An Unfinished Score (6 page)

Seven

When Suzanne and Petra arrive home, Ben is in the living room, playing the cello—something Suzanne has not seen him do in months.

The first time she saw him, he was hunched over a cello as though it were a child he was protecting from breaking waves. Though the instrument stayed silent, his fingers moved along the strings as though he were really playing, and his foot tapped time. When he looked up, Suzanne was unnerved by the dark eyes staring out under lashes so fair they were nearly white. He had reddish hair but no freckles, and he was more tan than pale. She had never seen anyone with his coloring.

“I could spend a night with that,” whispered Petra as they stood outside the practice room he occupied but they had reserved.

“But you like ugly men,” Suzanne said, though she assumed that what Petra suggested would happen, that Ben would fall for Petra for a week or forever. She assumed that she herself was too small and dark to attract his notice, but he fixed on her from the start, further unnerving her with his height as he stood and, as he spoke, with his rich Southern-melodied voice, itself cello-like. The first word he said to her in his molasses accent was
viola
, and she nodded that, yes, she played the viola.

“I’m writing some music for the viola,” he said, the
o
open and then pulled long. “Maybe you’d run through it for me sometime.”

Suzanne found her voice. “A sonata?”

“More like a group of caprices.”

“A young Schumann,” Petra said. “I hope you’re not planning to live off your wife’s performances and then throw yourself in the Rhine and get locked away for the rest of your short, stupid life.”

Suzanne learned then an important fact about Ben: he doesn’t swat banter back and forth. When a line is thrown his way, it sticks and he responds as though it were not a line. His words are always serious; he does not joke, and he does not flirt. To Petra’s attempt, he said, “I’d take Schumann’s compositions at any price. There have been few original composers. I’m not one for Romantic music, but I’d be happy if posterity could look back at my work and say that it was utterly new.”

“Oh, my god, such an earnest young composer,” Petra said sideways to Suzanne. Of Ben she asked, “Even at the price of poverty and extreme unhappiness?”

He lifted his cello, embracing it with his broad chest as well as his arms as he stood. “No one ever said we were meant to be happy. There are more important things.”

“I’ll do it,” Suzanne interjected. “I’ll play through the caprices for you.”

“She’s very good,” Petra said, putting her arm around Suzanne like a loving father. “Though her name isn’t Clara.”

Ben ignores them as they enter now. He is playing something that sounds more like math than music—notes and tempo that do not amount to melody. They sit and listen, and it is a good ten or more minutes before he is done.

“Just working some stuff out,” he says.

Suzanne rises when the house phone rings, then worries that she appears anxious to answer first. Her fear is dulled by Elizabeth’s voice.

“We just decided to have a potluck tomorrow night. All of you come, and be sure to bring your friend Petra. She’s fun; I like her.”

“You’re one of the few wives who does,” Suzanne says, and it is true that most women despise Petra on sight.

“I can’t believe that,” Elizabeth objects. “She’s terrific. Tell her she has to come.”

“You just like her because she likes the same dreadful music you do.”

“But she’s a violinist.”

“Classical musicians have famously appalling taste in popular music.”

“You for one.” Elizabeth snorts at her joke. “And there will be kids there for Adele to play with. My kids just love her, tell Petra that. Speaking of which, when are you and Ben going to give this town some more kids?”

Suzanne flinches, as she does every time the question comes up, not understanding how people can be so nosy, or so oblivious to the possibility that people who don’t have children might not be able to. Or might have lost one. She could retort snidely—the impulse is there—but she likes Elizabeth, likes having a friend who is a grown-up party girl, careless about dates and times but thoughtful when she hears you’re sick or celebrating. Elizabeth is free of malice, and Suzanne has never heard her say a mean word about anyone, not to them and not behind their back.

“We’ll see you tomorrow,” she says evenly, thanking Elizabeth before hanging up.

While Suzanne stares at the cabinet trying to imagine a dinner emerging from its contents, the phone rings again. She assumes it is Elizabeth, who always forgets something she meant to say and then phones back a minute later when she remembers.

Ben answers and passes the phone with a shrug. “Not Elizabeth.”

Suzanne’s pulse skips as she says hello, as if her body knows in advance who it will be.

“We need to talk,” Olivia says. “Call me soon to let me know when you’re coming to Chicago. You managed to get here plenty of times to see my husband. Make a way now. It’s important.”

“We don’t talk to telemarketers.” Suzanne is staring at Ben. “Please put us on your don’t-call list.”

“Call me soon or I’ll call back.”

