Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  “They’ve got books by the Kovacs,” Elsie said, “and they’ve certainly got a Bible. He can go on with the Old Testament stories. You’ve agreed about that.”

  “As stories yes. I have no objection to that. As stories, some real, some myth, of an ancient people with their own particular tribal deity named Jehovah. How far have you got, Tom?” I asked him pleasantly.

  Without raising his eyes from Toots and Casper he said, “Samson,” turning a page. “The part where he kills the lion with his bare hands.”

  “Those are all exciting stories,” Elsie said. “The Bible is exciting—it doesn’t have to be dull. Far, far from it. But it’s important for a person to read it all the way through from beginning to end. Too many educated people are completely ignorant of spiritual matters.”

  “What’s spiritual about tearing a lion in half with your two hands? Or rain coming down for forty days and forty nights, or living in a whale’s belly for a while? Let’s not use words like that too loosely.”

  “What’s spiritual about it? Incidentally the Bible doesn’t say whale, it says a big fish. But let that pass. The length of time Jonah was in it was three days, thereby symbolizing Christ’s death and resurrection after three days. The Old Testament is a preparation for the New. It foreshadows the events in it.”

  “Correction, foreshadows what some people think are events, others myths. What about this resurrection? Who said he arose? Where’s the witnesses? Affidavits please?”

  Lena came out in the thick of this and said, “At it again? I’m not sure it’s good for two parents to make a debating society out of a marriage in front of the kids.”

  “Why not?” I said, taking the beer which she now had the decency to hand me. “It gives the child both sides to the question and shows him his parents give him credit for enough intelligence to make up his own mind. Later of course, when all the votes are in, when all the precincts have been heard from. Let them hear from all the precincts, they can take it. Eh, Tom? Tom!”

  The kid’s seeming indifference to the subject Els and I took to be just that, but Lena said it was a defense mechanism—there is a lot of that going around, to judge by the reports—concealing deep wounds resulting from the family division.

  “Anyway, he doesn’t want to be a minister or a lawyer or anything like that,” I said, throwing a peanut at him. “He wants to quit school and work in the fireworks factory all his life. Or spend it humping pianos. Eh, Tomasko?” I reached over and rumpled his head, shaking an extra grin out of him. “And I’ll pay you ten cents an hour for washing your face.”

  We dropped him at the Kovacs and drove in my car to a steak house by the river, where our eye was caught by an outdoor art exhibit. Or Lena’s was, and nothing would do but we see it before eating. For me this was one of those unexpected turns in the road that life takes us on without any warning and without our in the least dreaming what lies in store for us around the bend.

  There were about ten or a dozen local artists with their paintings standing on easels and nailed to fences and even hung on bushes, the usual mixture of schools. Our foursome began to break up like an ice flow as generally happens when each follows his fancy, and so at one point I found myself standing before an oil of a horse that I figured was probably a self-portrait judging from the general execution, when someone appeared at my side who accepted responsibility for it.

  She was a woman of about forty, so much like Lena in size and even appearance that I thought at first it was her, and checked a remark just in time. She explained it was an early effort of the kind she had outgrown for abstracts, to several of which she now led me. They weren’t bad. I know a lot of fun is poked at these things, but I’m usually able to enjoy a picture—or not—entirely irregardless of its type. Take it on its own terms, what’s all the sweat? A mass (or even mess) of color and lines for their own sake can give you a sort of kick. And as for those conglomerations of stuff with newspaper headlines, whiskey labels and chicken bones stuck in them, why not? What is life but a conglomeration of newspaper headlines, whiskey labels and chicken bones for each of us to make his own head nor tail out of? The colors in the oils the woman now showed me were laid on in thick layers in a kind of painting called antipasto painting or something like that I believe. Green-eyed and blonde, she made herself up in the same technique. She had a mouth like a shrimp cocktail like Lena. Her pictures had a zing to them, and I told her as much in so many words. One was a bitter commentary on the futility of trying to strive for the kind of beauty they did in olden times, when it was all a fraud and a delusion anyway but nobody knew it. This consisted of an old-fashioned gilt frame that the canvas was put around, in a hollow square, typifying she said a frank recognition that the artist no longer has anything to say.

