The Church Piano

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 2: The Church Piano

The Kawai RX-5 at First Presbyterian had been donated by a family whose name was engraved on a brass plate screwed to the rim above the keyboard — GIVEN IN LOVING MEMORY OF RUTH AND HAROLD FESSENDEN, 1998 — and Clara had been tuning it since 2004, when the previous tuner, a man named Gerald Pace who had been tuning pianos in Portland since the 1970s, had retired to Bend and had given Clara his church accounts, four of them, along with the advice that church pianos were the most abused instruments in any tuner's rotation because they were played by too many people with too little care and were subjected to temperature swings that no piano should endure, the sanctuary heating up for Sunday services and cooling down for the rest of the week, the fellowship hall following its own thermal logic depending on what event was scheduled and how many bodies occupied the room and whether anyone remembered to adjust the thermostat, and Gerald had been right about all of this, but he had been wrong about the implication, which was that church pianos were not worth the trouble, because Clara had found that church pianos, precisely because they were abused, precisely because they were played hard and often and without the delicacy that a concert pianist brought to a concert instrument, had a character that privately owned pianos sometimes lacked, a quality of having been used rather than preserved, the way a working tool has a character that a display tool does not, the way a fishing boat has a character that a yacht does not.

The fellowship hall on this Tuesday morning was quiet except for the furnace, which ran in cycles, blowing warm air through floor vents for ten minutes and then resting for five, and the cycles created a low hum at approximately 120 hertz — the second harmonic of the 60-hertz electrical supply — that Clara had learned to ignore the way a sailor learns to ignore the sound of the engine, not by ceasing to hear it but by ceasing to attend to it, by placing it in the category of background, of the unchanging, of the sounds that carry no information and therefore require no response.

She had set the temperament and was tuning octaves upward from F4, working through the treble, each note tested against the note an octave below and against the intervals within the temperament octave, the fifths and fourths and thirds checked and cross-checked in a web of verification that was the tuner's equivalent of a pilot's checklist, each interval confirming or denying the accuracy of every other interval, the whole system self-auditing, so that an error in one note would manifest not just in that note's octave but in the thirds and sixths and tenths that included it, and Clara would hear the error as a wrongness in the cross-checks, a beat rate that was too fast or too slow, and she would trace the error back to its source and correct it and check again, and this process of checking and correcting was not tedious to her, had never been tedious, because it was the process by which randomness became order, by which a collection of approximately two hundred and thirty strings vibrating at approximately the right frequencies became a piano, became an instrument capable of playing Chopin or Coltrane or "Happy Birthday" with equal conviction.

She struck C6 and listened.

The note was clean, the three strings of the unison beating together — or rather, not beating, which was the goal, three strings tuned so precisely to the same frequency that they vibrated as one, producing a single tone with three times the amplitude of a single string, the volume and richness of the piano's sound dependent on this multiplication, on the fact that most of the piano's notes were sounded by three strings struck simultaneously by a single hammer, and if those three strings were not in tune with each other, if they were separated by even a fraction of a hertz, the unison would beat, would wobble, would have the quality that pianists sometimes called "honky-tonk," the deliberate out-of-tuneness that ragtime players cultivated for its roughness, its energy, its refusal to be polite.

Clara did not cultivate roughness. Clara cultivated the opposite — the stillness at the center of a perfectly tuned unison, the moment when three strings became one, when the beats stopped and the sound opened up and the note rang with a clarity that was, she had always felt, the closest thing to silence that music could produce, a sound so clean it was almost the absence of sound, the way a perfectly clear window is almost the absence of glass.

She finished C6 and moved to C-sharp 6 and then D6 and then D-sharp 6, working up the keyboard with the methodical pace that the work demanded, each note taking between thirty seconds and two minutes depending on how far out of tune it was, how cooperative the pins were, how the felt gripped, whether the string was seating properly on the bridge, and she was thinking, as she worked, not about Thursday but about the first piano she had ever tuned alone, without Leonard standing behind her, without his ear correcting her ear, without the safety net of his judgment.

It had been a Story & Clark console, 1965, in the basement of a house on Southeast Belmont, the home of a woman named Margaret Poole who gave piano lessons to children and who had called Leonard for a tuning and Leonard had sent Clara instead, because Clara was twenty-four and had been apprenticing for three years and Leonard had decided, without telling Clara in advance, that she was ready, that her ear was sufficient, that her hands knew the lever well enough, that the only thing left to learn was the thing that could not be taught by standing next to someone, which was the experience of being alone with a piano and responsible for its voice.

