The Piano Tuner

by Peter Meinke

  “Listen, you stupid Polack,” I said in a low voice, “get off my back and stay off.” I meant to say, “I’ll drink when I want and not drink when I want,” but I never got it out. Gorski jerked back and somehow, as I released his tie, my chair fell over backwards and I was lying on my back in the deep-piled carpet of the Blue Horse.

  It was a disaster, of course. The waiter helped me up, everyone staring, and mumbled something I couldn’t understand. I brushed him away, walked directly to the cloakroom, got my coat, and left the restaurant. Only when I got out in the fresh air I remembered I hadn’t paid the bill, which I knew would be a whopper: the Blue Horse had fancy prices, especially on its liquor. Well, that was Gorski’s problem; my problem was, we hadn’t even begun to talk about adhesives.

  Patricia didn’t seem surprised to see me home early. She was working in the yard, which she loved to do. I poured me a whiskey, then changed my mind and dumped it in the sink. I sat by the window, looking out at our beautiful azaleas, and as usual I was disappointed. Their bloom lasts so short a time, we wait for it so long, we build up in our minds such an image of impossible beauty and fragrance that the actual imperfect presence of these fragile flowers is always anticlimactic. It is similar to what we do with our children: such energy, effort, and emotion are invested in them that we take it as a personal affront when they don’t measure up to our totally imaginary and ridiculous expectations.

  I was already replaying the conversation with the Pole, and worrying how I would explain it to Prince. But mainly I was thinking, Maybe Gorski was right, I shouldn’t drink so much, I should get some exercise, golf or something. I really wasn’t in good shape. In fact, my doctor—old Benbow, who never said you actually had to do anything; he was of the permissive school—had recently suggested that I cut down on drinking and smoking.

  “On both of them?” I asked, winking at him. “What will you want me to cut out next?”

  He didn’t wink back. “I’ll let you know,” he said. “That’ll be twenty dollars.”

  And I still might do it, but every time I think of starting (of stopping, rather) I think of my grandfather, old Grandpa who grew up on beer and cigars in Schweinfurt, Germany, and sustained himself on American whiskey until he was eighty-eight, working right to the end (illegally, I’m sure) as a night watchman in Bridgeport. Of course, he didn’t like cigarettes. “Put out them stinkaroos,” he’d tell me, passing a cigar. “Have a real smoke.” He even said that to Patricia, who had innocently lit up her mentholated filtertip—the kind Grandpa hated the most—at the dinner table.

  She stared at him. He stared back. Then she took the cigar, jabbed her fork through it, and proceeded to light it up in a positively Olympian cloud of smoke. There was silence around the table (except for the sucking puffing sounds Patricia was making): everyone was afraid of Grandpa. After what seemed like an hour but must have been just a minute or so, Grandpa turned to me and said, “She’s all right,” and everybody laughed and dinner started again and Patricia and I got married.

  Gorski had got to me, all right. I went upstairs to bed without another drink (without supper, either). In the morning I told Patricia I was going to the club to play golf.

  “You don’t know how to play golf,” she said.

  “No problem,” I said. “Gene Martin has played for twenty years and has never broken 100. And that reminds me, I don’t feel like going to their cocktail party tonight.”

  She looked at me. It occurred to me that she didn’t look at me very much these days. “Suit yourself,” she said.

  But the club was packed and I only had a vague idea of where to rent or borrow golf clubs. I soon found myself at the nineteenth hole with Archie Miller and Hank Leone. I said no to the beers, but they came anyway. I felt sad, positively sinful, as I took my first sips, but as the day wore on I gradually became angry again, just like at the Blue Horse. I could see the Pole’s face leaning toward me. It was only poor overweight Archie Miller, asking what I wanted for lunch, but I felt like strangling him.

  “Your trouble, Archie, is that you only think about food. That’s why you look like a goddamn beach ball.”

