The Weight of a Piano

by Chris Cander

  She stood without a word and led him into the other room and then she paused, contemplating whether she should take Boris to her bed. Would it protect her and Mikhail? Their child, who was right then sleeping on a pallet on the floor? But she couldn’t imagine such a betrayal. No. She took a breath and gestured to the narrow sofa against the wall. He sat, and she could feel his eyes on her as she took her place in front of the piano.

  She’d play, as he’d requested, but would be cautious. There would be no fluffy swans, yet nothing revolutionary, either. After a moment of consideration, she chose the second movement of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Piano Sonata in C-sharp Minor, written in 1865, during his last term at the conservatory, 112 years before she and her guest graduated.

  Boris made a small huff of acknowledgment. “Good one,” he said. The sofa squeaked a complaint as he settled back against the worn cushions.

  She imagined that he closed his eyes as she played the simple, marchlike theme, in a gesture of Soviet patriotism. She hoped the enthusiasm of her performance would conceal her deep unease.

  THE PHONE RANG.

  “Is this Clara?” The voice was low and melodic, like a radio personality’s, and the use of her first name sufficiently intimate to raise goose bumps on her arms.

  “Who’s this?”

  “It’s Greg Zeldin.”

  She glanced at the dead bolt to make sure it was locked. The leasing office had boasted about how the neighborhood was turning around, but Clara knew there had to be a reason the rent was so cheap. “How did you get my phone number?”

  “It was on the bottom of your invoice.”

  “Shit,” she said. “Why are you calling? Didn’t you get my e-mail?”

  “I did, yes. I thought we should talk about this in person.”

  “What?” Clara spread the blinds with her fingertips and peered through the twilight to be sure he wasn’t standing outside her apartment. Just because his address said New York didn’t mean he was actually there. “Look, I’m sorry,” she said, letting the blinds go with a small clatter. “The deal’s off. I never should’ve listed it for sale in the first place.”

  “But I’ve already paid you. I’ve already started making the arrangements. You can’t just call the deal off.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I can. I refunded the payment. So you keep your money, I’ll keep my piano, and we can forget this ever happened. Good night, Greg.” She was about to hang up when she heard his voice keening through the tiny speaker.

  “Wait! Please!”

  She put the phone back to her ear and sighed into it before flopping down on the futon and looking at the ceiling.

  “If it’s a matter of money, I’ll pay more.” His radio voice turned breathy and went up a few notes, as if he were trying and failing to sound calmer than he was.

  “It’s not about the money.”

  “Clara, please. Listen to me.” He cleared his throat. “I need that piano.”

  She tossed her good hand up in a gesture of frustration. “There are thousands of other pianos for sale. Better ones. Cheaper ones.”

  “I need that one.”

  She closed her eyes. “So do I.”

  He said nothing for a moment. Clara could hear him slowly exhaling. “Okay. How about this. Let me rent it.”

  “Rent it? For what?”

  “For a week, two weeks tops. Keep the money, and let my guys come pick it up. When I’m finished, I’ll have it delivered back to you.”

  “I didn’t mean for how long, I meant why.”

  “Does it matter?”

  She thought for a moment. “Well, it might if I were considering renting it, but I’m not. I’m sorry. I have to go now.”

  She let it go to voice mail the first time he called back, and the second. The third time she picked up right away and said, “Please, stop this.”

  “Let me explain,” he said, rushing his words. “I’m a photographer. I do commercial work, fashion, portraits, the occasional wedding if I need the money. And music—instruments, concerts, CD covers, that sort of thing.” He paused. “There’s a photo series I’ve been thinking about for a long time that would feature an antique, ebonized upright Blüthner. I’ve been looking for one for a while, and there just aren’t very many of them around. It would mean a lot to me if you would consider letting me use yours.”

  She stood up and paced the length of her small living room.

  “Clara?” Greg said. “Are you there?”

  “What kind of series?”

  There was another pause on his end. “Well, I’m trying to depict the absence of music.”