Suzanne hangs up, steadying herself. Her heart feels like it has heavy, beating wings—a large bird trapped in her chest. Her eyes follow the linoleum’s lines of elongated stars, faded from their former silver to a dull gray, to the pantry, to the place where a wined-up Petra started to chip away to reveal the wood that they intended to reveal and refinish someday.

“It pisses me off,” Ben says, “that we still get those calls. I thought you signed up for that registry, that it was illegal for them to keep calling.”

“Shall we order Chinese?” Suzanne asks. Suddenly cooking seems impossibly hard.

Ben nods. “Hey, I wanted to tell you, I think I’m going to make a quick trip down to Charleston. My mother needs some things done around the house, and Charlie’s not going to get them done alone.”

Several ugly sentences form in Suzanne’s mind:
Why doesn’t she hire someone? Why do you have to go? When are you ever going to do the things that our house needs done?
She closes her eyes, pushing away the person who would say those things aloud, the person she doesn’t want to be.

“When are you going?” she asks.

“I was thinking next week, but I guess that depends on whether you want to go or not.”

“But you’ve been working day and night on the new piece.”

“Exactly. It will be good for me to step away from it, just for a day or two; you said that yourself.”

“Too bad Suzanne can’t go with you,” Petra says as she enters the kitchen. “But I need her to go to the Children’s Hospital in Philly with me.”

Ben glares at her “You’re not honestly considering going through with that, are you?”

Suzanne readies herself, fingers tense around the edge of her seat, for Ben’s lecture on deaf culture and the dangers of rupturing Adele’s social and cultural maturation. She waits for him to interrogate the meaning of a normal life, to emphasize the profundity of the deaf, to expound on the intricacies and beauty of American Sign Language, to argue that a full deaf life is better than a half-assed hearing one.

She asks herself whether she’ll respond out loud:
You think of her as a theory and not as a person
. Or:
Petra is the parent
.

But Ben is tired. The parallel lines that run across his forehead groove more deeply than usual, and his face looks heavy.

Petra smiles. “So I need Suzanne next week.”

Petra knows that she doesn’t want to go to Charleston, not as long as she lives. They have talked about it a lot, maybe too much. But even when they discuss it,
Charleston
is a word Suzanne avoids saying, a name that makes her wince when it is spoken by someone else, particularly if the syllables are pronounced by a native, even by Ben—the first one drawled and the second clipped. For her it is a word that says,
You are poor; you are unfit; you do not belong
. And she can admit this: it is the city where she lost her baby.

She understands why people love Charleston’s cobblestones and painted houses and marsh grass and salt air, people who view the bay from swinging chairs and admire the water rolling in to smother the vaguely rotten odors that leak from the earth when the tide is low. Charleston has things people want: galleries and festivals and good restaurants and money and ocean access and wraparound porches and flower boxes and the funky haunts made possible by the presence of art students, of white kids with dreadlocks.

People love the Charleston that cleans up its long history in the telling, makes it quaint, wears it as style. If the listener is not the Civil War aficionado the local speaker hopes for, the palmetto trees that saved the American Revolution can be mentioned, or the conversation can settle on the city’s notoriously promiscuous and quite possibly bisexual female pirate. But across the time Suzanne lived there, she never could learn the city’s secret speech codes—what things really meant, whether an invitation to drop by a home was intended or merely mouthed, whether a question about her musical preferences was meant to be answered in four words or forty. But she learned on her first visit one of the harshest codes: in Charleston the well-born make you say aloud things they already know.

“Your mother was Italian, right?” Ben’s mother asked, the
I
long, the color on her cheeks artificial. And she said
Realtor
with a tone that made clear she already knew that Suzanne’s mother wasn’t the successful model that the affluent tolerate at their cocktail parties but the kind who scrape by between cash-flow problems, selling starter homes and condominiums that are cheaper to buy than to rent—the kind of places where Suzanne and her mother also lived. Still his mother asked, “So she must have done quite well?”

“And what does your father do?” asked Ben’s sister, Emily, knowing already the most generous thing Suzanne could say was that he no longer worked. “Early retirement?” Emily pressed, cocking her head, her tone pleasant. Suzanne nodded, though everyone in the room knew the words closest to the truth were
unemployment
and
disability payments
.

Suzanne searched for sympathy in their eyes, some softening of facial lines or ease in their shoulders—something to suggest that they were, after all, nice people. She looked to Ben, who knew the language, but he was looking to the mantel, at the photo of his father standing in front of the small, fast yacht he had gone down on.

It was his brother who saved her, walking into the room with a surfboard. “Sort of like Ben,” Charlie said. “And sort of like me. You’ve done a wonderful job, Mother, raising a composer and a beach rat, neither of whom has ever worked for money.”

