Читать книгу An Unfinished Score - Elise Blackwell - Страница 9

There is no black on the right side of her closet, the side of her days. The clothes there are gray, white, blue, green, and tan. On hangers are a purple blouse, a red tee-shirt, and a pair of maroon pants—a gift from Petra she has worn only once.

The left side of her closet is monotonous night: solid black, the attire of performance. Like a widow in eternal mourning, Suzanne has pairs of black trousers, black skirts, black jackets, and black shirts. She has a black sweater, long- and short-sleeved black dresses, the formal black dresses of the soloist and plain orchestra dresses, black dresses designed to be seen from the opera boxes and those seen to best advantage from the floor. They seem extravagant in quantity, but each piece has been with her for years, worn many times, a fact once mentioned—a gratuitous cruelty—in a Charleston weekly whose music reviews were penned by a wealthy man’s wife who fancied herself a critic and likely had no idea what she cost Suzanne, a young woman born poor, pressed to pass among those who assume that people who wear the same outfit twice in a season lack self-respect.

Though Suzanne never wears black offstage, not since she was twenty, today only the left side of her closet feels possible. She finds black pants that are not too dressy and a black silk tee usually worn under a shimmering sweater at a winter concert. She knows Petra will ask her what the hell is going on, but she cannot help herself. She tries to dress the clothes down with boots, with dangling silver earrings, with a face scrubbed clean.

When the phone rings, she answers it. A woman’s voice says her name, more statement than question.

Suzanne repeats her own name. “Yes, this is Suzanne.”

“Suzanne, you owe me a great deal.” This is said so softly that Suzanne can hardly hear it. The woman hangs up, or maybe they are disconnected. Suzanne stands with the phone in her trembling hand, mouth growing dry until she breaks the frozen moment.

She knows a phone call can change your life. It was a ringing phone that brought her into the quartet. When Petra called with the invitation, Suzanne had been mulling over the possibility of resigning her seat in St. Louis and moving to a place where Ben would be happier and perhaps have more opportunity. Without first identifying herself, Petra greeted Suzanne, as usual, with a viola joke: “How do I keep my violin from being stolen?”

Suzanne delivered the tired punch line for her: “Put it in a viola case.”

“But this time, I actually need a viola,” Petra said. “I told them we’d probably have to get someone else now that you’re rich and famous, but I have to ask.” She told Suzanne that Anthony, a classmate from Curtis, was starting a quartet in Princeton, that he’d married a woman with family money willing to float the ensemble for two years, that he had a serious business plan, that their friend Daniel had already committed. “Not that you’d be interested, not with your job, but there’s no one Daniel and I would rather have. Anthony’s still such an asshole, but we’d have him outnumbered. Plus there’d be more stuff for Ben to do—an hour from New York and Philadelphia.”

“That already crossed my mind,” Suzanne answered.

“Your dad still lives in Philly, right?” Petra paused. “Or maybe I shouldn’t have reminded you of that.”

“It’s okay,” Suzanne said and asked if Petra thought working with Daniel would be all right, given his propensity to fall in love with whomever he played with.

“Suz?” Petra paused again—a long silence. “I really need you. With Adele. I’m failing as a single mother. There are problems. I need help.”

For four days, Suzanne kept Petra’s call to herself, knowing Ben would make the decision if she told him while she was still undecided. If it wasn’t her decision, she might hate him forever. So she decided on her own, and then she told him. She resigned her chair, with apologies, helping to arrange the auditions for the lucky player who would replace her, trying not to care who it was. She, Ben, and Petra emptied their penny jars and made an offer on the cheapest house for sale in Princeton. By the time Alex conducted her in Harold in Italy, it was too late to stop, and Suzanne’s life changed again.

Anthony did indeed have money, and he had a solid plan. Suzanne, Petra, and Daniel committed to stay with the quartet for at least two years and to accept no other work that would interfere with the quartet’s schedule—no playing in other ensembles, no session work in season, no solo performances without an okay. The contract each signed was so fastidiously crafted as to include practice schedules. In exchange, each would receive a modest but reliable salary. At the end of two years, the salaries would stop. If the quartet was not yet solvent through a combination of grant money, donations, CD sales, and performance income, it would dissolve. “It’s a business,” Anthony said when they gathered to sign the papers in the presence of his wife’s family lawyer.

