An Unfinished Score (14 page)

Nineteen

As his premiere nears, Ben rises even earlier, and Suzanne stays up late. Unable to practice in a sleeping household, she uses the late caffeinated hours to study Alex’s score. Using an electronic keyboard and earphones, she begins to sketch ideas for its arrangement. But the concerto is an unfinished composition, and she knows that she cannot finish the work without coming to a deeper understanding of its nature—an understanding profound enough to complete it on its own terms. At moments she feels as though she is inhabiting Alex’s very soul, and it is a place more foreign than any country she has ever stood in.

Her days go to practice, both alone and with the quartet as they prepare the
Black Angels
for performance. There are key problems to solve, most pertaining to amplification. All four musicians listen to what the music tells them to do, and their answers are remarkably similar. Perhaps this is why, despite their personality differences, they formed an ensemble.

They will not use an electric violin. They will amplify more than was possible when Crumb wrote the music but not as loud as is possible now. They will use bold physical gesture in addition to sound to create the necessary triple fortissimo. They will rosin heavily to play the ponticello right on their bridges without falling off. They hire a mixer—a young man Kazuo recommends—to ride the levels so that the nuances they have discovered while taking the music apart bar by bar will not be lost. They will highlight Crumb’s superstitious numerology: the trinity of three, the holiness of seven, the devil of thirteen. When it is suggested that Daniel be the one to cue, he says, “I don’t cue. That’s why I picked the cello.” But he is joking; he will cue the opening.

All four musicians agree that the
Black Angels
will be the concert centerpiece and will follow intermission. Everyone but Anthony wants to begin the program with the only quartet Ravel ever wrote. Rejected by the Prix de Rome and the Conservatoire de Paris, the music was criticized by none other than Gabriel Fauré, the man to whom it was dedicated. Fauré declared the final movement to be stunted, poorly balanced, a failure. Ravel himself viewed it as imperfectly realized but a great step forward. Frustrated, he left the Conservatoire in what proved to be a good move. The listening public soon embraced him, and Debussy wrote to him, “In the name of the gods of music and in my own, do not touch a single note you have written in your Quartet.”

“Debussy was right,” Petra declares. “It’s imperfectly perfect.”

They sit on the green outside Richardson Auditorium, each cross-legged except for Anthony, who sits with his legs in front of him, knees just a little bent. There are clouds, moving slowly, obscuring and then revealing the sun. Suzanne likes the warmth on her face but is relieved when a cloud takes it away and again pleased when it is returned.

Anthony argues for Haydn’s String Quartet in G major. “It does contain some real surprises, particularly that ending. It’s a good setup.”

Suzanne looks around at the other three. “Maybe Anthony is right. We could pitch it as a history bookends kind of thing—an early quartet and a late one.”

A black squirrel chases a gray one as she speaks.

Daniel’s expression is muddy. “That’s strange, isn’t it? I thought places were supposed to have either black squirrels or gray ones, not both.”

Petra cocks her head. “Let me get this straight. Suzanne is advocating that we play Haydn? You’ve got your eye on the checkbook, too? Counting people in seats?”

“Let’s just say I’ve been reconsidering a few things. Anyway, it’s not like Ravel is some risky statement. Who doesn’t like Ravel?”

Petra shakes her head. “People say they like Ravel. Really they like Haydn and Vivaldi. People should like Ravel, and we should make them.”

“People,” Suzanne whispers. “Who is that, anyway? And how can you make them like something they don’t just by playing it? They either won’t come, or they’ll come and won’t like it, though they may, as you say, say they do.”

“As long as musicians have required food, money has played a role in music,” Daniel says, a sarcastic imitation of one of their teachers at Curtis.

“Perhaps,” says Suzanne, looking directly at Petra, “we should be like Meyerbeer and pay off some critics and hire our own
corps de claque
.”

She is thinking of the worst night of her musical life: downtown Charleston, beautiful warm weather, swaying palmetto trees, the orchestra’s back to the bay, streets filled with tourists and Spoleto festivalgoers. Between pieces the conductor broke off to raffle off a Jaguar, assuring the audience members that they could understand classical music. He brayed like a donkey—the memory still reddens her cheeks—as he introduced the worst piece of classical music she ever had to perform. “Hee-haw!” he cried, shaking his intentionally stereotypical white mane. “Hee-haw!” And then Suzanne and her new colleagues sawed away at Ferde Grofé’s
Grand Canyon Suite
, the music swaying ugly to suggest the covered wagons, the musicians’ humiliation complete.

The next day Ben told her he’d turned down a paying stint at a conductors institute in Maine—a chance coveted by composers better known than he. He said, “I don’t want student conductors butchering my music, me having to scream at them not to speed up the crescendos and sitting around while professional conductors tell them how they look from the back, calling out, ‘Your hands are going to run into each other! Put your left hand down! No, not in your pocket!’”

When he told her how much it paid and who would have heard the piece, she couldn’t speak to him for a day and a half. Then her anger shrank into something cool and hard and she vowed to put her career ahead of his.

