by Chris Cander
As they slept off their profound drunkenness in their rooms down the hallway, the fire reached from the couch to the rug and the two wingback chairs and pedestal table that had been briefly displaced to accommodate the Blüthner and then soon returned to their original positions. The fire’s boiling black smoke collected and swirled at the ceiling, where the untended smoke alarm remained silent, its battery having been removed long ago and its replacement forgotten. Once it had filled the living room, the smoke crawled into the other rooms, devouring the oxygen it needed to burn, until it reached its ghostly fingers into the lungs of Bruce and Alice, stopping their heartbeats before they realized their air had been stolen, that everything around them was turning to ash.
CLARA COULD FEEL the rising sunlight even before she opened her eyes, as if the morning was knocking at her temples. Squeezing her lids shut only made it worse, so she covered her face with an arm to block out the light as she inventoried and reconciled her memories of the previous night. Oh no, she thought, as the events reassembled themselves in chronological order. She fell into relationships fairly quickly, but rarely did she fall so quickly into someone’s bed.
Holding still, she listened for the sound of Greg’s breathing. He was a heavy sleeper, snoring with his mouth open, and she’d been awakened several times; once, she’d watched his fingers flutter over what might have been an imaginary keyboard. But now the inside of the truck was quiet. Tentatively, she slid her unbroken hand across the blankets, feeling for a body. Finding none, she opened her eyes, recoiling from the pinkish early light, and sat up with a blanket clutched to her chest. She checked for pain in her broken hand, and was relieved that it didn’t ache as much as it had after she’d finally stopped hitting him with it. Everything else hurt instead: her head, her back, her joints. She cringed at the memory of her uninhibited dominance, the urgent grinding her knees had endured. She lay back and pulled the blanket over her head, pretending as a child does that if she can’t see anyone, then no one can see her, either.
The need to relieve herself finally forced Clara to stand and dress and finger-comb her hair and smack away the sour taste of her wine-infused breath. She closed the lid over the piano keys, though it was she who felt exposed.
She poked her head out of the bay door and looked right and left. Greg was fifty yards away, watching the sunrise with his hands in his pockets. She crept out of the truck and went around behind it, on the road side, to do her business. Then she picked up a water jug and took several long swallows, gargled and spit, and splashed some water on her face. Greg had sounded confident about the guys returning early, so she didn’t worry about conserving water. She found some gum in her pack and was grateful for her foresight in matters related to travel and comfort, if not in alcohol and men. Then, when she felt like she could avoid it no longer, she walked out onto the playa toward Greg.
“Good morning,” he said. He smiled, stopped, and smiled again as though testing whether the intimacy between them had held through the night.
“Morning.” Whatever expression she offered must have granted him permission, for he leaned in and kissed her, then turned her toward the rising sun, wrapped his arms around her from behind, and rested his chin on her shoulder. Last night’s rainstorm had been intense and brief. Now the sky was clear and the ground already dry.
“Think you and I could get the piano safely out of the truck? This light is perfect. I had an idea of bringing it out here onto the floor and laying it down on its side on top of some blankets. What do you think?” He squeezed her, kissed her on the neck.
“Symbolic.”
“Exactly.”
“Listen, Greg—”
“Clara, listen—”
“You go.”
“No, you.”
Clara sighed. “I was going to say that I’m sorry about last night. I drank too much and got a little overemotional. I wasn’t myself. I don’t know what got into me.”
“Apparently I did,” he said, turning her around. He winked at her, then kissed her again, more quickly this time, and said, “Don’t be sorry. I’m not.”
She pulled away, but not abruptly; she didn’t want to seem rude. “I don’t typically sleep with someone I hardly know,” she said.
“I wouldn’t have thought so,” he said. “That’s what makes it all the more important.” He took her by the hands, being extra careful with the broken one, cradling it in his open palm. She looked down; her cast was getting dirty, especially around the gauzy edges.
“Greg, I’m not sure…I mean, it was great—really great—but I’m not sure important is the right word.”
His own expression changed, a subtle lifting of the dark eyebrows, his pale stare belonging to someone bent on persuasion. “Actually, it’s exactly the right word. Hear me out, Clara. I know I wasn’t very welcoming when you showed up here. I couldn’t imagine what compelled you to drive all this way and then insist on staying. It was a little crazy, you have to admit.”
“I didn’t know you. I didn’t know if I could trust you.”
“Of course not. You couldn’t have known that we’d have anything in common, or that I loved your piano as much as you do. Or that we’d have a night like this.” His exaggerated leer made her smile. “I’m so glad we did. Aren’t you?”
She was, in fact, deeply uncertain about it—so sudden, so unexpected, so rough. But maybe that wasn’t a bad thing; she didn’t know. Certainly it had been a comfort. A release, at the least. She nodded.
“Good.” He took a breath. “But there’s something I need to tell you,” he said gravely. “Well, maybe I don’t need to, but I want to be honest with you.”
“Okay,” she said, mentally flipping through a catalog of concerns: he was married, he was a criminal, he had a sexually transmitted disease. They had used a condom, right?
“I was going to destroy the piano at the end of this trip. For the last photograph, I was going to push it off a cliff and shoot it as it was falling.”
