The Clarinet Polka (9 page)

We were right in the middle of dinner. My mom handed me the phone with her eyebrows raised.

I pretended I didn't know who it was. “This is
Constance
,” she says. It was the first time I'd ever heard her call herself that. “I'm sorry to call you at home. Is it all right?”

“It's all right this once, but don't make a habit of it.”

“I should have called you sooner, but I was too ashamed of myself. I'm just so sorry, Jim. Can you get away?”

“I don't know. When?”

“About ten.”

“What? You mean tonight?”

Yes, she did mean tonight. She'd meet me down by the river—“
Remember our spot?
” It didn't make any sense. Where the hell were her husband and kids? But I wasn't about to ask her that, and eventually I said okay. A perfect example of a guy letting his prick do his thinking for him.

So I changed my clothes and drove up to Center Raysburg and parked by Vick's shop and walked down to the river. Got there a little before ten.

By ten-thirty I'm getting fidgety, pacing up and down, staring at the lights on the Ohio side, smoking cigarettes. Oh, she's changed her mind, right? Or she's jerking me around. But I'll give her a few more minutes. Then I hear footsteps, and I see this girl walking toward me. Honest to God, I didn't know it was Connie until she was practically on top of me. I looked at my watch, and she was forty minutes late.

A miniskirt was like a uniform for her, and I didn't even know for sure if she owned a pair of pants, but she's wearing skintight blue jeans, the old-fashioned kind that fit tight all the way down, and a short leather jacket and high heels—I mean those real high spikes girls hadn't worn since I'd been in high school—and she looked exactly like one of those chicks who'd be climbing onto the back of a Harley in some sleazy old biker movie. I don't know what the hell I said, but she didn't pay any attention. She kissed me, stuck her tongue halfway down my throat, and I could taste the gin. “Take me somewhere and buy me a drink.”

That's a hard one. Do I want anybody to see us together? The nearest bar is Wallach's, but it's Polish and I'll know everybody in there. “You want to drive somewhere?” I say, and she shakes her head.

So I walk her two blocks up to J. P.'s because it's not Polish. She grabs ahold of my arm and hangs on to me. It takes us forever. She's not doing too well in her high heels, or maybe she's just not doing too well
period
. I'm trying to figure out how drunk she is. With Connie, it's hard to tell.

We step inside J. P.'s, and luck's not with me. The first person I see is Larry Dombrowczyk's old man. He's standing at the bar with a couple of his buddies. They've still got their work clothes on and their lunch buckets are sitting at their feet, so they must have just got off shift. Larry's old man sees me, and he takes a good, long slow look at Connie and gives me a big wink.

I get us a booth and a couple beers. She takes off her leather jacket, and she's wearing a thin white blouse under it, one of these semitransparent numbers, and she hasn't got a bra on. Every guy in the place is staring at her, and I'm thinking, oh, terrific. One of these clowns is going to make a move on her, and I'm going to have to duke it out with him, and I want to do that about as much as I want to swim to Ohio.

She's wearing gobs of makeup and she's not wearing her wedding ring. I'm trying to make conversation, but she doesn't say much, just gives me this weird glittery smile, and I'm feeling
tilt
like just before she ran screaming into the cornfield, and eventually it crosses my mind that there's lots of things I'd rather be doing than sitting around J. P.'s with this crazy woman.

I couldn't believe what she starts doing. She's sliding the pointy toes of those high heels up under my pants legs, and I'm thinking, hey, what is this? Have we gone through a time warp, or what? All I want to do is get it over with—like any idea of fun has pretty well gone down the drain—and I figure the place to do it is the floor of the shop, so I haul her back up onto her feet and back out onto the street, and now I know how drunk she is. If she hadn't been hanging all over me, a couple times she would have gone flat on her face.

It's a relief to get her into Vick's with the door shut. The minute we're inside, she's down on her knees unzipping my pants. She obviously doesn't give a shit if people on the street can see us through the window, or maybe she's too drunk to notice. I can't stop thinking about the fact that we're right smack in front of the window, and it
is
Vick's shop, you know what I mean? And I work there. A couple times I try to push her head away, but, no, she won't budge, and I think, oh, what the hell.

