An Unfinished Score (5 page)

Suzanne holds the viola to her chin, the bow to the strings, and opens Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Second Sonata for Solo Violin. A test for Doug, who listens with head cocked. When she finishes she tells him what a beautiful thing he has let her play.

“You know the story, right?” he asks. “About Jascha Heifetz? Someone walked up to him and said, ‘What a beautiful violin you have.’ He held it to his ear and said, ‘I don’t hear anything.’”

“Sometimes it is the player, but the instrument sure helps. I’d never let anyone but you near my viola with a mallet, that’s for certain.” Suzanne tucks her hair behind her ear, bow still in hand. “But you’re stalling. Tell me about the composer.”

“Let’s see. A deep sadness tempered by innate buoyancy, though some of the sadness was coming from you, I think. So hard to subtract out the performer.” He pauses to make eye contact before continuing. “A man—definitely a man, which makes it easier of course. A man with a deep desire for repair. A taste for the programmatic, possibly because of his time but also maybe because he likes stories or comes from a storytelling culture. Or he uses stories to make sense of his life. A Jew? Definitely listened to Shostakovich, maybe even in person.”

“Bingo,” Suzanne says. “Family members killed in pogroms and then most of the rest in the Holocaust. Emigrated to Russia, proved remarkably resilient, found some happiness in life and marriage, and mostly avoided trouble for a while.”

“And Shostakovich?”

“Loved Shostakovich, who later tried to get him out of jail, but what saved Weinberg was Stalin’s death. He was out in a month. You already knew that stuff, right? You recognized the piece?”

Doug is already reaching for the Stainer. “Nope. You know me, I don’t know my music history hardly at all. I’m just a technician.”

“No
just
about that, but, Doug, you’re all theory these days anyway. Seriously, did you really glean all that from the music itself?”

“It’s as good a way as any. I’m not always right, of course, and the women composers are much harder, more complicated, but I’m getting better and better. I think I’m going to write a book on it.”

“Just don’t start writing letters to the editor.” Suzanne smiles. “Anyway, it’s a game composers would hate, don’t you think?”

“Not to mention music critics.”

It feels good to be talking to someone she knows but not too well, to share some banter, to be thinking about something other than her own life. Yet she cannot help herself and says, “Up for one more?”

He hands the viola back to her, and she plays a stretch of the music she continues to think of as
Subliminal
, mimicking its thrust as best she can with a single instrument. The viola is suited to the task. She understands now how Lola Viola can sound like an entire ensemble all by herself, which, combined with her beauty, is the secret to her enormous commercial success—a rarity in their line of work.

“Wow.” Doug stares when she finishes. “Feels like a trick question, but okay. I’ll try. Contemporary, obviously. Innovative but with a strange conservatism. A streak of traditionalism, but not reactionary.”

“You’re describing the music itself.”

“I’m working my way to the composer through the music. Very well-trained, especially in composition theory. Fair-minded but incredibly stubborn and sometimes blinded by it. Emotionally restrained—incredibly so—but not without some emotion. The emotion is there but suppressed, consciously maybe, but not uniformly. Someone who uses intellect to translate emotion because the emotion frightens him. I’m guessing a comfortable childhood but with a tragedy of some kind. A deep point of pain.”

“Disappointment?”

Doug shakes his head. “Someone not unhappy with how his life has turned out, though maybe only because he didn’t expect more.” He shakes his head. “It’s not that simple. The music pulls in more than one direction, even more than usual. I’m starting to think the composer is a woman, which throws everything off.”

“You’re a sexist, Doug.”

“I guess, if you mean that I think men and women are different, and that women are more nuanced and complex.” He combs his hair with his fingers, slightly clumsily, as though he has a new haircut and his fingers expect longer hair. “I’m stumped, I guess. Dedicated is the best I can come up with, yet also detached. An oxymoron, I guess. I’m sorry.” He looks as though he really is.

“No, I’m sorry,” Suzanne says. “It was a trick question. It’s a collaboration: not a woman but two men.”