  I stayed angry while I drove with Hank Leone, who had been divorced the month before and was in no happy frame of mind either, to the Martins’ cocktail party. I was still in good control of myself, but when I get angry I drink faster. I was worried about the lost contract and I was worried about Patricia, back at the house. Sometimes I think I have a positive genius for suffering. I’ve noticed some people never seem to suffer at all, no matter what they do. Some people, even very tenderhearted ones, are entirely without conscience. I’ve known men and women who help strangers, love animals, cry at tragedies on TV, who think nothing of ripping off a supermarket, cheating on their income taxes or spouses, exceeding speed limits. They seem to possess no sense of guilt: these are the lucky ones. But we can’t have too many of these people or our society, which is constructed almost entirely on guilt, would collapse. When the deep inner voice stops crying Thou shalt not, the stones will crack and grass and weeds will reclaim the streets.

  In the middle of the party Roland Prince, Jr., arrived with his long-nosed wife. I saw right away that he had heard about my lunch with Bishek Gorski. He avoided me for a while, but when I went up to him he said he would like to see me in his office on Monday.

  “You can talk to me now,” I said, “if you’re not afraid to speak (I nodded at his wife) in front of Cyrano here.”

  “You’re fired, Charlie,” he said.

  “Listen, shrimpboat,” I said, “let’s step outside and see who can fire whom.” I knew as I said this it didn’t make much sense, but I was past caring by now. Hank Leone somehow steered us apart, and later on in the evening Patricia came to pick me up. I was lying on a big pile of coats in the guest room. The next morning I got up, hitchhiked to the club, picked up my car, and started driving west.

  That was five years ago. I had the vague idea of going away, drying up, starting over. I kept going till I came to this sleepy Midwestern city with its pink motels and cheap flophouses and free lunches. Small checks follow me, and I’m reasonably contented. Now that I’m over fifty, I don’t have the energy I used to have. I could write the kids, but somehow even that seems too hard to do. Once in a while, when a check comes, I splurge on a bottle of Martell’s Cordon Bleu and share it with the gang here. They don’t even know what it is. We sit around on our bunks drinking it out of paper cups, hiding them when Mrs. Matthews comes in to check on us. I get a kick out of that. And sometimes I exercise my old skills, just to show off. The Cloverleaf is going to raffle off a station wagon and the one who sells the most tickets gets a free Christmas turkey. I’ve already sold so many we’re planning on a great feast.

  But mainly I pick up bottles of this cheap and perfectly palatable wine. I lie here in the twilight and think. I blow smoke in a bottle and watch it sink. Hey. That rhymes. Patricia would be proud of me.

  Losers Pay

  I met him first on the basketball court. He was one of those small awkward players who throw themselves into basketball with tremendous energy, waving their arms, running erratically from man to man, never grasping the pattern of the game. Though he irritated me to the point where I would stop playing and hold the ball while he leaped around me, slapping my arms, the six of us (playing three-on-three) went out afterwards for beer—losers pay—and our friendship began that afternoon.

  I liked him for perverse reasons, which is why I like most of my friends. Though he was a freshman and I a junior, he was loud and opinionated. “The fucking dean hasn’t read a book in fifteen years,” he would say, or, “The whole goddamn lit department are fags.” And I would defend the dean, who was a nice guy, and the lit professors, who were very serious men; but while I was telling Curtis how unreasonable his attacks were, I was thinking how he had the feel for certain symbolic, if not literal, truths.

  Perhaps his background qualified him for this, because it was so dramatic, s
o excessive. Curtis Ganz was the only one at our school whose father had been murdered, though Ev Colson’s dad had driven off the Skyway Bridge in a 1969 Buick under strange circumstances. But to have a father murdered, that was something, and many of us developed a definite loathing for our sedentary parents doomed to die slowly of overweight and cigarettes. Curtis’s father, he told us, had been a flamboyant lawyer, and one night was arguing a case in the local bar when his opponent drew a small pistol from his pocket and shot him through the nose, bringing Mr. Ganz to a bloody and reasonably painless end, as he never recovered consciousness.

