Will Not Attend: Lively Stories of Detachment and Isolation (17 page)

The Kid wanted to play the piano. I tried to wise her to the facts: no Resnick had ever been able to play a musical instrument, or, for that matter, to draw, sing, or produce anything of beauty. I mapped it all out for her—how she’d dread the lessons, get frustrated by her lack of ability, and inevitably quit. No Resnick, I reiterated, will ever,
ever
be able to play the piano. That’s how much I loved this little girl. But she was seven. She was a kid. And kids live in lollipop land.

I had the same pipe dream when I was about her age. I wanted to pound out that old-time jazzy stuff I heard in black-and-white cartoons—songs like “Let’s Do It,” “Hard-to-Get Gertie,” and “No Wonder She’s a Blushing Bride.” It took
only one piano lesson to knock me in line. “Certainly you didn’t expect to just sit down and be able to play, did you?” asked the baffled piano teacher. Well, as a matter of fact, yes I did, honey. I’d seen mice, ducks, and even a porcupine do it, why the fuck
not me
? Now I had to protect my daughter from the same wake-up call. Or maybe, subconsciously, I wanted to prevent her from succeeding at something I had failed at. That’s not such a bad thing, right? Just human nature.

Ultimately, though, there was a larger issue—I didn’t want a piano in the apartment. They’re big ugly things, those pianos. Dust catchers. And unlike rabbits or tropical fish, they never die. Your family dies around it. The piano always gets the last laugh. My wife, Lorrie, the normal one, told me to take a deep breath. We didn’t have to get a
real
piano, she explained, just one of those digital keyboards. They’re only a few hundred bucks and you can shove it under the bed.

I’m not an unreasonable man. I could live with that. And maybe the Kid needed to learn about failure. She’d had an easy ride up to this point.

We bought the fake piano, but the piano teacher didn’t like fake pianos. Something about the keys not being weighted.What we needed, she told us—in front of the Kid—was a real piano. Thanks for having my back, Hot Asian Girl. I guess all that giggling at my witty asides wasn’t you being flirty after all. It was out of my hands. Like finding yourself in the path
of a freight train or a junked-up mistress with a straight razor, I was outmaneuvered by destiny. I left the piano shopping to Lorrie, requesting only that it not be one of those nursing home models.

It wasn’t long before she had “amazing” news: a woman in the building was selling her piano and wanted only a hundred dollars for it. The porters had already checked it out and said it would be easy to move. It was all too perfect and too fast. I wanted to know more. First, who was the seller?

“The lady on eight,” Lorrie said. “She’s got black frizzy hair. The one with the blind schnauzer?” I made it my business not to look at or interact with anyone in the building, so this triggered nothing.

“You know, she was in the Sensodyne commercial.”

I was still blindfolded and the piñata was across the street.

“Remember her husband—the really nice man with the cane, the one who died? He was on chemo? You hated the way he was always whistling?”

That vaguely rang a bell. I moved on to the important issue: What did this piano look like?

It was an upright, she said, not the coolest-looking thing in the world, but not awful. It was the right size and would do the job. Plus, the Kid liked it. I detected a bit of salesmanship in her voice. The whole thing seemed to just fall out of the sky. I insisted on seeing it.

She was bony, with firm, stringy muscles, and had no business wearing a tank top. Her Bellevue eyes complemented the wild salt-and-pepper hair that was straight out of a fright-wig catalog, or perhaps one of Darwin’s early sketchbooks. She appeared to be in her late fifties and was a quintessential New York loon—one of those classic Upper West Side ladies who smiled too much, had intergalactic notions about the existence of man, yet fiercely observed the High Holidays. I looked around the apartment. It was all there—the clutter, the framed Metropolitan Opera print, the brigade of Solgar vitamin bottles, and the funk of vegan pork. How this woman ever wound up in a toothpaste commercial must have been quite a story, one I had absolutely no interest in.

Her first words were to Lorrie and they were weighted with disappointment: “Oh,
this
is your husband?” Obviously she’d seen me around the building and wasn’t a fan. Perhaps I had insulted her somewhere along the line. Maybe she accidentally pushed the wrong floor on the elevator once and heard me exhale obnoxiously—a response I often produce for screwheads who waste three seconds of my valuable time. It didn’t matter. I was there on business, not to mend fences.

