An Unfinished Score (13 page)

Seventeen

Suzanne finds the porch light on—an unusual thoughtful detail from Petra—and Petra reading in the living room wearing underwear, tee-shirt, and slippers, her hair loose and her face clean. Suzanne registers the house’s distinctive smell, a smell she notices only when she has been away for more than a day.

Petra stands and embraces her. “Thank god you’re home. I’m not cut out to be a single mother.”

Suzanne almost says, “But you are a single mother.” Instead she says, “You’re a great single mother. Adele feels lucky to have you.”

“I’m trying, but I’m a disaster. I don’t know what I’d do without you. And Adele missed you like crazy. It’s like you’re the mother and I’m the father.”

“What does that make Ben?”

Petra shrugs and follows Suzanne to peek at Adele sleeping and then to the main bedroom. “So tell me everything about this mysterious session work.”

Her back turned to her friend as she sorts through the suitcase on her bed, Suzanne says, “I kind of lied to you. There was another reason I went to Chicago.”

Petra laughs. “Finally you’re having an affair!”

Suzanne shudders, restraining tears, holding back her desire to tell Petra every single thing. She wants to tell her about the time Alex took her to hear the all-Argentinean program at Frank Gehry Hall, about holding his hand while Renee Fleming sang Strauss in a darkened Carnegie Hall, about watching the awkward left hands of aspiring conductors at a conductors institute in South Carolina until they were laughing so hard they had to leave. Most of all she wants to tell Petra about the night Alex made good on his promise of a private performance by the world’s most celebrated violinist.

“I was just kidding, of course.” Petra hops on the bed, her hair falling easily around her shoulders. She leans back on Ben’s side of the bed.

Suzanne puts her dirty clothes in the small hamper in the corner, stows her earrings in the jewelry box in the top drawer of her nightstand. “Why ‘of course’?”

“Oh, give me a break. I know you. But something’s up. What?”

Instead of telling her the Felder story, Suzanne tells her the easier truth that Alex Elling’s widow has commissioned her to complete and orchestrate a posthumous concerto. She says it in a plain voice, planning to attribute any quaver or false note to her travel fatigue.

Petra’s response stings: “Why would she ask you?”

“Because it’s for the viola, because I played under him once. Because … I don’t know.”

“But you don’t have any composition credits to speak of. Of course you
should
have some, but it’s really weird that she would pick you without them.”

Now Suzanne shrugs. “Maybe she’s crazy, I don’t know. And maybe I’m crazy, too, because I told her I’d do it.”

“Good for you.” Petra’s smile is fast and wide. “Good for you!”

Suzanne spins the empty suitcase onto the floor and lies down next to Petra. “Maybe it will be the start of something big. I need something new, something to change.”

“Yeah, I feel like that a lot. I wish I knew what was going to happen with the quartet. Oh, oh, oh.” Petra slaps the bed several times. “I need to warn you: Anthony is going crazy with the online promotion.”

“Does he know he’ll be rubbing elbows with the Neue Musik people?”

“He read an article about the conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra live-posting a performance.”

Suzanne imagines Alex’s reaction to that news. Her smile is stopped by the recurring thought she keeps pushing away:
I didn’t really know him
. “Please tell me,” she says, “that he’s not planning that for
Black Angels
.”

“Not yet, thank god. But the rehearsal, promotion, stuff like that. He’ll have to get people to notice him, of course, which I’m sure he plans to use you for.”

Suzanne measures the information, the anxiety she feels in her throat. She has always been very careful not to self-promote, not directly, and she enjoys the conversations she has online. They make her feel in touch with some larger endeavor, part of a bigger music—a hint of the way she felt when she played with a traveling symphony and at receptions when Alex introduced her to people she never would have talked to otherwise. Yet Ben may be right that musicians have no business marketing themselves in words at all. Perhaps they should admit that they make something almost no one wants and that those few who do want it already know where to find it.

Not wanting to talk this kind of shop, she asks, “What about Adele? Have you decided?”

Petra turns to face her, head propped on one hand, tucking her hair behind her ear with the other. “I’m going ahead. I asked her, and she said she wants to hear us play.”

“She’s a little girl, though, honey. You’re the grown-up.”

Petra nods, her expression sad. “But she’s smarter than I am, and she’s old enough to know what she wants. And what she wants is what I want, too. I don’t want to make her do it, but I want her to do it.”

“You’re doing the right thing. Inasmuch as there is a right thing, you’re doing it.”

Suzanne’s eyes film with tears, and soon Petra is crying.

Through her crying Petra says, “When you’re young you always think there’s a right thing to do. You’re obsessed with making the right choice, like your fate is going to go in one direction and you could jump on the wrong boat and get it all wrong.”