  This had happened over ten years before, when Curtis was only eight or nine, and the murderer had already served his time and was paroled on good behavior. He, the murderer, was doing fine, but the Ganz family had never recovered, the children scattered to relatives, Mrs. Ganz having long been a semi-invalid. For a lawyer, Curtis’s father had turned out to be dazzlingly unprepared for sudden death: no life insurance, no will, no mortgage insurance. By the time Curtis got to college he was pretty much on his own, earning his own money, choosing Monroe College because it gave him the largest scholarship.

  Curtis was going to major in law. His ambition was to be a tough prosecuting attorney or a “hanging judge.” “I want to see those fuckers swing,” he would tell us, giving us his juvenile-delinquent stare. Curtis had barely begun to shave and still looked more like a high school sophomore than a college freshman.

  Our teachers both loved and feared him, because he was so cantankerous in class. In the long stretches of dull afternoons while the radiators and professors rattled on interminably, Curtis’s classes had a certain edge to them. Everyone would be gazing out the windows at the leaves whirling through the quadrangle or listening to the wind shaking the ancient windows of Truax Hall when Curtis would stand up and say, “Sir, why do all our major writers hate the Jews so much?” (Half of our class was Jewish.)

  “Well, they don’t really, Curtis,” the professor would begin. We had been reading Eliot and Pound and were now in the midst of The Sun Also Rises. “There are some anti-Semitic references in their work, but perhaps this is just a reflection of the anti-Semitism found in our society at the time.”

  “They’re not just references,” Curtis would say, and proceed to quote nasty anti-Jewish excerpts: he always did his homework. And the class would be off on a raging debate on the relation of morality to art, or, as Curtis liked to phrase it, of stupidity to talent. His general position seemed to be that most of our writers had their heads up their asses and were enjoying the view.

  In the evenings we would go down the hill to the local bars where we would play the bowling machines; losers would pay for a beer and the next game. Curtis was a fanatical player and an almost continual loser, though occasionally he had a sensational game, unrolling strike after strike so that often his name was chalked up on the board as the high game of the month even while he was losing 90 percent of the time. He also would get into fights with the “townies” because of his constant needling of the opposition. “Your turn, fatso,” he would say to a 200-pound metalcaster from the local foundry. Of course he never won his fights, but then he wouldn’t officially lose them either, as he never gave up: we would have to pry his opponent off him and carry Curtis, kicking and cursing, out to the streets. We believed he would have to be killed or beaten absolutely senseless before he would stop fighting.

  On quiet nights we sat around and talked about what we would do when we finished school. I was going to be a poet. “Write for TV, you twit,” Curtis would say. “At least that would be useful.” Curtis viewed TV as the opiate of the masses. The best thing you could do for the American people was to give them something inane to stare at while they sucked their thumbs; this kept them from beating their children or burning down the First National Bank. Though he didn’t have anything against beating children. “Children are always a projection of their parents,” he would announce. “Therefore child abuse is the equivalent of self-abuse, and hence pleasurable. The little pricks.” We loved to hear him talk like this; it was like having a profane and adolescent Samuel Johnson in residence.

  But the subject he would talk about most often was his father, and his father’s death. He had been a wonderful father. Before he was murdered they lived in the best house in Schenectady. All the fat G.E. bigwigs jostled their pink behinds to get invited to their parties. They had a spiral staircase, a tennis court, a bar stocked with every intoxicating beverage the fuckers have invented. And all that was lost because a little cross-eyed runt named Albert McGinnis put a bullet through Mr. Ganz’s nose in an after-hours bar called The Corporal.

  What’s more, the story was perfectly true. Because of Curtis’s conversational mixture of diatribe and outrageous exaggeration, there were those of us who were skeptical of anything he said, so I checked it out. I went downtown to the office of the Schenectady Dispatch, feeling guilty as I did so, and went through the yellowing papers of a decade ago. It didn’t take me long to find it, a brief article tucked away on the second page of the city section:

  Schenectady Lawyer Murdered. Albert McGinnis, 57, of 227-1/2 Maple St., has been charged with second-degree murder in the shooting death of Murray Ganz, 35, a lawyer associated with the firm of Miller, Pack & Henry, following an argument in a local tavern.

