Pavarotti Among the Pipes

The packed-to-bursting car gave a farewell toot, signaling the start of the annual family camping trip. The ancient Buick Century, top-heavy with its 4-bike roof rack, began cautiously backing out of the driveway. Relief started to spread through Tim, who stood on the front steps, waving good-bye—and good riddance—to his parents and younger siblings.

The Buick lurched to a halt. “Whoops, footwear!” Mom hollered from an open window. The youngest leapt from the teetering car, ran into the house, and emerged, holding water shoes aloft in triumph. The cautious back-up started again. Leaving for camping, take two. Tim, a farewell smile still plastered to his face, kept mechanically waving until the whole fam-damn-ly was out of sight.

Gone! Finally! Tim re-entered the cool, shady, gorgeously silent house. His chest ballooned with joy: no other humans for a week.

His misanthropic nature could be blamed on a childhood spent being carted around in that very Buick. Although big, it was not big enough to accommodate five rambunctious kids, two opinionated parents, and a dog. As the middle child of five, Tim always got squished between two older children and two even bigger car seats for infants. He was an insert, a random thought expelled from his parents’ loins on the board game of life somewhere between SQUARE ONE (the first two audacious self-driven children) and THE END (the last two precious entitled children). Tim was the quiet one, the contemplator, often accused of dithering when in fact he was weighing the possibility of future escape.

And now, he was in that hyper-extended childhood, the phase known as “grad school,” having come home after a year abroad doing historical-architectural research. He’d returned to a smaller family unit, since the SQUARE ONE siblings had departed to start their own families, but the house still felt crowded. Until today.

While the family was off camping, Tim would have adequate peace and quiet to weave his many notes and data into the first draft of Chapter 6 of his thesis, “structural idiosyncrasies of the Louvre.” He set up his workspace on the dining table and slapped a hand-lettered sign on his computer: Louvre or Bust.

He planned a week of busy cogitation, broken only by the demands of amateur zoo-keeping. The siblings had turtles and gerbils with finicky requirements for food and water. His mother’s plants required daily conversation and for these he had a talk-radio station cued up. Oh, and Binky the new pup required a twice-daily walk and a bushel of chew toys. Pets were normally fed in the evening, but Tim feared he might get so deeply immersed in his writing he would lose all sense of time. He decided to feed the pets first.

Next, he readied himself with a healthful snack and an engrossing meditation. He sat with fingers poised over the keyboard, mentally ramping up for the big blow-out writing session, when a spookiness descended. The rattling of the gerbil cage ceased. The glug-glug from the turtles’ fountain shushed. Even the talk-radio host calmed down. The hairs on the back of Tim’s head stood at attention. He picked up a badminton racquet and went exploring.

Sure enough, Binky had knocked over the super-sized container of turtle food and was noiselessly gobbling it up. As Tim approached, Binky sprinted off and merrily puked it all up in the basement bathroom. Tim shooed the furry miscreant into his kennel, then got a bucket of hot soapy water and began mopping.

The next thing he knew, water was spraying out everywhere.

*         *         *

Bob Kowalski groaned feebly and rolled over in his bed. Lulu—no, wait, no Lulu. That was the problem. His outstretched hand touched only cool sheets where a warm body used to be. How oppressed he felt, the thirtieth day alone now sitting on his chest like a fortress cornerstone. Lulu was not the “people person” she had claimed to be. She had kicked him out a month ago, saying, “Me and the baby can’t get forty winks when you keep bringing home visitors at all hours.” Damn, Bob thought, I tried to keep the parties quiet.

So now he lay in his decibel-deprived state, thinking about how to spend his lonely Saturday. He had promised to buy garden soil for Cathy, his upstairs neighbor. He called some buddies to meet for coffee but everyone else had other plans.

