An Unfinished Score (19 page)

They move to a larger room for the seminar on copyrights, to which the public is admitted provided they are orchestra donors or members of the American Composers’ Guild. Suzanne spies some of the usual types—guys with briefcases carrying pages of their unpublished and quite likely unfinished scores who will ask detailed questions about protecting their copyright to music no one wants to steal.

Yet she listens as closely as she can, jotting notes when an intellectual property rights attorney and someone from the American Music Center advise the young composers on commissioning fees, managing risk, payment considerations when considering hard and soft deadlines, and responding to plagiarism accusations or suspected plagiarism of your own work.

When Suzanne steps out, she scans the lobby. Relieved that Olivia is nowhere in sight, that Olivia’s presence is only the invisible mantle always heavy on her shoulders, Suzanne pushes through the revolving door. For four years travel to a new city almost always meant Alex—concerts, paintings, restaurants, long walks—and she feels her solitary stroll sharply. Her senses have returned, and the air feels like hands on her face. The shifting smells of evergreens, car exhaust, hot-dog stand, and newsprint alter her breathing, making it deeper or more shallow, more or less pleasant. She walks a loop of a few blocks, perhaps twenty minutes, before returning to the hotel, walking through the taxi circle, nodding to the young doorman, pushing back through the revolving door, feeling as though it did indeed spin her out and back in.

Standing in the center of the lobby, back to Suzanne, blond hair shiny, is Petra. Petra spins, tucks her hair behind one ear, and stares directly at Suzanne, as though she saw her coming in a mirror that Suzanne cannot see.

“It’s about time. I’m buying you a drink.” Petra laughs and adds, “I promise mine will be cranberry juice.”

“Why, are you pregnant?” Suzanne asks, her voice more bitter than she feels.

Petra shakes her head, and Suzanne follows her into the hotel bar, to a table in a dark far corner, a table perfect for secret assignations. True to her word, Petra orders juice. “But you should have a real drink,” she says and tells their waiter to bring Suzanne a whiskey.

They wait for the drinks to arrive and the server to leave before they start their conversation. Petra starts with a joke: “Why don’t viola players play hide and seek?”

Suzanne sips her drink and says nothing.

“Well?”

“You’re really going to make me answer a joke so old?”

Petra nods.

“Fine. Viola players don’t play hide and seek because they know no one will look for them.”

Petra reaches across the table and squeezes Suzanne’s forearm. “Except we did look for you. That’s what we were mostly doing, you know, looking for you.”

Suzanne decides to hold her own words until she hears more. “We were lonely. We were lonely for you. That’s mostly why we did it.” Petra tips her head to the side and smiles. “That and the fact that I’m a slut.”

“The girlish charm isn’t going to work on this, Petra. And it’s not likely that I’m going to buy into the explanation that you and my husband slept together to be closer to me.” Suzanne pauses. “That’s kind of a question.”

Her answer is simple: “Yes. We did.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Since when do you swear?”

Suzanne takes three large gulps of the whiskey, burning her tongue, palate, the left side of her throat. “Since you screwed my husband.”

Petra is shaking her head. “Maybe he wants the part of you I have, and I want the part of you he has.”

Suzanne waits, but Petra offers no more, so finally she says, “So you slept with my husband because you wanted to sleep with me.” Forgetting for a moment everything but that Petra is her best friend, who has always told her the worst about herself, she laughs.

“And if I asked you to, what would you say?” Petra returns her grip to Suzanne’s forearm.

Suzanne leaves her arm still, consciously, but ignores the question, and ultimately it is Petra who retreats from the physical contact.

“What I know and Ben doesn’t understand,” Petra says, unwrapping and removing the scarf around her neck, “is that those parts aren’t even half of you. You checked out on us a while ago, Suzanne. You left us alone, and we took comfort in each other.”

With nothing to say, no words coming at all, Suzanne feels the hollow in her neck, that ache that can be filled only with chin rest and wood. She wants Petra to leave so she can go upstairs and play music and think about nothing.

“I always figured that part of you died when you lost the baby, or maybe you saved a little of that and poured it into Adele. But it’s been gone from me and I’m pretty sure gone from Ben, and even he’s not so emotionally thick that he wouldn’t notice, even if he can’t name it.”

Suzanne begins shaking her head vehemently. “No,” she says. “You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to make this my fault. You don’t get to use Adele like that, and you don’t get to talk about my baby, not ever. If you ever say that again, if you ever even mention it in passing, you will never see me again.”

“Does that mean I will if I don’t?” Petra’s lips are stained a sheer bright pink from her juice.

What Suzanne wants, more than anything, is for her marriage to be happy and Petra to be her best friend. She wants Alex alive and perfect and unharmed—someone she admires but has never met. She says, “I would like you to leave.”

Petra is not stricken, as once she would have been. Or maybe she is stricken in some unseen way, because her transparency has clouded and Suzanne cannot read her. She merely nods, drains her juice, and shoulders the straps of her purse. “Call me if you change your mind. I have a room here. I can’t help but think you’re here because of me, because of me and Ben, and I’m not having you here alone.”

