by Chris Cander
“Not right now, maybe. But what if people show up? Other photographers? There was a whole group of them back at the hotel.”
“Yeah, photographers who’ll see a moving truck with two flat tires and decide to break in just in case there’s a piano inside they could shoot?”
Her uncle’s advice: The customer’s always right, Clara. Remember that. Not always, she thought. “No, of course not. Only a lunatic would want to take pictures of a piano out here.”
“Oh, great,” he said, flapping his hand up and letting it drop against his thigh. “Fine. You want to stay here and stand guard? Be my guest. But we’re leaving.” He turned to the movers. “Lock up the truck.”
Clara followed him to the SUV.
“Changed your mind, then?” Greg asked, his tone bitter. “Better to stick with the lunatic you know than the ones you don’t?”
“Nope. I’m just going to get my stuff. And some water. In case you guys aren’t back until tomorrow, I’ll make myself comfortable. It’s been a while since I camped out. Might be fun.” She unloaded two gallons of water, her roadside emergency bag, her backpack, then reached into the cooler for a bottle of wine. “I’m sure you won’t mind,” she said. “Since you’ll be driving all night.”
“Take it all,” he said. “You might want to share it with all the other piano photographers that show up.” He grabbed the cooler and dropped it on the ground next to her gear. “Enjoy yourself. We’ll see you in the morning.” Then he turned to the movers and hitched his thumb at the car. “Vámonos.”
They looked at each other and then at Clara, obviously reluctant to leave her. She shook her head and gestured for them to go ahead. Beto walked over and handed her the truck keys.
She was neither surprised nor offended when Greg actually started the car and drove away, kicking up a spray of dust and pebbles. Clara watched them go, noticing with peaceful detachment through the back window that he kept his face forward, his eyes presumably just on the road. Juan, however, had turned to see her from the backseat. She stood there, half-thinking they’d stop and turn around but not minding at all if they didn’t, until the car stretched the road tight between them, until it was just another dark rock on the move.
* * *
—
Clara dragged the cooler and the rest of her things to the playa side of the truck, so she’d be hidden from anyone approaching on the road. The few cars that had been parked near the sailing stones had been gone by the time they’d finished the shoot, and none had passed since they’d left. But she didn’t like the idea of being exposed—not just to people, but to animals and the elements.
She looked up: clouds gathered, tore themselves apart, then gathered again, reflecting red and orange light as if the sky were on fire. The shadows were stretching longer over the packed, cracked earth, making the ground look like it was getting pulled apart at the seams. Except for the wind, Clara felt surrounded by an infinite and alien stillness. She considered the dual meaning of desert, the noun and the verb, and how appropriate it was that she would feel abandoned here. Watching the last light drain behind the mountains, she felt like the sun was dragging part of her with it below the horizon—the vigilant part that usually protected her from the slippery, empty feelings lurking inside her that she didn’t care to acknowledge. But standing in the middle of a desiccated lake in Death Valley as the sky turned dark, she could not ignore the suffocating return of loneliness, and the vague fear that she would always be alone.
She had lost her parents, her aunt and uncle, her boyfriend. She didn’t miss Ryan as much as she’d thought she would: she had been silently leaving him for many months before he finally realized the time had come; she was nearly at the end of that grieving when he asked her to move out. Now she felt that hollow space tugging at her, greedy with hunger, begging to be filled. Yet she was afraid of wanting anything too badly, because once she had whatever it was, it could so easily be lost.
She thought of Peter. Her current vulnerability worked against her long-standing resolve to maintain a safe emotional distance from him, to protect and preserve their friendship, until she felt choked with longing. She imagined him walking toward her from beyond the dimming horizon, carrying hot soup or a blanket to drive out the cold that was making her shiver. He would wait to be welcomed before allowing the half-smile to become a full one. She would hold out a hand in invitation and he would sit down next to her. Then he would open his arms and draw her into the large, tender space against his ribs. She would nestle herself against him for warmth, for comfort, and that small act would abate the creep of isolation that always threatened her—even and perhaps especially when she was with someone. She reached for her phone to call him.
Zero bars on the screen. She walked north on the road, thinking the signal would be stronger the closer she got to the main road. How had Greg gotten reception? Still nothing. She turned and walked in the other direction. One bar appeared, briefly, then was gone again. The wind picked up, and the temperature was dropping, and she wondered if a storm was coming. By now it was dark, and she was scared. Jogging back to the truck, she felt for the keys in her pocket. No cell service, no sign of any other people. No voices on the wind, no headlights in the distance.
She rummaged through the cooler: sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, a block of cheese, crackers and grapes and a bar of dark chocolate. Plenty of food, but she’d only grabbed two jugs of water. Why hadn’t she taken all of them? In fact, why had she insisted on staying behind in the first place? She kicked the truck’s door and thought of the story her uncle had told her about the guy bitten by a snake in Death Valley. There might be other dangerous animals out there besides reptiles. Bobcats or coyotes or mountain lions.
She picked up her pack and the thermal blanket and both bottles of wine. She’d save the water for later. She settled into the cab, locking the door behind herself. If the guys weren’t back by first light, she decided, she’d hike out. Surely someone would find her.
