An Unfinished Score (11 page)

“It’s not just jealousy, either, I think. It’s those people. When we were alone I felt beautiful.”

“You are beautiful.”

“But then we’re there and suddenly all I can think is that my pretty purple dress cost thirty dollars and everyone can tell.”

“There was no other woman in that room for me.”

She didn’t tell him that for almost a week before he arrived her concentration turned to powder, from the fear that he wouldn’t come and then from the excitement that he would. She didn’t tell him that she barely slept for several nights and had to force herself to eat, that she spent an entire afternoon trying on dresses before buying the purple one. She just nodded and said, “I also hate even the idea that this is some ordinary affair, that this is anything other than the love of my life.”

That night they had dinner with Piotr Anderszewski after hearing his airy Bach partitas from the center of Carnegie Hall’s tenth row.

“I am the love of your life,” Alex said when he put her on the train home, and she decided that she would refuse her jealousy from then on, that she would believe what he told her. She thought of it as a leap of trust, and the trust was no less firm for the size of the gap that had been crossed to land there.

Now the Haitian driver drops her in front of the Intercontinental, so she is alone when she realizes that the lie Alex told her that day in New York had nothing to do with the woman in the red dress. He lied to her about something more important than a flirtation: he lied to her about music. If he wasn’t already composing that day, certainly he was planning to, and he hid that from her even after she asked, “Is that why you don’t compose?”

She passes quickly through the heavy revolving door, around the central staircase leading to the mezzanine, across the lobby floor of mosaic tiles, embedded as tightly as memories.
You are the last of many
. When she checks in with a friendly woman in a blue blazer she smiles and says what she must: “I only need one key.”

Mercifully her assigned room has a different layout from the one she shared here with Alex, but the decor is similar enough to hurt her. Locked in, she realizes that she is fully alone for the first time in a long time, that there is no need to perform. She has held together in front of everyone: Ben, Petra, Adele, the quartet, the town, the people on the plane, Alex’s wife, even the cab driver. Now she dissolves. Her crying is as long as it is fierce, and when she is through she is dry of tears, more calm than tired. She unpacks her few things, folding her tee-shirt, setting her plane-sized cosmetics on the bathroom’s marble counter. She hangs her dress and, wearing panties and bra, slides the score from the envelope Olivia gave her.

Suzanne has never been a savant who can hear music in her mind by reading a score—she has never been able to compose, beyond the basics, without an instrument in reach—but visual score study was part of her training, and she can analyze written music by sight. She can skim for structure. In her hands is a concerto for viola and symphony. The solo is complete, but much of the orchestration is merely sketched.

Preceding the concerto’s three movements is the introduction Petra tapped out that first day, an opening whose ending upbeat is rhythmic. Perhaps it is a nod to Bartók’s
Concerto for Orchestra
because throughout the first movement the main theme is prepared by a long crescendo that repeats the initial part of its motive over a subtonic rising through the orchestra—another move found in the Bartók. Suzanne sees it as the stretched curl of a wave, the kind of surf Charlie dreams of.

She senses as well the influence of Hindemith and nods to the nineteenth century in particular uses of sonata form. An interesting twist to Alex’s fundamental conservatism?
Clever
. Toward the end of the first movement, there is space for an improvised cadenza. A direct challenge to the violist, perhaps.

The second movement is one of the strangest stretches of music she has ever read. It is traditional in its use of suspense-generating techniques, but it lacks the formal symmetry and stability suggested by the first movement, the symmetry and stability she would have expected from Alex. The articulation into sections is at best partial, due not only to open, even deceptive cadences but also to elision in the viola line itself. This elision denies respiration to the soloist as well as to the audience. Another challenge, this one as much physical as creative.
No catching your breath
. The movement is further destabilized and made unpredictable by the inclusion of significant new material, even in the stretches of recapitulation. Music that makes its own rules only to break them.

Merely seeing the music in black and white, Suzanne knows that it calls for incredible virtuosity. Alex was ever skeptical of the virtuosic, nearly disdainful. No Liszt fan, he. She stops breathing, as though she is in a real wave, and finally inhales sharply, a gasp. If Alex was writing for the viola, he was writing for her. She cannot guess whether this piece was supposed to be a challenge or a tribute, or whether it was written in sheer overestimation of her ability. Her hands tremble as she reads on, the movement animating the pages she holds.