Clara had driven to the Poole house in Leonard's car — she did not yet have her own — with Leonard's tools in a bag that was too big for her, the strap sliding off her shoulder, the lever heavy against her hip, and she had been terrified, not of the work itself but of the possibility that her ear would fail her, that she would set the temperament and it would be wrong, that the intervals would beat at the wrong rates and she would not hear the wrongness, that she would leave the piano worse than she found it and Margaret Poole would call Leonard and Leonard would know that Clara was not ready, that he had been wrong, that the ear he had heard in his daughter was not the ear he had hoped for.

The Story & Clark was a modest instrument, forty-three inches tall, with a tone that was pleasant in the way that a well-made chair is comfortable — not remarkable, not inspiring, but adequate to its purpose, which was to provide a surface on which children could learn the fundamentals of the instrument, the relationship between the key and the hammer and the string, the physical logic of the piano, which was, at its most basic, a machine for converting a push into a sound. Clara had opened the top panel and looked at the strings and the tuning pins and the dampers and everything was familiar, everything was what she had seen a hundred times in Leonard's company, and yet everything was different, because Leonard was not there, and the absence of Leonard changed the meaning of every object the way the absence of a key signature changes the meaning of every note.

She had struck the fork.

The A had bloomed in Margaret Poole's basement, a low-ceilinged room with carpet and a drop ceiling and the particular acoustic deadness of a room designed to absorb sound rather than reflect it, and Clara had set the A and begun the temperament, working slowly, more slowly than Leonard would have worked, checking each interval twice, three times, four, her ear straining for the beat rates that would confirm the intervals were correct, and she had been halfway through the temperament, had set the F3-A3 major third and was checking it against the A3-C-sharp-4 major third, when she heard something that stopped her.

The F3-A3 third was beating at approximately seven beats per second, which was correct. The A3-C-sharp-4 third was beating at approximately 8.7 beats per second, which was also correct. But the F3-C-sharp-4 — the augmented fifth that spanned the two thirds — was beating at a rate that was not consistent with both thirds being correct. The cross-check failed. One of the intervals was wrong.

She sat for a long moment at Margaret Poole's Story & Clark, her hands in her lap, the lever on the music desk, the felt mutes wedged between the strings, and she listened to the inconsistency, and she could not tell which interval was the error. The F3-A3 sounded right. The A3-C-sharp-4 sounded right. But they could not both be right, because if they were both right, the cross-check would pass, and it did not pass.

She had wanted to call Leonard. She had wanted to pick up Margaret Poole's telephone — this was 1998, and Clara did not yet have a cell phone — and dial the number of the house on Ankeny and say, "Papa, the cross-check fails and I cannot find the error," and Leonard would have told her where to look, would have said, in his accented English that was precise and slightly formal, the English of a man who had learned the language in his thirties and had never fully adopted its informalities, "Check the A again, the A is where the error lives, the A is always where the error lives, because the A is the reference and if the reference is wrong then everything built on the reference is wrong," and Clara would have checked the A and found it a fraction of a cent sharp or flat, a deviation so small that it passed the octave check but accumulated through the thirds, the error magnified by the compounding of intervals, the way a small error in a foundation becomes a large error by the time it reaches the roof.

But she did not call Leonard. She sat with the inconsistency and she listened to it and she thought about what Leonard would say, and then she heard it — the A was high by approximately one cent, a deviation that was inaudible in the octave but that added 0.3 beats per second to the major third, and it was this accumulation, this 0.3 beats compounding across two intervals, that the cross-check had caught, and Clara lowered the A by one cent and checked the thirds again and the cross-check passed, the augmented fifth beating at the rate that confirmed both thirds were correct, and she continued through the temperament and finished it and tuned the octaves and the unisons and closed the piano and drove home and told Leonard that the tuning had gone well.

"How long," Leonard had said.

"Two hours and forty minutes."

"That is too long."

"I know."

"It will become faster."

"I know."

"The ear learns speed," Leonard had said. "The ear learns to hear in the first second what it now takes you ten seconds to hear. This is not a matter of talent. This is a matter of repetition. You will tune a thousand pianos and then you will tune another thousand and then you will be fast."