“Now I know you’re kidding,” says Petra.

“There’s nothing wrong with starting with Haydn,” Suzanne says. “He invented the goddamn string quartet, so who are we to be too good for him?”

Petra leans back on straight arms, stretching her long legs out in front of her. “Okay, okay, I don’t care. This is the question I have for you: How is a viola like a premature ejaculation?”

Suzanne knows the punch line but lets Petra have her fun.

Petra shakes her legs and says, “Even if you see it coming you can’t stop it.”

Suzanne watches the gray squirrel chase the black one around and up a young ash tree. She turns and sees Daniel watching the same scene, and then he turns, his eyes meeting hers, sharing this small seen secret.

“So you’re really going to break our hearts and marry someone else?” she asks him.

He tilts his head, the lids of his eyes lowering, giving him a sleepy look. “Somehow I think you’ll get over me.”

“I’m happy for you, you know.”

He nods slowly. “I know you are.”

Suzanne lies on her back when the sun emerges from another cloud, her face absorbing the warmth, her ears softening to the rustling leaves of the trees surrounding the green, her mind retuning to Alex’s confounding concerto. It is time to begin the hard work in earnest.

Twenty

While the
Black Angels
rehearsals are going well, Suzanne’s work on Alex’s score is an ongoing failure. The second movement of the concerto in particular feels beyond her ability, beyond even her powers to understand. She can play it now, without the score in front of her, but this is more a matter of memorization and counting than interpretation, and she cannot imagine an arrangement. The music simply doesn’t add up—angry crescendos alternating with slower mournful sections, the odd additions during the longest section of recapitulation.

For a while she works under the theory that the movement is about sex. She never deluded herself about that: her relationship with Alex started because of her looks and was always saturated with sex. It wasn’t only sex—neither of them ever thought that—but every aspect of their friendship was colored by physical attraction, by the warmth that spread in their chests upon sight, by the things they tried in bedrooms in dozens of cities, by the fact that those acts were stolen from their real lives and always wrapped in music.

So for a time she thinks she has found the key to the movement in sex, even placing the night Felder played while they made love. She believes this will allow her to fit the pieces together, to produce a whole that coheres and has broader meaning. She lets it guide her tentative decisions about instrumentation. More brass, she thinks, than she would have considered otherwise. It alters, too, the way she thinks about dynamics as she considers the ways that love is loud and soft, remembers how it felt when Alex made love to her noisily when he was angry, the intensity of her silent orgasm the night Felder played in the room.

But her theory breaks down halfway through the movement. Besides, she tells herself, Alex disliked not only program music but any music guided by extramusical ideas. He was like Ben in that, saying, “Music is its own language. It should not take its grammar from any other.”

So she starts over, taking the movement apart again, measure by measure, even slower. Once she and Alex attended a concert in which the pianist added a full ten minutes to the usual length of Beethoven’s third sonata. It was at the cathedral in San Juan, and afterward Alex and Suzanne sat across the street in a small park made strange by a statue of a penguin sailing a boat, the balmy tropical air soft on their skin. A man with a parrot on his arm rode up on a bicycle and offered to take their picture with his bird for five dollars.
“Hola!”
Suzanne greeted the bird, who answered “What a pretty lady.”

After Alex paid the man to leave them alone, Suzanne said, “I thought parrots could only repeat a line, not converse.”

“He was repeating a line, just not yours. I think they even imitate punctuation and speed. Unlike that pianist. It took him forty-one minutes to get through the thing.” Alex tapped his watch. “I guess he thinks he can find something in Beethoven that no one else has ever noticed if he just plays it slow enough.”

Now she finds that slowing down doesn’t help her any more than did learning to play the concerto faster. Over and over the work whispers,
You never really knew me; you never understood
.

She determines to do what forlorn and failing women often do; she decides to consult a psychic.

“I’ve got to see Doug about a bow issue,” she tells Ben, thinking that between this partial lie and the Chicago trip she is lying as much as she did when she was having an affair with a living man.

When he opens the door to his Hell’s Kitchen shop, Doug greets her with his full bass voice. “Don’t tell me there’s a problem with the bow. My work is always perfect.”

“It’s kind of embarrassing, but I’m here for your other talent. I need you to look into your crystal ball, or whatever it is you do.”

He puts a hand on her shoulder, looking down to make direct eye contact. “That’s not nice, my dear. It’s not quackery, and it’s not magic. I guess you could call it emotion theory, but really it’s about music. Go on back. I’m going to step out for a quick smoke while you tune.”

Alone in the crowded repair room, Suzanne strokes her viola, tightens the E string, rosins her bow. She notes the soreness under the calluses of her finger pads from playing more than usual. She needs to take a couple of light days before the
Black Angels
performance.

When Doug returns smelling of fresh cigarette, he takes a seat on a stool, crosses his long legs, places his hands palm up in his lap, closes his eyes, nods his readiness.