“I’D REMEMBER THIS ONE. Sure I would. Probably it was my old partner who worked on it—four years ago, you say? It was me, I’d remember it for sure. I see ’em all. Steinways, Yamahas, Melville Clark, Weber, Baldwin, what have you. List goes on and on. But you don’t see that many Blüthners here in the States, especially not uprights, and especially not one this old. In Europe, sure. Common as Kleenex. That’s how they talk about them, like we say Kleenex for tissue. They say Blüthner for piano. Well, that’s certainly true in the U.K. But you got it from a Russian, you say? Yeah, Russians love them, too. In fact, I hear they’re making a custom one right now for Vladimir Putin.” The technician lifted the fallboard and played a short tune with one hand, then ran through the scales, listening. “I can take care of the tuning right now, sure. Be a pleasure.”
The new owner shifted his weight, cleared his throat. “Well, actually I was hoping you might be able to take it back to your shop.” Given how his wife had glowered at him when he’d brought it home, he wondered if maybe that hadn’t been such a good idea after all. Maybe he should’ve taken it to work, or even rented a temporary storage unit.
“Oh no, that’s not necessary. It’ll only take an hour, ninety minutes tops,” the man said.
“I thought maybe it would be easier to do it in a more, I don’t know, professional setting.”
“Hardly ever makes any sense to move it for tuning. The transport’d cost more than the work. A total waste of your money. No, a tech’s always gonna come to you for tuning.”
“Well, isn’t there something else that you might need to do? I don’t know, maybe fix it up a little?”
The technician smiled. “This your first piano?”
He nodded.
“So let’s have a look here.” He opened the piano cabinet and peered inside. “This is a beautiful instrument, a real fine example of German engineering. An old one like this…let me check the serial nu
mber—yeah, this was probably made sometime between 1903 and 1907, not long after their fiftieth anniversary. Blüthners’re good for a hundred, hundred fifty years because of the soundboards. Julius had a real talent for hunting down just the right wood. Legend has it he’d travel to northern Romania back in the day to hammer the spruce trees, checking for tone. Only picked the ones that had real tight rings and didn’t leave any splinters, but they say he could tell by the way the tree fell if it’d make a good soundboard. So you got that going for you. A good soundboard like that improves over the years. The more it’s played, the more flexible it gets. Kind of like it remembers the music, you know?
“Looks like it was probably restrung last time it was in the shop. See how the strings are still pretty bright?” He bent toward the action to inspect it. “Yeah, not much oxidation. That’s a classic birdcage action there. It does sound kind of tubby, though. But looking at it now, I wouldn’t say you need to restring it again. Usually you only do that once in a piano’s lifetime, unless you have to replace the pinblock or the bridges. Yeah, I’d say everything looks pretty good. If you had it restored four years ago, I really think you don’t need anything more than tuning. Pity about these gouges on the lid, though. Nobody ebonizes wood anymore. That’s real craftsmanship right there. They used to add dozens of layers by hand back then. Now it’s all production lines, you know? Workers pressing buttons.” He passed his hand over the top of the case, pausing at the deepest cuts. “You want, I can tune it now, then take the lid back to the shop. Build these divots back up, sand them down flush, and respray it. Tricky to match black like this, especially using modern techniques, but I’d do my best. Ever watch performers onstage, dressed in all black? They leave the house thinking their black pants match their black shirt and black jacket, but under the stage lights they all look different? Kind of discordant? I could respray the whole case to keep it from looking patched, but then you’re talking real money. Depends on what you’re hoping for, and what you’re willing to spend.”
“I guess I hadn’t really thought about that.” He pulled his hand down his face, momentarily emphasizing the dark circles beneath his eyes. “Actually, I really just need to get it out of the house.”
“You thinking of selling it? Probably not much of a market for it, truth be told. You mind me asking how much you paid?”
“I don’t want to sell it. I just need to get it out of here for a little while. It’s causing…some friction between my wife and me, if you want to know the truth.”
“Huh,” the technician said, daring a glance around the sunny living room. “Well, I can’t say I’ve ever heard that one before. All right, in that case I guess I can take it back to the shop and hold it for you there. For a fee, you understand. I only have so much space. The workshop’s pretty small but I only have three other pianos right now, all grands, one I’m voicing and regulating and two I’m selling on consignment.”
“That sounds fine. And go ahead and do whatever you think is necessary while you’ve got it. But I don’t know if she’d want me to repaint the whole thing. Maybe just touch up the really bad spots if you can make them less visible. Could you do that?”
“Sure thing. And I subcontract with a good piano-moving company. I can call and see if they can come out here today if you want.”
“Please do that, yes. It is a beautiful piano, but it’s really screwing things up for me right now.”
CLARA WOKE UP to the sound of the wind. It was still dark. She pushed herself up, smacking the cottony residue from her mouth. She checked her phone: still life in the battery, still no signal. Thirsty, she thought about the water jugs she’d left beside the truck, but instead she drained the last sips of wine from the bottle. The wind whooshed in her ears, sending a shiver down her neck. It sounded almost musical. Gathering the blanket around her shoulders, she cocked her head. It wasn’t the wind.
