The Piano Tuner

by Peter Meinke

  “I don’t care what everyone says,” my father would shout, turning red. “You watch your lip around here, and fast!”

  On weekends we sat around a fire in the vacant lot, smoking cigarettes I had stolen (the Murphys favored the Lucky Strike red bull’s-eye pack, which showed through the pockets of their white shirts) and eating mickeys which I had scooped up from in front of Tietjen’s Grocery. About six of us were generally there—the Murphys, myself, and two or three of the tougher kids on the block whose faces have faded from my memory.

  One spring day when rains had turned the lot into trenches of red clay among the weeds and abandoned junk—people dumped old stoves, broken bicycles, useless trash there—Tom Murphy had the idea for The Lineup. This was based on a combination of dodge ball from school and firing squads from the daily news. The idea was to catch kids from the neighborhood, line them up like enemy soldiers against the garage that backed on to the lot, and fire clay balls at them. They would keep score and see who was the best shot.

  “Go get Frankie and his little brother,” Tom told me. To Tom, almost everyone was an enemy. “They’re playing Three Steps to Germany in front of his house. Tell him you want to show him something.”

  Since the cap incident, Frankie had become much more alert, darting into his house whenever the Murphys appeared on the block. He often looked at me with reproach during the past months, but never said anything, and I dropped him like a red hot mickey, though he had been my only real friend.

  “He won’t come,” I said. “He won’t believe me.”

  “He’ll believe you,” Tom said. Kevin stepped on my foot and shoved me into the bushes. It was the first time he had turned on me and I couldn’t believe it. I looked at Tom for help.

  “Go get Frankie and Billy,” he repeated. “We’ll hide in the bushes.”

  I walked miserably down the block, sick at heart. Shouldn’t I just duck into my own house? Shouldn’t I tell Frankie to run? Somehow these alternatives seemed impossible. I was committed to the Murphy brothers. While my childhood went up in flames, I spoke through the blaze in my head and talked Frankie into coming to the lot for some mickeys. I was bright-eyed with innocence, knowing full well what I was doing, cutting myself off from my parents, my church, selling my friend for the love of the Murphy brothers, whom I wanted to love me back.

  “My ma gave me two potatoes, they’ll be ready in a couple of minutes. You and Billy can split one.”

  Frankie wanted to believe me. “Have you seen Tom or Kevin today?”

  “They went crabbing,” I said, glib with evil. “Their Uncle Jake took them out on the bay. They promised they’d bring me some blue-claws.”

  The walk down the block to the lot, maybe two hundred yards, was the longest I’ve ever taken. I babbled inanely to keep Frankie from asking questions. Billy was saved when he decided to go play inside instead—he didn’t like mickeys anyway, a heresy admitted only by the very young. I didn’t dare protest, for fear of making Frankie suspicious. The lot appeared empty and we were well into it before Kevin stood up from behind a gutted refrigerator; Frankie whirled around right into Tom, who twisted his thin arm and bent him to the ground.

  “Lineup time!” shouted Kevin, “freaking A!” as they carried the kicking boy over to the wall. There they threw him down and tore off his shoes, making it difficult for him to run over the rusty cans, cinders, and thorny bushes. They had made a large pile of clay balls already, and the three other boys began firing them mercilessly at the cowering figure, their misses making red splotches on the garage wall. This was the first Lineup in our neighborhood, a practice that soon escalated so that within a few months boys were scaling the lethal tin cans their parents flattened to support the war effort. The Murphy boys held back momentarily, looking down at me.

  “Where’s Billy, you little fag?” Tom asked.

  “He wouldn’t come. He doesn’t like mickeys.” I was wincing at Frankie’s cries as a clay ball would strike him.

  “Maybe you ought to take his place,” Tom said. “One target’s not enough.” Kevin reached from behind and snatched off my glasses, plunging me into the shadowy half-world in which I was always terrified. Without my glasses I could hardly speak, and I said nothing as they pushed me back and forth like a rag doll.