Leonard had been right. Clara was fast now. She could tune a piano in ninety minutes, sometimes less, depending on how far out of tune it was and how the pins responded and how the room sounded, and the speed was not haste but efficiency, the ear hearing immediately what it had once taken minutes to discern, the hands making corrections that were precise on the first attempt rather than the third, the whole process streamlined by twenty-eight years of repetition into something that looked, to an observer, almost casual, almost easy, the way a surgeon's hands look casual when they are doing the thing they have done ten thousand times.

But speed had a cost. Speed required the ear to make rapid judgments, to hear a beat rate and categorize it — correct, too fast, too slow — in less than a second, and this rapid categorization depended on the ear's ability to resolve fine differences in frequency, to distinguish between seven beats per second and seven and a half beats per second, to hear the difference between a major third that was one cent sharp and a major third that was correct, and this ability, this resolution, this acuity, depended on the health of the cochlea, on the integrity of the hair cells that lined the basilar membrane and transduced sound waves into electrical signals, and the hair cells in the basal end of the cochlea, the end that responded to high frequencies, were the most delicate, the most vulnerable, the first to die.

Clara finished the Kawai at 12:35 and stood and stretched her back, which was stiff from bending over the piano, the occupational posture of the tuner, the forward lean that put pressure on the lumbar vertebrae and that every tuner she knew compensated for differently — some with yoga, some with chiropractic, some with ibuprofen, some with denial — and she gathered her tools and closed the lid and pulled a cloth from her bag and wiped the case, removing the fingerprints she had left on the glossy ebony finish, because a tuner should leave no evidence of her presence except the tuning itself, should leave the piano looking untouched, as though the tuning had happened by itself, as though the piano had simply decided, on its own, to be in tune.

She walked through the fellowship hall toward the door, passing the rows of folding chairs that were stacked against the wall, and the bulletin board with its flyers for Bible study and choir practice and a community dinner, and the kitchen where the coffee urns stood on the counter like sentinels, and she paused at the door and turned back and looked at the piano sitting alone in the hall, the lid closed, the bench tucked under, the brass plate with the Fessenden name catching the fluorescent light, and she felt what she always felt when she finished a tuning and looked back at the piano from the door, which was a satisfaction that was not pride exactly but something adjacent to pride, something more like the satisfaction a gardener feels looking at a bed that has been weeded and watered, the satisfaction of maintenance, of care, of having done the small invisible work that keeps the world from falling out of tune.

The satisfaction was complicated today by the knowledge that the ear she had used to tune the Kawai might be diminishing. She had not noticed any difficulty during the tuning — the treble had sounded normal, the beat rates had been clear, the cross-checks had passed — but this was not reassuring, because the loss, if it was loss, was in the highest frequencies, above the range where most of the tuning occurred, in the region above 6,000 hertz where the beats between the topmost intervals lived, the intervals she tuned not by counting beats but by listening for a quality, a brightness, a presence or absence of energy in the upper partials, and if that quality was fading she might not know it was fading because the fading itself was gradual, imperceptible, the way you do not notice the day getting shorter until one evening you look up and it is dark at five o'clock.

She drove to the bakery on Twenty-third Avenue. She ordered a sandwich — turkey and Swiss on sourdough, the same sandwich she ordered every day she tuned in this part of the city, the same sandwich she had been ordering for so long that the woman behind the counter began making it when she saw Clara's car pull up — and she sat at the table by the window and ate and watched the rain and thought about Leonard.

Leonard had tuned until he was seventy-one. He had tuned the Portland Symphony's Steinway for thirty-two years, from 1973 until 2005, and in his last years his tuning had changed in ways that only Clara had noticed, because only Clara's ear was trained precisely on the template of Leonard's ear, only Clara knew what Leonard's tuning was supposed to sound like, and what she had noticed was a slight widening of the octaves in the upper treble, a stretch that was a fraction wider than Leonard's usual stretch, as though the upper strings were being tuned slightly sharper than they should have been, and Clara had understood what this meant without understanding that she understood it, had known without acknowledging the knowledge, because acknowledging it would have required confronting Leonard, would have required saying to her father, "Papa, your hearing is changing," which would have been, in the language of their relationship, in the unspoken grammar that governed their interactions, an act of trespass, an invasion of the territory that Leonard kept private, the territory of his body, his abilities, his decline.

