Author: Sam Ridenour

Tri Mai is a bachelor, though not of the beer-and-babe-poster variety. He keeps his South Minneapolis foursquare house immaculate. Precision and aesthetics rule the roost in equal measure, and this balance is everywhere. It’s in the play of light through three stained-glass panels suspended in his front windows. It’s in the careful arrangement of living room chairs, all nine of them, into intimate groupings.

At thirty-five, Mai runs his own business building high-end audio equipment in his basement and selling it worldwide. He’s also an accomplished culinary artist, creating savory delights with little more exertion than other guys might put into heating a can of chili. Still, he hands me chicken wings and cheese bread in the lid of a to-go carton before we settle in to spin some records.

Mai’s stereo occupies as much space as a grand piano or the couch a future girlfriend might want to move in. Two speakers masquerading as bookcases anchor the room. Each is driven by a power amplifier the size of a steamer trunk. A rack of brushed steel components, topped with a granite slab, provides a solid foundation for the turntable.

Watching the needle descend onto the first record of the evening, I am hypnotized by the tonearm silently tracing the groove. I’m conjuring images from under the hood of a sports car as the dulcet voice of Annie Lennox drifts out into the room. Every nuance is audible: the soft intake of breath, even the creak of shoes on the floor.

“Women have all sorts of ways to be flashy: shoes, jewelry, hairstyles, clothes,” Mai muses. “But what do men have? Cars, watches, gadgets—that’s it. Strength is no longer the essential trait, so either our brain, wallet, or dick is bigger.” He gestures at his stereo and says, “I guess these are my beautiful peacock feathers.”

The amplifiers he built for himself glow with electrostatic tubes like a peacock’s iridescent courtship display. But the prime feather in Mai’s fan, the flagship product of his business, is the Tri-Planar Mark VII Precision Tonearm, or simply, the Tri-Planar Ultimate. Among audiophiles it is considered one of the best in the world. One reviewer for the Absolute Sound magazine complained in jest, “Hell hath no fury like a reviewer scorned by a component that refuses to let him down in at least one or two areas.” You can purchase your own Tri-Planar Ultimate from Mai’s website (www.triplanar.com), but at four thousand dollars, turntable not included, it’s not exactly for the average listener.

Mai, however, would love to see that change. “Too many people waste their money on crap,” he says, lowering the arm onto another LP. “Why not spend a little more on something well made, take care of it, and have it last the rest of your life? Everything I make will last a hundred years.”

When Mai was ten years old, he boarded a boat and left his family and his native Vietnam behind. Faced with little opportunity besides mandatory military conscription at fifteen, he set out in search of a better life. After spending more than a year at a refugee camp in the Philippines, he was finally welcomed into a foster family in Coon Rapids, Minnesota.

“Myron and Thelma Nash showed me the good life,” he says. “They showed me unconditional love. If I ever get to heaven, it will surely be because of them.”

While he had some exposure to music from the Nashes—mostly in church—Mai admits he wasn’t really captivated until his freshman year at St. Olaf College. There he dated a German classical violist named Katrine who played him the first vinyl record he’d ever heard.

“It was Heaven or Las Vegas by the Cocteau Twins,” he laughs. “The sound was different from anything I’d heard before. It was fuller but incredibly subtle. It showed me that music could have a body. I was hooked.”

Over the next decade, vinyl addiction would take him into the Twin Cities’ burgeoning rave scene and through a two-year stint building amplifiers for Atma-Sphere Audio. Mai eventually earned a graduate degree in sculpture from MCAD, and ultimately ended up building tonearms with the inventor of the Tri-Planar, a watch-maker named Herbert Papier. When Papier retired in 1999, after a two-decade quest to perfect the Ultimate Tonearm, he handpicked Mai to be his successor.

“I’m privileged Herb had the confidence in me to pass on his business, that I’ve been able to make something out of it, something successful.” He pauses to set the needle on the last record of the evening. “I’ve set up a pretty nice life for myself. I’m surrounded by beauty.” He glances round the room. “Though I’ve been thinking I should get rid of one of these chairs and get a loveseat.”

—Sam Ridenour

The autumn moon looks too far away, an amber porch bulb draped in a tattered shroud of moths, all but a handful of stars faded into the weave. Buoyed up on the breath of the lake, frail whispers of wood smoke foretell the winter. Out on Superior the lights of a freighter ride the horizon.

It’s disquieting the way those distant lights sometimes just wink out. One moment you’re tracking them, the next they’re gone—extinguished by a wave, by the arc of the earth, a trick of the eye. Cabin light thins out over the landscape. Ship lights simply disappear. “Damn it, Marlee, slow down,” Pete shouts, smacking his club of rolled-up newspaper hard into his palm.

