The Piano Tuner's Wife, a short story by William Trevor

Like the nameless narrator of Raymond Carver’s Cathedral (1981), the protagonist of William Trevor’s The Piano Tuner is a blind man with a strong sensory attachment to life. In his youth he marries Violet, a woman older by “almost five years” and less attractive than Belle, who he marries later in life.

The first scene in the story is of the later wedding at a small protestant church, the same church where the Piano Tuner married Belle in 1951. We discover that this blind man has not only a name, but a name that seems to compensate for his visual impairment through its syllabic strength and distinctiveness: Owen Francis Dromgould.

Through the course of the narrative, we learn that Belle and Violet were once rivals of a sort, that Owen chose Violet first, for reasons that aren’t disclosed. We also learn that his mental image of the visual world is largely based on what his wives have told him:

“Now, tell me what’s there,” her husband requested often in their early years, and Violet told him about the house she had brought him to, remotely situated on the edge of the mountains… She described the nooks in the rooms, the wooden window shutters he could hear her pulling and latching when wind from the east caused a draught that disturbed the fire in the room once called the parlour.” (4)

Each description (and we get many of these descriptions) quivers with detail and is imprinted by the reporter’s unique perspective. And that’s one theme in this story: how Owen comes to know his wives and the world through the words they share and those that they choose to withhold.

Though Violet passes on prior to the narrative present, Belle feels challenged by the lingering imprint of Violet's views (both those she shared with Owen and those she held for herself) and ways of moving about the world. The central conflict in this story is how Belle contends with the ghost of Violet’s particularities while sustaining her unique role as an individual and as Owen’s wife. Arguably, it’s also about the destabilizing effect of shifting perspectives, both in the way we view the world and in how we engage as participants in it. Despite what we see in the narrative—we cannot say with certainty that Violet is more desirable than Belle or the other way around, or that the type of tree each wife describes to Owen is a cottonwood or an oak.

All we know, through the straightforward unfussy language of the narrative, is that each character is trying their best to leave their own lasting imprint on life, or at least to make sense of it, on their own terms. That, by any definition (but especially by Darwinian definition) is survival.