  “With a piano? How does a piano show an absence of music? It makes music.”

  “Does it?”

  She looked over at the Blüthner. Its silence was both an answer and a rebuke. “I guess not all the time.”

  “I’m fascinated by the instruments used to make music. And the people who play them to make music. But what happens to the music if the musician dies? Or the instrument’s destroyed? What then?”

  “I don’t know.” She made a small laughing sound, an audible blend of discomfort and curiosity.

  “Have you ever been in a car or at a party where loud music was playing, then suddenly it got turned off? There’s this after-echo of silence that you can feel. You can even see it, like there’s been some physical shift in the space. Do you know what I mean?” He took a deep breath. “So I want to use the piano—your piano—as the symbol of what it feels like to inhabit the world when the music stops. I want to show it just being there, nobody playing it, just an ordinary object.”

  She was intrigued by his idea: that was exactly what the Blüthner was in her life. But she was still unconvinced. “I still don’t understand why you need this piano.”

  When he answered, his voice was strained. “My mom used to play an upright Blüthner when I was a kid, and I’ve never forgotten it. I guess I’m sentimental.”

  Goose bumps flared up again on Clara’s arms. She hadn’t heard anyone speak as ardently about music since her father died. It was the one thing he’d ever seemed passionate about. She thought of her mother: arms crossed, no-nonsense shoes even on Saturday mornings, shoulder pads under all her blouses and jackets like a football player or a soldier suited up and ready to take the field. Then she thought of her father: a ghost even before he died, a shadow behind an unfolded newspaper, a disembodied voice on the phone saying, I’ll be home late, don’t wait dinner for me. Even if her parents were ignoring each other and her, too, she’d give anything to be back inside their yellow cottage, lying on the living room floor as some strain of classical music and cigarette smoke floated through the air above her.

  “Where would you do it? In New York?”

  “No, in California. Not too far from Bakersfield, actually. Like I said, I’d only need it for a week and a half or so, maybe not even that long if everything goes right, and I’m sure it will. The guys I’ll use to move it are really good. They’ve worked for a set designer in Los Angeles for years and I’ve used them a couple times before on big jobs,” he said. “That’s not such a bad deal, is it? Three thousand bucks for less than two weeks’ rental?”

  No, she figured. It wasn’t.

  “So what do you say? If you let me rent it, then we both get what we want.” He sounded so convincing, so sure of himself, that by contrast Clara immediately realized how uncertain she was about everything: the crappy apartment, her financial situation, her breakup with Ryan, her future. Even the damn piano she couldn’t play and couldn’t part with. I hope you figure out whatever it is you want, I really do.

  “Fine,” she said, “you can rent it. But it’ll cost you five grand, not three, plus extra if you keep it longer than two weeks. It goes out of tune whenever you move it, and it’s not cheap to fix. Okay?”

  “Oka
y,” he said with obvious relief. “That’s great, Clara. It’s terrific. Thank you.” Her name from his mouth was like a caress in her ear. She pressed it harder against the phone. “I’ll send you the money now. My guys’ll be there this Saturday, the twenty-seventh. Does that work for you?”

  “That’ll work,” Clara said. “By the way—well, maybe they’ll expect it if they’re professionals—but it took three friends and me to get it up a flight of stairs.”

  “They can handle it.”

  “And you promise you’ll take good care of it?”

  “Yes,” he said, “of course. I’ll sign a rental agreement if you’d like.”

  “How can I be sure that you’ll be careful?”

  “How can we be sure of anything?” he said. “I guess you’ll just have to trust me.”

  * * *

  —

  After they hung up, Clara looked him up on the Internet. His website featured collections of work in the various categories he’d mentioned, and she clicked through all of them. His style was distinctive. He seemed to like stark contrasts: big swaths of sky and earth and human figures stirring between them. She was especially drawn to the landscapes, which conveyed movement that had been stopped in time: wind in trees, waves on a beach, water spilling over a cliff, storm clouds boiling in the sky. She found it interesting that in the portraits, few of the subjects’ faces were clear; instead, their identities were obscured in profile or beneath heavy shadows or simply blurred. The work appealed to her. Unfussy, straightforward, clean.