As the final movement rises to its climax, it covers an increasingly wide register—again the Bartók influence—but it also raises harmonic tension. Yet the ending is false, and the piece moves on to a modified Beethoven scherzo, a small
pow
, followed by a diminishing line in which the orchestra slowly disappears, leaving the viola alone in a bizarre fall that halts before it fully fades away.
Piling it on
, Alex would say if someone else had written it.

Suzanne has never seen a piece of music like this. She understands now why Alex might have kept this work to himself, and she fears learning whether he was even more brilliant as a composer than as a conductor and arranger or whether he misguidedly assembled a clumsy bag of tricks.
For you
. She imagines a great poet, a formalist, writing his worst, most sentimental and sloppy poem out of love and then finding it published against his will because he is famous.

She will know whether the music works or fails absurdly only when she hears it, but already she knows that the piece is nearly unplayable. Perhaps, she thinks, he was taunting her, paying her back for defending Berio’s circular-breathing excesses. Even at the basic physical and technical level, even with the emotional terror locked away, it will take her full skill.

She takes her viola from its case and stands over the score laid out on the high bed, the sheets of paper now looking almost harmless against the red bedspread. She plays through as best she can, straining to sustain the highest note her instrument is capable of, exhausting herself with the complicated fingerings and hand shifts, elbow pinching from the acrobatic bow work, patching through to the final eerie note.

An impossible piece of music, yes, but if she can ever play it well, then gorgeous, disturbing, harrowing genius.

Fifteen

Suzanne does not remember the dream, yet waking feels like escaping someone else’s brain, as though she’s been imprisoned in another head and is running down a foreign tongue, panicked to breathe fresh air before she is closed in forever.

After showering she dresses in jeans and tee-shirt, sandals and silver hoops.
Fuck Olivia
. She will go as herself, wear her regular uniform into battle; she doesn’t have to pretend to be a better self, a put-together self, a composed woman.
Alex loved me
.

Downstairs she carries a paper cup of coffee across the lobby and down the hall to the business center, which is cramped in comparison to the otherwise extravagantly spacious hotel. In the breezeless room, she returns a short message from Adele: “I miss you, too!”

There is also an email from Daniel. “I’m in love, really in love. Don’t worry, it’s not with you this time, or even Petra. I know I just met her, but I’m going to marry her. You’re a romantic still, right? So tell me you’re happy for me.”

“You know me,” Suzanne writes back. “Sucker for a happy ending. Send me an invitation. p.s. Who the hell is she?” As she hits
send
she remembers seeing Daniel walking toward Linda at the party as she played with her daughter and Adele.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down
. Maybe Daniel’s proposing to her, to the only widow Suzanne knows, other than Olivia.

The next new email is from Petra. Suzanne scrapes her teeth over her bottom lip. Olivia asked what she’d told Ben, but the person Suzanne lied to about this trip was Petra. Her story was fabrication: she needed to lay filler to finish up some old studio tracks in order to be paid for work she’d done before the founding of the Princeton Quartet. So she not only lied to Petra but asked Petra to lie by not telling Anthony, who might not approve of her taking outside work at this point in their performance cycle. Her story was plausible enough, and certainly it wouldn’t cost Petra much to withhold a small secret from Anthony. Petra agreed to do so if the lie was one of omission. “I hate saying things that aren’t true,” she said. Still Suzanne’s stomach pinches at the idea, and she knows she will have to figure out a way to seem to have more money than she did, to cut some hidden corner and offer the savings to Petra for Adele’s surgery. She lowers her head, realizing the worst of what she’s done: she has used Adele, telling Petra they needed the time alone because Adele was becoming more attached to Suzanne than to Petra. She stares at her hands on the keyboard, hands that belong to someone who would manipulate the affections of other people. Perhaps this is how it happens: You slip along and have your reasons, and one day you wake up as a bad person.

She opens Petra’s email, which holds news: Anthony has run the numbers. Princeton is against the war, or at least against war. “He wants to perform the
Black Angels Quartet
, with maximum publicity and a live recording.” He’s calculated that it’s a risk but not much of one if they work very hard and play very well and look very good doing it. “He thinks there could be real money in it, that this could make us nationally,” Petra concludes. “He’s already asked for you and me to wear our hair down for the performance. Asshole!”

