The Rounds

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 17: The Rounds

The first piano of the last round was the Yamaha U1 at the Huang residence, 4512 Southeast Hawthorne, the same piano Clara had tuned on the Monday morning that opened this account, the quarterly tuning that was now the final tuning, and Clara drove to the Huang house through the October rain, the same October rain that had driven the soundboards sharp a year ago, the rain that was Portland's most reliable weather, and she parked on Hawthorne and gathered her bag and walked to the door and rang the bell.

No one was home. David Huang had left a key under the mat, as he sometimes did when his schedule conflicted with Clara's, and Clara let herself in and walked to the Yamaha and opened the top panel and looked at the strings and the hammers and the felt and the pins, and everything was as she remembered, everything was the same piano she had been tuning for twelve years, and she struck the fork and set the A and began.

The tuning took ninety minutes. The piano was sharp from the autumn rain, as expected — the soundboard swollen, the bridge pushed up, the strings tightened — and Clara brought it down, corrected the sharpness, returned the pitch to 440, returned the intervals to the grid, and the work was the work it had always been, the lever and the fork and the mutes, the temperament and the octaves and the unisons, and Clara did the work with the care she always brought to the Huang Yamaha, the care that was neither more nor less than the piano deserved, and when she finished she checked the top octave with the Korg — three notes needed correction, by one to two cents each — and she corrected them and closed the panel and replaced the front board and wrote the date and her initials in the appointment book.

She paused before writing. She held the pen above the page and looked at the entry — "Huang, 4512 SE Hawthorne. U1. Quarterly" — and she thought about the fact that this was the last entry she would ever write in this slot, the last time "Huang" and "U1" and "Quarterly" would appear in Clara Resnikoff's handwriting in Clara Resnikoff's appointment book, and the thought was precise and small and heavy, the way a tuning fork is precise and small and heavy, and Clara wrote the date and her initials and closed the book.

She left the key under the mat. She drove to First Presbyterian.

The Kawai RX-5 was in the fellowship hall, as always, the lid closed, the bench tucked under, the brass plate with the Fessenden name catching the fluorescent light, and Clara let herself in with the church key and opened the lid and propped it and looked inside, and the Kawai was the Kawai, was the piano she had been tuning for twenty-two years, since Gerald Pace retired to Bend, and the piano was in good condition, the monthly schedule keeping the corrections small, the pins stable, the felt still gripping.

She tuned it in eighty-five minutes. The top octave required one correction — E7, two cents sharp — and she corrected it and closed the lid and wiped the case and walked through the fellowship hall toward the door, and she paused, as she always paused, to look back at the piano, and the piano sat in the hall the way it had sat for twenty-eight years, since the Fessenden family donated it in 1998, and it would sit here after Clara stopped tuning it, would be tuned by Yuki, would continue to serve the church and the preschool and the Bible study group and the community dinners, would continue to be played by the church pianist and the preschool teacher and the preschool children who struck the keys with a directness that Clara respected, and the piano would not know the difference, would not notice that the tuner had changed, would accept Yuki's tuning the way it accepted Clara's, without preference, without judgment, without the attachment that the tuner felt for the piano but that the piano, being a piano, could not feel for the tuner.

Clara locked the door and hung the key on the hook and drove to the Morrison residence.

The Steinway M was in the living room, and Peter Morrison was home, was sitting in a chair reading a newspaper — a physical newspaper, one of the last subscribers, a man who preferred the rustle of newsprint to the silence of a screen — and he looked up when Clara entered and said, "The A is flat."

"It's the season," Clara said. "The dry air. Everything goes flat in the fall."

"It was flat last month too."

"Last month was September. September is the transition. The piano doesn't know whether it's summer or fall. It drifts."

