The concertina sleeping beside Lefty has started to wheeze. It’s the middle of the night, even the streetlights have their misty blinders on, and the concertina can’t seem to catch her breath. In the dark Lefty listens to her ragged sighs. He can’t sleep to the concertina’s labored breathing. He’s worried. He can’t help thinking about what happened with the glockenspiel, how he would wake to find her place beside him on the bed empty, and then, from the other side of the locked bathroom door, he’d hear her heart hammering arrhythmically and flat, a dissonant rise and fall of scales. Once it began, it went on like that night after night. The neighbors complained; finally, he lost his lease. And one day at dusk, he found himself standing on a street of pawnshops and tattoo parlors, with nowhere to go and only a pawn ticket to show for what had been his life. He’d wandered out with a tattoo—not a rose or an anchor or a snake or a heart, but a single note of indelible blue, a nameless note without a staff, only an eighth note, really—stung onto his shoulder.
Afterward, he spent a long and, in retrospect, mournful time alone before becoming entangled with the tuba. He met her at a tuba fest, and for a while it seemed as if they were destined for each other, until the dreams started. Disturbing dreams in which he ran lost and breathless through twisting corridors, dreams he’d wake from in the dark to a borborygmus of gurgled moans, blats,
grunts, drones, which seemed drawn out longer each night, like the vowels of whales—melancholy whales. At first, he tried to tell himself that it was only gas. But the signs and symptoms were undeniably clear, and this time he didn’t wait for landlords or court orders to tell him it was over. He’d already been evicted from sleep. One afternoon, while the tuba was away for a valve job, Lefty, groggy with insomnia, packed what he could fit into a suitcase that once cushioned a saxophone and left the rest behind.
In the years that followed, home was wherever he set that suitcase down—a sad succession of flophouses and transient hotels, dumps that seemed tenanted by fugitives from the collective unconscious: Depression Deco lobbies; ill-lit corridors lined with doors emitting smells like whispers and whispers like smells; restless, rheumatic rooms that creaked and groaned under their own dingy weight, rooms that came furnished with desperation, and wallpapered with worn, fitful dreams. He carried a sax case but was past his time for saxophones and their slinky, sultry, seductive ways; their nocturnal predilections and swanky pretensions were for breaking the hearts of younger men. On his deathbed, his father had gestured him closer and before dying whispered in his ear, “The wallflowers, son, go for the wallflowers. They’ll appreciate it.” But his father was wrong about that as he was about everything else. The wallflowers were a vain, angry, neurotic, and anything but appreciative lot. Sometimes, in a fog, down by the docks, he’d hear sounds echoing the warning that lights could not convey—buoys dinging their bells, the moody moans of foghorns—and he’d think about the glockenspiel, recalling the sensitive touch of her mallets, and the patterns her glittering vertebrae left along his skin. He’d feel the blue tattoo ache like a bruise from bite marks on his shoulder. He’d think about the tuba until he could feel again a ghostly impression of her hard, cool mouthpiece and taste the brass against his lips (a taste not unlike that of his own blood after a fistfight), and then he’d recall
the way his breath flowed into her, as if there was no filling her up, as if she was sucking it from the deepest pocket of his body, leaving him hollow. He had carried that hollowness within him for years; he didn’t want to feel hollow any longer. Whatever came after the tuba would have to arrive on a breath of its own.
Now, he listens to the concertina wheeze, and perhaps to find a little respite from his worries, Lefty remembers nights as a child when his lungs sounded like wind blowing past a tattered shade, and his bronchial tubes gave recitals of the croup. While his father was God knows where, and his mother was at work, his grandmother would come to nurse him. It was a large family on his father’s side, and his grandmother managed to love them all and yet showed such special affection toward Lefty—maybe because his father was always God knows where—that everyone called her Lefty’s Gran, even if she was their grandmother, too.
