An Unfinished Score (8 page)

“What’s normal?” Petra asks, sounding again like Ben.

The doctor smiles—a professional gesture more than a genuine response. “There’s a philosophy department over at Temple.”

“That one boy,” Suzanne says, “he was humming ‘Frère Jacques.’”

“Again, it takes a lot of therapy and follow-through, not just here but in the home and school, to train the children how to interpret the signals their brains are receiving. But yes, some of them can perceive music and even sing well. That’s likely determined by innate talent underlying the deafness.”

Suzanne asks, “Is it really music to them?”

The doctor shrugs. “There’s probably a music theory department at Temple, too.”

Suzanne does not know how to phrase her question more usefully, to explain that it’s a real question and not, like Petra’s, just an expression of stubbornness.

“There’s work being done in Canada that suggests that maybe ten percent of music can be experienced through the skin, even in people who can’t hear at all. The researchers there designed a special chair that allows the deaf to have an experience of music. Not your experience but
an
experience. Add an implant, and yes, I would call it hearing music.”

When they stand to leave, the doctor hands Petra what they have come for: a thick stack of pages containing findings that suggest that Adele, if implanted, could talk on the telephone. That she could—more or less and depending on definition—hear.

“On the other hand, I should warn you. In your home country, in Sweden, where good candidates are implanted early and are not allowed to sign in schools, plenty of kids yank out their earpieces as soon as they get home and use sign language. I’ve read your daughter’s evaluation carefully. She’s just a little older than I’d like, but otherwise she’s as good a candidate as they come. But the cochlear is not a panacea. It’s a big decision.”

“I want her to hear me play violin,” Petra whispers. “Is that selfish? When I found out she was deaf, that’s what I hated the most. All the music I played for her while she was inside me—she didn’t hear any of it.” She is crying now. “I want her to be able to do anything, whatever she wants, to be happy.”

The doctor’s face is still—not unsympathetic but dispassionate. Suzanne recognizes the expression from the doctor who told her that her baby would die inside her, handing her a box of tissue but not laying a hand on her shoulder. Dr. Ormand has heard these things before, and it isn’t her job to make parents feel better.

As they walk back down the hall, Suzanne finds that it now smells exactly like a hospital and quickens her pace.

Ten

Suzanne drops off Petra downtown and steers south, where her Irish father lives stubbornly among Italians despite the fact that the last Italian willing to give him the time of day divorced him with cause two decades ago. She lets herself into his building and then into his third-floor flat.

He sits in the crooked frame of his window, exposing only a fraction of his profile. At this angle, though, his hand is larger than life. And Suzanne cannot forget that it is this hand that her mother saved her from, rousting her from sleep only days before her ninth Christmas, whispering close to her ear, “Quietly, quickly; come, Suzanne.” Her mother’s lips brushed her ear, and her face smelled clean, like mint. After that night, any time Suzanne spent with her father was counted in hours and not in days, and she understood that this was for the best.

Now his hand has stilled and the many serrated edges of his tricky personality have dulled. Years of heavy drinking have bored holes through his intelligence. As his brain’s nerves and synapses seek passage around these empty plugs to form a coherent story of the world, he revises the past and sees in the present mostly conspiracy and threat, whether from a new wrinkle in the tax code or the transport truck that bears toward his fender as he drives thirty miles per hour on the freeway.

She cannot bear to visit more than a few times a year. Ben never offers to come with her—and she never asks him to—so she always comes alone, with food prepared in a foil casserole pan.

Her mother, after they left that night, became a producer of frozen casseroles. She worked long days all week, in an office during the day and in the evening trying to sell houses in a sliding city, in a city whose residents had yet to discover that they wanted, after all, to live in town. So on the weekends her mother cooked for the week, freezing meals in foil pans for Suzanne to thaw and heat on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. As she grew older, Suzanne offered to help, to cook on weeknights. “No,” her mother would say, “your time is for practice.” When her mother died, she left a freezer full of neatly stacked dinners.

Eventually Suzanne ate this posthumous food, not out of nostalgia or tribute but because she was broke and needed to eat. The final meal was an improvised ratatouille stirred with noodles, made from an eggplant gone bitter, so the last taste of her mother was disappointment. Suzanne fell apart crying, wishing she had saved the delicious spinach lasagna or cacciatore for last.

