Martin

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 9: Martin

Martin Kelley had been a cellist with the Oregon Symphony for twenty-seven years, from 1998 to the present, occupying the fourth chair in the cello section, a position that suited his temperament — he was a section player, not a soloist, a musician who found satisfaction in the ensemble, in the blending of his sound with the sounds around him, in the subordination of the individual voice to the collective voice, the act of listening to the other cellos and adjusting his intonation and his dynamics and his bowing to match theirs, to merge with theirs, to become not Martin Kelley playing cello but the cello section playing as one — and Clara had met him in 2001, when she was twenty-eight and he was thirty-one, at a reception after a symphony concert, a reception she had attended because Leonard was being honored for twenty-three years of service as the symphony's tuner, and Leonard had introduced Clara to the musicians the way he introduced her to everyone, with a formality that was partly cultural — the Soviet formality that Leonard never lost, the instinct to present rather than simply to mention — and partly paternal, the pride of a father who believed his daughter was worth presenting.

"This is my daughter Clara," Leonard had said. "She tunes pianos. She has my ear."

Martin had shaken Clara's hand and said, "Your father tuned the Steinway for my audition. I got the job. I've always wondered whether the piano had something to do with it."

"The piano always has something to do with it," Clara had said, and Martin had laughed, and the laugh had been the beginning, the way a tuning fork's strike is the beginning — a single moment of contact from which everything else followed.

They had married in 2003 and divorced in 2014 and the marriage had lasted eleven years, which was longer than many marriages lasted and shorter than Clara had expected it to last and approximately the right length, she had concluded in the years since, for a marriage between two people who loved each other but who could not make the compromises that living together required, the daily negotiations over space and time and silence and company, the constant adjustment that marriage demanded, the equal temperament of a shared life, and Clara and Martin had not been able to find the equal temperament, had not been able to settle into a system of compromises that made all the keys of their relationship equally playable, had instead produced a marriage in which some keys were beautiful — the music, the conversation, the sex, the shared understanding of what it meant to spend your life listening — and other keys were unusable — the arguments about Clara's schedule, Martin's need for company, Clara's need for solitude, Martin's desire to travel, Clara's unwillingness to leave the pianos, the fundamental difference in how they occupied time, Martin filling his with people and activity and movement and Clara emptying hers of everything except the work, the pianos, the tuning, the listening.

The divorce had been quiet. No lawyers, no disputes over property, no contest. They had sat at the kitchen table of the house they shared on Southeast Belmont — a house Martin kept, a house Clara left — and divided the marriage the way a tuner divides the octave, into twelve equal parts, each part receiving an equal share of the imperfection, and they had signed the papers and Clara had moved to the house on Yamhill and Martin had stayed on Belmont and they had not spoken for six months and then Martin had called about a concert he wanted Clara to attend and Clara had attended and they had sat together in the audience and listened to Mahler's Fifth without speaking and after the concert they had gone to a bar and talked for three hours about everything except the marriage, and this conversation — long, circling, touching on music and weather and the city and the people they knew, touching on everything except the wound — had been the template for all subsequent conversations, the pattern they had established and maintained, a friendship built on the ruins of a marriage, a structure that avoided the collapsed sections, that walked around the holes in the floor.

Martin called on a Sunday evening in February. Clara was in the kitchen, eating pasta, the fork and the lever on the table beside her plate, the tuning fork and the pasta fork separated by approximately eight inches of pine tabletop, and the phone rang — the landline, which Clara still maintained because the sound quality was better than a cell phone, because the frequency response of a landline was 300 to 3,400 hertz while a cell phone compressed the audio to an even narrower band, and Clara preferred the fuller sound, the way a person who cares about coffee prefers a French press to a pod machine.

"Clara, it's Martin."

"Hello, Martin."

"I have something I want you to hear."

This was how Martin initiated most of their interactions — with something to hear. A recording, a concert, a musician on the street, and once, memorably, a bird outside his kitchen window whose song was, Martin claimed, in the key of D major. Clara had listened to the bird and determined that its song contained the notes D, F-sharp, and A, which was indeed a D major triad, and she had been pleased by this and Martin had been pleased by her pleasure, and the shared pleasure had been, for a moment, indistinguishable from the pleasure they had shared when they were married, the pleasure of hearing together, of listening together, of being two ears pointed at the same sound.

