An Unfinished Score (4 page)

They repeat brief and long segments, hammer a few measures at a time, begin anew. They finish with a full run-through, playing through their small errors of timing as though they have to, as though they are on stage. This reminds Suzanne of the funniest thing Rachmaninoff ever said. Playing with the famous composer in music’s most famous venue, violinist Fritz Kreisler lost his place and whispered, “Do you know where we are?” Rachmaninoff, the story goes, didn’t wait a beat before saying, at a volume audible to several rows of the audience, “Carnegie Hall.”

The quartet works hard today, but the music’s difficulty brings pleasure and absorbs the hours, even for Suzanne. Like most musicians, they turn into children when they play pizzicato. Daniel grins, bobs his head, exaggerates the movements of his hands and the tapping of his big foot. Just as Suzanne realizes she, too, is smiling, the piece is over and she returns to herself. Grief floods her, her smile now just a strange shape on her face.

The grief is for Alex, mostly, but it bleeds into the sadness she feels every time music is made and then gone—something real and loud in the air that disappears from all but memory. Sometimes Suzanne strains to imagine the music still living, playing on in some version of reality not organized by time, all its notes together like colors in black paint or white light. It might be a place, she thinks now, in which you can love two people without diminishing either.

As they pack their instruments, Petra’s whisper is a hiss: “Coffee.”

“Don’t you have to pick up Adele?” Suzanne says, folding a flannel swathe around the viola’s neck, careful with eye contact.

“You know the schedule. We have over an hour.”

They agree to walk the short diagonal to the edge of campus and then the half block to the coffeehouse on Witherspoon, which they both like even though the coffee is as thick as syrup. Daniel lingers, watching them leave, but they do not invite him to join them. Though the breeze is cool, under it sits a hot day—the summer to come—and Suzanne’s back feels slick by the time they climb the three stone steps into the shop.

Exiting as they enter is her friend Elizabeth. “It’s a small world,” she says, making an easy pun of the coffeehouse’s name.

She embraces Suzanne, pressing her into the large breasts that can only be called a bosom. Elizabeth’s maternal exuberance is how they met, at the public library, where Elizabeth spotted her as new in town and invited her to the first of many potlucks, warmly adopting her and Ben into Princeton community life despite their oddities, despite Ben’s cool reserve, despite their lack of children.

“I haven’t seen you in too long, Suzanne. Call me,” she says, certainly knowing as well as Suzanne does that she’ll have to make the call, understanding that Suzanne usually accepts but rarely initiates social interaction.

Petra and Suzanne take their coffee to a back table. The hour is odd, so they have a bit more privacy than is usual in their small town. Still, the place is noisy with coffee grinder, espresso machine, multiple conversations, someone humming, street sounds.

“Why the hell are you wearing black and not looking anyone in the eye? And your playing …” Petra trails off.

“Something wrong with my playing?” The viscous coffee tightens Suzanne’s hungover stomach as she sips through its heat.

Petra shakes her head. “You played beautiful but different.”

Suzanne shrugs, tells her that she isn’t sleeping well. “Besides, you know, Bartók.”

“You love late Bartók. You lobbied for that piece.”

“It’s the same as Prokofiev. I love it, but it puts me on edge.”

“That doesn’t explain the black clothes. Or you. You were very weird at dinner last night. You are weird today.” Petra’s accent thickens as she speaks, and then her words halt.

Suzanne watches the young men and women behind the counter steaming drinks and manipulating tongs to select pastries for the people in line. She scans the tables of professors—dressed as awfully in Princeton, land of the knee-socked laureate, as in any town—and the klatches of students and friends and mothers. She feels her cell phone buzz in her pocket, extracts it, and reads the caller’s number. The Chicago area code flips her stomach again. Chicago has always meant Alex, but it is not Alex’s number and the caller does not leave a message. Her throat constricts, and it feels like minutes before she can speak again.

When she does, her voice is half of itself. “Don’t you sometimes miss the anonymity of living in a city? Sometimes I think I need to live in a city again.”

Petra clenches Suzanne’s forearms with cool fingers and forces eye contact. “I tell you everything, and now you won’t tell me what the hell is going on with you.”

It’s true, what she says. Petra has always told Suzanne everything since the day they met, both new students at the Curtis Institute. Suzanne had deferred entry for a year so that she could nurse her mother through the final months of her illness while trying to cobble together a bank account with part-time jobs. No student pays tuition at Curtis, but she didn’t know how she was going to live and was contemplating the drastic step of offering to care for her crazy father in exchange for a cot in his South Philly flat. She was granted a reprieve in the form of a need-based fellowship for expenses and the phone number of a new violin student wanting a roommate.

