The Felt Mutes

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 12: The Felt Mutes

The felt mutes were strips of red wool felt, each twelve inches long and a quarter inch wide, tapered to a point at one end so they could be inserted between the strings of a piano to isolate individual strings within a unison, and Clara carried eight of them in her bag, in a leather pouch that Leonard had sewn from the remnant of an old briefcase, the pouch dark with age and oil, the leather soft from handling, the zipper replaced twice — once by Leonard, once by Clara — and the mutes inside were not the originals, were not the mutes Leonard had carried from Leningrad, were replacements that Clara ordered from a supplier in Cincinnati every two years, because felt mutes wore out, because the felt compressed and hardened under the pressure of the strings, because the wedge that was tight and secure in January was loose and slipping by December, and the mutes were, of all Clara's tools, the most expendable, the most replaceable, the most consumed by the work, the tools that were used up and discarded and replaced without ceremony, without sentiment, without the attachment that Clara felt for the lever and the fork.

And yet the mutes were essential. Without them, the tuner could not isolate the strings within a unison, could not tune one string at a time, could not perform the fundamental act of the craft, which was the comparison of one pitch to another, one string to another, one frequency to another, the comparison that was the basis of all tuning, the thing that the ear did, the thing that the ear was for. The mutes created silence — they silenced the strings that the tuner did not want to hear, so that only the string being tuned would sound, so that the ear could focus, could attend to a single voice rather than a chorus, could hear the one pitch in isolation and judge it and correct it without the interference of the other strings in the unison.

The mutes created silence. Clara was thinking about this as she drove to Mrs. Ashford's house on a Monday afternoon in late May, the Portland spring having arrived with its characteristic generosity — the rain diminished to occasional showers, the light returning, the temperature rising into the sixties, the city emerging from under the gray ceiling of winter like a painting emerging from under a varnish, the colors brighter, the edges sharper, the world more vivid — and Clara was thinking about silence, about the silence the mutes created, about the silence in the upper frequencies of her hearing, the silence that was not the absence of sound but the absence of hearing, and the two silences — the manufactured silence of the mutes and the unmanufactured silence of the hearing loss — were related, were both about what was not heard, were both about the ear's relationship to absence.

She had received the third audiogram the previous week. The numbers were: right ear, 30 decibels at 6,000 hertz, 50 at 8,000. Left ear, 40 at 6,000, 55 at 8,000. The progression was continuing. The drop at 8,000 hertz was now moderate to severe in the left ear. The asymmetry between the ears was widening — the left ear losing faster than the right, a pattern that Dr. Chau said could indicate additional factors beyond presbycusis, could indicate vascular changes or early cochlear hydrops, though these were speculative diagnoses that would require further testing to confirm.

The ibuprofen discontinuation had not produced the reversal Dr. Chau had hoped for. Three months without NSAIDs, three months of back pain managed by acetaminophen and yoga and the deliberate practice of sitting upright rather than leaning forward, and the hearing had not improved, had continued to decline, and Dr. Chau had said, with the measured honesty that Clara had come to respect, "The NSAID component, if there was one, does not appear to have been reversible. The progression is consistent with accelerated presbycusis. I'm sorry."

Clara had asked about hearing aids. Dr. Chau had discussed the options — digital aids with frequency-specific amplification, programmable to boost the frequencies above 6,000 hertz, potentially helpful for speech comprehension, potentially helpful for general sound quality, but with limitations for fine pitch discrimination: latency in the digital processing, coloration of the amplified signal, the introduction of artifacts that the ear would perceive as noise, as distortion, as wrongness, and the wrongness would be present in exactly the frequencies where Clara needed the most precise perception, the frequencies where the difference between correct and incorrect was measured in cents, in fractions of hertz, in deviations so small that any artifact, any distortion, any coloration would be larger than the signal Clara was trying to detect.

