Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  “Ah.”

  She appealed to McGurk. “Don’t you think it can go down the stairs either?”

  “I don’t get paid to think, lady. It’s all up to Mr. Waltz here. He’s the boss. What he says goes—out the window or through the door it makes no never mind to me.”

  “Lady,” I said, “what anybody else can do we can do. We don’t shirk no just claims on our brawn. But backs are broken and hernias sprung by taking pianos down stairs people said they came up, only they didn’t when checked into a little. Could we get in touch with your mother?” I held my breath, hoping the old lady wasn’t dead. But it was nearly that bad.

  “My mother happens to be in a sanitarium,” the woman said, breathing smoke.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Nervous or physical?”

  “But I’ll try to call her if that seems to be necessary. In order to throw a piano away.” Hers was a deep and belligerent melancholy now, and she sat down on the stool with the same kind of force you’ll smack a table with to emphasize a point. She was built like a Mendenhall. “Maybe they can wheel her to the telephone.”

  “Aw, lady.”

  McGurk sat down on the floor for another snooze while Art resumed his tour of the pictures, leaving the doghouse to me exclusively. Seeing the woman shuffle through the directory I sauntered over. “Where is your poor dear mother stopping? At what sanitarium?”

  “Nestle Down.”

  “A very good place. Highly spoken of. Not no snake pit. We move lots of furniture in there, including pianos. They let old people have their own belongings now days, it makes them feel more at home. I hope your mother is—isn’t too ill?”

  “My mother,” the woman said over her shoulder, “is completely helpless. Not an organ in her body functions properly. She has to be fed.”

  She dialed the number while I said “Aw” again and then asked either to talk to her mother—Mrs. Tinsdale was the name, so this woman was either married or divorced or both—or have a message taken to her while she held the wire for the answer.

  “I don’t like to quibble about money,” the woman harped away while we waited, “but it does seem a little ridiculous to pay all that just to throw something away. Forty dollars is more than the piano is worth.”

  “It’s like you said the other day—the theatre of the absurd.”

  I strolled out to the hallway for another gander down the stairs. No, there wasn’t room enough for two to tango in the squeezes, which meant that as heavy corner man at the bottom I wouldn’t even have Art to carry any keyboard to speak of, but would be carrying most of it myself on the turns. Since the turns were sharp as well as narrow, you would have to turn just a little in advance of the piano, as it were, which meant you would be carrying it out in front of you, like a pie. That’s when you feel weight. That’s when you can feel it in your marbles, when you’re carrying it out in front of you. That’s what puts backs out and springs hernias. It’s frankly why I don’t like to top a piano. I’d much rather be down there under it.

  I went back into the studio to see what the old lady had to say. I remember thinking it was a pity the daughter wasn’t one of them wire and metal sculptures who utilize junk. The piano would give her materials for years to come.

  The woman was just hanging up, slowly, after saying “Thank you” to somebody on the other end. She turned slowly toward me on the stool. “My mother is dead,” she said. “She just passed away.”

  “Well in that case,” I said, “I guess we can take that piano down those stairs. It’s the least we can do.”

  We tried to buck the woman up by this offer after letting her show a little emotion. Get the first shock out of her system. We insisted she have a stiff drink of whiskey, in which we all joined her. It was amazing the way the mood in that room changed from self-centered whining to mature cooperation. There was the feeling of friendship and human solidarity the news of death always inspires among the survivors. The woman told us something of her mother’s past, her life as a young woman in South Bend and her heroic efforts to keep a wayside refreshment stand going after her husband had been knocked down and killed by a truck that always stopped there for hotdogs and pop. She spoke of her mother’s suffering after she came to live with the daughter, now mercifully over. All arrangements had been made beforehand by the sanitarium, who were already proceeding with the undertaker of the family’s choice which the woman had given three, four months ago, when the old lady started to fail. There was nothing for the daughter to do now but try and distract herself by throwing herself into her work with redoubled zest. Life simply must reassert itself.