Lorrie, as it turned out, had been kind in her description of the piano. It was possibly the ugliest contrivance ever built by white men, to borrow an unpleasant phrase from Mr. Houck, my ninth-grade shop teacher. It reeked of the early
sixties, with its piss-yellow wood and fancy curves. No matter where my eye wandered, it was assaulted by filigree, latticework, or “what the fuck, let’s give it a shot” ornamentation. My best theory was that it had been designed to coax orgasms out of grieving old ladies who went piano shopping after the Kennedy assassination. Simply put, it wasn’t to my taste.

I tried to extract my wife from the apartment, but the woman had her pinned down. Her eyes grew damp as she nattered away about the piano and how all her kids learned to play on it, and she didn’t have room for it anymore because her sick mother was moving in, and how she prayed and prayed it would find a happy home. Who or what she prayed to was anyone’s guess; I pictured a metallic space crab with female breasts and a penis, wearing a yarmulke. But there was something more disturbing afoot here: She appeared to be under the impression that this was a done deal. Surely she couldn’t be that batty, I thought. “Oh, I’m so grateful!” she announced, walking past me to hug Lorrie. Her shoulder blades stuck through the back of her tank top like two oyster shells.

Sweetie and I had a bit of a growler when we got back home. I suggested there had been a conspiracy between her and that human flat tire on the eighth floor. Calling her honesty into question, I challenged her fraudulent description of the piano by invoking the name of the late Grace McDaniels,
one of the most revered sideshow freaks of the twentieth century: “She billed herself as the ‘Mule-Faced Woman,’” I ranted, “not the ‘Lady Who Ain’t the Cutest Thing in Town.’ It’s called truth in advertising! Not only that, her son was her business manager
and
her valet!”

“What’s your point?” Lorrie challenged me.

Realizing my point had skidded off the rails, I told her: “You have to go down there and tell that pterodactyl you don’t want the fucking thing.”

“Fuck you. You go tell her,” she responded.

“This was your little scheme, not mine. You knew what you were doing. I’m the victim here.”

“You’re insane.”

Sore spot.

“I knew that was coming! That’s always your cheap little go-to . . . uh . . . what the fuck is it called . . . your little smart-bomb thing . . . your big scene-stealer whenever you know I’m right and you’re—”

The front door slammed. The Kid was home from school. She ran into the living room and threw her arms around my waist.

“Did you see the piano, Daddy? Isn’t it beautiful?”

The day the porters wheeled the piano into my apartment, I realized this was something much more than just a large grotesque object entering my home. A gust of air smacked me
in the face as it rolled by, announcing the stench of other lives: the musk of triumphs and failures, faith and doubt, shitty diapers and cremation urns. As if I didn’t have enough on my plate. But I let it go. I did it for my darling daughter. Gagging down a teaspoon of false optimism, I thought if anyone on earth could coax something new and beautiful out of that cigar crate, it would be her. Maybe the Resnick curse had skipped a generation.

The Kid threw herself into piano lessons. The notes that initially lumbered through the apartment may have been sour and uncivilized, but at least they were loud and plentiful. As the weeks passed, my ears, admittedly untrained, could detect no improvement. To be perfectly honest, I think she was getting worse. Soon, grievances were lodged—the Kid wasn’t thrilled with the songs the Hot Asian Chick was teaching her. She didn’t give a shit about the girl with the lamb or the bridge collapse in London; she wanted to pound out the stuff she heard in the Charlie Brown cartoons.
The apple don’t fall far from the tree,
I proudly thought. On week eleven, she officially quit. I’ll never forget that day as long as I live: the piano teacher was wearing a halter top. Lorrie and I had a gentle talk with the Kid about the concept of patience, but she wouldn’t be swayed. She informed us she was giving up on music and sticking with television, an instrument she’d already mastered. The Resnick curse was alive and kicking. A
few days later, while goofing around with friends, she knocked over a container of turtle food, scattering thousands of compressed shrimp pellets all over the piano. The tiny particles wedged themselves between the keys and resisted the best efforts of a vacuum cleaner. Subsequently, any attempt at playing the chromatic scale was accompanied by what sounded like a pepper grinder (something the digital keyboard could do in its sleep). Soon the entire apartment smelled like a dumpster behind Panda Express, and Lorrie offered little opposition when I announced the piano had to go. The turtle, which now enjoyed strolling across the keyboard, pecking for treasure, didn’t get a vote.

