An Unfinished Score Part 8

I am sitting in the red chair, he would say. The plate gla.s.s is old, and so the gazebo in the yard looks like it is melting in the sun. Trace the lines of your right hand and describe them to me The plate gla.s.s is old, and so the gazebo in the yard looks like it is melting in the sun. Trace the lines of your right hand and describe them to me.

Or: I am sitting in the red chair, leaning back. Lie on your bed and tell me what you are wearing. Is your pillow soft or hard? Are you on your stomach or your back? Turn onto your stomach I am sitting in the red chair, leaning back. Lie on your bed and tell me what you are wearing. Is your pillow soft or hard? Are you on your stomach or your back? Turn onto your stomach.

Or: I am sitting in the red chair. Take out your viola and play for me. Be sure to put the phone close so I can hear. Brahms today. I want to hear you play Brahms I am sitting in the red chair. Take out your viola and play for me. Be sure to put the phone close so I can hear. Brahms today. I want to hear you play Brahms.

Olivia offers her the red chair, and Suzanne perches on it. The old plate-gla.s.s window looks wavy, and when the sun emerges from a pa.s.sing cloud the gazebo in the yard looks as though it is melting. But Alex misled her about the house: it is not small. It is bigger than anywhere Suzanne has ever lived.

As Suzanne scans the living room, she notes that if Olivia failed to keep some part of the marital bargain, it is in an unseen way. The house is kept. The room mixes deep red, pale blue, and dark wood, a combination more attractive than Suzanne would have thought. The furnishings match in style and in proportion, as though planned and purchased at the same time-something Suzanne has never known outside Ben's mother's home, whose furnishings Suzanne finds overly ornate and oppressive, dusty feeling even when clean. The room she sits in now is airy and uncluttered, but the chairs and sofa are substantial within their clean lines. The colors are balanced, and the total effect is of composure. It is a very nice room, a place where someone would want to live, even more so if that someone grew up unhappy in a dingy row house in north Philadelphia.

Suzanne lets her weight shift from her legs and leans back, sinking slightly into the red leather curved by a body larger than her own. She sits on Alex's chair, small within the depression made by his absent form, looking through his window, listening to his wife offer her coffee.

"No, thank you." She settles further into Alex's depression, trying to feel the shape as his embrace, wondering if she will smell him if she presses her face into the leather. A dirty shirt A dirty shirt, she thinks, or his pillowcase or his pillowcase. She wonders if she might be able to take something with his scent.

"Not taking a cup of my coffee doesn't absolve you for sleeping with my husband," Olivia says, her voice as cool as if she were talking about something that didn't matter. "You did that. Maybe he was even going to leave me for you and you were going to let him. You know that, and I know that. You might as well have some coffee if you want some. You look tired."

Suzanne feels the fatigue as gravity pulling at the corners of her eyes, as a weight in her cheekbones. On the plane-her first flight since Alex's death-she wanted to sleep but was afraid that if she relaxed her mind, she would imagine the crash, feel Alex's last terrible moments of life. And so she read with focus chapters of the autobiography of a man who lost his hearing and was fitted with a cochlear implant. A technophile, the author seemed most interested in how the implant made him a machine, in his need for software updates, in the pat irony that something artificial in the end made him more human. He was someone who grew up able to hear, who was restored rather than reinvented.

Suzanne read the description of the operation twice-how the surgeon bores through the base of the skull with a diamond-studded drill bit, how the nurse pours distilled water over the implant to protect it from static electricity, how the cut bone is reconnected with metal sutures. When she pictured not the man writing his story but instead the delicate place behind Adele's small ear, she decided not to give the book to Petra. She slapped it softy shut and felt the coming of sleep like a slip of satin across her face. But the wisp of irrational thinking that precedes a nap floated down too late, coming as the pilot announced the plane's final descent into Chicago, city of her lost lover, city of what she a.s.sumed was now her mortal enemy.

"I take it black," she says. "No sugar."

Returned with the service tray, Olivia asks, "What did you tell your husband this time?"

There is nowhere to set her cup without first standing, so Suzanne holds it on its saucer, a feat that requires both hands, and tries to sip the coffee down quickly, although it is very hot and the cup is very thin. "Nothing yet. I left while he was out of town, but I'm going to tell him the truth."

Olivia's composure breaks just slightly, a subtle collapse of her chin and slight alarm in her cool gaze. "The truth?" she repeats.