The twin bedside lamps splash imperfect circles on the ceiling, casting the air straw yellow.

“But then you learn,” Petra continues, “that there’s no right answer. Just this thing or that, and the things you do and the things that happen to you add up to whatever they add up to, and you never know if whatever good or bad comes your way is because of some particular thing you did.”

“I think I followed that,” Suzanne says. “And I think the most valuable thing you forfeit when you make a choice is knowing what would have happened if you’d decided differently.”

She holds her friend, lets her cry into her shoulder and neck, breathing in the clean smell of her shiny hair.

“I’m going to need even more help, though,” Petra whispers. “It’s going to take a lot of therapy and work. Driving to Philadelphia. Working with Adele every night. Eventually she’ll have to change schools, and that’s going to be hard. I can’t do it without you. I’m sorry because I know it’s not fair, but I really can’t.”

“You don’t have to do it without me, and fair doesn’t enter the equation anyway. What’s fair? I love Adele.”

“Things could change, though. Ben could want to move. Or the quartet could fail.” She laughs through her crying, “Anthony could single-handedly ruin us with his ‘online presence.’”

“There aren’t many guarantees in life, Petra, but I promise that I’ll always be your friend, and I’ll always do anything I can for Adele.”

Petra sits bolt upright. “No matter what?”

Suzanne nods and coaxes her back down. “No matter what.”

“I don’t deserve you,” Petra whispers, and Suzanne hushes her.

When Suzanne awakes in the middle of the night, dressed and on top of the covers, the lamp on her side of the bed is on, but the other has been switched off. Petra huddles against her, shivering in her tee-shirt and underwear. Without waking her, Suzanne works them both under the covers and darkens the room.

Facing away from her friend, toward the wall she can no longer see, she replays the night in San Francisco, the story she wanted to tell Petra but did not.

Almost exactly one year after his prediction that Felder would become the world’s most celebrated violin soloist, Alex made good on his promise for a private performance. He was guest-conducting the San Francisco Philharmonic, Felder as soloist, and Alex arranged an invitation for Suzanne to play with Symphony Silicon Valley the same week. Their last night, the night after they were both through with their musical responsibilities, Alex insisted that they leave the room to eat. “We’ll get depressed if we stay in all night. We’ll just be thinking about the airport.”

Back at the room, Alex made her wait in the hall. When he opened the door to let her in, she heard music. A single violin, unmistakably live. Alex put his fingers to his lips, and she entered quietly. In front of the floor-to-ceiling windows sparkling with the city’s lights sat Joshua Felder, blindfolded and bowing his elegant way through Bach’s Sonata 3 in C major. Alex pulled her hand, leading her to the edge of the bed, perhaps four feet from Felder. Suzanne studied the line of the young man’s jaw, the whiteness of his skin, the dark hair spilling over his blindfold. She gasped when he finished the piece and began the Bach-inspired violin sonatas from the humbly born Belgian composer Eugène Ysaÿe, perhaps her favorite violin music of any period. She felt Alex’s breath in her ear: “He’s going to play all six.”

Alex pushed her back on the made bed and slowly, quietly unbuttoned her blouse, undid her skirt, disrobed her completely. Again he put his finger to her mouth and she nodded, yes, they would make love in silence, the only sound Felder’s beautiful Stradivarius. She closed her eyes and listened to the long notes as Alex moved his hands and mouth down her body, slowly, taking time everywhere. She sealed her lips so she would not moan or cry out and felt that the entire world was touch and sound. She wanted time to pause, a permanent, exquisite caesura of pleasure.

When Felder finished the sixth Ysaÿe sonata, he set his bow on his knee for only a moment before lifting it and striking into Paganini’s caprices. Alex lay on top of her, settling his full weight on her in his attempt to be quiet as he entered her and they made love, though certainly Felder knew what was happening. The only mystery could be her identity. They moved together until a few bars before what Alex must have known was the end of the evening’s program, when he came violently, now making no attempt at silence.

Later, after Alex escorted the still blindfolded musician from the room, he said, “That’s something I’ve always wanted to do. At my age I’m not willing to wait much longer to do things I’ve always wanted to do.”

“But how did you convince him?”

“I have something he wants, and I have something on him.” Alex smiled, looking ruthless.

“I like being with a man who can call in favors,” Suzanne said. “Thank you.”

“I wanted to give you something you would never forget. Years from now, when you’re an old woman and I’m long dead, you can sit on the porch and tell your acolytes the story of the night you made love to the handsome conductor while Joshua Felder played the violin blindfolded.”

Eighteen

Ben returns the following evening as Suzanne, Petra, and Adele are finishing a small meal of eggs and salad. He’s tanned, just a bit, and perhaps thinner than when he left, a gauntness that shows in his neck and under his cheeks but nowhere else.

