Fringe Magazine - Issue 11 Archive- Fiction

Issue 11: August 2007.
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X bought the upright 1881 Steinway for two thousand dollars from a second-hand store a few blocks over from Washington University on her lunch break. She had intended to inspect a nineteenth-century English mahogany Chippendale ribbon-back settee she had seen in the storefront on her way to the parking garage—a perfect addition, she felt, to her front hallway. All morning, during her pediatric rounds, she felt the weight and angles of the settee graze the inside of her skull, presenting a fine argument of classic ornamentation much needed in her recently purchased townhouse, still shiny with Windex and Pine-Sol and filled with soft, velvety moving boxes that sharply divided her life from Y’s. But when she walked through the dark, musty store, her hospital clogs sinking into the nuzzled warmness of the old Oriental rug lining the path from door to register, she came upon it, the Steinway, pressed between the stairwell leading to the second floor and a mauve French Empire sofa littered with sheet music.

How Y would have loved this, she thought, quite unexpectedly, for she had given up all thoughts of what Y had wanted months ago, although more out of necessity than desire. The separation was all quite academic, or so she had wanted to believe. X had accepted a fellowship in Pediatrics at Washington University; Y had decided she quite liked teaching music theory at Rutgers, living in Trenton, close to her ailing mother and shiftless brother, that she didn’t quite like X’s clinical view of the world and her place in it. It was a divorce without the tears, at least for X. A handshake, a dividing of the assets from their four years together, with Y keeping most of the contemporary furniture that X hated anyway. It had happened so fast, the breakup, and without much of X’s attention. She had flown back and forth to St. Louis from Trenton, looking at homes near the university, filling out forms, and changing her mailing address and proper identity on the hundreds of small items that somehow named and identified her. There was simply no time for reflection. And now, she thought, months later, there was simply no place for it.

Now the dull ebony-finished Steinway before her, with its elaborate cutaway backdrop and yellowed ivory keys, also begged for love and restoration, two things that X did not think she possessed, but maybe did want, somewhere, in lingering traces beneath her well-scrubbed hands.

“It needs some work. You’ll definitely want to get new strings,” the Ukrainian woman, round and plump and moving in short waves while stationary, agreed when X inquired about the price. “But the soundboard and bridges are intact. That’s rare for a piano this old, one that hasn’t been restored. It has good tone, too. Do you play?”

“Not at all,” X admitted, somewhat embarrassed. But what did she care if she presented herself a fraud to this woman, so long as she had her credit card? “I just think it’s beautiful.”

“Ah, you should take lessons.” The old woman gathered up the sheet music and dropped herself softly onto the piano bench. “You’re going to get a lot of enjoyment out of this piano.”

X watched the old woman put on her glasses, which were chained around her neck with an odd assortment of brownish glass beads, and played what X recognized as a waltz. The old woman’s hands strained to reach the keys, her bones trapped under long tarps of wrinkled, spotted flesh. The sound was not good, that X could tell, even as the woman played measured and delicate music for half a minute. She wondered what she was doing. She had not decided to buy the piano to lure Y to St. Louis, or even to remember Y; they both felt a clean, fresh start was sorely needed. And yet this piano presented a piece, perhaps the last piece, to a puzzle she wanted to admire briefly before breaking it apart and funneling it back into the box.

When the piano was delivered at ten o’clock the next Saturday, X asked the piano movers if they would like some tea.

“It’s a fine instrument, and we’d love to have tea and hear you play it, but we gotta run,” the older man, the one who did the speaking, explained, dabbing his face with a soiled handkerchief.

“Are you sure? Perhaps one of you plays?” She took a few steps toward the piano, where it rested beneath a Kandinsky print in the front room with the bay window.

“You don’t play?” the younger man, who had a peach fuzz face full of acne, asked.

“Well, no,” X stuttered, not realizing the full responsibility of her ownership.

The younger man took a step toward the piano as X extended her hand. He wiped the seat of his uniform and sat on the bench.

“I took lessons when I was little…don’t remember shit,” he laughed, his fingers hovering above the keys. “I can play ‘chopsticks’, though.” He pushed his long, thin fingers onto the keys, making the room hum softly with staccato. The older man laughed as he folded the order requisition and shoved it into his front pocket.

“Don’t quit your day job, maestro,” he said.

X stood by the window, watching them as they pulled away from the curb. She turned to stare at the Steinway, arms crossed. She felt as if a baby had been left on her doorstep, and she wondered whether she should call someone and have it inspected, given a full physical.

X had not cared much about pianos, at least the nuts and bolts of them. Y had a respectable Apollo at the house they shared in Trenton that only needed the occasional tuning for it to interpret respectable Chopin sonatas through the inquiry of Y’s fingers. For X, music was a pleasant thing heard at the grocery store or reception area. She did not understand what Y meant when she spoke of the intricacies of organization, time keys, signatures, harmonies, accidentals, or even of feeling certain chord progressions tickle the back of one’s neck.

And now, X could not even appreciate the simple pleasure of background noise, for she could not play. She sat at the bench and looked at the keys, depressing one here and there, listening to the soft gasps of noise that vibrated from the strings inside the Steinway. She tumbled a few notes together; they sounded like little coughs, a disease she was uncertain of how to cure. She ran her hand over the smooth ebony finish; it reminded her of her pediatric patients, bubbled mounds of clay cherubs who had not yet been pulled like taffy into their angled adulthood.

She looked up restorers in the Yellow Pages when she got home from work that week, left messages, got estimates, and yet she knew for all this restoration, she could not make the piano play. She had decided against lessons the first evening her visitor settled into her home; she blamed it on scheduling, a lack of time resulting from her sixty-hour workweeks at the hospital. But she knew it was more than that. She was not a musician.