She had not said anything. Leonard had continued to tune, and the octaves in the upper treble had continued to widen, fractionally, incrementally, a drift that only Clara could hear, and then one day in the spring of 2005 Leonard had come home from a tuning at the symphony hall and had set his bag on the kitchen table — the same bag, the same table, the same gesture Clara performed every evening in her own kitchen, the choreography of the tuner's return — and had said, "I can no longer hear the seventh partial of C8."

Clara had been sitting at the table. She had looked at her father, at his face, which was seventy-one years old and which wore the particular expression of a man delivering a fact, not an emotion, stating a datum the way a scientist states a measurement, and she had said, "How long."

"Six months. Perhaps longer. Perhaps a year."

"Papa."

"It is not a matter of concern. It is a matter of fact. The ear ages. The hair cells die. They do not regenerate. This is known."

"What will you do."

"I will stop," Leonard had said, and the simplicity of the statement, the finality of it, the absence of negotiation or grief or any of the emotional furniture that Clara might have expected, had been, she understood later, the most Leonard thing Leonard had ever said, because Leonard did not negotiate with facts, did not grieve over measurements, did not argue with the cochlea any more than he would argue with a tuning fork, and when the ear could no longer hear what the ear needed to hear, the correct response was to stop, to put down the lever, to pass the bag to the person whose ear could still hear, which was Clara.

He had passed the bag to Clara. The bag, the lever, the fork, the mutes, the clients, the Steinway at the symphony hall, all of it, transferred in a single conversation over tea at the kitchen table on Ankeny Street, and Clara had taken it all and had not cried, not then, not in front of Leonard, because Leonard did not cry and did not want to be cried over, and she had driven home and sat in her kitchen with the fork in her hand and had cried then, alone, not because Leonard was losing his hearing — which was sad, which was the diminishment of a great capacity — but because the passing of the bag meant that Leonard was admitting mortality, was acknowledging the end of something, and the end of Leonard's tuning was, Clara understood even then, the beginning of the end of Leonard, because Leonard without tuning was Leonard without the organizing principle of his life, the way a river without its banks is not a river but a flood, and Leonard had lived fifteen more years, had spent them reading and walking and listening to recordings with a quality of attention that was different from the attention he had brought to tuning, a quality that was more like remembering than hearing, and he had died in 2020 at eighty-six, in the house on Ankeny Street, in the room where the lathe had been, which by then was a room with a chair and a window and a radio that played KQAC, the classical station, and Clara had been with him, and the last music he had heard was a recording of Sviatoslav Richter playing Schubert's Sonata in B-flat major, and whether Leonard could actually hear the recording or whether he was hearing the memory of the recording or whether the distinction between hearing and remembering had, by that point, dissolved entirely, Clara did not know and would never know.

She finished the sandwich. She put the wrapper in the trash and the cup in the recycling and she stood at the counter for a moment, looking at the pastry case without seeing it, and the woman behind the counter said, "Clara, you okay," and Clara said, "Fine, thank you," and went out into the rain.

The Morrison tuning was uneventful. The Steinway M was in reasonable shape — Peter Morrison played it occasionally, Sundays mostly, jazz standards and show tunes, the kind of recreational playing that kept the action limber without punishing it — and Clara tuned it in an hour and twenty minutes and left the house and sat in her car in the driveway for two minutes, watching the rain on the windshield, before driving to Mrs. Ashford's.

She thought about the audiologist. Dr. Evelyn Chau, referred by Clara's primary care physician, who had said, when Clara described the difficulty in the upper treble, "It could be nothing. It could be wax. It could be age-related. Let's have Dr. Chau take a look," and the phrase "take a look" had struck Clara as precisely wrong, because the audiologist would not look at anything, would listen, or rather would measure the limits of Clara's listening, would map the boundary between what Clara could hear and what Clara could not hear, a boundary that was, for most people, an abstraction, a fact about the body that had no practical consequence, because most people did not use the upper limits of their hearing for anything, did not need 8,000 hertz or 10,000 hertz or 12,000 hertz for anything that mattered to their lives, but Clara was not most people, Clara was a piano tuner, and the upper limit of her hearing was the upper limit of her profession, the ceiling of the room in which she worked.

The rain was heavy now, the gutters running, the storm drains churning, and Clara drove through the rain to Klickitat Street and parked in front of the Craftsman house and gathered her bag and walked up the steps and knocked on the door and Mrs. Ashford opened it and said, "The A is sharp," and Clara said, "Good afternoon, Mrs. Ashford," and went inside.