  “You see that hoop there?” one of them said. “Bring it over to the garage and stand in it, you four-eyed freak.” Squinting, I could barely make out a whitish hoop lying near the fire. I bent down and grabbed it with my right hand and went down on my knees with a piercing scream that must have scared even the Murphy brothers. They had heated the metal hoop in the fire until it was white hot and my hand stuck to it briefly, branding me for life. The older boys whooped and ran off, firing a few last shots at Frankie, Kevin not forgetting to drop my glasses in the fire, where my father found them the next day.

  I knelt doubled up, retching with pain and grief while Africa was falling to the Allies and our soldiers battled through the Solomon Islands: the tide had turned. I went home and had my hand attended to—first degree burns!—and slept dreamless as a baby for the first time in years.

  Conversation with a Pole

  Alcohol has always been a friend I could count on, unlike most of my other friends. Life in the business world is no picnic, and just when you need someone is the time they generally pick to disappear. They transfer, and you have to work with someone new, who has his own friends. They get promoted or demoted. They become unavailable. But alcohol is always available, and adjustable to your needs. What could be better than a cold beer after a set of tennis? than a good cognac by the fireplace? It’s raining outside and you look at your lady and she smiles that special smile and comes to sit next to you, leaning in your arms, sipping from your glass. Or an ice-cold martini while the smell of steak is coming from the kitchen, no, from your outside grill, and the martini and the liver paté and stuffed mushrooms and shrimp cocktail all go to the back of your neck and untie that knot that seemed permanent until this very moment and you smile thankfully and look at your guests and realize what wonderful people they really are, and you tell them so. Or a Bloody Mary on hung-over Sunday mornings, followed by Eggs Benedict and a dry Chablis. I mean, isn’t that what life’s all about?

  When I was in business I was famous for my lunches and dinner parties. The purchasing agents fell over themselves trying to get invitations. They would give orders for things they didn’t want, or wouldn’t need for a year, just to visit the club or get a shot at my wife’s onion soup and the good Bordeaux that went with it. My two kids, bless them, were just growing up then, and they would hang around, looking like angels, emptying ashtrays and bringing out the hors d’oeuvres. I remember particularly one night old Bill McShane, the head buyer for McClintock’s, and a hard man, a real hard man to please, just sat back around midnight and said, “Charlie, you win. I already told Gustafson I’d buy his stuff instead of yours, but I’ll cancel the order tomorrow. This has been something else.” He had downed about seven manhattans, a bottle of burgundy with dinner, and was now tapering off with brandy. Lots of people reacted that way; my wife and I would glance at each other then, surreptiously, and practically wink. It made it all worthwhile. I don’t think McShane ever changed that order, though. He was one of the toughest men in the business.

  I worked for Prince and Co., mainly in adhesives. It’s a good field, still expanding, and Prince is the best in the field, if I do say so myself. They make compounds that will hold anything together, any combination: rubber-to-wood, paper-to-metal, plastic-to-rubber, even metal-to-metal. You wouldn’t believe it would hold, but it does. Think of everything that needs some sort of adhesive compound. From one point of view, without them our entire modern world would fall apart: houses, furniture, cars, airplanes, telephones, not to mention your ordinary boxes of food and other goods. My wife has literary pretensions, she reads a lot, Book-of-the-Month and all that—she used to sneak some of the professors from our hick local college into our dinner par
ties, for social uplift, she said, but the poor buggers would gulp down the free drinks and puff on my cigars and pass out before dinner, so she stopped doing it. Anyway, sometimes we’d be having a little spat and I’d be sitting there, swirling a snifter of Armignac, and she’d shout, “Charlie, stop that! You’re just a goddamn glue salesman!” And I would say, “Patricia”—never call her Pat if you value your life—“Patricia, without glue all your goddamn books would fall apart tomorrow, what do you think of that?”