He might as well have said he was planning to do the same to her. She swiveled toward him, ready to—what, hit him again? Before she could say or do anything, he lifted a hand in benediction. “Wait. Please. I didn’t know you then. I didn’t know about your attachment to the Blüthner. I tried to buy it first, remember? And of course I thought this one had already burned up. I was looking for a replica.”
“But why?” Her heart was pounding, visions of her Blüthner falling down the staircase returning to her, along with the same feeling of panic and imagined loss. “Why would you want to do that?”
“I’m not going to, not now. I promise you, Clara. Don’t worry; I have something even better in mind.” He put his hand on her wrist, over the cast. “Before you showed up, I thought I wanted the last picture to show how my mother’s story really ended. But now”—he squeezed her arm—“you’re here. That changes everything. You brought my mother back to me.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Greg. Bringing your mother back?” She stepped away. “This is all too weird.”
“Don’t, please. It’s not weird. Okay, maybe it is.” He sighed. “I’ve been angry for a really long time. Abandonment issues. That’s what my therapist calls them, anyway. When he found out about my mother’s suicide, he didn’t waste any time in diagnosing me with an ‘unhealthy coping style.’ It was actually his idea for me to do something creative to help me process her death. Something symbolic. So that’s why I thought of this, of retaking the photos from our Death Valley trip, but with the Blüthner in them. All alone, nobody playing it, no music to melt the ice. Just like in the story. Don’t you see?” he said, his voice going soft. “The piano is my mother. I wanted to show how it felt to me when she died. What it looked like when the music stopped.”
“So you were going to push it off a cliff? What’s the point of that? It wouldn’t bring her back. It wouldn’t change anythin
g.”
“I know that now, thanks to you,” he said. “I woke up thinking about an entirely different interpretation of the whole project. Putting the piano in the pictures doesn’t have to represent the end of the music. It can symbolize the potential for music. You know, like at any moment someone’s going to walk into the setting from outside the frame. Like the music’s still there, somewhere, even if the musician isn’t. It just has to be perceived differently. So now I don’t want to illustrate her death by imitating it. I probably wouldn’t have felt any better afterward. I might have felt even worse. Just thinking about it now makes me a little sick.” He closed his eyes, shook his head.
She looked at him carefully as her heart settled down to a normal pace. His passion was compelling; it was probably the first thing that had drawn her to him. “I like that idea,” she said, “illustrating the potential instead of the actual.”
Her head was still pounding, from the adrenaline, the hangover, the already too-bright sun. But she was also moved by how he was smiling at her, his straight white teeth like the keys on her piano, and when he reached for her hand she let him take it.
“Think about this. If you hadn’t listed the Blüthner for sale when you did, I never would’ve discovered that it had survived. I maybe could have found another one, and done the essay as I’d originally planned. And we never would have met. It might sound crazy to say so, but it feels a little bit like fate, doesn’t it? Or kismet or serendipity or whatever else people call it.”
“It is pretty strange,” she admitted. What were the chances they would ever find themselves out here, with the piano, in the middle of the desert? All her adult life she’d been prone to inertia, not impulse. Yet here she was. She remembered what Peter had said when she was notified that the piano had been purchased: I know how much you like signs. You should take that as one.
* * *
—
They could see Greg’s rental SUV approaching, the morning sun lighting up the dust that sprayed up behind it and lingered in the air like the contrail behind a jet. Clara and Greg walked back across the playa to the cooler, the truck, the piano. She looked around with new embarrassment at the tableau: an empty wine bottle lying in the dirt, having spilled out of the cab when she’d heard Greg playing, not far from her thermal blanket, crumpled and wet from the rain. Remembering the makeshift pallet in the truck bed, she climbed inside to tidy up the evidence of their lovemaking while Greg began picking up the mess outside. A torn-open condom wrapper fell from the blankets when she shook them out, but where was the condom itself? She pocketed the wrapper and searched for its contents. Hopefully Greg had somehow disposed of it. She pushed away the unpleasant image of the movers, having found the condom, disapproving of her.
The truck bed was silent. If at that moment she were asked to hum any part of the Scriabin’s prelude, she couldn’t have managed to. Gone, too, was the tactile memory of Greg’s hands: on the piano, on her skin.
She was grateful to hear the slam of doors and the low Hispanic voices. She jumped out of the truck and watched Juan and Beto haul two new ten-ply tires out of the SUV.
“Buenos,” Juan said after they’d rested the tires by the truck. “We have food.”
Clara was struck by the consistency of basic human needs, even during crises. It seemed a rude paradox that one could feel hunger and confusion simultaneously. Or lust and anger.
“Thank you,” she said.
They gathered around the open hatch, and Greg passed out coffee and foil-wrapped burritos and asked questions in a businesslike clip: where did they get the tires (the garage in Beatty they’d passed driving into Death Valley, which was open twenty-four hours), where they spent the night (the Death Valley Inn), did they pick up more water (sí). After they ate, Greg told the guys to move the piano out onto the playa so he could photograph it while they changed the tires. Against this familiar routine—Juan and Beto unloading and pushing and positioning the piano, Greg setting up his equipment and barking orders—for a moment Clara found it possible to pretend that the revelations and events of the previous night had been nothing but a dream.
