Chapter 15: Samuel the Tuner
The man tuning the piano in the community hall was humming under his breath, and Odessa knew the tune before she knew the man. It was a Bach invention, played slowly, the way students play it when thinking about something else. She stopped in the doorway, plastic bag over her arm, and watched him work: a tall man in his sixties, grey-haired, with strong, careful hands and a small hammer. He tightened a string, listened, tightened it again, and nodded, satisfied.
"You're flat on the F," Odessa said, before she could stop herself. "The one above middle C. It's been flat since I came in."
The man turned, and his face changed in stages: surprise, then confusion, then a slow, dawning recognition that made him put the hammer down very carefully, as if it might break. "Odessa?" he said. "Odessa Bell? From Detroit? From the conservatory?"
She stared at him. The hair was grey now, and there were lines around his eyes that had not been there when they were twenty, but the voice was the same, and the way he tilted his head when he listened was the same. "Samuel?" she said. "Samuel Okafor? You used to sit two rows behind me and copy my fingerings when Professor Adeyemi wasn't looking."
"I did no such thing," Samuel said, grinning. "I improved them. And then you improved them back, and we argued about it for a whole semester. Odessa Bell. I heard you played at the Crane Gala. I heard it from my niece, who showed me a video on her phone, and I said, 'That woman plays like someone I used to know,' and my niece said, 'Uncle, that's because it is someone you used to know,' and I didn't believe her until now."
They laughed, and then they talked, the way old friends do when thirty years have collapsed into a single afternoon: about Elena Ruiz, still alive and still formidable; about the conservatory practice rooms, always too cold; about the jobs they had taken and the music they had kept. Samuel had come to Chicago decades ago and tuned pianos for concert halls, schools, and one very rich man who owned a Steinway he never played. He had tuned the Crane grand, in fact, the night before the gala.
"I tuned that piano myself," he said, proudly. "So if you sounded good, some of the credit is mine. A small amount. A tasteful amount."
"A very small amount," Odessa said, and they laughed again.
Then Samuel grew serious. He asked about her hands and her planned programme, and Odessa told him the truth: about her wrist, about the fear that one good night had been luck, and about the shelter piano, so out of tune it fought her. Samuel listened the way he listened to strings, with his whole attention, and when she finished he said, "Then we'll fix the piano first. Not the shelter one, that's beyond saving. But there's a practice room here, with a decent upright, and I'll tune it for you myself, properly, and keep it tuned. You can't practise on a lie, Odessa. Your hands need to hear the truth."
He kept his word. Over the next week, he tuned the hall piano three times, until it sang cleanly from the bottom note to the top. He also brought her a metronome, an old wooden one, and sheet music he had kept from their conservatory days, including a Bach piece she had forgotten she loved. "For your programme," he said. "Not because it's impressive. Because it's honest. Audiences can tell the difference."
Odessa practised on the tuned piano the next morning, and the difference was immediate. The notes were where she expected them to be. Her hands relaxed. Her wrist still ached after an hour, and Samuel, watching from the doorway, told her to rest it, and to practise in shorter sessions, and to stop being stubborn about pain, which was rich coming from a man who had once practised through a broken finger. She obeyed him, mostly, because old friends are allowed to say such things.
On the last afternoon, before he left, Samuel stood beside the piano and said, "You were the best of us, Odessa. Not the loudest, not the flashiest. The best. Elena used to say you played like you were telling the truth. Don't let a bad decade talk you out of that. Play your programme, and let Julian Voss listen from the front row. He'll hear it. Everyone will."
Odessa looked at the tuned piano, at the metronome ticking steadily, at her old friend, and felt her confidence return, not all at once, but the way light returns to a room: gradually, then suddenly enough to see by. She sat down and played the Bach invention, slowly, the way Samuel had hummed it, and he hummed along, off-key and entirely happy, and for the first time since accepting Clara's recital, she believed she could do it. Not because the piano was perfect, or because the fear was gone, but because she was no longer practising alone.