Lefty’s Gran would show up whenever he was sick, carrying her green mesh shopping bag. She always carried that bag in case she suddenly had to do some shopping, or on the chance she stumbled upon something valuable lying in the street. Even if it served no other purpose, it was good for carrying her purse in. When she came to see Lefty, the shopping bag would also contain the chartreuse protrusions of a half dozen lemons and the blue-green bulge of an economy-size jar of Vicks VapoRub, against which other, lesser bottles clinked.
The sight of her would set Lefty coughing.
“So, Louis,” his gran would say—oddly Lefty’s Gran refused to call her grandson Lefty—“So, Louis, I hear you got the Krupa again.”
The lemons and Vicks were part of her cure for the Krupa. But before unloading the shopping bag, before doing anything else, Lefty’s Gran would fill the apartment with steam. She’d go from room to room, balancing pie pans and cookie trays on the tops of radiators, and as she set them up they’d bang like cymbals
punctuating her stream of muttering: “Kid’s got the Krupa (Bang!) the Gene (Bam!) the drummer man (Boom!) Krupa (Crash!).
“Hey, Louis (Wham!), whatayou got?”
“The Gene Krupa.”
“You can say that again (Blam!).”
“The Gene Krupa.”
“Ha!” Lefty’s Gran would expel a laugh resounding like a cymbal clap, as if he’d just said something surprisingly hilarious even though she had taught him the you-can-say-that-again routine. “You can bet your dupa (Bing!) you got the Krupa (Bong!).”
She’d fill the pie pans and cookie trays to the brim with water; she’d set kettles and pots on every burner of the stove and let them boil; she’d turn the shower on hot in the bathroom and let it pour down clouds of steam; she’d hook the vaporizer up beside Lefty’s bed, fuel it with a glob of Vicks, and aim its snorky exhalations in his direction. The entire flat began to heave with breath.
While the steam rose like genies rushing out of bottles, Lefty’s Gran would rub camphor oil on his chest and on his neck, where his glands were swollen; she’d dab a streak of Vicks along his upper lip as if she was drawing a mustache. Then, she’d undo the babushka that she wore whether she was outside or in. She’d whisk it off with the flourish of a magician doing a trick, and years would disappear. When he saw her blurred in steam, minus her babushka, Lefty could imagine his grandmother as a girl. He wondered if she kept her head covered because her hair looked younger than she did. It was a lustrous ash blond, so springy with curls that it looked fake, as if she might be wearing a wig. This girlishness that she kept hidden was like a secret between them.
She’d twine her satiny babushka around his throat, and over the babushka she would wrap a rough woolen scarf that was reserved
for these occasions and known as the croup scarf. The scarf, a clashing maroon-and-pea-green plaid anchored at one end by a big safety pin, retained past smells of camphor and Vicks. Its scratchy wool chapped his chin where his skin wasn’t protected by the babushka.
By then, the flat was expanding with steam. Mirrors disappeared in the mist they reflected. Through the mist, the wallpaper, a pattern of vines and flowers, opened into three dimensions and came alive like flora in a rain forest. The background noise of outside traffic transformed into screeches of monkeys and tropical birds. Steam smoldered along the insides of windows and made them sweat; it condensed on the ceiling into beads that hung like rain above Lefty’s bed. He was sweating, too, sweating out the fever; germs were fleeing his body through the portholes of his pores.
In the kitchen, lost in steam, Lefty’s Gran was squeezing lemons. He could hear the vigorous, musical rattle of her spoon as she stirred honey and a splash of boiling water into syrup, then added lemon juice, and last, but not least, a dash of whiskey—Jim Beam—which was the brand of choice for all his relatives, by tradition referred to simply as Beam. Beam as in a ray of light.
Even stuffed up, Lefty could smell its fiery perfume.
The apartment was filling with aromas: pie tins and cookie trays baking on top of merrily knocking radiators; menthol, eucalyptus, camphor, lemon; and through the steam, like a searchlight glancing through fog: Beam. Lefty’s Gran stirred the lemon and honey concoction together in a coffee mug but served it in jiggersize portions, although they referred to a jigger as a shot glass—another family tradition. It seemed an apt name, as far as Lefty was concerned, for a glass that had the shape, density, and sometimes the wallop of a slug.
