An Unfinished Score (15 page)

Twenty-one

On Sunday Suzanne and Petra help Adele get ready for Ben’s concert. Adele turns from her closet holding a dress in each hand, eyebrows raised. Petra points to the lavender dress, Suzanne to the dark blue one. Adele looks uncertain—a child who likes to please others caught in a bind. With her hands occupied, language is only in her facial expression.

“Actually,” Suzanne signs, “the lavender one is perfect.”

Adele smiles her relief and dresses. She sits on the bed between Suzanne’s knees. Suzanne brushes and gathers her hair, cupping it in her left hand in a loose ponytail as she brushes with her right, releasing the honey smell of baby shampoo. Suzanne is looking not at the silky hair but at the swell of bone behind Adele’s left ear—the place the surgeon will puncture with a loud drill, boring a hole straight through, a procedure during which a small error would be devastating. Suzanne’s stomach retracts to a tight pit. No wonder Petra took so long to decide.

Suzanne tips her head to kiss the precise spot where the drill will enter Adele’s lovely egg-shaped skull. After she secures the ponytail, she spins Adele by the shoulders and signs, “You’ll look absolutely beautiful as soon as you brush your teeth!”

“That’s the
part I
always forget.” Petra leans into Suzanne and waits until Adele leaves the room to say, “Tell me again that it’s going to be all right.”

“It’s going to be all right,” Suzanne says steadily, though the tight circle of her stomach quivers as it releases with her breath.

“And you’ll be there for Adele no matter what I do.”

“You sound like you have a one-way ticket somewhere.”

Petra looks up, alarmed. “I would never leave her, not that. I don’t ever even think that, not even for a second.”

Suzanne runs her hand down Petra’s hair, a thicker, lighter version of Adele’s, just as silky.

“But I’m not a nice person. I could do something awful that would make you hate me, and that would be terrible for Adele.”

“Petra, you’ve done lots of awful things, and I never hate you.”

Petra’s laugh is a small snort. “True. But promise me you’ll always love Adele.”

“I’ve already promised you that. The promise is still good.”

Once Adele is ready, they walk down Leigh Avenue and turn up Wither-spoon, walking in their dresses in front of Princeton’s most run-down rentals and then the little market. A man standing in the doorway says,
“Que bella!”
as they walk by, and Suzanne nods at him. Across from the new library, they stop at the bakery for brioche. Petra chooses a chocolate-walnut stick. Adele points to a round brioche with a peach half as its center. Suzanne serves herself a cup of coffee from one of the large thermoses. The sound of the coffee flowing into the cup is reassuring, a reminder that the laws of physics are still in place. She breathes its rich-smelling steam before securing the lid.

Twenty minutes later they enter Richardson Auditorium holding hands, Adele between Suzanne and Petra, and take their seats near the back of the main floor. Suzanne is surprised: more seats are occupied than empty, even in the balcony. Scanning the audience, she recognizes a few of Ben’s associates and some friends from Elizabeth’s parties, Daniel with Linda, Anthony with Jennifer. Mostly, though, the crowd is the anonymous audience a musician desires: people who have come to listen to the music.

A few more arrive. Ben and Kazuo take their center seats. The musicians file onstage—an orchestrated entrance—stand in place, then sit
en masse
. The lights dim. Hush spreads.

Suzanne watches Adele as the music begins. A deaf child at a concert many adults couldn’t sit through, she looks not bored but rapt. Her chest rises and falls slowly with her deep breathing, and her eyes open fully to take in the darkened scene. Since she was a baby Adele has been a serious watcher of people—so serious that her only lapse in etiquette, seemingly ever, is this tendency to stare.

Suzanne presses her small hand between her own, but she distances herself by closing her eyes and giving herself over to the auditory world that is shut to Adele. Something Alex often said when she called him at an unexpected time and asked if it was okay:
I am all ears
.

Suzanne listens. She has heard Ben discuss the composition, and she has heard individual lines and pieces, but she has not attended a rehearsal and has never heard the music as a whole. Now its surprising beauty saturates her. There is no experiment for experiment’s sake any longer, no exclusion of the audience, yet Ben and Kazuo have invented something. They have not abandoned history, nor have they simply reclaimed it; they have extended music’s long, fascinating past into the new.

As she listens to the fugue, she remembers what Doug guessed about the composer of the music: emotionally restrained but not without effort. Someone who uses intellect to translate emotion. Fair-minded but stubborn and sometimes blinded by it. A deep point of pain. Someone not unhappy with how his life has turned out, though maybe only because he expected no more.