Adele jumps up when she sees him, and he hoists her into a large hug.

Suzanne registers his age in a way that she doesn’t when she sees him every day. He looked mature to her that first day she saw him hunched over his cello, but of course he was barely a man then, and now he’s one fully. There’s a line across his forehead, slight shadows in the parentheses that curve down from his nose, more thickness to his long neck. Despite the evident fatigue and the pressures that seem to press down on his shoulders, he is a handsome man. She stands and hugs him when he sets down Adele. She is surprised to recognize that she is glad to see him.

“One big happy family,” Petra says, a bit loud, patting them both on the back.

Suzanne makes more eggs and serves them to Ben with what’s left of the salad. The three adults share a bottle of wine, clean the kitchen, listen to Ives’s Second Symphony, and talk about music, politics, places they’d like to travel. It’s almost like the old days, except the things that aren’t said sit obvious and large between them.

Later Suzanne is half asleep when Ben emerges from the shower. Though she is tired, she feels his physical desire for her as such a strong presence in the room that she cannot pretend to sleep. She throws back the blanket and rolls into him, and he presses his mouth over hers so hard that it almost hurts. And she wants it to hurt, all of it, and to be something that she will never forget. And she wants to put everything back together again and make it all work and live happily ever after with Ben and Petra and Adele and a successful Princeton Quartet. In that moment, she wants her life exactly as it is but fully repaired and healed.

But she doesn’t know whether the road there means telling the truth or hiding it.

Several days later, she still vacillates. While she was at first grateful that Ben doesn’t ask her questions that would be hard to answer, she is surprised by how uninterested he is in her surprising new work.

“I’m glad you have something to work on that’s not Bach for a change,” he says.

If he pushed her, she thinks, she could do what she threatened on her last morning with Olivia: tell him everything. They would work through it, or they would divorce; either way it would be settled and Olivia would hold nothing over her and she could commence what would be the rest of her life. Maybe there would be happiness and children, maybe solitary important work, maybe nothing good at all. But she would know.

Sometimes she looks for opportunities to tell Ben, tries to drop a hint, pick a fight. “You’re so preoccupied with your composing you haven’t asked me about mine,” she says one morning as Ben pours a cup from the pot of coffee she has made for them.

“Sorry,” Ben says, looking up with surprise, as though her work simply hasn’t occurred to him.

She is seated at the table over the score. She runs her fingertips in a half circle around the rectangles of white paper. Though she has polished the table recently, her fingers graze circular stains from goblets, glasses, her own mug. A knife of light pierces a white shape imprinted by a hot dish, and she runs her hand back and forth through the beam.

Ben moves behind her and rubs her neck. “Is it any good?”

Suzanne nods, pulling her hands back onto her lap, trying to relax into his touch, her drive to speak the truth dissolving. “I was just hurt you didn’t ask.” She feels his lips on her temple.

“I would like to hear about it, look at it. Soon. I’m just really preoccupied. There’s so much work with this one. It was a mistake to go Charleston.”

While his music is almost ready, much of the business remains to be completed, from hiring additional musicians and technicians to designing and printing programs. Suzanne hopes Kazuo has more aptitude for the practicalities than Ben does. It is a distaste for this aspect of the composer’s trade that accounts for Ben’s lack of success after it seemed he was on the verge of a rare career.

Ben was not surprised when Suzanne said she would never live in Charleston. Neither was he surprised that she relented, easily, when, upon their graduation from Curtis, his mother offered them a spare house to use while Ben composed. They lived off the small trust fund from his father and Suzanne’s tiny salary with the Charleston Symphony. Suzanne endured the social hierarchy of a city you aren’t from unless your grandparents were born there, the politely delivered criticisms from Ben’s mother, the feeling that she wasn’t living the life marked out for her. It would be better, she told herself, for their children to be raised like Ben had been than like she had been. And then came the hints of inheritance. “Of course,” his mother would say, “Ben will need to be better provided for in the will if he’s to be a family man.”

When she lost the baby—late, after a room had been cleared for a nursery and girls’ names had been short-listed—the house mocked her. Ben’s mother’s comments about her ethnicity became more frequent.
Italian
and
Irish; how quaint. Did you go to mass every Sunday?
And then there was Ben himself, avoiding her tears, disappearing into his workroom, its heavy door closed. It was worse when he did try to talk about it. “Maybe it’s for the best,” he said one night while they ate at the dining room table—a huge piece of furniture that had come with the house. “Music requires sacrifice. You’d have to give up a lot, and we’d have to think about money.” Suzanne’s food stuck in her esophagus and she thought she might choke in silence, turning blue and cold, Ben never noticing.

Later he softened and said, “Maybe we can try again in a few years, after we’ve accomplished more.”