Suzanne sold the only thing her mother had left behind that had worth to anyone else (an eight-year-old Pontiac) and moved in with Petra sight unseen.

The first thing Petra said to her was, “Are you a tramp?”

Suzanne shook her head. “Practically a virgin.”

“Then I’ll take the bedroom and you can have the sofa bed. I don’t mind paying extra, and that will spare you from seeing the naked men.” She laughed. “It’s worse than that, even, because I mostly date ugly guys. Really nothing you’d want to see.” She paused, maybe looking to see if she’d shocked her new roommate. “And sometimes it’s not a man, but the women are always good-looking. I don’t sleep with ugly women.”

Suzanne unpacked her suitcase of clothes into the dresser Petra had already moved into the living room. Later, over the first bottle of wine that Suzanne had ever partaken in, Petra shamelessly recounted her adventures and become the best friend Suzanne had ever had.

When Petra arrived in the country, a man offered her a free place to live in exchange for letting him photograph her legs spread. “He promised me anonymity,” Petra laughed, “because he was going to take very close-ups.” She’d turned him down, but kept a version of the idea. She called a company selling “adult services” and told them no intercourse. A lot of girls probably try that—getting paid as a call girl without having sex—but Petra had long legs, blond hair, and a real Swedish accent. They hired her on her terms. “When I have sex, it’s always for free. Because I want to.”

Growing warm and bold with the wine, Suzanne asked her for details about the work. Petra told her the stories: the young man who wanted her to teach him how to give oral sex, the tiny woman who wanted to spank her in old-fashioned underwear, the guy who wanted to be whipped. The one who wanted her only from the ankle down, the one who masturbated while she crawled around the room and talked like a baby, the one who wanted her to dance in dim light wearing a red dress he had hanging in his closet. “It was his wife’s dress,” she told Suzanne, her eyes glazing wet. “She had died and he missed her. That was too much, the last time. After that I got a job making cocktails.”

“Mixing.” Suzanne put her arm around her, almost a hug. “It’s called mixing drinks.”

Petra wiped her tears with her forefinger until the streaks on her face were dry, laughing. “Crazy, no? Diapers, sure, no problem, but not a dead woman’s dress to make a widower feel better.”

Now, after years of Petra’s confidences, Suzanne feels guilty for not reciprocating, for separating herself from her best friend with deceit. She’s used to it, though, used to feeling distant from others because she has a secret. For four years she hasn’t been able to tell anyone why she is so happy when she is happy or why so sad or worried when she is sad or worried. For four years she’s been lying to her best friend, to her husband, to everyone she meets.

Now she shrugs. “I’m expecting my period.”

Petra surprises her by saying, “So you’re sure you’re not pregnant again?”

The lightbulb above their table flickers, and Suzanne looks toward the front of the shop, watching people pass the plate-glass window. She grips her drink. “Petra, we’re not even trying anymore. You know that.”

“I never believed that, you know, and I understand you don’t want me asking every month. I do, but I wish you could tell me. I tell you everything.”

Suzanne finds her eyes. “Petra, I swear. We aren’t trying anymore. We hardly even were, and then Ben changed his mind altogether.”

“What about your mind?”

“I decided it was for the best, too. My sister-in-law was right, I guess. You can’t replace a lost baby with another one.”

“Your sister-in-law is a bitch.” Petra lifts her cup and drains it with surprising speed. “So then that answer about your period is a total bullshit answer.”

“And you don’t really tell me everything.” Suzanne pauses, hating herself for using Adele to deflect Petra’s inquest.

“There’s nothing to tell there. I’ve told you. He was just a guy I slept with—nobody that matters.”

“He’s going to matter to Adele. She’s going to want to know. At least you should get the guy’s medical records, family history, that kind of thing.”

“Then I’d have to tell him about her. If I could remember his last name, if I could even find him. And what if he’s an asshole? What if he’s some horrible person and wants to share custody and make decisions about her life?” Petra is glaring now. “But you’re just changing the subject to avoid telling me what the hell is going on. Which is mean. And you’re not mean, so something must really be going on.”

“I’m so sorry, Petra. I’m having a hard time today. I guess I’m in mourning.” She speaks this truth gingerly, eyes cast down. “For the life I didn’t lead. For the baby I didn’t have. It’s my age, maybe, and my birthday coming around again. Lately I think a lot about my choices and how my life might have been different.” She wants to tell her everything, but she stops herself.