“What are you looking at?” She starts to add the word
Dad
to the end of her question, but the consonant sticks on her tongue, and the question ends with a small thud.

“The garbage men. All they do is stand there and smoke. Company’s owned by the brother of the guy who owns the building. It’s a racket. My rent money goes to them so they can stand around and puff their Marlboros when all I can afford is generic. One of these days I’m going to do something about it.”

Suzanne nods, but her father’s attention stays trained through the window.

“One of these days I’m going to write a letter to someone. Maybe the newspaper, or that television station. Someone ought to investigate this racket. Maybe I’ll get a petition going around the building.”

“I just came to look in on you.” Suzanne crosses the small efficiency unit and puts the lasagna in the half-sized refrigerator. “I have a friend waiting for me, so I can’t stay.”

“I suppose you’ll want me to wash that pan after I eat.”

“No,” she says, and when he looks at her, she musters a smile. She says what she says every time: “It’s the kind of thing you can throw away if you don’t want to keep it.”

“I know you mean well, but that’s the problem with this country. Everyone thinks you can just throw things away. Pans, paper, marriages, babies.”

She feels a twitch in her ribs. “Well, you can wash and keep the pan if you want, and maybe you’ll like what’s in it. I grew the basil—no cellophane bags involved.”

She waits, but her father sees only the workers who have caught his ire.

“I’ll see you next time,” she says. “Take care of yourself.”

Alex often asked her why she would drive to Philadelphia and back when she could have Chinese food or pizza delivered to her father with a phone call. Yet he understood, as much as anyone could, that her relationship to her childhood is more complicated than that.

Her car is parked to the left, past the garbage collectors, but she turns right to circle the block rather than cross her father’s field of vision and earn a role in one of the myriad small conspiracies against him. Though she strides, neck tall and straight, she feels like a teenager disappearing around the corner to sneak a cigarette. Or an adulterous wife walking an extra block, hoping her lover will call her cell phone like he said he would.

Over her the sky is mostly the same concrete gray as the buckling sidewalk, though sun glows through the connective tissue between cirrus clouds, making their edges glint like metal. She can hear from above the sound of knives scraped against a honing stone and is terrified that she doesn’t know whether the sharp sweeping noises come from an upstairs apartment or from the hot-steely sky itself, an auditory announcement of impending cosmic retribution.

An Asian woman trundles three children wearing summer shirts through the narrow door to a vegetable market. She makes brief eye contact with Suzanne but does not smile. Suzanne quickens her steps, anxious to be sealed into her car, its roof between her and the sky, the vent blowing cool air through the dashboard and the radio pushing out any music at all.

Eleven

Pop songs from the 1960s crackle from the car speakers as Suzanne zigzags northeast on mostly one-way streets, toward the restaurant where she’ll meet Petra. She touches the hospital literature that Petra left on the passenger seat. The cover page is a medical illustration of aural anatomy. As always, it looks so much like a seashell that Suzanne is tempted to ascribe pattern not just to the universe but to her own life.

On that first day in Charleston, after Ben’s mother and sister finished their stylized interrogation over cucumber-and-cream-cheese sandwiches and too-sweet iced tea, his brother, Charlie, took her to Folly Beach. Ben declined the invitation, choosing to stay behind to read theory for an upcoming exam.

At the beach Charlie taught Suzanne to ride a wave with her body. Over and over she swam out, the saltwater and sunscreen stinging, her eyes nearly closed. Over and over she stretched herself long, catching wave after wave, at once thrilled by and afraid of the water’s lift and slam. Joyously tired, the way the beach would always leave her, she soaked in sunshine, waiting for Charlie to come in from surfing the farthest break line. She felt his shadow over her before she saw or heard him. When she sat up, he placed two shells in her palm.

“It’s funny, isn’t it? The one that looks like an ear makes no sound.”

He held the other one, a large conch, to the side of her head, and she heard the false sea in one ear and the real ocean with the other. They sat together after that, listening to the waves, the squawking gulls.

After a while, he said, “You sure you want to marry into this family?”

“I want to marry Ben.” Suzanne had never said it aloud before, perhaps had not even thought it. But as she said the words, she heard them as truth.