Doug laughs in his deep bass. “I’m relieved. I was about to toss my book proposal in the trash.”

Suzanne turns to case her bow and sees Adele, her teary line of sight following the beautifully carved Stainer across the room as Doug leaves with it. Suzanne cups Adele’s face, presses her palm into the soft skin of her cheek, reassured by its softness and warmth.

Adele speaks, forcing out the awkward syllables, something she almost never does when her hands are free. “I want to hear you play. I want to hear my mom play. I want to hear Ben.”

Now they are both nodding, Suzanne whispering, “I know, I know.”

Doug returns and takes the check Suzanne signs for him. He shakes her hand, then bows low to Adele, pops up, smiles. “What’s this?” he mouths soundlessly as he reaches behind Adele’s ear and produces a quarter, which he places in her palm.

Five

Suzanne and Adele arrive home to find Petra and Ben watching baseball. Lounging on either side of the sofa, separated by a bowl of popcorn, they could be college roommates. Petra wears flannel pajama bottoms and a tank top ringed with condensation from the bottle of beer she steadies on her stomach. Her feet, stretched out to rest on the coffee table, turn out from her early ballet training, but she is otherwise boyish.

It is a rare moment: Ben and Petra fully at ease with each other.

“Who’s winning?” Adele signs.

“Suzanne’s team,” Petra answers, grinning her support for the city where they met.

Petra pushes the popcorn toward Ben and pats the open cushion next to her. Adele fits herself onto the sofa, leaning into her mother, no longer Suzanne’s ward.

With popcorn in her mouth and her eyes on the television, Petra says, “Oh, did you hear about that Wikipedia thing with Alex Elling?”

Suzanne, who was poised to leave the room, settles her weight evenly across both feet, holding still, swallowing away the catch in her throat.

“A bunch of his obituaries had this sappy line about music being a healing force, right?”

“I hate that kind of thinking,” Ben says, his eyes also on the baseball. “Music is notes on paper, value-neutral.”

“Yeah, yeah,” says Petra, “and apparently the dead guy agreed with you. Turns out two Canadian journalists were proving a point. They were waiting for someone to die who was famous enough to have obituaries written but not superfamous. When Elling died, they planted that line in the Wikipedia entry on purpose because they thought journalists would go for the schmaltz and they wanted to see how many would pick it up. Trying to prove a point about sloppy reporting, I guess. Turned up in something like ten obits. Brilliant.”

“That’s a pretty mean thing to do.” Suzanne’s voice sounds weak, but at least it does not quaver.

“Journalists should know better, right? Check their facts.”

“I mean a mean thing to do to Alex Elling.”

“He’s dead, what the hell. I know you kind of liked him, but he was famously a jerk, right? I think it’s funny that someone put feel-good words in his mouth.”

Suzanne walks to the bathroom to shower away the city and to be alone, noting that she wasn’t interested in her favorite Phillies even before Petra told her about the false line in Alex’s obituaries. Things that mattered last week no longer matter, and she does not even know whom her team is playing.

One of her several fights with Alex was about sports, though only on the surface; it was really an extension of a disagreement about music.

They only fought in the first year or so and most often in Chicago, in the city where he lived and worked, where his wife lived, where he could never fully relax the way he did when they were together elsewhere. On an early-summer walk along the boulevard that passes the aquarium, Suzanne mentioned Luciano Berio. It had rained earlier, just enough to raise the smell of wet concrete and leave the air humid.

“He enabled John Cage, so that’s one strike,” Alex said, his voice louder than it had been all day. “Then he wrote a bassoon piece that requires fifteen minutes of circular breathing. That’s strikes two
and
three. Pretentious. Good music should not try to be physically impossible to play. You know how I feel about virtuosity.”

At Curtis, Suzanne had had a bassoonist friend who had worked on his circular breathing, his goal to play the Berio piece. It had inspired her to think of her own practice as a form of training, as a physical discipline. Yet insecure about Alex’s greater knowledge and experience, still desperate to please him always, Suzanne changed the subject, suggesting they catch an inning of the Phillies game at a bar, check in on the score.