The “!!!FREE PIANO!!! (NEEDS A LITTLE TLC)” listing ran on Craigslist for thirty days. In the spirit of self-flagellation, I relisted it for another thirty days. A friend of a friend briefly expressed interest, but his wife’s allergy to shellfish queered the deal. It was like trying to give away donuts in a graveyard (to borrow another phrase from my deeply disturbed shop teacher). Once the Kid realized we were really,
really
trying to ditch the thing, she had a change of heart: “How could you get rid of my piano?” she moaned. “I
love
that piano! I want to keep it forever!” Then she turned on the old sprinkler system and I looked for a gun to put in my mouth.

The piano had become a boarder in the apartment—one
who was decomposing and fucking us on the rent. I found myself coming home later and later—anything to avoid being around it. Lorrie and I were fighting more than usual. On some nights, before my meds kicked in, I was convinced that if I lifted the piano lid, I’d find the lady on eight curled up inside it, weeping, “You promised to give it a happy home.”

The idea had been gestating, in one form or another, for some time. Finally, I saw an opening. The Kid was invited to visit a friend in the country for a few days over winter break. When she returned, the tale would go like this: Mommy read about a little girl in the newspaper who lived in a homeless shelter. Every night, the little girl kneeled by her rusty cot and prayed to Santa for a piano. But Santa was in a bind: How could he possibly fit a piano on his sled? That’s when Mommy got a great idea: What if we gave the little girl
our
piano! “A Christmas Miracle” we’d call it.

I pitched the plan to Lorrie, who’d been looking a bit fatigued of late but remained surprisingly sharp. Her only note was to cut “Mommy” and replace it with “Daddy.” I felt it was a juvenile request, but agreed in the spirit of compromise. I embraced her, elated that we were generally on the same page. “That’s why we’re still in love,” I said. “We’re always generally on the same page.”

There’s nothing more delicious than luxuriating in the minutiae of a diabolical plot. How thrilling once the chess
pieces start traipsing about the board. My first move, obviously, was the most critical: getting rid of the thing. I mused about chopping it up with a hatchet and taking it down to the river in little pieces. Lorrie, as she’s known to do, came up with something a good deal saner. After making a few calls, she learned that the sanitation department, on select days, provided free curbside removal of “large bulky items” such as sofas, appliances, and, one assumes, the odd steel drum containing a state witness. Remarkably, pianos were part of the deal. I was a happy taxpayer.

We waved goodbye to the Kid as the Volvo Cross Country pulled away from the curb and headed north up West End Avenue. She looked so joyful, sitting in the way-back with her little pals, hugging her orange plastic sled. It was one of those wonderful moments when the important things in life suddenly come into sharp focus. Half an hour later, the porters had the piano hog-tied to a dolly and were wheeling it to the freight elevator. A trail of dislodged turtle food ran through our apartment and down the tenth-floor hallway—as if it were dropping breadcrumbs, hoping to find its way home one day.
Nice try, prick. Rot in the dump.

The sanitation department collected bulk items in the early-morning hours, which meant it would be gone by the time I woke up. After dinner that night, I went outside for a
walk. I wanted the satisfaction of seeing it out there, waiting for its ride. With a little luck, maybe a dog would piss on it.

The porters had set the piano on the curb around the corner. It stood alone under a streetlamp, looking resigned and undignified. The bench lay upside down on top of it; its ornamental legs jutted skyward like a dead click beetle. As people walked by, several stopped to acknowledge the instrument, as if recognizing an old friend who’d fallen on hard times. A family toting leftover bags from Carmine’s approached it and the husband solemnly remarked, “Well, that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.” His little boy patted the key lid and murmured, “Awww.” Fearful of a chance look in my direction, I receded into my building’s courtyard to observe from the shadows, like an arsonist, returning to witness the blaze he’d set.

Lorrie and I spent the evening peeking down through a crack in the bedroom curtain, watching the parade pass by. People of every color and all walks of life stopped to pay their respects to the piano. There were varying expressions of outrage, compassion, and the somber uncertainty of life. I sensed Lorrie was in a funk, so I offered a different perspective: “People are full of shit. For all this melodrama, not one of ’em seems to want the fucking thing.”