  There was another paragraph or two, but I couldn’t find anything about the trial or the sentencing, or about McGinnis’s eventual release. Still, it proved Curtis’s story was not the product of a fevered imagination, however he might have embellished it.

  One night, very drunk, Curtis stated flatly, “I’m going to shoot the bastard. Some day I’m going to find him and shoot him in the stomach and talk to him so he knows who did it. And I’ll do it so I’m not caught. Anybody can murder anyone and get away with it in this dumb fucking country.”

  “No you can’t,” I said. “That’s stupid.”

  “I’ll do it slowly,” Curtis said. “I’ll burn his house down first. I’ll haunt him for a year.” He had it all planned out, he had been thinking about this for a long time. Suddenly it seemed that he could think of nothing else; in the next few weeks he dwelt on it incessantly, building baroque fantasies of assassination and torture. Nothing we could say could dissuade him, and to tell the truth we didn’t try very hard. It was exciting, and there seemed to be some justice in it. A tale of murder and revenge. Being involved in this was more interesting than Biology 102 or third-year French, and so we were sucked into his movie, as the saying goes.

  The first problem, which we never really expected to solve, was to locate the murderer. There was no Albert McGinnis in the telephone directory. We soon hit on the idea of going down to The Corporal, to “make inquiries,” Sam Spade-style. To combine drinking with detective work seemed to us the perfect activity. The Corporal was a grungy little bar in what we thought of as the Polack section of town. Strange meats (pig knuckles?) and huge pickles floated obscenely in jars on the counter-tops, polka music twanged from the jukebox, a dirty pool table crowded the far corner. A sign on the mirror said: Three Reasons for Making Love to Women Over 40: They don’t swell/They don’t tell/And they’re GRATEFUL as hell.

  There were four of us: Ev Colson, Marv Bluestein, Curtis, and myself. We sat at a filthy table with our beers. Colson said, “Jesus, you can get crabs just sitting here. And Polack crabs are bigger than blue-claws.” We picked out the oldest people in the bar as the best bets for knowing anything about McGinnis. I was assigned a gray-haired man with a large beerbelly and tattoos on both muscular arms. He was sitting at the end of the bar, and after gulping down my beer for courage I moved next to him and ordered two more. The man took his without saying anything.

  He was difficult to talk to and I knew why. I smelled of college. Curtis once said that college boys all smell alike to the working class—a repellent mixture of soap and fear, maybe, because we were scared shitless when we were talking to them. But gradually, as I bought more beers, he began ans
wering my questions. Yeah, he was a regular customer, he’d been coming here a long time. Yeah, for more than ten years, you could fill a fucking battleship with the beer he’d knocked off here. And finally, no, he didn’t know no McGinnis. Oh, that guy, the one who knocked off that asshole lawyer. Whaddaya want to see him for? Nah, he never comes here anymore, not for years, he’s a night watchman or something somewhere. Nah, I don’t know where, how about another beer, all right?

  We had arranged to meet at Tony’s, another bar down the street, when our conversations had finished—we were trying to avoid looking conspiratorial. When I got there Ev Colson was sitting alone at a table. “Jesus,” he said, “I’m no good at this. I was through in thirty seconds. Nothing.”

  “McGinnis is a night watchman somewhere,” I told him, and we settled down to wait for the others. Curtis was next in, with no information. “The fucker didn’t even know his own name,” he said, drinking my beer.

  But Bluestein came in with an excited look. “Got it,” he crowed, so we had to shush him down. “McGinnis is a night watchman!”

  “We already know that, peabrain,” said Curtis. Bluestein looked deflated.

  “But we don’t know where,” I said.

  “Ah! Well, I do.” He leaned forward. “McGinnis is a night watchman at Thornton Plastics out on Old Woodbridge Road. And he has breakfast at the Red Dragon five mornings a week. This guy I talked to knows because he met him there and tried to get him to smuggle out a carton of dishes.” Bluestein looked at us triumphantly. “But he wouldn’t,” he added.