home. We talked about the weather.
It isn’t as cool as it was yesterday, she said. Might be a hot summer.
She asked me to hand her a lemon. When I did she ran her delicate nail across its skin and held it up to my nose.
I love that smell, she said.
In the bright sunshine my grandmother looked particularly pale. She was so slight. There were mysterious bruises on her legs. Scabs. She looked very old and still very beautiful.
From the deck we could see new buildings going up, the city skyline, the Pacific Ocean far out to the west.
We could also see directly into the San Diego Central Jail, a tall building rising up across the street. I’d always found it unsettling to sit by the pool and glance up at a prison but that day it was devastating.
I kissed my grandparents goodbye and drove home to Los Angeles feeling miserable.
Before I moved to Paris my grandfather gave me some of his clothes – shirts and sweaters he didn’t want anymore. Things he wouldn’t ever wear again.
I think he was lucid enough to understand, if only vaguely, that he would give me these things because he’d never leave his apartment before he died. His shirts were all famous brands and most of them had been designed for him. There were little tags sewn into the collar, which indicated when they’d been made, and for whom.
One of his shirts still hangs in my closet. He’d ordered from Neiman Marcus ten years before he died: Sol Maksik – 1992.
Looking at that little tag I wonder if, when he’d been standing before his tailor’s mirror, he had any sense of how little time was left.
* * *
My grandmother died first, halfway out of her bed and on her way somewhere. Perhaps she was heading to the bathroom and suddenly, with no warning, her heart stopped beating. Or perhaps she knew, felt a shock of pain and was reaching for my grandfather, reaching for his help.
I have some bad news, my dad said when I answered the phone.
I called my grandfather. He was surprisingly coherent. I imagined him there in the bright daylight, alone, the silence of the place overwhelming, bearing down on him.
His voice was weak. In my entire life I’d never seen him display any real emotion. That day though he was despondent; he sounded so utterly sad.
She was a great lady, he said. She was a great lady.
Yes she was, I said.
That’s the way life is though. Nothing you can do.
He was trying to pull himself together.
Are you ok? I asked
Huh? Oh sure, yeah, sure. Why?
I’m worried about you, I said.
About me? Why?
Because -
Yes, he said, remembering, his voice quavering. She was a great lady.
Are you ok?
There was a long silence.
Poppy?
Yes, I’m here. I think it’s time to go. I’ll talk to you soon.
I love you, I said.
Ok, you too.
He fumbled with the phone and then the line went dead.
Months later he died.
The apartment was stripped clean.
I still imagine my grandfather alone there, half-sane, his wife vanished and the night coming fast.
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