Suzanne almost laughs and tells him he’s taking his new vocation too seriously, but she stops before she speaks. She wants him to take it seriously. This is her life: the concerto is the story of her past, the reality she lives in now, the possible ruin of her future. There’s nothing at all funny about being here. Being here may save her life, which, when she closes her eyes, she envisions as ancient ruins crumbling in a stony Irish field. She inhales as deeply as her lungs allow and plays the solo voice all the way through, pausing in silence between the first and second movement and again between the second and third. After she plays the last falling note, she smiles because she has never played the composition better. The concerto almost comes together, the answer to its riddle on the tip of her tongue.

“I’ll save you a little trouble,” she says to break the silence. “He’s contemporary. Trained in performance more than in composition. Favorite composers Bach and Brahms, though with wide-ranging tastes, except not a fan of serial music.”

“I could have told you all that.” Doug grins, but his mouth falls back into the downward tug of the rest of his face, and the corner of one eye twitches. “But this is a tough one. Really tough. Shostakovich’s last work was his Sonata for Viola, and everyone always says that’s fitting because of the viola’s timbre, because it’s so melancholic. But this, wow, no simple melancholia.”

Suzanne paces along the back wall, examining the instruments and bows set out for repair. The light coming through the barred windows is striped, giving the room an oddly modern look. It is like looking at a new photograph of an old place.

“Many contradictory impulses. A lot of emotion, that’s for certain.” Doug rubs his forearm as he looks at her. “A lot of negative emotion mixed in, but not simply sadness.”

Suzanne’s rib cage contracts, an internal wince that she fears shows on her face.
Sadness at my absence
, her mind’s voice insists.

“The composer was confused. There’s passion but also a lot of anger. A serious wound there, but there’s control, too, a kind of patience. Brilliant but a bit of the overestimation of the autodidact. You said he wasn’t trained in composition?”

Suzanne nods. “But he was trained in music.”

“So many broken rules. I’m not sure this is someone I would ever want to meet.”

His reading stings as Suzanne hears its truth. The childhood cuts that Alex’s ascendancy sealed off but didn’t heal. His love sometimes mixing with an anger that turned him cold. His self-assurance bleeding into sheer narcissism at his most manic. His vast musical learning telling him that he could compose without specialized theoretical training.

Fonder memories of Alex rise in her, drowning out the difficult man Doug has described. Alex with his hands in her hair and a smile beginning to curl his lips. Alex walking down Sixth Avenue eating an unlikely icecream cone in midwinter, the prop turning the serious, distinguished man into someone playful. Alex leaning back into a stack of pillows, reading a book in silence but still tapping his foot. Alex weeping openly over a wasted half hour of a weekend in Seattle, now irretrievable. Alex with his baton, about to set loose a perfectly prepared orchestra on an audience.

“No,” she says.

“I could be wrong. I don’t often say that, you know, but this really is a tough one. Very hard to decipher, not a straightforward person at all. It’s not another collaboration, is it?”

She shakes her head, rueful.

“So who is it? You know?”

It surprises her to realize there is no reason to lie. “Alexander Elling,” she says, starting to add, “the conductor” and “Chicago” and “who died.”

“I know who the hell he is,” Doug interrupts her, his goofy grin winning out again. “I didn’t know he composed.”

Suzanne returns her viola and bow to their case, fastening the locks with a close attention unwarranted by a manual task she has completed thousands of times. “No one did except his wife, apparently. There’s only this piece, and she’s asked me to arrange it. He started to orchestrate it, but there’s some stuff left to be written. For the life of me, I can’t quite get a hold of it.”

“So you came to me as a last resort?”

“Something like that. I thought you could give me some insight into him, or at least the part of him that he put into the composition. Please don’t be mad at me. I really couldn’t take it right now.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, okay?” His deep voice pauses, and he waits for her to answer by meeting his kind eyes and nodding. “Don’t take this the wrong way because I think you are as beautiful as ever—maybe more so because I’ve always gone in for the anemic look. Remember that girl Helen, the one I went loopy for? But you look tired to the bone. I thought you were going to fall down while you were playing.” He stands behind her, hands pressing down into her shoulders. “I’m going to buy you a sandwich, fries and milkshake not optional, and then I’m going to put you on the train, and you’re going to go straight home and sleep all the way through until tomorrow.”

She nods her compliance, her relief. Since Alex died and Petra regressed, no one has taken care of her. Once, early in their courtship, she asked Ben if he took her for granted, and he said he did. “Isn’t it a good thing to be counted on?” he asked, waiting for her to say yes.

Exhausted, she tries to sleep through the trip home, but she is bombarded by cell-phone talkers, by music she doesn’t like seeping around cheap earphones, by the intercom announcements of train cars and stops. For a moment she envies Adele; in the next she castigates herself for the thought. Better to hear everything than nothing—just ask Beethoven, Fauré, Boyce, Vaughan Williams.

On the walk home from the Dinky, Suzanne takes the slightly longer route down Witherspoon, stopping at the little market, ducking in under the “Wire money to Mexico” banner to splurge on a tamarind soda for Adele.