The Appointment Book

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 5: The Appointment Book

The appointment book was spiral-bound, six inches by nine, with a black faux-leather cover that was cracking at the spine and soft at the corners where Clara's thumb rested when she held it open, and it was the fourteenth such book in a series that began in 1998, the year Clara started tuning on her own, and the previous thirteen were in a box in the closet of the second bedroom, the bedroom that was not a bedroom but a storage room, a room that held the box of appointment books and a filing cabinet of invoices and a shelf of technical manuals — Reblitz's Piano Servicing, Tuning, and Rebuilding, the Yamaha technical reference, the Steinway service manual, the PTG examination materials — and a card table where Clara sometimes worked on action parts, replacing hammers or damper felts or key bushings, the small repairs that a tuner performed in addition to tuning, the maintenance that kept the mechanism functional between the larger rebuilds that were done by specialists, by the rebuilders who took a piano apart and put it back together the way a surgeon takes a body apart and puts it back together, replacing what was worn, restoring what was damaged, returning the instrument to something approximating its original condition.

The current book covered the period from January of this year through December, and it was October, so the book was three-quarters full, the pages from January through September dense with Clara's angular handwriting, each page divided into the days of the week, each day divided into time slots, each slot containing a client name, an address, a piano make and model, a tuning frequency — quarterly, monthly, biannual, annual — and occasional notes in abbreviated form that only Clara could parse: "hmrs need voicing," "A0 pin loose, discuss w client," "bridge crack rgt side bass, monitor," "Yuki — good temperament, thirds still wide."

Clara was sitting at the kitchen table on Friday morning — the day after the audiologist, two days after the Steinway — with the appointment book open in front of her and a cup of coffee beside it and the tuning fork beside the coffee, and she was looking at the schedule for the coming week, which showed five tunings on Monday, three on Tuesday, four on Wednesday, two on Thursday (one of which was the symphony), and three on Friday, a total of seventeen pianos, which was a typical week, which was the workload she had maintained for the past decade, seventeen to twenty pianos per week, approximately eighty per month, approximately a thousand per year, each piano a visit, each visit a relationship, each relationship a history recorded in the appointment books in the closet and in the current book on the table and in Clara's memory, which held the histories that the books could not hold — the sound of each piano, the feel of each action, the acoustics of each room, the personality of each client, the conversation that preceded or followed each tuning, the cup of coffee offered, the glass of water accepted, the brief communion of two people in a room with a piano, one of whom cared about the piano deeply and the other of whom cared about the piano absolutely.

She turned back in the book to Monday, October 14th — the day described in the first pages of this account, the day of the Huang Yamaha and the First Presbyterian Kawai and the Morrison Steinway M and Mrs. Ashford's Bösendorfer — and she looked at the entries and saw, in the margins, the notes she had made after each tuning: "Huang — hmrs hardening, recommend voicing. Kawai — solid, no issues. Morrison — bass bridge aging, A0 weak. Ashford — sharp from rain, B Imperial in excellent condition."

She turned forward to Thursday, October 17th, the day of the audiologist and the symphony. The audiologist's appointment was not in the book. The audiologist's appointment existed only in Clara's memory and on a card in her wallet, a business card for Dr. Evelyn Chau, Au.D., Portland Hearing Associates, 1220 SW Morrison Street, Suite 400, and the card had a phone number and a date and time written in pen — October 17, 10:00 AM — and Clara had not written the appointment in the book because the book was a professional record, a tuning record, and the audiologist was not a tuning, was not professional, was personal in the most intimate sense, was about the body, about the ear, about the instrument that the tuner used to ply the trade, and mixing the personal with the professional felt like a contamination, like writing a diary entry in a ledger.

But the audiologist's appointment had happened, had occurred between the morning's free hours and the afternoon's Steinway tuning, had occupied two hours of Thursday in a way that the book did not record, and Clara was sitting with the book now, on Friday morning, thinking about the appointment, about what had happened in the soundproof room, about the audiogram that Dr. Chau had printed and that was now in Clara's bag, folded once, tucked between the felt mutes and the lever, the graph that showed what Clara could hear and what she could not.

She had not looked at the audiogram since leaving the office. She had taken it from Dr. Chau and folded it and put it in her bag and driven to the Schnitzer and tuned the Steinway and driven home and eaten dinner and gone to bed and woken this morning and made coffee and sat at the table with the book, and the audiogram was in the bag on the chair by the door, and she had not looked at it.

She knew what it showed. Dr. Chau had explained it. Dr. Chau had been clear and kind and professional, had used the appropriate vocabulary without condescension, had pointed to the graph with a pen and traced the curve and said the words that Clara had expected to hear and had heard and had received with the same quality of attention she brought to a tuning, the quality of listening for the thing you do not want to hear.