Bob turned to social media—in a pinch it would do—and on his account @Bob_Kowalski typed in: #weekend whats happening who wants to #meetup #darts #pingpong

A quick response flew in from @Matilda_Ballroom: You promised #carioca some #weekend so come out and be my partner at #charity #danceathon tux required

Matilda was an old friend, who had danced up a storm at Bob’s and Lulu’s wedding. Surely participating in her dance-a-thon couldn’t get him in trouble with Lulu, could it? These charity events often ran short of male dance partners and Bob knew he was needed, even though he was no Fred Astaire. He showered, grabbed breakfast, and changed into dancing clothes. Not a real tux—but his old dance-tux, something durable and extremely comfortable that looked debonair under strong lights, if maybe a little soiled and timeworn up close. He could hardly wait to see a dance hall full of friendly folks.

While on the outs with Lulu, Bob was subletting the first floor of a house. As he was leaving, Cathy tottered downstairs, full of chatter about garden soil, her lumbago, and tips on banana bread. Bob had made banana bread once early on, in desperation trying to win back Lulu, and Cathy would not let it go. He wished he could sidestep her; there was such a thing as being too sociable. She seemed oblivious to the usual cues someone gave when they were trying to exit—the glances toward the door, the jingling of keys, the lengthening of pauses between responses. Finally he blurted out, “Well, gotta go. Busy day.” Maybe he shouldn’t have said “busy day”—unnecessarily cruel, given that she never seemed to have anything to fill her time.

Then his phone buzzed.

*         *         *

Binky barked in alarm as Tim scrambled to find the water main. Why had his parents taught him about grapefruit etiquette but never the location of the water main? As he hastily searched the basement he was struck by how vulnerable it was to water damage, with its silk rugs and irreplaceable photo albums, which by Murphy’s law occupied the lowest shelf of every bookcase. He gave up on finding the water main—Quick, a plumber! —and ran to the yellowing list of emergency numbers in the kitchen.

“Hello, KTO Plumbing. Big or small, we fix it all. Bob Kowalski speaking.”

“Oh! Uncle Bob!” Tim panted. “I wasn’t expecting you….”

“Izzat Tim? Hey, it’s been a dog’s age.” The man chuckled. “How ya doin’ on this lovely Saturday mor—”

“Do you know where our water main is located?”

“Laundry room, behind the freezer,” Bob replied without hesitation. “I’ll be right over.”

“Thanks!” Tim felt a twinge of guilt as he ended the call. Uncle Blowhard, his parents secretly called the guy, and the joke was that he had no off-switch. Tim quickly pushed aside the freezer so he could squeeze in and turn off the water. Disaster averted, whew! Binky trotted behind, happily rooting around a pile of dirty laundry.

Tim dragged the dusty shop vac to the bathroom and suctioned up most of the water before it could seep into the hallway. He was impressed by Bob’s memory but had no idea how long it would take him to get there. Might as well make the most of the time—and write paragraph one of Chapter 6. To set the mood, Tim made himself a café au lait, like he used to consume at Café Blanc before heading over to the Louvre. He was just about to take a sip when the KTO truck pulled up and a man in a tuxedo got out. Bob had the high-blown color of an outdoorsman, wore his dark hair in a mullet, and sported a tidy beard. If Pavarotti made house calls, this would be him.

Binky played watchdog, yapping like crazy, until Tim shooed him into the kennel, then hid his café au lait in the fridge, and invited Bob in.

“Did you find it okay? The water main?” Bob asked. “Normally there’s a separate valve for each room, too. I forgot to mention that.”

“That’s what’s broken,” Tim said sheepishly. “I was cleaning and the mop must’ve knocked the main tap by the toilet.”

“Uh-huh...” Bob nodded. “Let’s go take a look.”

“No need to bother,” Tim said. “I can order the part online,”

“You could… but it’s faster the old-fashioned way. My tools are in the truck.”

Tim motioned to his tux. “Yeah but… don’t you have some place you’re supposed to be?”

Bob looked him in the eye. “Didn’t you know plumbers always dress up on their days off?”