"What is it," Clara said.

"A cello. A Gagliano. 1780. I'm trying it out for a colleague. It just came back from a restorer in Chicago. The sound is — I want you to hear it."

"When."

"Tomorrow evening. Seven o'clock. My house."

Clara considered. She had not been to the house on Belmont since the divorce, had not entered the rooms she had lived in for eleven years, had not sat on the couch where she and Martin had listened to recordings, had not stood in the kitchen where they had eaten dinner, had not lain in the bedroom where they had slept and made love and argued and reconciled. The house was Martin's space now, Martin's territory, and entering it would be — she searched for the right word — entering it would be an adjustment, a retuning, a recalibration of the relationship between Clara and the space, the way you recalibrate your relationship with a piano when you tune it after a long interval, the piano not quite where you left it, the pitch drifted, the sound changed.

"All right," she said.

She hung up and finished her pasta and washed the dishes and sat at the table with the fork in her hand and thought about Martin and the cello and the house on Belmont and the eleven years she had spent there and the twelve years she had spent not-there, and the ratio — eleven to twelve — was approaching equilibrium, the time-apart almost equal to the time-together, and when the ratio reached one-to-one the marriage would be exactly half her adult life and the not-marriage would be exactly half, and this mathematical observation was not meaningful and yet Clara found it interesting, found the balance point approaching, the moment when the marriage would shift from majority to minority, from the larger portion to the smaller, and the shift would be gradual, would cross the threshold without ceremony, the way a pitch crosses 440 hertz on its way from flat to sharp, passing through the correct value without pausing, without marking the moment, the exact instant of correctness invisible, instantaneous, already past by the time you recognize it.

She did not think about what she would wear. She was not a person who thought about what she would wear. She owned clothes that were functional — jeans, sweaters, a jacket, boots — and she chose them by reaching into the closet and taking whatever her hand found first, the way she chose a felt mute from the bag, by proximity rather than deliberation. Martin had once said that Clara dressed the way she tuned — systematically, without vanity, each element chosen for function rather than appearance — and Clara had taken this as a compliment and Martin had not corrected her.

Monday evening. Clara drove to Belmont, to the house, a Craftsman bungalow painted dark blue, with a porch light that Martin had turned on, the yellow light spilling across the steps and the railing, and she parked and sat in the car for a moment, the engine off, looking at the house, and the house looked the same — the same paint, the same porch, the same yew hedge along the walk — and this sameness was a relief and also a provocation, the unchanged exterior implying an unchanged interior, implying that the life Clara had left was still in there, waiting, the rooms still arranged for two people, the kitchen still set for two, the bed still made for two, which was not true, which could not be true, which was a projection of Clara's memory onto Martin's present, and the projection was false, was the error of a mind that confused memory with reality.

She got out of the car and walked to the porch and Martin opened the door before she knocked.

He was fifty-five, three years older than Clara, and his hair was grayer than the last time she had seen him, six months ago at a coffee shop on Hawthorne where they had met for an hour and talked about Yuki's apprenticeship and Martin's plan to retire from the symphony next year and the weather, which had been summer then, the rare Portland summer of clear skies and dry heat, and Martin had looked well in the summer light, had looked younger than fifty-five, had looked like the man Clara had married, or nearly, the changes accumulated since the wedding small enough to be absorbed, the face still recognizably the face, the way a piano at ninety percent of its original condition is still recognizably the piano.

"Come in," Martin said.

She came in. The house was different. Not dramatically different — the walls were the same color, the floors the same fir, the living room still arranged around the fireplace — but the details had changed, the way details change when one person replaces another in a space, when the negotiated arrangement of shared life is replaced by the unilateral arrangement of solitary life. Martin's books had expanded from the bookshelf in the hallway to a second shelf in the living room. A new chair, leather, sat where the couch had been. The photographs on the mantel were different — Clara's face was absent, replaced by Martin's family, his sister's children, a group photo from a symphony tour.

