He nudged a plastic bowl of pretzels crusted with salt within arm’s reach. “That’s swell.” The bartender looked bored. There would be little activity in the bar until after supper. Five minutes passed without a word. “Red Sox won last night.”
“That so?”
“Five to three. Wakefield the knuckleballer got the win.” It was a guy thing. - a room full of men could stand around scratching their crotches and nursing beers. They didn’t agonize over the inevitable or suffer existential ennui tinged with spiritual angst. Rather, they nibbled pretzels and talked sports. The bartender rubbed at a water spot with a towel and went off to service another patron.
A message for Holly Heatherton. Bart Schroeder was getting nowhere fast.
Earlier in te morning there was that odd incident with the piano.
Bart Schroeder was heading back to his room after breakfast. As they reached the staircase, Holly Heatherton grabbed his arm. “Just a moment.” In a small sitting room off the dining hall was a baby grand piano. Holly slumped down on the padded bench. Positioning her hands, she began to play an impressionistic passage built on fourths and odd-sounding passing tones. The music was fairly simple, an intermediate level version of the original composition. After only a few, meager measures, she removed her hands from the keys. "Did you recognize that?"
"Debussy," Mr. Schroeder replied.
She nodded. "And this?" She offered up a jagged, dissonant theme in a percussive rhythm. The meter kept changing every third or fourth measure so that it was impossible to follow.
"Not even a clue," Mr. Schroeder said when the uneven tune came to an abrupt end.
"Bartok." She launched into a third piece that was even more obscure with a series of tone clusters played in the bass as the right hand hammered out single notes in a random, vertical pattern. She played the melody through from beginning to end, including a legato interlude.
"That was a twelve-tone row by Hindemith," Holly said, turning completely around to face him. A large, egg-shaped tear glistened in the corner of either eye. She reached up and deftly wiped them away. "Very unusual, don't you think?"
"Not as accessible as the Bartok," Mr. Schroeder said, "but interesting."
"Few people appreciate Hindemith's music. It's an acquired taste." The tears had reformed but this time she let them be. They quickly multiplied, dripping down her cheeks in thick rivulets. "You do understand what I'm talking about?" Her chest, what there was of it, heaved up and down in womanly anguish.
“Yes, I understand."
“So what should I do?”
Bart Schroeder was beginning to feel edgy again. “I don’t understand the question.”
“About my miserable life?”
A young family cut through the sitting room on their way to the dining room. “Let me think about it,” Bart replied, “and I’ll get back to you.”
*****
After leaving the bar, Bart rented a three speed bike with a straw basket draped over the handlebars. “You’ll find the bike path up by the dock,” the proprietor noted, “where it winds all the way to Edgartown and the southernmost beaches. “Take it slow, though, in this heat.”
Bart pedaled out to the landing and watched the afternoon ferry lazing into the dock with a fresh load of tourists, before heading out to the bike path that skirted the harbor. Up ahead, a pink burst of color from a hedge of salt spray roses edged the trail. A seagull resting on a telephone pole watched him pass with stony indifference.
The plan was to ride several miles south from Oak Bluffs to Edgartown along the winding trail dotted by sand dunes and scenic marshland. Bart walked the bike up the steeper hills and glided down effortlessly with the shift set in first gear.
A message for Holly Heatherton. Salt air and a tart, late-summer breeze off the ocean accompanied the ride. Yes, this was much better than trying to sort things out in the bar, which reeked of stale cigars and flat beer.
“Hey, dude!” A teenager with hair down to his shoulders and a goatee was waving at Bart, who braked to a halt. A paisley bandana was knotted around the youth’s neck. “Any idea where John Belushi’s buried?”
“The cemetery in Chilmark,” Bart replied.
“Where the hell’s that?”
“Fifteen miles that way.” He pointed due east.
“Way wicked cool!” The youth flung a backpack with an aluminum frame over his shoulders, and headed off down the road. Bart rested the bike on the kickstand and leaned against a scraggily pine. Ten minutes passed. He climbed back on the three-speed and pedaled leisurely back to Oak Bluffs.
*****
“The Heathertons, what room are they in?”
The desk clerk checked the register. “Room 301.”
Bart took the elevator to the third floor, locating the room at the far end of the hallway. “My name is Bartholomew Schroeder and I’m here to see Holly.”
