The Clarinet Polka (48 page)

“Oh, yeah? You must have a great time in confession.”

“That's different.”

She said her parents were going to have me and Linda over to the house some night when things calmed down and they felt like entertaining again. “Dad says you're a real friend of the family. And I'm supposed to thank you for rescuing me—from whatever it is you rescued me from.”

“I rescued you from your father calling the cops, okay? And them maybe coming into Patty's and busting you and that whole sorry crew for possession, okay? My God, Janice, where's your head?”

“You still didn't have to treat me like that.”

I just looked at her.

“I know you must think of me as a little kid,” she said, “but you never treated me like that before.”

It was a kind of ridiculous thing for her to say, dressed the way she was. But I told her the truth. “I don't think of you as a little kid.”

A kind of flicker goes over her face. If I hadn't been looking at her so close, I might have missed it. “I always thought we were—I guess, like equals,” she says.

I couldn't tell you what was in my head. I didn't have a clue what anything meant. But all of a sudden I could see her point. I hadn't treated her like an equal.

“Look,” I said, “maybe I was wrong too. Maybe I should have gone in there and sat down and had a few laughs with everybody and then said something like, ‘Hey, Janice, can I talk to you a minute?'”

“If you'd done that, everything would have been fine.”

“But I didn't do that. I'm sorry.”

She goes, “Whew. That's what I wanted you to say.”

“What?”

“‘I'm sorry.' Thanks for saying it. I always thought we could—you know, work things out. I always thought we weren't like other people.”

And that was the perfect time for me to say, “Janice, just what the hell are we doing?” But I didn't. I was afraid to hear how she'd answer that one.

So we looked at the view. “How's everything at home?” I said.

“Not too good. If we were still in Poland before the war, I wouldn't be sitting down for a week. But seeing as we're in America, they're just going to make me feel as guilty as possible. I never thought they'd just come out and say it, but they did. They said, ‘How can you treat us like this after everything we've done for you?'”

“Oh, yeah. That's a rough one.”

So we talked about how she was doing with her parents. Yeah, that was a safe topic. But what we were
not
talking about was just hanging over our heads, making us both uncomfortable. I was smoking lots of cigarettes. “So where you going tonight?” I said.

“Nowhere.”

Oh, is that right? That meant she'd got all dressed up to go have a fight with me—using her, you know, feminine wiles. Before that, I wouldn't have thought Janice even had any feminine wiles. “You want to do something?” I said.

“Yeah. Sure. I just have to call home every once in a while to let them know where I am. They always have to know where I am.”

I was kind of at a loss—just, you know, trying to figure out exactly what was going on—and she goes, “Did you miss me?”

For a couple seconds I was just furious. It was exactly like the crap I used to get from Dorothy. But then I looked right into her eyes and something went click in my head. It's true—she did look a little bit like Dorothy, but she wasn't Dorothy. She wasn't a thing like Dorothy. If Dorothy had said that, she would've been jerking me around, but there was just no way Janice was doing that. All she was doing was asking me if I liked her. “Yeah,” I said. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too.”

I remember staring down at the river like I was totally fascinated by the view and feeling this enormous sense of relief—and at the same time thinking about what a bind we were in, how hopeless it all was.

“I figured you'd got to the point where you couldn't take any more of that heavy stuff,” I told her, “and you just wanted to go off with your girlfriends and cool out.”

“Oh, I knew you'd understand. You know me really well, don't you? You know me better than
anybody
.”

I hadn't understood how scared she was until she stopped being scared. I saw her start to relax—like she'd been hanging on to this huge monster spring and now she was letting it go. “I thought it'd help,” she said, “to hang out with Sandy and Maureen. And it did help. For a while it did.”

And she's telling me how all Sandy and Maureen want to do is spend forty-seven years getting dressed and then go somewhere the boys can see them, and if they're not doing that, then they're talking about the boys they're going out with, or the boys they wish they were going out with, and so on and so on. It sounds like nothing's changed since I was in high school.