  She clicked on the biography tab.

  “I record what is there and what is not, so that you may see what it is that I hear.”

  —Greg Zeldin

  Greg Zeldin was raised in Los Angeles. He moved to New York in his early twenties to study music and fine art photography. He spent several years assisting many of the world’s top advertising and fashion photographers before opening his own studio five years ago.

  Greg has drawn upon traditional and modern photographic techniques as well as his understanding of musical composition to develop a synesthetic style that New York Times art critic Euben Goethe has called “an interpretation of the mysterious forces of music, nature, time and humanity that is as deeply lyrical as it is visual.”

  Greg is available for documentary, editorial, and commercial projects. For additional information concerning bookings, exhibitions, or ordering prints, please contact us. Thank you for visiting.

  “When we separate music from life we get art.”

  —John Cage, composer

  Unlike the obscured faces in his portraits, his own head shot was startlingly clear: his torso was angled aside but his face was turned directly toward the camera, one thick eyebrow arched in an expression at once arrogant and vulnerable. It seemed in conflict with itself, and he might’ve looked menacing except for the baby-bird quality of his translucent skin and the downy fuzz that his receding hairline had left behind. His lips were full and pouty against a square jawline, and while they suggested a smile, there was no hint of one at the corners of his intensely light blue eyes. The sly gaze was so unrelenting that Clara felt as though he were right there in the room, staring at her.

  So that you may see what it is that I hear. She looked at the piano and thought about that. She had known people who always heard music in their minds, always humming or whistling or tapping along to a beat that drummed only in their imaginations. Her father had once taken her to a performance of Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev by a young American pianist. Clara couldn’t remember anything about the concert except for his comments about it afterward. He said that the way the pianist’s hands flew across the keyboard, how she shifted her entire body with the pull and sway of the music, made him feel the concertos right down to his bones. He also said he’d be able to hear them again anytime he wanted in his mind, that he wished he had a talent for making music but didn’t, so he was grateful for the mental recordings. “Do you keep music in your head like that, Clara?” he asked. Searching her imagination for an answer and finding none, she simply nodded. “Then you understand,” he said solemnly, and drove her home in silence.

  She wondered now what having a jukebox in your mind would be like. Whenever anything did get stuck in her head—a jingle from a television commercial, some popular tune—she found it claustrophobic and couldn’t wait for it to stop. When music was playing on a stereo or in the garage, she could tune it out or switch it off if it got tiresome, but now she wondered if this was a shortcoming on her part. If she’d been able to hold a song in her mind, perhaps she could’ve learned how to really play the piano. She might’ve been like that concert pianist they’d seen, whose hands were probably delicate and clean instead of callused and grease-stained and broken.

  KATYA THREADED HER HANDS into her hair, yanking it at the roots. Mikhail watched without betraying his growing anger as small clumps of it fell to the rectangle of carpet that looked newer than the rest. “What have you done?” she screamed. “What have you done? What have you done?”

  Grisha was on the floor, crying along with his mother; next to him, where she’d dropped it, the avoska spilled the whole chicken she’d stood in line for two hours to buy.

  “What have I done, Katya?” Mikhail’s voice began its trembling ascension. “What have I done? I told you I would think of how to take your piano out of Russia. I could’ve pushed it out of the window or burned it for fuel, but I told you I would find a plan, and I did. You should be on your knees in front of me, thanking me in every way you can imagine for my brilliant solution to your problem—not shrieking at me like this.” His pale cheeks bloomed red, and he tapped the thinning patch of hair at his temple. “For a year you’ve treated me like a second-class citizen. So gloomy all the time. Never smiling. You just want to rot here in this place, eh? You tell me you won’t leave without that fucking piano, so I thought and thought and then after you tell me about the visit from your pansy ballerino, my mind gave me the idea you should be thanking me for. Now here you are, making my son cry, disturbing the neighbors, disfiguring yourself. Stand up! You disgust me.”

