Joanna Theiss
The Piano Tuner
The piano tuner is early. Linda, who has been cutting a final snowflake out of white paper, watches him push through the brittle shrubbery beneath her classroom window and press his nose against the pane. When Linda waves at him with her scissors, the piano tuner startles backwards, like a stray cat discovered hiding behind a trash can.
At the entrance to the school, Linda disarms the security system and pulls back the locks. She thrusts out her hand for him to shake. After a second’s hesitation, he obliges. She breathes in the outside smells clinging to his wool coat, cigarettes, diesel exhaust. Although she’s never met a piano tuner, it occurs to her that this one is too young. Piano tuning ought to be an old man’s game, right?
“Thanks for coming on such short notice, and in such terrible weather, too,” Linda says cheerfully. “They call this a wintry mix, but if you ask me, it’s more winter than mix.”
The piano tuner’s smile is more winter than smile.
“The poor old thing’s been stuck in the attic for years, ever since the teacher before me retired. She was classically trained, or so I’m told.” Linda leads him down the corridor and into her classroom. She can still feel the icy tips of his fingers from where they grazed the back of her hand during their brief, uninspiring handshake.
The piano, veiled in dust, has been pushed against the wall opposite the windows. It appears patient but not too hopeful, like an old man in line at the unemployment office.
Linda stands next to it and fans her arms up and down. “Ta-da,” she says, in a mocking falsetto.
“Is this stuff all yours?” It’s the first thing the piano tuner has said since walking in. His voice is thinner, less substantial, than his body suggests. He is short but dense, his frame like an inverted keyhole, a big round head balanced on the lonely edge of an acute triangle. His face is pale, his eyes are the color of river ice. A soft note of doubt sounds in Linda’s mind at his outside, underwater qualities, how he seems ill at ease indoors.
“The classroom is mine, yes, if that’s what you mean. I teach first grade through third,” Linda says. “Anyway, the kids will be so grateful to you. Let me know if you need anything. Anything at all.”
He doesn’t have anything at all to say to that. He weaves through the worktables, the tails of his coat briefly concealing the child-sized chairs, and something hard – his tools, for tuning the piano? – bang against the wood. He stops in front of a stack of lined paper. Linda watches him inspect a page containing cursive capitals, the tricky ones, the Qs and Zs.
The piano tuner moves over to the dictionary, spread open on its pedestal. He flips a few pages, bends close in a pantomime of reading, though she can tell he’s not. Could this be part of his process, getting to know the space before he begins work on the piano? Like piano tuning is a ritual with certain required steps. She would like that to be true, because otherwise, there is no reason why he loiters near the children’s cubbies, or why he peels Linda’s banana and bites off a third of it.
“Help yourself,” Linda says, with a hint of sarcasm.
He swallows, then arranges the fruit on the corner of her desk so the uneaten flesh rests on the peel.
Another, louder, note of doubt goes off in Linda when the piano tuner walks to the math materials, as far as he can get from the piano while remaining in the room. He reminds her of one of her students, all restless energy, touching, probing, delaying. Delaying Linda, and Linda’s father, more importantly, who needs his evening dose of medications.
Linda coughs into her fist. When the piano tuner doesn’t look over, she lifts the piano’s lid and presses on a key. The sound is muddy, as melodic as a boot breaking the skin of ice on a puddle. She presses it again, harder this time, and it sticks, hovering below the tide line of dingy whites and blacks like it is ashamed of itself.
“I don’t have much of an ear for music, but even I know that’s flat,” Linda says, projecting her voice. He glances at her with his watery eyes and for a moment Linda thinks he is finally, finally, about to tune the piano, to open the sides of his coat and reveal a row of tools, metronomes and tuning forks hanging from loops, like in those old crime shows, when bad guys displayed their stolen merchandise this way.
But no. He has found a new distraction. Like so many of the items in her classroom, Linda inherited the abacus from the teacher before her, who inherited it from the teacher before her, on and on, an unbroken queue of well-meaning women.
“How’s this work?” The piano tuner shakes the abacus like it is a tambourine. The beads thud dully against one another. Reluctantly, Linda leaves the piano and meets him in math.
“Pretty straightforward,” she says. With her pointer finger, she reaches over to move a bead across the top rod. “This is one.” She moves the second bead. “Two.”
He reaches out and moves the third. “So, this would be three?”
“Exactly. Very good,” Linda says. After so many years of teaching, praise is a reflex. “I use this to teach addition. The first row is for single digits, one through nine. The one below that is for tens, next for hundreds.” Linda and the piano tuner are side-by-side, Linda’s softly creased cheeks next to his thin, sunken ones, Linda’s high turtleneck and permed curls next to his heavy brows and the stubbled skin of his neck.
