An Unfinished Score (9 page)

Twelve

After Suzanne wrestles the car from its tight space, she heads not to the freeway but up Broad, toward Temple and then beyond into the monolithic slum that is north Philadelphia. This is the place that inspired Alex to get the hell out, that forged his strength as it scarred him, giving him a place to be from and to overcome. She shudders at how easily he might have been stuck, the terrain of his childhood as much quicksand as mud. How different his life would have been if his talent had been less enormous, if he’d been a sliver less obstinate, if his music teacher hadn’t tossed him a life rope, if his aunt hadn’t owned a piano and three classical records.

He’d listened to those scratchy records—the Chicago Symphony playing Beethoven’s Ninth, Horowitz playing the Beethoven sonatas, and the Berlin Philharmonic playing Brahms’ Third Symphony—again and again on an old Magnavox record player that looked like a suitcase, risking his father’s formidable wrath, insatiable for the music whatever the consequences.

Every chance he got or could make, he was at his aunt’s piano. At nine he was picked up by the police for breaking in to play while she was at work, after which she gave him a key and told him to hide it from his father. At fifteen he spent nearly every dollar he earned washing dishes at a Bavarian restaurant to take the train downtown to volunteer as an usher at the Academy of Music. At thirty—already prominent, in some circles famous—he attended the funeral lunch of his father at the same haus of strudel and beer, a smirk on his face, the weight of childhood terror beginning to lift.

Suzanne navigates her way to Olney, the once working-class German neighborhood now solidly destitute and black and not a place visited by people who look like she and Petra. Alex told her she was the only person he knew he could take on a date to a ghetto. She started to joke, to say she wasn’t that low-maintenance, but instead she held his hand and said there was no place she would rather be. He had that effect on her, made her want not to sound like everyone else. Sometimes she was careful with her words because she was afraid of disappointing him—boring him, losing him—but more often it was because she felt different with him. Like him, she had come from common, seeking something more, something harder. They were not like most other people. She and Alex came together because they fell in love, but their shared class was part of that. Not many people from any class but the top really make it, not in music, not in anything.

Suzanne parks in front of the row house where Alex endured the slow years of his youth.

“Did you ever live here?” Petra asks.

Suzanne says yes, she did, and it’s true in its own way. It is that much like places she did live, although her run-down neighborhoods were south of the city instead of north, and not often did she and her mother rent an entire house.

This street was and is a poor one, yet it is lined with alders and a few spindly oaks and is better than some. Many of the houses have porches or at least stoops, marking this a better block than those where the row-house faces drop straight into the sidewalk, a juncture marked by a decaying line of caulk. The dirty house looks as though it was once yellow, but Alex said it had always been that way—never yellow but looking like it used to be.

Its windows draw an inscrutable face: two small eyes and a large off-center mouth, the door a long scar.

Alex could have directed the Philadelphia Orchestra had he wanted to, but he’d sworn to himself that he would never again live in this city, the place that had produced both him and Suzanne. He’d had a real chance—one in three—of leading the New York Philharmonic, but his stubbornness had gotten the better of him. He’d been done in, as he had known he would be, by conducting an all-German program, Wagner to boot. He’d chosen the program out of spite, after some newspaper made a comment about his last name and parentage. He said he’d never regretted his defiance until he met Suzanne, and then it bothered him that they could have lived an hour’s train ride apart instead of enacting the geographic comedy they did.

Suzanne thinks now that if he’d put together another program—Ravel would have been safe in Avery Fisher Hall that year, or Delius, or even Copeland for that matter—he would not have gone down on a plane headed for Chicago. Wagner wasn’t even in his top ten, but he wanted to make a point. To Suzanne he always gave French music, including every recording of Debussy in print, all the Ravel recorded in the last twenty years.

She reaches for the CD case on the floor under Petra’s legs.

Petra grabs the case and flips through it. “What do you want?”

Suzanne considers the question, then says, “Anything by Verdi.”

Though she does not love the melodramatic libretti he grew to rely on, she loves Verdi for saying that he would accept the public’s criticisms and jeers only if he never had to be grateful for their applause. This he said after the flop of the comic opera he wrote the year both of his children and then his wife died.