"A version of it." Suzanne wants to stop there but knows that Olivia has brought her here to get something from her. She hopes that the more she gives Olivia up front, the less she will take in the end. "I'm going to tell him that I've been asked to arrange a posthumous viola concerto by Alex Elling. He'll ask why me, and that I will lie about."

When Olivia leaves the room to get the score, Suzanne rises and sets her cup and saucer on a side table across the room. She lifts a throw pillow from the sofa, presses it to her face, breathes in fabric. No Alex No Alex. She turns to the small fireplace, its narrow mantel, and there, in a dark wood frame, is Alex's son. She has feared this son, terrified that he will look like his father and crack her heart. This is only his picture, and already it is worse than she feared: he does not look like his father but rather an even blend of his father and mother. Half Alex and half Olivia-proof of their union, proof of Alex's permanent connection with Olivia, who has his pillow case, his dirty shirts, his chair, his large house, his child.

Olivia, who has returned holding a large folder. "You didn't know he was composing."

Suzanne shakes her head as she turns. Olivia reestablishes herself on the sofa, trousers holding their perfect center crease, blouse fresh. She is not a woman who rumples, and again Suzanne feels unkempt. Slovenly, her father once called her mother, who was working too hard and succ.u.mbing to the flu. Once Petra called herself a salope salope. "You know," Petra said, "French for sloppy. Even sounds like it." But later Suzanne read the definition in a French dictionary: b.i.t.c.h, s.l.u.t, wh.o.r.e b.i.t.c.h, s.l.u.t, wh.o.r.e. She tries to smooth her hair with her hands, hoping their oil will calm the frizz, wishing she had taken the time to put it up.

"Do you suppose he told you everything?" Olivia does not quite face Suzanne as she speaks, offering instead a three-quarter view.

"Most things, yes, I did think that."

"Did." Olivia's mouth pulls to one side, but the expression seems too sympathetic to be a smirk.

Suzanne presses a little harder; she wants to understand more than she wants to protect herself from this woman who certainly means her harm. "I don't know why he would keep such a thing hidden from me."

Olivia runs her hand up and down the envelope in her lap, just once in each direction, a tic almost under control. "Maybe he was embarra.s.sed, insecure of the quality of his composition."

"Alex wasn't subject to self-doubt. He was one of the most a.s.sured men I have ever met."

"Part of the attraction, I'm sure, but maybe he valued your opinion even more."

There is some truth in this. It took a long while for Suzanne to overcome her belief that she wasn't good enough for Alex, that he would leave her for someone more sophisticated, prettier, more talented, better bred. But finally she noticed that Alex depended as much on her as she depended on him. If she was critical or even neutral about a program he was considering he would grow agitated, or sometimes sullen, and later she would discover he had swapped pieces to win her approval. Once when he mused that he was going to start a program with Franck's "The Accursed Huntsman," Suzanne laughed and said, "Didn't Franck's students call him Pater Seraphicus?" The final program did not include the piece. And, more and more, particularly in the last year-the final year-Alex asked her opinion about questions of orchestration. How necessary is the bra.s.s strength? Heavier on the percussion? Can you hear the timpani? Would it work with strings only? How necessary is the bra.s.s strength? Heavier on the percussion? Can you hear the timpani? Would it work with strings only? She wondered sometimes if he was trying to push her to start composing, if despite his stated objections to composition he wanted her to do what she aspired to do. Now she wonders if he asked because he was the one beginning to write his own music. She wondered sometimes if he was trying to push her to start composing, if despite his stated objections to composition he wanted her to do what she aspired to do. Now she wonders if he asked because he was the one beginning to write his own music.

Olivia watches her, raptor-like. "Or maybe you didn't know him quite as well as you thought you did. Maybe you misread him."

Yes, Suzanne thinks; she has spent her life getting everything wrong, not understanding what was right in front of her. She's always felt like that: everyone else receives a graduation-from-childhood key to decipher human nature, but no one ever told her to get in line.

"Why didn't you just send me the whole score?" Suzanne asks, returning to her chair, Alex's chair. "Why make me come here?"

Olivia's expression lowers. "I knew about you all along, you know, even your name, almost from the very beginning. I've heard your CD, seen your picture. Now you have to know who I am, what I look like."

Suzanne remembers one of her early a.s.signations with Alex, an orchestrated meeting in the improbable city of Cleveland. She thinks of Olivia home alone, or with the son, knowing where her husband was, why and with whom.

Olivia's sideways smile returns, and now it looks as though it could be a smirk. "And we are just getting started."

Since retreat does not seem open, Suzanne pushes forward. "Can I see more of the house?"