“It’s a job,” said Daniel.

Anthony watched him. “No drinking before practice or performance. I put it in the contract, so make sure you read what you’re signing.”

Petra put a long arm around Suzanne’s shoulders. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “It’s music, too.”

At the end of two years, the quartet was solvent, if barely, and after four, its members’ earnings are just about what they were when they received salaries—sometimes a little more.

Now Suzanne risks arriving late, and they all promised never to be late. She walks fast to stop her shaking, but she thinks about the voice coming through the receiver, the voice entering her ear without permission: Suzanne, you owe me a great deal.

The practice room of the Princeton Quartet is almost subterranean, its only natural light coming from the long horizontal windows just below the ceiling, the rectangles that show only the moving shoes of passing students, often shoes of a kind and quality that Suzanne still never splurges on and could never have owned while in school. When she notes this, she recognizes the old bitterness of want and reminds herself that she does not have to work in an office or, like her mother, try to sell starter homes on the side in an effort to make something better. Suzanne plies her art for a living. She is a musician, which is what she has always wanted to be.

She drops the last step both feet at once and stands in the open doorway. Petra faces a far corner, jumping up and down with her hands in the air, still getting her jangles out. Daniel hunches his six feet three inches over his cello, his glossy head sagging. To someone who doesn’t know him, he might look relaxed, but Suzanne knows before she looks that his right hand is tense with his bow, his pinky finger rigid. He looks up at her, his face softening as though he is seeing her for the first time after a long absence. Suzanne worries that the crush that has wavered from her to Petra to her to Petra to her and most recently back to Petra is about to alternate again.

Though they joke about it, it really isn’t funny, and Suzanne feels too tired for it, for the delicacy and compassion it requires of her. Yet sometimes she wishes that she had fallen in love with Daniel, who lets his passion guide his choices and who lucked into the best halves of his Manchurian father and Canadian mother. He’s dark and tall, made sensual by large eyes and curving lips. With Daniel, she never feels as though she has said the wrong thing and is being judged for it. With Daniel, she almost always knows what he’s thinking and how he’s feeling. With Daniel, she never feels as though she is alone in the room and he is far away.

Suzanne is staring at him when Petra, without looking around from the corner she faces, asks why the viola players were found standing outside the party. She spins around to deliver the punch line before Suzanne can. Instead she freezes and says, “You’re wearing black. What the hell is going on?”

Daniel meets Suzanne’s eyes. “You look beautiful in black.”

“We’re almost late,” Anthony says, closing the door. “Two minutes.”

Handsome but effete, with a flourish of freckles high on his cheeks and forehead, Anthony is, as ever, well-dressed above the ugly tasseled loafers he was partial to even as a student. His pants hike as he sits, exposing two inches of extravagantly thin sock—an effect Suzanne suspects is planned.

Suzanne takes her seat. Now there is nothing but the familiar smell of wood and rosin, the sound of string being slackened and tightened, the asymmetrical weight of the bow in her right hand, the familiar plate of the chin rest, still cool under her jaw.

Playing chamber music involves an intimacy between people that is no weaker than the closeness of love or sex. To play with others is to be bound by and respond to their rhythms and desires without sacrificing your own. Like sex, great music can be made with someone you know well or not at all—and with someone you loathe so long as there is passion in your hatred. Yet, unlike sex, great music can be made even with someone you merely dislike. This explains why Petra, Daniel, and Suzanne play well with Anthony, even when they find his arrangements too facile. There is some other, unnamable sensibility they share.