I get done, and I pull my pants up, and she just stays there on her knees. I hold out my hand to her, like, here let me help you up, but she doesn't pay any attention to it. She says in her ordinary, everyday voice, “You could say thank you.”

“Thank you, Connie.”

Then she just falls over on the floor. She says something else, but I can't get it, so I kneel down on the floor next to her and say, “What?” and she gives me a little kiss on the cheek and says, “I'm sorry, hon. I'm afraid I have to sleep for a little while,” and she's passed out cold.

So what do I do now? Well, what could I do? I had a fifth in the car with a few shots left in it, and I got that, and we're in a TV repair shop, right? So I pick the set with the biggest, brightest picture, and I fire it up and sit there and watch it. She's out for—oh, I don't know, over an hour. Long enough for me to kill the bottle anyway. Then I hear this little shaky voice going, “Jim? Are you in here?”

She's a mess. Stumbling around half crying, telling me how sorry she is. “Oh, God, I don't know how I drove down here. Oh, God, it's a wonder I didn't kill myself. Oh, God, I'm poisoned. I wish I could throw up.”

“Go in the can back there and stick your finger down your throat,” and by God, she does it. I hear about a gallon of liquid pouring out of her.

She comes out and flops down on the floor with her back to the wall. “Oh, God,” she says, “I should be institutionalized.”

Vick had an old electric kettle, so I made her some coffee, put in a ton of sugar and coffee whitener, and she told me again how sorry she was. “Don't worry about it, honey,” I said. “There's no problem that I can see.”

I'll never forget this. I hadn't turned on any lights because anybody on the street could see us even where we were in the back. She was sitting on the floor drinking her coffee, and she was just a shadow. In this absolutely flat dead voice she says, “He thinks I'm having an affair.”

“Oh, yeah?” I say. “Whatever gave him that idea?”

“I'm not sure, Jim, but perhaps coming home dead drunk might have contributed to it. Why'd you let me go home like that? It was crazy, just crazy.”

“Christ, Connie, what was I supposed to do with you?”

“You could have talked some sense into me. I was counting on you. I should have called him, told him I was going to a movie—or something. I don't know.
Anything.
We should have gone to a hotel, and I could have had a shower. Oh, hell, I don't know. I don't know what I'm talking about. There was nothing you could have done, really.”

“So what happened?”

“Oh, not much of anything. He was very nice to me. He put me to bed. He took care of the kids. He waited a whole damned day, and then when we were going to bed the next night, he said, ‘Okay, Constance, tell me about the man.'

“I denied it, of course. I told him I was so bored I went into a bar in Bridgeport and got drunk all by myself. We've been fighting ever since. He took some time off. He never takes time off, but he took some time off. He took the kids and went back to his parents'. ‘You want to be alone, Constance?' he said, ‘so be alone.'”

This story did not fill me with joy. Naturally I was thinking, okay, Koprowski, you dumb shit, it's time to bail out of this one.

“I never wanted to get married in the first place,” she said. “I told him that. I said, ‘We had a perfectly good relationship until we got married. Now you think you own me.' I said, ‘You knew what I was like, and you married me anyway. The question is, can I be married to you and have my own life or not?' He kept asking me who the man was. He asked me a million times. I started yelling at him. ‘You've got sex on the brain, asshole. Who the hell am I supposed to be having an affair with? I don't
know
anybody in this goddamn miserable shitty-ass town to
have
an affair with.'

“The kids are all upset. They're very perceptive. They always know when something's wrong. Bonnie's been crying herself to sleep every night. I feel terrible. He doesn't deserve this. The kids don't deserve this. Even you don't deserve it. I don't know what the hell's wrong with me. I think maybe I need to see somebody—a psychiatrist or somebody. Oh, God, I'm so fucked up.”

I didn't know what to say to her. I told her I was sorry.

“You don't have anything to feel sorry about,” she said. “
I'm
the one who started this whole crazy mess. Do you think I've never had guys coming on to me before? Guys were coming on to me when I was twelve, for Christ's sake. I don't know what I was thinking. You were a big, good-looking guy, and I thought, oh, he wants to fuck me. Well, why shouldn't he? No big deal, right? Isn't that sick?

