The Piano Tuner

by Peter Meinke

  Emily had rented the car in London and had taken the Sealink ferry from Weymouth to Cherbourg, FATHER DIED YESTERDAY STOP, the telegram from her brother had said, CAN YOU COME HOME FUNERAL TUESDAY. Her brother’s telegrams never ran over ten words, and she could imagine him thinking where to put the STOP: FATHER DIED YESTERDAY CAN YOU COME HOME STOP. . . She would have preferred STOP FATHER DIED YESTERDAY CAN YOU COME HOME, but that was the difference between the two of them. Her brother was probably right.

  She should have answered him: gestures were important, even if they were misunderstood. She should have said, NEVER STOP NEVER STOP NEVER STOP NEVER STOP NEVER STOP. Her father would have liked that. He was a crusty and acid-tongued professor with whom she had argued bitterly; she had no intention of flying all the way to Boston to see his dead body. He would have ridiculed the idea. God knows she had reached out her hand to him over and over, only to have the miserable old bastard turn his back. Still, something felt called for and, compelled by a dark fluttering within her breast, a vague flashing of knives, an unfocused fear that ran like a spider along her nerves and veins, she had rented the car and left the city. It took several hours for her to realize she was headed for Mont St. Michel, and even now she was not sure why.

  Her father had taken them there years ago, when they were children, and she had been bored. All Emily wanted to do was race up and down the steep steps while her mother and brother dutifully listened to his discourses on medieval methods of building; Roman, Gothic, Baroque styles of architecture; and monastical rules. She of course was soon lost in the crowded and twisting lanes, and at their tearful reunion had been forced to endure lectures by both parents and told-you-so smirks from her brother.

  But as she drove out of London—was that just yesterday?—the stark and jagged image of the ancient abbey gradually formed in her mind, just as it had soared from the fogbound marshland outside of Pontorson, and she was drawn like a tired swimmer by the tide: she remembered it much more clearly than she would have thought. The monastery was about a hundred kilometers south of Cherbourg and she had reached—she imagined—about halfway down the coast when she hit the sheep. She really didn’t know where she was. The last sign had said Coustances, but whether Coustances was ahead or behind she had no idea. She supposed the sea was on her right, but all she could see were rolling green hills, clusters of pear trees, a few sheep munching grass near the road, and a bevy of fat white geese inside a small fenced-in area in the middle of nowhere.

  Where was everybody? Perhaps everyone in France slept in on Mondays, after the excesses of the weekend. Emily didn’t want to walk away from the car, but she couldn’t stay here forever. A lowslung Citroen, like a black cockroach, went by fast and honked without stopping.

  There was something odd about the pear trees; they seemed closer than they had at first, but not clearer. The fruit was varicolored, splashes of red, yellow, and green more like a pointillist painting than actual pears. She could smell them, though, sweet and heavy to the senses, and as the shadows approached the car she could feel the air turn perceptibly cooler. She remembered suddenly a bowl of fruit she had shared with Howard, how long ago was that? They had been sitting along the rocky shore outside of Penzance, a little village called Mousehole, eating peaches and pears with Cornish clotted cream and some bottles of pale ale; a cool breeze blew in from the dark water. She had shivered and Howard held her in his arms, smiling but saying nothing. Was it possible to be happier than they were at that moment? Happiness was different from what she had believed, and quieter. The thought occurred to her that if you loved someone with all of your heart, even for a fraction of a second, then you would go to heaven. She looked at the dead sheep and said, “I think I’m going bonkers.”

  She had to do something: she couldn’t just sit here twiddling like a Greek philosopher. Her father had been a man of action. By now he would have assembled the local police, a garage mechanic, and two insurance adjusters for appraisals and estimates of damage. As she thought this, however, a heavy lethargy took hold of her, not at all unpleasant. She had always preferred to stay still and let the world come around to her. She had observed her father’s restlessness—even in the theater he seemed eager to get it over with, and on his many trips he was always rushing to get home: experience was just something to discuss, to swallow as abruptly as possible. Emily came to believe that what he really wanted was to die, wanted life itself to be over so that he could rest at last and talk it over with God. For this contrary reason she had moved slowly through her days, like a mermaid floating in a translucent sea where all was calm, shadowy, and ambiguous.