Suzanne drinks the rest of her whiskey in a few short sips. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you, or with that. Not the way you think. I really would like you to leave. Leave all the way.”

“I already paid for my room.” Petra shrugs and starts to leave, but she turns around and steps close to the table, bending over, making Suzanne look at her. “You know I’ve always liked you more than him, even during.”

Petra’s words make her physical presence stronger, and Suzanne looks at the thin white pipe that is her neck, the collarbones revealed by the scoop-necked shirt, the shape of her shoulders underneath. It is now that she imagines Ben and Petra actually together. She has seen each of them naked many times, and now she fits them together. His hand tracing the line where Petra’s small, perfect breasts become her armpits, the V-shaped lines of her thin stomach, the scant hair between her legs, the slight inward curve where her long thighs join her body. Ben, just a little taller, lining up chest to chest, hips to hips, feet to feet.
Eyes to eyes
. She blinks and sees them other ways, the ways she has been with him: Petra straddling him on a chair, pinned by his weight against the wall, on her tiptoes in the shower, on top of him but facing backward. She pictures Petra under him, over him, in front of him.
Stop
.

Petra tries to smile, but it doesn’t hold. “Anyway, I hope you’ll call me.”

Suzanne closes and opens her eyes, slower than blinking. “I’m not going to change my mind, but we’ll talk when I get home.”

She watches Petra as she walks up to the bar and signs for the bill. The server asks her something and she stays for a moment, talking to him, and Suzanne sees something new in Petra’s body language, in the angle at which she stands, in the position of her shoulder—a slight reserve. It’s not just that Suzanne hasn’t noticed it before; it is utterly new. Suzanne looks down and is surprised by her own forearm, unmoved from the place it rested when Petra held it tight, sitting on the table as though it doesn’t belong to her at all but is just something someone left lying there.

Twenty-nine

The third day of the institute marks the serious turn to the compositions. After a score seminar with a master copyist, the day will be spent in reading sessions with various sections of the orchestra, beginning for Suzanne with percussion and ending with the full strings. Throughout the day Olivia watches and writes copiously with a blue pen on a yellow legal pad, but she says little, leaving it to Suzanne to listen, guide, negotiate. Suzanne tries to ignore her, to forget her as much as that is possible, but Olivia’s silence makes her presence louder. If the concerto is the story of Alex’s love with Suzanne, then Olivia is entirely the wrong audience.

The most challenging reading of the day is the requested special section with the principal cellist and double reeds. This is the music that Suzanne has not merely filled in, arranged, or embellished. This is the music that she herself created from scratch, summoned into existence from whatever void holds music that is unwritten.

It is nearly impossible to notate music completely. Marks on a page are but an elaborate shorthand, an approximation of the language the composer imagines hearing, desires to hear. There is always room for interpretation and so misinterpretation, but Suzanne finds that the young oboist with dark circles under her eyes understands her intentions, using dynamics to represent various states of sadness and agitation, following the tempo Suzanne wants. The bassoon player, despite his obvious talent, has less feel for the piece. His changes in dynamics are overstated, almost clumsy, making Suzanne’s compositional moves sound hackneyed and amateurish.

She recalls the concertmaster’s advice: “We want to play what you wrote, but we want to sound good.” She needs to make the music make sense to the bassoonist, to help him find the best tonal color, to help him feel the timbre. She tries to describe it in words, remembering a children’s book she used to sign to Adele that described sadness as a single petal fallen from a flower, a seal stranded on a beach while his family rode the current back out to sea, a marble that rolled under a sofa and was forgotten.

Olivia looks up from her pad, speaking softly but with audible, crisp words. “To give a less childish example, perhaps it would help to imagine a woman home alone while her husband goes to hear her favorite tenor with another, younger woman.”

Suzanne remembers that concert. She didn’t like the program at all, and she and Alex left early and went instead to a blues bar, where they drank gin and smoked cigarettes—two things she hasn’t done since—and watched people dance, their bodies close and sweaty, taking the dark room’s permission to move lewdly.

Suzanne tells herself that it isn’t due to Olivia’s analogy, but nevertheless the bassoon player’s reading of his part improves. She is relieved because she feels too exhausted to make it through more than once after that. “One final go at it,” she says, and she puts up her feet to listen.

Before she goes up to her room to rest before dinner, Olivia taps her shoulder. “Who was that woman—the blond—you were with yesterday at the bar? She’s not one of the composers.”

Suzanne wants to tell her it’s none of her business, but it seems easier to answer, and she’s no longer sure what belongs to whom, whose business is whose. She looks directly at Olivia and says, “I guess you could say that she is to me what I am to you.”

For once Olivia looks confused instead of like the person in charge. Suzanne walks away at a pace Olivia would have trouble matching without obvious effort, without denting her armor of composure.

