Читать книгу An Unfinished Score - Elise Blackwell - Страница 10

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.”

Suzanne holds the viola to her chin, the bow to the strings, and opens Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Second Sonata for Solo Violin. A test for Doug, who listens with head cocked. When she finishes she tells him what a beautiful thing he has let her play.

“You know the story, right?” he asks. “About Jascha Heifetz? Someone walked up to him and said, ‘What a beautiful violin you have.’ He held it to his ear and said, ‘I don’t hear anything.’”

“Sometimes it is the player, but the instrument sure helps. I’d never let anyone but you near my viola with a mallet, that’s for certain.” Suzanne tucks her hair behind her ear, bow still in hand. “But you’re stalling. Tell me about the composer.”

“Let’s see. A deep sadness tempered by innate buoyancy, though some of the sadness was coming from you, I think. So hard to subtract out the performer.” He pauses to make eye contact before continuing. “A man—definitely a man, which makes it easier of course. A man with a deep desire for repair. A taste for the programmatic, possibly because of his time but also maybe because he likes stories or comes from a storytelling culture. Or he uses stories to make sense of his life. A Jew? Definitely listened to Shostakovich, maybe even in person.”

“Bingo,” Suzanne says. “Family members killed in pogroms and then most of the rest in the Holocaust. Emigrated to Russia, proved remarkably resilient, found some happiness in life and marriage, and mostly avoided trouble for a while.”

“And Shostakovich?”

“Loved Shostakovich, who later tried to get him out of jail, but what saved Weinberg was Stalin’s death. He was out in a month. You already knew that stuff, right? You recognized the piece?”

Doug is already reaching for the Stainer. “Nope. You know me, I don’t know my music history hardly at all. I’m just a technician.”

“No just about that, but, Doug, you’re all theory these days anyway. Seriously, did you really glean all that from the music itself?”

“It’s as good a way as any. I’m not always right, of course, and the women composers are much harder, more complicated, but I’m getting better and better. I think I’m going to write a book on it.”

“Just don’t start writing letters to the editor.” Suzanne smiles. “Anyway, it’s a game composers would hate, don’t you think?”

“Not to mention music critics.”

It feels good to be talking to someone she knows but not too well, to share some banter, to be thinking about something other than her own life. Yet she cannot help herself and says, “Up for one more?”

He hands the viola back to her, and she plays a stretch of the music she continues to think of as Subliminal, mimicking its thrust as best she can with a single instrument. The viola is suited to the task. She understands now how Lola Viola can sound like an entire ensemble all by herself, which, combined with her beauty, is the secret to her enormous commercial success—a rarity in their line of work.

“Wow.” Doug stares when she finishes. “Feels like a trick question, but okay. I’ll try. Contemporary, obviously. Innovative but with a strange conservatism. A streak of traditionalism, but not reactionary.”

“You’re describing the music itself.”

“I’m working my way to the composer through the music. Very well-trained, especially in composition theory. Fair-minded but incredibly stubborn and sometimes blinded by it. Emotionally restrained—incredibly so—but not without some emotion. The emotion is there but suppressed, consciously maybe, but not uniformly. Someone who uses intellect to translate emotion because the emotion frightens him. I’m guessing a comfortable childhood but with a tragedy of some kind. A deep point of pain.”

“Disappointment?”

Doug shakes his head. “Someone not unhappy with how his life has turned out, though maybe only because he didn’t expect more.” He shakes his head. “It’s not that simple. The music pulls in more than one direction, even more than usual. I’m starting to think the composer is a woman, which throws everything off.”

“You’re a sexist, Doug.”

“I guess, if you mean that I think men and women are different, and that women are more nuanced and complex.” He combs his hair with his fingers, slightly clumsily, as though he has a new haircut and his fingers expect longer hair. “I’m stumped, I guess. Dedicated is the best I can come up with, yet also detached. An oxymoron, I guess. I’m sorry.” He looks as though he really is.

“No, I’m sorry,” Suzanne says. “It was a trick question. It’s a collaboration: not a woman but two men.”

Doug laughs in his deep bass. “I’m relieved. I was about to toss my book proposal in the trash.”

Suzanne turns to case her bow and sees Adele, her teary line of sight following the beautifully carved Stainer across the room as Doug leaves with it. Suzanne cups Adele’s face, presses her palm into the soft skin of her cheek, reassured by its softness and warmth.

Adele speaks, forcing out the awkward syllables, something she almost never does when her hands are free. “I want to hear you play. I want to hear my mom play. I want to hear Ben.”

Now they are both nodding, Suzanne whispering, “I know, I know.”

Doug returns and takes the check Suzanne signs for him. He shakes her hand, then bows low to Adele, pops up, smiles. “What’s this?” he mouths soundlessly as he reaches behind Adele’s ear and produces a quarter, which he places in her palm.