The Silence

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 32: The Silence

The day after the last tuning of the Bösendorfer was a Tuesday, December 24th, Christmas Eve, and Clara woke at six-thirty as she always woke, the body's clock set to six-thirty the way the fork was set to 440, the setting fixed by years of repetition, the body not knowing that today was different, the body performing the morning the way it had performed every morning for twenty-eight years — rising, showering, dressing, walking to the kitchen, making coffee, sitting at the table.

The fork was on the table. The lever was on the table. The bag was on the chair by the door. Everything was in its place, the geography of the kitchen unchanged from yesterday, from the day before, from every morning Clara could remember, and the sameness of the geography made the difference harder to locate, harder to feel, because the difference was not in the objects but in the schedule, not in the kitchen but in the appointment book, which was open on the table to the page for December 24th, and the page was blank.

The page was blank.

No appointment. No piano. No address, no name, no make and model, no time slot. The page was white paper with faint blue lines and the lines were empty and the emptiness was the first empty Tuesday in twenty-eight years, the first workday since 1998 on which Clara Resnikoff had no piano to tune, no house to visit, no instrument waiting for the fork and the lever and the ear.

She struck the fork.

A440. In the kitchen. On a Tuesday. On the first empty Tuesday. The sound was the same sound it had always been, the fundamental and the partials and the decay, and Clara held the fork and listened and thought about the fact that the fork did not know, that the fork vibrated at 440 hertz whether Clara was going to work or staying home, whether the lever was packed or unpacked, whether the appointment book was full or blank, and the fork's indifference to the schedule was the fork's nature, was the quality that made it a reference — it did not change, did not adjust, did not respond to conditions, simply was what it was, simply produced the pitch it produced.

Clara set the fork on the table and drank her coffee and looked at the bag on the chair.

The bag was packed. She had packed it last night, out of habit, the way she packed it every night — the lever in its sleeve, the mutes in the pouch, the Korg in its pocket, the notebook in the side pocket, the tools arranged in their compartments — and the packing was automatic, was muscle memory, was the body performing the ritual without consulting the mind, and Clara had packed the bag and set it on the chair and had gone to bed without recognizing that the packing was unnecessary, that the bag did not need to be packed because the bag was not going anywhere, that tomorrow was Tuesday but tomorrow was not a tuning day, was not a workday, was the first day of the rest of Clara's life that did not contain tuning.

She looked at the bag and felt the weight of it from across the room, felt the mass of the tools and the leather and the canvas, the fifteen pounds that she had carried for twenty-eight years, that she had lifted from the car and carried to the door and set on the floor beside the piano and opened and extracted the lever from and replaced the lever in and closed and lifted and carried back to the car, the cycle of carrying and setting and opening and closing and carrying that was the physical rhythm of the work, the body's contribution to the ear's labor, and the rhythm was going to stop.

Not today. Today the rhythm had already stopped. Yesterday had been the last day of the rhythm — the drive to Klickitat Street, the walk to Mrs. Ashford's door, the setting of the bag on the floor beside the Bösendorfer, the opening, the lever, the fork, the temperament, the octaves, the unisons, the closing, the carrying — and the rhythm had ended without ceremony, had ended the way a rhythm ends when the musician stops playing, the last beat simply not followed by another beat, the silence arriving not as an event but as an absence, the absence of the sound that had been present.

Clara sat with the absence. She sat at the kitchen table with her coffee and the fork and the bag and the blank page and she sat with the absence and she did not fill it. She did not turn on the radio. She did not call Yuki. She did not go to the Knabe. She sat in the silence of the kitchen and listened to the silence, which was not silence — the refrigerator hummed, the furnace cycled, the house settled, the rain fell on the roof, the clock in the hallway ticked — but which was, for Clara, a different kind of sound environment than the sound environment she had inhabited for twenty-eight years, the sound environment of a workday without work, a Tuesday without tuning, a morning without the anticipation of the piano.

The anticipation had been part of the work. Clara recognized this now, in its absence. The anticipation — the drive to the house, the approach to the door, the entering of the room, the first sight of the piano, the first sound of the fork in the room's acoustic, the moment before the work began when the ear opened and the attention focused and the body prepared — the anticipation was a state of being, a mode of consciousness, the tuner's equivalent of the athlete's warm-up, the musician's first breath before the downbeat, and the anticipation had been present every morning for twenty-eight years and was not present this morning and the not-present was palpable, was felt in the body as a kind of emptiness, a readiness with no object, the archer's arm drawn back with no arrow.

She finished her coffee. She washed the cup. She stood at the kitchen sink and looked out the window at the backyard, the small yard, the fence, the neighbor's laurel hedge, the December gray of the sky, and she stood and looked and did not think about anything specific, did not plan, did not organize, did not schedule, and the not-planning was unfamiliar, was the condition of a person who had been planned, organized, scheduled for twenty-eight years and who was now, for the first time, without a plan, without an organization, without a schedule.