“Yes, of course.” The woman stepped out on the landing and closed the door behind her. “I haven’t a clue what you said to my daughter earlier, but she’s so much calmer since breakfast.”
“I’m a plumber not a psychiatrist,” Mr. Schroeder qualified.
“Holly hasn’t cried… not once all today.” The woman reached out and grabbed his hand. “That’s a good omen.”
“In the morning, I’m leaving the island on the first boat out from Vineyard Haven and wanted to say goodbye.” He gave the woman’s hand a gentle squeeze. “I’ll wait for her downstairs.”
Before descending to the lobby, Bart went back to his room, washed his face and combed his hair what little there was of it. Then he bent down and felt the pipe under the toilet tank. The metal was dry. The night he arrived at the Oak Bluffs Hotel a ring of wetness was pooling on the floor near the toilet. Drip, drip, drip. A steady stream of cold water was bleeding out from the compression fitting. He closed the shut-off valve feeding the tank and went down to the front desk.
“My toilet’s leaking.”
“Oh, dear,” the desk clerk seemed flustered. “Finding a plumber at this late hour could be a problem.”
“I am a plumber.”
The woman’s mouth fell open. “You’re joking?”
“If you can scare up an adjustable wrench, I’ll fix it myself.”
The desk clerk fished a toolbox from under the counter. Bart rummaged through the offerings, finally settling on a small pair of pliers. “This should do the trick.”
Back in the room, he loosened the fitting and separated the flared section of tubing from its narrower counterpart. The metal was mildly corroded but structurally undamaged. After washing the crud from the mating surfaces with hand soap, Bart dried the metal.
The trick was to secure the fitting, which looked to be about ten or fifteen years old, tight enough to seal the joint and no more. Even the slightest excess pressure might stress the metal and fracture the delicate tubing. Sliding the pipes together, Bart screwed the compression fitting in place, hand tight with a little play, then opened the water supple. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Grabbing the fitting with the pliers, he twisted the nut clockwise a quarter-turn. Drip. Pause. Drip. Pause. Drip.
Another eighth of an inch. One final drip then nothing. He wiped the pipes dry and a slick film of moisture quickly reappeared but it was condensation, nothing more. The leak was sealed. He sat down on the edge of the tub. Five minutes later the floor beneath the toilet intake line was still bone dry.
*****
Booth Bay Harbor, Maine. Four decades earlier.
Bartholomew Schroeder and his new bride were settling into their honeymoon suite. A six-foot tall, soft bellied woman of Norwegian descent, Penelope ran the bath water but the tub wouldn’t fill. Using a silver quarter as an impromptu screwdriver, Bart loosened the bolts and pulled the chrome lever and face plate away from the tub. The rod that connected the drain and overflow assembly had slipped off its mounting bracket. He crimped the wire and tightened the two bolts holding the mechanism in place but, when he raised the lever and turned the water back on, the gurgling continued unabated.
Coming up behind him, Penelope wrapping her arms around his chest. “What’s the matter?”
“Minor adjustment,” he murmured, brushing her cheek with a flurry of kisses. “No need to panic.”
Bart removed the bolts a second time, pulling the entire bucket assembly out through the hole in the tub wall. He adjusted the heavy brass plunger three, full revolutions and put everything back together. Yes, that did it! Mr. and Mrs. Schroeder enjoyed their first bath together as a married couple.
“I’m getting out now,” Penelope said and leaned forward, but her husband held her by the shoulder.
“Open the drain.” Penelope reached up with her right toe and nudged the chrome lever upright. The soapy water rimmed with lavender scented bubble bath made a loud gurgling sound before beginning its slow descent.
“Now close it again,” Bart instructed. Curling her toe like a prehensile tail around the lever, she yanked the metal straight down.
Glob! There was an abrupt noise as the brass plunger slammed downward like a guillotine shutting off the rush of water. Silence. Bart released his grip. His bride of ten hours rose from the warm bath water but, instead of climbing from the tub, turned to face him. Penelope Schroeder raised her elbows high in the air, crisscrossing the forearms directly overhead then nonchalantly squatted, her glistening buttocks coming to rest on his stomach. “Now, if you have no objections, I’d like to go in the next room and make babies.”
*****
Holly Heatherton wore a print dress, her hair tied back in a French braid when she joined him in the lobby. Bart led the way back up the main drag toward the Steamship Authority landing where they watched as an endless stream of cars, motorcycles and produce trucks crept out of the belly of a docked ship. When the last vehicle left the hold, the ferry began loading passengers heading back to the mainland.