"Tomorrow, after my son leaves town and you come back. I do apologize about the hotel, but you should have waited until tomorrow, as I said. I would have paid the difference in flights. Money is nothing for me in this."

Suzanne nods, though the idea of money being meaningless is not something she has ever understood. Maybe the closest she has come were those times with Alex, those times she said, Let's get the real champagne Let's get the real champagne or or This meal is on me This meal is on me as though she were a person who could say such things all the time. as though she were a person who could say such things all the time.

"And tomorrow, when you come back," Olivia says, "I'll show you his study. I'll show you where he ate the breakfast I cooked for him every morning he was at home. I'll show you our bedroom." She says bedroom bedroom slightly more slowly than her other words and then pauses. "I imagine he told you we rarely slept together." slightly more slowly than her other words and then pauses. "I imagine he told you we rarely slept together."

The word rarely rarely bites Suzanne. bites Suzanne. Never Never is what Alex told her. is what Alex told her. I haven't slept with my wife in seven years, and I will never sleep with her again I haven't slept with my wife in seven years, and I will never sleep with her again. She believed him, nearly completely, even as she knew it was the kind of lie people tell in situations like theirs, even though she could not say the same thing. Still she believes him, and she suspects that Olivia is trying to trip her up, to erode her faith in Alex. She is trying to inflict pain She is trying to inflict pain.

"It's not a subject that came up. It was never about you." Suzanne can feel the small square of her own chin, pointed straight to the ground instead of lifted as it is when she curves over her viola. It is pointing down so she will give away nothing. In her posture she holds her version of Alex away from his wife, holds it for herself.

"Really?" Olivia asks, gazing through the gla.s.s waves of the window as if, though surely not, she is disinterested. "Because for me it was always very much about me. A difference in perspectives, no?"

"We just didn't talk much about other people, except for musicians." Suzanne steps forward to take the envelope with Alex's score, anxious to be alone with it, the one thing Alex may have left that is hers alone: music written by him for the instrument she plays.

People often call a musical score a piece of music, but of course it is only the two-dimensional representation of a complex experience. Yet unlike a photograph or a birth certificate, it is a representation that preserves not just a moment but the full music itself, protecting it intact through years of neglect or disinterest, making it possible at any moment, allowing it to be played centuries later. Cryogenics for songs and symphonies Cryogenics for songs and symphonies, Alex said once. Are not lost Verdi operas found and played? Do not university choirs perform chorales not heard by any ear since sung by medieval priests?

If she can play this score, breathe life into the composition, she can resuscitate Alex, at least an an Alex. The music in Olivia's hand promises a communion between the living and dead, a way to share time with the man she loved. She takes the envelope. Alex. The music in Olivia's hand promises a communion between the living and dead, a way to share time with the man she loved. She takes the envelope.

"It will be difficult," Olivia says, "to fill in another person's gaps, figure out what someone else meant, was thinking and feeling. He'd only just begun the orchestration. But it shouldn't be too hard for you." Olivia produces again the full but flat smile. "Since you knew him so very well."

Suzanne gestures to the coffee cup, to be polite, to deflect Olivia's clinical gaze.

Olivia waves away the suggestion. "I'll take care of it. It's nothing, in the scheme of things," she says. "And you, you will start work tomorrow and stay until you can play the solo for me. Then you'll go home and work on the arrangement, and then we'll see about getting an orchestra."

"You're asking me to do something I can't do. I can play the solo for you, but I'm not a composer."

"You started to be; you wanted to be. You've had the theoretical training. You help arrange music for your quartet."

"A full orchestra has eighty instruments. I don't know what to do with the bra.s.s, the winds, the percussion."

"You took advanced instrumentation and orchestral writing. I've seen your transcript; did you know that? I know every retreat and fellowship and residency you've ever been offered."

Suzanne does not want to respond to this, but instinctively she mouths, "How?"

"Did you think I wouldn't want to know whom my husband was sleeping with?" Olivia shrugs. "You do the best you can, and we'll see if we can get it premiered. Maybe here-his orchestra-or else Philadelphia. Which do you think for Alexander Elling's unveiling?"

"You are deluded if you think a major orchestra is going to perform anything I arrange."

"Maybe your husband can help you." Her whisper is loud. "So Chicago or Philadelphia?"

"Chicago-that's an easy choice." But even as Suzanne says this, she hesitates. Maybe Alex would have wanted it performed in Philadelphia, after everything, despite his venom for the city of his scarred childhood. Maybe he would have viewed it as the ultimate triumph over that childhood.