She would need to find others. She had a cocktail party, some colleagues from her department, sipping Chardonnay and Shiraz and eating cheese and crackers while the soft murmur of conversations filled the living room. But the conversations always returned to the Steinway; did she play? Why did she buy an antique piano?

“My ex was a pianist, a professor of music. I guess I was used to having one in the house, even if I never touched it,” she laughed, explaining to an internist whose thick, dark hair and dark, oiled skin were close enough to smell. “It’s kind of like dating an artist and just collecting art, no?”

The wife of another fellow sat down at the piano and played “Greensleeves.” The notes came from deep within, slightly muffled, as if struggling with emphysema. X’s guests listened politely as the fellow’s wife pressed onto the yellowed ivory keys. X wondered whether it was too late to trade the Steinway for the Chippendale settee.

“It needs a little work,” she explained later, after several guests had tried bits of Rachmaninoff, Bach, and Gershwin. “I’ve been getting restoration estimates. I think it makes a nice decorative piece, at any rate.”

When X noticed her cleaning lady eyeing the piano the next week, she implored her to play.

“Well, I can play a little bit, you know—my husband likes show tunes,” she explained, but then looked at her grubby pink T-shirt with roses and faded denim jeans. “But I bet that cost you a fortune.”

“Not really. And I bought it to be played,” X lied, extending her hand toward the bench. But why had she bought it? It was a question that had plagued her the past few weeks. She was not an impulsive shopper, certainly not of antique instruments which she did not know how to play and had no real intention of learning, she thought. Did she really think she could invest in lessons, lessons that should begin at a very early age, before one’s hardwiring maps the stubbornness of one’s personality, one’s limitations?

X sat on the Napoleon III-style sofa while the cleaning lady pounded out a song from Guys and Dolls, her small body bouncing off the bench as she wrestled with the soft keys and whispering, breathless notes. X remembered Y’s long, slender body, wrapped in a kimono, playing etudes in the evening in Trenton while X drove her eyes into medical journals on the other side of the room. She tried to remember the serene expression, the soft, long line of Y’s lips as she glided up and down the keys effortlessly, as if she were undertaking a morning stretch. She tried to imagine Y at this instrument, what seduction would have to occur to make the notes sound vital, confident, alive.

“Bravo!” X leaned forward and clapped as the cleaning lady leaned back and caught her breath. “I didn’t realize you were so talented.”

“Thanks, ma’am.” The cleaning lady stood up, her skin shades of pink to match her T-shirt. “I’d better get going. Those houses don’t clean themselves.”

“Feel free to play at any time,” X said at the door as the cleaning lady left, vacuum tumbling behind her like a petulant child. She thought briefly, very briefly, of having the piano delivered to the cleaning lady’s house, where at least some Rodgers and Hammerstein could be enjoyed by the masses, but knew the restoration costs would be prohibitive for a cleaning lady and her electrician husband. She also knew that the black cancer sitting in her townhouse—and yes, it had begun to feel that way, for reasons she could not quite articulate—was hers and hers alone. She had to restore it to its former glory, make it sing, somehow.

But it was not a frivolous investment. Medical school and residency had required many year’s of X’s life, but to learn an instrument would take many more. Of course, it was never too late to start, but it was truly a talent that required practice, cultivation, dedication. One doesn’t decide one day to learn an instrument the same way one might decide to take vitamins. And it wasn’t even a matter of learning on a new, tuned organ—hers needed so much fixing. And how did X honestly think fixing and then learning the instrument would enhance her measured life?

The idea occurred to her at night. For many days she wrote it off as a nocturnal delusion, for who would spend two thousand dollars on a piano only to do that to it? But the idea plagued her during rounds, during consultations, during martinis after dinner with colleagues, and on the treadmill at the hospital gym. Perhaps it plagued her longer in her life, how to get to the heart of something so foreign, a talent seemingly out of her skill set, how to approach something she was so unaccustomed to wanting or needing and yet she knew brought so much joy, so much careless happiness to others. And it would be all in the approach she, as a surgeon, knew.

X approached the instrument cautiously; perhaps it only needed conservative surgery. She opened it up and looked at the row of strings inside. Carefully, she removed two of them, then played the corresponding keys. A soft clink chirped from them. She took the wires and hung them outside her kitchen window. The long, tangled cords looked like mutant daddy longlegs tickling the glass.

The surgery became more extensive. She then got a screwdriver and began popping up some of the keys, leaving the piano looking like a prizefighter’s smile. She leaned a few keys against the terra cotta bricks in her garden, a few on the outside window sill of her bedroom. She removed one of the pedals and replaced her doorknocker with it. She placed the backdrop with the soft cloth lining outside her back door, strapping it to the railing to catch a breeze through the cloth. She placed a few ebony keys in the birdfeeder, left some on the floor for the cat to bat around.

Then, after a week of letting the instrument acclimate to its new configuration, she began to listen. At first, there was silence. She listened harder, so much so that she forgot to breathe. Gradually, she began to breathe quietly and close her eyes, quiet her mind. She began to hear the rain plunking against the ivories in the garden, the wind blowing softly through the cloth in the cutout backdrop, the piano wires scraping against the glass during breezy evenings, a woodpecker drilling through one of the ebony keys, others being scooted across the floor in compulsion by a furry black paw. Underneath all these things was a metronome that someone had placed expertly, without X’s knowledge, in the folds of her chest, drawing them together, in concert between air and space.