by Chris Cander
Yet inside it vibrated with the recent memory of the piece that had been played on its lonesome keys a few nights before: Scriabin’s Prelude no. 14 in E-flat Minor. Could anyone still hear it? And it had been so long since the hammers had struck its strings in that specific, energetic combination. Oh, how hard it had tried to produce the right sounds, grateful as it was to finally have been asked to once again, but it had been jostled badly out of tune and already sagged beneath the weight of more than a hundred years.
The Blüthner carried the memory of every note it had ever created. Every chord, every scale. It held on to the emotion of every prelude and sonata. It had absorbed all the grief and longing and joy and exultation expressed through its action, the impression of every touch and every tear shed at its keyboard. And it remained partially wounded, even after the passage of time, by various scratches and dents and occasional episodes of careless, angry banging.
It felt as though it were twice its actual size, a burden to itself and to others. When the wind blew at it now, it could feel its insides shifting. Instead of music it produced only small, inaudible creaks and groans. It was like a very old woman, an ancient and childless babushka with little left to offer.
The hands that pressed against it weren’t there to play, only to push. After yet another uncomfortable and bumpy ride, it was wrestled off the dolly and positioned at the precarious rim of a cliff. Right there, someone yelled, as close to the edge as you can! Someone unwrapped it from its blankets, ran a soft cloth over its ebony case to erase the dust and fingerprints. But its brass pedals were neglected. Once gleaming and fleet, they were now as dirty as the bare feet of a prisoner being dragged to the gallows. The hands let go and stood back away from it, without anyone even noticing that the bottom beam on the bass end wasn’t touching anything. All five hundred and sixty pounds—plus the invisible emotional and musical heft—was imperfectly balanced several thousand feet above the ground below. I know how you can be free.
More hands on its case. Its fallboard was lifted to expose the keys, and the low-angled sunlight glinted on the ivory. Come stand here with me. Someone touched its keys, a stroke from the bass to treble end, then a plinking of notes one after another, not music. That’s not music. Let me go. There was a moment of stillness, bodies pressing close to its treble end: an arm draped on the top, a leg next to the truss. Can anyone hear me playing? Music of its own making, a record of its journey, pulsed and swirled silently inside.
Then there was movement, quick and explicit. Was it the music? The light? Then there was nobody standing close by, with only cold air pushing and voices shouting across the empty air.
I’m sorry.
The breeze collected some dust from the mountain and flung it all over. The music stopped; now there was debris inside the keyboard. The Blüthner wavered, paused, then wobbled harder when another gust pushed it off its dangerous balance.
What would it feel like to fly? To leave the summit and fall into the great void?
This is what it would feel like. Its lid and fallboard would lift at their hinges and sail away. The key sticks would rattle out of their octaves, come apart from the action, and all eighty-eight of them would float into the blue. The strings would unwind from their pins, sighing at the loosening of tension. The backstays and untended pedals would come loose from the rod, and the bridges and frame would break the case apart. The trusses would quit the key block and plinth, and the only thing the hammers would ever strike again would be the hard, salty surface of the earth. When the soundboard collapsed into splinters, all the accumulated notes would finally be released, and the piano once again as weightless and pure as it had been so long ago, when it was nothing more than a melodious idea contained inside a very tall spruce tree in the mountains. Good-bye, good-bye.
GREG MADE NO FURTHER mention of Peter. When Clara sat down at the table, he said, “The not-boyfriend won’t be joining us, then?” She shook her head, to which he nodded, and that was that. It was clear that he hadn’t expected Peter to stay, having already ordered and paid for just two matching meals—fried chicken strips, vodka martinis—and now he urged her to finish hers quickly so they could get on the road. She took a few bites, then slid her glass across the table to him, her appetite gone. He gulped the martini down and said, “Let’s go.”
