GRAND OBSESSION

 

As soon as I touch the keys I am carried off by the sound I remember so well.
Perhaps it is even better than I remember. A gossamer northern lights of shimmering tone, an impeccable, effortless touch that draws music out of me as if I were merely a vehicle for the composer. I stop, breathtaken. Then I start again. I play the Schumann, the Mendelssohn. A Chopin prelude. Some Mozart, the most demanding of the tone taskmasters.

She is back! Marlene is back! She is more beautiful than ever. She is dressed in a golden gossamer gown that brushes the toes of her golden silk slippers, up on a dark stage, the spotlights on her, singing "Falling in Love Again" in her smoky contralto. My heart flips over. This is the most gorgeous piano in the entire world. I am humbled to have such an instrument in my living room. I am not its owner, but a mere custodian. Such an instrument could never really be truly owned by anyone.

I've run out of my memorized repertoire, so I play some arpeggios. I dive deeply into the gorgeous, bell-like tones, the pealing treble, the sonorous, warm bass, the richly complex tonal tapestry of the tenor—all of it deeply pleasurable. The music is a shimmering phosphorescence, reverberating all around and within me, suffusing the room with a halo of light.

I get up and open the kitchen door and stand on the threshold. Marc and my husband, Oliver, look up from their conversation, expectant, silent.

"Thank you!" I whisper, tears in my eyes. "Thank you for giving me my piano back!"

Before Marc leaves, he shows me how to pull the action out of the piano and onto my lap, how to "sugarcoat" the strike point of the hammers by pricking them with a voicing tool, how to lubricate something called the key bushings so the action will stay fluid. He recommends I learn the "Black Key" étude by Chopin to keep the voicing even, that I buy a brass-wire pot scrubber to keep notes from getting too harsh, that I buy a can of Elmer's Slide-All to lube the key bushings, and that I get a four-needle voicing tool. He draws pictures of exactly where to needle on the hammers to get certain effects.

"Don't train the local techs. They won't appreciate it."

"You mean other techs don't know what you showed me?"

"No, they all do it the way the hammer manufacturers have taught them, without chemicals, and too much needling that just ruins the hammers. Hammer manufacturers are ruining their product because now everyone wants a prevoiced hammer. That's why they make them so hard." He is spluttering now with agitation. Clearly we are treading into polemical territory. His voice becomes shrill. "I have to basically completely undo what the manufacturers have done to get the sound I want." His face goes dark, his jaw set. Then he brightens again.

"I can coach you over the phone, it wouldn't be the first time I've done that." He gives me his cell phone number. "That should hold you until I can come out again."

And how long will that be?

"Probably a couple of years."

By now it is eight o'clock, and very dark outside. Marc says he must be off. Oliver and I protest that we have reserved him a room in the nicest hotel in town, but Marc refuses it. He says he must go, into the night, over the wintry mountain passes, back to Bozeman.

After he is gone, I play my piano, luxuriating in its lush tone, even more beautiful than I remember. I call Carl in New York and tell him Marc has given me my piano back. When, at last, I can pull myself away from the piano to go to bed, I fall asleep feeling fulfilled and at peace.

The next morning, I go straight to the piano, eager to resume my embrace of Marlene's magic. I sit down, open the fallboard, and begin to play.

Then I stop, stunned. I can hardly believe what I hear.

The treble's tone is dull and wooden. It will not project above the bass and tenor sections. Every flaw Marc corrected is back! I try playing again, then recoil. It seems the piano's beauty and vibrancy were restored for one brief, magical evening, only to be lost with the dawn, like a glittering coach turned into a pumpkin while I slept. At once, I call Marc on his cell phone.

Marc sounds unperturbed. "I told you the shelf life of what we are doing is very short, including tuning," he says. "It's an infant piano. It's utterly volatile, and its rate of change will eclipse any changes I make. We've reached a point of diminishing returns, as far as what I can do. I have no further cards to play. The only thing I could do is replace the hammers."

"Does it need new hammers?"

"No. It is still evolving. Ninety-nine percent of what I did is tuning."

That can't be right. The piano has been tuned three times since it arrived, and that didn't solve the problem.

"Play it for five hundred hours and then voice it again," Marc continues. "If you don't like how it sounds, just listen to the music, not the piano."

How can this can be—don't other people get new pianos and aren't they happy with them from the beginning, and remain happy?

"The only people who are happy from day one and remain consistently happy are those that don't really have a relationship with their piano," says Marc. "Either they don't play or they can't hear. The piano is like one of those blow-up dolls to them. Anyone who can hear will have this problem with a new piano."

So, according to Marc, my ability to hear, so carefully nurtured in me by my father, so key to my enjoyment of music, is now an affliction? My inner skeptic goes on high alert.

"Look," he says. "I'm a piano makeup artist. I simulate a seasoned concert instrument. It's all just smoke and mirrors." He laughs.

I feel a pang of horror. He can't mean this.

"You are at the beginning of a journey," he explains. "It's volatile. It's unpredictable. The piano will react to you, and your ear will adapt to it. Adapt to the piano. Engage in a dynamic communication with it. Don't come to it with a preconceived idea of what it should give you at a particular moment in time. It's growing and evolving. It's alive and living, and you have a relationship with it. You can hurt it and it can hurt you.

"You've bought a ticket for a ride. You can either take the ride or turn the ticket back in. You'll get the ride you get."

Marc assures me that Carl will take the piano back in a heartbeat and refund all my money, if that is what I want. But what I want is the sound that Marc created. I want it so badly, just knowing that my piano can do that, even if only for a few hours, makes me not want to give it up. What did Marc do to create Marlene? I need to know. I need to understand.

Months pass and the piano is no better, despite all the "playing in" that everyone tells me will make all the difference. What happened to my piano? But beyond that, what has happened to me? Why am I in the thrall of a piano? What, in practical, technical terms, is the difference between the Marlene who seduced me, and the piano that leaves me cold?

In the fall, my investigative reporting project ends. One September day, I telephone Marc. May I spend some time with him in New York, I ask, to watch him work? To my surprise, he says yes.

Just as an inner compulsion called me to the piano late in life, just as an inner vision of tone led me to Marlene, so now I am drawn to New York, to immerse myself in Marc's world, find out his secret, and bring it back.