An Unfinished Score (10 page)

People often call a musical score a piece of music, but of course it is only the two-dimensional representation of a complex experience. Yet unlike a photograph or a birth certificate, it is a representation that preserves not just a moment but the full music itself, protecting it intact through years of neglect or disinterest, making it possible at any moment, allowing it to be played centuries later.
Cryogenics for songs and symphonies
, Alex said once. Are not lost Verdi operas found and played? Do not university choirs perform chorales not heard by any ear since sung by medieval priests?

If she can play this score, breathe life into the composition, she can resuscitate Alex, at least
an
Alex. The music in Olivia’s hand promises a communion between the living and dead, a way to share time with the man she loved. She takes the envelope.

“It will be difficult,” Olivia says, “to fill in another person’s gaps, figure out what someone else meant, was thinking and feeling. He’d only just begun the orchestration. But it shouldn’t be too hard for you.” Olivia produces again the full but flat smile. “Since you knew him so very well.”

Suzanne gestures to the coffee cup, to be polite, to deflect Olivia’s clinical gaze.

Olivia waves away the suggestion. “I’ll take care of it. It’s nothing, in the scheme of things,” she says. “And you, you will start work tomorrow and stay until you can play the solo for me. Then you’ll go home and work on the arrangement, and then we’ll see about getting an orchestra.”

“You’re asking me to do something I can’t do. I can play the solo for you, but I’m not a composer.”

“You started to be; you wanted to be. You’ve had the theoretical training. You help arrange music for your quartet.”

“A full orchestra has eighty instruments. I don’t know what to do with the brass, the winds, the percussion.”

“You took advanced instrumentation and orchestral writing. I’ve seen your transcript; did you know that? I know every retreat and fellowship and residency you’ve ever been offered.”

Suzanne does not want to respond to this, but instinctively she mouths, “How?”

“Did you think I wouldn’t want to know whom my husband was sleeping with?” Olivia shrugs. “You do the best you can, and we’ll see if we can get it premiered. Maybe here—his orchestra—or else Philadelphia. Which do you think for Alexander Elling’s unveiling?”

“You are deluded if you think a major orchestra is going to perform anything I arrange.”

“Maybe your husband can help you.” Her whisper is loud. “So Chicago or Philadelphia?”

“Chicago—that’s an easy choice.” But even as Suzanne says this, she hesitates. Maybe Alex would have wanted it performed in Philadelphia, after everything, despite his venom for the city of his scarred childhood. Maybe he would have viewed it as the ultimate triumph over that childhood.

She is already considering Olivia’s question—where the concerto will be performed and not whether it should be. That, she understands, is how powerful Olivia is.

Fourteen

Because she does not want to ask Olivia to use her phone, or even to have Olivia see her phone for help, Suzanne walks several blocks with viola and roller bag so that she is out of view when she uses rationed cell phone minutes to call information and then for a taxi. This is not a neighborhood of taxis, except perhaps those arranged by homeowners for early-morning trips to the airport, and the wait is nearly thirty minutes. The minutes sag as Suzanne sits on her suitcase at the corner she named for the dispatcher by reading the street signs, imagining in each upstairs window of each house a pair of eyes, watching her. She looks as though she has been evicted, or perhaps as though she is fleeing an unstable marriage.

The driver, a large, dark man, smiles broadly at her, taking the trouble to get out, put her bag in his trunk, open the back door for her. She keeps her Klimke and Alex’s score, resting them on her lap. She names a hotel where she has been with Alex—emotionally dangerous, and probably expensive, but there’s comfort in the familiar and relief in having a place to name, as though she belongs somewhere and is doing what she is supposed to be doing. She sinks back, her hands lightly weighting the score on her viola, and gazes out the side window. Her view crowds as they move from the large, widely spread estates near the lake to the smaller and more varied houses of the inner suburbs, which give way to the less orderly shapes of the city itself, a city that still feels small to Suzanne, who grew up knowing wide Philadelphia and tall New York. Occasionally she meets the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Finally she asks him where he’s from.

He grins and says, “Haiti” in a series of short syllables, three or four of them rather than two.

“Port-au-Prince?”

He shakes his head, the gesture large and amused. “No, no, I am a village boy.”

“But now Chicago,” Suzanne says.

On the night of one of her ugliest fights with Alex, their taxi driver had been Haitian, though they had not talked to him enough to find out if he was from capital or village.

The evening had started well, the weather beautiful enough to walk to the Upper West Side venue from Alex’s Murray Hill hotel, where they’d spent the entire day. They were on their way to a performance that Alex had to attend. It would be awful, he warned her, but it was one of the reasons he was in town and a favor to a friend as well.

In a dark purple sleeveless dress, Suzanne felt as she often did walking next to Alex: beautiful and important. Whenever she turned a man’s head, Alex put his arm around her or reached to hold her hand, and she felt specially claimed. Mostly, though, they walked with a slight gap between them, a space that felt not empty but magnetized. “Anyone who looks at us can see that we are lovers,” Alex said, and she believed it was true.

