Works in progress: Jack Clark on Lisa B. Gertz, 1952-2020

     Regular EGD readers might remember Jack Clark, the Chicago cabbie turned acclaimed mystery writer. He has a new private eye novel out, Nickel Dime Town. Jack wrote this tribute to his late wife, and asked if I would post it. 
     When I first read it, I was inclined to take my editor's scalpel and whittle it down to size.  But then I decided, his wife, his life and I should let him have his say, unabbreviated. Besides, it contains one of my new favorite lines, "How could you keep from bragging?" 

     I’ve been reading Eve Babitz lately. She was an L.A. rich kid who once told her grandmother that she had decided to become an adventurer. She seems to have lived up to that wish. She’s incredibly funny in a very dark way. She once testified at a Senate hearing in favor of LSD and told Bobby Kennedy, “Everyone I know smokes marijuana except my grandmother.” She loved Los Angeles, and the city seems to be the main subject of the two books I’ve read to date, both of which are mostly set in the 1960s. She hung out with, slept with, and wrote about the people you’d expect an L.A. adventurer to know. But it’s her humor that really shines through for me. It makes you feel you’re looking straight into her heart.
     Reading Babitz, I found myself frequently thinking about my ex-wife, Lisa B. Gertz. She would have loved her. Once I had the dark thought, maybe she did know of her, and she kept her a secret. No, I decided. Lisa and I talked books and writers all the time. She wouldn’t have been able to stop herself from calling to quote some of the best lines. They were both smart, extremely funny, and they both happened to be Jewish, but not of the religious variety. Lisa once described a Passover dinner at her family home. Her father would say, “The Jews came into Egypt. The Jews went out of Egypt. Let’s eat.” They were more into show tunes. She knew all the words.
     We were both big fans of Joan Didion, who Babitz has recently been compared to. I liked Play it as it Lays and Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Lisa was a big fan of The White Album and another book. It might have been Salvador. Neither one of us got very far with Didion’s most popular book, The Year of Magical Thinking, which we thought should have been retitled The 10,000 Famous People I Know. 

     “Now we know what John Gregory Dunne was doing all those years,” Lisa said. This was Didion’s husband whose death led to her magical thinking. They were known as each other’s first readers, and he’d obviously been cutting out all that name dropping for decades.
     Didion got some editing revenge. Lisa called me one day to ask if I’d read Dunne’s posthumous novel. “I looked through it at the library,” I said.
     “What’d you think?”
     “I don’t think I’ve ever finished any of his books.”
     “How about the beginning?”
     “That wasn’t Dunne,” I said. “That was Didion.”
     “Yes,” Lisa shouted. She’d noted it too. Didion hadn’t just edited her husband’s book. She’d tacked on her own beginning.
     Lisa called once and asked me if I remembered the beginning of The Man with the Golden Arm. “Of course,” I said. It’s one of my favorite novels.
     “Okay?”
     “Okay what?”
     “How’s it go?”
     I had to think for a second or two. “The captain never drank,” I started. “Yet, towards nightfall in that smoke-colored season between. . . “
     “Okay. That’s enough,” she cut me off, and was soon gone.
     I never did find out what that was about. I think she may have had some bet with someone.
     She called another time to tell me that she’d planned to kill Bob Greene. “How are you going to do it?” I saw no need to question her motive.
     “Oh, I decided I’d never get away with it,” she said. “How could you keep from bragging?”
     She was a big fan of The Bob Watch, of course. When an editor at the Reader gave me a bound copy of the entire series, I passed it on to her. I’m pretty sure she thought this was the best gift I’d ever given her.
     ` She called when I was living in Lincoln Square. “I was in your neighborhood last week and I suddenly understood all of 20th Century European history.”
     “Okay. Let’s hear it.”
     “Well, I went into Salamander Shoes, and I tried on a pair of boots. They were the most comfortable things I’d ever had on my feet.”
     “And how does this. . . “
     “So then I went down the street to that Northern European furniture store. I sat down on a sofa. It was like sitting on a tree, but you know it will last for two hundred years.”
     “And how does this explain. . . “
     “Well, we can’t sit here any longer. Let’s go invade Poland.”
     She was proud of herself, I could tell. But still, it took her an entire week to put that together.
     When I was having a hard time trying to sell my first novel, which was about a cab driver named Eddie Miles. She suggested I change his name to Edwina Miles and make her a lesbian separatist. I’d probably be rich now if I could have figured out how to pull it off.
     One day she called to tell me that she had some kind of blood cancer. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s going to take years to kill me.”
     We went out to lunch at the Greek Islands, and I asked her if she was going to have to go through chemotherapy. When she told me no, I said, “Oh, that’s good. I don’t think you’d survive it.” She was just so skinny. She didn’t have an extra ounce of fat to burn.
     I didn’t realize I’d hurt her feelings until she sent me an email: “I should have poured a drink in your pocket when you said I would never survive chemo.” She thought I was saying she wasn’t tough enough. I explained that that was not what I’d meant at all.
     Later, she told me she’d decided to forgive me.
     The last email I got from her came in late November 2019. She been thinking about the death of a friend’s child years before. “I think that funeral was the saddest thing I ever saw.”
     In that horrible spring of 2020, I realized I hadn’t heard from her in a while. I’d called several times and left messages, but she’d never called back. I made some phone calls and finally tracked her down to the Holy Family Medical Center in Des Plaines.
     I called the number that her son Alex had given me and asked to talk to her.
     “What’s your relationship?” the nurse asked.
     “I’m her ex-husband.”
     “Oh.” She snapped to attention. I think she might have missed the ex part. I heard her say to someone: “Lisa Gertz? Who’s she?”
     Another woman answered: “The one all the way at the end.”
     I don’t know if the nurse carried the phone all the way to the end. She probably transferred the call to the room phone. “She’s sleeping now,” she told me. “But I’ll put the phone down by her ear. Maybe she’ll wake up.” I don’t remember if she did wake up that day.
     Another time when I called, the nurse told me that Lisa was in treatment, and I assumed that this was for the slow-moving cancer that wasn’t quite ready to kill her.
     We did talk at least once but all she could say was that she was so tired. She didn’t have the energy to talk.
     I couldn’t visit her, of course. No one could. This was the time of Covid, and the medical community had decided that visits were too dangerous.
     In Israel, I read, a television crew was getting dressed in safety gear so they could film inside a Covid ward. An orderly asked, if you can do that for them, why couldn’t you do the same for the families? And so in Israel, they began to let one family member dressed in safety gear sit by the bed.
     To me, the great crime of the Covid years is that we let all those people die alone. I didn’t understand it then and I don’t understand it now. I never will.
     When Alex called me in May a few days before his mother’s 68th birthday, I knew what it was about before I picked up the phone. I wondered how long she’d waited down there, all the way at the end, before they’d figured out that she was dead.
     I assumed it was the cancer that had killed her. The doctor had given her a bit of hope that turned out to be false. Her sister called me after the death certificate arrived. Like so many others, Lisa had died of Covid.
     She never lost her sense of humor. I sent her text after text and left messages, but she never answered. In my last message I asked her to just give me some kind of response so I’d know I was actually getting through to her.
     She responded but I missed it at first. It wasn’t until after she died while scrolling through our texts that I found her final one, a single period. I’d asked for some kind of response, and she’d given me the smallest one she could come up with.
     Of course, there are other ways to read that as well.