Clara had not ordered hearing aids. She had thanked Dr. Chau and taken the audiogram and folded it and put it in the bag and driven home and put it in the filing cabinet, in the folder labeled MEDICAL, next to the first and second audiograms, three pages of a story she did not want to read.

She parked on Klickitat Street and walked up the steps to Mrs. Ashford's porch and knocked, and Mrs. Ashford opened the door and did not say "the A is sharp," which was unusual, which was a break in the twenty-two-year ritual, and instead said, "You look tired, Clara."

"I'm fine," Clara said.

"You are not fine. You look the way my husband looked when he was carrying something he did not want to carry. Come in. I've made tea."

Clara came in. The house was the same — the Craftsman woodwork, the leaded glass, the Bösendorfer in the living room, the chair by the window where Mrs. Ashford sat with her book — and the sameness was a comfort the way a familiar pitch is a comfort, the way A440 is a comfort, the reliability of the known, the unchanging, the fixed point. But Mrs. Ashford was not offering the sameness today, was not offering the ritual of the tuning, the silence of the working hour, the Chopin at the end. Mrs. Ashford was offering tea and a chair and the attention of a woman who had been paying attention for eighty-four years and who could see in Clara's face what Clara had not yet said.

They sat in the kitchen, at a table that was older than Clara, a table that Mrs. Ashford and Douglas had bought when they moved into the house in 1978, the same year the Bösendorfer arrived, the table and the piano entering the house in the same season, becoming part of the house at the same time, the way two trees planted in the same year become part of the same landscape, their roots intertwined beneath the surface.

Mrs. Ashford poured tea into cups that had belonged to her mother, china cups with a blue willow pattern, translucent at the rim, and she sat across from Clara and waited, and the waiting was not impatient but attentive, the waiting of a person who understood that some things required their own time to be said, that the speaker needed silence in which to form the words, the way a tuner needed silence in which to hear the pitch.

Clara drank the tea. It was Earl Grey, and the bergamot was strong, and the heat of the cup in her hands was a sensation she focused on, a physical fact she could attend to while the other fact — the fact she was about to say — organized itself in her mind.

"I'm losing my hearing," Clara said.

The words came out plain, came out the way Leonard's words had come out when he told Clara he could no longer hear the seventh partial of C8, plain and factual and stripped of emotion, the statement of a measurement rather than the expression of a feeling, and the plainness was not a choice but a necessity, because if Clara had allowed emotion into the statement the emotion would have been too large for the statement, would have overwhelmed the words, would have turned the medical fact into a confession of grief, and Clara was not ready for grief, was not ready for the full emotional weight of what she was saying, was only ready for the fact, the datum, the number on the graph.

Mrs. Ashford's face did not change. Her eyes, behind the tortoiseshell glasses, remained steady, remained focused on Clara, and the steadiness was not indifference but composure, the composure of a woman who had heard bad news before — the diagnosis of Douglas's illness, the prognosis, the timeline — and who knew that the first response to bad news should be attention, not reaction, listening rather than speaking.

"High frequencies," Clara said. "Above 6,000 hertz. It's called presbycusis. Age-related hearing loss. It's common."

"I know what it is," Mrs. Ashford said. "I have it. Have had it for years. The birds are quieter than they used to be. The consonants in words are harder to hear. Douglas had it too. He said the world was becoming more bass."

"For most people it's not significant. For a tuner —"

"For a tuner it is the only thing."

"Yes."

Mrs. Ashford was quiet for a moment. She lifted her cup and drank and set it down, the china making a small sound against the saucer, a high-frequency click that Clara heard clearly, that was well within her range, and Clara thought about Mrs. Ashford hearing the same click with her eighty-four-year-old ears, which had lost far more than Clara's ears had lost, which had been losing for decades, which had narrowed the world of sound around Mrs. Ashford to a range that was smaller than Clara's current range and that was shrinking still, and Mrs. Ashford had lived with this, had continued to play the piano, had continued to hear the Chopin, or some of the Chopin, or enough of the Chopin.