As they crossed Central Park, Alex asked her about Ben’s work.

“He’s working on something new,” she told him. “He wants to extend some of what Janáček was after in his last pieces. He’s connecting largely through the math, using certain identity permutations.”

“You husband sounds like an interesting guy.”

Suzanne faltered in her response, unsure what Alex was after. Finally she settled on a quiet “Yes.”

“Is he good? Is he a real composer?”

Suzanne nodded because yes, Ben was a talent.

“At least he’s not into minimalism.”

“No one really is anymore,” Suzanne offered.

“It’s still played enough. Just yesterday I saw that guy advertised in the
Voice
as ‘being on a first-name basis with Philip Glass.’ Made me ill just reading that.”

“The public’s always a bit behind the game, no?” Suzanne drifted closer so that her arm brushed Alex’s, hoping to bring him back from his line of thought with her physical presence.

“It’s as big a problem in music as in art. Once you’re about an idea and not about the medium, you’re in trouble. Composers should leave the concepts to the philosophers and writers, who might have the talent for it. Take a look at what’s being performed. Operas based on David Lynch movies—is that all they can come up with?”

She wanted to tell him about the beautiful composition she’d played at a conductors institute the previous summer—penned by a young music professor in South Carolina—but she didn’t know how to make a space for her own ideas in Alex’s black-and-white pronouncement. She imagined him disparaging academics and thinking her naive. It wasn’t until later in their relationship that she realized he valued her opinions, that he wasn’t testing her to see if she was smart, that she didn’t always have to be on her intellectual toes the way she had to be with Ben. So on that day she laughed and held his arm, wanting only to maintain their closeness. “Is that why you don’t compose?”

“That’s part of it,” he said, and they walked on, exiting the park and heading farther west to the small auditorium, which was located in a 1970s office building whose exterior in no way suggested that it held a performance space.

Even when they were not in Chicago, people at concerts recognized Alex, and Suzanne was already practiced in being with-but-not-with him. When two men came to shake his hand, she excused herself to the bathroom. Between conversations he slipped her a ticket, and she went first into the auditorium, Alex joining her just moments before the lights dimmed. He did not take her hand but pressed his leg against hers in the dark.

The first piece was an appalling exaggeration of serial music. The composer played electric violin and was accompanied by a dancer of sorts—the program called him a movement artist—encased in black leggings and turtle-neck. Summoning her natural compassion for any performer, the empathy borne of kinship, she kept her eyes forward, afraid that her smile might turn to laughter if she glanced at Alex. To make time pass, she counted the ratio of heads to empty chairs in the rows in front of them: the theater was not quite half full.

The beginning of the main fare suggested something better. The composer-pianist had broken apart Bartók’s piano sonatas, filling in the spaces with his own measures. The music was beautiful and made new, as though the composer had cracked open a geode, separating the sparkly, faceted pieces, revealing something previously hidden. But then the silent woman standing near him onstage made a circle of her mouth and let out a chilling note before chanting in a strangely high monotone: a poem by Wallace Stevens, word by slow word. She could imagine Ben, an opera hater who believed that words and music were incompatible, noncomplementary languages, standing indignantly and huffing from the room before the chanter made it through the poem’s first stanza. She felt Alex, who usually sat preternatu-rally still at concerts, flinch in the seat beside her, a spontaneous aversion he covered by switching the cross of his legs, folding his arms, sinking back further in his chair as though anxious for an extra inch between him and the horror on stage.

The reception was held on the second floor of the same building, in a large conference room whose burgundy, blue, and rose paisley carpet belonged in a movie-theater lobby. The swirling patterns and the quick glass of inexpensive champagne tilted Suzanne’s perception, and she felt ill at ease as the room filled. She skirted its circumference, sampling warm grapes and cheese and miniature quiches, hoping the food would serve as ballast. She determined to be happy and charming, to be what Alex wanted her to be, to be the woman he had flown from Chicago to be with.

When she felt a little better, and when enough time had passed that she and Alex could slip away, she found his head among the crowd and wove her way to the center of the room, where he was talking to a tall brunette in a red dress. The young woman was pretty in the way that Suzanne had been at twenty-two. Her hair was the same unusual shade of brown, and she had narrow hips and breasts of a certain shape and lift, though she was half a foot taller than Suzanne had ever hoped to be.

Suzanne felt her pulse in her carotid artery, felt fingers of heat climbing her neck, touching her face, which she knew must look red.
Jealousy
, she named for herself, hoping to douse it by identifying it. She felt low to the ground. She’d worn ballet flats instead of heels because of the long walk, but now she had blisters on the backs of her heels anyway. She tried to smile.

“I don’t think I ever understood that poem until today,” the young woman was telling Alex.