  “I’ve been commissioned to do a mural for a new office building downtown,” she told us, “in which I’m expected to depict the usual things like Capital and Labor and so on. The conventional sort of thing you can’t avoid in dealing with official committees. You know how it is.” McGurk nodded from the floor, whiskey glass in hand. Twelve dollars an hour for three men. “Well it’s just struck me like a flash from heaven that I could do worse than get a few camera shots of you men in action now that I’ve got you here performing this sort of Herculean task. I mean what more perfect models could anybody dream of for Labor? What better specimens?” Art looked modestly at the floor. I hoped he was wearing his truss today. The woman walked the floor with her palms together, in an absolute tizzy they call them. Inspirations were striking her at a rate that none of us would survive. “And what better theme than furniture movers to symbolize the mobile society of our time.”

  “You do them sculptures too lady?” McGurk asked.

  “No, no, I don’t mean mobile in that sense. I mean our culture with its lack of roots and sense of place, its absence of home identity and family feeling. In some things it’s impossible to work from live models, but photographs are a good substitute. So if you don’t mind while I load my Leica …”

  Because of a bad turn in the inside vestibule we had to dolly the piano on end to the hallway. There we took her down three, kicked her back to McGurk and carried her down the first flight, just barely clearing the header. It was like working in a cave. On the first landing we set her on end on the dolly again and wheeled her around into position for the next flight, which had the really nasty bend in it. The whole damn staircase was like a large intestine. The woman shot us in dramatic positions from above, leaning over the bannister and popping flashbulbs for a fare-thee-well, but now she squeezed past us and went down the next flight to get some angles from below. This flight was where the murder began.

  We had the keyboard riding inside, toward the bannister, and the back, the heavy corner, against the wall, and I had fully as little help from Art as I expected—though of course it wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t wedge in beside me on the turns. He did little more than help steady her on course, reaching over from behind me, though doing his share of “Whewing” and “Jesusing” as always. I don’t think he carried more than ten percent of the load, and since top man can’t manage more than thirty or forty due to his position, that left me with a good half of a fiddle weighing damn near half a ton, and I mean I could really feel this one in my grapes. We took her down four and set. After this the pretzel work began. The fiddle was still on end—the turn was too sharp to carry her any other way.

  “Want to take her two more, or is a step at a time enough?” McGurk asked, knowing what I had. “This is the bend in the river.”

  I was a second in answering. I leaned my head on my arm, holding onto the feet of the piano till a twinge in my groin subsided. I was afraid I had strained my milk this time. I had done it once before years ago and gone around for 6 mos. with the family jewels in a sling. From below came a chipper voice: “Now, I want to get the sense of weight from underneath, the tension of back and thigh in a perspective looking up—the whole tremendous sense of a Burden being come to grips with.”

  “You’ve come to the right place, lady,” says the page turner, adjusting the pad on his shoulder. He spat on his hands. “What say,
shall we try for two or just take her down one? What does the old Waltzenheimer think?”

  I knew I was wasting in anger energy desperately needed for my work, but this habit of Art’s irked me. It hit me where I lived. My name is obviously an abbreviation of Waltzinski or probably Walzinski, by ancestors who weren’t ashamed of it but who did Americanize it by hacking away some of the underbrush. Why not? I thought I would teach the page turner a lesson. Also there was your sexual motive here, the feeling that he was a potential rival for his wife. So after we got past the turn and he had his shoulder wedged in beside mine again, more or less, I decided I would give him a little more of his legitimate share of the piano. This I did by tipping it ever so slightly over in his direction.