He drove fast, apparently trying to make up for the delay. He put on a CD—a collection of Scriabin’s études, preludes, and mazurkas—and pursed his lips as though to blow her a kiss. “Fate,” he said. They passed stark-white sand dunes teeming with tourists and photographers. “Who knew a place called Death Valley would be so popular amongst the living?” he said. Clara could see a little boy sliding down a dune near the road on a flattened cardboard box, laughing while his father took his picture. She wondered if someday that photograph would replace the memory it was meant to memorialize.
A few years ago, a long-time Kappas customer became the accidental owner of a 1966 Triumph Bonneville when he successfully bid on an abandoned storage unit. The guy had never ridden a motorcycle before but wanted to, so he brought it to the shop to get it tuned up and said they were welcome to take it out if they felt like it. A beautiful machine, it was ported and polished, with high-compression pistons and rings, a welded crank, and a racing clutch. Peter and Clara opened it up on their lunch break, taking turns in front. On a straight stretch of highway heading east out of town, toward the mountains, Clara had gotten it up to 110 miles per hour with Peter holding on around her rib cage—gently, not clutching, trusting her—when they saw a police cruiser parked on the shoulder in the distance. What a rush of adrenaline! She knew that even if the cop wanted to stop them, by the time he got up to speed they’d already be miles down the road, and at exactly the same moment she decided not to slow down, Peter shouted above the rushing wind into her ear, “Keep going!” like he was reading her mind. If that bike had wings, they would’ve been flying. They leaned forward together, shouting and laughing as they passed the policeman.
How close to home would Peter be by now? She leaned her head against the glass, pretending to nap so she wouldn’t have to share her thoughts with Greg.
* * *
—
That evening Clara begged out of dinner, claiming she didn’t feel well. And she didn’t—not having had enough sleep the night before on the playa, having spent far too many hours on jarring roads and in the car in general—but mostly she wanted to be alone. Also, it had been strange at lunch, Greg ordering her food and the movers watching them with dawning awareness, then trying not to look at them at all. She didn’t want to repeat that experience, at least not yet. Instead, after letting him kiss her good night, she showered and fell right asleep so she wouldn’t have to think about anything at all.
Nor did she go back out with them on the following day’s shoot. Greg woke her with a knock on her door. He put the coffee and muffin he’d brought her down on the nightstand, then pulled her back into bed. “I still don’t feel great,” she said, heading off any question of intimacy.
“Let’s just lie here for a minute, then.” Fully clothed, he spooned himself behind her, his breath slow and hot on her neck. After a moment she could feel him getting hard, and he wriggled closer. “Feeling any better?” he whispered.
“Maybe later,” she said, and lay rigid, like she was playing dead.
Finally he sighed and pushed himself off the bed. “Well, I hate to leave you here all alone.”
“I’ll be fine. I just really need some more rest.”
He came around to her side of the bed and kissed her. “I’ll come back later to pick you up, okay? I’m going to do a couple shots nearby, and then there’s only one left, the last one of the series. It’ll be incredible, but it won’t work if you’re not there. Think you can make it to that one?”
She nodded.
“Wear that shirt I gave you, okay? I’ll meet you out front at three.”
He kissed her again.
She lay there for a long time after he left. The coffee he’d brought her went cold, then stale.
* * *
—
“This is going to be great,” Greg said. “Remember I said I had something better in mind for the last photo? Instead of capturing the end of my mother’s life, I want to capture the beginning of ours.” He ushered her into the parking lot without waiting for a response. It seemed she had been appended to Greg’s vision of his future, even without a hint of her approval.
They drove along the eastern side of the valley, with sunbeams lighting the pale hair on Clara’s arms and crawling into her lap through the glass. For half an hour, Greg didn’t stop talking as the road gradually wound up into the mountains, cutting through low hills speckled with shrubs that looked like fat, grazing sheep. She watched the moving truck in the side mirror, noting the lack of expression on Juan and Beto’s faces.
