The Weight of a Piano Read online

  She cleared a stack of papers from the sofa and perched on the edge. Some instinct to help him welled up inside her, whether maternal or romantic she didn’t know, and she sat on her slender fingers to keep herself from tidying up the awful room.

  “Do you know Luba Vasilevna?” he asked.

  “The singer?”

  “Who else.” He pulled a record from its sleeve and put it carefully on the turntable. Soon a high, warbling voice rose above the crackling, singing praise to the Motherland. Mikhail closed his eyes and nodded along. Katya didn’t especially care for this style of music, yet she enjoyed watching him listen to it with such obvious admiration, and wondered if he’d listened to her so attentively earlier. Perhaps he understood what it was like for her to play, to travel outside herself on the music, to hear colors. She thought briefly of the old German, how he was blind to the world but was still able to see music. Standing there, Mikhail became more and more attractive even as he seemed once more to forget her. The song ended just as the kettle screamed, and there was a frantic feeling in the air.

  “She’s good, yes?”

  “She’s very patriotic,” Katya said, the kindest thing she could think to say.

  “I like the Morse code in the background.” He handed her a cup of strong, sweet tea. “Luba Vasilevna,” he said wistfully, then shook his head and plopped down next to her on the sofa, as though they’d been married for years. He spoke the singer’s name again, softer, and although Katya knew that Luba Vasilevna was enormous and age-spotted, with thick, black brows that made her look even less feminine than Leonid Brezhnev, she felt an inexplicable pang of jealousy.

  “My name is Ekaterina, by the way,” she said. “In case you’re wondering.”

  He looked at her carefully before setting his cup down next to the others. “I would like to kiss you now,” he told her. “Katya.”

  She liked the sound of her name in his mouth, deep and deliberate. It was the color of eggplant, and though nothing so exotic was ever available to regular citizens, she wanted to taste eggplant, and so she put her cup next to his and let him lean close to her. Her heart beat in rilievo as his mouth pressed against hers, and she could feel his heart beating faster, too. Was he as nervous as she? He rested his hands on her shoulders like he didn’t know what else to do with them, and this display of uncertainty bolstered her own courage. She was ready to shed the burden of innocence. She threaded her fingers into his hair, lightly tapping out a measure of Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto against his head, and pushed the tip of her tongue into his mouth. He made a small gasping sound, then slid his hands down to her waist and pulled her closer. They kissed tentatively at first, wordlessly asking and granting permission to advance. A damp heat rose around them as their lips and hands moved more freely, more passionately, until each was nearly panting into the other’s open mouth.

  Katya became aware of a throbbing sensation between her legs that she had never felt before. She had touched herself there many times, often after playing a lengthy or demanding piece of music, but it was always prescriptive and quick, like scratching an itch. What she felt now was nearly an ache, a need not just for a touch, but to be touched by Mikhail. She moved one of his hands from her breast to the inside of her thigh.

  “Oh, Katya,” he moaned.

  “Misha,” she whispered back, claiming him with the diminutive of his name.

  Without breaking their kiss they pulled themselves onto the floor on top of those dirty clothes, unbuttoning each other’s shirts. She moved her hands over his chest and arms as he kissed her earlobes, the hollow at her throat, her nipples. Her stomach muscles constricted as he kissed down the length of her belly. When he paused to unfasten her skirt, she helped him pull it loose and peeled off her pantyhose and underwear. He looked at her with what seemed like awe, so instead of being embarrassed by her nakedness she slowly shifted one knee aside, opening herself to him, offering him a better view. Then he did something she hadn’t known was even possible: he knelt between her legs and kissed her there until she thought she would explode and then did.

  “Misha,” she said again once she finally caught her breath.

  “Yes?” He was kissing her belly as it heaved up and down.

  “You’ve done this before?”

  “I can’t remember now,” he said, and smiled at her.

  She laughed, sat up, and kissed him, then unbuckled his belt and slipped her hand into his pants. She felt the hard length of him jump at her touch. “Now this,” she said, and pulled him down on top of her.

  There were more than twenty-nine thousand notes in the Rachmaninoff piece that had started playing in her mind when they first kissed; it took nearly forty minutes to play it from start to finish. She heard all of it twice in her imagination as she and Mikhail discovered and rediscovered each other, on the pile of clothes, the sofa, the narrow cot he slept on. Once they were finally too tired to continue, it was deep into the evening.

  They dressed and Mikhail made a fresh pot of tea, Katya accepting her cup with a tiny smile. Now that their clothes were back on, she felt shy again. Still pleased, yes, but a note of shame welled up as though she could hardly believe her own behavior, how unlike her it was. Perhaps it meant that she had found the man she was supposed to love. Usually, falling in love preceded making it. Could it work out of order, too? It seemed that she had a moral duty to try.

  She watched him set the needle down on another record, his brow furrowed in concentration. Based on what she could know about him in a single afternoon, she liked Mikhail. What would it be like to love him?

