The Last Tuning

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 16: The Last Tuning

The decision arrived in September, the way September arrived in Portland — not suddenly but inevitably, the summer light softening, the air cooling by a degree each day, the rain returning first as mist and then as drizzle and then as the steady fall that would continue through March, and Clara felt the season turn and felt something turn with it, a settling, a resolution, the sense of a pitch that had been wavering finally coming to rest.

She was sitting at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning, the appointment book open in front of her, the tuning fork beside it, the audiogram — the fourth audiogram, the one from August — in her hand. The numbers were: right ear, 35 decibels at 6,000 hertz, 55 at 8,000. Left ear, 45 at 6,000, 60 at 8,000. The left ear had crossed the threshold into severe loss at 8,000 hertz. The asymmetry was widening. Dr. Chau had discussed hearing aids again, more urgently this time, and had mentioned the possibility of further testing — an MRI to rule out retrocochlear pathology, a referral to an otologist — and Clara had agreed to the testing and had not agreed to the hearing aids, had not refused them but had not agreed, had left the question open the way you leave a window open, the air coming through but the decision about whether to close it deferred.

The audiogram in her hand was a piece of paper with a graph on it, and the graph told a story, and the story was the story of decline, and the decline was continuing, and the question that the audiogram posed — how long, how far, how much more — was a question without an answer, because presbycusis did not have a predetermined endpoint, did not follow a schedule, did not announce its terminal value, but simply continued, the curve descending year by year, the frequencies retreating, the edge of hearing moving inward like a coastline eroded by the sea.

Clara looked at the appointment book. The pages for September showed the usual schedule — seventeen pianos per week, eighty per month, the rounds, the ritual, the work. She turned the pages forward through October, November, December, and the pages were blank, the schedule not yet filled, the future not yet committed to paper, and the blankness of the pages was — Clara looked at the blank pages and felt what the blankness meant, felt the whiteness of the paper as a kind of silence, the silence of a future that had not yet been decided, that could be filled with tunings or could be left blank, and the choice between filling and leaving blank was the choice that Clara had been approaching for a year, the choice that the audiogram had been asking her to make, the choice that Leonard had made in a single conversation over tea and that Clara had been unable to make because Clara's loss was not Leonard's loss, was not a cliff but a slope, was not a single frequency missing but a range of frequencies diminishing, and the slope did not provide the clarity that the cliff provided.

But Clara was tired. Not physically tired — her body was strong, her back managed by the acetaminophen and the yoga, her hands steady, her stamina sufficient for a full day of tuning — but tired in a way that was harder to name, a fatigue of the spirit or the will or the part of the self that sustained the effort of compensation, the daily work of leaning closer and striking harder and checking with the Korg and managing the gap between what the ear heard and what the ear needed to hear, and this fatigue was cumulative, was the fatigue that builds over months of extra effort, the way a muscle fatigues not from a single exertion but from the sustained effort of holding a position, the body not moving but working, the effort invisible but real.

She was tired of the Korg. Tired of the device in her bag, the electronic judge that confirmed or denied what her ear could no longer confirm or deny on its own. Tired of the dependency, the reliance, the concession. The Korg was not a tuning fork — the Korg was a crutch, and the crutch was necessary and the crutch was helpful and the crutch allowed her to continue working, but the crutch was not the leg, and using the crutch every day reminded Clara that the leg was weak, and the reminder was exhausting.

She was tired of the secrecy. She had told Martin. She had told Mrs. Ashford. She had told Yuki. She had not told the symphony. She had not told Paul Dreyfus at the Songbird studio. She had not told the Huangs or the Morrisons or the church secretary at First Presbyterian. She had not told any of her clients except Mrs. Ashford, had not announced to the people who trusted her ear that the ear was failing, had not disclosed the limitation that affected the quality of the service she provided, and the non-disclosure was — Clara did not call it dishonesty, because the tunings were correct, the Korg and Yuki ensuring the correctness, the product undiminished even if the process was compromised — but the non-disclosure was a weight, was a secret carried daily, and the carrying was tiring.

She looked at the appointment book. She looked at the blank pages of October, November, December.

She picked up a pen.

In the margin of the first Monday in October, she wrote: "Begin last round."

The words on the page were small, were angular, were in Clara's handwriting, and the words changed everything. The words converted the vague intention that had been forming since August — the intention to stop, to end, to put down the lever — into a plan, a schedule, a commitment written in ink in the book that organized her professional life, and the commitment was not to stop immediately but to stop after one more round, one more visit to every piano on her list, one last tuning of every instrument she had tuned for years, one final pass through the city of pianos that was Clara Resnikoff's Portland.

She counted. She had eighty-seven active clients. Eighty-seven pianos. Some tuned monthly, some quarterly, some biannually, some annually. In a normal schedule, she would visit each piano at least once between October and the end of the year. Some she would visit twice. The Bösendorfer she would visit three times. The Steinway she would visit six times. She would begin in October and end — she did the math, calculated the schedule, distributed the pianos across the remaining weeks — she would end in late December. Twelve weeks. Eighty-seven pianos. Twelve weeks to say goodbye to every instrument she had tuned, to every room she had entered, to every sound she had tended.