“I might watch sports if time were unlimited,” Alex said, not looking at her, “but really it’s just false news—teams up one year or not, and nobody from the city they play in anyway. How many of your Phillies were born in Philadelphia?”

“
I
was born there,” Suzanne answered, her hurt shifting to anger, adding, “It’s not like most people on the Chicago Symphony are from Chicago.”

He looked down the slope of his nose, eyelids half lowered—his look of disapproval. “Don’t do that.”

He let her change the subject again, but throughout the afternoon he seemed removed. He walked a little farther from her than usual, sometimes even pulling ahead a step or two, leaving her to feel as though she were trailing him. As though she wanted him more than he wanted her. Finally, on a park bench where they stopped to watch a pair of inept wind-surfers in the bay, she said, “I can get disapproval at home. I can’t stand yours. I don’t want to watch every word that leaves my mouth. I don’t want to worry all the time that I’ll say the wrong thing.”

“I know.” He patted her knee but rose to walk more, again outpacing her just enough that she felt as though she were following.

Though his direction seemed aimless, she soon realized he had a destination in mind: a cab stand. He directed their cab to a small record store in Hyde Park. The clerk there knew him, chatting him up about rare recordings, mentioning a German import, a new recording of Grieg lyric pieces played on Grieg’s piano.

Alex walked to a back corner, knowing the location of the music he sought. He paid while she poked around the store, checking to see if the Princeton Quartet CD was there, risking the disappointment that it would not be and finding herself cheered that it was.

She forgot, at times, that some of her dreams had come wildly true.

Outside Alex handed her the small bag that held his purchase, and she extracted a disc of Piotr Anderszewski playing the Bach partitas.

“Remember?” Alex asked.

“Of course I do. He played Chopin and Sibelius before intermission.”

Alex stood looking at her, shifting his weight between his feet perceptibly. This was something she had never seen in him before—the impression that he was uncomfortable in his own body.

“I’m a bastard. You know that.” He shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, moving that small amount closer. He raised his hands to cup her cheeks and grinned suddenly. “I don’t care for Berio, but I actually like baseball.”

She nodded. “So let’s go back to the hotel and watch the end of the game.”

He put an arm around her. “Somehow I don’t think we’ll ever have so much time together that we’ll spend even a minute watching a television. Maybe if we live together for twenty years we’ll feel like going to a game. Hell, maybe we’ll even go to a movie.”

The shower beats warm water down on her. She tilts her head sideways to let a stream trickle into one ear and then the other. She doesn’t remember if her team won that day in Chicago, and she doesn’t care if they win today. Alex was right, even in his annoyed posturing. She has no need of false news when the real news has ruined her life.

But then she smiles, just a little at the corners of her mouth. She’d been right about the quotation about music’s healing quality, right that Alex would never say something like that. He’d been hard to get to know, but she had done it. He had loved her, and let her inside his mind.

Six

Weeks of torn sleep follow the trip into New York. Suzanne’s nights shred like newspaper. In the middle of the night she bolts awake from dreams of her cell phone vibrating with Chicago’s area code.

Her morning dreams, though, are mostly pleasant, and at dawn when she is half asleep she sees them rippling over the real bedroom like layers of mist. Alex’s whispers slip between Ben’s deep breaths, curling like vapor. She tries to roll herself back into the sweet fog, but always it dissipates quickly, abandoning her awake, too early, in a warm room, again facing a day that will feel too long.

One week bleeds into the next while another seems to flow backward, but each day’s time is slow, its demarcations concrete.
Minute by minute, left foot, then right
. Seconds click by in painful increments, a metronome set on largo.
Breathe
, she reminds herself, coaxing her lungs to expand and then empty.