  The result was a howl of protest from the page turner, who at the same time staggered against the bannister, grabbing a spindle of it. It come off in his hand with a snap like a firecracker. In a twinkling we were in trouble. The fiddle (still on end remember) wobbled off course, and with a terrific heave and a very loud “For Christ sake!” McGurk tried to steady it back on. Without much luck. There was another crackling sound which was either some more bannister giving way or somebody’s neckbones grinding. Losing Art’s carrying support of course lost the piano that much more equilibrium, that much more steerability, which rapidly sent the whole situation to hell in a handbasket. With McGurk’s labors (and Herculean is good) concentrated for the moment solely on pilot work, I now had damn near that whole fiddle on my back. I could feel muscles coming away from my bones from the heels up. I was convinced I could hear them, though that may of been the blood throbbing in my head. We couldn’t set the piano on the step because of the way it was swaying crazily in midair. For me to set would lose it the little support it had because, from that far down, I simply couldn’t heft it. It would have listed out of control completely and toppled over the bannister and gone crashing to the floors below, probably taking half the stairwell with it. That was the reasoning sheer instinct did for me. I didn’t think it out, it just went through my mind like a streak of lightning. So the same way you have to paddle a canoe faster than the current to keep control, we had to go down those steps like a bunch of drunken sailors. The very momentum of the piano made us speed up to keep control. Through some superhuman effort McGurk finally got the piano righted away from the bannister and toward the wall, along which it bumped, but now suddenly the top was tilting dangerously forward. There was a split second when it could of somersaulted down the stairs behind us. But then, summoning all the strength I had out of muscle, guts and bones, in one agonizing single heave I somehow managed to hump it back to McGurk, who of course was pulling back on the top himself. Even Art Salerno came through in this pinch. Like three men fighting a monster we stumbled down the stairs in a kind of insane trance and dropped it on the landing with a thunderclap that shook the whole building.

  “That was excellent, but, shoot, I’m afraid my bulb didn’t go off,” came the cheerful voice.

  None of us said anything. Art and I sank down on the top step of the next flight and sat with our tongues hanging out, gasping like fish out of water. Our arms hung limp between our knees, our eyes bulged, we breathed in death rattles. McGurk was draped in a collapsed state over the piano, which was still on end. His head was cradled on his arms, and he was whimpering softly. For a minute there was only that and the sound of Art and me’s death rattles.

  “I assume you’ll have a similar maneuver on this next flight? I mean you’ll do the whole thing over again? The light is better here, and we’ll get a longer, more theatrical sweep.”

  I raised my head in my own good time. When I spoke my voice was without tone.

  “Lady,” I said, “in a minute we’ll all pick up this here piano—the three of us. When we do, you’ll put the dolly under it. Then we’ll roll her around the landing and come downstairs, and when we do, you’ll be waiting there for us with the dolly again, to slip it under her. And so on. That’s the way it’s going to be all the way out to the truck.”

  “Oh well, perhaps a shot of you loading it on the truck will be more to my purposes. Yes, suddenly come to think of it. The furniture actually leaving, the moving van the symbol of the mobile society. That’s much the best. And it goes without saying you’ll get the twenty dollars I’ve saved, to divide among you.”

  Taking our time, and with frequent rests, we finally got the monster out of that hallway and on the truck. After getting it on the tailgate she asked us to hold the pose while she shot us from various angles. Which was no sweat, except for the tedium of the posing. In fact with the piano resting at last on the tailgate there was no sense of strain in our positions, so she got us to fake it. “Could you put your foot way back and your shoulder here,” she asked me at one point, “so I can get a continuous sweep of line from your heel upward?”

  “That’s not a natural way to be shoving a piano on a truck lady,” I said.

  “That’s all right. It’s the artistic authenticity I’m after. Whether it’s literally valid doesn’t matter.”

  She bustled around and got set, squatting down in a variety of angles while we sustained poses that weren’t literally valid.

  “Lady,” I said at last, “for a bunch of guys symbolizing a mobile society ain’t we standing a long time in the same place?”

