Concert Pitch

You hear the truck before you see it, because the muffler has been going since 2011 and Gaétan has never once admitted it.

It is ten past six on a Friday in late October, and the street lamps are already on. You are standing at the window of the downstairs workshop with a cloth in your hand, in a room that smells of felt and lemon oil, with the upright against the back wall and its front panel off. Across the street a dépanneur’s sign flickers green on the wet pavement. The pickup swings in to the curb with half the exhaust scraping, and a big man gets out and stands looking up at the building with a cardboard box in his arms.

You go down and open the street door before he can ring.

“Rémi,” Gaétan says.

“You’re early.”

“I left the farm at noon. I didn’t trust myself to wait.” He holds out the box. “My sister sent maple butter. Marie-Claude says you don’t eat enough.”

“Marie-Claude has watched me eat for twenty-two years.”

“She says it anyway.” He is fifty-nine, a man who hauled milk cans for forty years and then sat down, and he does not come in until you step back. Then he has to turn a little to get his chest through the door.

Fourteen months. You have counted them every morning without meaning to. Alain died on a Tuesday in August, in the hospital on Saint-Denis, of a heart nobody had thought to worry about, and Gaétan came down from the Townships the same night and stood by the hospital bed with his cap in both hands. In twenty-two years of Christmases you had never found one thing to say to him, and neither had he.

Now he is here for the piano. It was their mother’s, a Heintzman from 1958, and Alain brought it to Montréal when she died and kept it in the front room like a relative. Gaétan wants it back at the farm. His sister’s granddaughter has started lessons, he said when he rang, in the same careful voice he used to ask whether Alain had left a will. He will load it in the morning with a neighbour of yours and the four moving pads you keep in the hall. You offered to tune it first. He said it didn’t need it. You said it did.

“Sit,” you say. “I’ll make coffee. This takes an hour.”

---

It takes more than an hour. He sits on the lowest stair of the staircase that goes up to the flat, with his knees apart and his coffee on the step beside him, and watches you work.

You strike the tuning fork on your knee and set its stem on the bench, and the A rings out thin and clean, four hundred and forty cycles a second, the note the whole orchestra stands on. You match the middle string to it, pull the temperament strip, and bring the other two in, and the wavering between them is the part nobody believes until they hear it, a slow wah, wah, wah where two strings disagree by a hair.

“That,” you say. “Hear it?”

“Sounds like my brother snoring.”

“It’s two strings fighting. I turn the pin until they stop.”

“Until they stop.” Gaétan says it slowly. “How do you know when?”

“They go quiet. The sound gets bigger and the fighting goes out of it.” You turn the lever a hair and the beating slows, and slows, and stops. The note sits in the room like something that has been set down. “There.”

He says nothing for a while. You do the next unison. In the kitchen upstairs the radiator ticks.

“Alain said you could hear a mistake through a wall,” Gaétan says.

“I could hear his.”

“He used to say you were the only person who ever told him he was flat.” You hear the stair creak as he shifts. “He liked it. It drove him crazy and he liked it.”

You don’t answer. Your hands are steady on the lever, which is the one reliable thing about you.

“I should say something,” Gaétan says, behind you. “And then I’ll carry the piano out to the truck myself, tonight, in the dark, and you’ll never have to face me again.”

“You’ll put your back out.”

“Then I’ll put it out.” He clears his throat. “Rémi. Turn around, mon vieux.”

You put the lever down and turn around.

He is sitting with his hands dangling between his knees, looking at the floor. He lifts his eyes with an effort you can see.

“I stared at you too long at the sugar shack, the spring you two came up for the sugaring-off. I’ve stared at you too long at every table since. I never touched anything and I never said a word, and I made myself sick over it, because he was my brother.” He swallows. “He knew. He told me, the year before. He was drunk on my wine. He said, ‘You’re an idiot, Gaétan, you watch him when he’s pouring.’ And I said I didn’t know what he meant, and he just laughed at me for ten minutes.”

The room is very quiet.

“He said that to you,” you say.

“He said, ‘If anything happens to me, don’t be proud about it. He’ll need someone who isn’t careful.'” Gaétan’s mouth is unsteady. “I said he was being morbid. I didn’t come to ask you for anything. I’m telling you because I couldn’t carry the piano out of here with it in my chest.”

You do not remember deciding to cross the floor. You are standing over him with the dust cloth still in your hand, and he is looking up, enormous even sitting down, with his beard shaking a little, and you say, “I knew, Gaétan.”

“You knew.”

“Since the sugar shack. I never knew where to put it either. Alain thought it was funny. I took it for the ugliest thing in me.” You drop the cloth. “I thought I was a traitor for noticing.”

“Rémi.”

“Ask me properly.”

He looks at you without a word. Then he says, very carefully, as if reading from a card, “May I kiss you.”

“Yes.”