He’d sip his medicinal drink until it was cool enough, then belt it down as if drinking a toast: Na zdrowie, germs, take this!
When the shot glass was empty, his gran would bring a refill on the theory that he needed fluids. She’d have a couple belts herself on the theory that she needed fluids, too.
“Na zdrowie,” she’d say—bottoms up!
“Na zdrowie,” he’d answer—down the hatch!
On such white winter mornings—white steam on one side of the pane, white snow on the other—propped on a throne of pillows with the babushka like a raja’s turban wound around his swollen glands; with menthol, eucalyptus, camphor, lemon, and through the steam, his gran materializing with a mug in one hand and a bottle of Beam in the other—on white mornings like that, how could a boy not conclude that being sick might almost be worth the joy of getting well? Those were mornings to be tucked away at the heart of life, so that later, whenever one needed to draw upon a recollection of joy in order to get through troubled times, it would be there, an assurance that once one was happy and one could be happy again.
Sometimes, on those mornings, Lefty would wonder how his room, its window clouded as if the atmosphere of Venus was pressed against the pane, must have looked from the street. He wondered how it sounded to strangers passing by. Could they hear the vaporizer hissing like a reed instrument missing a reed? Could they hear his gran, who was now sipping Beam straight from the bottle, singing “You Are My Sunshine” in her Polish patois? She loved that song. “Not to be morbid,” she’d say, “but sing ‘Sunshine’ at my funeral.”
Not to be morbid, but when that time came, Lefty played it on the sax, his breath Beamy, played it to heaven, his back braced against the steeple of St. Pius.
She taught Lefty to play the measuring spoons like castanets in accompaniment to her gypsylike singing. She was playing the radiators with a ladle as if they were marimbas. Lefty was up, out of bed, flushed, but feeling great, and in steam that was fading to
wisps, he was dancing with his gran. Her girlish curls tossed as around and around the room they whirled, both of them singing, and one or the other dizzily breaking off the dance in order to beat or plunk or blow some instrument they’d just invented : Lefty strumming the egg slicer; Lefty’s Gran oompahing an empty half gallon of Dad’s old-fashioned root beer; Lefty bugling “Sunshine” through the cardboard clarion at the center of a toilet-paper roll; Lefty’s Gran chiming a closet of empty coat hangers; Lefty shake-rattle-and-rolling the silverware drawer; Lefty’s Gran Spike Jonesing the vacuum cleaner; Lefty, surrounded by pots and lids, drum-soloing with wooden spoons; while Lefty’s Gran, conducting with a potato masher, yelled, “Go, Krupa, go!”
How would it look to some stranger who had crept to the window and seen a boy and his gran carrying on as if they’d both been miraculously cured of the croup, doing the hokeypokey face-to-face with the babushka between their teeth?
It would have looked the way it appears to him now, peering in at the memory, like a stranger through a blurred window, straining to hear the beat of pots and the faint, off-key rendition of a vaguely familiar song.
And how would it look to the boy and his gran if they were peering in on him now, watching at the window while an unshaven stranger with a blue note on his shoulder worriedly paces in his dirty underwear, in the dead of night, to the sickly wheeze of a concertina? For a moment, Lefty almost expects to see their faces at the window, though the window is four stories up. He almost feels more like the boy staring in than the unshaven man who is pacing the floor. The boy and his gran seem more real to him than his room in the present. Suddenly, it’s clear to him that memory is the channel by which the past conducts its powerful energy; it’s how the past continues to love.
He moves directly to the suitcase buried in the back of the
closet and rummages through it until he finds a scarf. It’s not the old scarf of maroon-and-pea-green plaid anchored with a safety pin; this scarf is navy blue. Nor is it redolent of camphor and Vicks; this scarf smells of mothballs. But it’s woolly and warm and will have to do. He gently wraps the scarf about the concertina, and immediately her labored wheezing softens and is muffled.
He doesn’t own enough pots to constitute a drum set, or to occupy all four burners, but he fills the single pot he has and, with the fanfare of a cymbal crash, he sets it to boil.
