The Clarinet Polka (20 page)

The main person Janice talked about was her dad. He was a strict old-fashioned papa straight from the old country, a real tyrant. All the time they were growing up, the kids had Polish lessons with the old man, and if they didn't get their work done, all hell broke loose. On Sunday nights they read out loud to each other from the great works of Polish literature, and if they mispronounced anything, old Czesław was on them like a shot. But he cut Janice a lot of slack because she was a girl—his darling daughter—and she could usually get him laughing. Her brothers he rode day and night.

Her dad liked things real quiet—well, saying that doesn't give you the full horror of it. He was totally looney tunes, whacked out of his skull, bananas about noise, and the minute he walked through the door, unearthly silence descended. He took the phone off the hook. Nobody could play the radio or the TV. Everybody tiptoed around the house in their stocking feet and talked in whispers.

You couldn't wash dishes after he got home because the sound of the plates banging together in the sink bothered him. If you were going to sneeze, you ran into the bathroom to do it. If you were doing your homework, you had to make sure your bedroom door was shut because the sound of a pencil scratching on paper bothered him. Flies buzzing bothered him. The locusts in the trees bothered him. The cat walking across the carpet bothered him. Her parents' bedroom had double-pane glass on the windows and like forty-seven layers of drapes, and still her dad would wake up in the middle of the night if a dog barked six blocks away.

Now you'd think a man like that, the last thing in the world he'd want would be for his kids to play musical instruments, right? Wrong. Good old Czesław was determined that there was going to be music in his house, and by music he meant Mozart and Beethoven and Chopin and all that other good shit. He was big on culture, and he had a huge stereo in the living room, and he was the only one who was allowed to play it, and somehow the sound of that didn't bother him at all, and he'd sit there with a big smile on his face with the damn thing cranked up to the last notch. “If I never hear
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
again,” Janice said, “it'll be too soon.”

Both the boys had violin lessons. To this day her brothers would rather drink carbolic acid than listen to classical music on the violin. Janice came along, and she was supposed to play the violin too. She was in the fifth grade at St. Stans, and Sister Angelica told her dad she was gifted, so he figured he better get her a fiddle and get her started.

“Dad,” she said, “please let me play the clarinet so when I go to high school I can get into the band and just for once be like all the other kids.” He thought that over and said okay, and she about dropped dead of surprise. He took her down to Kaltenbach's and bought her the best clarinet in the store, and the minute she got her hands on it, you couldn't pry it loose from her.

“I don't know why I loved it so much,” she said. She loved everything about it—the shiny keys, the black wood, the way it felt when she held it, and after she stopped squawking, she even started to like the sounds she made. “I don't want to sound conceited or anything, but I knew I was going to be good. I knew it was something I could do better than the other kids.”

She took lessons with the old lady at Kaltenbach's, and Janice would always say, “Could you play it over for me, please, so I can get the hang of it?” and the old lady would play it a few times on the piano, and Janice would memorize it right there on the spot and come back the next week and pretend she was reading the music. The old lady kept giving her harder and harder pieces. Sometimes Janice wouldn't remember exactly how it went, and she'd make it up, and the old lady would sigh and say, “That's very pretty, Janice, but that's not what's written here.”

Janice got bored with the pieces from the old lady and spent all her time playing along with whatever was on the radio. “That's how I learned a lot of new keys,” she said.

Eventually the old lady said, “I don't know what to do with you, Janice. You'll be going up to Central, won't you? I think you'd better take some lessons from Mr. Webb.”

Well, Mr. Webb didn't know what to do with her either, so he started lending her jazz records. “That was wonderful,” she said. “I could play them over as many times as I wanted.” She memorized a whole bunch of jazz tunes. That's when she was in the eighth grade.

Her freshman year at Central, Mr. Webb put her right into the senior band. The band music was really easy, “baby stuff,” she said, and she could play any of it just so long as she got to hear it first. Halfway through the year, Mr. Webb called her into his office. “He started out trying to be calm,” she said, “but he got all worked up. He got so mad at me he broke a pencil.”