In her room Suzanne pulls open the thick curtains and sits in the gauzy light permitted by the thin inner curtain. She rests her feet on the ottoman and closes her eyes. Even as she is thinking how nice it is to be alone—to have no one looking to her or even at her—the impulse to call Petra tugs. She can imagine them sitting cross-legged on her bed, her telling Petra what Olivia is doing to her and Petra reassuring her that Olivia is indeed diabolical but won’t eat her alive. Even the imagining gives Suzanne a sliver of relief, but as soon as she feels it she closes herself to the idea. Everything that has happened is too huge to be treated as though it were small, too difficult to make easy.

Instead she rouses herself to wash her face, change clothes, primp as though she cares how she looks when she goes down to the lobby to be ferried with the others, in small groups, to the Greek restaurant where they will dine.

An hour later she is sitting, in a dark blue dress and silver jewelry, at a large table as a waiter and waitress who could be brother and sister bring bottles of retsina, baskets of bread, olives, sauces in small white bowls. They splash skillets of kasseri cheese with ouzo, set them on fire with disposable lighters, and douse the flames with lemon juice. It is the same start to a meal Suzanne shared with Alex in Detroit. He’d made an excuse to come hear her play in a university auditorium, and after her recital the two of them braved streets so empty that deer mingled on the yellow center lines, searching for what the pianist had told her was the only decent restaurant in walking distance. Now she watches Alex’s wife as she feels Alex soak into her with every sip of the resin-flavored wine, every bite of the lemony cheese, the warm bread, the salty olives, the garlicky
tzatziki
.

Fuck Olivia
, she thinks yet again, and then she is pierced by the thought of Petra, alone in her large room, maybe thinking the same thing about her.

The young composers talk business at first, debating the pros and cons of university sinecures, wishing aloud that there were more organizations like the Minnesota Commissioning Club—the group of ordinary people who pool their money to commission contemporary music.

Red wine follows the retsina, and they toast Minnesota as heavy plates of food arrive. The talk begins to bridge business and music.

“I’m just not sure what the future of the orchestra is,” says Lisa-Natasha. “Find me one where half the audience doesn’t have gray hair and a walker and I’ll say we have a fighting chance.”

The quietest of the group, Paul, now speaks, his accent so strong that he seems to be speaking in a second language, although he is English. “Of concern to me is the future of the orchestra in the compositional landscape. In a world where composing is more and more private, and more and more about recording and not performance, why should we bother arranging for seventy parts?”

Bruce smiles at Suzanne. They know the thrill of being one of those seventy.

The others’ responses are equally predictable according to each person’s stance toward music and place in the world. Suzanne thinks back to Curtis, when these conversations excited them to stay up late, drinking and arguing. She wishes she was still capable of that. But she is hardly paying attention until she hears Alex’s name. It comes from Greg.

His voice is beautiful, with a complex texture to the tone, the sound of beads being pulled across a stiff fabric. “How was he trained?”

Olivia fields his questions, and those of the others, about Alex’s early days on the piano, his first job as a conductor, his rise. But mostly she shares his stories of musicians, particularly of the difficult or downright insane. She tells the story about the principal flutist who chose to be demoted rather than sit next to her ex-boyfriend, the orchestra’s second flutist; the soloist who demanded all red candies; the famous pianist who played with tobacco tucked into his lip; the pubescent violin prodigy with a drinking problem; another who would eat only organic food; a beautiful cellist who always slept with someone seated on the first row of the balcony. “Never mind if she got a more attractive offer. Had to be someone from the first row of the balcony.”

They are stories Suzanne has heard before, told better. It seems that it is now Olivia’s turn to be the one who has drunk too much, whose composure has frazzled.

Her mouth moving like a hinge, the shape of her skull evident under her skin, Olivia asks, “You played under him, didn’t you, Suzanne? I don’t recall him having any stories about you. I guess you were easy.” She smiles. “To work with, I mean.”

Greg looks at Suzanne, a gaze she interprets as sympathy. Lisa-Natasha stares at her, forgetting to either eat or put down her fork.

“You know me,” Suzanne says, “always aiming to please the conductor
and
the composer. May we be so lucky tomorrow.” She raises her glass to the table, hoping this is enough to turn the attention away from her, away from Alex, to move the conversation along to something else.

“Here’s one for you,” Olivia says. “A conductor and a violist are standing in the middle of the road. Which one do you run over first?”

This is not one of Petra’s jokes, and Suzanne does not know the punch line. No one else answers, either.

“The conductor,” Olivia says, her voice now low and controlled.

“Okay,” Bruce says. “Why the conductor?”

Olivia’s smile widens greedily. “Easy. The conductor first because you always take care of business before pleasure.”

Eric laughs hard, and Bruce laughs politely. Greg stares at Olivia. Lisa-Natasha stares at Suzanne, who looks over her shoulder. She’s not looking for any concrete reason, but it catches the waiter’s attention. Suzanne realizes that she is still thirty minutes and a piece of baklava away from escape, and then she realizes that there’s no safe ground to hide from anything that’s happening. Her eyes follow the jumpy light of the twin candles at the center of their table, and she wishes she could will herself out of time altogether.