Grief in four movements

Movement 1 
I follow closely as the woman shuffles into a living room crowded with floral sofas. She gestures towards an old upright piano as I place my bag of tools down on the carpet. 

Oh dear, one of those pianos. Unable to think of something more tactful, I say, “I rarely see this model of piano anymore.” (Thankfully!)

The lady beams and the shaking of her blue-veined hands becomes more pronounced. “It belonged to my Auntie,” she explains, pride in the quavers of her voice. “It is ninety years old, and a good quality piano.” 

“Lippman was one of many brands from the early 1900s,” I say carefully. “Every household had a piano, and there was such a demand for instruments that the quality of workmanship suffered. Few of the pianos from that era are in working order today.” 

“That makes my piano special, doesn’t it?” 

I must have been too tactful. 

My fake smile vanishes as I remove the upper and lower sounding boards to reveal the piano strings. The outer shell of the piano smells of fresh polish, but the mechanism reminds me of a Jewish proverb; They paint the sepulchres white, but inside are rotting bones.

“Some of the strings have frayed badly,” I tell the woman.

“But I always took great care of the piano!”

I choose more direct words. “The reason there are few Lippman pianos left today is that mass production sometimes led to poorer quality workmanship and design.”

“Oh, but my piano is handcrafted!” She adds, “My grandson is showing promise. His family does not have a piano, so he will be coming over to practice on mine.” 

Oh dear. I play some simple thirds, but the lack of harmonisation and horrendous pitch compel me to stop. Some of the keys are warped, and the internal mechanism is disintegrating as time compounds the issues created by poor workmanship. 

I’m a piano tuner, not a miracle-worker. 

I explain that no matter my efforts, playing the piano will expedite its decline. 

But she still smiles. There is something about the smile that makes me think of Celeste. I push thoughts of Celeste away and listen to the woman’s words. 

“I know it is not a grand piano,” she says, “But it is wonderful to think that my grandson will learn to play on his great-great-aunt’s piano.”

“I know you treasure this piano, but perhaps you should consider retiring it. If your grandson tries to learn piano on this instrument, he will be unable to recognise the correct sound of each note and chord, and he likely will develop bad techniques to compensate for faulty keys. A modern keyboard would give him a better opportunity.”

“A keyboard! Oh no, not when he can learn on a family heirloom.”

I hint that she could spend my quoted fee instead on a keyboard for her grandson. But at the end of my explanations, she asks me to tune the piano. 

I try. I work my way along the keyboard, one string at a time. It is a disheartening task. The felt has worn off the hammers and the keys still stick. The tuning pegs are too smooth and the wires too brittle for me to be confident that my work will hold. How could the lady not see and hear that this piano is beyond tuning? How can she continue to believe that there is nothing wrong a check-over and tune can’t fix?

Even in my frustration, I know that she is not the first or last person to lie to herself. Bother, I’ve done it myself, and with more important things than pianos. My thoughts jolt back several years and I think of Celeste again…

Celeste is sitting at the table, her dark head resting on her arms. She tells me she is “just tired” and that the cure is iron tablets, rest and vitamins. We need to give the treatment more time, it’s too early, she says. We both know she has lost weight without trying, and the doctor seems concerned. Yet we choose denial for too long. 

I turn a tuning peg hard and the frayed wire protests. I loosen the peg, thankful the wire did not snap and whiplash out. Never ignore warning signs. 

Eventually I reach the last key. I play Handel’s Largo, simplified so that the notes do not jar or stick. The lady tells me that Largo was played at her daughter’s wedding. 

She says Largo speaks to her of love and faithfulness. 

Yet I hear only discord. 

*   *   *

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Movement 2 

Several days later, I stand in front of a different piano, in a different house. My hand reaches out involuntarily towards the sleek blackness of the baby grand piano. 

“What a quality instrument,” I say sincerely, “Your Yamaha is always a pleasure to tune.”

“The piano is decent enough, I suppose,” the owner says, gathering up the sheet music dumped on the stool, the book ledge and top of the piano. With effort, I remove my eyes from the piano to look at him. And coincidently the room. There are music books and papers everywhere, and glass-fronted cupboards reveal the narrow spines of hundreds, perhaps thousands more music books.   Alongside the piano sits an electric keyboard, and near that a desk with a double screen computer, box speakers and elaborate sound mixing set-up. 

“Sorry about the mess,” he says, offhandedly. “Been busy composing this week. Have a deadline coming up soon.” 
 

“How’s the composing going?”

“There are several notes drastically out of tune.” He demonstrates. He’s right – sort-of. Three notes are minutely off-pitch, making several chord intervals too wide, and one too narrow. 