She was misusing her God-given talents, he said. He'd been teaching music for twenty years, and he'd never seen anybody with the gift she had. “Janice,” he yelled at her, “you can't go on like this.
You've got to learn to read music!
”

It was a year later and she still couldn't read music. “I keep trying,” she said, “and I still feel guilty. But it's just so boring.”

So how do you practice the clarinet in Czesław Dłuwiecki's house of silence? Well, most nights he worked late. After he got home, Janice would carry her clarinet and her little record player down into the storage room back of the furnace in the basement. She'd shut every door there was. He could still hear her, but he'd put up with it for as long as he could because she was his little musical genius, so if she was lucky, she could play a couple hours before her dad would send her brother down to tell her please to stop because that faint bit of music was coming up through the floorboards and driving him nuts.

Janice had a good sense of humor about her father. She could do his voice in both Polish and English, and she had him down to a T—the way he waved his hands in the air, the way his eyes bugged out when he got pissed off.

“What's he going to do when he finds out you're playing in a polka band?” I said.

“Oh, he's not going to like it one little bit. I know exactly what he's going to say. ‘Those people'—he means everybody in South Raysburg—‘Those people don't have a real culture. It's a degenerate peasant culture.'”

I had to laugh at that. “Degenerate, huh?”

“That's right.
Zdegenerowana
. Well, I don't care what he says, it's
my
music.”

The first thing Linda gave Janice to learn was “The Clarinet Polka.” Linda lent her about a dozen different versions of that tune—a whole bunch of records and even some tapes so Janice could hear the way they'd played it back in the Second Ice Age—and by the time Janice listened to all those versions about a million times and learned to play it her way, she was hooked but good on polka music. It wasn't just something fun to play like New Orleans jazz, it was
her
music. “Maybe it's in my blood, I don't know. I thought, oh, now I know why I've been playing the clarinet. I was born to play this stuff.”

*   *   *

The way I was going, I could have drifted along for God knows how long, thinking, hey, this may not be great but it's not that bad either. If I'd had a girlfriend, maybe I could have gone along like that for years, you know what I mean? Working for Vick, going home for dinner most nights, talking to Linda about her polka band, driving Janice around and having our little talks, knocking back a few with Georgie in the PAC. It was a strange time. I wasn't drinking much more than what seemed reasonable, and whatever was bothering me, I'd got real good at putting it out of my mind. I was sitting in deep neutral, and when I came out of it, I could have gone a lot of different directions. I still kept thinking, okay, Koprowski, one of these days, you're going to Austin.

Then—well, it was sometime in December. I remember I was worrying about my Christmas shopping. It was one of those nights when the Ohio Valley looks like shit. Bitterly cold, lots of air pollution, muddy gray sky, dirty old snow frozen onto the sidewalks, everybody saying, “Jesus, if it snows tonight, the road's going to be a nightmare.” It was a Wednesday night. You'll see in a minute why I remember that.

I did the usual when I got off work, popped into the Greek's for a quick one. I forget what was going on at home; maybe Mom was doing something with the sodality, I don't know, but anyhow dinner wasn't happening, so I ordered lamb souvlaki to go. The funny thing is that I was feeling pretty good. I was looking forward to getting out of the cold and curling up in my little bed in my trailer and sipping at a fifth and eating my Greek dinner and watching TV and basically just dialing out on the world. You don't expect somebody to be in your car, right? You just open the door and get in, right? Connie was sitting in the passenger seat.

I jumped back out of the car like somebody had shot me. She was just sitting there reading a book. “Yeah, it's me,” she said, “the bad penny.”

I could still feel the adrenaline. I yelled at her, “Get the hell out of my car.”

She got out, and we stood there looking at each other. “Scare the bat piss out of me, why don't you?” I said, or something like that, and she said she was sorry. She was all in black leather—black coat and black boots up to her knees and black gloves and even a black leather beret. She looked like an ad for something.

“I'm sorry I broke our date,” she said.

