An Unfinished Score (17 page)

Twenty-five

The quartet’s performance now part of her past, Suzanne returns to work on the concerto. She works the way she used to, the way she worked when she still believed the world was hers for the taking if she just tried hard enough.

But still it is not enough. Working with Alex’s score, her hands and mind in his measures of music, was supposed to keep him close to her, in her. But the harder she seeks him, the more remote he becomes. She cannot find herself in his work, not even herself as violist.
Maybe he knew you as little as you knew him
. As she works, grief reverberates in her ears, an inaudible sound felt rather than heard. Grief not that she has lost him but that she is losing him always, over and over. It is the sensation of abandonment, of being left alone and not knowing in what form you will survive it.

She tries every theoretical approach she learned at Curtis and through her own studies, and she tries the more personal, remembering Alex’s reactions to other concertos. Once, in Seattle, they heard Vassily Primakov play Chopin’s first piano concerto. Flawed and brilliant, the work has been criticized since its premiere for its elementary orchestration. “But the piano itself!” Alex said, eyes lit with excitement.

But that does not apply to his viola concerto—the solo line is not enough.

The best concertos are relational; their very subject matter
is
the relationship between the soloist and the rest of the orchestra. She doesn’t want to write a second-rate piece of music, and she doesn’t want Alex to have conceived of one. There has to be a key, she thinks, to open the door between the brilliant and difficult viola score and the rest of the instruments.

Again and again she wants to throw down the work. Yet she continues, clinging to the belief that she will restore Alex to herself, that if she follows him around enough corners, she will reach the end of the maze and find something of him to grab. Then she will understand—the music, the person Alex was, the person she was with him, what she is without him.

She also knows, when she lets herself think about it, that she works because she fears Olivia. Suzanne does not want her life undone. She does not want Ben hurt more, and she does not want to lose him. Her life may not be the life she wanted, but it could be much worse.

Or perhaps it is the challenge that keeps her working: the old ambition, the deep desire to compose and now, at last, a chance to start that part of her life, to be alone and see in what form she will survive it. So she comes back to the work every morning and most nights.

It is midmorning on a very hot Tuesday when she breaks through. It is the most mundane of moments. She is sitting in her living room, cross-legged in shorts and a tank top, her hairline and back damp with sweat because they cannot afford to run the air conditioner all the time. She is eating grapes, slowly because they have seeds.

Understanding doesn’t come in a single flash, but it does develop quickly, building like a strong wave. She stares at the score and in her mind hears what is missing from the concerto: an elegiac echo against the viola line. Alex left space for it but left it unwritten, almost as though he foresaw his own death. Holding the dead and the missing in her mind—her mother, Charlie, her baby, Robert Schumann, the Adele born with hearing ears, but mostly Alex—she writes for the orchestra an elegiac line, a subdued but emotion-saturated voice to accompany and answer the viola. Less than an equal conversation but a clear voice that she allows to snake among the double reeds and the cello. Mostly it will be carried by the bassoon, that comic tragedy of a tone, an instrument like a man with the face of a clown and a heart aching with unrequited love.

There is more than one solution to every musical conundrum, yet Suzanne believes she has found Alex’s true intention, or something very close. It solves for her the mystery of a concerto written by a man who found most concertos distasteful. The viola does not perform a virtuosic solo, though virtuosity is required, but is the stronger half of a duet before the crowd of the orchestra. The central voice is witnessed, and it is answered. She spits out a grape seed and nods.

Twenty-six

After Suzanne completes her work on the concerto and sends it off to Olivia, she returns to full-time practice. When playing alone, she finds a new lightness and pleasure in her instrument, its look and feel, smell and sound. She plays whatever she feels like, including some frothier baroque tunes, some Roma dance music, Debussy, moving from one thing to the next according to mood or whim.

With the quartet she practices portions of the regular repertoire, and the members discuss their next moves. Anthony is working on the marketing of the
Black Angels
CD and has accepted some invitations that suggest the quartet’s swelling reputation. They agree to a performance in Montreal and to appear at festivals in Salt Lake City and Austin. As they consider their future programs, Petra continues to advocate for the Ravel quartet and Anthony shows signs of softening on the point. Domestic bliss has made Daniel unusually easygoing. “Sounds good,” he says a lot, regardless of who is proposing what. One day Petra suggests a Christmas CD, just to see if he’s listening, but he catches on and grins, giving Petra what can only be called a bear hug. “I’m not quite that far gone. Linda has made me happy but not stupid.”

