An Unfinished Score Part 7

The other reasons, which were even less tangible, she kept to herself, not so much to protect Alex's feelings but because she had no words that wouldn't get them wrong.

Alex sipped tea, then looked into the bottom of his cup. "I married my wife for a similar reason. She was competent and elegant. She knows how to organize the bills and cancel a magazine subscription and make sure the car gets properly serviced and the gutter cleaners are called the month they're supposed to be called. She knows how to dress for a morning meeting versus a c.o.c.ktail party. She knows how the world works and how you're supposed to live in it-the things I didn't know. When you have a childhood like ours, normalcy is irresistible, no?"

Suzanne nodded. "You want things to work like they're supposed to."

"You want the house to be warm in winter and things to start when you turn them on and turkey to be roasting in the oven on holidays." He turned his eyes but not his head sideways before continuing in a voice carrying traces of the accent that he had all but eradicated but that returned when he talked about his childhood. "When I was a kid, what I wanted maybe as much as anything else was automatic sprinklers like I saw in the middle-cla.s.s neighborhoods. I thought those people were rich and that they knew how to do things. Our yard was a patch of dirt with a little strip of dead gra.s.s. My wife knows how to open up the yellow pages and find a land-scaper. She knows how to program program the automatic sprinklers. She buys flowers from the nursery and makes the front of the house look nice all the time. She has made my work possible, by and large, and she knows how to put herself together for a fund-raiser and how to talk to those people I can't stand, how to ask them for money." the automatic sprinklers. She buys flowers from the nursery and makes the front of the house look nice all the time. She has made my work possible, by and large, and she knows how to put herself together for a fund-raiser and how to talk to those people I can't stand, how to ask them for money."

Suzanne swallowed her jealousy not just of his wife but of him. "Then why are we here now?"

"Great s.e.x or a nice lawn? Gra.s.s isn't all it's cracked up to be." He squeezed her hand over the table. "Seriously, automatic sprinklers is a pathetic goal, the bent dream of a poor kid. Anyway, I'd argue that our spouses didn't fully deliver on their end of the bargain, though probably yours more than mine. But that's not my reason, and I don't think it's why you're here, either."

His directness made Suzanne nervous. It was the sort of conversation that could be irrevocable, that could change her life if she wasn't careful. And still she felt gnawing envy of Alex's wife, of his success, of his entire life. Around them the good cheer from the shared birthday song lingered, and people's words bounced, jovial. She set down her fork and waited for Alex to finish his answer, worried that he would describe their relationship as a symptom of mental illness or an act of self-destruction. "Why are we here?" she asked, her question almost a whisper.

"Because we fell in love," he said, holding her forearm now, rubbing the inner crook of her elbow hard with his thumb. "We're here because we fell in love."

He asked her about her life's other defining choice-why she had chosen the viola-and she told him the story of Charlene Ling.

"My mother put a violin under my chin when I was eight."

"Two years too late," Alex interrupted.

"An unrecoverable edge," she continued. "But I had talent and a good teacher and I might have kept going with it, except I had the misfortune to attend middle school with Charlene Ling."

"Arguably the best violinist in the country after Felder. But that's good fortune that you switched. You were made for the viola."

"Aside from all the jokes." Suzanne smiled. "If you happen to play in the school orchestra with someone on her way to being the world's best, you don't think, 'I'll be second best in the world.' You think there's a Charlene Ling in every school in every city in every country and that the world doesn't have enough orchestras for you to have a chair anywhere."

She did not add that the greatest anxiety of many female musicians is not stage fright but the creeping fear that they will wind up spinster music teachers surrounded by instrument-wielding children who aren't theirs and a pack of mewing cats who are.

"But you didn't give up music."

She shook her head. That had never been an option for her, not ever. "Switched to a less compet.i.tive instrument, at least at my school, and got to be first viola instead of second fiddle."

Alex lifted his chin to acknowledge her small pun, but he let her continue talking.

"I figured I'd be visible, marry a visiting conductor, and travel the world happily ever after with my famous husband."

"The cult of the conductor. Everyone wants us." He paused from his food, spread his hands, grinned. "And now you have me."

Suzanne shrugged, thinking still of his wife, the woman who knew how to dress, how to get things done, how to raise money. "I do and I don't. Anyway, I was twelve then, p.r.o.ne to romantic fantasy."

"And so then what happened?"

"I fell in love with the viola."

Suzanne hears the door push open, a jangle of bells.