  CLARA WALKED SLOWLY BACKWARD, steadying the piano as Peter, Teddy, and their other brother, Alex, pushed it through her new apartment complex. “Bump,” she warned them. They slowed down and one-two-three tipped the dolly over a buckle in the paved walkway. Feeling its heft jostle beneath the padded blankets, Clara didn’t know which she resented more: that she couldn’t afford to hire professional movers or that she was moving the piano at all.

  “Careful,” she said when they turned a corner and maneuvered around a curve to the staircase leading up to her second-floor apartment. Clara studied the pale stucco building, the roof that was missing a few red tiles, the chipped paint on the balcony railing, but at least it had a view of the community pool; the units behind hers looked out onto a Walmart parking lot. She heaved a sigh from deep within her chest. “I feel like Sisyphus at the bottom of the hill.”

  “Let’s just hope we’re not doing this for all eternity,” Peter said. When he looked at her, she knew he wasn’t referring only to the move. He wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve, then squinted at the steps, his mouth moving as he counted to fourteen. “That landing’s pretty small.”

  “It’s okay,” Clara said, “I already measured it. The hard part will be the turn at the top.”

  They got the two-by-fours from the moving truck and laid them parallel on the stairs at the width of the piano legs, and rolled the Blüthner so the keyboard side was facing the building. Peter said, “Alex, you and I’ll go first and pull. Teddy and Clara, you’ll push from the bottom.” He looped a heavy nylon strap around the piano and wrapped one free end around his hand and gave the other to Alex to wrap around his, so that even if the weight shifted and slipped, the cargo wouldn’t slam right back down to the bottom.

  “This would be a hell of a lot easier if we had a crane,” Teddy said.

  “Or if you put on a little muscle,” Alex said, giving his biceps a squeeze.

  “Cut it out,” Peter said. “Clara, you stay here, next to the building, and Teddy’ll go on your right. It’s heavier on your side, Teddy, so be careful. Alex and I can manage most of the weight, but we need you guys to guide it up.” They got into position, Peter and Alex on the third step, their broad backs tensed and ready, Teddy and Clara below. Clara checked the alignment of the casters and the two-by-
fours, then tested the integrity of the metal handrails on either side of the staircase by giving them a stiff shake.

  “Ready?” Peter asked.

  “Okay,” Clara said, “go.”

  “Stay with me,” he responded.

  They made it about halfway up, all of them grunting under their mostly coordinated effort, before Alex said, “Stop for a sec. I need to readjust.” He rewound the strap more tightly around his hand, his fingers now turning white. “All right, ready to roll.”

  On the next step, Teddy pushed his side of the piano harder than he needed to, perhaps to prove something to his brothers, or maybe to Clara; Peter took a false step up to compensate for it and Alex tried on instinct to match it, but slipped. The piano, all five hundred and sixty pounds of it, swayed, and Clara braced herself against the railing with her left hand, ready to use her own small body to protect the instrument. If the Blüthner started to crash down the stairs onto the ground below, it would have to go through her first.

  “Hold it!” she shouted.

  Peter and Alex planted themselves to block its movement but it tipped to the right, then overcorrected and tipped even harder to the left, smashing against Clara’s hand and pinning it to the railing. She screamed, high and tight, and as if in commiseration, the piano released a cacophony of notes from inside its thick wrap.

  “Teddy, you asshole!” Peter said. “Lean it back, get it off her!”

  Clara squeezed her eyes closed as hard as she could until she saw lights bursting behind her eyelids—her trick for stopping tears. The guys, yelling at one another in Greek, managed to right the piano and haul it onto the landing, their adrenaline a proxy for Clara, who stayed where she was with her throbbing hand draped almost casually on the railing and chanting to herself, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

  * * *

  —

  The scaphoid, the small bone above the thumb on her left wrist, was fractured. The ER doctor said it wasn’t severe, but he wanted to put her in a plaster cast up to her elbow to make sure it would heal correctly.

  “I can’t wear a cast. How could I work?”

  “Well, what sort of work do you do?”

  “I’m a mechanic.” She held up her unbroken hand, with its rough skin and perpetually grease-stained fingernails, as proof, though he was looking at her like she’d told him she was a lion tamer or a mermaid. It wasn’t an uncommon reaction. New customers were usually surprised to see her hoisting tires and swapping out parts, but she was strong for her size and she knew what she was doing.

  “Well,” he said, letting his eyebrows slide back into place, “in that case you might want to take some vacation time.”

  * * *

  —

  “Aw, shit, Clara,” Peter said when she walked back into the reception area. “I’m really sorry. Damn Teddy. I should’ve known he’d screw something up.”

  “It’s not your fault,” she said. “Not Teddy’s, either. It’s mine. You guys were doing me a favor.” She cradled the cast with her other arm, moving her swollen fingers tentatively.

  “How long do you have to wear that thing?”

  “He said six weeks. Maybe a little less. He wants to do another X-ray in a few weeks to see.”

  “I can help,” he said. “I can bring food, drive you anywhere you need to go.”

  “I’ll be okay.”

  “I know you will. But you don’t have to do it all on your own.” He took her unbroken right hand into his and covered it with his other as if he were holding a lightning bug that he didn’t want to let go of. His hands were so large that they enclosed hers entirely. She closed her eyes and, for just a moment, flattened her palm against his until she could feel the calluses that matched her own. It was far too easy to imagine letting him gather the rest of her up in his embrace. As gently as she could, she withdrew from his clasp.