"I want to tell you about Douglas," Mrs. Ashford said.

Clara waited. In twenty-two years of tuning Mrs. Ashford's piano, Clara had heard many things about Douglas — about his career as a professor of English at Reed College, about his love of Chopin, about his death from pancreatic cancer at seventy, about the music he had requested in his last weeks — but she had not heard Mrs. Ashford tell a story about Douglas in the way that the tone of Mrs. Ashford's voice now indicated, the tone that meant not an anecdote but a narrative, not a recollection but a teaching.

"Douglas was a reader," Mrs. Ashford said. "He read everything. Fiction, history, poetry, philosophy. He read the way you listen — with the whole of himself, with everything he had. And when he was sixty-three — seven years before he died — his eyes began to fail. Macular degeneration. The center of his vision blurred. The part of the eye he used for reading, the part that resolves the fine detail, the letters on the page — that part was dying."

Clara heard the parallel. The center of the eye. The upper range of the ear. The part that resolved the fine detail.

"He went to specialists. They tried treatments. Some helped, temporarily. Some did not help at all. The degeneration continued. He could see — he was not blind — but the fine work of the eye, the work of reading, was becoming harder. The letters blurred. He used magnifying glasses. He used large-print books. He adjusted."

"How long did he read."

"He read until the day he died. But the reading changed. In the last years he could not read new books — the effort of deciphering each word was too great, the eye too tired, the letters too indistinct. So he read the books he had already read, the books he knew, and his memory supplied what his eyes could not, and the reading was a combination of seeing and remembering, the eye and the memory working together, the memory filling in the gaps that the eye left, and Douglas said — I remember this exactly — Douglas said, 'I am not reading the book. I am remembering the book with the book in front of me.'"

Clara set down her cup. The kitchen was quiet. Through the doorway she could see the edge of the Bösendorfer in the living room, the curve of the case, the dark wood catching the afternoon light.

"He could have stopped," Mrs. Ashford said. "He could have said, 'My eyes cannot do what they once did, and therefore I will not read.' He could have put the books away. But he did not put the books away. He read differently. He read with assistance — the magnifying glass, the large print, the memory. He accepted that the reading was not what it had been, that it was diminished, that the experience of reading with perfect vision was gone and would not return, and he read anyway, because the reading was still worth doing, because the book was still the book even if the eye could not see every word, because the act of reading was not only the act of seeing but the act of understanding, and understanding did not require perfect vision, required only sufficient vision, enough vision to connect the eye to the memory to the meaning."

"The piano is not a book," Clara said. "If I miss a note, the piano is wrong. If Douglas missed a word, the book was still the book."

"Was the piano wrong last month."

"I don't —"

"Was it wrong. Was the Bösendorfer out of tune when you left."

"No. The Bösendorfer was in tune."

"Then your hearing was sufficient. Sufficient for this piano. Sufficient for this room. Sufficient for me."

Clara looked at Mrs. Ashford. Eighty-four years old. Five feet and one inch. White hair pinned up, glasses, cardigan, the blue willow cup in her hands. A woman who had been played to by her dying husband. A woman who had been listening to the Bösendorfer for thirty-seven years. A woman whose own hearing was diminished and who continued to play, continued to listen, continued to hear the Chopin or enough of the Chopin.

"It will get worse," Clara said.

"Everything gets worse. My knees get worse. My eyes get worse. My hearing gets worse. The house gets older. The piano gets older. The wood dries and cracks and the felt hardens and the strings stretch. Everything moves away from where it was. This is what time does. The question is not whether it gets worse. The question is what you do while it gets worse."

"My father stopped. When he couldn't hear the seventh partial of C8, he stopped."

"Your father was your father. His answer was his answer. It does not have to be yours."