But Clara was not thinking about the audiogram now. She was thinking about the appointment book. She was thinking about the record of her working life, the archive of pianos and addresses and dates that constituted, in their accumulation, a map of Portland as seen from the bench of a piano tuner, a map that showed not streets and neighborhoods but pianos, each piano a point on the map, each point connected to Clara by a line of repeated visits, the lines forming a web that covered the city from Lake Oswego to St. Johns, from the West Hills to the neighborhoods east of Eighty-second Avenue, a web that Clara had been weaving for twenty-eight years and that she could trace in her memory the way a spider traces its own web, by feel, by familiarity, by the knowledge of every intersection and every strand.

She turned to the beginning of the book, to January, and read through the entries for the first week of the year, and each entry was a miniature narrative, a compressed story told in names and addresses and abbreviations:

Monday, January 6: 9:00 — Petrov, 1520 SE Belmont. Young Chang studio. Biannual. Note: new client, referred by Morrison. Apartment, second floor, no elevator. Carried tools up. 11:30 — Lincoln High School, 1600 SW Salmon. Yamaha C7. Quarterly. Note: music room cold, thermostat broken. Tuning will not hold. 2:00 — Chen, 8834 SE Division. Kawai K-8. Annual. Note: daughter advanced, needs better instrument. Discuss upgrade. 4:00 — Portland Center for the Arts, 1111 SW Broadway. Steinway B. Monthly. Note: used for recitals. A at 442 per request.

Each entry was a life. The Petrov apartment on Belmont, where a man in his sixties practiced Rachmaninoff with a passion that exceeded his technique, the Young Chang studio upright barely adequate for the demands he placed on it, the keys worn in the patterns of the pieces he played most — the C-sharp minor prelude, the second piano concerto, the études-tableaux — the wear telling Clara the story of his practice the way footprints in snow tell the story of a walk. Lincoln High School, where the music teacher, a woman named Sandra Yee, fought the administration every year for the budget to maintain the Yamaha C7, and every year the administration suggested that the students could use keyboards, electronic keyboards with weighted keys and built-in metronomes, and Sandra Yee had responded, each time, with a calm ferocity that Clara admired, explaining that a keyboard was not a piano the way a photograph was not a painting, that the instrument mattered, that the physical engagement with real strings and real hammers and real resonance was part of the education, and the administration had relented, each time, and the Yamaha had been tuned, each time, and the students had played it, and some of them had heard, in the piano's sound, the thing that Sandra Yee wanted them to hear, the thing that a keyboard could not provide, the thing that was not volume or tone or pitch but presence, the quality of being in the room with a vibrating body, a body of wood and steel and felt that responded to touch with sound, that gave back what was given, that was alive in the way that anything is alive that changes when you interact with it.

Clara read through January and February and March, through the winter tunings when the pianos were dry and flat, the soundboards contracted, the humidity low, the gaps between the keys and the keybed wider, the touch looser, the tone brighter because the dry soundboard reflected more of the strings' energy and absorbed less, and the tunings were quick in winter because the pianos had drifted uniformly flat and needed only to be raised back to pitch, a straightforward correction, a simple tightening of all the pins by approximately the same amount, like tightening a hundred bolts on a single flange, each bolt turned the same fraction of a turn.

She read through April and May, the transition months, when the rains returned and the humidity rose and the soundboards began to swell and the pianos began to drift sharp, the winter flatness correcting itself and then overcorrecting, the pitch rising above 440 as the bridge pushed up and the strings tightened, and the spring tunings were more complex than the winter tunings because the piano was moving, was in transition, was passing through 440 on its way to wherever the humidity would take it, and tuning a piano in transition was like painting a wall that was still being built, the surface shifting under the brush.

She read through June and July and August, the summer months, when the humidity stabilized and the pianos settled into their summer pitch, slightly sharp, and the tunings were stable, predictable, the pianos holding their tuning better than at any other time of year because the conditions were constant, the humidity steady, the temperature even, the soundboard at equilibrium, and Clara had used the summer months to schedule the pianos that needed work beyond tuning — the voicings, the regulation adjustments, the minor repairs that accumulated over the year and that she addressed in the slower summer schedule, when the rain stopped and the light lasted until nine o'clock and the city felt like a different city, a city of open windows and dry streets and a clarity of light that made the winter's gray seem impossible, like a rumor.

She was in September now, turning the pages, reading the entries, and each entry was a memory, each piano a face, each address a room, and she was aware that she was doing something she rarely did, which was looking backward rather than forward, reviewing the past rather than planning the future, and she understood why she was doing it, understood that the looking backward was a form of accounting, an inventory, an assessment of what she had and what it was worth, the way a person reviews their savings when they begin to suspect that their income is going to decrease.