Her mind must have been playing tricks; sure, she was a little drunk, but there was a different kind of throbbing inside her temples, thumping in a rhythm she recognized from long ago, something that one of her piano teachers had tried to teach her. Chopin? One of the nocturnes? Yet even tangled as she was inside the grogginess of an interrupted sleep, she knew the sound wasn’t just her imagination. She wasn’t nearly talented enough to hold such musical detail in her memory—unlike her father, or others whose minds could play entire pieces note for note, earworms digging tunnels into their temporal lobes. She turned in her seat, trying to orient herself to the melody. The varying speed of the wind lifted and dropped notes, making the music both difficult to follow and sound muffled and profoundly off-key. Perhaps she was still asleep, simply dreaming.
The melody seemed to be sloping downward, like stones crumbling down the ridge and onto the playa; then a higher-climbing crescendo and decrescendo brought to her the jagged ridges of the mountains surrounding them, and the notes that trilled on the treble end of the scale became sparks of color against the dust that lay on the floor of the world. Then the wavelike melody conducted the movement of the clouds undulating darkly overhead. She was seeing what she heard.
Then it stopped, just long enough for her to realize that not only was the music real, it was coming from her piano, muffled because it was inside the truck. She got out of the cab. “Hello?” she said, sotto voce. Her heart began beating faster as she tiptoed to the back of the truck, which was still closed. Had the movers forgotten to lock it?
The piece ended, whatever it was, and she froze in the abrupt silence. Perhaps she really had imagined it. She held her breath as long as she could, waiting. When she exhaled, it was visible in the cold air just as another piece began, fast and emphatic, with a continuous, almost frenetic rhythm. Her heart leapt again, because this one she did know. In fact, even after so many years of determined but ultimately failed lessons, it was the only piece she could recognize instantly, even if it was coming from an out-of-tune piano, because it was the one that her father had played again and again on the stereo for the last year or so of his life, that had proved impossible for her to play, that had haunted her in her dreams ever since. Scriabin’s Prelude no. 14 in E-flat Minor.
She remembered her father sitting in his study, his eyes closed and his hands grasping the chair’s arms as though trying to keep himself from floating away, listening to this piece he was playing loudly enough to annoy the neighbors. Early sunlight from the window lit up his dark red hair like a halo. Her mother had already left for work; it was his turn to drive her to school. Clara had come in to tell him they needed to leave or else she’d be tardy, but when she saw his white-knuckled clench of the armrests, and the tears rolling down his freshly shaved cheeks, she knew not to disturb him. She was hardly ever late for school, so her homeroom teacher would understand.
Daddy, she thought now, and her uncertainty vanished. She might have been standing in the desert in the middle of the night, or she might have been dreaming, or she might even have been on the threshold of madness, but she didn’t care. She hoisted the scrolled-down rear door, half-expecting to find the interior transformed and her father sitting there in his chair, waiting for her. She wouldn’t let him get away this time. She would crawl into his lap, like she’d desperately wanted to for the past fourteen years and even before then, and rest her lonesome head on his shoulder.
But instead it was Greg inside the truck, sitting on the cooler and a stack of blankets in front of her Blüthner, playing.
The piece was short, only a minute or so of bursting color and flying hands. Greg bent forward, hunched over the keyboard, his bad leg held rigidly out to the left, his right foot working the pedals. He didn’t seem to be aware of the door opening or the cold, dust-coated wind rushing in or Clara standing there with her mouth open. She could see a sheen of sweat on his pale, flushed face as he built up through the dynamic waves to the pounding climax, then fell down the cadence and came to an abrupt ending with a loud, slow crash. When h
e finished, he left his hands on the keys and put his head down on top of them, his torso heaving with gulping breaths.
A high-pitched yelp caught in his throat; then he released it in a fit of unself-conscious sobbing that pulled Clara to the edge of the open door. It may have been a terrible intrusion to eavesdrop on a grown man crying, but it seemed worse to let him do it alone. She lifted the edge of the blanket draping her like a cloak, pulled herself up into the bed, and sat down next to him on the improvised bench, tucking her feet underneath.
After a moment, he raised his face to wipe it against his sleeve. His left hand remained on the keys, flat and defeated. The firm voice of her former teacher returned to her: “Hold your hand like this, round like a ball.” Clara lifted her own hand, her good one, and placed it on top of Greg’s, a move that surprised both of them.
For several seconds, he was still. Then he sniffed once and, without looking at her, pressed his thumb onto her pinkie finger with just enough force to convey a message: Don’t move, stay here.
She stayed. “You came back,” she said. The relief she felt took her aback. “Why?”
“Juan. He doesn’t usually say much, that one, but he wouldn’t shut up about leaving you behind once we took off. A few miles up the road I started to agree with him, so I let myself out and told them to go on.”
“Guilty conscience?” she said.
“Always.”
“Are they here, too?”
“No, I told them to stay in town until morning but to get out here around dawn. No sense having everybody camping out, and I gave them cash to buy tires.” He paused. “I’m sorry I left you out here.”
“I’m sorry I called you a lunatic.”
“It’s okay. It’s probably a fairly accurate description.”