Clara thought about this. She thought about Leonard's clarity, the cleanness of his decision, the metric and the measurement and the stop. She thought about how she had admired this clarity, had seen in it the elegance of a tuning fork — one pitch, one frequency, one truth, no ambiguity — and she had assumed that her own ending would be similarly clean, similarly clear, a moment when the hearing crossed a threshold and the decision was made.

But her ending was not clean. Her ending was not a threshold but a slope. Her ending was not a single frequency lost but a range of frequencies diminishing, the resolution fading rather than vanishing, the capacity declining rather than disappearing, and the slope did not offer the clarity that Leonard's cliff had offered, did not provide the single, definitive moment when the answer changed from yes to no.

"I don't know how to tune a piano with a hearing aid," Clara said.

"You don't know because you haven't tried. You didn't know how to tune a piano at all, once. Then you learned. You can learn again."

"Learning to tune with an impaired ear is not the same as learning to tune with a healthy ear."

"No. It is harder. It requires more. It requires you to use what you have rather than what you had. It requires you to accept that the tuning will be different — not worse, necessarily, but different — and that different is acceptable, if the piano is in tune, if the music is served, if the person who plays the piano can play it and hear it and be — " Mrs. Ashford paused, searching for a word. "Be held by it."

"Held by it."

"The piano holds the music. The music holds the player. The tuning holds the piano. If the tuning holds, everything holds. And the tuning does not need to be perfect to hold. It needs to be right enough."

Right enough. The words Yuki had used, sitting on the bench at Clara's Knabe, listening to the C major chord. Not perfect. Just right enough.

Clara sat with the words and the tea and the quiet kitchen and the Bösendorfer visible through the doorway, and she felt something shift in her, not a resolution but a loosening, a relaxation of the tension she had been carrying since October, the tension of a person holding a secret, and the secret was out now — Martin knew, Mrs. Ashford knew — and the telling had not made the problem smaller but had made the carrying of the problem lighter, had distributed the weight to other hands, other ears, other hearts.

"I should tune the piano," Clara said.

"You should tune the piano," Mrs. Ashford said.

Clara went to the living room and opened the Bösendorfer's lid and propped it on the long stick and looked inside, at the strings and the hammers and the bridges and the soundboard, the interior she had been looking at for twenty-two years, the landscape she knew better than any other landscape in her working life, and she took the mutes from the pouch and the lever from the bag and the fork from the bag and she struck the fork and set it on the soundboard and the A filled the room.

The Bösendorfer's A. The sound that was not just 440 hertz but 440 hertz filtered through Alpine spruce, through the specific soundboard of this specific instrument, through the room and the house and the afternoon light and the twenty-two years of Clara's listening and the eleven years of Leonard's listening before that, the A that was the reference point for this piano, for this relationship, for this long conversation between tuner and instrument.

Clara set the A and began the temperament. She worked with the care she always brought to the Bösendorfer, the care that was not labor but devotion, each interval set with the attention that the instrument deserved, each beat rate counted and confirmed, each cross-check performed and passed, and the temperament was clean, was smooth, was the temperament she had set on this piano hundreds of times, the grid of equal temperament laid down on the strings of a Bösendorfer Imperial by the hands of Clara Resnikoff, daughter of Leonard Resnikoff, tuner of this piano for twenty-two years.

She tuned the octaves. She tuned the bass with confidence, stretching the lower notes with the knowledge of three decades, the ear and the memory working together, the sound and the experience combining to produce decisions that were correct not because the ear alone dictated them but because the ear and the accumulated knowledge of this specific piano collaborated, the ear hearing what the piano was doing now and the memory recalling what the piano had done in every previous tuning, and the collaboration produced a tuning that was informed by history, by context, by the relationship between tuner and instrument.

She reached the upper treble. She tuned through C6, C7, into the top octave, and she leaned close — closer than she used to, closer than Mrs. Ashford had ever seen her lean — and she struck each note and listened and adjusted and listened again, and the top octave came into tune, or came into what Clara's ear could perceive as in tune, and then she took out the Korg, and she felt Mrs. Ashford's eyes on her as she did so, felt the weight of the older woman's attention, and she checked the top octave against the device.