“Almost there,” Greg said as they approached a turnaround where a few campers and trailers were parked. A LIMITED ACCESS sign warned visitors in a vehicle longer than twenty-five feet not to risk driving the last few steep miles to the summit. Clara could hear the truck downshift behind them as they kept going up the fifteen-degree incline and around the tight, blind hairpin turns, with only low guardrails to prevent them from falling over the edge.
On car trips, her father used to indicate on the steering wheel how far away from their destination they were. The starting point was at the nine o’clock position, the destination at the three. Asked how much farther it was, he’d point somewhere on that top semicircle—her first lesson in percentages—and she would settle back into her seat, her expectations recalibrated. Greg, incessantly tapping on the steering wheel with either thumb, probably to a tune sheltering in his head, offered no such comfort, and to her it felt unsettling, as if they were going backward.
But wasn’t that what she was doing with Greg? Going backward into the past?
“Come on, come on,” Greg said, urging the car to giddy-up. As they neared the parking lot where the road ended, the mountains released them into a panorama of light and sky. Only two other cars were there, passengers strolling along the perimeter with their jackets flapping and their hands roofing their eyes, taking in the view.
It was at least twenty degrees colder than at the hotel and Clara held her arms wrapped around herself, shivering inside the flimsy T-shirt as she surveyed the vista. Juan and Beto wandered over, stretching, and Greg pointed at the ridge extending off to the southeast and along the dirt footpath cutting across it that led to the actual summit of Dante’s Peak. “Let’s get it out there, on top of that knob.” Juan cocked his head, as though calculating the possibility, and Greg said, “It’s fine. Just take it easy.”
According to the information plaque, they were at an elevation of 5,475 feet and directly above the white salt flats of Badwater Basin, where they’d been on Tuesday. Unencumbered views of the mountain ranges rose up all around before fading into the distance. The Funeral Mountains to the north, Coffin Peak to the southeast. With the exception of the wind and a couple trying to take their own picture—the woman holding her hat down, the man holding the camera out, both of them smiling into the sun with their backs to the valley floor below—everything was still. It looked abandoned, as though everything that could possibly happen already had, all its potential having been overtaken by the actual.
A deep sadness welled in her while she watched the movers struggle against the muscular wind to keep the piano on the dolly and Greg huddled over his equipment. After gathering what he needed, he leaned into the wind and, limping, led Juan and Beto toward the summit. “You coming, Clara?” he called over his shoulder, but she just stood there, unable to follow him any farther.
Perhaps it was a trick of the air moving so quickly at this high altitude, or maybe it was a reflex of her mind to counter the morbid silence, but Clara thought she could hear music. She angled her head toward the sound: it was the Scriabin piece, though slow and dirgelike, not at all how she was used to hearing it. But it was so clear she could swear it was coming from the piano, as if both the instrument and the music were trying to tell her something. Yet the Blüthner was wrapped and mute, being simultaneously pushed and pulled up the rocky pass. She thought of her father sitting in his study with his fingers tented at his forehead, listening to his stereo. We’ll get you lessons; you’ll learn to play the music in your own head. If he’d lived, would he have left her mother? Would he have gone to live with Katya, and taken the piano with him? Would she have lived there, too, with Greg as her stepbrother? Would she have grown up without the mortal daily fear of being alone?
For fourteen years she’d wondered where her piano had come from, what stories it carried with it when her father and his friends heaved it into her life and left it there. The various dealers and tuners and teachers had all remarked on it: how old, how solid, how moody, how nearly impossible to keep in tune. Whenever anyone played it, even an upbeat piece, it sounded melancholy. Had it also been melancholy for Greg’s mother? What if every single thing ever played on her Blüthner left an afterimage, a shadow of emotion deposited somewhere inside the case, on the soundboard or the hammers or the strings? What if—just as a photo album grew thick with memories of holidays, vacations, family, and friends—the piano gained the weight of each owner and his or her music?