  But then we’d make up, and that was always fun. Patricia is a remarkable person. Like most men, I married out of a sheer lack of confidence, but I was lucky. When it was time for me to marry, I married the one who was in love with me at that time, and that was Patricia. The thought that someone else would ever fall in love with me never entered my mind. She was a lit major from Goucher College, but she still looked like the curvy blonde cheerleader she had been in high school. Her skin was so pale and smooth it was a pleasure just to run my finger over her cheekbone or down the curve of her calf just above the ankle. I was nothing but a glorified stock boy in those days. I knew I wanted to sell, and knew also I needed experience and not college to do it; but we had no idea in those good-bad old days of hamburger and cheap beer in returnable bottles that I would rise so fast in the company. In six years I had the largest territory in Connecticut and a lovely old home in Hartford; in ten years we had an elegant sloop named Asharah that we kept at Watch Point where we’d entertain during long sunburned weekends. Those were the days! The sloop was named after some Phoenician sea goddess that Patricia had read about, but when I painted it on I misspelled it—it should have been Asherah—and for a few weeks she was mad, and after me to repaint it. But after a while we got to like it: it seemed more original somehow. That’s what it was like in those days: even our mistakes turned out right.

  Right now the snow is coming down hard outside my window, almost like hail, and I feel a long way from Watch Point. In general, snow has a softening effect on this city, covering the dirty sidewalks, rounding the harsh corners of the apartment buildings. It brings out the kids on their sleds in a nearby vacant lot, and I like to go out and watch them, but my legs aren’t what they used to be so I don’t go out as much anymore. I can watch the people hurrying into Mac’s grocery store or ducking into the Cloverleaf Bar for a quick beer or a game on the bowling machine. I like to lie here and smoke and think. It’s comfortable. Did you ever notice how smoke rises in the air but sinks in a bottle? That’s right. If you hold a cigarette in your hand the smoke rises and disperses in the upper regions (except maybe at the Cloverleaf, where the air is thicker than chowder), but if you hold a cigarette down in a bottle the smoke sinks and curls to the bottom like a net in water. Strange.

  But what I wanted to tell you about was this conversation I had with a Polish engineer. It was an important conversation for me; in fact, it led to everything else that happened. Not only can I remember every word of it, I can remember, word for word, various variations that might have occurred and led to completely different conclusions. Over the past five years I have put together a series of possible conversations and followed the implications out to places far far away from Mac’s grocery and the Cloverleaf Bar. One even took me to Warsaw, where I lived in the Old Town in the shadow of the castle Gorski told me about, and gave advice to the Party leaders on what adhesives to use: Gorski said they need men like me in Poland. But unfortunately the conversation didn’t go that way, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why. That’s one of the pleasures of retirement: Time to think. I wish to God I had studied philosophy somewhere along the line. I often feel I’m on the verge of something really important, something about the way our lives go one way and our thoughts go another and we’re caught barefoot in a no-man’s-land where the ground is covered by broken stained-glass windows from old bombed-out cathedrals. That was an actual dream I had once. What it means I wish I knew.

  His name was Zbigniew Gorski—I still have his card. Despite the fact that our former National Security Advisor has the same first name, Zbigniew is tough to pronounce so everyone called him Bishek, which was funny enough. He was something less than medium height, neat, almost dapper, and curiously young-looking. I had been told he had fought with a troop of Boy Scouts in the Warsaw Uprising so I figured the youngest he could be was forty-five, a year younger than me. But I’ve always looked mature for my age. I was 6′2″ when I was fourteen, my hair was gray by thirty-five. I think it helped me make sales, and even when I was fifteen the older boys would send me in to buy their six-packs: I had a better chance of getting served. Now I was sitting at the Blue Horse Inn with a foreigner who was my age but looked like my son.

  Also, I was nervous. I usually take out directors or purchasing agents to dinner, not engineers, but this was a special case and a big order crucial to the company hinged on the outcome. Frankly, things had not been going too well for me for a year or so, and I’d been called into the office a few times to explain my decreasing sales. But the adhesive business is simply getting more competitive each year, as I explained to Roland Prince, Jr., a short stocky man with half the brains of his father despite having graduated from Wharton Business School. The father and I had been very close, and when he kicked over out on the golf course—not a bad way to go, except he fell in the water hole: for old time’s sake, everyone said—I knew Prince & Co. would never be the same for me again. At any rate, at this time I wasn’t the only one having trouble, sales were down all across the country, so when Bill Bishop made a huge sale to ATX Electronics involving the aircraft business and a government contract, everyone was happy because it eased the pressure across the board. But something went wrong. Their engineers told their purchasing department that our product wasn’t the best one for the job. I knew it was—I had made a sale, on a much smaller scale, and it worked perfectly. That was why Prince told me to take out the engineer.

