At eight o’clock one Saturday morning, six giants appeared in front of the constructing where I live, propped open the front door, and began heaving a thickly swaddled 1930 Steinway Model L grand piano up the narrow switchbacks to the fourth floor.
If these stairs give out, I assumed—not a distant possibility—I’ll have blood on my hands. Some 90 minutes in, as I glanced out from my kitchen entryway onto the landing one floor below, considered one of the giants caught sight of me: “Oh. You’re the guy.”
I’m the guy—the guy who saw fit to spirit a 600-pound piano onto the vinyl-tile living-room floor of his railroad apartment next to a cement factory. After I sat down and played, even before the tuner had come to settle those jostled strings, I understood directly that it was the appropriate alternative: A grand piano—sweet sounding, sensitive keyed, screen free, and utterly indifferent to the standard of your Wi-Fi—has made my life a hotter, lovelier, better-ballasted thing.
I grew up in Salt Lake City, a spot with a whole lot of pianos: the flinty hand-me-down upright in my mother’s dining room, on which she taught my first six years of lessons; the five- or six-foot grands within the living rooms of a few of our neighbors, whose kids I’d babysit for spending money and so I could tinker away after they went to bed. These were families I knew from our Mormon church, where I’d go on school-day afternoons to practice when my mom was teaching at home—as ward organist, she had the keys. Then there was the 6-foot-11-inch Steinway Model B in my piano teacher’s front room, where a handsome fire purred all winter and she or he sat incurably glamorous, welded to her coffee mug, an assassin on the keyboard.
I loved learning the piano. I loved the puzzle of a latest piece, noticing how some composers’ ideas (mostly the Russian romantics—Scriabin, Rachmaninoff) felt almost preprogrammed in my brain, so intuitive were each the sounds and the physical movements that made them—while others posed a baffling and charmless blockade. Being a semiserious student meant I needed to play some Bach and Beethoven too—earlier, sparer, more naked music than the romantics, and because of this, less forgiving of weak points in technique. Outside a number of episodes of real stage fright, I loved performing, and by the second half of highschool, I used to be giving passable solo performances to a recital hall stuffed with smiling family and friends.
What I didn’t love was practicing—the actual tedium by which one perfects fingering and touch and voicing and rhythm, the duty of finding the music within the music. But within the unsupervised solitude of the church, at a well-kept instrument in a giant room where it sounded good, I discovered something more fun: improvisation—playing chords that flowed out of me just like the testimony I’d hear in that very room on Sundays.
After college in California—a spot where, at the associated fee of a few years of peace, I revealed myself to be gay and cut ties with Mormonism—I moved to Los Angeles to start maturity. Suddenly, the abundance of pianos I’d known as much as that time was replaced by none. (The exception was the Bösendorfer in my first employer’s Brentwood front room.) Electronic keyboards got here and went, but using them—lifeless, rickety, bereft of voice or vibration—was like cooking with earplugs in your nose.
And thus it went for a lot of pianoless years, through a move across the country to Brooklyn. The rare encounter with a piano was each pleasing and painful, given the deterioration of my repertory memory and dexterity—until I made something up one evening for my friend Courtney on her Yamaha upright, and she or he said, in the way in which that the appropriate person at the appropriate time can glide in and unlock the door to a complete other wing of your life, “You must really have a piano.” She told me concerning the auction house Doyle, on the Upper East Side, where an undervalued grand might occasionally show up alongside the vases and the rugs. I trekked there within the January cold and, shooting squarely from the hip, placed a bid—a number of thousand dollars—for a honey-colored Steinway from the Nineteen Twenties. (James Barron’s magnificent Latest York Times series on the making of a Steinway describes “a keenness if not a reverence” amongst musicians for instruments from this “golden age”—a phrase at which the corporate, which remains to be making and selling pianos, chafes.)
I got outbid, however it didn’t matter. I used to be hooked on a vision of my life infused with the romance of my very own Steinway. I discovered an identical instrument at a suburban dealer and picked what turned out to be the coldest day of 2016 for a visit there on the Long Island Railroad. After I arrived, the windows of the shop were fogged over from the humidifiers on full blast to protect against the expansion and contraction that promise every piano its eventual doom.
As I sat there muddling through Brahms, attempting to repatriate to a rustic whose language I could only faintly recall, I dreamed of getting a piano like this in a spot where nothing could ever keep me from it—no keys to the church, no cords or MIDI cables to extract from a closet. At any hour of any day, under any condition, I could just walk right as much as the keys and press down on considered one of them, after which one other, after which sit down and be up, up, and away.
Contemplating such a thing was marvelous. It was, at the identical time, absurd. On the dealer price, I’d must take out a loan—even for this model that, having not recently undergone the key renovations a piano needs over its life, was 1 / 4 the associated fee of latest; plus, I actually did fear that the haul to my decrepit walk-up would end in disaster. What would occur if I had to maneuver?
However the dream made a greater case, and I suppose it was never really as much as me anyway: My piano is haunted, you recognize. Its arrival, every week or so after that Long Island test run, coincided with an isolated but terrifying instance of sleep paralysis and hallucination. I hadn’t bargained for the way much and with what fervency this object would exert its pull, or how immediately.
The Bach corpus I once rejected is now my favorite, and I’m making my way through his toccatas; adult me has a modicum of discipline and patience, it seems, and has experienced many brain-remodeling recordings of Glenn Gould. My last Zoom lesson with my piano teacher (the identical one, as glamorous and caffeinated as ever) was largely of the “no notes” variety—an interaction without precedent in our relationship. But mostly, I like to take a seat down and play whatever comes—for my friends, for a person, for the camera on the phone with which I sometimes post my countless song to Instagram.
I’ve sat at that piano playing karaoke tracks for party guests. I’ve sat there singing the hymns of my childhood, a fragile reclaiming of a confiscated history. I’ve sat there as my ex-boyfriend cloistered himself at the other end of the apartment with a set of noise-canceling headphones: “It’s just so loud.” It sometimes occurred to me that my piano would still work within the apocalypse, which seemed melodramatic. But then I sat there, alone, with a shattered heart within the early days of COVID, and from my bench, I could see the spire of the Empire State Constructing pulsing red and white, up and down: emergency.
A bit later, I sat there once I wasn’t sure how you can pick up steam writing a novel concerning the origins of my childhood faith. I played a number of notes and sang along from the thirty eighth chapter of Job, making up music to go along with the words—a legend of creation—which have chased after me for the reason that moment I first read them: “When the morning stars sang together, and all of the sons of God shouted for joy.”
You would possibly, I suppose, just get a guitar. Or a harmonica. Each are portable, perfect for dabbling, and invite as much joyous creativity as any musical instrument. But some things in life are supposed to be heavy and indebting and antiquated; they are supposed to demand regular and highly specialized maintenance; they are supposed to bring forward the load of the past, to induce it upon us, to maintain us unreasonably awake. I take into consideration all of the years once I didn’t have a piano, when to some extent I believed it unattainable, one other piece of the past I’d had to depart behind. However the thing a few piano is that it’s too big to vanish; it’s large enough to fight, large enough to search out its approach to you. “Oh,” my piano said in that outlying showroom all those years ago. “You’re the guy.”
