The Piano Tuner

by Peter Meinke

  Daryl would always sit at the corner table near the poolroom, where he could hear the conversation in both rooms. He seldom took off his battered old black cowboy hat with a small iron eagle pinned to it. Stretching out his scuffed black boots, he looked like an emaciated trucker on the last leg of a transcontinental haul.

  “Jesus, you look awful,” Seifer would say. Seifer was always doing isometrics and ate lots of fiber.

  “I like to look awful. I’m supposed to look awful, those are the parts I play.”

  “You don’t have to play it offstage. And you don’t have to look dead. Why don’t you come jogging with me tomorrow morning? We’ll fix you up.”

  “Jogging’s the sport of the last resort,” Daryl said, “and I’m not there yet. It’s more faddish than Zen or yogurt.” Agnes brought him a beer and stood by the table.

  “You look like an old man,” said Seifer. “Pretty soon you won’t be able to play anything but grandfather parts. Jogging will knock ten years off your body. What’s the matter? Afraid you can’t do it?”

  “All it takes to be a jogger,” Daryl said to Agnes, “is a certain amount of stubbornness and meanness of spirit. No talent, no grace. Just an overwhelming fear of death.”

  Seifer had the infuriating habit of never getting insulted. “All right,” he said, walking away, “but when you start choking to death on one of those weeds just come to me and I’ll help you out, if it’s not too late.”

  “Of course he’s right,” Daryl said when Agnes sat down. “I’m in terrible shape. I used to be pretty good at baseball when I was a kid. But I never thought I’d live so long. When I was a kid I couldn’t imagine living to be thirty, and here I am forty-six, and still kicking, more or less.” He took a deep swallow of beer.

  “Why not?” said Agnes. “There is nothing wrong with you.”

  “I’m sick in the head, Agnieska,” he said, tapping his pale scarred forehead. “El Sicko, that’s me.” Daryl had begun calling Agnes by her Polish name, insisting it was far lovelier and more feminine than the American equivalent. “I have this terrible fear that some day, when I’m dying, I’ll burst into uncontrollable tears and cry the last twenty-four hours of my life. Me, who’s always so cheerful!”

  Agnes didn’t laugh; she never laughed. “You have nothing to cry about,” she said. “You want to cry, I will tell you Polish stories, then we can both cry.”

  “No Polish stories, I couldn’t stand it. I know enough stories already. In Argentina,” he said, “you know what they do? They cut off the hands of little girls and send them in shoe boxes to their mothers. Shoe boxes!”

  “Argentina,” said Agnes. “What do you know about Argentina?”

  “Argentina is right around the corner.”

  For Daryl, everything was right around the corner: cancer, unemployment, detached retinas, car trouble. It was just a matter of time before these things would get you. “It’s all psychosomatic,” Seifer told him. “It’s in your head. Think healthy and you’ll be healthy.”

  “You make me feel like throwing up,” Daryl said. “Did you see all those dead fish floating in Lake Maggiore? Big swollen bellies? El stinko? I suppose they were worried about inflation and just keeled over.”

  “Fish aren’t people.”

  “Jesus, a college education and he’s just figured out that fish aren’t people.” Daryl was tough on everybody, but college students brought out his most aggressive instincts. He was always trying to drink them under the table, never seeming to recognize that at least half of them were better drinkers who would still be going strong while Agnes was guiding him back to his room. He could get along with Agnes. She had an expression—a shadow in her eye, something in her voice—that blunted his bitterness.

  “Why do you put up with me?” he asked her, after she steered him to his bed and took off his shoes. She didn’t answer at first so he repeated it.

  Agnes sat down on the bed. “Maybe you remind me of someone,” she said.

  “Tell me.”

  “No, I can’t talk about it. I’ll just say I knew a man in Poland who was as unhappy as you, but his reasons were mostly political.”

  “What happened?”

  “They got him finally. I didn’t help him enough, I was too frightened.”

  “Do I look like him?”