Peter Morrison folded the newspaper and set it on the side table and leaned back in the chair and watched Clara tune, which was something he sometimes did, not from curiosity about the process — he had been watching Clara tune for ten years and had seen the process hundreds of times — but from pleasure, from the satisfaction of watching a skilled person do skilled work, the same satisfaction Clara felt watching a good carpenter or a good surgeon or a good baker, the satisfaction of seeing competence in action.

Clara tuned the Steinway M. The piano was a pleasure to tune — the action responsive, the strings cooperative, the sound bright and particular, the piano with opinions about its own voice, the piano that Clara had described to herself as "interesting" — and the tuning took seventy-five minutes, which was quick, which reflected the piano's cooperative nature and Clara's familiarity with its tendencies. She checked the top octave with the Korg. Correct. No corrections needed. The ear had been sufficient, today, for this piano, in this register.

She packed her tools and Peter Morrison walked her to the door and said, "See you next year," because the Morrison piano was an annual tuning, and Clara said, "Yes, see you next year," and the words were a lie, were the first lie of the last round, because Clara would not see Peter Morrison next year, would not tune the Steinway M next year, would not enter this house next year, and the lie was small and kind and necessary, because Clara was not going to tell each client, at the end of each last tuning, that it was the last, was not going to convert each farewell into a ceremony, was going to let the last tuning be a tuning, not an ending, was going to let the work speak for itself, as the work had always spoken for itself.

She drove through October. She tuned pianos.

She tuned the Yamaha C3 at Franklin High School, where Yuki had tuned her first full piano, and the music room was empty and the piano was in reasonable shape and Clara tuned it alone, without Yuki, and the tuning was good.

She tuned a Baldwin baby grand at a house in Sellwood, a piano she had been tuning for eight years, owned by a retired judge who played hymns on Sunday mornings and who always offered Clara a glass of lemonade, even in October, even in the rain, and Clara accepted the lemonade and tuned the Baldwin and drank the lemonade and said goodbye.

She tuned a Kawai upright at a yoga studio on Alberta, the piano with the incense residue on the hammers, the piano that Yuki had been tuning for the past six months, and Clara tuned it herself for the last time and wiped the incense from the hammers and tuned the piano and left.

She tuned a Petrof grand at a house in the West Hills, a Czech piano with a warm, dark tone that Clara admired, owned by a couple who had bought it in Prague on their honeymoon and had shipped it to Portland at a cost that exceeded the piano's value, a decision that was economically irrational and emotionally perfect, and Clara tuned the Petrof and thought about the couple in Prague, young and in love, finding a piano in a shop and deciding that this piano would come with them to Portland, would be part of their life, would sit in their living room and hold the music they would play together.

She tuned a Steinway B at a recording studio in the Pearl District, the Songbird, Paul Dreyfus's piano, the piano where Paul had first noticed the sharp top octave, and Clara tuned it with Yuki, Clara doing the temperament and the mid-range and the bass and Yuki doing the top octave, and the tuning was correct, every note verified, every octave clean, and Paul played the Debussy and nodded and said, "Perfect," and Clara said, "Thank you," and did not say, "This is the last time."

Piano after piano. House after house. Week after week. The last round proceeding through October and into November, each tuning a farewell, each farewell unspoken, the pianos receiving their last tuning from Clara Resnikoff without knowing it was the last, the way a person receives any ordinary day without knowing it might be the last ordinary day, the way every moment is potentially the last moment and is therefore, if you pay attention, both ordinary and extraordinary, both routine and irreplaceable.

Clara paid attention. She noticed things she had not noticed before — or had noticed but had not attended to, had filed in the background of her awareness without bringing them to the foreground. She noticed the light in each room, the way the morning light came through the Huang's east-facing windows and illuminated the Yamaha's keys, the way the fluorescent light in the fellowship hall at First Presbyterian gave the Kawai's ebony finish a bluish cast, the way the afternoon light in Mrs. Ashford's living room caught the Bösendorfer's satin finish and made it glow.