*         *         *

Bob and Tim drove to a hardware store with a gardening center and picked up bags of sheep manure and a flat of tomato seedlings, no problem, but they could not locate a “standard” toilet water valve. Bob looked up and down the aisles for a clerk while his nephew dithered among the display shelves. “Help me find someone,” Bob said, but Tim ignored him. “Why is it you’d rather spend an hour looking for something than one minute flagging down a clerk and asking for help?”

“Remember? I wanted to order online,” Tim said, an edge to his voice. “Clerks are useless.”

“Aw, don’t be so quick to write off everyone else,” Bob said, “except for your own superior self.”

Tim stepped back, nostrils flared. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“The world needs more ‘connectors,’” Bob said, “people who aren’t afraid to say hello, find some commonality.”

“Nope, more people need to keep their mouths shut,” Tim said. “Like, I was on the subway, reading, and some lady comes up to me, starts talking about the Louvre. I just looked at her and thought: you have some nerve, lady.”

“The Loo?” Bob said.

“No, the Louvre.”

“Ah, the Louvre!” Bob broke into a grin. “That’s real interesting. Did you know the Louvre originally had proportions of the classic twelfth-century Philip II-style castle?”

Tim took a step back and gave a puzzled look. “You’ve been there?”

 “Don’t mind me,” Bob said, “I like random factoids.” He saw a clerk and waved an S.O.S. While waiting, he said, “That subway lady was just looking for commonality. You have to come out of your shell, Timbo. Learn how to speak up—like she did—so you can discover shared interests. The older you get, the more you’ll find that you need to win someone over to your side. It might be a prospective employer. But at some point, you’ll need to reach out to someone.”

The clerk appeared, commented jovially on Bob’s tux, and pulled out the drawer of valves. “Thanks!” Bob said, selecting a package. “This’ll do.”

 Tim pushed the shopping cart to checkout. “I don’t need to schmooze. I just need to ace my classes,” he said. “My record speaks for itself.”

Bob frowned. “I may be hazy on details, but in grad school, don’t you do research with some bigwig?” Tim nodded and Bob continued. “Point proved: you have to reach out and convince someone to take you on.”

“A formality.”

“Nope, grad school’s pretty damn close to apprenticing in the trades. When someone asks to come on as my apprentice, I’m checking the vibes. They better have people skills.”

Tim broke eye contact. “Over here… the line-up’s shorter…”

“The bigwig has to collaborate with you,” Bob said. “Do you think he wants someone he can’t comfortably talk to?”

Tim gave a theatrical sigh. “Please! I hear people blathering all the time.”

Bob thought what he wouldn’t give to have some people, Lulu and Junior, “blathering” to him at the end of day.

On their way to checkout, the men came to a DIY sandbox display. Adults were squinting at how-to signs while little children were shrieking with joy, clambering around the demo sandbox, filling pails with sand, and overturning them.

“Hey, d’you remember that family reunion?” Bob said softly.

“When we built castles on the beach?” Tim said. “Yeah…I was seven or eight. You taught me the name of each castle part as we built it—stronghold, barbican, ramparts.” He laughed wistfully.

“I sure remember that mega-castle—yeah, we outdid ourselves!” Bob swelled with accomplishment as he recalled seeing the castle intact the next day.

“Yeah, Labor Day weekend,” Tim relaxed his posture as he reminisced. “First week back to school… first show and tell. Man! I was burning to tell them all about the castle—with the stronghold and donjon and so on. I looked up a bunch of other things, too. Like crenellation.”

“What?” Bob said in mock alarm. “You spoke aloud about it? Sounds a little… extroverted.”

“Yep, thirty kids.” Tim’s face crinkled around the eyes. His brief foray into the world of an extrovert. His uncle was right: it hadn’t killed him. Although, much later that evening, he would remember the downside: how some older kids had pushed him into the lockers, yelling, “Dungeon! Castle creep!”