The cello case stood upright in the corner of the living room, black and angular, and beside it was Martin's own cello case, and the two cases stood like sentinels, like paired pillars, and Clara looked at them and thought about the Gagliano, about a cello made in Naples in 1780, about the hands that had shaped the wood and fitted the plates and carved the scroll and that had been dead for more than two centuries, and the cello had survived them, had survived the maker and every player who had played it since, had survived the way the tuning fork survived, the way any well-made instrument survived, the object enduring while the hands that used it changed, generation after generation, the instrument accumulating the touch of each player the way the rosewood handle accumulated the grip of each tuner.

Martin opened the Gagliano's case with the care of a person handling something precious, the latches clicked open and the lid lifted and the cello lay in its velvet bed, and it was — Clara's breath caught, not because the cello was beautiful, though it was beautiful, but because the varnish was a color she had not seen before on a stringed instrument, a deep amber-red that was not the orange-brown of most old Italian instruments but something richer, darker, more complex, the color of honey held up to a fire, and the wood beneath the varnish showed the grain of the spruce top, tight and even, the rings of the tree visible through the amber like the years of the tree's life visible through the years of the cello's life, the two timescales layered.

Martin lifted the cello from the case and sat in the leather chair and positioned the instrument between his knees and tightened the bow and drew it across the open strings — C, G, D, A, the four strings tuned in perfect fifths, not the tempered fifths of the piano but the pure fifths of the string player, the fifths that beat not at all, that are consonant, that are the natural intervals of the overtone series, the intervals that the piano cannot have because the piano has sacrificed purity for versatility, has traded the beauty of the pure fifth for the functionality of the tempered fifth — and the Gagliano's open strings filled the room with a sound that was unlike any sound Clara had heard from a cello, a sound that was not louder or brighter or warmer than other cellos but that had a quality she could only describe as depth, a dimension to the sound, a sense that the sound came not from the surface of the instrument but from inside it, from the interior of the wood, from the space between the top plate and the back plate, the resonating chamber that was the cello's body, its lungs, the hollow from which the voice emerged.

"Listen to this," Martin said, and he played the opening of Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, the prelude, the most famous piece in the cello repertoire, the broken chords that every cellist knew, that every musician knew, that every person who had ever heard a cello in a concert hall or a recording or a movie soundtrack knew, and the Gagliano sang the Bach with a clarity that was almost painful, each note distinct, each overtone present, the harmonics rising above the fundamentals like light rising from a lamp, and Clara stood in Martin's living room and listened to the Bach and heard in it not just the music but the instrument, the wood, the varnish, the two hundred and forty-four years of vibration that the cello had absorbed, the history stored in the grain, the accumulated resonance of a quarter-millennium of sound.

Martin played for five minutes, the Bach prelude and then a section of the Dvořák concerto and then a passage from Elgar, and Clara listened, and the listening was the purest listening she had done in weeks, purer than the listening she did while tuning, because this listening had no purpose other than itself, no objective other than hearing, no task other than attention, and the absence of purpose freed the ear from the anxiety that had been accompanying her tuning, the anxiety of the upper frequencies, the worry about what she could and could not hear, and she listened to the Gagliano with the full range of her hearing, the range that was still vast, still extraordinary, still capable of hearing nuances that most ears could not perceive, and the cello's frequencies were entirely within her functional range, the fundamentals between 65 and 880 hertz, the overtones extending upward into the thousands but weighted toward the lower frequencies, the body of the cello emphasizing the lower partials, the warmth, the depth, the interior quality that was the Gagliano's signature.

Martin stopped playing. He held the bow above the strings and looked at Clara.

"Well."

"It's extraordinary," Clara said.

"The low C. Did you hear the low C."

"I heard everything."

"The restorer said the bass bar had separated. He reglued it and the bass response came back. He said it was like the cello remembered what it was supposed to sound like."

Clara thought about this — about an instrument remembering its own sound, the wood retaining the pattern of its vibration the way the ear retains the memory of a pitch, the physical structure encoding the acoustic history — and she thought that this was not metaphor but fact, or close to fact, because the wood of a stringed instrument did change over time in response to vibration, did undergo molecular changes that affected its resonant properties, and an instrument that had been played for two hundred and forty-four years had been vibrated for two hundred and forty-four years, and the vibrations had shaped the wood the way a river shapes its banks, by constant repetition, by the patient application of energy over time.

"Sit down," Martin said. "I made tea."