Bart turned away from the pier and, in no great hurry, retraced his route toward the town center. He ducked into a building where a crowd of parents and young children were queuing up to ride the musical carousel. The hardwood floor was littered with pop corn, the nonstop calliope music deafening. Riders leaned far forward gripping the horses’ reins with one hand as they lunged for brass rings dangling from a wooden chute positioned at a steep angle. Each time a rider managed to snare a ring, another slid down to take its place.
Bart bought bags of popcorn. They went out in the street where the sun was almost down. A trawler that might have been the same ship he had noticed on the morning Holly joined him for breakfast was lurching in to shore. “There’s something I want to show you.”
He led the way back to the hotel and brought the girl up to his room. “Sit there.” He indicated a Windsor chair with curved armrests and spindly legs splayed at a generous angle. Next to the chair was a bedside table that Mr. Schroeder had dragged to the center of the room.
“Where did you get all this weird stuff?” Holly indicated a collection of plumbing supplies—tube cutters, copper fittings, emery cloth, lead-free solder and rosin flux.
“Hardware store.” Mr. Schroeder reached for a propane torch. “I’m going to teach you what little I’ve learned about this beautiful and sordid world we live in. Are you ready?”
Holly Heatherton, folded her hands in her lap. “Yes, I’m ready.”
Half an hour later he shoved the night table back where it belonged. “That’s all I have to say,” Mr. Schroeder muttered. “Understand what I told you?”
“Yes, emphatically.”
Shrouded in a twilight haze, objects in the room were beginning to lose definition, blend and blur. The nautical pictures hanging over the brass bed had shed their vivid colors in favor of more somber, elegiac tones, while the reading lamp was dissolving into the night table. “So what did you learn,” Bart pressed, “about the human condition?”
“Copper tubing must be properly cleaned, bone dry and heated to the proper temperature,” she said, “before solder can flow into a fitting, sealing the joint.”
“Patience is a virtue. What else?”
A muggy breeze from the open window carried with it an acrid potpourri of decomposing fish, slimy seaweed, salt spray roses and fresh-mown grass. “Some plumbers dress the joints by cleaning away excess flux and solder but the final step is more a matter of professional pride, not necessary.”
“You’ll be alright, then?”
“Can’t imagine why not.”
“Here, take this,” he handed her a small piece of emery cloth stained with flux, “to remember me by.”
“A talisman of sorts.”
In the morning for his last meal on the island, Mr. Schroeder ordered the salmon omelette with Monterey jack cheese, chive and diced scallions. The ferry departed promptly at eight o’clock. For the first time in over a year, he felt free and unencumbered, as though a slab of stone as thick and weighty as a marble cemetery monument had miraculously lifted from his heart.
Kindred Spirits
Harry Jankowski stood under a flowering dogwood tree in the Brandenburg Arboretum. Directly above his head, a raucous collection of jays was feasting on clumps of wine-colored berries scattered among porcelain petals. Thirty feet away in the trellised rose garden, a middle-aged woman sat on the same bench he had recently abandoned, a familiar, moss green volume with a cracked spine resting on her lap. Bent over slightly at the waist, her lips fluttered in silent accompaniment to the printed text. From his vantage point, the slim, dark-haired woman looked reasonably attractive, but as he drew closer, Harry realized his favorable impression had been premature.
She wasn't ugly per se. Rather, it was as though, early on, God had become distracted and wandered away from the wet canvas before completing a meager handful of details. The woman's features were drab, colorless. The unassuming face, an aesthetic work in progress, exuded a disconcerting blankness.
"Is this book yours?" she asked.
Harry had driven halfway home before realizing the tattered anthology of Persian verse, was missing. He stepped closer. "It's a library book," he noted apologetically. "I must have gotten distracted and…”
"Would you mind terribly if I read through to the poem’s end."
"No, of course not." He sat down beside her. "Which verse were you reading?"
"The Rumi." She lowered her head again. Leaning closer, Harry could just barely make out the final stanza.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you;
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want;
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth
Across the doorsill where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.
The woman returned the book. "What do you think it means?"