He rolls up some sheet music and smacks the piano stool with it. “If those notes were in tune, I would have finished composing the second movement last week.” 

I quirk an eyebrow into the recesses of the piano and turn the conversation to tuning. The owner is more particular than most of my clients, but his ear is excellent, and this is the fourth or fifth visit I have made to his studio. We work together in mutual respect to account for the idiosyncrasies of his instrument.  

After an hour and a half, he nods grudgingly. “I suppose that will have to do. This Yamaha is a nice enough instrument and fits my space, but my dream piano would be…” He expounds, anger in his voice as he jabs at a note on the keyboard. “If I had my dream instrument, think what I might accomplish!”

I remember he said those same words last time. He has said it so often has persuaded himself that the ‘flaws’ of this piano mean he never had the opportunity to achieve his dreams. It is not his overindulgences, his skill set or the existence of more accomplished competitors. It is all the piano’s fault. 

The cycle of anger and bargaining is a self-destructive one. 

As he keeps talking, the sound I hear morphs into my own voice. If only I had more time, I hear my voice say; if only life wasn’t so cruel, if only I could change the unchangeable. I see the hurt in Celeste’s face, the wet redness of her eyes, and I hate myself for taking it out on her. I should be the one helping and supporting her. Instead, I’m angry about everything I can’t do, and trying to bargain away the un-bargainable. 

I would tell him not to do this to himself, and instead focus on being the best composer and pianist he can be. But he’s still talking, so I say none of it aloud. 

It was a long time before I would listen to Celeste, and this man isn’t ready to listen to the piano tuner.

 
I pack up my tools and shuffle my feet. Eventually he seems to realise I am leaving and stops talking. In the lull, I say,

“Life is short, dreams are shorter still.” 

“What did you mean?” His face is puzzled. 

I don’t explain, but I grip his hand a moment longer than normal as I say goodbye.  

*   *   *

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Movement 3 

The next house visit that I remember was weeks, perhaps even months, after the Yamaha. 

On this occasion I follow the lady and her aura of perfume across marble tiles, past great potted palms and under a glass roof that mimics a conservatory. The music room is left of the main staircase and the centrepiece is a grand piano.
 

Not just any grand piano. I step forward quickly, my eyes mesmerised by the black keys at the base end of the keyboard. I count all nine of them, knowing that these extra keys give the piano the impressive range of eight full octaves. 

“An Imperial Bösendorfer, 97 keys in total,” I whisper. 

“Handcrafted in Austria. One of the only 300 they made last year. We had it specially imported for this room.” 
 

There’s something about the lady’s voice, a strange and weary flatness, that makes me momentarily more interested in her than the instrument. Her monotonal words are at variance to the proud words. 

“Your Bösendorfer is a magnificent instrument,” I say. It would also be valued between three and four hundred thousand. Additional costs would also include the cost of importing it, and ongoing insurance. Additionally, most owners would pay to fly in a Bösendorfer-approved tuner from Austria. 

So why was I contracted to tune a piano worth more than my house? 

I play several notes in the base end of the keyboard, and the perfection of the resonance thrills me. The extra base notes themselves I have little interest in, but the added volume and tonal quality they lend the rest of the standard base notes is thrilling. 

The lady moves away and I barely notice; my interest absorbed by the piano. I have never tuned a piano of this calibre, and may never again.  

I uncover the tuning pegs and sound the A below middle C. Precise, immaculately pitched to my ear. I sound the D; infinitesimally over pitched; one of the note’s strings could be tightened a little. I touch the G. It’s the perfect pitch of an unplayed, untouched piano. 

Through my excitement comes a sharp spear of disappointment and comprehension. How many Imperial Bösendorfers become symbols of status, yet empty of life and joy?

I tune the piano carefully. When I finish, I play my usual cadences to check my work. But the emptiness of the room and the coldness of the tiled floor seep through my hands, and out through the keyboard. Heavenly cadences morph into something much more sober. The echoes die slowly, the space killing them at last. 

With a start, I discover the lady has returned and is standing inside the room. “That was a nice piece,” she says. She gives a small smile, but the stretch marks around her face speak of something that is not a smile. “It had repeating parts.”

“It’s a famous piece by Frédéric Chopin, a great composer of the 1800s,” I tell her, “Part of one of his sonatas.” 
 

I don’t tell her that the name of the piece is Marche funèbre – The Funeral March. Two centuries later, its chords still speak to human hearts of death and despair. 

I want to tell her that I understand. That I know what it is like to go through that numbing stage, when the pain becomes so unbearable, depression encases you, claiming to protect your fragility until things improve. Instead, it perpetuates hurt and divides you from those you love.  

It separated Celeste and I from each other, it betrayed the vows we had made to each other. 