Her income was not going to decrease. Not yet. Not necessarily. The audiogram in the bag might mean many things, might mean nothing, might mean a mild loss that was compatible with decades more of tuning, might mean an adjustment rather than an ending. But Clara was taking inventory anyway, was counting the pianos, the clients, the relationships, the years, the way a person counts these things when they begin to understand that the counting itself is finite, that the number of tunings remaining is a number, a specific number, even if the number is unknown.

She closed the book and picked up the fork and held it without striking it, held it in her right hand, the steel cool against her palm, and she thought about the numbers. Twenty-eight years of tuning. Approximately a thousand pianos per year. Approximately twenty-eight thousand tunings. Twenty-eight thousand times she had struck this fork and set the A and built the temperament and tuned the octaves and set the unisons. Twenty-eight thousand times she had entered a room and opened a piano and listened to what the piano had to say and corrected it, brought it back to the grid, back to the system, back to the equal temperament that made all keys equally playable by making all intervals equally impure.

Twenty-eight thousand compromises.

She struck the fork. The A rang in the kitchen, thin and clear and precise, and she set the fork on the table and watched it vibrate, the tines blurring with the speed of their oscillation, 440 cycles per second, too fast to see but visible as a blur, a doubling, the tines appearing to be in two places at once, the fork occupying a space that was wider than the fork, the vibration extending the steel beyond its resting dimensions, and this was what sound was — the extension of matter beyond its rest, the agitation of molecules, the disturbance of air, the pushing of waves outward from a source, and the waves traveled from the fork through the air of the kitchen to Clara's ears, where they entered the ear canal and struck the tympanic membrane and set it vibrating at 440 cycles per second, and the membrane's vibration was transmitted through the three bones of the middle ear — the malleus, the incus, the stapes, the smallest bones in the human body — to the oval window of the cochlea, and the cochlea converted the mechanical vibration into a hydraulic wave in the fluid that filled its spiral chambers, and the wave traveled along the basilar membrane, and the membrane's width and stiffness varied along its length, so that different frequencies caused maximum displacement at different positions, and 440 hertz caused maximum displacement at a specific position, approximately 60 percent of the way from the base to the apex, and at that position the hair cells — the stereocilia, the tiny filaments that protruded from the tops of the outer and inner hair cells — were bent by the membrane's motion, and the bending opened ion channels, and the opening of the channels generated electrical signals, and the signals traveled along the auditory nerve to the brainstem and from the brainstem to the auditory cortex, and the cortex interpreted the signals as a pitch, as a note, as the A above middle C, as 440 hertz, as the reference tone from which everything else was measured.

This was hearing. This was the chain of events — mechanical, hydraulic, cellular, electrical, neural — that connected the vibrating fork to Clara's consciousness, and every link in the chain was functional, every component was working, and at 440 hertz the chain was strong and the signal was clear and Clara heard the A as she had always heard it, but the chain was weakest at its beginning, at the hair cells, which were the most delicate components, the most vulnerable to damage, the most susceptible to the cumulative effects of aging, and the hair cells at the base of the cochlea, the cells that responded to the highest frequencies, were the most exposed, the most fragile, the first to die, and when they died they did not regenerate, did not grow back, did not repair themselves, because the mammalian cochlea, unlike the avian cochlea, had lost the capacity for regeneration sometime in the evolutionary history of the mammalian line, a loss that had no obvious explanation, a deficit that science had not yet corrected, and the hair cells that Clara had been born with were the only hair cells she would ever have, and some of them were dead now, and the audiogram in her bag showed which ones.

She put the fork down. She went to the bag and unzipped the side pocket and took out the audiogram and unfolded it and looked at it.

The graph showed frequency on the horizontal axis — 250 hertz at the left, 8,000 hertz at the right — and hearing level in decibels on the vertical axis, with zero at the top and higher numbers descending, so that better hearing was higher on the graph and worse hearing was lower, and the convention was counterintuitive, the good news at the top and the bad news at the bottom, as though the audiogram were a map of a landscape where the peaks were health and the valleys were loss.

Clara's audiogram showed normal hearing from 250 hertz through 4,000 hertz. The symbols — circles for the right ear, crosses for the left — clustered near the top of the graph, near zero decibels, indicating that Clara's hearing at these frequencies was excellent, was within the normal range for a woman of any age, let alone fifty-two, and this was the range where most of the tuning occurred, where the temperament was set, where the octaves were tuned, where the unisons were matched, and this was good news, this was the news that Dr. Chau had delivered first, had led with, had emphasized.

But at 6,000 hertz the symbols dropped. The right ear dropped to 25 decibels, the left to 30. At 8,000 hertz — the highest frequency the standard audiogram tested — the right ear was at 35 decibels and the left was at 40.

