One afternoon, Jake the tuner came in for his scheduled visit, arriving with his old duct-taped valise and his droopy jeans, and we had a conversation that went something like this:

Man, this is a horrible thing you’re doing to this piano, Martin, just horrible. You’ve got to at least get a dehumidifier in this place and clear out those ferns and maybe block off a few of the windows.

Really, Jake, I guess you feel some deep personal need to humanize pianos. I suppose it’s part of your job—the way some people humanize, say, dogs.

Well, yeah, I take care of them and tune them, and each one has a kind of personality, sure. Yeah, I guess I do humanize, if that’s the word, although I think the word you want is personify.

A bundle of wires and felt and wood, a fat cast-iron frame and a soundboard, really, nothing, nothing. It’s a sickness to say it’s anything else except those things, Jake, for Christ sake. It’s a sickness to think the way you think—even if it’s your job. It’s nothing, nothing, nothing in the world at all, nothing, so if I want to let the thing rot in the heat, then so be it. Now if you don’t mind I’d like you to get out of here.

[Omitted in this section: the long conversations with Irene on the patio, gin in hand, as they watched the flat stone barges being tugged toward New York. Left out are those resolutions made under great duress, the vows, the statements of fact, the cold/hot touches, the intense sessions with the shrink, the feelings expressed and reexpressed, the intense vibration he felt along his palm, the physical therapy sessions, the hot wax treatments, the arthritis specialists, the acupuncturists. (Omitted from this section of omissions: he couldn’t stand the tinny sound the damaged Steinway made, but he went ahead and lived with the hope that his abuse of the piano would somehow eliminate the weight in his hands, as if his fingers might, in the hope of making clear sharp notes out of the bar room sound, press firmly, resolutely upon each note.) ]

The carnality of it, the brute squeezing, the concave twitch of thigh muscles when you’re pushing hard, deep into the center, that terminus. Then the lifting sensation, peeling back, the void, the sense that some feckless bit of life has slipped away, lost. (Just as when working over a piece I might make a slight trill, a grace note, finished before my awareness of it set in.) It was to be done—and it would be labeled perfect and brilliant, coming from a place hidden deep within the work itself, and so it was when I was with her, her Italian stockings twisting in a helix along the top of a chair. Outside in the blue winter night, cars pushed through the slush on Park Avenue. Down the street the museum was closed for the night, the great display cases, the paintings, shrouded in darkness, the coat racks empty. Behind the museum a blanket of white covered Central Park. Trees eased under the weight of fresh snow. Alone in my orgasm I’d begun thinking about how in a few days I might take Margaret and Sylvia—at that time Sylvia was about eight—shopping on Fifth Avenue, where, spread out on sheets of damp cardboard in front of Tiffany’s, vendors in rags would plead with us, rubbing their hands together, stamping their feet to stay warm, selling cheap imitation cashmere scarves.