It’s obnoxious, actually, the way she plunges ahead like a twelve-year-old on a school picnic, bounding over ankle-breaking rocks in the dark as if this were a warm and sandy beach, disregarding the headlong cliff and the bone cold water below.

“Hurry up,” she shouts back, skimming across the stones, a growing bundle of dried sticks cradled in her arms.

Out beyond the sheltering curve of light from the cabin window, he’s feeling his way, each foot holding out for an oath of stability before committing to every new step.

“Marlee, wait for me,” he shouts after he’s lost sight of her. “I don’t know this place well enough.”

“I’m right down here, Pete,” she laughs, suddenly there, below. Her voice lingers above the tiny sparking of her lighter.

“Hurry up, let’s get this fire going. I’m chilly.”

Hand on foot, she guides him down a mossy rift in the rock face.

Down here Superior thrums hard against her granite cup. Down here the bedrock flows in solid continuation of the waves. Down here the stone is smoother, forever giving itself to the water.

In the week following the funeral, in the days of sheltering love, the shore stayed warm long after the sinking of the bloated August sun. It cradled their bodies while she wept, while he held her and tasted her tears, while embers burned to cinders and the lake eased away the hard edges of her sorrow.

“You’d better treat my daughter right, Peter,” Marlee’s father said one translucent morning last spring when he still knew who Pete was, when he still recognized his own daughter.

“Or I’ll climb out of this bed and kick your ass.”

The two men shared a laugh. Pete knelt beside Carl, held his hand, and gave his promise.

“Give me the newspaper,” she says, crouching over her little teepee of sticks, sparking the lighter beneath the cup of her hand.

“I still remember the first time we came here,” he says, grinning, crouching down beside her, caressing her leg.

“Give me the newspaper,” she says. “I’m cold.”

“Have a sip of whiskey. It’ll warm you.” He presses his flask into her hand.

Orange tendrils flicker around brittle black paper—a tiny storm rising under a canopy of twigs— then smolder and die.

“More paper.” She drops her lighter at his feet. “Get it blazing.”

“Take a drink. It’ll warm you up.”

“That’s a dangerous myth,” she says, drinking, wiping her lips.

Another miniature thunderstorm expires on the stone, despite high hopes and heroic blowing. Smoke disappears into the lake’s misty breath.

“What really happens is your blood vessels dilate, and your heat escapes more quickly. You feel warmer only because all your body heat is right up at the surface.”

Superior is awfully deep. The bottom is tiled with a thousand broken vessels. Some are still sinking into the shifting sand. One night they broke up on the rocks, or burned, or welcomed in the water. Then they went under like coffee cups in the sink. Some just disappeared. A few have never been found.

The toothless mouth of night draws tight around the shore. Behind another tip of the flask, Pete peers up toward the cabin with its golden glowing window, bathtub, fireplace, big soft bed. The newspaper all burned up, the night growing damp and chill, Pete sparks the lighter against blackened bark again, again, then lays it to rest.

“Let’s go back, Mar,” he says. “I don’t think this is turning out so well. I’m getting cold. We can make some coffee.”

“We’ll warm each other up,” she whispers, turning a girl’s face to his and kissing his jaw. “I’m not ready to go back,” she says.

Shirt and shoes in a damp little heap, Marlee lies stripped on the cold stone. Pete kneels beside her, laying his hands on her trembling body. Over the dark edge beside them, Superior pounds at the shore.

“Treat my daughter right,” her dad had warned. Under different circumstances Pete would be pleased to oblige, but right now the rocks are cold and hard on the knees, and it’s beginning to drizzle.

“I really don’t think this is going to work out, Mar.” His eyes are dry, beginning to burn. “Let’s go in.”

“I just want a fire, baby.” She shivers, alone.

“Let’s go back to the cabin.” He rises to his feet and offers his hand.

“We’ll get a fire going in the fireplace. The bed is nice and soft. Come on, I’ll warm you up enough to last a lifetime.”

She sits up, elbows on bare rock, grief darkening her face. “I’m not going back.” She’s crying now.

“I need to be out here. Why can’t you give me that, Pete? Stay out here with me.”

Marlee drops her head back over the edge and offers salt tears to the lake. The porch light moon is gone. Pete can’t see her face, but he can feel her body shudder.

“I’m not sure this is going to work out, Mar,” he says beneath the hush, hush, hush of the lake.

Sometimes there is no squall, no crashing waves. It just works its way silently in, and the cargo soaks it up. Nothing to notice except you’re riding a little bit lower. Nobody recognizes how serious it really is. Then something shifts, and Superior claims you, and you’re just another coffee cup at the bottom of the dishpan.