The news arrives by certified letter when Suzanne is home alone, practicing. She is playing Hindemith and eyeing the angle of her elbow crook when the doorbell rings. Her arrangement of Alexander Elling’s Viola Concerto, Op. 1, has been accepted into the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute. If she accepts the invitation—and they hope she will—there will be breakouts and rehearsals, analysis and feedback, instruction in the business of composing, dinners with other aspiring composers. At the end of the grueling week will be a full public performance of “the work.” Compliments of Olivia’s industriousness and cunning, Suzanne will hear the composition, fully orchestrated.

She rereads the letter, her body tingling. It is the sort of letter she fantasized about receiving when she was younger, when she still thought she might make her way as a composer as well as a performer. It is Alex’s piece that has been accepted, she understands, and the weight of his name is heavy. But the concerto is her work. too, in its interpretation and execution. Suzanne wrote the second line, did much of the orchestration.

Yet when her excitement slides away, soon, the emotion gripping her is cold, quaking fear. Not insecurity or stage jitters but true fright—the terror of free fall. Olivia may be trying to destroy her, beginning with her marriage, but only beginning there and ending in something even larger and darker. That night Suzanne wakes over and over, each time in a sweat, seeing every hour the clock passes at least once: eleven fifty-eight, twelve sixteen, one forty, two ten, two fifty-six, three twenty, four o’clock. She rises for the day shortly after five, exhausted but relieved to be out of bed, away from the twisted sheets, away from the sound of Ben’s even breathing as he sleeps through the hot night.

Her eyes and skin are scrubbed raw by the insomnia; her logic is untrustworthy. Fortunately there is no practice scheduled. Not good for much else, she decides to make breakfast for the others. She’ll need to tell them about Minnesota, but not today. She’ll think about it more and make the announcement when her mind is working more swiftly. Now she concentrates on the simple work in the kitchen. She brews coffee, relieved by its smell as it begins to drip. She cuts into a pineapple, slowly, rendering it into matching cubes. She slices apple, squeezing lemon over the slices so they do not brown. She washes blueberries and blackberries, cuts up a kiwi. Next she mixes pancake batter, stirring in cinnamon and walnuts to make the recipe her own.

An hour or so later she is eating the food with Ben, Petra, and Adele. Suzanne smiles at everyone, foists seconds, pushes fruit, but only Adele seems happy with the breakfast. Ben’s aloofness is at its most marked. He and Petra do not look at each other and only occasionally look at her. Petra and Adele sign a little but not much. Petra looks haggard, as she often does these days. Her eyes are shallow on her face but shadowed by dark spots where they meet her nose. Underneath are bruised circles. Her normally straight back slumps as she sits. Suzanne feels fatigue pull on her own spine so lifts her posture and pulls back her shoulders, refusing to curl into the deep tiredness she feels.

When Petra returns from taking Adele to the summer camp at her school, she suggests a long walk. Suzanne begs off to practice a little and then nap, but her friend presses. “
Please
.”

They cut down the 206, keeping tight to the left side of the road until they can peel off into the woods surrounding Mountain Lake. The day is hot but not so humid as it has been, and walking feels good.

Suzanne quickens her step. “Let’s make it feel like exercise,” she says. “Maybe we’ll outpace the mosquitoes.”

They find the path that circles the lake. It’s a workday for most people, and they pass almost no one. A middle-aged woman jogging, two young guys fishing the lake with simple line poles, a man running a border collie.

Suzanne waits for Petra to talk—there must be something behind her uncommon invitation—but Petra just walks on. They cross the mucky section on the lake’s far side, near where an icehouse sat until it was taken down last summer.

“This lake was put here for ice; did you know that?”

Petra shakes her head. “I should come here more. It’s nice.”

“Back when I was trying to run, I came here a lot. Petra,” Suzanne starts, thinking she should talk to Petra about her drinking, which is beginning to take an obvious toll on her physically as well as emotionally. But she is so tired herself she is afraid she will get it wrong, and she is in no position to give anyone advice about how to live their lives. Maybe Daniel can say something to Petra, can talk to her about how he stopped and how he feels.