  “Not really.” Agnes pulled Daryl’s head to her breast and began singing softly in Polish. “Sto lat, sto lat/Niech zyje, zyje nam ...” Her singing voice was surprisingly pure, high, and fragile.

  “What does that mean?”

  “That means I want you to live for a hundred years.”

  “What a frightening thought! I’d have to play Methuselah!”

  “Or Solomon!”

  “Or Grandma Moses!”

  In October a new play opened, Mamet’s American Buffalo, and Daryl had his biggest part since he had been with the company. He played an aging small-time crook. The play attracted very small audiences—it was much too obscene for St. Petersburg—but there was general agreement that Daryl’s performance was first-rate. At the same time many claimed, with Robertson, that this was because Daryl really was an aging small-time crook. What did any of them know about him, after all? Five years before, they had been a struggling acting company in need of an older player who would work for peanuts, and this man with the unlikely name of Daryl Dana had shown up and gotten the job without much competition and with fewer questions.

  But American Buffalo was his time of triumph and on the last night of the play the director gave a party in Daryl’s honor. It began in The Grouper with many pitchers of beer, songs, dances, and finally toasts. “A toast to Agnes!” Charlie Robertson’s face was flushed. “To the True Muse of the Central Avenue Theater, whose golden gifts”—he raised his beer—“sustain us through the dark night of the soul, not to mention all the idiotic reviews.”

  Everyone laughed and applauded, except Daryl. He was approaching the edge of real drunkenness. “Don’t patronize Agnes,” he said.

  “I’m not patronizing her,” said Robertson, smiling at everyone, waving his arms about. “We all love Agnes.”

  “You’re a pompous ass, Robertson.” Daryl leaned across the table on his elbows and emptied his beer on Robertson’s lap. “Have a beer on me, pompous ass,” he muttered, straightening up.

  The director was a large man, just turning paunchy, with heavy arms and shoulders. He was feared for his quick temper—once, in a rage, he had destroyed the entire set of Man and Superman the night before the opening—but on this occasion he turned pale and stood up quietly. “Dana, you’re a spoiled and sorrowful bastard, and I bet you ain’t been spanked in forty years.” The more angry Robertson was, the more Southern and ungrammatical his speech became. He began walking carefully around the table. “I’m gonna pluck you like a chicken, so you might as well jus’ start layin’ eggs.”

  Daryl hesitated for a moment; then, as the larger man approached, he jumped up, upsetting his chair, and ran to the door of the bar. “I quit,” he yelled, his normally low voice pitched high and reedy, as if his throat had dried up. “I quit this two-bit outfit!” He backed up as Robertson came toward him, turned, and ran out the door onto Central Avenue.

  No one spoke in the bar. It was like the frozen tableau at the end of The Inspector General. Several of the actors were holding their mugs of beer in the air, waiting for someone to break the spell. Agnes was the first to move: she took off her apron. She looked hard at Robertson for a moment and then went out into the night. The stars were so low they looked like airplane lights, but there was no moon in sight. She could see Daryl’s hunched figure across the street, heading toward the center of town. He didn’t acknowledge her cries, and it took her several minutes to catch up with him.

  “Go away,” he said. “I want to be alone.” But then he stopped. “Jesus, I sound like Greta Garbo!”

  “Daryl, it is all right. I want to be with you.”

  He stared at her, the emotional effort seeming to so
ber him. “Agnieska, go away. Can’t you see I’m a clown, and a cowardly clown at that? To think I ran away from that fat-ass Robertson!”

  “You are not a coward! Who wants to brawl in a bar? Phil and Harry spent a year getting rid of all the troublemakers—you did the right thing. I hate bullies like Robertson!”

  By this time they were near Howard Street and the center of town; it was almost 2:00 A.M. In the entire city there were maybe a dozen people on the streets, wondering what they were doing there, or maybe past wondering. The low buildings looked beat and shabby: this was where Jack Kerouac came to die. As Daryl and Agnes walked, an occasional figure, usually black, would detach itself from the shadows and approach them, only to stop and fade back into the darkness when confronted by their self-absorption.