  “I’ll buy that,” I said.

  “Oh, wonderful. Do you want to take it with you or leave it till the end of the show? A small deposit will hold it. I have a price of fifty dollars on it.”

  “No, I don’t mean I want to buy the painting. I just mean that I agree with what you’re trying to say in it. I see eye to eye with you.”

  “Oh,” she said rather sadly. I felt so embarrassed that I stood there letting her point out some of the painting’s merits I might otherwise of overlooked in a spiel lasting ten, fifteen minutes, while my party vanished completely from view. The use of a nasal spray to get a rippled effect on the paint for a finishing touch was honest despair, she said, not bad faith or intellectual perversity.

  “I like it quite well, but I like that one even better, I think,” I said, pointing to another, just to give me something else to seem to be wavering between, and thus ease myself off the hook. “Oh, I like all these much better over here.”

  “I’ll tell Bruno Hoffman,” she said. “His start over there.”

  This was really a hell of a note. I couldn’t go and I couldn’t go till I had patched this booboo up somehow. This woman might be going through menopause, a nervous breakdown or what not. I caught a glimpse of my party way down at the other end of the exhibit, looking for me. But I couldn’t leave till I had smoothed this over, which meant hanging around to admire her work a little more in as casual a way as possible. It was a hot night. I had left my coat in the car, and I had on one of those Harry Truman sport shirts with the palm trees that are plenty representational and short sleeves. I stood in profile to the woman with my gut sucked in and a thumb hooked in my belt so as to show off the muscle of my right arm, the majority of which is covered with tattoos.

  At last the woman came over.

  “Have you ever posed?” she asked.

  “No ma’am, I never have.”

  “You have a magnificent build. What do you do, may I ask?”

  “I’m a furniture mover.”

  “Ah. Well I could use one of those too. I’ve got a piano I can’t get rid of.” She laughed. “Have you ever tried to discard a piano? It’s a sort of monstrosity my mother’s had in the apartment, that’s just cluttering the place up. But nobody wants it. The Salvation Army doesn’t want it, the settlement house doesn’t want it, even the town disposal won’t take it. Nor a private trash man I called about it. He said it isn’t ‘reasonable refuse.’” The woman laughed again. “It’s one of those crazy no-way-out Samuel Beckett situations.”

  “He that new cartage outfit in town?”

  “No, no, this is the theatre of the absurd, where there’s no solution to anything. Do you see any solution to it? I mean you must have situations like this, where somebody doesn’t want a piano moved to anywhere, just out. Where do old pianos go when they die? They must go somewhere.”

  “To charity places, other people. Somebody who might want one for a rumpus room or something.”

  “Nobody wants this. Don’t think I haven’t tried to unload it! So now what do I do? Chop it up and slip it piecemeal into the garbage? Pour kerosene on it in the back yard and burn it up? Or what?”

  I stood there thinking, enjoying the smell of perfume and
the rise and fall of a bosom in a green silk blouse while I turned over the crisis vexing their owner—who watched me through horn-rim glasses. I had seen a comedian eat a pair just like it on television the night before. His were props without lenses of course, probably carmel or taffy he could stuff into his mouth and chew up for a finish to a skit where he was distracted by lust. A state of mind I appreciated. Suddenly I had an inspiration. “Just a minute,” I said.

  I turned and by dint of wigwagging like a lunatic got the attention of the other three and then got them to come back. When they did I asked Elsie, “Would the Gospel Mission like a piano? You have nothing but that portable organ you take out on the street don’t you? This lady has one she’ll very kindly give you.”

  “Oh, that’s very charitable of you,” Elsie said to her, “but I think a family is donating us one. What kind do you have?”