Petra strokes Suzanne’s hair, causing a table of male professors to stare at them without even disguising their leers. Performing for them, Petra kisses her cheek and holds her hand on the tabletop. “You say it like it’s already over. Anyway, you have a great life. Musician married to a musician—how often does that work out? And the quartet is actually succeeding, and Adele likes you a lot more than she likes me. And she loves you just as much.”

Suzanne lifts a smile. “If you and I make out right now, those men will die of heart attacks.”

“Almost reason enough,” Petra says, pulling back, dropping the physical contact altogether. “So, what do you call
Harold in Italy
?”

This is one Suzanne hasn’t heard, so she waits for Petra to deliver the punch line.

“The longest joke ever written.”

Suzanne bursts out laughing, but there are tears, too, and Petra looks stricken.

“I’m sorry,” Suzanne says. “That’s the last piece I played in St. Louis. It makes me think of one of those lives I didn’t get to live.”

Her cell phone vibrates again. This time there is no number to read, only the word
unknown
.

“Is it important?” Petra asks.

“I hope not.” Suzanne returns the still buzzing phone to her pocket and lifts her viola case. Though she holds it on her hip with both arms, like a young child, she feels as though her arms are flailing, as though she has just stepped off a cliff and is plummeting, waiting for the ground to rise up and stop her fall. The sensation is as real as in a dream.

Four

By Saturday, Suzanne’s phone has vibrated with another call from Chicago and two more
unknowns
. She knows that it has to be about Alex and that she should answer it, but she also knows that the woman who called her home is probably Olivia Elling. She cannot swallow when she even thinks the name, so she turns off her phone for long stretches. It’s not denial, she promises herself, but a necessary postponement. It feels like time has stopped, just for a bit, right in the middle of her life flying apart. Soon enough some god will hit the start button, her universe will expand at the speed of light, and everything she has will be taken from her.

It is her turn to make the trip into the city, bringing the bows to the only person she and Petra trust to rehair them. Ben is at the dining-room table with blank score pages and a pencil. His neck curves, and his hair falls into his eyes. On a whim, she asks him to go with her. “We could get lunch,” she says, but what she is thinking is that they can walk in the park and she can tell him everything. She can tell him everything before someone else does.

“No thanks,” he says. “I need the work time.”

So she makes her way to the back of the house and finds Adele alone in her room, arranging stuffed animals in circles on the floor. She waves for Adele’s attention and asks if she wants to come to New York. “We have to bring the bows to Doug, but we can do fun stuff, too.”

Adele smiles and signs, “I like the train!”

“Brush your hair and teeth and we’ll go.”

The trolley-style car that runs back and forth between Princeton and the train station at Princeton Junction—called the Dinky by everyone in town—is less than a mile away. Suzanne and Adele turn up John Street, walking across the neighborhood facetiously named Downtown Deluxe by the black families pushed there to make room for the upscale retail development of Palmer Square. Most of the original inhabitants—some of them descendants of valets and footmen granted their own freedom after accompanying young Southern gentlemen to Princeton—are elderly now, their children and grandchildren moved into suburban neighborhoods. Downtown Deluxe has turned partly Latino, attracting Princeton’s new workforce, mostly young men and a few families from central Mexico, some from Guatemala.

Increasingly, though, as the rest of the town is grabbed by millionaires, the neighborhood is sprinkled with young white families. Suzanne’s is one of these: she is part of the neighborhood’s problem of rising property taxes that may push its poorer residents outside borough limits. Sometimes at one of Elizabeth’s parties, someone reminds her of this, as though she could have afforded to live anywhere in town and is slumming for fun. Yet her neighbors are kind to her. They do not hold her responsible for wider demographic shifts, and, like people everywhere, they are sympathetic to a house with a young child, even if they can’t figure out whether the blond or the brunette is her mother. It helps that Adele is a charmer, She waves and presses the word
hello
from her mouth as they pass Percy, a thin, elderly man who shuffles through the neighborhood, smoking cigarettes and striking up conversations with whoever walks by.

The handful of people on the Dinky are aggressively underdressed in a way that calls attention to their university affiliation. There are just a few more people—these in business clothes—on the breezy platform at Princeton Junction as they wait for the off-hours local. When the Amtrak train rushes through, Adele squeezes Suzanne’s hand hard, a laugh monopolizing her small face.

On their train, people boarding and exiting smile at Suzanne as she signs with Adele as best she can with the bow cases tucked under her arm. Their expressions are a cross between the amused looks given to mothers of identical twins and the pitying looks laid on mothers of children in wheelchairs. Half adorable novelty, half handicapped. There are men in the world, Suzanne knows, who go out of their way to date deaf women. She reminds herself, again, that she is not Adele’s mother. That she is not a mother.