His mother passed Suzanne a plate of benne wafers. “You’re very thin,” she said, and Suzanne couldn’t tell if the sentence was a compensatory compliment or recrimination.

Ben walked toward the picture of his father, rested his fingertips on the mantel in front of it. “Suzanne and her father are very different people,” he said finally, after she had the cookie in hand, napkin underneath to catch the sesame seeds, no longer in need of rescue.

Charlie grinned at her, swiped his streaked hair from his eyes, young person to young person, bonded by similar tastes in popular music and a common enemy.

Ben cases his cello. “Suzanne?”

Suzanne hates that they have so many of their few conversations in front of Petra, but this time it feels like a mercy. “I guess I’ll stay up here. I did tell Petra I’d go to Philly with her, and I should see my dad. Petra will give me an excuse not to stay very long. That is, if you don’t mind going alone.”

He shrugs. “No, that’s fine. Probably easier since it’ll just be a few days.”

“Stay as long as you need to,” she says, wondering if she can use his trip as a way to do what she probably has to do, which is to find out what Alex’s wife wants from her.

When she thinks of her—
Alex’s wife
—of how angry she could be, of what she might be capable of, Suzanne feels her whole world pulling away like a receding tide sucking sand back into the ocean.
Be prepared to lose everything
, she tells herself, and wonders how much she has to lose.

Eight

On Friday after rehearsal, Suzanne waits for Adele to get out of school, and together they bake a cake in the hot kitchen. Adele’s choice is odd for a child: an Italian chiffon cake made with dark green olive oil and orange-blossom water.

“You have sophisticated tastes for your age,” Suzanne signs.

“Maybe my taste is better because I don’t hear. They say that, you know.”

Suzanne presses her hand on her own breastbone, feeling something catch at the base of her throat. She composes herself and signs, “I think you’re just a sophisticated kid.”

Adele nods her pleasure at that, and Suzanne feels relieved. Adele loves to go to social events, but Suzanne has noticed that she grows anxious before them, slightly manic.

“You mix the dry ingredients, and I’ll get everything else ready to go.”

Suzanne sets the oven temperature, greases the Bundt pan, grates lemon and orange peel, gets out the mixer, separates eggs, measures milk, olive oil, vanilla. As long as she concentrates on the work of the moment, she feels almost normal. In those moments when she remembers everything—her lonely marriage, the baby she lost, Alex, Olivia, her whole crashed life—she wonders if she will ever feel happy again. She compresses herself back into the small, functional version of who she is and summons a smile. “Ready to mix?” She does not want to grow puny and bitter. She does not want her life to be already decided.

Adele folds the whipped egg whites into the batter, the spatula graceful with the turns of her thin wrist, which is limber like a conductor’s. Her arm moves slowly and she looks transfixed as she smoothes clumps in the whites. Suzanne hears nothing against this silent symphony except birds and distant traffic.

After she centers the pan in the oven, she lets Adele lick the bowl and beaters. She knows she shouldn’t—raw eggs—but she wants to share this rare fond memory from her own childhood.

“Don’t worry,” she says when Petra calls, “I washed the eggs before I cracked them.”

“Can I meet you and Adele there?” Petra asks.

An hour later Suzanne drives across Princeton with Ben and Adele, as though they are a nuclear family. The entire car is fragrant with the still warm cake. “What’s going on with Petra?” Ben asks, and Suzanne appreciates that he tips his face down so Adele cannot read his lips in the rearview mirror.

“The usual, I guess.”

“She seems a little more out of control than usual.”

Suzanne shrugs. She knows Petra is struggling with the decision about the cochlear implant and does not want to raise the subject again with Ben.

At Elizabeth’s house, Ben presents the cake to the hostess.

“I wish Henry could cook!” Elizabeth says, and Adele and Suzanne exchange elbow pokes. Elizabeth hugs each of them in turn, pressing Suzanne into her pillow of a chest, kissing Adele on both cheeks, quickly embracing Ben.

The house and yard teem with chatting mothers, children hard at play, husbands arriving from work—most from jobs in New York and some from local employment—to meet their families for the start of the weekend. One of Elizabeth’s children takes Adele by the hand, pulling her away to play. Suzanne makes her way through the house to the backyard, where adults talk in groups and children roam in small packs. Along the way she chats with people she recognizes. As always, making conversation with people she knows only a little feels like work, but she does that work. “A musician, yes. Viola,” she says more than once. She wishes she could be more like Ben and Petra—wishes she didn’t care—but she wants to fit in. If she cannot live an extraordinary life, a desire that crashed with Alex’s plane, then she’ll take the ordinary life she craved as a child. She needs to belong in this town, to be one of its families, to live a normal middle-class life. And so she tries. She answers the questions, compliments the women’s dresses, inquires about the husbands’ jobs, asks people about their tennis games and running times and where they take yoga. She finds a cooler on the porch and pours herself a glass of wine from a thick-walled, wet bottle.

