An Unfinished Score Part 4

But for Petra, arguments can be sport, and she and Anthony push back and forth the idea of performing the Black Angels Quartet Black Angels Quartet.

"I think it's a perfect time to play an antiwar piece. Don't you agree, Suzanne?" Petra spins her gaze, glances at Suzanne.

Suzanne once played the piece, subt.i.tled Written in a Time of War Written in a Time of War, in a course in which the professor was trying to teach his students about gesture, both physical and musical. She shrugs under her viola as she places her fingers on the strings, trying to steady herself as she warms up. Her right wrist feels weak, her biceps tired. There is a sharp pinch just inside her left shoulder blade.

"You don't have many opinions of late," Anthony says. "Funny thing is that I'm not sure it's such a bad idea. I'd like to feel some people out."

"Poll our electorate?" Petra asks. "See whether it would gain us more donors and audience members than it would cost us?"

Anthony takes no offense at Petra's words. "It's Princeton," he says, "so it's hard to say how it would play-I'm talking aesthetically more than politically."

Forcing herself to partic.i.p.ate, Suzanne enters the conversation. "If we were to perform Black Angels Black Angels, would we present it as a museum piece or translate it? I mean, the directions say amplify as much possible. Back then Crumb didn't have any idea what that would mean today. We'd blow out the back of the room."

"The huge score," Daniel says as he enters, "is reason enough for me to sign on. I like big pieces of paper."

"The physical size of the score could could be a conversation piece for our," Anthony pauses as he searches for the word, "for our base." be a conversation piece for our," Anthony pauses as he searches for the word, "for our base."

"Well," Petra says, taking her seat, "you smell which way the money's blowing and let us know."

Today they practice Suzanne's favorite of their standards: The Art of Fugue The Art of Fugue. The clean counterpoint lifts her from her life, from s.p.a.ce and time, from bad news large and small, from her anxiety, into an airy world of notes. They know the piece well, so despite its challenges, they play through and the hour feels more like performance than practice. They perform for themselves. They leave the piece as Bach left it: unfinished after the letters of his musical signature. Only Bach could take such a corny idea as weaving the letters of his name into his music and have it sound perfectly elegant.

The abrupt ending hangs above them, not menacing but haunting, not a guillotine but a ghost, and they know not to ruin the moment with speech. They pack their instruments quietly, nodding good-bye, silently sharing a rare secret performance. This love of playing is what holds them together across their differences of taste and personality. Even Anthony is in it for the music today.

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 a.s.sumed that what Petra suggested would happen, that Ben would fall for Petra for a week or forever. She a.s.sumed 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 mola.s.ses accent was viola viola, and she nodded that, yes, she played the viola.

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

"Cla.s.sical 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 a.s.sumes it is Elizabeth, who always forgets something she meant to say and then phones back a minute later when she remembers.

Ben answers and pa.s.ses the phone with a shrug. "Not Elizabeth."

Suzanne's pulse skips as she says h.e.l.lo, 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 p.i.s.ses 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? 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, pus.h.i.+ng away the person who would say those things aloud, the person she doesn't want to be. She closes her eyes, pus.h.i.+ng 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-a.s.sed hearing one.

She asks herself whether she'll respond out loud: You think of her as a theory and not as a person You think of her as a theory and not as a person. Or: Petra is the parent 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 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 p.r.o.nounced by a native, even by Ben-the first one drawled and the second clipped. For her it is a word that says, is a word Suzanne avoids saying, a name that makes her wince when it is spoken by someone else, particularly if the syllables are p.r.o.nounced 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 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 gra.s.s 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 bis.e.xual 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 I long, the color on her cheeks artificial. And she said long, the color on her cheeks artificial. And she said Realtor 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 c.o.c.ktail parties but the kind who sc.r.a.pe 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?" with a tone that made clear she already knew that Suzanne's mother wasn't the successful model that the affluent tolerate at their c.o.c.ktail parties but the kind who sc.r.a.pe 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, c.o.c.king her head, her tone pleasant. Suzanne nodded, though everyone in the room knew the words closest to the truth were unemployment unemployment and and disability payments 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 pa.s.sed 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 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-cla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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.