She is already considering Olivia's question-where the concerto will be performed and not whether it should be. That, she understands, is how powerful Olivia is.

Fourteen.

Because she does not want to ask Olivia to use her phone, or even to have Olivia see her phone for help, Suzanne walks several blocks with viola and roller bag so that she is out of view when she uses rationed cell phone minutes to call information and then for a taxi. This is not a neighborhood of taxis, except perhaps those arranged by homeowners for early-morning trips to the airport, and the wait is nearly thirty minutes. The minutes sag as Suzanne sits on her suitcase at the corner she named for the dispatcher by reading the street signs, imagining in each upstairs window of each house a pair of eyes, watching her. She looks as though she has been evicted, or perhaps as though she is fleeing an unstable marriage.

The driver, a large, dark man, smiles broadly at her, taking the trouble to get out, put her bag in his trunk, open the back door for her. She keeps her Klimke and Alex's score, resting them on her lap. She names a hotel where she has been with Alex-emotionally dangerous, and probably expensive, but there's comfort in the familiar and relief in having a place to name, as though she belongs somewhere and is doing what she is supposed to be doing. She sinks back, her hands lightly weighting the score on her viola, and gazes out the side window. Her view crowds as they move from the large, widely spread estates near the lake to the smaller and more varied houses of the inner suburbs, which give way to the less orderly shapes of the city itself, a city that still feels small to Suzanne, who grew up knowing wide Philadelphia and tall New York. Occasionally she meets the driver's eyes in the rearview mirror. Finally she asks him where he's from.

He grins and says, "Haiti" in a series of short syllables, three or four of them rather than two.

"Port-au-Prince?"

He shakes his head, the gesture large and amused. "No, no, I am a village boy."

"But now Chicago," Suzanne says.

On the night of one of her ugliest fights with Alex, their taxi driver had been Haitian, though they had not talked to him enough to find out if he was from capital or village.

The evening had started well, the weather beautiful enough to walk to the Upper West Side venue from Alex's Murray Hill hotel, where they'd spent the entire day. They were on their way to a performance that Alex had to attend. It would be awful, he warned her, but it was one of the reasons he was in town and a favor to a friend as well.

In a dark purple sleeveless dress, Suzanne felt as she often did walking next to Alex: beautiful and important. Whenever she turned a man's head, Alex put his arm around her or reached to hold her hand, and she felt specially claimed. Mostly, though, they walked with a slight gap between them, a s.p.a.ce that felt not empty but magnetized. "Anyone who looks at us can see that we are lovers," Alex said, and she believed it was true.

As they crossed Central Park, Alex asked her about Ben's work.

"He's working on something new," she told him. "He wants to extend some of what Janaek was after in his last pieces. He's connecting largely through the math, using certain ident.i.ty permutations."

"You husband sounds like an interesting guy."

Suzanne faltered in her response, unsure what Alex was after. Finally she settled on a quiet "Yes."

"Is he good? Is he a real composer?"

Suzanne nodded because yes, Ben was a talent.

"At least he's not into minimalism."

"No one really is anymore," Suzanne offered.

"It's still played enough. Just yesterday I saw that guy advertised in the Voice Voice as 'being on a first-name basis with Philip Gla.s.s.' Made me ill just reading that." as 'being on a first-name basis with Philip Gla.s.s.' Made me ill just reading that."

"The public's always a bit behind the game, no?" Suzanne drifted closer so that her arm brushed Alex's, hoping to bring him back from his line of thought with her physical presence.

"It's as big a problem in music as in art. Once you're about an idea and not about the medium, you're in trouble. Composers should leave the concepts to the philosophers and writers, who might have the talent for it. Take a look at what's being performed. Operas based on David Lynch movies-is that all they can come up with?"

She wanted to tell him about the beautiful composition she'd played at a conductors inst.i.tute the previous summer-penned by a young music professor in South Carolina-but she didn't know how to make a s.p.a.ce for her own ideas in Alex's black-and-white p.r.o.nouncement. She imagined him disparaging academics and thinking her naive. It wasn't until later in their relationship that she realized he valued her opinions, that he wasn't testing her to see if she was smart, that she didn't always have to be on her intellectual toes the way she had to be with Ben. So on that day she laughed and held his arm, wanting only to maintain their closeness. "Is that why you don't compose?"

"That's part of it," he said, and they walked on, exiting the park and heading farther west to the small auditorium, which was located in a 1970s office building whose exterior in no way suggested that it held a performance s.p.a.ce.