---

His mouth tastes of coffee and the cold. He doesn’t move for the first few seconds, as if he is waiting for you to change your mind, and you grab his flannel shirt by the front and pull until he stands. He is six foot three, and you have to tip your head right back. His close-cut beard is soft, and silver under the workshop light. His hands come up and settle on your ribs and then slide round to your back, and he lifts you without trying, a few inches off the boards, and you laugh against his mouth.

“Put me down.”

“Shall I set you down?”

“No.”

“Good.” He sets you on your feet and kisses you again, roughly, with his whole weight leaning into it, and the stair rail digs into your back and you don’t care. “How do you want me, mon vieux? Say it. I’m not good at guessing.”

You feel the grief come up and the want come up with it. “Not upstairs,” you say. “Not the bed. It’s still his side. I can’t, not yet.”

“Then not the bed.”

He says it at once, with no flicker of disappointment. It is exactly what you needed him to say. You lean your whole weight against his chest for a second and feel the slow thud of his heart.

“The pads,” you say. “They’re in the hall.”

He goes and gets them without being asked, four quilted grey pads with the canvas gone soft, and lays two of them down the narrow staircase over the treads, pressed in at the edges. He tests it with his weight. The wood groans and holds. When he straightens up, flushed to the ears, he looks as if he has built a barn and is waiting to be told it’s crooked.

“It’s perfect,” you say.

“It’s a staircase.”

“It’s perfect.”

You undress each other at the foot of the stairs, in the workshop light, slowly, then not slowly. He drags his shirt off and there he is, big and white-furred, with a soft round belly and a farmer’s shoulders. You put your palms flat on his chest, just to feel it, and he shudders. His hands are shaking when he works at your belt. Boots, jeans and shirts end up in a pile by the piano.

“Say what you want,” you tell him.

“I want you to tell me when to stop.”

“Don’t stop. Just say what you want.”

“I want to put my mouth on you. And then I want to be inside you, if you’ll have me.” He says it quietly, to the middle of your chest. “And I want you to say it, every time, so I know I’m not dreaming.”

“Yes,” you say. “To the mouth. To all of it. Do it.”

He lowers himself onto the floorboards with a grunt, because of the left hip, and takes you in his mouth. It is nothing you were ready for. He is clumsy for about three seconds and then he isn’t, and there is the wet heat and the scratch of beard on your thighs and a low growl coming up out of him that you feel in the base of your spine. You hold on to the stair rail and say his name, the French way, and then you say some other things.

“Câlisse,” you hear yourself say. “Oh, that’s good. Don’t stop, don’t quit on me. Your mouth, your fucking mouth.”

He doesn’t stop. He takes more of you, and his big hands come round and cup you from behind and pull you in, and when you look down you see his eyes are closed and his face is perfectly serene, as if he were at his prayers.

“Up,” you manage. “Get up. Keep that up and I’ll come.”

“Would that be bad?”

“I want it inside me. But first it’s my turn.”

He gets up. It takes him two tries, and you’re both laughing. You turn him around and press him back against the wall beside the stairs, and you sink to the floorboards yourself, knees cracking, and look up the length of him. He is thick and flushed to the base, leaking onto the grey hair of his belly, and he watches you with no defences left at all.

“What do you need?” you say.

“Your mouth. Rémi. Please.”

“Just say it.”

“Suce-moi.” It comes out cracked, a farmer’s French, the word you can’t say to your own face. “Suck me. It’s all I’ve thought about since the sugar shack.”

You do. There is more of him than you can take whole, so you take what you can and work the rest with your hand, and the taste of him fills your mouth, salt and clean. He hits the wall with the flat of one hand. “Câlisse. Câlisse de câlisse, Rémi, that’s, ah, that’s your mouth, that’s your actual mouth.” He is trying to be quiet and failing. His hips shiver forward and stop, forward and stop, and you let him have a little, feeling the thick head touch the back of your throat, until he gasps, “Wait, wait, or I’ll finish, I’m going to,” and you pull off with a sound that fills the room.

“Not yet,” you say, wiping your mouth. “Not before I’ve had you inside.”

“Then the stairs,” Gaétan says, hoarse, and half laughs. “Mon Dieu. The stairs.”

---

You lie back along the staircase on the soft pads, with your shoulders up on the sixth stair and your hips on the third, knees drawn up. It is an absurd position and a perfect one. He stands over you on the boards in the lamplight, naked and enormous, his cock dark and thick against the white of his belly, and lets out a long breath.

“My God, Rémi.”

“Get the gel. It’s in the bathroom, on the left. Water-based.”

He is back in twenty seconds with the gel and a foil packet.

“Use one,” you say.

“Yes.”

He rolls it on with his lip between his teeth, concentrating, slicks himself, and kneels on the second stair between your thighs. Then he puts his hand flat on your chest and stops.

“Tell me again.”

“Yes, Gaétan.”

“Say so if it’s too much.”