“You don’t have a calculator?” the piano tuner asks.
“You can’t learn with a calculator, or not really. Not well. You learn best with simple objects, without so many bells and whistles. At least, that’s the theory,” Linda says this with a shrug, though of course she believes it. Distraction is the curse of the modern world.
“Can you do other kinds of math on it, too? Like… multiplication?” The face he turns to her is lamby, as trusting as a six-year-old’s. His breath smells sweetly of banana.
“Sure. But we don’t have time for that now. We need to get this piano fixed. If you’re not…” Linda doesn’t know how to finish the sentence. If you’re not going to tune the piano, please leave? If you’re not going to tune the piano, then why are you here?
“They should’ve sent me to a school like this, don’t you think?” he says, and something in the way he asks this, conversationally, like he is proposing how the plot of a movie could be improved, disturbs Linda as much as the piano’s tone had when she tested it earlier. Wrong, somehow.
Linda knows, at once, that there has been a mistake. That she has made a mistake. That she has made the mistake she warns her students about: of making assumptions, of ignoring one’s instinct, of becoming distracted.
Before Linda can move, the man grabs her. She cries out, she squirms, but these measures are useless; he is stronger than her and has the advantage of surprise, of her shock at the sudden change in pitch from what she was expecting – an ordinary meeting of two professionals, the calm tinkling of piano keys – to this, whatever this is.
When Linda tries to escape his grip, the abacus he still holds smashes into her spine, a corner digging through her shirt. Linda’s cheek presses against his, almost like they were hugging and he forgot to let go.
And then: liquid, hot and salty, trickles between the cleavage of their cheeks, trickles into Linda’s turtleneck, pools on her collarbone. He shudders, and a hiccup in his chest echoes in Linda’s, and there is a caesura, a pause when time is not counted, when the recording rewinds, back to before Linda let a man into the school after hours, back when the bell had rung for dismissal, and Linda was cleaning up her classroom, taping up the children’s snowflakes, and a little boy, one of her worst, stunted-short and big-headed, rushed into the empty room and tackled her around the waist, buried his face in the corduroy of her skirt, and began to weep, to hold onto Linda like she was bobbing driftwood in a vast ocean. Maybe she was. Maybe she was the only floating thing left to him.
“It’s going to be okay,” she says to the man, like she said to that boy. If Linda, a teacher to the end, hinges her elbows just so, she can reach his lower back, and the surprising bulk of his middle, and make this hug reciprocal. Linda can pat his back, and remember that broken boy, his life all jangled up in the minor chords. Linda can let herself be held and wait until his tears stop falling, until she can press the right key and hear it ring out, in tune.
At the entrance to the school, Linda disarms the security system and pulls back the locks. She thrusts out her hand for him to shake. After a second’s hesitation, he obliges. She breathes in the outside smells clinging to his wool coat, cigarettes, diesel exhaust. Although she’s never met a piano tuner, it occurs to her that this one is too young. Piano tuning ought to be an old man’s game, right?
“Thanks for coming on such short notice, and in such terrible weather, too,” Linda says cheerfully. “They call this a wintry mix, but if you ask me, it’s more winter than mix.”
The piano tuner’s smile is more winter than smile.
“The poor old thing’s been stuck in the attic for years, ever since the teacher before me retired. She was classically trained, or so I’m told.” Linda leads him down the corridor and into her classroom. She can still feel the icy tips of his fingers from where they grazed the back of her hand during their brief, uninspiring handshake.
The piano, veiled in dust, has been pushed against the wall opposite the windows. It appears patient but not too hopeful, like an old man in line at the unemployment office.
Linda stands next to it and fans her arms up and down. “Ta-da,” she says, in a mocking falsetto.
“Is this stuff all yours?” It’s the first thing the piano tuner has said since walking in. His voice is thinner, less substantial, than his body suggests. He is short but dense, his frame like an inverted keyhole, a big round head balanced on the lonely edge of an acute triangle. His face is pale, his eyes are the color of river ice. A soft note of doubt sounds in Linda’s mind at his outside, underwater qualities, how he seems ill at ease indoors.
“The classroom is mine, yes, if that’s what you mean. I teach first grade through third,” Linda says. “Anyway, the kids will be so grateful to you. Let me know if you need anything. Anything at all.”
He doesn’t have anything at all to say to that. He weaves through the worktables, the tails of his coat briefly concealing the child-sized chairs, and something hard – his tools, for tuning the piano? – bang against the wood. He stops in front of a stack of lined paper. Linda watches him inspect a page containing cursive capitals, the tricky ones, the Qs and Zs.