Harry ran an index finger thoughtfully over the faded buckram cloth. "Sleep would seem a metaphor for most people's natural state. Even wide awake, we often miss the secrets Rumi hints at." The intoxicating scent of roses coupled with the woman's perplexing features catapulted the normally reticent man in an uncharacteristically chatty mood. "So few people take an active interest in poetry these days,” Harry added. "Here, see for yourself." He opened the slim volume and pointed with a taut index finger at the yellowed slip of paper pasted on the inside of the front cover where, at cockeyed angles, a smattering of dates was stamped in black ink.
Prior to Harry checking the book out, the anthology hadn't seen the light of day in six years. Before to that, it languished in the musty stacks another four. “Over the last forty years," Harry noted with morbid humor, “only twelve readers showed interest."
The woman studied at her fingers, which were slender with pale pink, lacquered nails. "Do you come here often?
"Mostly weekends, when the weather’s decent."
"I'm Dora." She extended a hand. He pressed her fingers gently.
"Harry Jankowski."
The woman rose and, began moving at a leisurely gait down the flagstone walkway past a profusion of pink blossoms that reeked sweetly like incense. Before she had proceeded very far, Dora abruptly returned. "Just for the record, I'm partial to the traditional poets - writers such as Frost, Ferlinghetti, e e cummings, Robert Lowell, Ann Sexton and John Berryman."
"Berryman's Dream Songs are rather challenging," Harry noted.
"Yes, I know," Dora agreed. "Much of his later writing is beyond my limited abilities."
Harry missed Dora’s final observation. Rather, he was concerned by the disconcerting fact that the last three writers on Dora's list of personal favorites had met with tragic ends. "Sylvia Plath, the author of the Bell Jar, wrote some interesting free verse."
“I was never a great fan." Dora shook her head vigorously from side to side. “Plath glorified mental illness… her poetry a snake pit of nuttiness.”
The vigorous rebuttal set his mind at ease. “Yes, I totally agree!”
On the ride home, Harry glanced at the frayed anthology resting on the passenger seat and grinned foolishly. A senior moment - that's how he understood the miscue when he realized the book was missing. A dumb, addled-brained bit of mental torpor guaranteed to waste gas and time.
Not that Harry had any special place to go most Saturday afternoons.
Since his wife left, his social calendar had atrophied, shriveled away to nothing. Monday through Friday he managed a temporary employment agency; weekends mostly found him treading water, waiting for the workweek to resume.
It was almost two in the afternoon when Harry pulled into the driveway. He tossed a meager load of laundry in the washer - mostly dress shirts he needed later in the week. Then he swept the kitchen floor, filled the bathtub and even threw some of his ex-wife's lavender-chamomile bubble bath in the steamy water. He didn't usually indulge in such questionable extravagance, but the chance meeting with the woman with the unremarkable, slapdash face had propelled him in a weird frame of mind.
Twenty minutes later when the buzzer in the basement sounded, he switched the damp clothes over to the dryer, went back up stairs and gingerly climbed into the tub. Only now did Harry grasp why he left the arboretum without the book. Since early spring, when the weather finally became warm enough to visit the park with any regularity, he had begun studying the deciduous trees. There were numerous maples - the Norway, silver, sugar, mountain and diminutive box elder, as well as the striped or moosewood varieties – he was attempting to identify. Maples shared certain unique characteristics - sweetish watery sap and long leafstalks. Almost all had palmately veined, fan-lobed leaves. Harry absorbed all this from the plaques that dotted the landscape.
Even with trees as common as birch, things got dicey. Harry could easily identify the ever-present American or paper birch. But then there were the black, gray and yellow birches and, of course, the American hornbean, also known as musclewood, ironwood or blue beech. They all fell under the same generic species, betulaceae, sharing simple, alternate, stipulate leaves, which were generally thin and often doubly serrate with fruity catkins and a one-seeded nutlet. He had gone off on a walking tour to take one last look at the trees before heading home, forgetting the book.
What were the odds of meeting a fellow poetry enthusiast in the Brandenburg Arboretum on a late summer afternoon? With his big toe, Harry flicked the hot water on and waited as the soothing warmth crawled from the front of the tub to the rear. Sliding down in the sudsy water, the perfumed bubbles tickled his ears.
*****
During their marriage, on the rare occasion when his ex-wife, Nadine, reach for reading material, she favored the National Inquirer or Reader’s Digest. The busty blonde Harry had fallen hard for some twenty-five years earlier was a dolt, the woman's fleshy loveliness little more than a paper-thin mask. Three years earlier in the throes of a hormonally-induced midlife crisis, Nadine ran off and left him.