Even when they were not in Chicago, people at concerts recognized Alex, and Suzanne was already practiced in being with-but-not-with him. When two men came to shake his hand, she excused herself to the bathroom. Between conversations he slipped her a ticket, and she went first into the auditorium, Alex joining her just moments before the lights dimmed. He did not take her hand but pressed his leg against hers in the dark.

The first piece was an appalling exaggeration of serial music. The composer played electric violin and was accompanied by a dancer of sorts-the program called him a movement artist-encased in black leggings and turtle-neck. Summoning her natural compa.s.sion for any performer, the empathy borne of kinship, she kept her eyes forward, afraid that her smile might turn to laughter if she glanced at Alex. To make time pa.s.s, she counted the ratio of heads to empty chairs in the rows in front of them: the theater was not quite half full.

The beginning of the main fare suggested something better. The composer-pianist had broken apart Bartok's piano sonatas, filling in the s.p.a.ces with his own measures. The music was beautiful and made new, as though the composer had cracked open a geode, separating the sparkly, faceted pieces, revealing something previously hidden. But then the silent woman standing near him onstage made a circle of her mouth and let out a chilling note before chanting in a strangely high monotone: a poem by Wallace Stevens, word by slow word. She could imagine Ben, an opera hater who believed that words and music were incompatible, noncomplementary languages, standing indignantly and huffing from the room before the chanter made it through the poem's first stanza. She felt Alex, who usually sat preternatu-rally still at concerts, flinch in the seat beside her, a spontaneous aversion he covered by switching the cross of his legs, folding his arms, sinking back further in his chair as though anxious for an extra inch between him and the horror on stage.

The reception was held on the second floor of the same building, in a large conference room whose burgundy, blue, and rose paisley carpet belonged in a movie-theater lobby. The swirling patterns and the quick gla.s.s of inexpensive champagne tilted Suzanne's perception, and she felt ill at ease as the room filled. She skirted its circ.u.mference, sampling warm grapes and cheese and miniature quiches, hoping the food would serve as ballast. She determined to be happy and charming, to be what Alex wanted her to be, to be the woman he had flown from Chicago to be with.

When she felt a little better, and when enough time had pa.s.sed that she and Alex could slip away, she found his head among the crowd and wove her way to the center of the room, where he was talking to a tall brunette in a red dress. The young woman was pretty in the way that Suzanne had been at twenty-two. Her hair was the same unusual shade of brown, and she had narrow hips and b.r.e.a.s.t.s of a certain shape and lift, though she was half a foot taller than Suzanne had ever hoped to be.

Suzanne felt her pulse in her carotid artery, felt fingers of heat climbing her neck, touching her face, which she knew must look red. Jealousy Jealousy, she named for herself, hoping to douse it by identifying it. She felt low to the ground. She'd worn ballet flats instead of heels because of the long walk, but now she had blisters on the backs of her heels anyway. She tried to smile.

"I don't think I ever understood that poem until today," the young woman was telling Alex.

The comment would ordinarily have infuriated Alex, but instead of walking away, instead of soliciting Suzanne as a mocking conspirator, he discussed the poem and delivered trivia about Stevens. He was smiling more than usual-it was something he usually forgot to do-and smoothing his hair with his free hand the way he had those first few times he'd spoken to Suzanne. She'd been warned right away, by one of the ba.s.sists in St. Louis, about Alex's reputation as a womanizer.

Alex turned to her now. "And what did you think of the Bartok?"

Suzanne wanted desperately to say something smart, but her mind felt wavy. She tried to a.s.semble a sentence to explain how she felt the composer had cracked open the sonatas to find something new and beautiful inside.

"But the poem," the tall young woman said. "Don't you think that's where the real innovation lies? Anyone can do deconstruction."

Her pulse still throbbing in her neck, Suzanne reached for something to say. "I think words and music are incompatible, noncomplementary languages."

The woman laughed, tossing her hair behind her shoulder in a move that elongated the triangle between them, bringing her closer to Alex and making Suzanne the outlier. "It seems we're not in the presence of an opera fan."

Suzanne took two steps back, then turned away, murmuring to be excused.

"But perhaps a fan of yours," she heard the young woman say.

Fifteen minutes later Alex found her sitting on a bench at the side of the empty lobby downstairs. He was buoyant as he said, "I've been looking for you."

"Not very hard," she whispered.

"What are you talking about?"

She shrugged. "Let's go, okay?"