The sun was starting to set, turning the sky red, and I remember the light coming straight at us. I remember the golden braids wound up on her head, and how we had to squint looking into the sun. Then she turned to look at me and the light fell on the side of her face and her eyes were just sparkling—this intense blue—and her skin was just glowing, you know, like I could see right through it, like I could see the little blue veins in her temple. And that weird outfit with the two skirts didn't look dopey to me anymore, and the light even made her legs glow, and I could see the pink of her long legs shining through those white stockings. Yeah, that light was something else, all blue and gold, and she was so radiant, she looked so alive, she looked so beautiful I can't begin to tell you.

She was saying how there were all these things she couldn't get out of her head—all that shit her parents went through, and her brother telling her that Poland was just a backward third-rate country somewhere to the east of Europe, and her dad saying, “the Polish soil is soaked in blood,” and she was tired of thinking about all that stuff, but she couldn't stop thinking about it, and she wished it could all be different.

“Sometimes I wish I could be a child again,” she said, and she looked right at me. “Oh, isn't that funny? For me to say that? After giving you hell for treating me like a child.”

Our eyes locked together for a few seconds, and then she took her turn staring down at the river and getting totally fascinated by the view. “It's like I was in a cocoon,” she said, “but now I've got to come out and face the real world—and maybe I'm just not ready for it.

“Jimmy?” she says. “You know what's so hard? I've lost my dream.” And she's telling me again about that dream of Poland—Krajne Podlaski with its river like glass that she'd thought was the Ohio—and all that romantic Polish poetry, all that stuff that meant so much to her when she was growing up. And I'm thinking, oh, for Christ's sake, Janice, don't just keep talking about Poland.

But then I flip that one over—why shouldn't she be talking about Poland? And her lost dream and all that? Because it's weighing heavy on her mind. And there's something else too. If she wasn't talking about Poland, what else would she be talking about?

The bind we were in— It wasn't just stupid or ridiculous or funny or any of that shit. It was painful. I could feel it in my chest. Like I was really hurting. And that's probably why I blew up at her. I mean it was good-natured and all, but I just let her have it.

“Come on, Janice,” I said. “Wasn't it a good dream? Wasn't it just a dandy dream? Your mom and her cousin riding around on their horses, and your dad running through the woods with his pals, and that nice little town where everybody got along with everybody? And the old prophet guy, what's-his-name, saying everybody should love everybody because we're all children of the same mother. And people fighting for Poland's freedom like that virgin maid, whoever the hell she was. Who could ask for a better dream than that? I think it's terrific your folks gave you that dream. It's probably what got them through. And if I was you, I'd hang on to that dream for dear life.”

SEVENTEEN

In the Ohio Valley, you always get a spell in the summer when it's even worse than usual—the temperature shoots up way over ninety and it's so humid you think you can wring out the air like a sponge, and you walk around with your tongue hanging out, and the smoke from the mills gets trapped and doesn't go nowhere, and the mosquitoes come out at twilight and have a field day on you, and everything kind of stinks of sweat and misery. You always forget from one year to the next how awful it can be, and then, BINGO, there you are again, stuck in it for however long it lasts. That summer it hit the first week in August.

So there's this one day that really takes the cake in the misery department—I mean it's just sickening—and we're real busy at the shop. I guess when people are too hot to move, they watch a lot of TV. And good old Constance Bradshaw calls me up and says, “Why don't you come out for dinner? I'll make something nice—and you can spend the night if you want.” She sounded kind of pathetic. It wasn't anything she said, but there was this kind of whiny tone in her voice.

Now I hadn't been seeing much of Connie. Well, to get specific here, I'd have to say I hadn't laid eyes on Connie since that night when Janice ran away from home. If I told you I had a plan all worked out in my head, I'd be lying, but what I was doing in my half-assed way was letting the Jim and Connie Show die a natural death.

