Chapter 4: The Hall in Daylight

“When I play these together, listen for the swelling in the sound. Tell me whether it gets slower after I move the lever.”

He leaned forward.

“Slower, not quieter?”

“Slower.”

She played the interval. He held a finger above his knee, moving it with what he heard. She made an adjustment and played it again.

“That’s slower.”

She could hear it too, once he had directed her toward it. She let the sound fade and tested again, harder this time, then with the neighboring notes. The tool stayed steady in her hand.

At the next comparison, he answered before she had finished listening.

“Slower again.”

She looked around at him.

“I haven’t moved anything yet.”

His finger stopped.

“Oh.”

The word traveled cleanly across the space between them. He put both hands under his thighs, as though they had been responsible.

“Listen again,” she said.

This time he waited through the sound and through the silence afterward.

“I can’t tell.”

She had an answer ready about attention, about how the ear needed to learn where to settle. She could almost hear herself delivering it. But his shoulders were drawn up, and the difference she was asking him to judge had not been plain to her either.

“All right. We’ll check it another way.”

She changed the comparison, played a little more slowly, and asked him to stand nearer the end of the keyboard. He did not need to pronounce the note correct. She needed him to describe what reached him from there.

“This one keeps moving,” he said. “The other one goes thin.”

“Which one? Show me.”

He pointed, keeping his finger above the key until she nodded. Then he pressed it.

She listened with him. It was easier when she did not also have to watch his mouth. She asked him to play it again, and he did, with an uneven force that made her lift her hand.

“About this hard.”

She demonstrated. He tried once more.

“Yes. Like that.”

The work advanced in small pieces. Sometimes he heard a change she could follow; sometimes his descriptions sent her back to the beginning. Once she asked whether the flutter had gone and he said, “Mostly,” which was no use until she asked what he meant. He meant that it was still there, but he wanted it to be gone because they had been listening to it for so long.

She laughed before she could stop herself.

He looked offended for a moment.

“That happens,” she said.

“To you?”

“Yes.”

He moved his chair back into the patch of daylight. By then it had narrowed enough that only one of his shoes was in it.