Maybe, she thinks, but what she mostly hears is the thing she values most in the world: perfect music. She sees colors with her eyes closed, mostly blue and purple but also orange, red, green, white. The music sounds beautiful, looks beautiful, is beautiful. It holds her, and when it comes to its end, she doesn’t understand why she was deaf to it before. All of Ben’s promise and talent are still there. For a moment she understands that it is worth everything to have this music in the world, whether the world wants it or not.

Deaf to
. She opens her eyes, kisses Adele’s temple. Adele is smiling and indeed looks to Suzanne as though she, too, is suffused by the music she cannot hear, as though she, too, has rediscovered the meaning of what they do, the reason they live and work and live lives that others think are strange.

Adele wriggles her hand, and Suzanne realizes she has been holding it too tight. She remembers Evelyn Glennie, deaf since the age of twelve, playing percussion barefoot in order to feel the music. And those case studies, those deaf people whose brain waves when listening to music mimic the patterns of the hearing, perhaps because they sense a percentage of the sound through their skin. Adele and Suzanne raise their hands to clap simultaneously. Suzanne leans back to tell Petra, again and this time sure of it, that everything is going to be all right, that Adele has the ability to hear music at least in her mind.

But she halts her voice when she sees Petra staring ahead stone-like, tears jagging her face. She is looking not at Adele but still at the stage, her expression illegible save for the tears, which Suzanne cannot interpret.

The applause in the auditorium is heavy, even ecstatic, but Petra’s hands remain in her lap.

The reception on campus is Kazuo’s doing, but Ben has agreed to go. He seems even to be enjoying the attention, at least a little. He seems lighter, a weight lifted like a stone from atop his head, and his smile comes more readily. From across the room, Suzanne sees him shake hands, nod in response to passing comments, make conversation with Anthony, with Daniel, with people from the music department. He accepts Petra’s quick hug. Suzanne holds her distance, supervising Adele as she scours the refreshments, getting her to eat a sandwich half and some fruit before she raids the selection of petits fours.

“Congratulations,” she says to Daniel and Linda as they approach.

“I know it’s fast,” Linda says, “but we’re in love, and I’m getting too old to wait.”

“You’re not anything old,” Daniel says, putting his arm around Linda’s slim shoulders.

Anthony joins them, saying, “So that was very good, and very well-received.” He’s surveying the room, nodding approval, comforted by success.

Suzanne discovers that she is smiling, perhaps over their shared surprise that the music was obviously appreciated.

It is late in the day when Suzanne finally tells Ben what she thinks. She leaves out the fact that she was surprised, saying, “Don’t be insulted by this because I don’t mean beautiful in any kind of simple or stupid way, but it was absolutely beautiful.”

“Or beautifully absolute?” He is smiling, playing with his words, staring at her breasts as he parts her blouse. “Did you really think I’d be insulted if you called my music beautiful?”

“You never know.”

He grabs her wrist as she reaches for the light switch, tells her he wants to see her standing naked. He strips her and walks around her in a circle before lifting her, completely, and carrying her to the bed. He kisses her mouth, stomach, legs, back, arms. When he pauses, just for a moment, he lingers at her ear and whispers, “It’s beautiful because I composed it for you. I don’t care what those other people think. It’s you I wanted to like it.”

She tries to make her sobbing silent. She does not want him to ask her why she is crying because she could not explain it. Ben kisses the tears on her face, her crying mouth, but he asks nothing, says nothing, and when they are done they fall asleep hard.

It is just dawn when they are awakened by a ringing phone. Suzanne bolts up, thinking,
Olivia
, grabbing a robe so she can hurry down the hall to answer first. But Petra has already risen to answer it and is calling, “It’s for you, Ben. Some woman.”

Suzanne throws down the robe and puts on jeans and a tee-shirt. She uses the bathroom, brushes her hair and teeth. If this is it, she does not want to be undressed. She feels each step as she walks to the living room, which is suffused in dawn’s pinkish gray light as the streetlight in front of the house clicks itself off. She hears the phone receiver set down in its cradle, the sound of her husband crying.

This is the first time she has heard him cry, ever.

She sits next to him on the sofa, lightly places her hand on the back of his head, trying to fashion words to explain, if indeed it was Olivia who triggered his tears. “Ben,” she whispers.

