The Dry Season

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 28: The Dry Season

Portland's summer arrived in July, arrived the way it always arrived — late and sudden and without apology, the rain stopping as though a valve had been closed, the gray ceiling lifting to reveal a blue that the city had forgotten existed, the temperature rising from the sixties to the eighties in the span of a week, and the city opened, opened its windows and its doors and its patios and its parks, and the people of Portland emerged from their houses and stood blinking in the light like animals leaving a cave, and Clara drove through the opened city with her windows down and the air moving through the car and she heard the summer — heard the difference between winter Portland and summer Portland, the acoustic signature of the city changing with the season, the rain's white noise replaced by the particular sounds of dry weather, the sounds of lawnmowers and children and birds and the distant hum of air conditioning units cycling on for the first time since September, and the city sounded brighter in summer, sounded sharper, the absence of rain removing the acoustic blanket that had muffled Portland for nine months and exposing the raw sound of the place, the city's voice unpadded, unabsorbed, clear.

And every piano on Clara's list went flat.

This was the season. This was the annual cycle that Clara had been tracking for twenty-eight years, the cycle that was as predictable as the tides and as inescapable — in winter the rain came and the humidity rose and the soundboards swelled and the bridges pushed up and the strings tightened and the pianos went sharp, and in summer the rain stopped and the humidity dropped and the soundboards contracted and the bridges settled and the strings loosened and the pianos went flat, and the flatness was not a disaster but a condition, not an emergency but a season, the pianos responding to the weather the way trees respond to the weather, the way all wooden things respond to the weather, because a piano is a wooden thing, is a structure made of spruce and maple and beech and poplar, is a forest assembled into the shape of an instrument, and the forest remembers the weather, remembers moisture, remembers dryness, and the remembering is in the wood, is in the cells of the wood, in the fibers that swell when wet and contract when dry, and the swelling and contracting move the bridge, and the bridge moves the strings, and the strings change pitch, and the pitch is the weather made audible.

Clara arrived at the Huang residence at nine o'clock on a Monday morning in mid-July, the first tuning of the summer schedule, and the house was warm — the Huangs did not have central air conditioning, relied on a window unit in the bedroom and a fan in the living room, and the living room where the Yamaha U1 stood was seventy-eight degrees and the relative humidity was — Clara checked the hygrometer she carried in the bag, the small dial she consulted at the beginning of every summer tuning — thirty-one percent. Thirty-one. In January the humidity in this room had been fifty-four percent. The soundboard had lost twenty-three percentage points of moisture in six months, and the loss was in the piano, was in the sound, was in the pitch, which was flat, uniformly flat, the entire keyboard depressed by approximately fifteen cents, the piano sagging under the weight of the dry air, the strings loosened by the contraction of the board.

She struck the fork. A440. The fork did not go flat in summer. The fork was steel, was metal, was not wood, did not absorb moisture, did not respond to humidity, vibrated at 440 hertz in January and in July and in every month between, and the fork's immunity to the weather was the reason it was the reference, was the reason a tuner struck the fork rather than listened to the piano — the piano changed, the fork did not, and the gap between what the piano said and what the fork said was the work, was the correction, was the tuning.

She set the A. She pulled the string up to the fork, raised the pitch by fifteen cents, the lever turning the pin clockwise, tightening, and the A came up to 440 and the unison locked and Clara began the temperament, and the temperament was the summer temperament, the temperament that required pulling up rather than bringing down, the temperament that fought the dryness, that restored what the weather had taken, and Clara worked through the intervals — the fourths and fifths and thirds and sixths, each one set against the pull of the dry air, each one brought to the correct beat rate and checked and cross-checked — and the work was familiar, was seasonal, was the summer tuning she had done for twenty-eight years.

The work was also harder than the winter tuning, because pulling a piano up to pitch was more demanding than bringing it down. Raising pitch meant tightening strings, and tightening strings meant increasing tension across the plate, and increasing tension across the plate meant that the strings pulled against each other, each tightened string affecting its neighbors, the whole system resisting the correction, and the tuner had to overshoot — had to tune each note slightly sharp, knowing that as the neighboring strings were tightened the pitch would drop, the correction pulling itself back toward flat — and the overshooting was a skill, was a judgment, was the tuner estimating how much the piano would settle and compensating in advance, and the estimation was based on experience, on knowledge of this specific piano in this specific room in this specific season, and Clara's estimation was good, was the product of twelve years of summer tunings on this Yamaha, twelve cycles of dry and wet, twelve summers of pulling the piano up and letting it settle and pulling it up again.

She finished the Huang piano in ninety-five minutes — five minutes longer than the winter tuning, the extra time the cost of the pitch raise, the cost of the summer — and she checked the top octave with the Korg and corrected two notes, one cent each, minor adjustments, and she closed the panel and packed her tools and left the key under the mat and drove to the next appointment.