In a far corner of the backyard is a quartet of chairs. One appears to wait for Suzanne; the others are occupied by Petra, Daniel, and Anthony in their usual arrangement.

“Can’t you at least sit in different seats?” Suzanne asks as she approaches.

“We just can’t get enough of each other,” Petra says, patting the empty chair.

Suzanne sits and looks out to her right, where she can hear but not see a small brook on the other side of a boxwood hedge.

“A viola player and a cellist are standing on a sinking ship,” Petra says. “The cellist calls for help, says he can’t swim.”

Suzanne finishes Petra’s joke: “‘That’s okay,’ says the viola player, ‘just fake it like I do.’”

Petra lifts the outsized bottle of wine leaning against her foot and tops off Suzanne’s glass, though it is still nearly full. “Keeping it close so we don’t have to get up and down just to stay liquidated.”

“Hydrated,” says Daniel.

“And so I don’t have to talk to those women. It’s not like I even want anything to do with their stupid husbands, and if I did they should thank me. If one more of them says how ironic it is for a musician to have a deaf child, I’m going pistol.”

“Postal,” says Daniel.

“Right,” says Petra, “homicidal.”

The timbre of her laugh straddles the border between lighthearted and reckless. Suzanne knows, from experience, that this means Petra is a couple of hours into her drinking. She knows it’s why Petra didn’t come home, why she wanted to meet at Elizabeth’s. Suzanne angles her chair so she can see the group of kids Adele is playing with. Adele seems to have given up trying to lip read—something difficult in groups and impossible with moving children—yet she appears happy in the company, handing toys back and forth with a boy her age, smiling.

“What do you think, Suzanne?” Daniel’s off-center gaze suggests that he has drunk plenty of wine as well.

“We’re recycling the argument over performing
Black Angels
,” Anthony says.

Suzanne shrugs. “I’ll play anything.”

“Even Tchaikovsky?” Anthony exaggerates the lift of his eyebrows.

Suzanne smiles, though she feels as though she is watching them from far away. “Let’s not get carried away.”

“We know your theories,” Petra says to her. “Romanticism yes, sentimentality no.”

“My theories?” She wonders if Petra is angry with her or just wined-up and in the mood to quarrel with anyone. She reminds herself that Petra’s arguments are rarely personal, but her friend’s sentences have sharp points tonight, and her voice is pitched higher than usual.
Theories
is a word they usually reserve for Ben—a shared defense disguised as mild disdain.

“I think we should play the
Black Angels
.” Daniel speaks without looking at any of the others. “If we can’t do something, say something, about what’s going on in the world, then what use are we?”

Petra shrugs. “Either way. There’s always a war somewhere, no? Besides, this isn’t my country. I have the luxury of being an observer.”

Suzanne listens to their arguments but continues watching Adele at play. Adele interacts through objects—handing the other children found leaves and flowers, accepting a bubble-blowing wand. Suzanne wonders if she will always have to give to fit in, and how that giving will change as she grows up. She imagines Adele with the implant, almost hearing, learning to speak but still noticeably different. She wonders whether Adele will be more fully accepted or instead rejected. With the implant, she’ll be neither hearing nor deaf but instead an inhabitant of the one category children will not tolerate: indefinably different. Suzanne is not sure adults accept that kind of difference much better than do children, even as she hopes that children are nicer these days than they used to be, that better parents have made better kids.

Anthony waves for her attention. “Suzanne, what do you think?”

She sips her wine, which tastes too much of its cask. “Here’s my opinion, then. The contribution of art to society is its existence more than its content. It’s not the job of art to comment on current events. It should matter, but it should inspire by existing, by exploring what’s beautiful, what’s timeless.”

“Oh, my god, you sound exactly like Ben.” Petra’s words slur and she blinks frequently, her expression prickly. “I think I’m going to puke.”

Years of experience with her drinking father tell Suzanne that it’s useless to reason with Petra now, but she is tired of one-way niceness, of covering for Petra with Adele, of defending Petra and Ben to each other, of always being the grown-up. “You wanted to know what I think, and that’s what I think. Take the Holocaust, the role of music. What was miraculous wasn’t people writing music about how awful the camps were. What was miraculous was the people in the camps playing Bach, saying,
You can’t take this away from us
, saying,
This is beautiful no matter what
.”

