"Huh," he said, softly. He was standing very close to me, leaning down over the strings with his tall man's stoop. "It sounds like it's breathing."
"That's what my grandfather used to say."
"It sounds like the vent," he said, "when somebody's fighting it, and then they stop fighting it. The alarms go off and the numbers are all wrong and then you change one setting, just a tiny bit, and it all goes quiet. And they're breathing with it instead of against it." He straightened up. "Sorry. That's a weird thing to say about a piano."
"No," I said. "That's exactly what it is."
We looked at each other. The stage door guy, somewhere back in the wings, dropped something metal, and it rang through the theater, and we both jumped.
"Do you play?" I asked, a little too briskly, turning back to the keys.
"No. My abuela did. She had an old spinet in her house in Nogales. When she died, nobody wanted it, so I had it shipped up here. It cost more to ship than it's worth. It's in my living room. I put mail on it." He was quiet a moment. "I don't think it's been tuned since the Carter administration. When you press the keys it sounds like a saloon in a movie, right before the fight."
"I could tune it."
"You don't have to do that."
"I know I don't have to," I said. "I'm offering."
"That's really nice, but it's fine, honestly, it's just a piece of furniture at this—" He stopped. He closed his mouth. He looked up at the sunburst on the ceiling as if consulting it. Then he looked back down at me and said, carefully, like a man walking out onto ice, "Yes. Thank you. I would like that."
"See," I said. "That wasn't so hard."
"It was incredibly hard," he said. "You have no idea. I'm sweating."