When she auditioned for St. Louis, she told herself it was for the practice. She wanted to test herself, to see if she’d make the first cut past the blind performance and through the finger workouts of the grueling week of semifinals and finals. She didn’t think she had any real chance, not at first, but as the week moved along she could hear herself playing well—very well—reading along without hesitation, her tone the best it had ever been. And she could tell that people liked her. “Most viola players are so goddamn moody,” the music director told her, “but you’re a normal person.” He laughed at her wisecracks, introduced her to people, showed her the neighborhoods where a musician could afford to live. And so she won the job and went from third chair of the Charleston Symphony to principal violist of one of the country’s best orchestras, where she was happy. But Ben was not.

When she was offered the job, she knew she would take it. Ben asked her if it was ego, and she admitted that was part of it. To his credit, he never believed they wouldn’t move. When he saw her salary—more than triple her poverty-line wages in Charleston, where so many of the musicians were the talented offspring of serious old money or part-timers with day jobs—he merely nodded and said he would tell his mother. Since the Minnesota premiere of his first symphony, he’d burned all of his completed compositions except one full-length work and a few short pieces, none of them performed save a partita at a college student’s recital. They had watched the numbers in their checkbook register tick down like an odometer running in reverse.

“You’re making a mistake,” was all Ben’s mother said, and Suzanne wanted to prove her wrong. Suzanne had overheard her telling Ben’s sister, Emily, that she was a heavy chain, making Ben follow her to a crime-ridden city so she could fulfill the ambitions of a girl who’d grown up on the wrong side of the tracks.
The wrong side of every line: city, religion, immigration year
. Suzanne pushed into the room where they chatted over coffee, saying, “Find Ben a job he’ll take, and we’ll stay.”
Or
, she thought but did not say,
make good on that other offer
. “I would never interfere,” his mother answered, her back straight and her voice modulated. Good breeding, the Charlestonians said of her, someone whose grandparents’ grandparents had been born in their city.

After the move Ben was miserable, though he was kind enough to pretend they were happy when his mother phoned every other Sunday at three. Suzanne saw him shrivel, his sullenness giving way to something more self-destructive, living across the river in an Illinois suburb, despising all things Midwestern and hating her for taking him there. Her work was more intense than it had been in Charleston, of course, with a longer season, some travel, and frequent rehearsals.

Sometimes, looking back, she thinks they could have made it work. Ben could have tried harder to make friends and contacts in St. Louis. They could have moved across the river into the city after they realized the suburb was a mistake, after they realized they were not the kind of people who could live comfortably next door to people who do not listen to music. But when the symphony announced an ambitious tour schedule, Suzanne imagined Ben alone in their house, dying. A melodramatic vision, but she believed in it. Also, she told herself, the life they were making there would never accommodate children. So when Petra called, she figured it was for the best. Perhaps Ben’s mother was right about her: she’d always had a smart poor girl’s desperate desire to succeed and have the world notice.

Over time Suzanne heard in Ben’s remarks a disdain for the work that paid most of their bills. And she wondered if he heard in her sentences conformity, utilitarianism, a lack of the kind of imagination he equated with intelligence. Always she was too tired to debate the subjects that really interested him, the theories that sparked his fire. Once she started to tell him that she still thought about those ideas, but she didn’t get around to saying it. If she had, would their life have unfolded in a different, better shape? Or would he have heard only the accusation? Over time they talked of music less and less; like other couples they knew, they spoke of other people, of household lists and chores, of money in and money out.

Now, about twice a year Suzanne tries to bring up the future, to discuss what they will do when his trust fund runs out, if the quartet doesn’t make it, when her performance days are waning, at what point it will be too late to have a child. Even if the quartet succeeds, they aren’t many years away from using only soft-light photos on their CD covers—if CDs survive or classical musicians figure out a way to profit from downloads. And if they make it more than a few years, then there will be no photos at all. What will happen the day Anthony tells Suzanne and Petra to pin their hair up?

Suzanne hopes that Kazuo will be able to help Ben into a teaching position more permanent than the occasional course he teaches at the Westminster Choir College. She considers it for herself sometimes as well. She could be happy teaching at Curtis; she knows this. She might even be willing to teach children for supplemental income, in order to have children of her own. She’d been willing to give up on children to lead an extraordinary life, but since Alex’s death, the pull has returned. It feels impossible, though, even without Olivia’s long shadow. When Suzanne wakes in the middle of the night, as she does every night, the fear that gnaws at her after she sorts through her quotidian worries is that her life will be a paltry version of ordinary. It will be unremarkable yet lacking the common rewards of living like everyone else.

And then comes the deeper, colder fear, the one that stops her from telling the truth and starting over clean: that she will wind up alone, her only solace being able to play, rather well, music written by people who are dead.