Relieved that Petra seems to be herself again, Suzanne writes, “You know me, slut like you. I’ll play anything, and I’ll have fabulous hair.”

The next email, from Anthony himself, links to a list of ideas for increasing concert attendance. Developed by members of a children’s orchestra in Texas, the list includes guerrilla performances in public places, door prizes, costumed events, and the participation of pop singers. “Just throwing it out there,” Anthony’s note says. “Keep an open mind, you guys.”

Having squandered too much on yesterday’s taxis, and because she is up early, Suzanne navigates Chicago’s public transportation. After a ride in a crowded L-car that smells weirdly like sugar, a bus carries her from the urban to the suburban. Its belly is empty save for half-a-dozen young women who speak to each other in Spanish. They disperse at Suzanne’s stop, which is the end of the bus line. Suzanne has about a mile farther to walk, but the day is pleasant and she wishes the walk would take forever. The idea of returning to Alex’s house—Olivia’s house—is as frightening as being trapped in the mind she awoke from.

The houses she passes proclaim upper-middle-class respectability. Though Suzanne knows that unhappiness can invade any home, seeping through its cracks as easily as the scent of honeysuckle or skunk, and that all people are deeply strange when you really know them, it’s hard to imagine anything but perfectly browning apple pies, badminton games in the backyard, dinners eaten in the comfortable knowledge of growing stock portfolios.

Books romanticize the starving composer who survives on half a loaf of bread, but Suzanne suspects that comfort, or at least stability, are better friends to art than is squalor. Bach was poor, feeding all those mouths on an organist’s take-home pay, but the income was regular, and feed the mouths he did. Suzanne thinks of George Crumb, composer of the antiwar music they will soon prepare for performance. He taught at Penn State for three decades before retiring to the comfortable home in which he and his wife of fifty years raised their children. A wonderfully ordinary life from which he wrote some of his century’s most interesting music.

Despite Doug’s biographical theories, Suzanne wonders if music doesn’t exist outside its circumstances, standing alone across time, carried into the future by its score, its origins and motivations and even subject matter ultimately irrelevant.
Its composer’s life irrelevant
. So why not a long, happy marriage? Why not a nice home with well-adjusted children, funded by a dependable salary? Ben always asks why happiness should be anyone’s primary goal, but can’t someone write great music and lead a normal, happy life? Crumb is not the only example, yet Suzanne has never expected to be happy. Even her relationship with Alex was more about compulsion than the pursuit of joy. And now—now she does not deserve to be happy.

Again Olivia seems perfectly ready for her. In a long, simple dress she looks even more elegant than she did yesterday, and the house smells of baking, of something yeasted and sweet. A guest bedroom has been prepared: tightly made bed with towel and washcloth folded on its corner, fresh irises, water pitcher, and magazines on the nightstand. Everything suggests a welcome visitor.

Suzanne sets her suitcase and viola on the taut bed, startled when she realizes that Olivia has reappeared behind her, in the doorway.

“I’ll give you the tour before you get started.”

As they walk through the house, Suzanne cannot hear her own footsteps. A ghost haunting Alex’s house, she feels in long moments that he is the one alive, merely away on a short tour, about to phone home from Vienna.

Olivia leads her first to the music library, which comfortably holds a Bösendorfer baby grand at its center. In one corner is an armchair, a small stereo system, and, held upright by stands, two violins, a viola, and a cello. An inanimate quartet. In another is a cabinet, which Olivia opens to reveal smaller wind instruments, metronomes, wood blocks, papers, clips, pens. The room’s side walls and most of the near wall, save for the doorway, are fully shelved, filled top to bottom with CDs, books, score binders. The far wall is split by French doors that open into the backyard. Suzanne sees the gazebo, Olivia’s gardens, a sliver of Lake Michigan.

“This is where he worked and where you will work, in the conservatory.”

The conservatory
.

Alex always called it
the library
or
the music room
. His jump in class—a leap achieved partly through self-manufacture but also through marriage—was not singular and clean, though he said he sometimes felt more relaxed with the upper class than the middle. “So many eccentrics, and such good educations.”

Despite his soft spot for Verdi, Alex mocked the composer’s self-proclaimed anti-intellectualism. Verdi, born five months after Wagner, writing at the age of fifty-six: “There is hardly any music in my house. I have never gone to a music library, never to a publisher to examine a piece. I keep abreast of some of the better contemporary works not by studying them but through hearing them occasionally at the theater.” He insisted, “I am the least erudite among past and present composers.”