“Hell, he’s so hot, so do I!” Charlie laughed, but then his face settled into something serious, an expression Suzanne couldn’t read. “Does Ben ever talk about our father?”

Suzanne touched Charlie’s forearm, briefly, and shook her head. “Just a very little. A childhood memory or two. And that he drowned during a storm.”

“Out there somewhere.” Charlie stretched his arm toward the blurred horizon, where the pale sky met the darker ocean. “It’s kind of weird, don’t you think, that my mother keeps a picture of the boat on the mantel? There are other pictures of him, where he’s not standing in front of the boat he died on, but that’s the one we all have to look at.”

“I’m sorry” was all Suzanne could think to say, and she held the conch back to her ear as she studied the translucently thin shell in her palm, noting its imperfections, that it was chipped in two places.

She wedges the car into a tight parallel space on South Street and walks the few blocks to the Afghan restaurant where she will meet Petra, the restaurant where Alex asked her about her two most crucial choices in life: instrument and husband.

The establishment is small and made smaller by dark red decor: walls, carpet, chair cushions, tablecloths all versions of the same hue. Lining the foyer are teapots, samovars, rice pots, long-handled spoons, daggers, an antique machete—objects of cooking and objects of war—together with framed reviews as well as articles about how violence in Afghanistan goes on and on. Last time she was here, Suzanne asked Alex if it was wise of the place to associate death with its cuisine. “It’s fine,” he said, “because people want to be told what they already think. If the restaurant displayed pages of Afghan poetry or pictures of Afghan children watching television, people wouldn’t come back. Food and blood aren’t a problem. They’re what people expect.”

It is late for lunch but early for dinner, and Suzanne has the place to herself while she waits. She points to a table near the window, and the old man who seats her and will probably also cook her food leaves her with a menu that she does not study. She plans to order the precise meal she ordered the last time she was here. She cannot remember what Alex ordered, which feels like a crushing loss. If she can’t remember every detail, perhaps it is less painful to remember nothing.

What she does remember is their conversation, nearly perfectly. The place was more than half full that day, mostly with a workday lunch crowd, including someone celebrating a birthday at a table of six. Someone hummed the birthday song and, in a spontaneous coming together, everyone in the restaurant sang. This struck her as funny, and she laughed until she contracted the giggles.

While she stifled her laughter, Alex asked her, cold, “Why did you marry your husband?”

She felt her mirth drain and somberness cross her, shadowlike. She thought about his question—how she might answer it—for what felt like too long.

“There were several reasons,” she told him finally, “including how serious he was about music. Really committed and really talented. I thought we would have this life of music, even that we would be at the center of something, though I guess there hasn’t been anything to be the center of for a long time. Not like eighteenth-century Vienna, nineteenth-century Paris.” She paused before striking a more embarrassing truth. “I also thought he would take care of me. He was confident and from a stable family with some money. Old Charleston. And he seemed like he was going somewhere, that he could make me safe and take care of our children. You know how I grew up.”

Alex nodded, simple understanding.

The other reasons, which were even less tangible, she kept to herself, not so much to protect Alex’s feelings but because she had no words that wouldn’t get them wrong.

Alex sipped tea, then looked into the bottom of his cup. “I married my wife for a similar reason. She was competent and elegant. She knows how to organize the bills and cancel a magazine subscription and make sure the car gets properly serviced and the gutter cleaners are called the month they’re supposed to be called. She knows how to dress for a morning meeting versus a cocktail party. She knows how the world works and how you’re supposed to live in it—the things I didn’t know. When you have a childhood like ours, normalcy is irresistible, no?”

Suzanne nodded. “You want things to work like they’re supposed to.”

“You want the house to be warm in winter and things to start when you turn them on and turkey to be roasting in the oven on holidays.” He turned his eyes but not his head sideways before continuing in a voice carrying traces of the accent that he had all but eradicated but that returned when he talked about his childhood. “When I was a kid, what I wanted maybe as much as anything else was automatic sprinklers like I saw in the middle-class neighborhoods. I thought those people were rich and that they knew how to do things. Our yard was a patch of dirt with a little strip of dead grass. My wife knows how to open up the yellow pages and find a land-scaper. She knows how to
program
the automatic sprinklers. She buys flowers from the nursery and makes the front of the house look nice all the time. She has made my work possible, by and large, and she knows how to put herself together for a fund-raiser and how to talk to those people I can’t stand, how to ask them for money.”