  Emily liked ambiguity. She enjoyed being semi-lost, heading down a strange coast to Mont St. Michel, which she semi-remembered. An ambiguous world is a free world, rich with suggestion, each clear decision being a limiting factor: if you turn left, all the magical possibilities on the right are eliminated; to choose one thing is to cut out another.

  As if to vindicate her lassitude, over the next rise in the road a dark object emerged that clarified, as it drew nearer, into a horsedrawn wagon with perhaps a dozen men on it, six on each side. They were singing a song that didn’t sound French; perhaps it was Latin, and indeed they had a generally monk-like appearance, wearing rough brown capes and simple sandals. The horses were blinkered so they wouldn’t shy from the high-speed cars, and their ribs showed, making a sharp contrast with the fat sheep and geese in the French countryside. The wagon slowly pulled even with Emily’s Ford and shuddered to a stop with all the creaking of an ancient ship settling in its dock.

  “Pardonnez-moi,” Emily said. “Pouvez-vous m’aider! Do you speak English?”

  The nearest monk detached himself, grunting as he dropped off the wagon, and peered into her back seat without answering. “Nuffink to be done ‘ere, is it?” he said, to no one in particular. He had puffy androgynous lips that he moistened every few seconds with his little pink tongue. “You better come wiv me, darlin.” His accent was very Cockney, not unlike the barkeep at the King’s Crown that Howard had been so jealous of. “ ‘Ave anuvver pint, darlin’,” the barkeep would say, “you’re the bes’ fink wot ever comes in ‘ere.” Once, on the back of a beer coaster in their usual booth, someone had written:

  Emmy woz ear wiv Bernard

  She woz ear

  Yes she woz

  Woz she ear

  Cors she woz

  Emmy woz ear wiv Bernard

  She hadn’t known what to make of that. Was the barkeep named Bernard? She was afraid to ask. Was it a poem? Was it a joke? Emily thought if they kept going to the King’s Crown the mystery would eventually be solved, but Howard felt it was too weird, and possibly dangerous—he didn’t like her name coupled with strange men—so they stopped going. Maybe that was why they broke up: like yoked satellites in orbit around a fixed star, they had been held together by the sociability of the King’s Crown. At home they argued over what television programs to watch and how much Howard drank.

  “Come wiv me, darlin’,” the man repeated, holding out his hand, soft and pink as his tongue. With mixed feelings of relief and apprehension Emily went with him to the wagon. Her legs seemed strange and far away, but she felt warm, sitting among all these men, the good bitter odor of hay and sweat washing over her. The horses lurched forward in their creaky traces once again, and they moved dreamily away from the damaged Ford. Almost immediately she relaxed—she was in someone else’s hands, thank God—and the jostling of the wagon made her sleepy. The singing now was quieter and more sporadic; a pewter tankard was being passed around. “Quelquechose à boire!” the man next to her asked. He had a warty, not unkind face, and a huge belly trembling with a life of its own.

  “Merci.”

  The mug was so heavy she had to use both hands, and at the same time she noticed that her dress had ridden up her thighs and the man was staring at her legs, which even to her seemed strikingly white and provocative. The drink was fruity, a fermented cider, sweet and thick; she took
a small sip and passed it on to the pink-tongued man on her right, then pulled her dress down over her knees, though it was difficult to keep it there with the jouncing of the wagon along the country road. Despite her problems and discomfort she felt almost coquettish, twitching her skirt down among these monastic males who were probably seldom in such proximity to a female.

  “I’m so sorry to trouble you,” she said. “I just need to get to the nearest garage.” What was the French word for “garage”? The word for gas was “l’essence,” she knew that, so she could always say, “la place óu vous achetez l’essence.”