They sat in the kitchen, at the table, the table where they had once eaten dinner every evening, the table that was smaller than Clara remembered or that the kitchen was larger, the proportions shifted by the absence of the second person's claim on the space, and Martin poured tea into mugs — two mugs that Clara did not recognize, new mugs, Martin's mugs — and they sat with the tea and the silence between them and the Gagliano in the other room.

"How is the work," Martin said.

"Fine. Busy. The usual."

"And Yuki."

"She's getting good. She tuned a whole piano last month at Franklin. By herself. The temperament was clean."

"Does she remind you of yourself."

Clara thought about this. "She reminds me of the part of myself that was uncertain. The part that didn't know yet whether the ear was good enough."

"Your ear was always good enough."

"I didn't know that then."

"Your father knew."

"My father decided. Which is different from knowing."

Martin drank his tea. He had a way of holding the mug that Clara remembered — both hands wrapped around it, the fingers interlaced, the mug cradled rather than gripped — and the gesture was so familiar, so particular to Martin, that Clara felt the physical memory of it before the emotional memory, the body recognizing the gesture before the mind catalogued it, the way the ear recognizes a pitch before the brain names the note.

"I'm retiring in June," Martin said. "I told the orchestra last week."

"You mentioned it last summer."

"I've decided now. June. The last concert is Beethoven's Ninth. Appropriate, I think. The Ninth has everything. You end with the Ninth and there's nothing left unsaid."

"What will you do."

"Teach, maybe. Play chamber music. There's a quartet that meets at Reed College. Amateurs, mostly, but they play well. I might join them."

"You'll miss the orchestra."

"I'll miss the sound. You can't replicate the sound of a full orchestra with four people. But you can make a different sound. A smaller sound. A more — intimate sound."

Clara looked at Martin across the table. His hands around the mug. His gray hair. His face, which was both the face she had married and not the face she had married, the way the Steinway at the Schnitzer was both the piano Leonard had chosen and not the piano Leonard had chosen, the instrument changed by time but continuous through the change, the identity persisting even as the particulars shifted.

"Martin," she said.

"Yes."

She had not planned to tell him. She had not come to his house with the intention of telling him. She had come to hear the cello, to listen to the Gagliano, to spend an evening in the presence of music and in the company of a person who understood music, and she had not planned to tell him about the audiogram, about the loss, about the upper frequencies that were fading, about the four errors in sixty tunings, about the Korg, about any of it, and yet she was sitting at his table with tea in a mug she did not recognize and the impulse to tell him was present, was strong, was the impulse of a person who has been carrying a weight alone and who sees, in the person across the table, someone who would understand the weight, who would not minimize it or dramatize it but would hear it the way a musician hears a dissonance — as a fact, as a condition, as something that changes the sound.

"I've been thinking about something," she said.

"About what."

She looked at the tea. She looked at the mug. She looked at Martin's hands.

"About the upper treble," she said. "About the top octave. About whether —"

She stopped. She could feel the words forming, the sentence that would contain the information, the statement that would convert the private fact into a shared fact, and the conversion felt irreversible, felt like striking the fork — once struck, the vibration could not be unstruck, the sound could not be unproduced, the information could not be unshared.

"Whether what," Martin said.

"Whether the tuning is as good as it used to be."

Martin set down the mug. His expression changed — not dramatically, not to alarm or concern, but to a quality of attention that Clara recognized from the years of their marriage, the quality that Martin brought to anything that mattered, the focusing, the quieting, the turning of the full ear toward the sound.

"What do you mean," he said.

"I mean that the top octave is harder than it used to be. The highest notes. The beats are harder to hear."

She had said it. She had not said "hearing loss" or "audiogram" or "presbycusis." She had said what she had said in the language of the work, in the vocabulary of tuning, and the vocabulary was both accurate and evasive, was both the truth and a translation of the truth into terms that were more comfortable, less clinical, less final.

Martin was quiet for a long moment. He looked at Clara with the expression of a musician who has heard a note go out of tune and is deciding whether to mention it.

"How long," he said.

"Six months. Maybe longer. I noticed it in the fall."

"Have you seen someone."

"An audiologist. In October. Again in January."

"And."

"High-frequency loss. Mild to moderate. Progressive."