She would not say goodbye in words. She would not announce to each client that this was the last tuning. She would simply tune, as she always tuned, with the care and the precision and the attention that the work demanded, and the goodbye would be in the tuning itself, in the quality of the work, in the silent farewell that the tuner offered the piano by making it as right as she could make it, as perfectly tempered as her ear and Yuki's ear and the Korg could achieve, one last time.

She called Yuki.

It was Sunday morning, nine o'clock. Yuki answered on the third ring, her voice carrying the slightly unfocused quality of a person who had been awake but not fully engaged, the Sunday-morning voice.

"Can you come over," Clara said. "I need to talk to you."

"Now."

"Now. I'll make coffee."

Yuki arrived at nine-thirty on the bicycle, and Clara met her at the door and they sat at the kitchen table and Clara poured coffee into the two mugs — the white for Clara, the blue with the chip for Yuki — and they sat across from each other, and the kitchen was quiet except for the refrigerator and the rain and the silence between them, the silence that Clara was about to fill.

"I'm going to stop tuning," Clara said.

Yuki set down her coffee. She did not speak. She looked at Clara across the table, and her face showed the expression that Clara had expected — not surprise, because Yuki had known, had seen the compensations, had watched the decline, had tuned the top octaves that Clara could no longer tune — but the expression that follows the confirmation of something known but not yet confirmed, the expression of hearing the words that make the knowledge real.

"When," Yuki said.

"December. I'm going to do one more round. One last visit to every piano. Eighty-seven pianos. Twelve weeks. I'll start in October."

"And then."

"And then I'll stop. I'll pass the clients to you. The Huangs, the Morrisons, First Presbyterian, the Songbird studio, all of them. And the symphony."

"The Steinway."

"The Steinway. Serial number 507,281. My father's piano."

Yuki was quiet. She held her coffee in her hands — the top-grip, the palms covering the opening — and she looked at the table, at the tuning fork lying between them, at the appointment book open to the blank pages of October.

"And Mrs. Ashford," Yuki said.

"Mrs. Ashford's Bösendorfer. Yes. That too."

"Clara, you don't have to — the Korg works. I can do the top octave. We can keep going the way we've been going. The tunings are good. The clients are satisfied."

"The tunings are good because you are good. Because the Korg is good. Because the system we've built — you and me and the device — produces correct tunings. But the system is not me. The system is a workaround. The system is the crutch. And I don't want to spend the rest of my career on a crutch."

"It's not a crutch. It's a collaboration."

"It started as a collaboration. It's becoming a dependency. Every month the Korg catches more errors. Every month the top octave takes more of your time and less of mine. The trajectory is clear. In a year, maybe two, you'll be doing the entire tuning and I'll be — what. Standing next to you. Holding the bag. Listening to the frequencies I can still hear and pretending to hear the ones I can't."

"You wouldn't pretend."

"No. I wouldn't pretend. Which is why I need to stop before I would need to pretend."

Clara picked up the fork. She did not strike it. She held it in her hand, the steel cool, the weight familiar, and she looked at Yuki.

"My father stopped when he lost the seventh partial of C8. He had a clear metric. A single frequency. The metric was met, and he stopped. I've been looking for a metric like that — a single moment, a clear threshold, a frequency I can point to and say 'this is the boundary, this is the line, this is the moment when the ear is no longer sufficient.' But my loss is not like his. My loss is a slope. A gradient. A continuous decline. And the slope doesn't give me a threshold. The slope gives me a daily choice — can I still do the work, can I still do the work, can I still do the work — and every day the answer is 'yes, but less,' and 'yes, but with help,' and 'yes, but not the way I used to,' and the yeses are getting qualified, are getting softer, and I need to stop before the yes becomes a no that I didn't hear."

Yuki's eyes were bright. She was not crying but she was near it, and Clara saw this and felt the corresponding pressure in her own eyes and chest, the physiological response to another person's emotion, the sympathetic vibration that the body produced when it encountered grief in another body, and Clara held the emotion the way she held the fork — firmly, without striking it, without releasing the vibration into the room.

"You'll take the clients," Clara said. "All of them. I'll introduce you. I'll tell them you're ready. The ones who know me well — the Ashfords, the symphony — I'll tell them personally. The others I'll notify by letter."

"What about the lever."

Clara looked at the lever, which was on the table beside the fork. The chrome vanadium steel. The rosewood handle shaped by Leonard on the lathe in the garage. The handle worn by Leonard's grip and Clara's grip and, now, faintly, by Yuki's grip. Three sets of hands. Three generations of tuners. The lineage recorded in the wood.

"The lever goes with the work," Clara said. "When the work passes to you, the lever passes to you."

"I can get my own lever."

"You have your own lever. The Hale number two. Use it for the day-to-day tunings. The lever —" Clara touched the rosewood handle. "This lever is for the Steinway. And the Bösendorfer. This is the lever for the pianos that require it."