Suzanne bites the corner tip of her tongue, wincing but not releasing it. She tries not to ask herself if Alex would be alive if he’d given the people what they wanted.

“Dear heart,” Petra whispers, crooking her neck to see in the sideview mirror. “Memory lane is great and all, but I don’t think we should be hanging out in this neighborhood.”

“Forget the Verdi. Play the
Kinderszenen
. Did I tell you I heard Matsuev play it in Paris? One of the most beautiful things I have ever heard. He played it first, and I almost wanted to leave before the Chopin.”

“You and your Schumann.” Petra laughs.

“He played
four
encores that night. I doubt I’ll ever see that again.”

They make good time to Princeton, where they pick up Adele, groceries, and wine, in that order.

The phone is ringing as they enter the house. Suzanne feels a chill of brief panic but forces herself to answer.

“I thought I’d get the machine,” says Ben.

Suzanne starts to ask him why he didn’t call her cell, but she stops because she does not want to hear the answer: he doesn’t actually want to talk to her. It’s how he always is in Charleston. She wants to tell him not to bother calling, but that’s not the kind of thing married people can say to each other.

Perhaps it is only because Petra mentioned Schumann when Suzanne and Ben met, but the association has stayed firm in Suzanne’s mind. She wonders now, even, if she married him because of it, at least a little. In those Curtis days, when she thought of Robert and Clara Schumann, it was not the later marriage, when he was institutionalized and being driven mad by a constant A in his ear—an inescapable thrumming note he swore was real—and his virtuoso wife left her children with relatives to support the destitute family by touring. And she did not think much about the mature Clara Schumann, outliving first her husband’s sanity and then, by another forty years, his death. Rather she imagined the young, happily married Schumanns triumphing over the obstructions of Clara’s father, writing scores, using their newspaper to decry the cheap and commercial while championing the innovations of Chopin and shoring up the reputation of Bach, opening their home and their piano to the likes of Johannes Brahms. Suzanne pictured a busy home, filled with children and visitors and new music. She pictured people at the center of the musical world of their day—contributing, shaping, weighing in. They mattered to music, and music mattered to them.

Of course Ben is not like Robert Schumann at any age, though they hold in common three traits: a disrespect for received notions of form, the choice of the cello’s voice to soothe anxiety, and the decision to eschew performance for composition. The story goes that Schumann ruined a hand with a home-rigged metal device he crafted to shorten the time it would take to develop finger independence. It’s a tale often repeated by piano teachers to illustrate the truth that shortcuts don’t work, that music accommodates no cheating.

Yet Suzanne has always suspected the story is a half truth, an excuse authored by Schumann himself, or perhaps by history, to explain his choices. It was well and fine for Clara to play for the public, but Schumann would rather spend those hours composing new music or writing about it.

Suzanne wonders how they did it all. They were, after all, parents of eight children, five of whom survived childhood. It’s always mentioned that way in the history books: five surviving children. Maybe the thinking is that parents in the eighteenth century expected several of their children to die, but can it really be that they didn’t suffer as much? Suzanne has imagined the Schumann household in the days following the death of a child and wondered if music was played and, if so, which pieces and by whom. After she lost the baby, she couldn’t play for six weeks, and she and Ben barely spoke to each other for much longer.

“How’s your mother?” she asks him now.

“The same, okay, and my sister. They said hello.”

Petra takes the bag of groceries from Suzanne and drops a stack of mail on the cypress buffet in front of her.

“How’s Charlie?”

There’s a static-filled pause, as though Ben is calling from across the world.

“I don’t know. I guess he’s okay. He hurt his knee and couldn’t surf for a while, which my mother of course sees as providence.”

Suzanne musters a laugh, which is followed by another long pause. It grows longer, and Suzanne flips through the mail, determined not to speak first, not to carry the conversation that Ben initiated by calling. She sorts junk mail from the bills, which she stacks neatly, then pauses at a manila envelope with no return address and an Illinois postmark.

“I just called to say hello,” Ben says.

“Okay, thanks for that. I’ll see you soon, yeah? Or are you staying?”

“I think I’ll head back early next week, probably drive straight through.”

“Stay longer if you want.” She pulls at the envelope with her teeth, tearing it unevenly open in her hurry.

“I promised Kazuo I’d be back by weekend after this, so maybe I’ll stay on into next week, if you’re sure.”

