第14章 A Client With the Wrong Hands

There is a specific kind of wrongness a piano has when it has been tampered with, and Coralie heard it the moment she crossed the threshold of the house on Fenwick Row, before the client had said a word about his daughter learning to play. The piano was not out of tune. That was the first thing. A neglected piano goes flat and lazy, drifting low, the way an old dog lies down. This one had been tuned recently and badly, tuned at the top and bottom and left to rot in the middle, so that the bass sang and the treble told the truth and the octaves between them had been pulled away from each other on purpose. Somebody had made a room of sound with a lie built into the exact middle of it, and had left the lid open, and had waited. "Miss Tunstall," the client said, and he said it the way a man says a thing he has rehearsed once and then decided not to over-rehearse. "Thank you for coming out. The piano's been nothing but trouble." His voice was pleasant. She could not place it, which meant nothing, because she could not place any voice she had not filed. She filed it now, standing in the doorway with her case strap cutting into her shoulder, and she took him apart in the first six seconds: he stood with his weight on his right, he did not ring anything against anything, he finished his words, and when he crossed to the window to open it for air he dragged his left foot on the boards. Once. Coralie's blood went cold and slow, the way it had gone in the basement, and she stood absolutely still and let the room be only a room. "The middle register is fighting itself," she said. "Whoever tuned it last was in a hurry." "My brother-in-law," said the client. "He fancies himself musical." She had a rule, which she had made for herself at nineteen and broken exactly once, and it was this: never work in a house that is listening back. A room where someone is waiting to hear how you react is not a room, it is a stage, and a woman who cannot see her audience must decide, before the first note, whether she is a tuner or a performer. She stood in the doorway of a stranger's house and did the arithmetic she was tired of doing, and she was still doing it when she set her case down on the boards, and answered, in the flat and even voice she used on difficult pianos, the question the room was asking. She set down her case and opened it by touch, and she made herself do her work, because doing her work was the only thing that had ever held her together, and while she worked she listened to every sound the house made with its mouth closed. The clock in the hall, too fast. The refrigerator, too loud. A phone on a table, face down, buzzing once every few minutes in a pattern that meant someone was watching a notification rather than answering a call. And the man, moving around behind her, from the window to the door and back, and the drag came and went and came again, and she could not decide whether it was real or worn or dropped in on purpose, and that was the whole trap, she understood suddenly, that was the entire design of the afternoon. He wanted her to decide. He wanted her to choose between her ear and her doubt, and whichever she chose, he would be there on the other side of the choice, taking notes. "If you'd like to hear it," the client said, "I can play." She did not want to hear him play. She wanted to leave. He sat at the piano and played, badly, the way a man plays who has been told he plays well, and under the wrong notes she heard the thing she was listening for without meaning to. Under the music, he coughed, twice, the two dry notes of a door, and then he began without knowing it to whistle, between his teeth, the first bar of a song from a war he was too young to have fought. Chalk. The smell came late, the way smell does, on the air from the open window, and it was chalk and something under it, something bitter and copper, and Coralie stood in a stranger's front room and understood that she had walked into the middle of a demonstration. She stood with one hand on the open lid, the strings cooling under her fingers, and let the room finish telling her what it was. The clock too fast. The fridge too loud. The phone on the table, face down, buzzing in the pattern of a man watching notifications and not answering them. And behind all that, so faint a person with ordinary hearing would never have caught it, a third sound, a small, patient click on the floorboards, a ring turning against a ring, a metronome set to the tempo of the room. He was keeping time. He had been keeping time the whole afternoon, the way a musician keeps time under the melody, so that when the moment came he would be exactly in it. She did not run, because running is what an animal does and she had trained herself out of being an animal a long time ago. She closed the lid over the strings, slowly, and stood up straight, and spoke to the room and not to the man. "Whistle the second bar," she said. The music stopped. "I'd like to hear the second bar," Coralie said. "Go on. You're doing so well." For a moment there was nothing in the house but the fast clock and the too-loud refrigerator and the buzzing phone. Then the man laughed, softly, and the laugh came from a different place in the room than his voice had been, and the drag in his foot disappeared, and both his feet moved even and clean, and every word he said finished itself perfectly, and he sounded, when he spoke at last, exactly like a man with nothing to hide. "I only know the first bar," he said, gently. "I never learned the rest. But it's a lovely song, isn't it. It was very good of you to come." There was one more thing she could do, and she did it, because doing a thing is better than waiting for a thing. She crossed to the piano and struck a single note in the middle register, the one he had sabotaged, and let it hang in the room, ugly and honest. Every ear in the house turned toward it, drawn the way ears are drawn to a wrong note, and in the half second of that shared attention she heard what she had come for and what she would take away: under the hum of the note, the man's breathing had changed, and in the change there was a small dry catch, two notes, a door. She did not turn around. She closed the lid, packed the two forks in their cloth, and walked out with her shoulder straight, and behind her, the ring on the floor found its rhythm again and kept it. Coralie picked up her case and walked out of the house, and she did not look back, and on the step she heard him close the door and lock it, once, and then, from inside, through the wood, faint and friendly and level, she heard him begin to hum the second movement, the one her husband hummed, the one that belonged to the dark of her own flat. ---