She does the things that have to be done. She attends rehearsals. She practices. She brings food home from the grocery store, helps with Adele, tidies the house, writes checks to the water company and the phone company, buys stamps. She tries to keep up with her online life, answering emails, accepting Facebook friend requests, hunting for an interesting link to post. Yet she notices things slipping through the cracks in her concentration. She cleans the bathroom but forgets the shower or the mirror. An email from a music blog requesting an annotated list of her five favorite pieces in the viola repertoire goes unanswered; when the reminder comes, a day before the deadline, she types out a paragraph from the top of her head and hits
send
without proofreading. She fails to answer questions posed directly to her in the Twitter feed. One day she sees an online ad with a woman’s face, the caption reading, “This is what depression looks like.” She recognizes the sad expression from the mirror and remembers what she said to an acquaintance worried about her after her mother died: “Being sad about something sad is not depression. It’s human.” Twice she sits down with the idea of composing, thinking
doloroso
, but both times her focus is vague and she abandons the effort without really beginning, the second time without playing or writing a single note.

She knows that it is a Tuesday when she opens the gray shoebox. The box is so ordinary that no one would bother to look inside. She keeps it casually on the closet floor, under a small pile of socks and scarves—the only jumble in the house that belongs to her, its neatest companion. Suzanne: made tidy by living her life in a series of small rooms in small flats and tiny houses whose only freedom was the space she made by keeping her belongings few and carefully placed. One thing under her control.

This box—unremarkable, on sight not worth opening—houses the tangible evidence. A small, private museum, it holds a history of particular love. A hiding place secret because visible and mundane, of four illicit and extraordinary years. It conceals no love letters. Those exist in ether, in whatever cyberspace contains deleted emails.
And maybe also on Alex’s
computer
. The thought thumps inside her chest like a missed heartbeat, but she tells herself, no, surely Alex—experienced in infidelity—was the more careful lover, covering his tracks, deleting their incriminating messages. Still, she wonders whether internet service providers and webmail accounts give passwords to bereaved spouses.

She rests her hand on the shoebox holding the material stubs of romance: concert tickets, boarding passes, train receipts, program notes, restaurant matchbooks palmed by a nonsmoker, flyers, hotel pens, and other small souvenirs of fraught geography, drives across hundreds of miles, aching airport good-byes.

Alex and Suzanne made love the day of the final of three performances of
Harold
, both before and after the Sunday matinee. His plane left that night, and he was scheduled to leave a week later for a two-month tour of Europe. So a few days later they each drove four hours just to have a long lunch in Bloomington, Illinois, talking music over the worst Indian food Suzanne had ever eaten but afterward would from time to time crave. He called every day from his tour, not missing one, and she holds now the scraps of paper with the phone numbers of hotels in London, Paris, Munich, Brussels, Amsterdam, Rome, Sienna, Madrid, Barcelona. She touches a small stack of transatlantic calling cards whose minutes were drained by long conversations. One of them ran out during a call to Berlin, from where Alex told her the story of Ovid, banished by the hypocritical Augustus for his scandalous writings on love. Ovid lived in exile on the Black Sea, without his beloved third wife, to whom he wrote for the remaining decade of his life but never saw again. There the poet lived without a library sufficient to do his work among a people whose language he could not understand. Over time his heartache did not heal, but he did learn the language well enough to compose a eulogy for the still living Augustus. “The eulogy and the language it was written in were lost centuries ago. Not a word survives,” Alex told her.

“That’s one of the saddest stories I’ve ever heard,” she said, to which he replied, “Precisely.”

She moved to Princeton while Alex was in Europe. The day after he landed they each drove five hours to meet midway.

Suzanne dresses for practice, veering from black so that Petra will not interrogate her more. The jeans she once had to wriggle into slip on easily. She pulls on a tee-shirt and sandals, pins up her hair, skips makeup when faced with her reflection’s pointed watching. She does not want to see herself.

She almost doesn’t answer the phone, but after years of waiting for audition calls—and then Alex’s—it is hard for her to ignore a ringing phone. There’s always the chance that the news is good, that the voice is beloved.

The voice on the other end says her name, repeats it and then asks, “Do you know who this is?”

“Who?” Suzanne echoes, but her chest tightens because she is almost certain that the voice she is hearing belongs to Alex’s wife, that this is not good news at all.