I was seeing a lot of Janice again. It was like she'd decided on a compromise—sometimes she'd hang around with her girlfriends and sometimes she'd hang around with me—but I was never sure when I was going to see her, because if we made all these arrangements, that's called
dating
, and we both knew we shouldn't be doing that. So sometimes when I'd come home from work, she'd be there—pretending she'd come to see Linda—and sometimes she wouldn't, and I knew perfectly well I shouldn't ever get to where I was depending on her, but it really pissed me off that I couldn't depend on her. And then I got pissed off that I was pissed off, you know what I mean? Because she wasn't my girlfriend so I had no right to get pissed off. Oh, yeah, I was having just a dandy time.

That conversation we'd had up there on the hill at the end of Pike Street kept going around and around in my head, and there'd been a whole hell of a lot of things we hadn't said—you know, straight out in so many words—but one thing seemed pretty clear. The mess we were in wasn't just
my
problem. Yeah, she liked me too—although for the life of me, I couldn't figure out why. In my own mind I was just this total loser, going nowhere fast, and I thought she was nuts for liking me—or maybe it was just a schoolgirl crush that didn't mean anything—but anyhow, I was real pleased she liked me. But I just didn't have a clue what to do about it.

So I'm standing there in the shop, listening to Connie whining away on the phone, and— I don't want to make excuses for myself, but I was in, I guess you could say, your classic state of hopeless confusion. Nothing seemed right to me. It didn't seem right to see Connie feeling the way I did about Janice and knowing that Janice felt something for me too—but on the other hand, how can you betray somebody who isn't your girlfriend? And maybe I wasn't doing Janice any favors by encouraging her. And maybe this, and maybe that, and maybe the other.

But you know what tipped me over the edge? This is something I'd just as leave not tell you because it makes me sound like a total pig, but I'm trying to be honest here, right? You see, earlier in the summer, Connie had gone out and bought herself an air-conditioning unit. Seeing as money's never a problem with her, she'd got the super humungo heavy-duty model, and they'd delivered that sucker and it'd sat in the middle of her bedroom floor until I'd gone out and installed it for her. We'd cranked it up, and, lo and behold, that thing sure kicked out the cold air. Her apartment was on the small side so that unit didn't just take care of the bedroom, it pretty well chilled out the whole damn place.

Well, to make a long story short, I got off work and drove out to St. Stevens. Mrs. Constance Bradshaw meets me at the door, and it's kind of a shock. When we'd been having our Mature Relationship on Sundays, we'd been real heavy into the good taste. Like brunch wasn't just eggs and toast, it was your eggs Florentine or Benedictine or Augustine or some damn thing, and we ate them off the family china. We hit the sack in good taste too—nice shower first, with the round soap that smells like gardenias, and then you've got your one hundred percent cotton sheets ironed all crisp, and Connie's sweet little bod all clean and shaved and scented and powdered and naked, or maybe with just a wisp of white lace.

So she opens the door for me, and I note right away that good taste seems to have gone down the drain for the night. She's got your whorehouse makeup and your biker's girlfriend heels and God knows where she got it, but she's stuffed herself into one of these tacky plastic minidresses—fire engine red—a couple sizes too small so she's spilling right out of it. She's drunk, naturally. Not really slobbering yet, but definitely off to a good start. “I'll bet you can guess what I want to do,” she says. Well, gee, Connie, I'm not exactly sure. Let me search my mind.

Yep, it was cool in there, a real relief, and I can do a Pavlov's dog number on your low, crude, tasteless sex appeal as good as the next guy, and I'm thinking, yeah, it was a good idea to come out here. This is probably just what I need. So we get right down to business. Afterward she brings me a cold beer and jumps into the shower. I'm hungry as a horse, so I chug the beer and it goes straight to my head. I pull my jeans on and go have a peek in the kitchen.

Well, at least Connie had the dinner planned. There's all the stuff to make it laying out there on the counter—some raw vegetables, and a head of lettuce, and a whole bunch of lamb chops—but she hadn't got any further than that, and I'm thinking, Koprowski, you dumb shit, you should've grabbed a sandwich before you drove out here instead of trying to save yourself a couple bucks.