Nestled between towering window panes and a dimly lit cocktail bar in one of D.C.’s most storied hotels, there once was a grand piano played by a man named Peter Robinson.

       For more than a decade, he performed Cole Porter and George Gershwin for the who’s who of Washington. He met senators and secretaries; he schmoozed with lobbyists and lawyers. But of all the professions he came across from that piano bench, Robinson’s dream job remained his own.

       Wp Get the full experience.Choose your plan ArrowRight

       “I thought I had reached the goal, done what was so hard to do,” Robinson, now 72, said. “I had found a stable place where people could go if they wanted to hear me.”

       That contentment, earned by a lifetime dedicated to the art, made the swift end to Robinson’s career all the more painful. Last May, the piano man received a call from the Jefferson Hotel’s general manager. It took less than a minute for him to learn that he would never return to work. The pandemic had forced hard economic choices, and the grand piano had landed squarely on the losing side of that equation.

       Advertisement

       Story continues below advertisement

       His wife, overhearing the call in the kitchen, turned to Robinson.

       “What are we going to do?” she asked him.

       “I don’t know,” Robinson said.

       More than 19 months later, he still doesn’t.

       Millions of Americans returned to work as vaccines became available and in-person school resumed, but the recovery has in large part skipped over the hospitality industry — and in particular, hotels and the people they employ. The latest analysis from the American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA) found that the pandemic wiped out “a decade’s worth of revenue and job growth.” The association predicted the country’s hotel industry would finish 2021 down more than $59 billion in business revenue from 2019, after losing nearly $49 billion in 2020.

       Story continues below advertisement

       Few cities have been as directly affected as Washington, known as a place for power brokers to converge. In 2021 in the nation’s capital, total revenue from hotel business was projected to be down 86.5 percent from the 2019 total, according to the AHLA analysis. By fall 2021, only 11 percent of D.C.’s 9,600 hotel workers who had lost jobs during the pandemic had returned to work. An October update from the DowntownDC Business Improvement District reported that “the business traveler, the international traveler and the convention traveler were mostly missing” from the city center.

       D.C.’s Lost Year: How the pandemic upended lives and businesses across a region

       As a result, the Jefferson, like many of its neighboring hotels, has taken stringent cost-cutting measures since March 2020. The hotel stayed closed for more than a year after the onset of the pandemic, and when it reopened, it did so with significant reductions in staffing and service.

       Advertisement

       “This has been and continues to be an unprecedented time for the hospitality industry,” the hotel said in a statement. “Sadly, this has resulted in difficult decisions, and we no longer offer live entertainment at the Quill and had to remove our grand piano.”

       Story continues below advertisement

       Removing the grand piano also meant removing the grand piano’s player, and that left Robinson in the kitchen at home, suddenly out of work, reckoning with what to do with his twilight years.

       In a way, it seemed that Robinson had spent his entire life preparing to play at the Jefferson. He started practicing when he was 6 years old and living with the effects of a polio infection. He was limited in mobility but able to press the keys and hear the music soar. He honed his skills as a teenager, harnessing the pain from the lingering effects of his illness and channeling it into his parent’s grand piano. Bill Evans, a famed American jazz pianist, was his high school hero.

       “Music, to me, has always been a safe haven,” Robinson explained. “A form of meditation.”

       By college, the piano was so core to Robinson’s being that he felt compelled to play at all times. But he also was wrestling with expectations to join, as he put it, the “legit working world.” So he graduated with a major in English — not music — and spent the next decade dancing between jobs in politics and pursuing music full time. Between brief stints on Capitol Hill, he found gigs at restaurants and hotels in D.C. and Kansas City.

       Advertisement

       Story continues below advertisement

       During that time, a woman named Mary approached him after he played a set at a hotel restaurant. Robinson found her naturally beautiful and evidently sharp, so he decided on the spot that he had to spend more time with her.

       “It was a torrid love affair,” he said. “And it still is.”

       But Mary was nervous about marrying a musician — “for good reason,” Robinson added — and so the piano man was beginning to accept that he would never find a stable enough career playing music. But that changed one day in the basement of the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill, where Robinson was whistling in line for lunch and a stranger invited him to hear the pianist John Eaton play at the Fairfax Hotel.

       Story continues below advertisement

       That night, Robinson witnessed Eaton command a room. He sounded “impeccable” and looked like a professional, the type Robinson had wanted to be.

       Advertisement

       “I thought, ‘Wow, I respect this guy,’” said Robinson, who would come to form a close professional relationship with Eaton. “I went more often than I could afford.”

       Two years later, Robinson became the piano player for two D.C. hotels, kick-starting a decades-long career that spanned Washington’s most illustrious hotels. He soon quit politics for good.

       “There was no music on the Hill,” he explained. “And I had to have music.”

       Then, he proposed to Mary, at the Jefferson Hotel no less, where he was playing at the time.

       Amid a new surge of the coronavirus, here are five tales of people’s hopes for a restoration of pre-pandemic life.

       So in March 2020, on his 11th year at the Jefferson, Robinson felt that he had it all. Passion, romantically and professionally. And security, he thought, in both.

       Story continues below advertisement

       Then came the phone call in the kitchen, and suddenly, his life was bookended by viruses that upended his sense of self.

       Advertisement

       “It feels like what I do doesn’t have enough value for someone to want what I built,” he said. “It makes me feel very ashamed of myself.”

       Since that day, Robinson has searched for jobs to no avail. For months, he could not find a single opening for a hotel piano player. By the time there were a handful of listings, Robinson’s health had further declined because of the long-term effects of polio. Instead of playing the piano from a bench, he now has to sit in a wheelchair.

       Robinson said he isn’t sure if he is ready to reintroduce himself to the public as a “guy in a wheelchair.” He is even less sure that any business would want to invest in someone of his age and appearance.

       Story continues below advertisement

       So the piano man is passing his time at home. He has applied for and received a Small Business Administration loan and a grant from Montgomery County, where he lives, which has allowed him to write and record his music; and he has started psychotherapy, which he hopes will help combat his new and pervasive feeling of being adrift in the world.

       “I miss the feeling of self-respect that I had,” he said. “I thought I was actually contributing something.”