He turns into her, wetting her shirt with his tears. She waits, stroking and holding his head. “Ben,” she says again with her breath.

“It’s Charlie,” he says when he lifts away from her.

Her loud and involuntary response brings Petra back to the room. “Are you—” she begins, but she backs away when she sees them.

Twenty-two

While Petra takes Adele to school, Ben and Suzanne sit at the table with their coffee, Suzanne with a bowl of cereal. She has given Ben a plate with sliced banana and red globe grapes, figuring maybe he can eat fruit, but he pushes even that aside. He tells her she doesn’t have to go to the funeral.

“I want to,” she says, meaning it, “but my contract is pretty unforgiving, and performance night is almost here. I’m going to talk to Anthony. I want to come.”

Today the quartet breaks from preparing the
Black Angels
and works on the Haydn quartet it will play during the concert’s first half. Sometimes Suzanne regrets advocating for the piece; at other times it feels right. Today it feels like shelter, a building she knows and needs, a place to be.

The quartet plays well, each of them and the four together. It is one of those days on which years of practice distill into a clean energy and the work seems easier than it is. When the last notes are played, rehearsal disbanded, and her viola back in its case, the shock and sadness of Charlie’s death return, streaming into the whirlpool of Suzanne’s other emotions—her grief for Alex, her fear of Olivia, her delight at Ben’s successful premiere, her sorrow that his moment of triumph was undercut so immediately by his brother’s death.

When Suzanne talks to Anthony, he proves surprisingly human: he tells her she should go to Charleston, practice schedule be damned.

“If I missed a family funeral,” he says, moving their stands to the wall, leaving the room in the condition they promised, “Jennifer would have me bullwhipped in Palmer Square.”

Suzanne picks up the water bottle Petra has left by her chair and sets it by her purse. “So you know that about her?”

“More than anyone, believe me.” He brushes his trousers with the palms of his hands, wiping off chalk and rosin dust. “Which isn’t to say that I’m unhappily married. We all have our arrangements—give up this to get that. I know you guys don’t like her, but Jennifer helps make me who I am, and I love her for it.”

“Thank you, Anthony.”

“Don’t tell anyone I’m going soft. I wouldn’t send you off if we weren’t ready for the performance, and I don’t want Petra and Daniel thinking they have a license to sleep all day.”

Petra is lurking outside and startles Suzanne as she emerges from the subterranean practice room. The day is overcast but weirdly bright, and the buildings and trees are gray outlines against a metallic sky.

“Is he all right?” she asks.

“Yeah, he’s being great, actually. Told me to go to the funeral.”

“No, Ben. Is Ben all right?”

Suzanne shrugs. “I suppose. Inasmuch as he’s ever all right.” She is thinking that he cried in front of her for the first time, wondering if it will be the only time. It has made her want to protect him, even from Petra’s curiosity.

“Tell him I’m sorry.” Petra hugs her suddenly.

Suzanne steps back and hands Petra her discarded water bottle. “You can tell him.”

“Sorry for you, too. I know you liked Charlie a lot.”

When they get home, she tells Petra she’s going to lie down for a few minutes and then pack a bag for Charleston, but instead she searches for the shell that Charlie gave her at Folly Beach. She is surprised when she remembers that she put it in her box of Alex mementos. Her box of souvenirs has become a coffin, containing reminders of only the dead.

She holds the shell in her hand as they enter Charleston, Ben pressing their car slowly into a downtown clotted with summer tourists. Their route takes them past the location of one of her worst professional memories: the night she played the
Grand Canyon Suite
as a Jaguar was raffled. But it also takes her through more pleasant memory terrain, including the theater where she played in the small orchestra for a theatrical event at another year’s Spoleto festival. They’d had fun, the group seated behind thick black netting, visible only partially to the audience, only to the first few rows, playing music that was easy yet not uninteresting, music that was fun. Before and after, they’d sit outside in the warm breeze, listening to the stage performers speak Chinese, watching them warm up for their contortions, legs behind their heads, cigarettes hanging from their dry lips.

She unfolds her hand, uses one palm to press the shell into the flesh of the other until it hurts, and then examines the temporary imprint.

As much as she wishes they could stay at a hotel—guesses, even, that Ben’s mother would prefer it—it is not possible to suggest. And Ben’s sister now occupies the house she and Ben once lived in, the one intended to be a home for their child. Morbidly—she knows this—she wonders what happened to the mattress she stained with blood, the only physical evidence that her child existed.