“Here’s a livelier piece,” I say quickly. But after a few bars, I realise that I’m playing a section from another of Chopin’s symphonies. On a piano like this, the notes are crying, expressing a depression and pain deeper than human words. I try to play something different, even a few bars of waltz. But my fingers and heart fight my hands.

My fingers are shaking. Really, I’m a grown man, how could I be so unnerved by the melancholy of this room? No, it’s not really the room. The French doors lead directly to green, sunlit garden, the lack of much other furniture in the room draws attention – rightly – to the centre piece, and the acoustics are – I’m running out of synonyms for ‘perfect’. It’s not the room, it’s the lady. 

I pack up my tools and discuss the bill. The lady seems to be hardly listening. I leave behind a piano designed to be played and admired, but now sitting silent. 

But for one moment, as I shut my van door, I think I hear something. A perfect note A, a precise 440Hz coming from inside the house.  And then just silence.

*   *   *

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Movement 4 

At the next house, a woman opens the door, with a toddler on her hip, and holding a dog by the collar. Another child, perhaps five or six, is holding onto her leg. 

“I’m here to tune the piano,” I say.

“Oh, of course! Ben, pick up your toys! Come in! Stop barking Rover!” She relaxes slightly when I’ve stepped over the toys and shut the door behind me. “We don’t have a gate on the driveway yet,” she explains, “So I can’t let any of these out into the front yard.” 

I nod as though I understand, and she shows me where the piano is. As expected, there are small fingerprints all over the polished wood, and little chips where the piano stool has been shoved in. Several cushions sit on the stool to make it the right height for little hands. 

“Anything particular issues that you’ve noticed?” 

“Just give me a moment to put him outside.” I assume she’s referring to the dog, but she puts both dog and children outside. She returns and points out a key sitting a little higher than the rest. “Maybe one of my boys shoved something underneath the key. I’m not sure whether he used a dinner knife or whether there is something still under there.” 

I unscrew the nuts holding the flat wooden pieces at either end that lock the keyboard in place and investigate. There is something under the key, something red. I manage to poke it out. It is a playing piece of some sort, a fake coin from a game. 

She looks at it. “Oh dear. I thought there was something in there.” 

I grimace and take off the bottom sounding board to reveal the lower part of the piano harp. 

“Oh!” Sitting on a little ledge inside the cavity is a toy dinosaur, a star-shaped paper clip, a five dollar note, a couple of game pieces and a small plastic figurine. 

The lady hasn’t noticed what I have found. She’s frowning to herself in a resigned sort of way as she runs her fingers over a long scratch above the music book shelf. 

I wonder if I should say something. No. It’s just a child’s secret spot for hiding their treasures, and it’s unlikely to be affecting the tonal quality of the piano. 

“How are the children finding playing the piano?” I ask instead.

“Sometimes they seem to make progress, other times they only seem interested in making as loud a noise as possible. One of them can play a semi-recognisable ‘Happy Birthday’.”

“They’re still young.” 

“I accept that the fact that none of my children appear to be musical prodigies. I’m still going to encourage them to practice and challenge themselves, but I realise that they are not achieving anything boast-worthy. They may not while I am alive.” 

Something in the tone of her voice makes me look at her sharply. She’s wearing an open-neck shirt, and for the first time I notice the start of a vertical scar starting just under her collarbone and disappearing into her shirt. 

My stomach sickens. I fumble with my tools, pretending that I am looking for something, but my mind is numb. I’ve seen that type of scar once before. A vertical scar that will run the length of the breastbone; a scar caused by a surgeon’s scalpel. 

As the lady keeps talking, I now hear the faint wheeze on the end of her sentences, the pauses when she catches her breath. They are audible when one knows what to listen for. 

The person I remember seeing with the same scar was an older man, showing me his proof of open-heart surgery after a heart attack that had almost killed him. But the person my thoughts turn to is Celeste. 

Celeste had physical scars of a different sort. A matching pair of horizontal scars slicing across her breasts. To no avail. 
 

I blink back the wetness in my eyes and focus on the lady. “I think being realistic is very important,” she says, “You need to face life’s challenges squarely and honestly.”

I nod. “And to hold onto hope. True hope is grounded in the realistic weighing of facts. Hope enables you to keep going, whatever or whoever you lose.” 

She looks at me sharply, as though she’s just realised that we might be talking about something other than her children’s musical abilities. Her hand creeps up and bunches her shirt at the neckline to hide the scar. 

Then she gives a cautious smile of solidarity. Because somehow, as two strangers, we recognise we have each reached the fourth movement of the sonata. We have played through the turmoil and the heartache, and have found ourselves in that final movement, that movement of acceptance and hope. 

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