She noticed the sounds of each house. The Huang house was quiet, suburban, the sound of a neighborhood where people were at work during the day, the silence punctuated by the occasional dog or delivery truck. The Morrison house had a grandfather clock in the hall that chimed on the quarter hour, each chime a small interruption that Clara had learned to work around, pausing her listening until the chime decayed. The judge's house in Sellwood had a grandfather clock too, but this one did not keep time, had stopped years ago, and the silence of the stopped clock was a different kind of presence than the sound of the working clock, the silence of a thing that should be making sound but was not.

She noticed the smells. Each house had a smell, and each smell was associated with a piano, and the association was so strong that Clara could, she believed, identify a house by its smell alone — the Huangs' house smelling of laundry detergent and rice, the Morrison house smelling of wood polish and coffee, Mrs. Ashford's house smelling of lavender and old paper and the particular dry, sweet smell of a Bösendorfer's interior, the smell of Austrian spruce and wool felt and the oils of eighty-four years of human touch.

She noticed these things because she was paying the kind of attention that you pay when you know the paying will end, the heightened attention of a person who is seeing a place for the last time, the attention that converts the ordinary into the significant by the simple act of knowing that the ordinary will not be repeated, that this light, this sound, this smell, this piano, this room, this moment — will not occur again in the same configuration, will not be experienced again by this particular consciousness with this particular ear in this particular body, and the singularity of the moment was both sad and beautiful, was the sadness and beauty that exist in all last things, the quality that the Japanese call mono no aware, the pathos of things, the bittersweet awareness of impermanence.

Clara did not know the Japanese term. She knew only the feeling, the quality of attention that the last round demanded, the quality of listening that was different from any listening she had done in twenty-eight years of tuning, because this listening was not for the purpose of correction but for the purpose of farewell, not listening to fix but listening to remember, not the tuner's ear but the mourner's ear, the ear that hears what it is about to lose and attends to it, fully, completely, with the whole of itself, while it still can.

She tuned seventeen pianos in the third week of October. She tuned fifteen in the fourth week. She tuned the Steinway at the Schnitzer with Yuki, and the tuning was smooth and correct and the Steinway sounded like the Steinway, like the piano Leonard had chosen, like the sound of a room with no windows, and Clara closed the lid and covered the keyboard and walked off the stage and did not look back, because looking back would have been a ceremony and Clara did not want ceremony, wanted only the work, the quiet work, the last work.

November arrived. The rain continued. The pianos continued to go sharp in the humidity and flat in the dry spells, the seasonal cycle that Clara had been tracking for twenty-eight years, and she corrected the drift and returned the pianos to pitch and the pianos accepted the correction the way they always did, without complaint, without resistance, without knowing that the hands correcting them were the hands of a woman who was saying goodbye.

Clara drove through Portland. She drove east and west and north and south, from Lake Oswego to St. Johns, from the West Hills to Division Street, and the city was the city it had always been, the bridges and the rivers and the rain and the trees and the houses with pianos in them, the city that Clara knew by sound, by frequency, by pitch, the city whose acoustic signature she had been cataloguing for fifty-two years, and the catalogue was complete, was comprehensive, was the record of a life lived in sound, and the record would endure in Clara's memory even after the rounds ended, even after the last piano was tuned, even after the lever and the clients and the appointment book were passed to Yuki.

She would remember the pianos. She would remember the Yamaha U1 and the Kawai RX-5 and the Steinway M and the Baldwin baby grand and the Petrof and the Steinway B and all the others, the eighty-seven instruments that constituted her working world, and the memory would be aural, would be the sound of each piano stored in the auditory cortex, retrievable, accessible, the sound that the tuning fork unlocked, the way a key unlocks a door, the reference pitch opening the door to the memory of every piano Clara had ever tuned.

But memory was not hearing. Memory was the echo. Hearing was the sound.

She continued the rounds. She tuned pianos. She said goodbye without saying goodbye. She let the work speak for itself.

The work spoke.