She thought again of how it had looked sitting on Racetrack Playa among the sailing stones, all of them in a freeze-frame moment of departure with their dried-out trails curving behind them. Maybe they were so still not because they were at the mercy of the ice and wind, but because they were simply too heavy to go any farther. Was there a limit to how much her piano could absorb before it began to disintegrate under its own weight? Then she wondered, with a measure of guilt and grief, how much of her own inadequacy and unhappiness and sorrow had been imposed on it.
Before Clara, it had been Katya’s. And before that, whose? A long, fanciful history unspooled in her mind as Greg and the movers slogged along the ridge to Dante’s View, of the owner or series of owners and players and teachers and tuners before them. The piano’s maker. The person who sounded it for the first time. The people who carved the wood and assembled the innards. The person whose imagination conceived it, and held it as a thought before it came into being, ready to make the music it was destined or fated to. She pictured them as ghostly revenants, with their individual claims, trapped inside the ebony case. She, too, had been a ghost of sorts. But she didn’t have to remain one.
Greg pointed at the precipice and shouted, “Right there, as close to the edge as you can!”
They maneuvered it off the dolly and unwrapped it, the shine of its thick, black finish like an aura in the low slant of light. Clara’s breath caught in her throat; Scriabin’s ghost prelude banged inside her temples. Her head and chest were pounding. She had kept the Blüthner as a talisman, the only souvenir that had survived her childhood, the last gift her father had given her. Yet it hadn’t been a gift at all. It had been a cover story.
Death, Funeral, Coffin—it was all right there on the information sign. And she, who was always looking for signs, had failed to notice it until now. She gazed down at the valley floor, then back at the piano, swaying on the dolly, Beto and Juan shouting directions at each other about how to stabilize it. She imagined herself trudging up the difficult ridge with them on their forced march, pushing the Blüthner up and up and up like Sisyphus did to his boulder, always pushing toward something—which might feel like happiness or home—only to have it come back down again. She had suffered from the fear of loss for so long that not until now did she realize how shackled she’d become by it.
She gasped as the spell broke inside her, and she took off running toward Greg as fast as she dared on the unstable path.
He was crouched over, attaching a lens to his camera. “What is it?” he sa
id as he stood up. “You look so happy. I’m glad, because I need you in this one. This, our first portrait together. With the piano, of course.”
“I know how you can be free,” she told him, panting through a grin. “Both of us, we can just let it go.”
He put his hand on her shoulder, then slid it down the length of her arm to intertwine his fingers with hers. “What are you talking about? Let what go?”
“The piano.”
“Clara, I can’t even guess what you’re talking about. I told you, we have a chance at a new beginning right now. We have to hurry, though. It’s all set up, and I already set the timer, but we only have a little bit of time in this light.” He pointed at the sheer outcrop on a ridge beyond the piano. “See that cliff? My mother died there. I want to photograph us standing together next to the piano with the cliff blurred in the background. A triumph over tragedy.”
Clara didn’t care if her father had loved another woman. It didn’t matter. She even felt a surge of affection for him, and for her mother, too. Who knew what burdens they’d borne? What good would it do for her to blame them now for their failures in love?
“No, Greg.” She pulled her hand away, but still looked into his eyes. “It’s a terrible tragedy that we lost our parents. They lost each other. But we don’t have to keep doing this.”
“But I want to.” He looked hurt, and also scared.
“You don’t even know me. And I don’t know you.”
“We know enough.”
She smiled at him. What was he really hoping to accomplish here? Why did he think he could bring anything in Death Valley back to life? Greg was, she realized, just another way the piano would always hold her down. “What I know is that for me this piano was my father. I just didn’t realize that until a couple minutes ago. For you it’s your mother. But it’s not either of them. It’s only a piano. An old, out-of-tune, impossibly heavy, sad old piano that we’ve loved for all the wrong reasons.” She stepped toward him and gently held her bare hand to his face. He’d shaved around his goatee, and the skin was smooth and cool. “As wonderful as the other night was, it was for the wrong reasons, too. I can’t be with you, Greg. I don’t think we’d have a future together as much as a weird reenactment of our parents’ past.”