  “It’s an old Mendenhall upright.” I winced but said nothing. That’s a piece of antideluvian artillery that hasn’t been made since around 1920. I only saw two in my life, and I would rather move the truck up and down stairs.

  We left it that Elsie would find out for sure about it and I would call the woman, who scribbled her name and number on a piece of paper in return for one of my business cards, which I always carried in my wallet. Elsie contributed to the exchange by handing the woman one of the leaflets she carried in her bag. “I don’t know whether you’re saved or not, but I’d like you to take this home and read it. It may change your life.” The woman saw what it was and quickly put it in the pocket of her skirt, not before I saw it was the one entitled “Where will you spend eternity?” with a picture showing heaven like a magnificent hotel and the line “You can make your reservations now. Simply call Jesus.” The woman’s name was Ona Mervin I saw as we walked away, and I lagged a step behind to make sure the telephone number on the slip of paper was elegible before tucking it into my billfold.

  The incident made me a foul ball at dinner. We went to a fish house with outside tables where you could smell the cooking from a Chinese restaurant across the street. Parading within view of us was one of those religious nuts that it’s a mistake to think are limited to cartoons. I have seen them on the streets of New York and Chicago as well as here, ranting away and waving their Bible. This one didn’t preach. He carried a placard predicting the end of the world, besides handing out leaflets in which he specified the exact date of the Second Coming as worked out by his interpretation of Revelation—Monday, June 11. Two weeks from now.

  “Let’s all remember to put it down on our appointment calendar,” I said.

  Elsie was reading a leaflet she took from him when he passed us. She knew him from the mission, and had exchanged a few words with him. “I don’t think it’s right trying to prophesy the exact day,” she said, “but the end is coming some time, and he may be correct. Who knows? It says in Isaiah the heavens will be rolled together as a scroll. Have you ever thought what an atomic explosion looks like? Just like a scroll. Mock all you want, but you’re trifling with your immortal soul.”

  I had drunk three whiskies by the time our fish came and now poured out some beer from my bottle. Art poked his trout with his fork, as though making sure it wasn’t still alive before tackling it. I said, “Did you know I could belch the entire Ten Commandments?” Lena laid a hand on my arm across the table and said, “Everything is relative. With the Persians it’s a sign of courtesy to your host. That you enjoyed the meal.” See, with Lena always the obscure fact, the little-known detail.

  When we squared up I made sure again I had the slip with the woman’s name and phone number on it. But that wasn’t necessary. Two days later she telephoned me at the office to check whether the mission could use the piano, and I had to report that they already had one.

  “Oh, dear. That leaves the last resort—the city dump. How much would you charge to take it there?”

  “It’s twelve dollars an hour for three men, and five dollars for the first flight of stairs and three dollars for each additional flight. What floor are you on?”

  “Third, at 21 Poplar Street. Just off the river.”

  “It’ll come to over twenty dollars. I’ll make it twenty.”

  “Lordy. That’s a lot of money just to throw something away. You couldn’t use a nice oil, could you? That blue and gold one with the leaves that you admired? I had a price of sixty dollars on it.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that to you, lady. I know you artists need the money.”

  three

  ONE LOOK AT that stairway and I knew the piano would have to go out the window by block and tackle—another twenty dollars. Even getting a little apartment spinnet under them low headers and around them corkscrew turns into the light of day would be like giving birth to something, and the Mendenhall upright staring us in the face was twice the size and weight. We had McGurk with us to top it, but my regular keyboard man, Bill Bascomb, was on a long haul to Detroit, and so Art Salerno was working keyboard today. In view of all this I was relieved we had to swing the dinosaur, but nervous about breaking the news to the woman, who wasn’t going to like the extra twenty smackers. We were all up in her studio waiting for her to get off the phone so we could tell her. McGurk sat on the floor snoozing with his back to the wall, like a Mexican taking a siesta, which is what he makes out of any delay, while Art Salerno walked around rubbering at the pictures. I avoided them, not wanting to be seen admiring something and having it shoved on me as payment at this junkture. After all I appreciated the woman’s point—we were only taking the fiddle out to the dump. Out of the tail of my eye I looked for the leaf study I was suppose to be mad about, without success.