"This is a mild to moderate high-frequency sensorineural hearing loss," Dr. Chau had said. "It's consistent with presbycusis — age-related hearing loss. It's common. Most people your age have some degree of high-frequency loss."

"Most people my age are not piano tuners," Clara had said.

Dr. Chau had paused. She was a woman of about forty, with the composed manner of a clinician who delivered bad news regularly and had learned to deliver it with clarity and without false comfort. "That's true. The frequencies affected are above the range where most speech occurs. For most people, this level of loss has minimal functional impact. For a musician — for someone whose work depends on high-frequency discrimination — it's more significant."

"How much more significant."

"It depends on the specific demands. Can you tell me more about what you need to hear."

Clara had told her. Had explained the beats, the intervals, the upper partials, the territory above 6,000 hertz where the quality of the highest octave's tuning was determined, and Dr. Chau had listened with the attention of a person hearing a description of a world she had not known existed, a world where the difference between 25 decibels and zero decibels at 8,000 hertz was the difference between certainty and doubt, between hearing and inferring, between being Clara Resnikoff and being someone who used to be Clara Resnikoff.

"The loss is bilateral and symmetric, which is typical of presbycusis," Dr. Chau had said. "It will likely progress. The rate of progression varies. Some people experience a gradual decline over many years. Others experience a more rapid decline. There's no way to predict with certainty."

"Can it be treated."

"Hearing aids can amplify the affected frequencies. For your purposes — if the goal is to restore the ability to hear fine pitch differences at high frequencies — hearing aids might help, but they introduce their own artifacts. The amplification is not perfectly linear. There may be distortion. For speech, the trade-off is usually worth it. For fine pitch discrimination, it's less clear."

"So there is nothing to be done."

"There are things to be done. Hearing protection, when possible, to slow the progression. Hearing aids, when the loss progresses to the point where they're needed. And — I want to be straightforward with you — there is adaptation. The brain compensates. People with mild hearing loss often develop strategies, consciously or unconsciously, to work with the hearing they have."

Clara had taken the audiogram and folded it and put it in her bag and thanked Dr. Chau and left the office and sat in her car for ten minutes and then driven to the Schnitzer and tuned the Steinway, and the tuning had been fine, had been good, had produced a result that the conductor and the pianist performing that evening would have found satisfactory, and Clara had left the Schnitzer and driven home and not looked at the audiogram.

She was looking at it now.

The curve was there. The drop at 6,000 hertz, the further drop at 8,000. The territory she was losing. The hair cells that were dead, the frequencies that were fading, the upper edge of her hearing retreating like a tide going out, leaving behind a beach that was still functional — she could still hear, still tune, still work — but that was narrower than it had been, that had less room, that offered less of the sky, less of the high country, less of the territory where the finest discriminations lived.

She folded the audiogram and put it back in the bag.

She opened the appointment book to next week's page and looked at the schedule and saw seventeen pianos waiting for her, seventeen instruments that needed her ear, her hands, her attention, and she picked up a pen and wrote, in the margin of Monday's page, a note that was not a tuning note but a personal note, the first personal note she had ever written in a professional book:

"Hear what you can hear."

She closed the book. She finished the coffee. She struck the fork one more time — A440, clear, true, present, the one fixed point — and she put on her jacket and gathered her bag and went to the car and drove to her first tuning of the day, a Yamaha upright in a house on Southeast Division, a nine-year-old girl's piano, a piano that needed nothing more than what Clara could give it, which was a tuning, a correction, a return to the grid, the grid of equal temperament that made all keys equally playable by making all intervals equally impure, the grid that was itself a compromise, a deliberate acceptance of imperfection in service of functionality, and Clara thought about this as she drove, thought about the compromise, thought about the bargain that equal temperament struck — every interval slightly wrong so that every key could be used — and she thought that this was not unlike the bargain she was now striking with her own body, accepting a slight wrongness in the upper frequencies so that the rest of the range could continue to function, accepting a loss so that what remained could still be used.

The difference was that equal temperament was a choice. Presbycusis was not.

She parked on Division Street and got out of the car and gathered her bag and walked to the house and rang the bell, and a woman opened the door and said, "Oh, the piano tuner, come in," and Clara entered and saw the Yamaha upright against the wall and opened the top panel and struck the fork and set the A and began to tune, and the tuning was the same as every tuning, was the ritual, the practice, the act of listening and correcting that had organized Clara's life for twenty-eight years, and she did it now as she had always done it, with care and precision and the quiet satisfaction of doing the thing she was made to do, and if the upper treble was slightly less certain than it had been six months ago, slightly less sharp, slightly less resolved, no one in the room could hear the difference.

Not yet.