Martin's face did not change but his hands tightened around the mug, the fingers pressing against the ceramic, the knuckles whitening slightly, and this was the only sign of the emotion that the words had produced, the only indication that Martin had heard in Clara's clinical summary the thing that the clinical summary contained, which was not just a medical fact but an existential one, not just a diagnosis but a sentence, the sentence being not that Clara would stop tuning but that Clara's tuning would stop being what it had been, would stop being the thing that Leonard had made, the thing that the Portland Symphony depended on, the thing that Mrs. Ashford trusted.

"Clara," Martin said.

"Don't," Clara said. "Don't say what you're going to say."

"What am I going to say."

"You're going to say it will be all right."

"I was going to say I'm sorry."

Clara looked at him. The two statements — "it will be all right" and "I'm sorry" — occupied different positions on the spectrum of response, and the difference between them was the difference Martin had always understood, the difference between reassurance, which was what people offered when they wanted to make you feel better, and acknowledgment, which was what people offered when they wanted to make you feel heard, and Martin had always been better at acknowledgment than reassurance, had always understood that Clara did not want to feel better, wanted to feel heard, wanted the sound she made to be received by an ear that could receive it, fully, without simplification, without the reduction that reassurance performed.

"I'm sorry too," Clara said, and the words were inadequate and she knew they were inadequate and Martin knew they were inadequate and the inadequacy was all right, was acceptable, was the equal temperament of human speech, every word slightly imprecise, every statement a compromise between what was meant and what was said, the thought always larger than the language, the experience always richer than the description.

They sat with the tea and the inadequate words and the cello in the other room and the rain on the windows, and after a while Martin said, "Play me the fork."

Clara reached into her bag, which she had brought from the car, which she always brought from the car because the bag contained the fork and the fork was — she would not have used the word "talisman" but the word was not entirely wrong — the fork was the thing she carried, the thing she kept with her, and she took the fork from the bag and struck it against her knee and held it up, and the A rang in the kitchen, thin and clear and precise, and Martin heard it and Clara heard it and the fork vibrated at 440 hertz and the two of them sat at the table and listened to the A decay in the kitchen where they had once been married and were now not married, and the A was the same A it had always been, unchanged, undiminished, the one fixed point, and it decayed and disappeared and the kitchen was silent.

"That's the one Leonard carried from Leningrad," Martin said.

"Yes."

"I always loved that fork. It sounded like certainty."

"It is certainty," Clara said. "It's the only certainty I have."

Martin reached across the table and took Clara's hand, the hand that was not holding the fork, and held it, and Clara let him hold it, and the touch was neither romantic nor perfunctory but something between, something in the register of tenderness that exists between two people who have loved each other and lost each other and found, in the losing, a different kind of closeness, a closeness that was not the closeness of marriage but the closeness of shared understanding, the closeness of two ears that had been trained on the same sounds, two lives that had been organized by the same frequencies.

He held her hand for a moment and then released it. Clara put the fork back in the bag. Martin poured more tea. They talked about other things — the symphony's spring season, Yuki's progress, Mrs. Ashford's Bösendorfer, the weather — and at nine o'clock Clara said she should go, and Martin walked her to the door, and at the door Clara turned and said, "The Gagliano."

"Yes."

"It sounds like it remembers."

Martin smiled. "I know. That's what I wanted you to hear."

Clara drove home through the rain. She parked in front of her house and sat in the car and thought about the evening, about the cello and the tea and the hand and the fork and the words she had said, the disclosure she had made, the private fact she had made shared, and the sharing had changed the fact, had made it more real, more dimensional, the way a piano's sound becomes more dimensional when the lid is raised, the sound traveling outward instead of inward, the room receiving what had been contained.

She had told Martin.

She had not told Yuki. She had not told Mrs. Ashford. She had not told the symphony. She had told Martin, who was the person she had once been closest to, the person who had known her hearing at its best, who had heard her tune the Steinway when every note was certain, when every interval was clean, when the top octave was as clear as the middle octave, and Martin would carry this knowledge now, would hold it, and the holding would be — Clara searched for the word — the holding would be a form of witness, a confirmation that the loss was real, that it mattered, that it was not nothing.

She went inside. She did not strike the fork. She went to bed.

In the morning there were pianos to tune.