"Sorry I'm late," Petra says, sitting down, grabbing the menu. "I'm starving."

With sudden clarity that constricts her lungs, Suzanne remembers what Alex ordered that day: tomato-lentil soup and a rice dish with dried fruit and nuts. This is what she asks for when the old man comes to take their order.

Petra orders her meal and bread for the table. "Do you have a wine list?"

"Sorry, no liquor license," he says, retreating with their menus. "I'll bring you tea."

"Is that why you picked this place?" Petra asks, joking but her voice stretched just a little tight.

"I'll buy you a bottle on the way home if you'll indulge a side trip."

Suzanne tries to feel Alex in the smell of the steam rising from the raisin-studded rice, in the tanginess of the soup, in the texture of the soft, warm bread she tears with her fingers. She wishes she had asked that day, when she could have asked him, what he meant about his wife not holding up her end of the bargain. She wishes she had asked to see a picture so that now she could match a face to the voice she has heard through her phone. She wonders if Olivia simply wants to torment her or if there's more, and she wonders how far she'll go. A woman who knows how to get things done A woman who knows how to get things done.

"It's time to swallow, honey."

Suzanne looks up. "What?"

"You've chewed that bite like sixty times," Petra says. "Tell me it's not a diet. You're getting way too skinny."

Suzanne shakes her head. "I'm not trying to lose weight."

Twelve.

After Suzanne wrestles the car from its tight s.p.a.ce, she heads not to the freeway but up Broad, toward Temple and then beyond into the monolithic slum that is north Philadelphia. This is the place that inspired Alex to get the h.e.l.l out, that forged his strength as it scarred him, giving him a place to be from and to overcome. She shudders at how easily he might have been stuck, the terrain of his childhood as much quicksand as mud. How different his life would have been if his talent had been less enormous, if he'd been a sliver less obstinate, if his music teacher hadn't tossed him a life rope, if his aunt hadn't owned a piano and three cla.s.sical records.

He'd listened to those scratchy records-the Chicago Symphony playing Beethoven's Ninth, Horowitz playing the Beethoven sonatas, and the Berlin Philharmonic playing Brahms' Third Symphony-again and again on an old Magnavox record player that looked like a suitcase, risking his father's formidable wrath, insatiable for the music whatever the consequences.

Every chance he got or could make, he was at his aunt's piano. At nine he was picked up by the police for breaking in to play while she was at work, after which she gave him a key and told him to hide it from his father. At fifteen he spent nearly every dollar he earned washing dishes at a Bavarian restaurant to take the train downtown to volunteer as an usher at the Academy of Music. At thirty-already prominent, in some circles famous-he attended the funeral lunch of his father at the same haus of strudel and beer, a smirk on his face, the weight of childhood terror beginning to lift.

Suzanne navigates her way to Olney, the once working-cla.s.s German neighborhood now solidly dest.i.tute and black and not a place visited by people who look like she and Petra. Alex told her she was the only person he knew he could take on a date to a ghetto. She started to joke, to say she wasn't that low-maintenance, but instead she held his hand and said there was no place she would rather be. He had that effect on her, made her want not to sound like everyone else. Sometimes she was careful with her words because she was afraid of disappointing him-boring him, losing him-but more often it was because she felt different with him. Like him, she had come from common, seeking something more, something harder. They were not like most other people. She and Alex came together because they fell in love, but their shared cla.s.s was part of that. Not many people from any cla.s.s but the top really make it, not in music, not in anything.

Suzanne parks in front of the row house where Alex endured the slow years of his youth.

"Did you ever live here?" Petra asks.

Suzanne says yes, she did, and it's true in its own way. It is that much like places she did live, although her run-down neighborhoods were south of the city instead of north, and not often did she and her mother rent an entire house.

This street was and is a poor one, yet it is lined with alders and a few spindly oaks and is better than some. Many of the houses have porches or at least stoops, marking this a better block than those where the row-house faces drop straight into the sidewalk, a juncture marked by a decaying line of caulk. The dirty house looks as though it was once yellow, but Alex said it had always been that way-never yellow but looking like it used to be.

Its windows draw an inscrutable face: two small eyes and a large off-center mouth, the door a long scar.

Alex could have directed the Philadelphia Orchestra had he wanted to, but he'd sworn to himself that he would never again live in this city, the place that had produced both him and Suzanne. He'd had a real chance-one in three-of leading the New York Philharmonic, but his stubbornness had gotten the better of him. He'd been done in, as he had known he would be, by conducting an all-German program, Wagner to boot. He'd chosen the program out of spite, after some newspaper made a comment about his last name and parentage. He said he'd never regretted his defiance until he met Suzanne, and then it bothered him that they could have lived an hour's train ride apart instead of enacting the geographic comedy they did.