The next appointment was the Steinway M at the Morrison residence, and Peter Morrison met her at the door and said, "It sounds like a honky-tonk," which was Peter Morrison's summer greeting, his annual complaint, the phrase he used every July when the piano went flat and the intervals went sour and the Steinway M, which was normally a refined and particular instrument, sounded like a barroom piano, the pitch sagging, the unisons drifting, the temperament dissolving in the heat.

"It's the humidity," Clara said. "The lack of it."

"I know it's the humidity. You've been telling me it's the humidity for ten years. Install a humidifier, you said. I didn't install a humidifier."

"You could still install a humidifier."

"I could. I won't. I like the seasons. I like that the piano changes with the weather. It makes the piano feel alive."

Clara appreciated this. She appreciated Peter Morrison's willingness to live with a piano that changed, that responded to its environment, that was not climate-controlled into a state of artificial stability but was allowed to be what it was — a wooden instrument in a wooden house in a city that had seasons, a thing that breathed with the weather, that expanded and contracted, that went sharp in winter and flat in summer, that was alive in the way Peter Morrison meant, alive in the sense of responsive, mutable, connected to the world rather than isolated from it.

She tuned the Steinway M. She pulled it up to pitch, the pins resistant, the Morrison piano's pins always slightly stiffer than average, the pinblock in excellent condition, the laminated maple gripping the pins with a firmness that made the tuning more physical, more muscular, the lever requiring more force, Clara's wrist and forearm working harder, the body involved in the work in a way that the ear sometimes obscured — tuning was physical, was manual labor, was the body's effort translated through the lever into the pins and from the pins into the strings and from the strings into the air, and the physicality was part of the summer tuning's difficulty, the raising of pitch requiring more force than the lowering, the body working against gravity, against the piano's desire to be flat.

She tuned through the morning. She tuned the Morrison Steinway and drove to a house in Laurelhurst where a Kawai grand stood in a sunroom — a sunroom, the worst possible location for a piano, the temperature fluctuating wildly, the humidity even more so, the piano subjected to direct sunlight in summer and cold drafts in winter, and Clara had recommended against this placement for years and the client had declined to move the piano because the sunroom was where she liked to play, where the light came in, where she could see the garden while she practiced, and Clara had accepted the client's preference the way she accepted the weather, as a condition to work within rather than a problem to solve.

The Kawai in the sunroom was very flat. Twenty cents, uniformly. Clara raised it, and the raising took two passes — the first pass bringing the piano up to approximately five cents flat, the overshoot calculated, the settling anticipated, and then a second pass to bring the remaining five cents up to pitch, the second pass finer, more careful, the piano now closer to its target and the corrections smaller — and the two passes took two hours, and Clara's back was stiff from the bench and her wrist was sore from the lever and the sunroom was hot, was eighty-five degrees, the July sun coming through the glass and heating the room to a temperature that made the piano go even flatter as Clara tried to bring it up, the dryness and the heat working against her, the season resisting the correction.

She finished the Kawai at one o'clock and sat in her car in the shade of a maple tree and ate the sandwich she had packed and drank water and let her wrist rest. The wrist was a concern. Not a medical concern — the wrist was strong, was healthy, was not arthritic or strained — but a fatigue concern, the concern of a person who had been turning pins for five hours and who had three more pianos to tune before the day ended, and the summer schedule was the most physically demanding schedule of the year because every piano required a pitch raise and every pitch raise required more force than a standard tuning.

She rested for fifteen minutes. She drove to the next appointment.

The afternoon pianos were a Baldwin upright in Sellwood — the judge's piano, the one with the hymns and the lemonade, and the judge offered lemonade and Clara accepted and the Baldwin was twelve cents flat and Clara raised it in one pass and the tuning was clean — and then a Yamaha C3 grand at a studio in the Central Eastside, a teaching studio where a piano teacher named Margaret Fong taught thirty students a week and where the piano was played six hours a day, five days a week, and the playing combined with the summer dryness had put the piano twenty-five cents flat, the most severe pitch change Clara had encountered this summer, and the raising required two passes and took ninety minutes, and Margaret Fong sat at her desk in the corner of the studio and graded theory worksheets and did not watch, did not listen, did not attend to the tuning the way some clients attended, and the inattention was not disrespect but trust, the trust of a client who had been working with Clara for fifteen years and who assumed the piano would be correct when Clara was done, the assumption that was the highest form of professional trust, the assumption that the work would be done well because the worker was who the worker was.

Clara finished the Yamaha C3 at four o'clock. She had one more piano — a Steinway S at a house in the Pearl District, a small grand in a condominium, the piano owned by a retired surgeon who played Scarlatti sonatas in the morning before his walk — and Clara drove to the Pearl and parked and climbed the stairs to the third floor and knocked, and the surgeon opened the door and said, "I can't play the Scarlatti when it sounds like this," and Clara said, "I know," and went to the piano and struck the fork and began.