The summer his wife flew the coop, the couple had signed up for a tour of the Holy Land through a local church group. Rather than forfeit the deposit and air fare, Harry went alone. He visited Jerusalem then toured the Upper Galilee before heading down through the Negev Desert into the southern Sinai to the Monastery of Saint Catherine. Saint Catherine, the tour guide explained, lived in Alexandria during the persecution of the Christians under the reign of Maximus. When she converted to Christianity, the Romans tortured and finally killed her in 307 A.D., cutting off her head as a gruesome admonition to her Christian zealots.
The Sinai was barren, a dried-up, godforsaken wilderness infested with poisonous snakes and wild camels. A short distance from the monastery stood a huge outcropping of reddish rocks, what was thought to be the original site where Moses witnessed the burning bush. The reddish-brown hills strewn with huge boulders, the thousand year-old, stucco monastery was thrown together from brick, mortar and whatever raw materials lay readily at hand.
Initially, Harry found the landscape otherworldly, apocalyptic, hideous, an affront to everything civilized. But when his eye was drawn back for a second look, an intrinsic harmony emerged from the desolation. He noticed a small cluster of fir trees off to the right of the main gate and how the stunted mountains directly behind the monastery heaved up toward an unbounded sky.
Harry returned home chastened. The barren, blistering wilderness of the southern Sinai mirrored his inner spiritual wretchedness. Some nights he sat in his condo contemplating the desert’s message. At the Monastery of Saint Catherine Harry sensed that he was not just growing older. Men in their late twenties grew mature and settled. In their thirties and forties their hair fell out or went gray; they developed a glut of yuppie ailments - tennis elbow, carpal tunnel syndrome, trick knees, spinal subluxations, acid reflux and hemorrhoids.
No, that wasn't it either. Harry wasn't easing into middle age - he already plateaued a decade earlier. Now he was just plain growing old. It's why he made weekly pilgrimages to the secular shrine that was the Brandenburg Arboretum, where he meandered among the greenery like some fetishistic obsessive-compulsive, reading the plaques, memorizing the genus, species and identifying characteristics of the various trees and shrubs. While other men in similar quandaries downloaded soft porn from the internet, Harry Jankowski staked his purse on botany.
This middle-aged poetry lover with the unfinished face - would she return or was Dora’s appearance in the park a fleeting aberration? Five minutes after meeting, Harry no longer noticed the drab exterior.
No, that wasn't terribly accurate. It was more like viewing sepia tones in an old-fashioned print. The murky, monochromatic reddish brown shadings exuded a distinctive warmth seldom attained from modern, digital photography. Once past the initial shock, Dora wasn't terribly unattractive. Unlike Nadine’s flamboyant, chameleon charms, Dora’s rudimentary features, in their ragged simplicity, hid nothing.
* * * * *
The previous December at three a.m. with the tail end of an icy blizzard raging in the streets, Nadine called. Groping for the receiver, Harry knocked the bedside lamp over. With his left ear epoxied to the receiver, he recognized the familiar, nasally voice.
The woman was babbling a clutter of barely coherent sentence fragments. “Met this guy at a club… a musician. We went out a few times and got intimate.” Nadine’s voice cracked. “Earlier tonight he says he’s got two lovely daughters and another bun in the oven.” “Could you come over for a while, just until I get a handle on my freakin’ nerves?”
With a grinding of gears and metallic scraping noise, a snowplow turned the corner and lumbered down the street. Harry, who could set his watch by his ex-wife’s failed romances, ran a hand through his thinning hair; he retrieved the overturned lamp. His face went through a series of contortions. "At this hour of the night? No, definitely not!" He hung up the phone.
Harry knew the woman was wacky when he married her.
His crime was thinking he could make Nadine over in his own image. He wandered to the window. The storm was relenting, the sticky, wind-driven snow that battered the East Side of Providence since early evening replaced by a flurry of windblown powder. In the front yard, a thick sheet of icicles bowed a birch tree almost to the ground. The grimy snow was piled four feet on the impassable sidewalks from the last storm. Harry rubbed his finger on the frost-covered window. From the basement, the boiler purred softly sending a wave of hot water gurgling through the pipes. The sheer curtains bega