  Around a corner, somewhat isolated from the other buildings, was Poochie’s Diner, an all-night coffeehouse of indifferent cleanliness where the late nighters could meet the early risers. Poochie made good coffee, though everything else he sold seemed on the slippery side. He was a short round man with a desperate look, whose hair stood up as if constantly electrified; his only son had disappeared two years before—people whispered he was at the bottom of Tampa Bay because of some drug deal.

  Agnes and Daryl sat down at a corner booth and ordered coffee. “I can’t stay in this town,” said Daryl, staring at the table.

  “Of course you can. You were wonderful in Buffalo. They need you.”

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass if they need me. I can’t face that group again.”

  There was a pause. Then Agnes said, “I need you.” They were both holding on to their coffee cups like mendicants in the street.

  “You need me least of all. You’re the strong one.”

  In the silence that followed, Agnes looked up. When her eyes widened, Daryl turned and saw three young men seated on the turnstools with their backs to the counter, looking at once unfocused and malevolent. Their black vests and boots, their heavy grease-stained levis, far too hot for Florida, their tattoos: a biker’s outfit has more clichés than a banker’s. The tallest one had spurs on his boots; the other two wore chains for belts. Agnes recognized the tall one, but didn’t know his name.

  “Hello, Aggie,” he said. “You still my sweetheart?”

  The question was so bizarre that Agnes said nothing. The bikers slid off their seats and slouched toward the door in that threatening stroll they have mastered.

  “So long, lover,” the tall one said. “See you at The Grouper.”

  In a few minutes they heard the motorcycles cough and roar away; the bikes had been parked in the back, out of sight. The two sat silently for a long moment. “I do not care about brave or cowardly!” Agnes said suddenly. “No one knows what that means anyway. I want someone who has sense, good sense!” She spoke this defiantly, holding Daryl’s eyes. “Who will live a long time!” she almost shouted.

  A stout woman with peroxided hair was staring at them from the next table with such intensity that Daryl leaned over and handed her the ketchup. The woman shifted her stare from the couple to the bottle, sitting there as if hypnotized by the Heinz label.

  “I’ll tell you something about me,” Daryl said. “You know that accident I told you about?” He hesitated. “Where I got these scars? Well, there wasn’t any girl. Just some stupid kids. Horsing around. I made it all up so you’d be interested in me. But it’s all lies. I wasn’t even driving.”

  “No,” she said. “Of course not.”

  “I’m a liar. I’m stupid.”

  Agnes smiled as naturally as if she had been smiling all her life. “I do not love you because you are smart. I love you because you are beautiful.”

  Their dispirited waitress had perfected the eye-on-the-floor and seemed to take forever to get to them, but at last they were outside on the dark tree-lined street heading toward Central Avenue.

  “What’s the sensible thing to do?” he asked after another long silence.

  “That is what you must decide.”

  He had already decided, and was steering them back through the sad streets, sweetened a little by the rich smell of old flowering trees with the lovely names: jacaranda, bougainvillea, magnolia, mimosa. He knew he was right because she held his hand tighter as they neared The Grouper. The party was still going on, more or less, though the noise was subdued and sober. Robertson was sitting at the head of a long scarred table, apparently declaiming a speech from some play. They watched through the window for a minute.

  “Some show,” said Daryl.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Some show.”

  “Well, let’s get our tickets.” He pushed the door open and they walked in.

  II

  From Abroad

  A Decent Life

  Hannah Broch didn’t like the way her husband dressed, drank, drove, walked, talked, cleared his throat, made love (too noisy) or water (likewise). In the morning he’d try to fold his pajamas, but they always looked like a lump. His belly was large and soft. He was one of those people who, given, say, a telephone number, could concentrate on it for a few seconds and almost immediately would not only have forgotten the number but whose it was and to whom he was talking. In the evening he’d waddle in smelling of beer and try to kiss her. She could have poked his eyes out. And now he had a mistress! She could have kicked in his teeth.