The Bösendorfer was waiting.

It was always waiting. It sat in the living room the way a large animal sits in a clearing — patient, present, occupying its space with the authority of a thing that knows it belongs where it is. The satin ebony finish caught the gray light from the windows, and the music desk held a volume of Chopin that was open to the Ballade in G minor, and Mrs. Ashford had been playing the ballade, Clara could tell by the position of the bench and by the slight warmth of the keys when she touched them — the ivory, real ivory on this instrument, the keys made before the ban, smooth and slightly yellow with age, warmer to the touch than plastic, more responsive, the surface that Mrs. Ashford's fingers had been pressing for thirty-seven years, the surface where the Chopin lived.

Clara opened the lid and propped it on the long stick and looked inside.

The Bösendorfer's interior was, to Clara, the most beautiful sight in her working life. The strings were longer than on any other grand piano — the Imperial model was nine feet six inches, longer than a Steinway D, longer than any other production piano — and the bass strings were wound with copper that had oxidized over the decades to a dark reddish brown, and the treble strings were bright steel that caught the light in parallel lines like the strings of a harp, and the soundboard was spruce from the Austrian Alps, hand-selected and hand-graduated, thinner at the edges and thicker at the center, and the bridges — the pieces of maple that transmitted the strings' vibrations to the soundboard — were capped with hardwood that had been notched for each string, and the tuning pins, two hundred and forty-four of them on this ninety-seven-key instrument, stood in their rows at the near end of the piano like a field of small chrome soldiers, and the whole assembly — strings, pins, bridges, soundboard, plate — was a system of tensions and resistances that had been in equilibrium for thirty-seven years, and Clara knew this system the way a sailor knows a ship, every plank, every fitting, every place where the structure was strong and every place where it was aging.

She struck the fork and set it on the soundboard and the A filled the room.

The Bösendorfer's soundboard transformed the fork's tone in a way that no other piano Clara tuned could match. The spruce gave the A a warmth, a fullness, a quality of occupying not just a frequency but a space, the sound seeming to come not from a point on the soundboard but from the entire room, from the walls and the ceiling and the floor, from the house itself, and Clara listened to this A and felt the familiar recognition, the "ah, yes" of returning to a sound she knew, and she set the tuning lever on the A4 pin and began.

The Bösendorfer responded to the lever the way a well-trained horse responds to the reins — with sensitivity, with cooperation, with a willingness to move in the direction asked. The pins turned smoothly in the pinblock, the felt around them still gripping after thirty-seven years, which was a testament to the quality of the pinblock, a laminated maple block that Bösendorfer manufactured to tolerances that other companies did not attempt, and Clara turned the A4 pin and brought the string down from its rain-induced sharpness to 440, and she muted the side strings and tuned the center string and then tuned the side strings to the center string, setting the unison, listening for the moment when three strings became one, and the moment arrived, as it always did, as a quieting, a settling, a sound that was more like silence than like sound, and she moved on.

The temperament on the Bösendorfer was, for Clara, an act of intimacy. She had set this temperament hundreds of times, had listened to these strings accept the grid of equal temperament hundreds of times, and the intimacy was not emotional — or not only emotional — but physical, the ear knowing what each interval should sound like on this specific piano, in this specific room, at this specific season, the beat rates modified by the room's acoustics and the piano's inharmonicity and the humidity and the temperature, so that the temperament Clara set on the Bösendorfer in October was not the same temperament she would set in July, not because the target pitches were different but because the sound was different, the room was different, the piano was different, and the ear had to account for all of this, had to hear through the variables to the constants, had to find the correct in the midst of the changing.

She worked for two hours. The Bösendorfer required more time than any other piano on her schedule, not because it was more difficult to tune — it was, in fact, easier than most, the pins responsive, the strings well-behaved, the bridges clean — but because Clara gave it more time, took more care, checked more cross-intervals, set the unisons with more precision, stretched the bass and treble with more attention, because this piano deserved it, because this piano repaid the attention with a sound that no other piano could produce, and because Mrs. Ashford, sitting in her chair by the window with the book of poetry in her lap, deserved to hear her piano at its best, deserved to sit at the keyboard after Clara left and play the Chopin and hear the notes ring true, every interval singing, every unison alive, the piano returning to her the love she had given it for thirty-seven years.