He doesn’t know about the concertina, but as the water rumbles into steam, he’s feeling a little better already—less anxious. He’s been worried about the concertina, and his worries have made him feel helpless. He should at least have recognized that something was wrong before it came to this. The concertina has been in a minor mood lately, one that Lefty’s found contagious—wistful, pensive, melancholy, heartsick by turns—a mood that, for lack of perfect pitch, words can’t exactly convey. Even music can only approximate—a G minor from a Chopin nocturne, perhaps; or the D minor of a Schubert quartet, the one called “Death and the Maiden”; or, at times, an airy, disorganized noodling in no discernible key at all, like an orchestra tuning up; or a squeal like a bagpipe with a stomachache; or a drone as if the concertina were dreaming in a scale that only a sitar would find familiar. She’s been in a minor mood that turns a polka into the blues, a jig into a dirge, a tarantella into a requiem. And a tango—how long has it been since he’s heard her slink into the stylized passion of a tango?
Polka, jig, tarantella, tango … wistful, pensive, melancholy, heartsick … menthol, eucalyptus, camphor, lemon. He’s found a mantra on which to meditate, a talismanic spell to chant.
He rifles through the cupboard, but he’s out of honey. Not out, exactly; the fact is that he’s never owned a jar of honey in his
life. He opens the arctically austere cell of his refrigerator: a bottle of catsup, a jar of pickles, a couple containers of Chinese takeout that need to be pitched, but no lemon, not even a plastic citrus fruit ripening in there.
Fortunately, he does possess a shot glass and a bottle of whiskey—not Beam—but memory is, at best, approximate, and he bets Old Guckenheimer will do the trick. In honor and imitation of his gran, he belts down a couple quick doses to test its efficacy, and a couple more for the sake of fluids.
There’s that fiery perfume!
Now it’s the concertina’s turn. Even distressed, the concertina looks lovely in the navy blue scarf. It heightens her complexion of mother-of-pearl. Oh, he thinks, little beauty, sweet companion, the one I didn’t realize I was searching for, who almost came to me too late; little squeeze box who taught my fingers to sing, who taught me how to close my eyes and let the music flow.
He loves her pliant fit between his palms, and the way her body stretches as she yawns rhapsodically. He loves to feel the pumping of her breath. It’s like a summer breeze warmed by the bellows of her heart—although bellows has never seemed to him a word suited to her. There’s nothing bellowy about her, no puffed-up sentiments, no martial clamor that might accompany the lockstep or goose step of a march, no anthems for football halftimes, or for saluting flags while windbags swell with their own rhetoric; and though, a few times in her company, he’s heard angelic whispers—an echo of some great medieval organ—no hymns. Hers has always been a song of earth, of olive trees, vineyards, blossoming orchards melodic with bees.
Na zdrowie, little squeeze box.
He watches as, delicately, she inhales the fumes of whiskey-tiny sips starting at do and slowly ascending through re, mi, fa, sol, to a tremulous la-ti. And after the shot glass has been drained repeatedly, he lifts her gently from the bed and they begin to dance
to a tune they play together, a tune whose seesaw rhythm is like the panting of lovers. Not a polka, jig, tarantella, or even a tango. They dance to a dance they’ve just invented, an ancient dance they’ve just recalled.
If there are strangers on the street at this late hour, they’ve stopped to listen as if, like dogs, they can cock their ears. They listen, inhaling the cool air, with their heads thrown back against the night. Their breaths plume; their eyes are locked on the faint wisps of dissolving constellations. And though it’s a dark, American city street on which they’ve stopped, they know there isn’t the need to feel afraid because, instead of danger, tonight the air carries music.
Na zdrowie, strangers.
Na zdrowie, music.
Then, in the long diminuendo of a sigh, the concertina folds up quietly, peacefully, exhaling a sweet, whiskey breath, and Lefty lies down on the pillow beside her, covers them both with a bedspread, and closes his eyes.
Sleep, like a barcarole, carries him away.