As they stood in line, a man in a paint-stained T-shirt interjected, “’Scuse me, is that sheep manure you’ve got?”

“Baa baa black sheep, three bags full,” Bob said in a singsong. “It’s your lucky day—big sale on. B-O-G-O-H-O. Aisle 17.” The man pushed off with his cart.

Tim smiled. Classic Bob. “B-O-G-O-H-O?”

“Buy one get one half off. Okay, maybe it’s not a huge sale. But I made his day—didn’t you see how his eyes lit up?” Bob straightened his cuffs. “Where was I? Oh yes, building in a race against the tide. So many folks on the beach assumed we were father and son. It made me hungry to start my own family. You were such a curious kid, full of questions that got me wanting to know more. I even went to the library! Signed out a book!”

Now it was Tim’s turn for gentle mockery. “What, you turned into an introvert?” He tried to imagine Pavarotti sitting quietly with a book in his big hands. “And how’d that go?”

Bob winced. “Terrible.” He massaged his brow. “I got a three-day headache. See, one of my eyes doesn’t focus quite right—ever since I was a kid. I wasn’t much of a reader then, either.”

The clerk scanned their order and Bob made small talk (“yep, my other suit’s a birthday suit”) and paid.

A realization dawned on Tim: Bob was compelled to reach out to people; they were his primary source of information. Poor Bob. People could be vague, self-contradictory, and just plain wrong about things. Tim reloaded the cart and pushed it to the truck.

“Oh hey, don’t look like that,” Bob said, putting the key in the ignition.

“What?”

“Your face—full of pity—‘poor Bob, learning disabled’—isn’t that right? You think I’m an ignoramus and you feel sorry for me.” He kept his eyes directed solely toward the road as he drove.

“No, I—well—” Tim felt his color rising.  

Bob held up his hand. “Audiobooks. I listen to ‘em all the time. Winchester, Gladwell. Mary Beard.”

*         *         *

As they pulled into the driveway, Tim was pressing his temples in the grad school position of penance: Six hours and not a single word written. But he had learned a lot about Holodomor, the 1933 famine in Ukraine—Bob’s recap of the audiobook du jour.

Bob replaced the broken valve, expertly applying Teflon tape to prevent leaks, something that Tim hadn’t the foggiest to do, and something likely not emphasized in the YouTube tutorials, either. Soon the plumbing was ship-shape.

“The bathroom floor looks real clean, too—like you meant to mop it,” Bob chuckled. He brushed off his dance-tux. “I better hustle over to Matilda’s dance-a-thon.”

Tim offered to pay but Bob waved it away. “Let me at least carry your tool case to the truck,” Tim said, hoisting the box with a grunt. “Jesus! Didn’t realize how heavy it is!” Suddenly inspiration struck. “Bob, why don’t you come for dinner tomorrow night? I make a mean chicken cacciatore.”

 “Sounds great,” Bob said. “But I’ve got dad time with Junior… and if I’m lucky, maybe Lulu. How about next weekend?” Then he was off in the KTO truck.

Eight hours and still not a word. Binky needed walking soon. The pup wore a comically aggrieved expression that invited comments from random strangers. Tim usually avoided such prattle by wearing large noise-canceling headphones that signaled “get lost.” But maybe not today.

Chapter 6 would chew up the evening and the wee hours. He loved to dig deep, sit quietly, and make sense of it all. But today hadn’t been a waste; it had been fun, with Pavarotti among the pipes. Tim thought maybe he was turning into an extrovert by proxy.

           He pulled up the file on his computer and typed in the opening sentence for Chapter 6: “The Louvre originally had proportions of the classic twelfth-century Philip II-style castle.” Bob’s factoid. Tim planned to look into it.

Then he scrolled to the dedication page, which read: “To my family, in spite of whom this thesis was written.” He added: “To Uncle Bob, who first inspired my love of castles.”

THE END