  Hannah shook her head sometimes, wondering why she held on to the little bastard. The truth was, she was competitive. She would rather pull out her hair and set it on fire than lose at anything, whether it was cards or cribbage, chess or conversation. To get a divorce, then, would be to admit a great defeat, and she was not about to do it. Therefore, when she discovered her husband was having an affair, she called the Authorities. She was uncertain what they would do, or even what they were supposed to do, but she knew they were there—they were everywhere—and they had ways of smoothing over all difficulties. People often resented the amount of paperwork generated by the Authorities, but everyone admitted they got the job done, and life was better.

  She had first become suspicious when Stefan began whistling again. Before they were married he had been a great whistler; he had a real talent for it. He liked best the famous arias from operas like Pagliacci or Carmen—he would prance like Escamillo the bullfighter when he whistled the toreador tune—but he could also whistle from works like Tosca, long stretches that nobody else could remember. After a few years of marriage, however, they had stopped going to the opera, and soon after that he had stopped whistling.

  “Hannah says we can’t go, she has nothing to wear,” Stefan would explain to their friends. “And she’s perfectly right, she has nothing to wear.” He’d spread his hands out. They were soft and pudgy, stained with purple ink from the stamp pad at the post office where he worked as a clerk all week. The pay was low, and by now there was little chance of advancement, but they had enough to eat and a comfortable apartment on Krolewska Street, nicer than most of their friends’, and in a good section of the city, though all the sections nowadays were more or less alike. At any rate, people no longer moved from job to job, but stuck with the one they were assigned and hoped for the best.

  There are two basic attitudes toward life: when confronted with the possibility of a new experience, you can either say yes or say no. Both answers are correct and will be equally regretted, experience being what it is. But the attitudes are incompatible and cause most of the difficulties between married couples. In the early years of their marriage Hannah and Stefan quarreled along those basic lines. Stefan would want to leave the city, or even the country, change jobs, collect butterflies, buy a car, have children; Hannah would point out the impossibility, the danger, of these ideas. They weren’t ready, they couldn’t afford it, their apartment was too small, they had no contacts. Because she was the stronger of the two, they had settled down and were reasonably secure. He had stopped whistling, but that was all right with her: she was tone-deaf and mainly held the impression of his fat cheeks puffin
g in and out, in and out.

  Stefan, like many others, was neither a leader nor a follower: he was a loner. People tend to mistake loners for leaders—this was Hannah’s mistake when she met him—but in truth, most of them make atrocious decisions for others: their abilities are limited to their own rhythms. So it was with Stefan, at any rate, who had had his chances that he didn’t really want and had blown them completely, to the chagrin of his more ambitious wife. Once, replacing someone who was sick, Stefan directed a small branch post office for three months and caused so much confusion with the first-class mail that there was a military investigation.

  In most ways, except for his corpulence, he was a nondescript man. He wore a modest beard and too-small wire glasses that he was always pushing up his nose with a one-fingered gesture that made him go cross-eyed. At parties women didn’t notice him until late in the evening: he had a kind of staying power, the ability to look hopeful after midnight, that touched their hearts, particularly as the men of that district tended to drink themselves into oblivion. Someone gave him a cruelly affectionate nickname, the Social Butterball, an appellation that made him smile but turned a knife in his wife’s heart. How undignified to be married to the Social Butterball!

  Hannah hadn’t paid close attention to his habits for many years, but when the whistling started she came alive again as her competitive juices began to flow. Stefan noticed her renewed attractiveness right away. She was a large, handsome woman with a deep voice and a mane of dark hair piled on top of her head. She had an ample bosom that was almost formidable, if such a word can be applied to those feminine softnesses. This was in marked contrast to Eva, who had almost no bosom at all. Eva, in fact, with her slender figure and short blonde hair looked like a young boy, and this combined with her wide gray eyes gave her such an air of vulnerability that Stefan’s heart had reached out for her as soon as she entered the post office about six months before. She had had some complication in paying her telephone bill, and Stefan had made it seem even more complicated than it was, so she had to come see him several times and he had the opportunity to ask her to lunch. Thus the affair had begun.