“Can you imagine admitting that, much less bragging about it?” Suzanne once asked, Alex’s hand on the small of her back as she lay on a hotel bed. Now she can remember the bed, what the room looked like, but not which city they were in.

“Sure,” he answered, hand following the curve, “because he was lying through his teeth.”

Olivia shows Suzanne every room except the son’s closed bedroom. There are many, including three bathrooms. Each room is clean, airy, and decorated with both taste and real money. They reach the far end of the house. “Our bedroom.”

Suzanne absorbs the high queen-sized bed, the matching nightstands, the reading chair and ottoman, the elaborate draperies—a cool green.
Alex and Olivia’s bedroom
. Suzanne points to the head of the bed, to the pillow on left-handed Alex’s preferred side.

“I suppose you’ve washed the sheets.”

“What a peculiar thing to say.” Olivia runs her hand over the bedspread, back and forth, the bed high enough that the action does not require her to bend. “Do you imagine that I’m not in the habit of washing the sheets every week?”

“His smell,” Suzanne whispers. “I was hoping there would be something with his smell.”

Olivia looks at her, her expression changing but unreadable. Her eyes don’t exactly narrow, but they seem to pull long, as though she has control of facial muscles that other people cannot access. “I was about to wash his pajamas when I heard the news on the radio,” she says, her gaze cast to her long-fingered hand. The nails are manicured but unpainted. “That’s how I found out, you know, on the radio.”

Suzanne feels no need to say, “Yes, I know what that’s like; me, too.” She is wondering if the radio is better or worse than any other way, if the form matters even a little.

“So I stopped. They were right over the machine, and I almost dropped them in the hot water, but I didn’t.”

“I want the shirt,” Suzanne says. “You have everything else left of him. I want the shirt.”

Olivia lifts her gaze, and now Suzanne can read her expression.
Hatred
. “I have everything because I was his wife. You have nothing because you were not.”

“I want the shirt,” Suzanne repeats.

“I’ll let you have it after you finish the arrangement. A performance-night gift. No flowers for you.”

“Performance night,” Suzanne says, registering what Olivia is asking her to do, her dread swelling into something nearly unbearable.

Olivia’s hand now sits still on the bed where she slept with Alex for more than twenty years. “You will be like Clara Schumann for Brahms, playing his music for the public.”

Suzanne spends most of three days in the conservatory. She spends most of three days working through the viola part section by section, deciphering each movement phrase by phrase and then stringing them like beads. She spends most of three days in the music, most of three days trapped in Alex’s mind. Unlike her nightmare, it is not damp, dark, and terrifying. But neither is it familiar or expected; it offers none of Alex’s comfort.

Brahms
, Olivia said, and Brahms is what Suzanne would have expected from Alex. Brahms, dismissed by many contemporaries as stodgy, a holdover who would be flattened by the Wagnerian train to the future. Brahms, a brutal tongue and sour disposition hiding a deep generosity for those he respected. Brahms, brilliant but conservative in his use of counterpoint and sonata form, ever skeptical of program music, a man who never wrote an opera. Brahms, suspicious also of virtuosity, beloved by musicians instead of by fascists, whose music transcended its moment and outlasted its critics by centuries. Brahms, temperamental and emotionally difficult in life, elegant and restrained in his music.
Sublime Brahms
.

Yes, a reincarnation of Brahms would have made sense from Alex, but this difficult music is nothing like Brahms. In Alex’s concerto, emotion is barely restrained, virtuosity is required, and a story seems to thread the movements. Almost always when Suzanne works with the score, her chest feels tight, constricted. She grows breathless quickly with the physical exertion required to play the piece and suffers mild tinnitus when trying to fall asleep at the end of each long day.

In this discomfort, painstakingly though sometimes with bright flashes of insight, Suzanne tries to decipher Alex’s intentions in the black marks on paper. She tries to discern which sections are joyous and which written out of pain, which reflect desire and which satisfaction. If she can put them all together, she thinks—get each segment right and play the piece through—then she will have Alex’s narrative of their love affair to twine with her own. Then maybe the story will become whole, the larger sum of her memory fragments, the parts of the story she failed to understand. Through Alex’s music, she will know what happened to her.