“I was up all night,” Petra whispers.

“Me, too. Full moon?”

Petra shakes her head. “New moon, totally dark.”

The path takes them away from the lake and then back around, up a long hill. The path widens considerably, though the foliage is thick on either side and in places obscures the lake below. Suzanne feels the climb in her hamstrings, her gluteal muscles, her expanding lungs. Maybe she will start running again, when she gets back from Minnesota. It feels good to be moving, to be breathing a little hard, to be outside.

As the path narrows near its end, where it will drop them back near the 206, Petra asks, “Have you talked to Ben much lately?”

“Every day, Petra. I talk to him every day.”

“I mean really talk to him. Mr. Aloof.”

Suzanne stops and turns to face her, but Petra keeps walking, saying over her shoulder, “You need to talk to him.”

Suzanne opens her mouth to ask Petra what she’s talking about, but Petra is already across the road and walking fast toward home. Despite the day’s heat, despite her physical exertion, Suzanne’s skin goes cold and she shivers, her stomach a core of ice.

Twenty-seven

It should even the score, what Ben confesses to Suzanne. She should forgive him the second he speaks, given her more extended offense. But human emotions are not balanced equations, and there is the wild variable: Petra is her best friend.
Was
her best friend.

Outrage chokes her, yet there’s a cooling relief in knowing that she is not a worse person than everyone else, that what she’s done isn’t off the charts. She sits on the very edge of their bed, not wanting to ask if it happened there and not wanting to sit further back in case the answer to that unasked question is yes. She imagines Ben and Petra here while Adele slept on the other side of the house, all alone. She feels the blood pulsing through her carotid arteries so hard it feels visible, and her vision fills with small black dots, as though she is about to lose consciousness.

“It just happened,” Ben is saying. “I don’t know, really, it just happened.”

She blinks, and the visual static clears. Staring at the small squares of her knees, she thinks that this is something she can understand, that she should understand. Still she says, “You just happened to take your clothes off with my best friend?”

Ben surprises her by saying, “More or less.”

“How many times?”

“I’m not sure.” He shrugs, looking helpless, looking like he wants to run from the room. He breathes a few audible breaths, settles into himself a little. “About five, I guess.”

“Each time that memorable?” She hears the ugliness in her voice, the predictability, the easiness and wrongness of the hypocritical path she is starting down.

“They kind of blur; they’re part of one thing.”

Suzanne swallows, tries to soften her voice. “Would you tell me when the first time was? Maybe it doesn’t matter, but I would like to know.”

“About a year ago, maybe. It wasn’t any particular day or event. You were out of town, and we were drinking—we were pretty drunk—and it just happened. It wasn’t a big deal, and we promised that it was just a fluke and we wouldn’t be weird about it. The next day or so we avoided each other, and then you came home, and it actually felt like it never even happened. Like it was a movie I saw once.”

“Until it happened again.”

“Not for a long time, not until a few days before that party at Elizabeth’s, a day you went into the city for some reason. I don’t remember exactly.”

“Is that why she was drunk and belligerent at the party?”

“It was different the second time, maybe because it was the second time, and she wanted to tell you right away and beg forgiveness.” Ben rubs his forearms, which are clenched, their veins three-dimensional and blue. “I told her not to, that I didn’t want you to know, not ever.”

“When was the next time?”

His voice is faded, not so much a whisper as his full voice eroded and made rough. “Don’t do this. To yourself, don’t do it.”

Suzanne stands, leans her forehead into the door of her closet, rests her weight there even though it hurts a little. “So why tell me now if you didn’t want to tell me ever?”

“I did want to tell you the truth, but I didn’t want to hurt you. And then Charlie died and I told Petra never again and she agreed and so I decided not to tell you. I didn’t want to hurt you, and I didn’t want you to leave. I was afraid you were going to leave when you found out I lied about my dad, and I figured you’d definitely leave me if you found out I was lying about something less … less sympathetic.” He shakes his head the way he does when he steps out of the shower and gulps a large breath.

She repeats her question when she realizes he hasn’t answered it. “So why tell me now?”