Suzanne swallowed her jealousy not just of his wife but of him. “Then why are we here now?”

“Great sex or a nice lawn? Grass isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” He squeezed her hand over the table. “Seriously, automatic sprinklers is a pathetic goal, the bent dream of a poor kid. Anyway, I’d argue that our spouses didn’t fully deliver on their end of the bargain, though probably yours more than mine. But that’s not my reason, and I don’t think it’s why you’re here, either.”

His directness made Suzanne nervous. It was the sort of conversation that could be irrevocable, that could change her life if she wasn’t careful. And still she felt gnawing envy of Alex’s wife, of his success, of his entire life. Around them the good cheer from the shared birthday song lingered, and people’s words bounced, jovial. She set down her fork and waited for Alex to finish his answer, worried that he would describe their relationship as a symptom of mental illness or an act of self-destruction. “Why are we here?” she asked, her question almost a whisper.

“Because we fell in love,” he said, holding her forearm now, rubbing the inner crook of her elbow hard with his thumb. “We’re here because we fell in love.”

He asked her about her life’s other defining choice—why she had chosen the viola—and she told him the story of Charlene Ling.

“My mother put a violin under my chin when I was eight.”

“Two years too late,” Alex interrupted.

“An unrecoverable edge,” she continued. “But I had talent and a good teacher and I might have kept going with it, except I had the misfortune to attend middle school with Charlene Ling.”

“Arguably the best violinist in the country after Felder. But that’s good fortune that you switched. You were made for the viola.”

“Aside from all the jokes.” Suzanne smiled. “If you happen to play in the school orchestra with someone on her way to being the world’s best, you don’t think, ‘I’ll be second best in the world.’ You think there’s a Charlene Ling in every school in every city in every country and that the world doesn’t have enough orchestras for you to have a chair anywhere.”

She did not add that the greatest anxiety of many female musicians is not stage fright but the creeping fear that they will wind up spinster music teachers surrounded by instrument-wielding children who aren’t theirs and a pack of mewing cats who are.

“But you didn’t give up music.”

She shook her head. That had never been an option for her, not ever. “Switched to a less competitive instrument, at least at my school, and got to be first viola instead of second fiddle.”

Alex lifted his chin to acknowledge her small pun, but he let her continue talking.

“I figured I’d be visible, marry a visiting conductor, and travel the world happily ever after with my famous husband.”

“The cult of the conductor. Everyone wants us.” He paused from his food, spread his hands, grinned. “And now you have me.”

Suzanne shrugged, thinking still of his wife, the woman who knew how to dress, how to get things done, how to raise money. “I do and I don’t. Anyway, I was twelve then, prone to romantic fantasy.”

“And so then what happened?”

“I fell in love with the viola.”

Suzanne hears the door push open, a jangle of bells.

“Sorry I’m late,” Petra says, sitting down, grabbing the menu. “I’m starving.”

With sudden clarity that constricts her lungs, Suzanne remembers what Alex ordered that day: tomato-lentil soup and a rice dish with dried fruit and nuts. This is what she asks for when the old man comes to take their order.

Petra orders her meal and bread for the table. “Do you have a wine list?”

“Sorry, no liquor license,” he says, retreating with their menus. “I’ll bring you tea.”

“Is that why you picked this place?” Petra asks, joking but her voice stretched just a little tight.

“I’ll buy you a bottle on the way home if you’ll indulge a side trip.”

Suzanne tries to feel Alex in the smell of the steam rising from the raisin-studded rice, in the tanginess of the soup, in the texture of the soft, warm bread she tears with her fingers. She wishes she had asked that day, when she could have asked him, what he meant about his wife not holding up her end of the bargain. She wishes she had asked to see a picture so that now she could match a face to the voice she has heard through her phone. She wonders if Olivia simply wants to torment her or if there’s more, and she wonders how far she’ll go.
A woman who knows how to get things done
.

“It’s time to swallow, honey.”

Suzanne looks up. “What?”

“You’ve chewed that bite like sixty times,” Petra says. “Tell me it’s not a diet. You’re getting way too skinny.”

Suzanne shakes her head. “I’m not trying to lose weight.”