Having married a domineering woman from a rich family whose wealth has been diluted but not drained by generational expansion, Anthony thinks always of the books and of appearances. He is a man who subtracts tax and wine before figuring a tip, who divides a four-way bill not into quarters but by calculating the exact cost of each person’s meal. The sole time Suzanne saw him pick up a whole check—at a luncheon with his father-in-law and a potential donor—he figured the tip in odd cents to make the total charge an even number, leaving the poor server to count out from the till her too-few dollars and sixty-seven cents. “Makes the ledger much cleaner,” he announced as he produced the loops of his elaborate signature.

“Cherubini,” Petra whispered, not softly, making Suzanne smile though she tried not to.

Maria Luigi Cherubini. As directeur du conservatoire he was dictatorial, demanding separate entrances for men and women and once chasing Berlioz around the library tables for using the wrong one. Cherubini. Timid in his harmonies, known to history as a textbook composer of white-key music of no great significance, now a man seen but not heard: the Louvre’s millions of visitors see his face, as painted by Ingres, but few hear his music. Yet in his day he was considered by Beethoven to be one of the immortals. He was admired by musicians for his technique and was financially successful during a time when the Parisian scene was all about money.

Cherubini. A way for the quartet to think about Anthony, who plays his violin with a rare and sturdy clarity and is capable of originality of interpretation—particularly of Debussy—that baffles those who know him away from his instrument. His tastes, when he steps away from questions of money, when he considers the Princeton quartet’s critical as well as monetary success, are fine if a bit cold. His choices for the quartet have been mostly wise, including bringing in Andres Flanders to perform Bocherinni’s fifth guitar quintet as part of last year’s February program. He’s also made a name as a reviewer, his exertions toward fairness giving decency to his fastidious judgments. Ben should hate him, yet does not, which Suzanne supposes suggests something good about them both. And because Anthony functions by reason and not by feeling, he is easy enough to work with. He holds no grudges. Suzanne arrives on time, works hard, and knows what to expect.

Too often, though, Anthony stays near safe musical shores. The quartet plays Beethoven and Bach, of course, and sometimes Brahms or Ravel. Never Janáček and never the Shostakovich string music that Suzanne loves. Anthony is cautious about including contemporary composers, keeping them occasional and unassailable. All too often the quartet’s programs include some piece of pretty-headed, many-noted brunch music by Haydn or Telemann—music written at the behest of someone who could pay for it. Suzanne fears that one day the quartet will wind up playing “Happy Birthday” for some snarling old woman or unctuous child before she realizes what is happening in time to stop it.

“At least you play for a living,” Ben said when Suzanne complained about a Vivaldi quartet, a piece of music she knew Ben despised. So many times at Curtis she had heard him say, “Vivaldi is the enemy of music’s future—and its past.”

Alex always called Vivaldi supermarket cake frosting—pretty if you don’t know better, unpalatable if you’ve eaten freshly whipped cream on real pastry. Like Suzanne, he loved Fauré, that undervalued treasure, the musician’s composer. Though they broke on new music, she and Alex shared some peculiarities of taste, including an adoration of Janáček, his seemingly reckless juxtapositions, his refusal to comfort with transitions of either melody or silence, his controlled anger, his generosity, his respectful demands on the musicians who would play him, their finger pads be damned. And they shared an unlikely soft spot for Schubert, poor drowned boy who should have been stronger but whose music is so bright it sparkles. Suzanne understands that weakness is a fact of her art but knows it is not true that Schubert and the great composers wrote out of their insanity and indulgence. They wrote around it, despite it, as best as they could in the midst of it.

Today the quartet works on a piece surprising from Anthony: Bartók’s sonorous but disturbing final quartet, written while the composer was changing publishers after refusing to answer a Nazi-authored questionnaire about his race. He was contemplating the larger decision of changing countries, though he would wait to move until the death of his mother, whom he supported. No doubt Anthony—who might well have filled out that paperwork to protect his position—chose the Bartók as a show-off piece. He hopes they will impress the audience with their glissandos, with the ponticello and con legno bowings, with the acrobatic stoppings and the notorious Bartók pizzicato. They will play the piece first, to a still fresh audience, or perhaps sandwich it between intermission and some problem-free piece that will let the people leave happy.

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.