“What was I thinking? Just what in God's name was I thinking? And then I couldn't just leave it at that, could I? Oh, no, that would be too sensible for wacko Connie. I had to go and track you down—and it took some effort, believe me. Oh, God, I should be locked up.”

We talked— No, that's not right. She talked and I listened until two in the morning. She kept saying what a nice man her husband was and how, if she wanted to be married, he'd be the perfect guy to be married to, but she just didn't want to be married, and I kept thinking, Christ, do I ever need another drink. I offered to drive her home, but she said she could drive. I offered to follow her to make sure she got there okay, and she kept saying no, but I could tell she didn't really mean it, so she drove away in her Mustang, and I followed her in my Chevy.

I don't know whether it was having me behind her or not, but she drove like somebody's grandmother—in a dead straight line and not much over forty the whole way. I knew I should have been thinking about the mess she was in, and maybe the mess I was in right along with her, but the only thing I could think about was where I could get a drink at that hour. We got into St. Stevens and she pulled over. She rolled down her window and motioned me to stop.

I got out and walked over to her car. “We're just a couple of blocks away,” she said. “I'm okay now. I don't want the neighbors to see you. Not that any of them would still be up. Oh, hell, this is crazy. Look, Jim, I'm just so sick of the back of that goddamned truck. Can you get us a hotel room for tomorrow night? Not too sleazy, okay? I'll pay for it, if that's a problem.”

“Sure,” I said.

“He said he'd call around five,” she said, “and I'll need to talk to the kids, so okay, I'll meet you down by the river. The same place, around eight?”

“That's fine,” I said.

“Oh, God, do I ever feel awful,” she said, and she just sat there with the engine off, looking at me. I didn't know what she was waiting for.

Then, of all the crazy things for her to do, she reached out the window and shook my hand. “Thanks for being so understanding, Jim,” she said.

I burned out of there and went sailing into Bridgeport because I was pretty sure I knew a place where if I scratched at the back door, they'd let me in, and I was right. I had a couple boilermakers and thought things through. Any fool could plainly see that Mrs. Constance Bradshaw was bad news, and I sure as hell didn't want to be the one making her little girl cry herself to sleep every night. Right, so what I was going to do was call her up tomorrow and tell her to forget the whole thing.

*   *   *

The only hotel in Raysburg that's not too sleazy is the McClain, but it's not exactly cheap either, not to mention that it's right smack downtown, so I booked Connie and me into the new Holiday Inn out on Route 70 as Mr. and Mrs. Johnson. Did I have a credit card? What, are you kidding? So I had to drive out there and leave them a twenty-buck deposit. I threw my toothbrush and a change of clothes and a couple fifths into my flight bag. Then, just in case she turned up early, I made sure I was down on the riverbank waiting for her by seven-thirty.

By nine I was starting to get steamed, but I kept reminding myself that she'd been late the night before. I'd been planning on staying halfway sober so when we hit the sack I might be able to put on a halfway decent show, but eventually I said piss on it, went trotting up to Wallach's, had a couple shots, and bought a six-pack to keep me company. I was pretty damn quick about it because I didn't want her to turn up and not find me waiting for her. By my watch, I'd been gone less than half an hour.

By eleven I was through the six-pack, but my flight bag was in the trunk of my Chevy, so I started in on the Jack Daniel's. I was calling her every name in the book, but then I'd think, no, wait a minute. Maybe it's not her fault. What if she'd showed up while I was gone? Well, that would have meant she couldn't wait even a lousy half an hour—and besides, she would have seen my Chevy. So what was going on? Had her husband come back from Baltimore? Had she got herself so drunk she couldn't drive? Was she jerking me around intentionally? I gave her till midnight. The thing that really got to me—like the last straw—was that twenty-buck deposit.

Needless to say, I was fairly well plastered by then, but I was in one of those I'll-show-you-bitch moods, so I started making the rounds. There's lots of bars in Raysburg. How the rest of the night went I couldn't tell you because I had—well, I won't say it was the first, but it was the first
big
blackout. A whole chunk of my memory gone just like somebody took a pair of scissors to a videotape.