The piano tuner moves over to the dictionary, spread open on its pedestal. He flips a few pages, bends close in a pantomime of reading, though she can tell he’s not. Could this be part of his process, getting to know the space before he begins work on the piano? Like piano tuning is a ritual with certain required steps. She would like that to be true, because otherwise, there is no reason why he loiters near the children’s cubbies, or why he peels Linda’s banana and bites off a third of it.
“Help yourself,” Linda says, with a hint of sarcasm.
He swallows, then arranges the fruit on the corner of her desk so the uneaten flesh rests on the peel.
Another, louder, note of doubt goes off in Linda when the piano tuner walks to the math materials, as far as he can get from the piano while remaining in the room. He reminds her of one of her students, all restless energy, touching, probing, delaying. Delaying Linda, and Linda’s father, more importantly, who needs his evening dose of medications.
Linda coughs into her fist. When the piano tuner doesn’t look over, she lifts the piano’s lid and presses on a key. The sound is muddy, as melodic as a boot breaking the skin of ice on a puddle. She presses it again, harder this time, and it sticks, hovering below the tide line of dingy whites and blacks like it is ashamed of itself.
“I don’t have much of an ear for music, but even I know that’s flat,” Linda says, projecting her voice. He glances at her with his watery eyes and for a moment Linda thinks he is finally, finally, about to tune the piano, to open the sides of his coat and reveal a row of tools, metronomes and tuning forks hanging from loops, like in those old crime shows, when bad guys displayed their stolen merchandise this way.
But no. He has found a new distraction. Like so many of the items in her classroom, Linda inherited the abacus from the teacher before her, who inherited it from the teacher before her, on and on, an unbroken queue of well-meaning women.
“How’s this work?” The piano tuner shakes the abacus like it is a tambourine. The beads thud dully against one another. Reluctantly, Linda leaves the piano and meets him in math.
“Pretty straightforward,” she says. With her pointer finger, she reaches over to move a bead across the top rod. “This is one.” She moves the second bead. “Two.”
He reaches out and moves the third. “So, this would be three?”
“Exactly. Very good,” Linda says. After so many years of teaching, praise is a reflex. “I use this to teach addition. The first row is for single digits, one through nine. The one below that is for tens, next for hundreds.” Linda and the piano tuner are side-by-side, Linda’s softly creased cheeks next to his thin, sunken ones, Linda’s high turtleneck and permed curls next to his heavy brows and the stubbled skin of his neck.
“You don’t have a calculator?” the piano tuner asks.
“You can’t learn with a calculator, or not really. Not well. You learn best with simple objects, without so many bells and whistles. At least, that’s the theory,” Linda says this with a shrug, though of course she believes it. Distraction is the curse of the modern world.
“Can you do other kinds of math on it, too? Like… multiplication?” The face he turns to her is lamby, as trusting as a six-year-old’s. His breath smells sweetly of banana.
“Sure. But we don’t have time for that now. We need to get this piano fixed. If you’re not…” Linda doesn’t know how to finish the sentence. If you’re not going to tune the piano, please leave? If you’re not going to tune the piano, then why are you here?
“They should’ve sent me to a school like this, don’t you think?” he says, and something in the way he asks this, conversationally, like he is proposing how the plot of a movie could be improved, disturbs Linda as much as the piano’s tone had when she tested it earlier. Wrong, somehow.
Linda knows, at once, that there has been a mistake. That she has made a mistake. That she has made the mistake she warns her students about: of making assumptions, of ignoring one’s instinct, of becoming distracted.
Before Linda can move, the man grabs her. She cries out, she squirms, but these measures are useless; he is stronger than her and has the advantage of surprise, of her shock at the sudden change in pitch from what she was expecting – an ordinary meeting of two professionals, the calm tinkling of piano keys – to this, whatever this is.
When Linda tries to escape his grip, the abacus he still holds smashes into her spine, a corner digging through her shirt. Linda’s cheek presses against his, almost like they were hugging and he forgot to let go.
And then: liquid, hot and salty, trickles between the cleavage of their cheeks, trickles into Linda’s turtleneck, pools on her collarbone. He shudders, and a hiccup in his chest echoes in Linda’s, and there is a caesura, a pause when time is not counted, when the recording rewinds, back to before Linda let a man into the school after hours, back when the bell had rung for dismissal, and Linda was cleaning up her classroom, taping up the children’s snowflakes, and a little boy, one of her worst, stunted-short and big-headed, rushed into the empty room and tackled her around the waist, buried his face in the corduroy of her skirt, and began to weep, to hold onto Linda like she was bobbing driftwood in a vast ocean. Maybe she was. Maybe she was the only floating thing left to him.