  Katya had sunk down onto the carpet where her piano had stood for the three years they’d lived in this shabby apartment. Finished with her hair, she clutched at the fibers that had cushioned the Blüthner, absorbing the vibrations of her music.

  “That night I went to see Boris, you should’ve seen his face!” At this, Mikhail laughed. “Let us say he was not expecting a visit from me. Such a guilty look on him! He’s no KGB, I tell you. When he told you about his fancy ideas, did you wonder how he could ever get the money he needed? Maybe he is some Menshevik turning pirouettes into social reform, I don’t know. I don’t care. But I know something about him that you do not.”

  “What are you saying?” she asked without looking at him. “Just tell me what you did with my piano.” Her tears fell into the fibers; it felt as though her entire soul would leak out from her eyes.

  “Simple,” he said, his voice brightening with his own self-regard. “I never could believe that a man like him, so light like a whisper, elegant as a tsarina, would have such love for a woman, but he does, Katerina, he does.” Mikhail bent down next to her, his knees popping as he crouched. He reached under her chin with his thick index finger and lifted her face toward him so he could look at her. “And it is not you. It is the babki he carries in his wallet.

  “To find weakness is not so difficult, you know,” he continued. “Doesn’t matter if you’re talking about a structure or a circuit or a person. A good engineer knows what to look for, but a great engineer can see it without effort. Boris’s weakness is as obvious as his dainty loafers. Nobody in Russia can afford such things, Katerina. When you lent him my slippers at the door the day he came here, did you notice how fine and soft his shoes were? Italian-made, without question. Even if a ballerino travels to Italy, he cannot afford these lu
xuries on a Soviet salary. Do you see where I’m going with this? Has your soft mind caught up with me yet?”

  Mikhail laughed. “I will give your small friend credit; he understood very quickly. When I mentioned his fine loafers and suggested that the KGB might like to know where he got the cabbage for such things, he realized the dangerous situation he was in. It’s not so hard to see, is it, Katerina? I didn’t know exactly what he is buying and selling, but when I guessed that it was something he could transport in his ass while he was twirling across the border, then sell to someone who would put it up his nose, his face told me I was correct. Maybe after he buys those fancy shoes he uses his drug money to fund his little revolution, I don’t know. Good for him. And what he puts up his ass is of no interest to me, Katya. I’m sure it has been stretched out many times by a variety of objects. But the KGB has great imagination for such things. There is no telling how creatively they would explore Boris’s cavernous hole if they had reason to believe he was hiding something there.”

  “Where is my piano?”

  “Chi-chi-chi. I’m trying to tell you. I made a proposition to him. In exchange for my silence, I offered to sell it to him.”

  “Why?” she screamed.

  “It’s only temporary, Katya. My solution for getting your fucking piano safely out of Russia. We will go to Europe first, I told you. Boris also goes to Europe with his ballet company, as a cover to move drugs, yes? And also to buy shoes.” He laughed again. “So I suggested he pack his opiates behind the—what do you call it? The iron frame? I think he even agreed it was much more logical for a traveling ballerino to hide his inventory in a musical instrument instead of inside his abused rectum. I’m surprised he hadn’t thought of it before. Perhaps he could transport the same amount—who knows how vast his own emptiness is—but certainly it would be easier to feign innocence if the drugs were discovered inside a piano. And then he could still enjoy a decent shit along the way. And, when he finishes his smuggling, he gives us back the piano. Everybody’s happy.” Mikhail smiled broadly, baring his small, yellow teeth, and opened his hands in a gesture of triumph. “See, I promised you I would solve this problem. Now, stop with the crying before your misery becomes contagious. Soon we will go. We will all have a big adventure, even your precious piano.”