The music in Pennsylvania Station—it is Brahms today—always makes Suzanne feel as though she is in a movie, the camera taking a long-scene shot of its troubled heroine, a woman about to find a suitcase that does not belong to her and will entangle her in mystery and adventure, in danger that she will narrowly avert by using her wits. As always, she is embarrassed when she catches herself with this thought. She focuses on the floor, made grimy by the day’s thousand shoes, and holds Adele’s hand as they press through the crowd’s main current and rise by escalator to the street, one of Manhattan’s least attractive stretches.

She tightens her arm over the bows, having heard the stories of musicians leaving instruments in cars or on street corners. The violist who left his four-million-dollar Stradivarius in a taxi and celebrated its recovery by playing a concert for the Newark airport cabdrivers. The most famous missing American viola left on a Chicago curb as its owner climbed into a limo, an instrument that reappeared years later in a murder-for-hire scheme. The Italian virtuoso who lost two separate Amati violins—a decade being time enough, it seems, to forget a hard-learned lesson.

She cannot imagine New York without sound—the city
is
sound—but she tries to give Adele a day for her senses. They start with taste at an outdoor café across from Lincoln Center. Crunchy granola parfaited with creamy yogurt and fruit. Suzanne closes her eyes, feels the textures in her mouth, notices which part of her tongue tastes sour, which sweet.

The café is next door to an Italian restaurant where she once ate with Alex after a Friday morning Philharmonic performance. Joshua Felder was the soloist that day, playing Bartók’s unalloyed violin concerto. Afterward Alex told her that Felder would be the world’s top violinist within a year and that once he was he would give them a private performance. “Not really going out on a limb with that first claim,” she answered as they sat facing the street, autumn sun on their faces.

“But the second?” Alex asked.

“Far-fetched.”

“Maybe I have the goods on him.”

They laughed, and Suzanne forgot the remark until it came true, about a year later, when she entered Alex’s hotel room in San Francisco and the blindfolded Felder began to play.

Her throat trembles and her hand is shaking. Adele looks up at her, her alarm visible, and Suzanne closes the memory and throws away their almost empty parfait cups.

They walk west through Central Park. At the small zoo, they breathe in the musky smell of mammals and dirty-straw avian smells of the bird pens. At the Met they see the jeweled colors of the Asian tapestries, the intense pastels of the Impressionist paintings, the dark shadings of the German Expressionists, the panoramic view from the rooftop sculpture garden, where Alex once bought her a glass of good champagne served in a plastic flute. Up the street, Suzanne lets Adele choose from the case of pastries at the café in the Neue Gallery: a forest-fruit torte that feasts first their eyes and then their mouths. They stop next to ride the carousel. The air swirls as the carousel spins faster and faster and their animals rotate up and down amid the turning. Suzanne tries to imagine how the ride would feel if she couldn’t hear the calliope music, the cries and gasps of delighted children. She closes her eyes, shutting down one sense, but she knows that’s not the same thing at all.

When it’s time for the appointment, they make their way back down the city, to one of the few neighborhoods that still offers such ordinary goods and services as sewing-machine repair, pet supplies, and hardware. Doug’s shop is unmarked save for a simple name plate; he does not advertise, and he does not need to. There is an old-fashioned bell apparatus, and Adele pulls the cord, smiling when she sees the movement of the bells that she cannot hear. Suzanne once saw a catalog with a baby monitor for deaf parents; a light shines over their pillows when their baby cries at night.

Doug ushers them down the tight hallway and into his small, stuffed shop. He’s tall and muscled like a swimmer, noticeably handsome though his face sags a little, hound-like as if from gravity, and his skin has gone gray from two decades of nicotine. “I can’t quit now,” he always says in his bass speaking voice. “I’m no good to anyone with shaking hands. But I never smoke around the instruments. It alters the humidity.”

“The dangers of secondhand smoke,” Suzanne says before introducing him to Adele, saying, as she always says, “She’s a pretty good lip reader if you look her square on.”

He faces Adele, kneels, kisses her hand, says hello. Adele looks away and then back, uncomfortably pleased by the attention.

Doug straightens, stands again. “I’m checking out the condition of a stolen violin. Someone came in to have it appraised, and I recognized it from the registry. Told the guy I’d give him two hundred dollars and had him write down his name and address. I figured it would wind up being a donation, or maybe the musician would pay me back, but the guy actually wrote down his real address, and the police found him there.”

