It was 1973.

I can’t remember whether it was a cool or warm morning, but it was sometime between the spring and summer because it still rained often. But not that day.

The early sun was still pale and ricocheted off the piles of books on the red Persian rug. The piles, and towers, and staircases of books forming cities in the peripheral of the room, holding the unemptied ashtrays or the used teacups, chalky brown rings coating the inner rim, the cold tea still sitting a quarter way to the bottom, forgotten. My mother had bohemian taste, and even the dirty things felt luscious and full of soul.

I thumbed through an edition of Astrologique. My mother had never taught me French, but the pictures’ bulbous curves and muted colors were somehow exotic enough. And so was he. Maybe it’s just that the stars were on my mind, but from the edge of the magazine, I watched the piano tuner—who’d seemed otherworldly— fiddle delicately with the Challen nestled in the corner by the window. (That Challen might as well have sprouted moss. It rained a lot, and my mother kept the windows open during thunderstorms.) 

He dressed like a chimney sweep, and his disposition was like that of an alien who’d just ridden in from another planet or maybe a different time; one who’d only known how to mimic human behavior without actually feeling it. Could be that he just had a deep knowing—that he knew the instrument so intimately and so well, and I had never known anything so deeply in my entire life.

My mother wasn’t home, and suddenly, I’d wished that she’d known better than to leave me there alone with a strange boy. But not because he unsettled me, but because his movements were so sensual, hunched over the inside of that piano, testing each key with patience and a gentleness that only comes with confidence. He moved like a rolling wave with every pluck and maneuver of his tool.

I couldn’t take it. I set the magazine down on the velvet chaise and crept over to him. The old floorboards moaned, and nearby saucers rattled in the small thump of my footsteps until I stood behind him. I suspect he felt my breath on his neck. He turned around, but had not seemed startled. We stared at each other.

He was also young, around my age of seventeen I guessed, although his eyes were old. An occupational hazard of deep knowing and, I’d guessed, a trade such as his. His eyes, they’d known something I didn’t. But they were so tired and so sad, that I realized whatever they did know, I didn’t want to know, myself.

-“Yes?” I couldn’t place his tone. I guessed it was annoyance.

-“Do you play?” I’d asked.

-“No.”

He set his long fingers back to roving the strings.

-“How do you know what it’s supposed to sound like if you don’t play?”

-“I’ve been trained, of course.”

I was disappointed. He couldn’t really have known the instrument as well as I’d thought if he’d only learned the maintenance but never the music. Still, despite his curtness, his sadness, his otherworldliness, his inexplicable movements made my cheeks flush, and I wanted him to feel human, too. I spun him around.

This time, the annoyance in his face was unmistakable, but I couldn’t see how it shifted when I closed my eyes and drew my lips to where I suspected his would be. And I hadn’t needed to reopen them, because my arrow had reached its target— soft, fleshy and wet.

The day opened to a cacophony of musicless piano keys clashing behind us, their tuning, irrelevant. We breathed life into each other with our hot and sticky air. But the violence in his tongue made me, once again, wish to never know the things he did about life. Or about piano maintenance.

Somehow, though, he’d left another sort of knowing in my bones, as even after— while I scrubbed the red Persian clean and he finished his tuning— I’d felt my blood vibrating, pulling towards him like the north pole of a magnet.

#

I was in the shower when my mother returned. I could feel her, too. Could almost hear the click of an unlocking door above the shower’s parade against porcelain. Could hear her play a few keys to test the piano’s tune before sprinting into a full melody. She played her favorite, To a Wild Rose.

My wet hair dripped onto the floor, my soggy towel wrapped around my new body, and I leaned against the hallway arch— the white paint chipping from the molding— while I listened to her play.

There was nothing haunting, anymore, about its sound. I’d liked it better the way it was before, just slightly out of tune.

And I’d wished he had just left the piano as he’d found it.

END