She speaks kindly but minimally to her mother-in-law, who has put herself together with clothes and makeup but whose face reveals something broken inside. Sometimes, when she closes her mouth, her upper and lower lips don’t quite line up, and she does not rearrange them. Her stare has gone sideways, too, but still she manages to look at Suzanne with disapproval.

Suzanne determines to fold herself into something small and quiet, to be helpful but not fully there. She keeps their belongings neatly stored in the guest bedroom, tidies the gardens outside when Ben’s mother is inside and the kitchen when Ben’s mother steps into the yard.
Blameless
, she thinks; she wants to be blameless.

The days after her mother’s death were a span of too much food, of neighbors and friends and distant cousins she’d never heard of bearing casseroles and pies and muffins and fruit salads—far more than one grieving person could eat, dishes that spoiled, leaving Suzanne later to thaw and eat the posthumous food her mother had cooked for the freezer. At Ben’s house, it is different. Despite his mother’s standing in local society, her membership in a church, her many clubs, there are few visitors. Flowers arrive in florists’ delivery vans, filling both the house and the funeral home with expensive arrangements, but people do not arrive with them, and no one brings food except Ben’s sister, who has stopped by a bakery. Suzanne cooks some simple dishes to have on hand and slips out to a sandwich shop for a platter in case people do show up.

Ben moves about his childhood home, seeking empty rooms and not eating at all.

At night Suzanne stares at the floral wallpaper, the matching bedspread, the beads hanging from the reading lamp. Ben stares at the ceiling.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“What’s okay?”

She turns to him. “I have no idea. Stupid question.”

“I’m okay.” He turns off the lamp, and the room turns powdery with only the pale summer-night light that slides through a gap in the heavy brocade curtains.

The funeral is efficient. That’s how Suzanne thinks of the short service at the Episcopal church—family and parental friends in the front few pews, Charlie’s beach pals in the back. Suzanne touches the closed casket, which is shiny enough to return her own image, stained burgundy and perfected as if airbrushed.

She remembers the time she complained about the
Grand Canyon Suite
and the raffle. Ben’s mother said musicians shouldn’t gripe about efforts to enlarge their audience. “You’ll never make a living if no one comes. Maybe playing music people want to hear is a good thing.” Charlie smirked and said, “And what about your church, Mother? Should the priest tell people what they want to hear, soften its stance on adultery to increase its audience?” Her face tightened as she told him it wasn’t the same thing at all. “To them it might be the same thing, a kind of infidelity,” Charlie answered, and Suzanne didn’t even bother to mask her smile.

Now she sees tears in her reflection and pulls back her hand from the casket’s cool, hard surface, wishing she had been as good a friend to Charlie as he had been to her, wishing she had been more alert. Her sin, she thinks, is not adultery but self-absorption, of cutting herself apart from the people she is supposed to love, the people she does love. It’s what Petra was trying to tell her.

The service is followed by a scattering of ashes from a small rented yacht.

“He would want to be in the ocean,” Suzanne whispers to Ben, holding his arm, trying to say and do the right thing.

Overhearing, Ben’s sister says, “He would want to be with our father. This is where our father is.”

“Of course.” Suzanne mutes her voice. “That’s part of what I meant.”

Ben’s mother joins them at the prow on the way back to shore. With her regal stature, she reminds Suzanne, just a little, of Olivia. Or, more accurate: she reminds her of Olivia come unhinged. Though her lipstick is perfectly applied, the mouth underneath still sits crooked, makes her frightening.

“Such a terrible, terrible accident,” she says. “I know he would have found the right kind of woman if this hadn’t happened. Then he would have been all right. He still could have done so much in life. He would have had children and a business, everything a man’s supposed to have.”

Suzanne is still not certain of the surrounding details—she has not wanted to pressure Ben—but she knows that Charlie took his head off with a shotgun and that his mother has not cried in front of anyone.

Ben walks away from them and stands alone at the back of the boat, looking out to the sea that holds the remains of the only other men in his family. Suzanne faces the curvature of the shoreline, the wind off the ocean buffeting her back, her hair lashing her face in irritating strands. The sounds of wind and wave and fluttering sail meld into a single wail, its tone at first cello-like and then giving way to a plaintive bassoon and finally the sound of sea from a shell. In that moment, Suzanne hears the very sound of grief.