  But the warty man said, “De rien,” and smiled back at her as if he understood. Of course monks were scholars, everyone knew that, they practically kept civilization alive during the Middle Ages. Emily had the sudden thought that she was becoming part of history, like the artists in the museum where she worked as an assistant cataloger. Her father had wanted her to be an artist, and was disappointed when she had given it up. “Now we’re both catalogers,” he had said when she told him she had joined the museum’s staff. “We’ll spend our time writing footnotes that later catalogers will prove obtuse.” But he at least was pretty well known, having edited a number of textbooks and critical collections concerning metaphysical poetry and having taught courses in Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herbert—poets she had scarcely glanced at. Her father had liked poetry that was difficult; she liked simple poems: “Songs of Innocence,” the Cavaliers.

  Stone walls do not a prison make

  Nor iron bars a cage . . .

  You could remember lines like that, how did that start?

  When Death with unconfméd wings

  Hovers within my gates . . .

  That sounded wrong, but Emily couldn’t concentrate as the wagon jounced along the narrow road. They seemed almost to be staying in one place, like a French mime, with lots of knee action but no progress. Still, she had noticed a sign, VILLEDIEU-LES-POÊLES, so they must be getting somewhere. Maybe the landscape was approaching them, like Birnam Woods to Dunsinane. Although no gas station was in view, they were entering a small town between two rows of attached houses. It was broad daylight but lights were on behind most of the lace-curtained windows. Where there’s electricity there’s bound to be gas stations, Emily thought. And dead fish and squashed turtles—the works. The houses were surrounded by small plots of ragged sunflowers and neat woodpiles; the town had a gray worn look, comfortable, livable, if not exactly prosperous: France is doing all right, she thought. Around the front doors clustered fat round thick clumps of hydrangeas—pale blue, off-white, dusty rose—their ripe elegance setting off the old brick and plaster construction of the walls.

  “Ici, madame,” said the heavy monk on her left. They had stopped at the last door of the first group of homes. The sunflowers in the field beyond nodded like tired women with broken teeth; a dark Romanesque church loomed from the other side of the field, and beyond that more houses stretched out as far as Emily could see.

  “Ma voiture,” she began, “est brisée ...”

  “Nuffink for it, luv,” said the first monk, his soft hands surprising her. She couldn’t believe how strong he was as he lifted her down from the wagon. “Time to rest; everyone’s buggered.”

  “I’m not tired,” Emily protested, “pas fatiguée,” but even as she said it she could feel her head nodding, eyelashes (long and thick, her only fine feature, according to her father) pulling her lids down like lead sinkers. They were leading her along the hard-packed dirt path to the front steps, one monk on each side, as if escorting her to a seat in the theater.

  “What are you thinking of?” she had asked her father once as they sat together watching . . . what? A Shakespeare comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost, that was it. Her father, as they changed scenes, sat staring as if hypnotized at the frail neck of the elderly lady in front of him, white hair wisping like smoke around her thin shoulders. “I could loop a rope over her head,” he said. “She’d be gone before anyone knew. Never be missed.” He smiled at her, but Emily turned away, not responding. She didn’t like his mordant humor, was not convinced it was humor. Sometimes she thought, as she surveyed the daily disasters in the Guardian, that the wars covering the globe were simply extensions of her father’s fantasies, his unhappiness. Why was it that when women were unhappy they thought of suicide and when men were unhappy they thought of murder?

  “Je ne suis pas fatiguée,” Emily repeated drowsily. The monks had led her down a dank corridor with thin, cold radiators on the left and peeling rose-hued wallpaper on the right. Their sandals and her shoes made an enormous racket in the hallway. The room they brought her to was small, severe, but not unpleasant. They sat her down on a narrow bed with an iron bedstead, painted white, pushed against the white-curtained windows. A crude woodcarving of a weeping Christ hung over the bed.

  “ ‘Ere you go, luv,” the monk said, taking her by the heels and swinging her unresisting legs up on the bed. His powerful fingers seemed to be curled around her for a long time, and she fought to open her eyes and protest. She was afraid her dress was riding up again, but she was too exhausted to care and fell asleep with the two strange men bending above her. But even in her sleep she was afraid and could hear the rough voices of the men as they moved about the room, doors opening and closing. What were they going to do to her?