“All under control here,” Suzanne says flatly.

They say good-bye, and Suzanne extracts the contents of the envelope with a shake and a pull: a music score. It looks like any other computer-generated score except that it is smaller in size than most, with more lines to the page, and so rather elegant, its glossy black notes close together. There are a few penciled notes and instructions, written in two hands—one unknown to Suzanne and the other unmistakably Alex’s.

The page is trembling when Petra startles her from behind, her breath in her ear. “What do you have there?”

“I think I’m holding the score to a viola concerto,” she says because there is no other answer. “I’ve never seen it before.”

Petra plucks the sheet from her hand and takes it to the piano. Standing in the kitchen with her eyes closed, Suzanne hears Petra play the agitated opening theme.

In the four weeks since Alex’s death, Suzanne has survived minute to minute, breath by breath, muting herself, fleeing to the past as often and as fully as she can, hiding in the shallowest present she can make, as numb as she can will herself to be.

Now, on the one-month anniversary of the plane crash that killed her lover, as she listens to Petra play the horribly beautiful music, feeling returns to Suzanne like the excruciating tingle of blood circulating in a limb that has fallen asleep.
Pain
.

II. Agitato

Thirteen

She must have watched Suzanne come up the walk, because Olivia opens the door even as she knocks. Usually Alex called her
my wife
, or simply, with the power of an incantation,
she
. As in:
She just pulled up; I have to go
. Or:
I can’t get out tonight to call; I think she is suspicious
. Or, some days:
She is making me angry enough to leave her; do you think the quartet would consider relocating?

Still, Olivia’s is a name Suzanne has heard often enough, and yet she is unprepared for the woman. She is unprepared for the elegant lines of her face or the way her straight posture, combined with her height, makes her regal. A Greek rendering of a goddess, an Athena, stepping past middle age with grace. Her hair is not graying or salt-and-pepper—the words Alex casually tossed—but gloriously silver and black, sleek, coiled into a smooth chignon at the nape of her long neck. Alex did not warn Suzanne that Olivia’s dark eyes are so large they relegate her other features and drain her face of specific age. Before her now, Olivia dwarfs Suzanne in inches, in poise, and, Suzanne fears, every measure that matters.

Suzanne feels like something flimsy and easily crumpled. Toss her in a can, or just light a match nearby.

She finds her voice. “Olivia,” she says, because “Mrs. Elling” seems even more preposterous.

Olivia wears her smile evenly, and someone else might take it for warm. Her handshake is cool yet full with touch and generous with energy as she says, “Ours is a peculiar meeting, no?”

Suzanne only nods. Under Olivia’s aggressive composure she feels frizzy and unkempt, lacking in grace, sour smelling from the too-warm airplane. Her once smart travel dress has lost its form through many washings and now hangs loose, a frumpy sheath that makes Suzanne look thick-waisted though she is not. Olivia wears gray trousers and a pale green blouse, both crisp and wrinkle free. As if to prove her unworthiness, Suzanne says, “You are not what I expected.”

“It’s funny that you should say so, because you are precisely what I expected.” Olivia pulls the door open wider, stepping back for Suzanne to pass.

As Suzanne penetrates the Elling residence, she recognizes objects often described to her, but the house is much larger than she anticipated, larger than the house she pictured when Alex told her that he loved his little place with its peek at the lake, that his little house was all he needed until she was all he needed.

I am sitting in the red chair
, he would say.
The plate glass 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
.

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
.

Olivia offers her the red chair, and Suzanne perches on it. The old plate-glass window looks wavy, and when the sun emerges from a passing 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
, she thinks,
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 assumed 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
. 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 succumbing to the flu. Once Petra called herself a
salope
. “You know,” Petra said, “French for sloppy. Even sounds like it.” But later Suzanne read the definition in a French dictionary:
bitch, slut, whore
. 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 embarrassed, insecure of the quality of his composition.”

“Alex wasn’t subject to self-doubt. He was one of the most assured 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 brass 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.

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 assignations 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
or
This meal is on me
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
slightly more slowly than her other words and then pauses. “I imagine he told you we rarely slept together.”

The word
rarely
bites Suzanne.
Never
is what Alex told her.
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
.

“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 glass 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.