Suzanne thinks now that if he'd put together another program-Ravel would have been safe in Avery Fisher Hall that year, or Delius, or even Copeland for that matter-he would not have gone down on a plane headed for Chicago. Wagner wasn't even in his top ten, but he wanted to make a point. To Suzanne he always gave French music, including every recording of Debussy in print, all the Ravel recorded in the last twenty years.

She reaches for the CD case on the floor under Petra's legs.

Petra grabs the case and flips through it. "What do you want?"

Suzanne considers the question, then says, "Anything by Verdi."

Though she does not love the melodramatic libretti he grew to rely on, she loves Verdi for saying that he would accept the public's criticisms and jeers only if he never had to be grateful for their applause. This he said after the flop of the comic opera he wrote the year both of his children and then his wife died.

Suzanne bites the corner tip of her tongue, wincing but not releasing it. She tries not to ask herself if Alex would be alive if he'd given the people what they wanted.

"Dear heart," Petra whispers, crooking her neck to see in the sideview mirror. "Memory lane is great and all, but I don't think we should be hanging out in this neighborhood."

"Forget the Verdi. Play the Kinderszenen Kinderszenen. Did I tell you I heard Matsuev play it in Paris? One of the most beautiful things I have ever heard. He played it first, and I almost wanted to leave before the Chopin."

"You and your Schumann." Petra laughs.

"He played four four encores that night. I doubt I'll ever see that again." encores that night. I doubt I'll ever see that again."

They make good time to Princeton, where they pick up Adele, groceries, and wine, in that order.

The phone is ringing as they enter the house. Suzanne feels a chill of brief panic but forces herself to answer.

"I thought I'd get the machine," says Ben.

Suzanne starts to ask him why he didn't call her cell, but she stops because she does not want to hear the answer: he doesn't actually want to talk to her. It's how he always is in Charleston. She wants to tell him not to bother calling, but that's not the kind of thing married people can say to each other.

Perhaps it is only because Petra mentioned Schumann when Suzanne and Ben met, but the a.s.sociation has stayed firm in Suzanne's mind. She wonders now, even, if she married him because of it, at least a little. In those Curtis days, when she thought of Robert and Clara Schumann, it was not the later marriage, when he was inst.i.tutionalized and being driven mad by a constant A in his ear-an inescapable thrumming note he swore was real-and his virtuoso wife left her children with relatives to support the dest.i.tute family by touring. And she did not think much about the mature Clara Schumann, outliving first her husband's sanity and then, by another forty years, his death. Rather she imagined the young, happily married Schumanns triumphing over the obstructions of Clara's father, writing scores, using their newspaper to decry the cheap and commercial while championing the innovations of Chopin and shoring up the reputation of Bach, opening their home and their piano to the likes of Johannes Brahms. Suzanne pictured a busy home, filled with children and visitors and new music. She pictured people at the center of the musical world of their day-contributing, shaping, weighing in. They mattered to music, and music mattered to them.

Of course Ben is not like Robert Schumann at any age, though they hold in common three traits: a disrespect for received notions of form, the choice of the cello's voice to soothe anxiety, and the decision to eschew performance for composition. The story goes that Schumann ruined a hand with a home-rigged metal device he crafted to shorten the time it would take to develop finger independence. It's a tale often repeated by piano teachers to ill.u.s.trate the truth that shortcuts don't work, that music accommodates no cheating.

Yet Suzanne has always suspected the story is a half truth, an excuse auth.o.r.ed by Schumann himself, or perhaps by history, to explain his choices. It was well and fine for Clara to play for the public, but Schumann would rather spend those hours composing new music or writing about it.

Suzanne wonders how they did it all. They were, after all, parents of eight children, five of whom survived childhood. It's always mentioned that way in the history books: five surviving children. Maybe the thinking is that parents in the eighteenth century expected several of their children to die, but can it really be that they didn't suffer as much? Suzanne has imagined the Schumann household in the days following the death of a child and wondered if music was played and, if so, which pieces and by whom. After she lost the baby, she couldn't play for six weeks, and she and Ben barely spoke to each other for much longer.

"How's your mother?" she asks him now.

"The same, okay, and my sister. They said h.e.l.lo."