  Much later, when she opened her eyes again, it was dark and she was sitting up in bed, clutching the bedcovers to her breast and looking out the window at a ghostly and unknown landscape. Her heart rattled; where was she? She remembered she had been driving to Mont St. Michel, and as she thought this she had the feeling that the covers were solidifying and she was holding on, not to blankets, but to the leather cover of her car’s steering wheel. Where was she! At this moment the door on her right opened. Light poured in from behind, making the figure bending toward her a black silhouette, though he seemed to Emily to be vaguely familiar; and she reached out her hand for the last time.

  The Starlings of Leicester Square

  “I understand,” the boy said. They were looking at a snapshot of four generations.

  “No, you don’t,” the man said. “This was snapped right here in Leicester Square, in front of the statue of Shakespeare, because everyone thought I was a writer. I tried, but couldn’t do it. I’d sit all morning and bang out a few lines, and everyone said they were terrific, but no one would publish them unless I paid for it. So everyone said you need an agent to get published, but you can’t get an agent unless you’re already published. I was a great disappointment to your mother. She thought she was marrying the new Shakespeare because I won the Senior Poetry Prize. It all seems bloody stupid now. For five years I sat at that typewriter with my thumb up my nose while your mother supported us. Have you lost your voice?”

  “Hello.”

  “Jolly good.” He had signaled the waiter in the Swiss restaurant to come over. “This wine is wretched,” he said. “Bring us something decent: a Neuchâtel red, chilled.” The waiter said nothing, but picked up the bottle and padded off. It was clear he didn’t believe the man, who was dressed, below his good sportsjacket, in jeans and filthy sneakers.

  “This is you,” the man continued, “on my lap. You were a fat thing, and your head came out like a zucchini. And that’s your grandpa, who is still a fat thing, and that proper Englishman with the mustache and the stiff lower lip is your great-grandpa. Was. He never forgave me for marrying an American, and Jewish to boot. He told me it would never work out. Quite right, too. Would you like this picture?”

  “I don’t know,” the boy said.

  “Then to hell with it.” The man crumpled the photograph and stuffed it in his cup of coffee, which spilled over the printed tablecloth. “If you don’t want something hard enough”—his voice rose and diners at the nearby tables turned their heads—“then to hell with it.”

  The boy sipped his coffee and said nothing. He looked at the man steadily, without expression. He was a tall boy, pale,
with brown curly hair and the faint beginnings of a mustache.

  “That’s what your mother did to me,” the man said, “hardhearted bitch. Sorry,” he added, as the boy raised his chin. “She did the same thing with old Rex when he got flatulent, just chucked him out. Said she couldn’t breathe the air and he was staining her nice little ruggies. Waiter!”

  The waiter stood silently, staring at the tablecloth.

  “There’s been a terrible accident, a frightful accident,” the man said. “This time I’d like an Irish coffee, put in a double scotch instead of whiskey.” The waiter carried away the cup with the crumpled photograph bobbing on the surface.

  “But she liked this square, all the birds, all the trees—that’s why I thought we could meet here. You’ve changed, you’re looking more and more like her. Little eyes. But you’re tall—in two years I’ll be a shrimp next to you. She liked these big ugly knobby trees with the peeling bark and a thousand starlings on every limb, and I liked all the theaters around them, so it was a spot we could get together on. What do you feel, sitting here?”

  “I don’t know,” the boy said again. “Nervous, I guess.” He paused. “But not very nervous.”

  “Yes, just like your mother. She was not very anything. That’s American, I think.” He leaned back, waving his arms and teetering in his chair. “But we’re all Americans now. We queue up for burgers and milkshakes and pizza and Star Trek VII. Bloody joggers all over the city, knocking down old ladies and picking them up again, nice as pie. Confess, you’re a jogger, am I right?”

  “Yes,” said the boy. “I’m on the track team at college.”

  “I knew it. You have that lean and hungry look that worried Caesar. Do you think too much? Are you a dangerous young man?” He pulled out a mashed pack of cigarettes. “What kind of young man are you?”