The Steinway S was fourteen cents flat. A moderate correction. One pass. The piano came up smoothly, the pins turning, the strings tightening, the pitch rising to 440, and Clara set the temperament and tuned the octaves and checked the top octave with the Korg — all correct, no corrections needed, the ear sufficient today for this piano — and she packed her tools and the surgeon played a Scarlatti sonata while she packed, the D minor sonata, K. 141, the fast one, the one with the repeated notes and the crossing hands, and the Scarlatti was in the range where Clara's hearing was undiminished, was all fundamental and lower harmonics, was the territory of the harpsichord transposed to the piano, and Clara heard the Scarlatti clearly, heard every note, heard the surgeon's precise technique and the piano's bright, particular voice, and the hearing was good, was clean, was the hearing of a person whose ear, in this range, was as acute as it had ever been.

She drove home through the summer evening. The light lasted. Portland in July had light until nine-thirty, the sun setting behind the West Hills and the sky holding the light long after the sun was gone, the twilight extending, the dusk stretching, the city suspended in a golden interval between the day and the dark, and Clara drove through this interval with her windows down and the summer air coming in and she heard the city in its summer voice — the sound of people on patios, the sound of restaurant doors opening onto the sidewalk, the sound of music from open windows, the sound of the city permeable, the boundary between inside and outside dissolved by the weather, the acoustic wall that winter erected now removed, the city's sound leaking outward and mixing and producing a summer acoustic that was richer, denser, more complex than the winter acoustic, the winter city sealed and the summer city opened.

At home she sat at the kitchen table and struck the fork.

A440. The fork was cool despite the warm day. The steel held its temperature longer than the air, was slow to change, was thermally stable the way it was acoustically stable, and the coolness of the fork against Clara's fingers was the coolness of permanence, of the thing that did not change when everything around it changed, and Clara held the cool fork in the warm kitchen and listened to the A decay and thought about the day — the pianos she had tuned, the pitch she had raised, the summer she was in, the season that was the most physical season, the season that tested the body as much as the ear.

She thought about the pianos going flat. She thought about the soundboards contracting and the bridges settling and the strings loosening and the pitch dropping, and she thought that the pianos' response to the season was a kind of honesty — the piano did not pretend to be unaffected by the weather, did not maintain its pitch through willpower or stubbornness, but changed, openly, audibly, the change evident to anyone who listened, the flatness a public acknowledgment that the conditions had changed and that the instrument had responded to the changed conditions, and the acknowledgment was not a failure but a fact, not a weakness but a property, the piano being what it was, a wooden thing in a wooden world, subject to the forces that all wooden things were subject to.

Clara's hearing was doing what the pianos did. Clara's hearing was responding to conditions — not to the weather but to time, not to humidity but to age — and the response was a kind of flatness, a lowering, a retreat, the frequencies diminishing the way the pitch diminished, the upper edge dropping, the capacity contracting, and the contraction was not a failure but a condition, not a weakness but a fact, and Clara could tune the pianos back to pitch but could not tune her hearing back to its previous sensitivity, could not raise her own frequencies the way she raised the strings' frequencies, because the piano had a tuner but the ear did not, the piano could be corrected but the ear could only be compensated, and the compensation was not the same as the correction.

She set the fork on the table. She went to the Knabe and lifted the fallboard and played a chord — D major, the bright chord, the summer chord, the chord that Beethoven used for the Ode to Joy — and the chord was warm in the warm kitchen, was full, was resonant, the Knabe's sound filling the small house, and Clara listened to the chord and heard it fully, heard every note, heard the fundamental and the lower harmonics and the upper harmonics fading above the tenth partial, and the chord was beautiful despite the fading, was complete despite the incompleteness, was sufficient despite the insufficiency, was a summer chord in a summer house and the summer was the season of openness, of permeability, of the boundary dissolved, and Clara was in the summer, was permeable, was open to the sound that was available and was not mourning the sound that was not.

She closed the fallboard. She went to the porch and sat on the steps and listened to the evening — the neighborhood sounds, the long light, the warm air, the summer — and the evening was in the frequencies she could hear, was in the range of her functional hearing, was the world at its middle frequencies, the birds and the traffic and the distant music and the wind in the trees, and Clara listened to the evening and the evening was enough.

The fork waited on the table.

The summer continued.

The pianos went flat and Clara raised them and the pianos went flat again and Clara raised them again, the cycle continuing, the work continuing, the season continuing, and the work was good and the season was good and the light lasted until nine-thirty and Clara was in the summer, in the dry season, in the season when the pianos needed her most and she could still give them what they needed.

She could still give them what they needed.

For now, the giving was enough.