“Well, shit, honey, that's all right. No problem. It's only been three or four months since then, but what's a little time between friends?”

“Don't give me that, Jim. I called you. I called you
twice
. You hung up on me. You were terrible.”

“Yeah, I guess I was. It's true.”

“If you want me to go away, just say so.”

It's totally ridiculous sometimes why you do what you do. I'd paid five bucks for the souvlaki dinner, and I was standing there with the bag in my hand, and it was getting cold. “Look,” I said, “I got a trailer over back of Raysburg Hill.”

She got her car and followed me. I parked where I always did, and she parked across the road. It was starting to snow, but not much. I watched her walk across the road. She looked good in black. We went in my trailer. She took her coat off, and she was wearing a black leather minidress. Quality leather, that soft, ungodly expensive stuff that feels almost, you know, buttery. “Is there any heat in here?” she said. “I'm half frozen.”

“You want some Greek food?” I said. Turned out—surprise—all she wanted was a drink. I poured her a shot of Jack Daniel's and she downed it. “You mind if I eat?” I said.

“Oh, heavens no. Go ahead.”

I had a good heater in there. Little forced-air oil furnace. I fired it up, but she still couldn't get warm. She kept her gloves on. Dress gloves. The real tight kind. “I've turned thirty,” she said, “so I guess you can't trust me anymore.”

A lot of things I could have said to that, but I didn't. I looked at her, and I thought, hell, kid, if a man was into leather, he'd be creaming his jeans by now. I won't lie to you and try to say I wasn't enjoying the show, but at the same time something didn't feel right about Connie being in my trailer. Other than me and the landlord, the only people who'd set foot in my trailer were George and my sister, and I'd just as soon have kept it that way. I didn't like it that Connie even knew where I was living.

“I owe you an explanation,” she said. “Do you want to hear it?”

Of course I wanted to hear it. Wouldn't you?

“Well, you remember what a mess I was?” she said. “I'd been drinking since about two in the afternoon. And you remember how late I got home? All I wanted to do was sleep. I wanted to sleep all day. At eight in the morning the phone started ringing, and it wouldn't stop. It rang over twenty times. I finally picked it up. He was calling me from Baltimore. He'd had a nice long chat with Tommy, man to man, and—well, Daddy explained to Tommy that when Mommy talked about keeping secrets, she hadn't meant keeping secrets
from Daddy
. So Tommy told Daddy all about the funny man that Mommy had met in the record store and about how he'd got to play the games in the penny arcade.”

You can imagine my delight at hearing that. She was talking in her I-could-care-less voice, and every once in a while she'd give me her weird creepy little smile—like, get the joke? Now if you give me half a chance, usually I can get the joke, but I sure wasn't getting this one.

“I threw some things in a suitcase,” she said, “and I caught the next plane to Baltimore. We left the kids with his mother and checked into a hotel. I was terrified. I was sure my whole world was going to come crashing down around my ears. We talked for two days nonstop. I agreed to everything.

“I told him about you,” she said, “but not really you. I wouldn't tell him your name. That's the only thing I wouldn't give in on. That was not negotiable. I told him you were an insurance salesman—married, in serious trouble with your marriage. I told him you had two kids. I told him we mainly sat around together and drank and I listened to your sad tale of woe. I knew he'd never believe I hadn't been to bed with you, so I told him we'd done it once—a quickie in a cheap hotel room. I said we'd both been so nervous it hadn't been very good. I said I hadn't felt much of anything. I said I felt sorry for you.

“He told me that if we were headed for the divorce court, he had no intention of being nice about it. He said I could be as free as I wanted just so long as I didn't sleep with other men. That was
his
non-negotiable demand, and he had no intention of budging on it. But anything else was okay.

“So I agreed to give our marriage another try, to really work at it this time. I said I'd never see you again. I said I'd never sleep with another man again. He said he'd cut back his hours and spend more time with the family. He agreed that as soon as he could, he'd try to open a practice in Baltimore so we could get out of this godforsaken hole. He said I'd been drinking too much, that he was worried about me, so I agreed to cut back.