  “You’ve done it before, Charlie,” he told me. “Take him to the best place in town. Snow him. Take it easy on the booze, but snow him. This is important, Charlie. You know how to do it.”

  I won’t say that Prince exactly threatened me, but, as I said, I was nervous. The Blue Horse is the poshest restaurant in Hartford, you practically have to wade through the carpet, and I got there a half hour early to make sure of a good table. I told them to put a couple of bottles of vodka on ice, and was on my third martini by the time Gorski came in. We hit it off right away, though he was a serious type, and I was feeling pretty good. “You’re not the engineer who invented the Polish parachute?” I asked him.

  “The one that opens on impact? No.” He smiled slightly. I guess he had heard all the Polish jokes.

  We were drinking vodka straight because that’s what he had ordered: I had guessed right. Anyway, toss an olive in an ice-cold glass of vodka and what do you have? A Polish martini, and not bad either. The Blue Horse featured a Czecho-slovakian beer called Pilsner Urquell, and when I suggested that as a chaser, Gorski said that was a good idea. I liked him, a man after my own heart. We got to talking about drinking habits. He always drank vodka straight, but usually here in the States the vodka wasn’t served cold enough. In Poland the vodka was better, too; he drank a brand called Zytnia. I had him write it on his card because I’m interested in that sort of thing.

  “You Poles are supposed to be real drinkers,” I told him. “Everyone says, never try to drink with a Pole.”

  “We drink too much,” he agreed, “but not like you Americans. We usually drink only when we eat. What did your Hemingway say? It’s a way of ending the day?”

  “Yes. Well, my wife would know about that,” I said. “She’s a great reader. I think it’s a pretty good way of starting the day, too.” I raised my glass and smiled at Gorski, and he smiled back. Maybe he had a sense of humor after all. But he really was stuffing in the food, skinny as he was. I wasn’t too hungry myself. I was feeling light-headed, with that wonderful sense of clarity that drink can sometimes gi
ve you. Even my vision seemed sharper, and the face of the waiter as he brought us the bottles was like some old portrait where every line, every shadow, had a life and story of its own. His cheekbones alone told me he had spent a miserable childhood.

  “Seriously,” Gorski said, “you Americans must drink every day. You wait all day for the cocktail hour. When it comes close to that time, your face lights up and you make your martini and you sit down and say Aah! Doesn’t that mean you’re alcoholics?”

  “We don’t have to drink every day. We like to drink. It’s practically a health food. We relax. It’s fun.”

  “But you do drink every day!” He was beginning to get a little irritating, and I was glad to detect a slight slur in his voice. “What’s the difference between having to and wanting to, as long as you do it? When was the last day you didn’t have a drink?” he asked, and sat back like some goddamn prosecuting attorney.

  I tried to think, but who keeps track of things that they don’t do? He smiled broadly, exposing a set of very bad teeth. “If you drank more,” I said, “your teeth wouldn’t be so bad.”

  He covered them up. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  “I could stop anytime I wanted to,” I said firmly. “In fact, I probably won’t have a thing tomorrow.” As I said this, I remembered we were supposed to go to the Martins’ for cocktails, and for some reason this infuriated me. Suddenly it seemed hard to breathe, and Gorski’s complacent face appeared to float across the table like some obscene Halloween balloon.

  “You still haven’t answered my question,” he repeated. “When was the last day that you didn’t have any drink at all?”

  I suppose at that time I had been hanging by a thin emotional thread. I was tired—I hadn’t slept well in weeks—and nervous, and the combination of these things with this infuriating cross-examination as if I were back in Townsend High School with its collection of vicious and sadistic teachers, all of this simply caused that thread to snap. Even so, I reacted with reasonable calm. I reached out, slowly—in actual slow motion, it seemed to me—and grabbed his tie. I pulled his head toward me, dragging his tie through that unspeakable goulash he had chosen to eat.