She lingered by the truck, wanting to pitch in while knowing that she wouldn’t be able to loosen the lug nuts or jack up the truck with only one usable hand. She’d changed thousands of tires since her uncle had taught her how to do it, both in and outside of the garages where she’d worked. It was a small point of pride that whenever she drove past a stranded female, she stopped to offer aid. Protecting other women from the dangers of the road made her feel like a minor hero. Twice she’d stopped to help out male drivers. The first, a young professional in an uncomfortable-looking suit who was trying a little too hard to promote an image of power, hissed that he didn’t need any help, that an emergency roadside service had already been summoned. The second, a heavyset retiree sweating in his golf shirt, had accepted her offer with a lascivious smile and pushed his thin white hair off his forehead. While she was bent over, setting the jack under his car’s frame, he placed his hand on her rear end. She spun around to see that the other was down his pants. She only stopped for women after that.
She had gotten as far as positioning the jack beneath the truck’s rear axle when Juan returned from setting up the piano and took the tire tool from her. “You sleeping okay last night?” he asked, sounding genuinely concerned. He began loosening the lug nuts on the truck’s rear tire with an ease that made Clara jealous.
She nodded. “I’m good.” She looked away so he wouldn’t see the heat coloring her face. What portion of her shame was due to her inability to change a goddamn tire and what was due to how she’d passed the small hours inside the truck, she couldn’t say.
Under the bright sunlight, the polygon shapes of the playa blended together once more into an almost seamless plane. Greg moved around the piano, which was lying on its back atop the moving blankets, just as he’d suggested to her earlier, its fallboard open to the sky like a gaping mouth. She wasn’t worried for its safety; they’d been careful positioning it, far more so than she’d been with Greg the night before. He photographed it from various angles, then lay down on his stomach in front of it to shoot it from there. She couldn’t see his face at this distance, but the felicity of his movements made her wonder what he was thinking as he lay there next to the piano. About his mother or her? If his mother and her father had lived, had married, then she and Greg would be step-siblings. She considered this idea numbly.
When he finally stood up, with some difficulty, his clothing was covered with light-colored clay dust. She looked down at her own rumpled front. What she wouldn’t give for a shower. She found three aspirins in her bag and chased them with water from the plastic jug.
Minutes later, when Greg raised his hand and gave the circling motion with his finger, Clara said to Juan, “I think he’s finished,” and slipped one octave deeper into a sort of melancholy. Confused, broken, aching, dirty, watching everyone else fulfill some purpose either intrinsic or imposed.
Having replaced both tires, Juan and Beto walked out to fetch the piano. She wandered after them, thinking she could at least help Greg with his equipment. When she held out her good hand in a wordless offer, he gave her the tripod, then kissed her. She didn’t quite kiss him back, but instead looked over his shoulder in case the movers were watching, and was relieved that they weren’t.
GREG HAD HARDLY LEFT the couch in the ten days since the accident, refusing the privacy of his own bedroom so he could keep an eye on his mother. Each time his father passed through the room, Greg glared at him but said nothing. Katya had started sleeping in his bed, anticipating the time when she could leave Mikhail and begin a new life with Bruce, and reunited once more with her Blüthner.
She carried a lunch tray to Greg and put it down on the table. He stared blankly at the television, where a newscaster was reporting from the scene of a fatal house fire. “Grisha, why are you watchin
g this? So depressing.” She picked up the remote but hesitated as the camera panned to the hollowed-out house. “Two people confirmed dead,” the woman was saying. “Total loss of property.”
“So terrible,” Katya said, switching it off. It was hard enough to manage her own sadness; she couldn’t contemplate someone else’s. She thought of Bruce, and wondered if he’d asked Alice for a divorce the night before, if he’d carried his promise through, how she had reacted, and when they would tell their daughter? Katya looked at the telephone in its charging base. Surely he would call her soon, tomorrow if not today.
* * *
—
By Monday, she still hadn’t heard from him. She didn’t want to call him at home—she never did that—so she tried his office number at the university. It rang and rang, then went to voice mail—an automatic recording, not even his voice—and she remembered that he’d be teaching a class right then. She didn’t leave a message.
* * *
—
On Tuesday, she dialed his home number. If Alice answered, she would hang up; if Clara did, she’d ask to speak with her father. But no one picked up.
* * *
—
Wednesday morning, she was wrecked. It had been six days since they’d spoken. They couldn’t meet at the bungalow because Katya refused to leave her son, but Bruce had called to say he loved her, that Clara’s sleepover had been arranged, that he was moving forward with his plan. Why hadn’t he called since then? Maybe he was sick. Still, she needed to see him to put her mind at ease, so she decided to drive to his house. If his car was there but not his wife’s, perhaps she would be bold enough to ring the bell. Or perhaps she’d just pass by; she was desperate enough for that. What if he’d changed his mind? Or if when he’d asked, Alice had convinced him to stay, maybe just for the girl? That’s what had happened the last time, after Alice had discovered them.