“I’ll tell you.” You take his wrist, the whole wide thickness of it, and bring his palm to your mouth. “Now.”

He starts with his fingers. His hands are enormous, and he is so careful that it makes you want to scream. One, with plenty of the cold gel, in slow circles until your breath comes in jerks. Then two. The stair edge presses a line along your spine, and you grab the rail beside you.

“Higher,” you say. “Left a bit. Yes. There, right there, câlisse, oh, mon Dieu.”

“Here?”

“Yes. Right there.”

“I’ve got it.” His voice is thick. “I’m going to remember where it is.”

When he finally pushes in, you have been wanting it for so long that you cry out before it’s half done. He stops at once. He stays absolutely still, braced on one big fist beside your head, shaking with the effort, and says, “Rémi. Talk to me.”

“Don’t stop. Go on. Slowly. Slowly.”

He goes in slowly. The width of him opens you up past anything, and the long thick slide keeps coming until his belly rests against yours and his thighs against your thighs. He puts his forehead down on your collarbone.

“All of me,” he says, in a rough whisper. “You have all of me.”

“I know. I can’t feel anything else.”

“Is it too much?”

“It’s exactly enough,” you say. “Move.”

He moves. The first strokes are a slow roll, back and in, so careful that you tell him to quit being polite. He laughs, breathless, and quits. The next stroke goes in so deep that the pads slide on the treads, and your shoulders slide up the stairs with them, and you hear the old wood take the weight and complain. He plants his knees, takes your hips in both hands, locks them, and fucks you in long deliberate drives, with the muscles of his thighs standing out.

“Like that?” he asks.

“More.”

“Like that?”

“Fuck, yes. Mon vieux, don’t be careful.”

“You’re the toughest thing I know.”

“Then use me. Say what you’re doing to me. I want to hear it.”

“I’m,” he says, and loses the sentence, and finds it. “I’m fucking you on a staircase, I’m fucking my brother’s husband, and you’re so hot inside that I can’t think in two languages. You grip me like you’re angry.”

“I am angry. Keep going.”

“Then I’ll keep going all night.”

“Deeper,” you say. “Take what you’ve been wanting, mon vieux. I’m all yours for it, every last stroke.”

That does it. He gives a groan from low down in his chest and the rhythm changes. The slap of his body against yours fills the workshop, louder than the radiator upstairs, and the piano strings hum back at every deep stroke, the A you tuned that evening thin and exact over the rest. You hear yourself shouting, bits of French, bits of English, whatever there is. “Plus fort. Là. Là. Gaétan. Câlisse. Oui, oui, oui.”

“I’ve got you,” he says. “Right here. I’ve got you.”

He lets go of your hip and slides a palm up your belly to your chest, and the weight of that hand spread warm over your heart is what tips you over. You don’t touch yourself. You don’t need to. The coming rises from the base of you like a struck bell and goes right through, and you arch against the pads with your mouth open and spill hot across your stomach, pulse after pulse, while he holds you through it and says your name.

You clench around him and that takes him with you. He thrusts once, twice, a last deep shove that rocks you against the stair, and then he is coming too, a great shudder running through his frame. He folds over you with a hoarse, drawn-out sound, and you lock your legs round his waist and hold him there, both of you panting, his heartbeat hammering into yours.

Neither of you says anything for a long while.

---

Afterwards you find out that a staircase is a terrible place to lie, for two men over fifty, and that you cannot get up.

“My hip’s gone,” Gaétan says, from the floor.

“My back’s gone.”

“Alain would be laughing.”

“He’d have made tea,” you say, “and gone out for the evening, and told everyone at the dépanneur.”

Gaétan’s laugh bursts out of him as a great helpless wheeze. You find his hand without looking and hold it. The lamp is still on over the piano. Outside a bus goes by on the next street with a hiss of tires, and the green light from the shop sign swims on the ceiling.

You help each other up in stages, like two old dogs. He washes his hands in the little sink and brings you a glass of water and sits beside you on the bottom step with a pad round his shoulders, and the two of you look at the piano.

“It doesn’t leave tomorrow,” you say. “Does it.”

“No.” He says it right away. “Marie-Claude’s granddaughter can come here on Saturdays. She can learn on the Heintzman. I’ll drive her down.” He turns his big head. “If I’m allowed to drive down.”

“You’ll have to stay somewhere.”

“I know where I’d like to stay.”

“Not the bed.”

“Not the bed. Not until you say so.” He squeezes your hand. “I’ve got time. I’m fifty-nine and I’ve got nothing but time and a very bad muffler.”

You get up, finally, and take the tuning fork off the bench. You tap it against your knee and hold the stem against the wood of the stair rail, and the A comes up out of it, bright and small, filling the stairwell. Gaétan closes his eyes. He begins to hum along, a big, cheerful sound that sinks under the note and stays there. You stand with the fork buzzing in your hand and you let him.