“I need to see you.”

Her chest squeezes itself, a vise, and her stomach contracts. “That’s not a good idea. It’s better that we don’t.”

“We have shared something important, no? There’s a connection between us whether you want there to be or not.” The woman pauses. “I need to see you. You need to come to Chicago.”

“I have to go right now, somewhere to be.”

“All right, but I’m going to call back if you don’t call me soon. I assume you’ve dialed this number before? Talked to my husband in our home?”

“Yes,” Suzanne whispers and hangs up.

Petra and Anthony are arguing when she enters the practice room, but their words lack heat. Suzanne unpacks her viola, tunes, rosins her bow, still trembling as she watches these two people capable of arguing ideas without emotion. Daniel, for whom all arguments are personal, has not arrived. When they were students at Curtis, Petra made the mistake of sleeping with Daniel. He struggled with her moral philosophy, with her assertion that she could be a loyal friend even as she was an unfaithful lover. “If you’re going to ask me to sleep with just you, then we’re breaking up immediately,” Petra told him. A rough stretch followed: Daniel throwing rocks at the windows of the apartment, Daniel phoning drunk in the middle of the night, Daniel wetting Suzanne’s shoulder with his real tears. It took about a month for his understanding that Petra was a friend worth having outweighed his desire to sing lead in a tragedy quickly turning trite.

Suzanne learned something about Daniel that Petra does not understand: for him everything is personal. If Petra and Daniel argue over politics or movies, and certainly if they argue over music, the differences in their opinion are, for him, indicators of moral difference. He either assumes she’s inferior or fears he is. It’s something Suzanne understands, feels herself when Ben mocks a piece of music she loves or makes a cutting comment about performance as a goal in itself.

But for Petra, arguments can be sport, and she and Anthony push back and forth the idea of performing the
Black Angels Quartet
.

“I think it’s a perfect time to play an antiwar piece. Don’t you agree, Suzanne?” Petra spins her gaze, glances at Suzanne.

Suzanne once played the piece, subtitled
Written in a Time of War
, in a course in which the professor was trying to teach his students about gesture, both physical and musical. She shrugs under her viola as she places her fingers on the strings, trying to steady herself as she warms up. Her right wrist feels weak, her biceps tired. There is a sharp pinch just inside her left shoulder blade.

“You don’t have many opinions of late,” Anthony says. “Funny thing is that I’m not sure it’s such a bad idea. I’d like to feel some people out.”

“Poll our electorate?” Petra asks. “See whether it would gain us more donors and audience members than it would cost us?”

Anthony takes no offense at Petra’s words. “It’s Princeton,” he says, “so it’s hard to say how it would play—I’m talking aesthetically more than politically.”

Forcing herself to participate, Suzanne enters the conversation. “If we were to perform
Black Angels
, would we present it as a museum piece or translate it? I mean, the directions say amplify as much possible. Back then Crumb didn’t have any idea what that would mean today. We’d blow out the back of the room.”

“The huge score,” Daniel says as he enters, “is reason enough for me to sign on. I like big pieces of paper.”

“The physical size of the score
could
be a conversation piece for our,” Anthony pauses as he searches for the word, “for our base.”

“Well,” Petra says, taking her seat, “you smell which way the money’s blowing and let us know.”

Today they practice Suzanne’s favorite of their standards:
The Art of Fugue
. The clean counterpoint lifts her from her life, from space and time, from bad news large and small, from her anxiety, into an airy world of notes. They know the piece well, so despite its challenges, they play through and the hour feels more like performance than practice. They perform for themselves. They leave the piece as Bach left it: unfinished after the letters of his musical signature. Only Bach could take such a corny idea as weaving the letters of his name into his music and have it sound perfectly elegant.

The abrupt ending hangs above them, not menacing but haunting, not a guillotine but a ghost, and they know not to ruin the moment with speech. They pack their instruments quietly, nodding good-bye, silently sharing a rare secret performance. This love of playing is what holds them together across their differences of taste and personality. Even Anthony is in it for the music today.