Yuki looked at the lever. Her face showed what Clara expected it to show — the understanding that the lever was not a tool but an inheritance, not a piece of equipment but a piece of history, and the inheritance carried a weight that was not physical but moral, the weight of the expectation that the inheritor would use the tool as the previous owners had used it, with care and precision and the kind of attention that the rosewood handle had been shaped to receive.

"And the fork," Yuki said.

Clara looked at the fork. The steel tines. The stamped A and 440. The fork that had traveled from Leningrad to Portland in 1971. The fork that had set the A for every piano Leonard had ever tuned and every piano Clara had ever tuned. The one fixed point.

"The fork stays with me," Clara said.

The words came out before she had decided to say them, came out of the place where decisions are made before the deciding mind catches up, the place where the body knows what the mind has not yet acknowledged, and the words were right, were true, were the answer to a question she had not asked but that the situation had asked for her — what do you keep when you give up the work, what do you hold when you put down the lever, what remains when the tuning is done — and the answer was the fork. The fork was the reference. The fork was the A from which everything else was measured. The fork was the thing that did not change. And Clara needed the thing that did not change, needed it the way a person who has lost their footing needs the railing, the fixed point, the thing you hold when everything else is moving.

Yuki nodded. "The fork stays with you."

They sat at the table with the coffee and the fork and the lever and the appointment book and the silence of the decision, and the silence was not empty but full, was the silence that follows a chord, the silence that contains the chord's memory, the room still vibrating with the sound that has ended, the air still holding the shape of the frequencies that have ceased.

"I'll be all right," Yuki said.

"I know you will."

"I mean — will you be all right."

Clara considered the question. She considered it the way she considered a tuning — carefully, attentively, listening for the answer in the question, the way a tuner listens for the pitch in the sound.

"I don't know," she said. "I know what I'll lose. I don't know what I'll have."

"You'll have the fork."

"I'll have the fork."

"And you'll have — you can listen. You can come to tunings. You can hear the pianos. You won't be tuning them, but you can hear them."

"I can hear them in the frequencies I can still hear."

"Which is most of them. Which is the bass and the middle and the upper middle. Which is the Chopin and the Brahms and the Bach. Which is the music."

Clara looked at Yuki. Twenty-nine years old. Dark hair, short. The face of a musician, the face of a listener, the face of a person who heard the world with the clarity and the resolution that Clara had once possessed and was now losing, and Yuki's face was earnest and kind and worried and hopeful, all of these at once, the way a chord is multiple notes at once, and Clara felt the chord that Yuki's face produced in her, the complex emotion that was grief and pride and gratitude and love, all sounding simultaneously, all beating against each other the way the notes of a chord beat, the intervals not pure but tempered, not perfect but functional, the emotion not simple but workable.

"Twelve weeks," Clara said. "Eighty-seven pianos. One last round."

"I'll come with you."

"For the ones that need the top octave, yes. For the others — I'd like to do them alone. One last time alone with each piano."

"I understand."

Yuki finished her coffee and stood and put the mug in the sink and came around the table and did something she had never done before — she put her hand on Clara's shoulder, the touch light, brief, the touch of a person who is not accustomed to touching but who recognizes a moment when touch is required, when words are insufficient, when the body must speak what the voice cannot say — and then she took her hand away and gathered her bag and went to the door.

"Same time Wednesday," Yuki said.

"Same time Wednesday," Clara said.

Yuki left. Clara sat at the table with the fork and the lever and the book. She picked up the pen and wrote in the October pages, filling in the schedule, the eighty-seven pianos distributed across twelve weeks, each piano assigned a date, a time, a slot in the book that would be the last slot, the final entry, the closing bracket of a parenthetical that had opened twenty-eight years ago when Clara tuned Margaret Poole's Story & Clark on Belmont and discovered that her ear was good enough.

She wrote the last entry on the last Monday before Christmas: "Mrs. Ashford. Bösendorfer Imperial. Last tuning."

She closed the book. She struck the fork.

A440.

She held it and listened and the sound was what the sound always was — clear, true, present — and the sound did not know that it was being heard by an ear that was failing, did not care, did not adjust itself to the condition of the listener, simply vibrated at the frequency determined by its mass and stiffness, simply produced the pitch it had always produced, and Clara listened to the pitch and felt the permanence of it, the immunity to time, the incorruptibility that was the fork's gift and the fork's reproach, and she held the fork until the sound decayed and the kitchen was silent.

Then she put the fork in her pocket — not in the bag, which was the bag's place, but in her pocket, close to her body, against her thigh — and she went to the Knabe and played the Chopin, the Nocturne in C-sharp minor, the dark one, and she played it slowly, with care, with the attention of a person who has decided something and who is living in the silence between the deciding and the doing, the silence that is not peace but is the precursor of peace, the quiet that arrives when the question has been answered even if the answer has not yet been accepted, and the music filled the house and went out through the windows into the September rain.