“So no music can ever comment on the world? Just itself? That’s masturbation.” Petra says the word too loudly, and a nearby couple look over their shoulders, the woman shifting them away.

“Let the rock stars protest war,” Suzanne says. “People actually listen to them anyway.”

Petra looks straight at her and pauses before she says, “You’re such an elitist.”

“If you’re mad at Ben, Petra, then argue with him. But, sure, I agree with him on this. We live in a culture that doesn’t value what we do. To meet it halfway is to give up. If holding up the best music ever written as a great human accomplishment makes me an elitist, then I am a snob, a monk in the tower protecting the books from barbarians.”

“You’re self-absorbed, that’s what you are,” Petra says. “When’s the last time you thought about the war or even anybody else?”

Suzanne’s anger expands and then fast shrinks back into the small, dull pain of feeling alone in the world. It’s what you are left with when the person in the world who best knows you dies, something that has now happened to Suzanne twice. Next, she thinks, she’ll lose Petra and then Ben. Being without them would make her even more alone than she is when she is with them.

Anthony’s wife strolls toward their group carrying two small plates and forks. Jennifer wears thin gold jewelry that seems too delicate for her sturdy frame. She holds a law degree that she’s never used, and her family’s money is no longer looked down on as new money—it’s been three generations, and even in Princeton people no longer care very much where money is from so long as it is plentiful and tastefully spent. That the money is spread thinner now is a more serious problem and the reason the quartet is always under pressure to become more reliably profitable.

Though Jennifer dictates to Anthony most of his life, from where he dines to what brand of shirt he wears, in front of the others she waits on him as though she is a well-dressed servant. She hands him a plate holding cake with sliced strawberries and asks if she can bring him coffee. He stands to give her his chair.

Watching the children play, Jennifer explains her child-rearing notions as though they are all gravely interested—as though Daniel and Suzanne are parents and Petra is a by-the-book mother instead of who she is. Jennifer tells them she has plans to market her ideas in the form of a chart she’s designed to track her own children’s behavioral progress and quantify their rewards and punishments.

“It’s like a game for them,” she says. “Each child is a different color of cat, and the chart looks like a board game except it’s vertical and magnetic so you can put it on the refrigerator. Very colorful. Their pieces get sent back spaces for particular offenses—like three spaces for whining—and they also receive surprises along the way, such as a trip to Thomas Sweet for a day without sibling rivalry.”

Suzanne pictures her life on the board, her childhood ambitions punished with poverty, her adultery with pain, her need to fit in with shunning. Her cat would fall backward right off the chart.

Anthony, who may or may not approve of his wife’s meting out of childhood’s pleasures, smiles. “Jennifer’s research suggests there’s a national market for this kind of thing.”

Petra leans over, tipping her low-slung lawn chair to a dangerous angle. “Great,” she breathes into Suzanne’s ear. “Now children in all fifty states can hate her.” She rights herself, pushing off the grass with her hand.

Suzanne smiles, relieved to have her best friend back on her side, if only because they now face a common enemy.

“I don’t understand.” Jennifer points to the rather flat piece of layer cake she’s just taken a bite from. “The recipe was three pages long, describing every test the kitchen made. I followed it exactly. I even beat the eggs and sugar over simmering water until the mixture reached exactly 110 degrees. I have a new thermometer—the good kind.”

“You took your cake’s temperature?” Petra smiles at her.

“It looks delicious,” Suzanne says quickly. “Ben always prefers a moist fallen cake to one that’s cooked too long.”

Daniel nods. “It looks great, Jennifer. I’m going to get a piece later after I finish my wine.”

“The glass or the bottle?” asks Petra.

“That’s not the point.” Jennifer looks at Anthony, then Daniel, searching for support. “That’s not the point. If you follow the rules, you’re supposed to get what you set out for. A recipe is a pact.”

“Like music.” Anthony rubs his wife’s rounded shoulder with his free hand. “You can’t give an audience a pleasant beginning and then hit them with something they don’t understand. Same thing with marriage.”

“I suppose you think life works that way,” Petra says, her words loose but her face clamped. “Follow the rules, advance three spaces, collect your reward. Americans who were popular in high school always think like that.”

Dusk lurks above them and then settles, as though the darkness is not a declining of light but a tangible thing losing altitude. Once lowered, it leaves Suzanne slightly chilled. Adele sits with another child, a girl whose mother, Linda, is a widow.

“She’s beautiful,” Daniel says of the woman, who stands beyond the girls.