“It was killing Petra—she was really cracking up, drunk all the time, going crazy. You know she doesn’t lie, and I’m starting to think it’s because she can’t, not without making herself sick.”

“So you’re telling me for her sake?”

Ben shakes his head. “I wouldn’t do that. I’m telling you because she’s making me. I’m telling you because she was going to tell you if I didn’t.” He runs his fingers through his hair, smoothing it down and then messing it up, taking a long time to speak again. “I don’t know what to say except that I’m really, really sorry. I kept trying to make things better between you and me and it never worked and then, I don’t know. It didn’t mean that much, you know.”

“It means all kinds of things.”

Suzanne imagines Ben at home, black pen making notes across page after page while she is at a concert with Alex in Chicago, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Cleveland, London. She should tell Ben; she knows this. She should let him off the hook, relieve his guilt and herself from her lying. She always figured he must know, at least generally—but if he did, wouldn’t he bring it up now? Wouldn’t he fling it in her face, defend himself, blame her infidelity for his? She flips it over and back, but still she doesn’t know the answer because Ben isn’t like other people, and even if he was it’s increasingly plain that Suzanne doesn’t understand anyone at all, that she has misjudged everyone who matters to her.

“But not that much,” he says, his voice insistent. “It doesn’t mean that much.”

She turns, looks down to where he sits, now slumped, and into his eyes. “Do you think we’ll be able to find a way to start over?”

Ben shakes his head, and again she shivers. This is not what she wanted, not really, not now.

“No, Suzanne. People don’t get to start over. And even if we could, I don’t think I would want to undo everything just to undo a couple of the worst things. I don’t want to start over; I want to just keep going.”

“Keep going with me?”

Ben nods. “I want us to keep going.”

She steps toward him and shoves his shoulders back as hard as she can, pushing him off balance, wishing she had the nerve to punch him in the face. “I am really, really pissed off, so pissed off I can’t see straight.” She squints to release her tears.

“I know,” he answers, righting himself. “I can tell.”

She leans back against the wall and slides down halfway into a squat, her feet pressing down and her back flat on the wall. Her thighs, parallel to the floor, burn with the effort. For just a moment she feels something opening between her and Ben. And for a moment their whole predicament seems funny. She laughs. “That’s progress, right? You being able to tell what I’m feeling?”

“Yeah.” Ben nods, finds her eyes and holds them. “That and you telling me straight out.”

He is not laughing, and now she isn’t either.

She braces herself tighter, concentrating on the strength of her legs, the muscular pain. “I’m going to think while I’m away. I’m going to Minneapolis.”

“You’re running away from me.”

He stands and holds out his hands to help her up, but she uses her legs to slide up the wall without his assistance. She folds her arms and looks past him, across the bed at his nightstand, noting with part of her attention that it’s covered with a fine layer of dust except for the circle where his water glass sits at night and the rectangular shape indicating a book’s phantom presence.

“I’m not running away Ben. I actually have to go to Minneapolis, and then I’m coming back. I will come back, and we can see then. I can’t do anything now anyway.”

“You shouldn’t leave. It’s a mistake.”

“It has nothing to do with this, or you. It’s about the music. Of all the people in the world, you should be able to understand that.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“I don’t know. A week. And you need to keep Petra away from me until I get back. Tell her not to call me because I won’t be answering.” She opens her closet to pull out her suitcase. “And when I get home I want to run the goddamn air conditioning at night. I can’t sleep when it’s hot, and I don’t think our marriage can survive another night of me listening to you sleep while I can’t.” She doesn’t speak her other thought, which is that Petra should stay away not just from her but from him.

Ben sits back down, watching her pack. “If it means we can keep going, we can run the air conditioner more.”

Suddenly calm and focused on what she is about to do, she says, “I’m not promising that, and neither can you. We’ve let things go pretty far.”

“But maybe not too far. We’re not like other people.”

“No,” she admits, “we’re not much like most other people.”

“I feel like I’ve always been waiting for you, so what’s another week?”

She peers back into her closet, wondering what a person is supposed to wear at a composers’ institute. She grabs jeans, shirts, and black dress and drops them on the bed next to the suitcase. “You’ll work while I’m gone?”

“Of course,” he says. “It’s what I do.”