Petra takes the bag of groceries from Suzanne and drops a stack of mail on the cypress buffet in front of her.

"How's Charlie?"

There's a static-filled pause, as though Ben is calling from across the world.

"I don't know. I guess he's okay. He hurt his knee and couldn't surf for a while, which my mother of course sees as providence."

Suzanne musters a laugh, which is followed by another long pause. It grows longer, and Suzanne flips through the mail, determined not to speak first, not to carry the conversation that Ben initiated by calling. She sorts junk mail from the bills, which she stacks neatly, then pauses at a manila envelope with no return address and an Illinois postmark.

"I just called to say h.e.l.lo," Ben says.

"Okay, thanks for that. I'll see you soon, yeah? Or are you staying?"

"I think I'll head back early next week, probably drive straight through."

"Stay longer if you want." She pulls at the envelope with her teeth, tearing it unevenly open in her hurry.

"I promised Kazuo I'd be back by weekend after this, so maybe I'll stay on into next week, if you're sure."

"All under control here," Suzanne says flatly.

They say good-bye, and Suzanne extracts the contents of the envelope with a shake and a pull: a music score. It looks like any other computer-generated score except that it is smaller in size than most, with more lines to the page, and so rather elegant, its glossy black notes close together. There are a few penciled notes and instructions, written in two hands-one unknown to Suzanne and the other unmistakably Alex's.

The page is trembling when Petra startles her from behind, her breath in her ear. "What do you have there?"

"I think I'm holding the score to a viola concerto," she says because there is no other answer. "I've never seen it before."

Petra plucks the sheet from her hand and takes it to the piano. Standing in the kitchen with her eyes closed, Suzanne hears Petra play the agitated opening theme.

In the four weeks since Alex's death, Suzanne has survived minute to minute, breath by breath, muting herself, fleeing to the past as often and as fully as she can, hiding in the shallowest present she can make, as numb as she can will herself to be.

Now, on the one-month anniversary of the plane crash that killed her lover, as she listens to Petra play the horribly beautiful music, feeling returns to Suzanne like the excruciating tingle of blood circulating in a limb that has fallen asleep. Pain Pain.

II. Agitato

Thirteen.

She must have watched Suzanne come up the walk, because Olivia opens the door even as she knocks. Usually Alex called her my wife my wife, or simply, with the power of an incantation, she she. As in: She just pulled up; I have to go She just pulled up; I have to go. Or: I can't get out tonight to call; I think she is suspicious I can't get out tonight to call; I think she is suspicious. Or, some days: She is making me angry enough to leave her; do you think the quartet would consider relocating? She is making me angry enough to leave her; do you think the quartet would consider relocating?

Still, Olivia's is a name Suzanne has heard often enough, and yet she is unprepared for the woman. She is unprepared for the elegant lines of her face or the way her straight posture, combined with her height, makes her regal. A Greek rendering of a G.o.ddess, an Athena, stepping past middle age with grace. Her hair is not graying or salt-and-pepper-the words Alex casually tossed-but gloriously silver and black, sleek, coiled into a smooth chignon at the nape of her long neck. Alex did not warn Suzanne that Olivia's dark eyes are so large they relegate her other features and drain her face of specific age. Before her now, Olivia dwarfs Suzanne in inches, in poise, and, Suzanne fears, every measure that matters.

Suzanne feels like something flimsy and easily crumpled. Toss her in a can, or just light a match nearby.

She finds her voice. "Olivia," she says, because "Mrs. Elling" seems even more preposterous.

Olivia wears her smile evenly, and someone else might take it for warm. Her handshake is cool yet full with touch and generous with energy as she says, "Ours is a peculiar meeting, no?"

Suzanne only nods. Under Olivia's aggressive composure she feels frizzy and unkempt, lacking in grace, sour smelling from the too-warm airplane. Her once smart travel dress has lost its form through many washings and now hangs loose, a frumpy sheath that makes Suzanne look thick-waisted though she is not. Olivia wears gray trousers and a pale green blouse, both crisp and wrinkle free. As if to prove her unworthiness, Suzanne says, "You are not what I expected."

"It's funny that you should say so, because you are precisely what I expected." Olivia pulls the door open wider, stepping back for Suzanne to pa.s.s.

As Suzanne penetrates the Elling residence, she recognizes objects often described to her, but the house is much larger than she antic.i.p.ated, larger than the house she pictured when Alex told her that he loved his little place with its peek at the lake, that his little house was all he needed until she was all he needed.