She went to the living room. She stood beside the Knabe. She did not open the fallboard. She stood beside the piano and looked at it — at the mahogany case, at the music desk, at the closed fallboard covering the keys — and she thought about the piano as an object, as a piece of furniture, as a thing in a room, rather than as an instrument, as a tool, as a vehicle for the work, and the thinking was strange, was disorienting, was the experience of seeing a familiar thing from an unfamiliar angle, the way a city looks different from the air than from the street.

The Knabe was a piano. The Knabe had strings and hammers and a soundboard and a pin block and eighty-eight keys and it produced sound when the keys were struck and the sound was musical and the music was beautiful and none of this had changed. What had changed was Clara's relationship to the piano, which had been the relationship of a tuner to an instrument — the professional relationship, the relationship of correction and maintenance and adjustment — and which was now becoming the relationship of a person to a piano, the relationship of a player, a listener, a companion, the relationship that Clara's clients had with their pianos, the relationship of the amateur, the lover, the person who played for pleasure rather than for pitch.

Clara opened the fallboard. She sat at the bench. She played a chord — A major, the chord that contained the reference pitch, the chord built on the fork's note — and the chord was in tune, was clean, was correct, she had tuned the Knabe two days ago, and the correctness was her own, was the product of her own ear, her own hands, her own ninety minutes at this bench, and the correctness would last — would last a month, perhaps, before the drift began, before the weather and the time and the settling of the strings carried the piano away from 440, and then the piano would need tuning again, and the tuning would be — whose? Clara's? Could she tune her own piano after she had stopped tuning professionally? Was the distinction between professional and personal relevant to the act of tuning, or was tuning tuning regardless of the context?

She did not answer the question. She played the Chopin. The Nocturne in C-sharp minor. She played it as she always played it — slowly, with care, with the attention that the piece demanded — and the nocturne filled the living room and the sound was good, was right, was the sound of a piano in tune in a quiet house on a Tuesday morning in December, and the sound was sufficient, was enough, was the sound that Clara could still make and could still hear and that was, in the range of her hearing, beautiful.

She finished the nocturne and sat at the bench and let the last chord decay. The living room was quiet. The rain fell on the roof. The clock ticked in the hallway.

She thought about the day. The empty day. The day without pianos, without clients, without the lever and the bag and the drive through the city. The day that was Christmas Eve and that was also the first day of the new life, the life without tuning, the life that Clara did not yet know how to live because she had not yet lived it, had only imagined it, had only anticipated it, the way she had anticipated the pianos on the morning drive, but the anticipation of the new life was different from the anticipation of the pianos because the pianos were known and the new life was unknown, and the unknown was — was not frightening exactly, was not dreadful, but was unfamiliar, was the condition of not knowing what the day held, what the week held, what the months would hold, the condition of the blank page.

She went to the kitchen. She made more coffee. She sat at the table and looked at the fork.

The fork was on the table. The fork would stay on the table. The fork was not going into the bag because the bag was not going to a piano because there was no piano to go to, and the fork would stay on the table, in the kitchen, in the house, and Clara would strike it in the morning and in the evening and the fork would produce the A and the A would be correct and the correctness would be — would be for Clara. Not for a piano. Not for a client. For Clara. The reference tone without the work it referenced. The starting point without the journey it started. The A without the tuning.

Could the A exist without the tuning? Could the reference tone be meaningful without the thing it referenced? Could the fork be the fork if the fork was not used?

Clara struck the fork.

A440. Clear. True. Present.

Yes. The A could exist without the tuning. The A existed regardless. The A was not contingent on the work. The A was not dependent on the lever or the bag or the appointment book. The A was a physical fact, a frequency, a vibration, and the vibration occurred whether the tuner was working or retired, whether the ear was healthy or diminished, whether the day was full or empty. The A was the A. The A remained.

She held the fork until the sound decayed. She set it on the table. She looked at the blank page in the appointment book and she looked at the bag on the chair and she looked at the fork on the table and she sat in the kitchen of the house on Yamhill on the first empty Tuesday and she listened to the rain and the refrigerator and the furnace and the settling and the ticking and she listened with the ear she had, the ear that was diminished in the upper frequencies and extraordinary in the middle and functional in the low, and the ear heard the house, heard the weather, heard the city through the walls, heard the world as it was, imperfect and present and continuing.

She would give the lever to Yuki tomorrow. She would keep the fork. She would play the Knabe. She would listen. She would attend concerts and hear the pianos she had tuned and hear them being played by pianists who did not know that Clara had set their A, had built their temperament, had stretched their bass and unified their unisons. She would listen with the ear she had.

The day continued. The rain continued. The silence — the silence that was not silence but the absence of the work — continued. And the absence was not empty. The absence was full. Full of the twenty-eight years that had preceded it. Full of the pianos and the clients and the intervals and the temperaments. Full of Leonard and the fork and the lever and the A. Full of the work that had been done, the work that was complete, the work that was, like the Bösendorfer's last tuning, finished.

Clara sat in the fullness. She did not go to the Knabe. She did not call Yuki. She did not unpack the bag. She sat at the kitchen table with the coffee and the fork and the blank page and the rain and she sat in the first day of the rest of her life and she listened to it.

The listening was enough.

The A remained.