C-sharp 7. Correct.

D7. Plus one cent. She adjusted. Correct.

E7. Correct.

F7. Plus one cent. She adjusted. Correct.

The rest. Correct. The top octave was clean, or as clean as the combination of Clara's ear and the Korg could make it, and Clara put the Korg away and tuned the unisons and finished and closed the lid and packed her tools.

Mrs. Ashford rose from her chair and walked to the piano and sat on the bench. She did not play immediately. She sat with her hands in her lap and looked at the keyboard, at the ivory keys, at the eighty-eight whites and the fifty-two blacks and the nine extra bass keys that made the Bösendorfer Imperial ninety-seven keys in all, and she looked at these keys with the expression of a woman who had been looking at them for thirty-seven years and who saw in them not just keys but a history, a conversation, a relationship that had outlasted her husband and her knees and her hearing and that would outlast, eventually, her.

She played the Nocturne in E-flat major. She played it the way she always played it — slowly, attentively, each note given its weight — and the Bösendorfer sang, and Clara stood by the door and listened.

The piano was in tune. The nocturne was beautiful. The room was full of sound.

Clara heard it all — the bass, the mid-range, the treble, the melody, the accompaniment, the harmonics, the resonance of the soundboard, the decay of each note, the silence between the notes — she heard it all, and in the hearing was the answer to the question she had not asked, the answer that Mrs. Ashford had given without being asked, which was: you tune until you cannot tune, and the cannot is not a date on a calendar but a condition of the ear, and the condition changes slowly, and while it changes you work with what you have, you lean closer, you use the device, you accept the help, you let the memory collaborate with the ear, you let the knowledge of the piano supplement the perception of the sound, and you produce a tuning that is not what it was but is what it is, and what it is, if it is right enough, is enough.

"It sounds right," Mrs. Ashford said, without stopping.

"It sounds right," Clara said.

She let herself out. She drove home through the late afternoon, through the May light that was gold and long and generous, the light that Portland gave for three months of the year as compensation for nine months of gray, and she drove with the window down and the air on her face and the sounds of the city entering the car — the tires on pavement, the buses, the bicycles, the conversations of people on sidewalks, the birds that Mrs. Ashford could no longer hear as clearly as she once had — and Clara heard these sounds and catalogued them and was grateful for them, for the hearing she had, for the frequencies that remained, for the range that was still vast even if it was narrower than it had been, and the gratitude was not resignation but recognition, the recognition that what she had was still a great deal, was still more than most people had, was still the ear that Leonard had trained, diminished but not destroyed, compromised but not defeated.

She parked in front of her house and went inside and set the bag on the table and took out the mutes, the red felt strips, and looked at them in her hand. Eight strips of felt, tapered, worn, due for replacement. The most expendable of her tools. The tools that created silence.

She put them back in the pouch and put the pouch in the bag and left the bag on the table and went to the Knabe and played the Chopin, the Nocturne in C-sharp minor, the dark one, the one she preferred, and she played it slowly, the way Mrs. Ashford played the E-flat, and the Knabe was not a Bösendorfer, was a modest piano in a modest house, but it was in tune and its sound was honest and the music filled the rooms and Clara played until the light in the windows was gone and the house was dark and the music was the only thing in the room that was not dark, and then she stopped and closed the fallboard and went to the kitchen and struck the fork.

A440.

She held it close. She listened for the partials. She listened past the tenth, past the eleventh, into the territory where the harmonics faded, where the sound dimmed, where the edge of her hearing lived, and she listened to the edge and accepted it, did not fight it, did not rail against it, accepted it the way she accepted the edge of the soundboard, the edge of the key, the edge of the hammer's arc — the edge was where the thing ended and the not-thing began, and the edge was real and could not be moved, could only be approached and acknowledged and lived with.

She set the fork on the table.

Tomorrow there were pianos to tune.