“An idiot?’

“He bought it online and said he didn’t know it was stolen. The owner plays for the Pittsburgh Symphony. I told her I’d check it out for her.”

“She leave it in the car?” Suzanne asks.

“Don’t know, but the guy who stole it had no idea how much it was worth. Banged it around a little and sold it cheap. But I think it’s all right—lucky violin.” Doug taps the instrument, front and back, with a rubber ball held by two stiff wires, a crude tool but his favorite for detecting open seams. “I really don’t get people who steal instruments. It’s not like taking money. It’s like stealing someone’s wife or husband. You just don’t do it. I like women—you know me—but when I hear the words
I’m married
or
my husband
, then it’s all off the table.” He looks up to wink. “Lucky for you.”

“I guess some people are just wired differently.” Suzanne watches his work, feels Adele’s thin arm twine into hers. “Something for your biographical theories.”

Across two years, Doug has expounded and refined a theory that all music is autobiographical, even for performers and certainly for composers. “As autobiographical as memoir,” he says, “though much harder to tease out.” Once he showed Suzanne a sketch of his ideas about the relationship among a composer’s life, basic temperament, historical period, and influences. He’d been trying to refine his thoughts into a formula, accounting for the fact that some life events are more overpowering than others, that some musical periods particularly reward conformity, that certain personality traits are most likely to influence a composer’s music. “Can you be a brilliant composer and an asshole?” he asked her once, and was surprised by the speed of her “Of course.”

Occasionally Suzanne tests Doug, playing a piece he’s unlikely to know and asking him to tell her about its composer. He’s accurate in broad strokes. It’s not hard to tell if a composer is generally intelligent or a musical savant, cool or expressive, happy or sad. It’s the fortune-teller’s art, and Suzanne’s never been tricked by a good palm reader. But lately Doug has been peculiarly right, spooking Suzanne like the time a state-fair psychic told her that her mother was dead and her father was a conspiracy theorist.

Suzanne and Adele watch as Doug rehairs Petra’s bow and then Suzanne’s. “They don’t kill the horses to get their tails,” Suzanne says as Adele fingers the two black tails hanging among the many white ones—a stable with no bodies—explaining the difference in sound between black and white, answering that yes, everyone in the quartet uses white hair, but a lot of bassists use black for a rougher sound.

“I say it every time, but this is a beautiful bow.”

Suzanne nods, slowly. “I’m very lucky with bow and viola.”

“Almost as good as being lucky in love. Which would you trade if you had to, Ben or the Klimke?”

A few years ago, Suzanne would have said
Ben
to make the quick joke, but now she thinks of the other choice, her stomach a heavy ball. She’ll never know whether she would have left Ben for Alex. She went back and forth so many times, and now she’ll never know what she would have done had she been forced to decide. What she says is about her viola: “I was lucky to get in on a Klimke early. Got one just before they went through the roof.”

Suzanne signs the story of Marcus Klimke, tells Adele how he models his violas not on Stradivarius dimensions but on Amati: just a bit smaller yet wider across the base. A darker, deeper sound. “Perfect for playing
Harold in Italy
.”

“Will I ever go to Italy?” asks Adele, who has been reading about the Venetian canals.

Suzanne answers in both sign and speech. “I think you’ll go everywhere you want to go, but be careful because everyone says Venice smells bad.”

“Done!” Doug rosins the bow, holding it by the ebony frog. “And now you must play, even though I don’t have a Klimke on hand for you. Let’s see.…” He peruses the instruments lying on his work table, hanging from the walls and ceiling, in cases on the floor. “Just a minute.”

Suzanne hears his steps climb the other side of the wall and then move overhead, in the apartment above his shop. He returns in a few minutes, handing a viola to Suzanne as casually as he would pass an umbrella. The instrument’s most unusual feature is its scroll, which is carved to resemble a young woman with large, almond-shaped eyes and a slim waist. But she sees the viola is also notable for the quality of its finish and color—a strangely bright amber.

“A Stainer replica?” she whispers, her pulse quickening.

“The real thing. Your hand already knows it. So play us something pretty and don’t tell anyone I let you touch it.”

“Whose is it?”

Doug grins. “Lola Viola’s.”

It was only a week or so ago that Suzanne heard Lola Viola interviewed on the radio, saying, “I traded my real name for real fame” and talking about her new record and her million Twitter followers.

Doug’s eyes tilt, just barely, toward Adele. He tips his chin at her, looks down, his smile winning against the gravity always dragging at his face. “It’s tuned and everything.”