Clara finished at 6:15. The light outside the windows was gone, replaced by the orange glow of the streetlamp on Klickitat, and Mrs. Ashford's lamp was on, and the room was warm, and the piano was in tune.

"I spoke with Yuki this morning," Mrs. Ashford said, as Clara packed her tools.

"About what."

"About the Chopin competition in March. She said she might go to listen. I told her she should go to compete."

Clara looked at Mrs. Ashford. "She can't compete. Her wrist."

"She can tune a piano. Can she not play well enough to compete."

"Playing and tuning are different things."

"I know what they are," Mrs. Ashford said, and there was in her voice the mild impatience of a woman who had been playing the piano for seventy-six years and did not need to be told the difference between playing and tuning. "I mean that the girl is a musician, not a technician. She should remember that she is a musician."

"She knows what she is," Clara said, though she was not sure this was true, was not sure that Yuki had settled the question of what she was — pianist or tuner, performer or maintainer, the one who makes the music or the one who makes the music possible — and this unsettledness was something Clara recognized because she had lived it herself, in the early years, when she was still deciding whether she was a pianist who tuned or a tuner who played, before she understood that the question was false, that the distinction was a boundary drawn by people who did not understand that listening was the more fundamental act, that hearing was the deeper skill, that the tuner's ear was not lesser than the pianist's ear but more demanding, more precise, more attuned to the reality of the sound rather than the intention of the performer.

"Tell her to come see me," Mrs. Ashford said. "Tell her to come play the Bösendorfer. A girl who can play this piano should not give up playing."

"I'll tell her," Clara said.

She closed her bag. She walked to the door. She turned back and looked at the piano, which sat in the lamplight like a dark, sleeping creature, its lid closed, its keys hidden, its strings silent but ready, always ready, to be struck, to vibrate, to fill the room with the sound that Mrs. Ashford had been listening to for thirty-seven years and that Clara had been tending for twenty-two of those years and that Leonard had tended for eleven years before that, the sound that was not just the Bösendorfer's sound but the Ashford house's sound, the Klickitat Street sound, the sound of a particular piano in a particular room played by a particular woman with particular hands, a sound that existed nowhere else in the world and that would, when Mrs. Ashford died, exist only in memory, in the air of the room, in the wood of the soundboard that would remember, for a time, the vibrations it had carried.

"Good night, Mrs. Ashford."

"Good night, Clara. Thursday you have the symphony."

"Thursday I have the symphony," Clara said, though this was not entirely true, because Thursday she also had the audiologist, at ten in the morning, before the symphony tuning at two, and the proximity of the two appointments — the measurement of her ear's decline followed by the use of her ear on the most demanding piano in her rotation — struck her as either unfortunate or fitting, she could not decide which.

She drove home through the rain. She parked in front of her house. She went inside. She struck the fork.

A440.

She heard it. She heard every partial. The fork was clear, was true, was the one fixed point.

She set it on the table and turned off the lights and stood in the dark kitchen and listened to the house, to the rain on the roof, to the furnace clicking on, to the refrigerator humming its low, constant pitch, to the silence between the sounds, which was not silence at all but the ambient noise of a house at night, the thermal creaking of the framing, the settling of the foundation, the wind pressing against the windows, all of it a kind of music, all of it pitched, all of it occupying frequencies on the spectrum that Clara's ear parsed without effort, and she listened to this music and tried to hear whether any of it was missing, whether any frequency that should have been present was absent, whether the upper edge of her hearing had retreated since yesterday or since last week or since the day six weeks ago when she had first noticed the muffling in the top octave of the Steinway B, and she could not tell, could not perform on herself the measurement that Thursday's audiologist would perform, because you cannot hear what you cannot hear, cannot perceive the absence of a perception, cannot know what frequencies have left you because the leaving is silent.

She went to bed.

She did not sleep for a long time. She lay in the dark and listened to the house and the rain and the city beyond the rain, the distant sound of a train crossing the Steel Bridge, the faint bass of a truck on Hawthorne, the high hiss of tires on wet pavement, and she catalogued these sounds by frequency and by distance and by source, as she always did, as she had done every night for as long as she could remember, the cataloguing a form of practice, a way of keeping the ear sharp, the way a musician practices scales not because scales are music but because scales keep the fingers ready for music, and she listened and catalogued and eventually she slept, and in her sleep she heard nothing, which was either rest or prophecy, and she would not know which until Thursday.