  “Thanks for being such a good friend,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  After Peter dropped her off, Clara stood at the base of the stairs leading up to her apartment, feeling the heat of the day radiating off the cement, and awkwardly rested her cast on the railing before slowly climbing up the steps. Inside, where a new coat of paint looked too glossy on the old walls, it felt like somebody else’s apartment. An unfamiliar slant of light came in from the east-facing window, illuminating the dust motes swirling around the cramped room and her haphazard stacks of boxes. But wasn’t that how it always felt when she was starting over? Nothing ever seemed right, not at first. Sometimes never at all.

  The quiet was unsettling, but she didn’t feel up to digging through the boxes to find her portable stereo. Instead she went to the Blüthner, which the guys had pushed against the wall by the door. She lifted the bench lid and pulled out one of her old pieces of sheet music: a simple version of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. The first movement was played mostly by the right hand, and the sorrowful, ghostly melody matched her mood. She sat down and adjusted the bench, then lifted the fallboard and put her fingertips on the yellowing keys, remembering what her first teacher had told her about curving her hands as if each were holding a ball.

  From her first lesson, Clara had planned to devote herself to learning her father’s favorite piece of music—Prelude no. 14 in E-flat Minor by the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, which he’d looped repeatedly on his CD player at home. It was wildly energetic from the start through its abrupt and dramatic ending, and very difficult even for an accomplished pianist to play well, her teacher had told her. Abbie Fletcher, who always smelled pleasingly like a swimming pool, said she admired Clara’s choice but suggested they not get ahead of themselves. “Scriabin is wonderful. And it happens that he loved Chopin as much as I do,” Mrs. Fletcher said. “In fact, when Scriabin played his Prelude and Nocturne for the Left Hand Alone, they called him the left-handed Chopin—le Chopin gaucher. Perhaps someday you’ll be able to play Scriabin, dear, but for now let’s focus on the fundamentals.”

  Clara played a few notes of the sonata, forgiving the piano for being so far out of tune. It had just survived a near-fatal crash, after all. Tentatively she continued, but because her memory of the piece and her technical skill were both lacking, she couldn’t fix her eyes on either the music or the keyboard and had to keep glancing back and forth between them. The result was a staccato and discordant stabbing that made her feel even worse than the silence had. Besides that, her left hand ached from trying to spread her thumb and pinkie across an octave to play the bass part, so in the middle of the seventh measure she snatched the papers off the music rack and ripped them in half again and again until the thickness made it painful for her broken hand, then hurled the pieces toward her boxes and watched them float like big confetti flakes before settling on the floor.

  She leaned forward, put her arms on the keys—creating a brief discordance—and rested her forehead against the hard cast. The ivory keys went out of focus and she closed her eyes. Maybe Ryan had been right. What good was having the piano if she couldn’t play it? She’d taken lessons for years, practicing diligently to become the pianist her father had so desperately wanted her to be. But the songs never sounded right. She was fifteen years old at her first recital, where she played “A Little Russian Song,” which Mrs. Fletcher had arranged so it sounded more difficult to play than it really was. Her aunt and uncle clapped enthusiastically when she finished, along with the parents of the elementary school kids who were also performing, in spite of the mistakes she’d made. Even when she could play all the notes, they came out more mechanical than musical. By then she was working with Jack at the garage, so she knew her hands were good for something, yet she was never able to make them translate the emotion behind a piece of music through her fingers. Whenever she sensed that her music teacher had given up hope, she found a new one. Then, finally defeated, she gave up, too. The Blüthner became little more than a
piano-shaped paperweight, keeping what was left of her childhood memories from floating away.

  If she’d saved up all the money that all those years of lessons had cost, not to mention the tuning and moving expenses, it certainly would have covered a six-week forced vacation while her hand healed. Now she’d have to go into debt just to survive until she could work again. She pushed herself away from the keyboard and stood up, then wiped off the smudges on the case with her sleeved forearm. Then, because she had loved and hated the piano equally for the fourteen years she had owned it, she made a fist with her good hand and brought it down once, hard, like a gavel on the lid.

  What would’ve happened if they hadn’t been able to stabilize the piano earlier? What if it had gathered enough momentum from its wobble that they couldn’t keep it from breaking through the railing and falling—what, ten feet, maybe twelve?—to the concrete slab below? Would it have crumpled in on itself the way cars do during crash tests? Or would it have smashed into splinters? What would that have sounded like? All the potential music that was trapped inside it would be lost amid the clatter and bang of the ebony case shattering and the heavy innards spilling out, muted forever.

  The image of the Blüthner falling to its death gripped her, much like the time or two she’d stood on the precipice of something and thought, against all logic, of jumping. How would she have felt to see her piano broken open, its countless interior parts—unnameable to her—strewn everywhere? She’d be stunned, of course. Shaken. But maybe she’d have discovered something else there in the splintery mess. Maybe akin to relief. If the Blüthner were gone, she’d never again have to move it or tune it or suffer its silence.