“It’s going to be okay,” she says to the man, like she said to that boy. If Linda, a teacher to the end, hinges her elbows just so, she can reach his lower back, and the surprising bulk of his middle, and make this hug reciprocal. Linda can pat his back, and remember that broken boy, his life all jangled up in the minor chords. Linda can let herself be held and wait until his tears stop falling, until she can press the right key and hear it ring out, in tune.
*
The piano tuner is late. He had a devil of a time finding a parking space big enough for his van. Then, when he was two blocks from the school, he realized he’d left his lever and mutes in the glovebox. Doubling back, the snow that had slowed his drive from the shop required extra caution on the untreated sidewalks, though he nearly slipped and broke his back anyway.
He shouldn’t have taken this job. A 1980s Danneman, treated rudely by generations of grimy schoolchildren, then neglected in a humid attic for God knows how long? No surer way to murder an instrument than that.
Yellowish light pours from the ground floor of the school, like a tropical aquarium surrounded by vacant tanks. He has to admit it does look cozy. There might be a kettle in there somewhere, or better yet, one of those machines that makes single-serve coffee from plastic pods. A cup to warm the numbed tips of his fingers so that he can rescue the piano’s true voice, if it isn’t too far gone.
The piano tuner steps through the school gate, loafers crunching on salt. The teacher who was supposed to wait for him is not standing by the entrance, as promised. Well, who’s fault is that? It’s thirty degrees out, and he’s an hour late.
The piano tuner’s breath smokes, then falls. He takes off his gloves and pulls out his phone. He’s got the school’s number saved somewhere in there, he thinks, or could it be in his email? He’s hunched over, shivering, plunking around on the screen, when he feels it, a tickle on the top of his head, the ancient signal that someone is watching you when you didn’t know you were being watched. His eyes shift to the left of the entrance, to the big window there.
The scene is so clear, it is almost painterly. A tidy classroom, framed by paper-cut snowflakes. Simple, rustic objects arrayed across shelves, art prints tacked neatly to the walls, and, smack dab in the middle of it all, the teacher.
The piano tuner takes in his big wool coat, his pale cheeks splotched red, like drops of blood spreading in a cup of milk. The teacher holds an abacus in both hands and stares into the dark.
A little young to be a teacher, the piano tuner thinks, before walking through the unlocked front door.
He shouldn’t have taken this job. A 1980s Danneman, treated rudely by generations of grimy schoolchildren, then neglected in a humid attic for God knows how long? No surer way to murder an instrument than that.
Yellowish light pours from the ground floor of the school, like a tropical aquarium surrounded by vacant tanks. He has to admit it does look cozy. There might be a kettle in there somewhere, or better yet, one of those machines that makes single-serve coffee from plastic pods. A cup to warm the numbed tips of his fingers so that he can rescue the piano’s true voice, if it isn’t too far gone.
The piano tuner steps through the school gate, loafers crunching on salt. The teacher who was supposed to wait for him is not standing by the entrance, as promised. Well, who’s fault is that? It’s thirty degrees out, and he’s an hour late.
The piano tuner’s breath smokes, then falls. He takes off his gloves and pulls out his phone. He’s got the school’s number saved somewhere in there, he thinks, or could it be in his email? He’s hunched over, shivering, plunking around on the screen, when he feels it, a tickle on the top of his head, the ancient signal that someone is watching you when you didn’t know you were being watched. His eyes shift to the left of the entrance, to the big window there.
The scene is so clear, it is almost painterly. A tidy classroom, framed by paper-cut snowflakes. Simple, rustic objects arrayed across shelves, art prints tacked neatly to the walls, and, smack dab in the middle of it all, the teacher.
The piano tuner takes in his big wool coat, his pale cheeks splotched red, like drops of blood spreading in a cup of milk. The teacher holds an abacus in both hands and stares into the dark.
A little young to be a teacher, the piano tuner thinks, before walking through the unlocked front door.
--
Joanna Theiss (she/her) is a former lawyer living in Washington, DC. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in The Penn Review, Chautauqua, Peatsmoke Journal, Milk Candy Review, and Best Microfiction, among others. Bluesky: bsky.app/joannatheiss.com
Joanna Theiss (she/her) is a former lawyer living in Washington, DC. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in The Penn Review, Chautauqua, Peatsmoke Journal, Milk Candy Review, and Best Microfiction, among others. Bluesky: bsky.app/joannatheiss.com