  At last she got what she wanted, and then insisted on riding along to the city dump. There she got some interesting shots of three mystic figures carrying a piano acrost a blasted landscape in the fading light of day. The long shadows we cast gave it a haunting surrealist quality she called out as she darted around clicking the shutter. I could see she was more excited by this sudden development than the Labor poses. We were three allegorical symbols of the general human enigma, carting their mysterious burden toward the slag heaps of oblivion. Garbage was dumped here as well as junk, so we sank to our knees in vegetable matter as we plodded toward the brink of doom, the veins in our necks standing out like whipcord and bucking for ruptures to a man. Once we stumbled and the page turner pitched forward on all fours, covering himself with glory. “Let’s leave her here,” McGurk pleaded, sinking in fruit peels and inner tubes. “No,” I said stubbornly, “we’ll take her to the edge. I want to see this sonofabitch go over.” Salerno begun to vomit, contributing his bit to the eternal conundrum.

  Seeing that Mendenhall roll end over end down that mountain of filth was one of the most satisfying moments of my life—my professional life anyway. With a last jangle of music it keeled over on its back, castors up, and laid there. That finish seemed an echo of the question left suspended in the summer air among the droning flies by the three men with their mysterious burden—“Why? To what end? What for?”

  “I want you to see the pictures when they’re ready,” the woman told me when we walked back to the truck. “I’ll call you the minute they’re developed, and then you can come up to the studio and have a drink.”

  four

  THE SHOTS of the dump come out beautifully. One in particular had a haunting quality of world’s end, the woman said in describing what she would shoot for in the oil she was now definitely going to base on it. The views on the stairs and truck were only routine studies for composition. “It has a magic approximating the effect of painting itself, don’t you think?” she said of the city limits shot. Hazy air and smoke from scattered fires softened the setting sun to a red coal. And who were them mystic figures carrying their enigmatic burden through the rubble of the universe in the evening of Time? Were they pallbearers transporting into oblivion the instrument of song? Were they phantoms wandering through the World Ash of Goderdamerung? Were they, these men drifting with their backs to us as if in a dream, the executors of some inscrutable design to whose meaning they themselves lacked the key, or the exemplars of some voluntarily assumed despair, bearing to the edge of Hell the last artifacts of human longing? These were some of the things the woman who was going to paint the picture wanted to know. I may not have them all straight o
r in the right order, but that was the general drift.

  “I’m thinking of calling it ‘And the daughters of music shall be brought low,’” the woman said.

  She left the studio couch where we were looking at the prints together to fix us drinks. I could hear her clattering around in the kitchen. I couldn’t take my eyes off the picture. There we were, McGurk, Art Salerno and me, exemplars of some voluntarily assumed despair or whatever, phantoms in a surrealist landscape. And here I was sitting up here looking at myself in a setup just as fantastic and surrealist. A thought within me struck a sour note: they like men from the lower orders, these upper-crust women.

  “You must of had lots of interesting experiences with pianos,” she said cheerfully coming back with two whiskey highballs. She handed me one as she joined me again. She sat down the same way she had before. She first knelt on the couch and then sat on her legs. This produced a hollow in the upholstery like another pit for me to fall into. The springs twanged eagerly to make room for me.

  “Oh I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just work. We don’t generally wind up lugging them acrost symbolic landscapes. The only interesting thing I can think of offhand, we got stuck in a turn once with an upright we should of swung and had to saw the toes off the legs at either end to jockey it around. The people gave us permission of course. It was no trouble to glue them back on, and probably cheaper than swinging. We all laughed like hell when we did it, including the owners. She was a fat jolly woman.”

  “I’d like to play a piano,” she said, and sipped thoughtfully. As I watched her I remembered she hadn’t paid her bill yet, nor had another word been mentioned about splitting the twenty bucks among the crew. Reflections like these slow down sexual stimulus. “It’s a secret regret I always have, not learning to play an instrument. It must release an awful lot pent-up within you. Sort of ventilates the spirit.”