  She was chattering away about the prize awards with somebody who had also been hung in the show, and between them I gathered they differed violently with the jury’s selections. She was dressed in spattered white garageman’s overalls with a smock over them, and the horn-rim glasses were shoved up onto her forehead. She sat on a low stool with her back to us, so I figured it was safe to go on a cautious tour of the paintings, at least those behind her.

  Stepping over McGurk, I saw several that I recognized from the exhibition, both the representational and the non. Then suddenly there were several canvasses in a whole nother vane. Either she was living with somebody who also painted or she was going through more periods than you could shake a stick at. These were vague dreamy landscapes of moonlit woods and misty rivers you could hardly make out they were executed with such feeling. Nocturnes I guess you’d call them. Even the scenes that weren’t nighttime had this vague poetic feeling—like nocturnes during the day. Why had I missed these at the outdoor show, if they were there?

  Art Salerno, working his way from the other direction, bumped into me in front of a seascape. Together we viewed it.

  “Jesus,” he said under his breath.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” I must admit now that he gravels me, so that I can hardly agree with him even when he expresses an opinion I share. “I rather like it,” I lied.

  “If she could only make up her mind.”

  “She’s been going through different periods.”

  “She was going through one when she painted this thing.”

  I ignored the vulgarity of the remark. It’s the kind of joke you might think of but wouldn’t say. I could increasingly appreciate Lena’s beefs about this man. At the same time I was glad he deserved them. It justified my cause with Lena, or would if I ever got to have one. Lena made me think of the woman and I turned to her thinking, “Christ lady, do you want to cauliflower your ear with that damn telephone?” Then I thought of my wife, and in a fit of rage at the sheer difference I looked at the woman and said mentally, “I’d like to pin you to the mattress, baby, I’d like to split you in two like a broiler.” I prodded McGurk with the toe of my foot. He smiled up at me like a child awakened from sleep, shoving his cap off his dirty face. Strong as an ox and twice as bright, I like McGurk. No complications. The best piano topper in the business and no
complications. He jerked his head toward the woman, who was rattling away about something in the show that had a certain macobber charm. It was costing her twelve bucks an hour for three men talking about macobber charm. “Nice big window anyway,” McGurk said lazily, then settled down to resume his nap, leaving the diplomatic crisis to me. But just then the woman suddenly wound up the conversation and he snapped to his feet.

  The woman swung around on the stool and smiled brightly at us. “Well so!” she said, as though to ask why wasn’t the fiddle on the truck and on its way to the dump. I took a step forward.

  “Lady,” I said, “that piano won’t go down them stairs. I’m afraid we’re going to have to swing it. You know—lower it out through the window with block and tackle. That’s twenty dollars extra.”

  With the dying smile, like a fire blown out in a high wind, she took me in from head to foot. She twitched the glasses down to her nose to size me up as a specimen. “Oh but it came up the stairs. Why not down?”

  I glanced at McGurk, who turned away, rubbing his nose. This is the wheeze you are prepared for when the customer’s pocketbook is threatened with a swing job—the piano came up the stairs, why can’t it go down? The trick now is to jog their memory just a little as an alternative to calling them a liar. I made a concerted effort to be polite.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I ask the name of the crew that performed that miracle?” The piano crew is considered the aristocrats of furniture movers, and ours was regarded as one of the best in Indiana, that is with Bascomb on keyboard. You would have to go to Chi to find the beat, and even there I understand they are beginning to follow the eastern custom of using four men on a crew instead of the classic three—which I don’t regard as legitimate.

  The woman turned to a table for a cigarette and a holder, and by the time she turned around waving a match out and breathing smoke from her nose, the resemblance to Lena was uncanny. “Well, the piano was moved here from South Bend a long, long time ago, and I wasn’t actually here at the time, but my mother was.”