The comment would ordinarily have infuriated Alex, but instead of walking away, instead of soliciting Suzanne as a mocking conspirator, he discussed the poem and delivered trivia about Stevens. He was smiling more than usual—it was something he usually forgot to do—and smoothing his hair with his free hand the way he had those first few times he’d spoken to Suzanne. She’d been warned right away, by one of the bassists in St. Louis, about Alex’s reputation as a womanizer.

Alex turned to her now. “And what did you think of the Bartók?”

Suzanne wanted desperately to say something smart, but her mind felt wavy. She tried to assemble a sentence to explain how she felt the composer had cracked open the sonatas to find something new and beautiful inside.

“But the poem,” the tall young woman said. “Don’t you think that’s where the real innovation lies? Anyone can do deconstruction.”

Her pulse still throbbing in her neck, Suzanne reached for something to say. “I think words and music are incompatible, noncomplementary languages.”

The woman laughed, tossing her hair behind her shoulder in a move that elongated the triangle between them, bringing her closer to Alex and making Suzanne the outlier. “It seems we’re not in the presence of an opera fan.”

Suzanne took two steps back, then turned away, murmuring to be excused.

“But perhaps a fan of yours,” she heard the young woman say.

Fifteen minutes later Alex found her sitting on a bench at the side of the empty lobby downstairs. He was buoyant as he said, “I’ve been looking for you.”

“Not very hard,” she whispered.

“What are you talking about?”

She shrugged. “Let’s go, okay?”

He held open the door for her as they walked out to find dusk settling. She didn’t intend to, but when he put his arm around her bare shoulders, she condensed into herself. He dropped his arm and stepped in front of her, blocking her. “What’s wrong?”

“I feel like I can’t say anything about music to you, and then there you are pretending to like the concert.”

“What are you talking about?” His voice lifted, his father’s accent angling into his words. “I always ask your opinion about music, and I’m pretty sure we both thought that concert was about as bad as it gets.”

“But you were telling that woman otherwise.”

“Don’t be jealous. Don’t do that.”

“It’s hard to imagine you’d let her comment pass without a sneer if she wasn’t young and pretty.” Suzanne tried to step around him, but he held her shoulders tight with both hands. Her throat constricted as she softly croaked, “You let her make fun of me as though I wasn’t even there.”

“She’s a stupid girl. Stupid and pretentious. And I was ‘letting her comment pass’ because her father happens to be a philanthropist with a love of classical music. If you haven’t noticed, it takes money to run an orchestra. A whole fucking lot of money. Would you even have been interested in me if I wasn’t successful?” He dropped his grip on her shoulders and spun to the street, hailing a cab. “I can’t believe this.”

Two taxis passed before one stopped. In the back of the cab, Alex glared down his nose at her, then out the window, then back at her while the cab driver tried to make a left turn through heavy pedestrian traffic.

“Can’t you just drive around the block?” Alex yelled at the man.

“Almost got it, sir.”

“I’m sorry,” Suzanne said, her mouth heavy with silent crying. “But it was a fair response.”

“What the hell do you think I’m doing here? You think I flew to New York to see that crap? Or was it for the disgusting finger sandwiches?”

“I just want to be sure you’ll tell me if it’s ever over. I don’t want to be pathetic.” She was crying aloud then.

The cabbie made eye contact in the mirror as the car gained speed heading downtown. Out the window the street looked shiny with reflected orange light.

“It wasn’t ever going to be over,” Alex said.

“Wasn’t.” Her throat ached as she spoke. “I just don’t want to be a notch, one of many.”

“The last of many, Suzanne. You were going to be the last of many.” He turned from her, leaning forward, his arm a barrier. “Where are you from?” he asked the driver, cold and steady, as though Suzanne was not in tears, as though she was not in the car at all.

“Haiti,” said the man, “but now New York. I’ve been here a long time.”

Back at Alex’s hotel, Suzanne sat on the bed, contemplating catching the train back to Princeton even though she had made an excuse to be away for the night.

Alex sat at the desk, a map open under a lamp’s tight circle of yellow light, furiously writing on a notepad. He circled something with a flourish and threw the pad at her, its corner catching her leg. A tiny pain. “There,” he said.

On the lined paper he had written the location and date of every one of their assignations. There had been fourteen then, some lasting only a few hours and some spanning several days. The ink tallied the total miles driven, distances flown, circled the already staggering total. The precision of his memory stunned Suzanne. He remembered even a meeting she had forgotten: three hours in Wilmington, Delaware, on a bitterly cold January afternoon.

“The next time you have any doubts about how I feel about you, take a look at a fucking map.”

He’d grabbed her shoulders again then, removing her clothes with no hesitation, making love to her until neither of them was angry anymore. The next morning she woke to his renewed touch. His fingers combed her hair. His lips grazed her eyelids. “I’m sorry I get so angry,” he said.

She turned into him. “I’m sorry I get jealous.”

“I know my reputation, my track record, but you have to believe that I love you.”