November142011
story by kpbstevens
A Visit from the Piano Tuner
Mr. Gilbert lifted the front panel off of the piano and revealed the hammers and the tuning pins and the strings. Renata stood by the patio doors and watched him. Without its front panel the piano looked terribly exposed, no longer lush and capable of catching and holding the light from the window, but rawly mechanical. She felt that she was looking at viscera. Mr. Gilbert’s hands were old, the skin sinking from the bones and creating pale cavities between the knuckles. His skin was mottled with age spots and looked incredibly soft. He was wearing green jeans that were so faded with washing that they looked almost dusty. His shirt was also faded, a reduced blue with an open collar and a breast pocket that was ripped at the corner.
He sat on her piano bench with his body half turned. He didn’t seem to be aware of her presence. He set out his chromatic tuner, and his tuning wrench, and his mute, and then he ran a slow hand over the vertical strings, and Renata could almost feel their rasp against the back of his nails. “This is a very good piano,” he said to her, not looking at her, and she had a distinct memory of him tuning the piano while sitting in her mother’s piano room, while a younger version of herself, still in high school but gathering her maturity about her like a shawl, stood in the doorway, watching him. She didn’t remember being offended by the sight of the piano’s inner workings, then. Now he took the mute and slid it over a string, and played a C, listening with his head cocked and inserting the tuning wrench over a pin, turning slightly, his old, thin, soft hand firm on the wrench’s wooden handle. She closed her eyes and listened with him as the note wavered and then steadied into tune. Then she opened her eyes, because in that moment she had felt her lips purse and imagined the fading, almost baby-like taste of Mr. Gilbert’s mouth.
He had already slipped the mute to another string, and was playing a note and turning the wrench with an accountant’s dull efficiency. She turned and went out onto the patio. She clutched the railing and looked down over the spreading lawn. Sunlight was hot against the grass, and the distant line of trees were static with light, as if the light had captured it and the grass and the blue sky with the sudden, insistent popping of a flash bulb. She squeezed the railing and listened to him shifting quickly between notes in the room behind her. Had he felt it? That abrupt, insistent longing as he tuned that first note?
He would be at it for hours. She couldn’t stand on the patio the entire time. She didn’t want to walk back through the room. But she made herself turn and go back in. As soon as she crossed the threshold she felt it again, that wave of longing that was like the membrane of an egg, emanating out from him and surrounding her and pulling her further in. She felt blood rush to her face. She went quickly to the sofa and sat down and picked up a magazine. Her neck was tight and her fingers could barely grasp the slipperiness of the pages. She made herself concentrate and thought, “It’s only because you’re lonely. You’re so lonely that you’re lusting after an eighty year old piano tuner.” She stifled a laugh, then glanced up quickly to see if he had noticed. He had turned to face the piano and was fiddling with his mute and his wrench. His shoulders were small and hunched inward. She saw that he had a sore at the top of his head, where his hair thinned and the skin was pink and shiny. She stared at the sore and the longing drained from her body. She turned her head and looked through the patio door and laughed again. Then her mouth turned downwards and she felt her loneliness, as hard and thick as the sunlight against the hot glass, and she wanted him to put the front panel back on the piano so that she could look at it and see the warmth of its wood, the dark-stained whorls, and maybe lay her hands flat against it, or her cheek, and feel its smooth polish - her one consoling thing.
Tags: /piano /piano tuning /loneliness /heartache
