Part 7 (2/2)
She reaches for the CD case on the floor under Petra's legs.
Petra grabs the case and flips through it. ”What do you want?”
Suzanne considers the question, then says, ”Anything by Verdi.”
Though she does not love the melodramatic libretti he grew to rely on, she loves Verdi for saying that he would accept the public's criticisms and jeers only if he never had to be grateful for their applause. This he said after the flop of the comic opera he wrote the year both of his children and then his wife died.
Suzanne bites the corner tip of her tongue, wincing but not releasing it. She tries not to ask herself if Alex would be alive if he'd given the people what they wanted.
”Dear heart,” Petra whispers, crooking her neck to see in the sideview mirror. ”Memory lane is great and all, but I don't think we should be hanging out in this neighborhood.”
”Forget the Verdi. Play the Kinderszenen Kinderszenen. Did I tell you I heard Matsuev play it in Paris? One of the most beautiful things I have ever heard. He played it first, and I almost wanted to leave before the Chopin.”
”You and your Schumann.” Petra laughs.
”He played four four encores that night. I doubt I'll ever see that again.” encores that night. I doubt I'll ever see that again.”
They make good time to Princeton, where they pick up Adele, groceries, and wine, in that order.
The phone is ringing as they enter the house. Suzanne feels a chill of brief panic but forces herself to answer.
”I thought I'd get the machine,” says Ben.
Suzanne starts to ask him why he didn't call her cell, but she stops because she does not want to hear the answer: he doesn't actually want to talk to her. It's how he always is in Charleston. She wants to tell him not to bother calling, but that's not the kind of thing married people can say to each other.
Perhaps it is only because Petra mentioned Schumann when Suzanne and Ben met, but the a.s.sociation has stayed firm in Suzanne's mind. She wonders now, even, if she married him because of it, at least a little. In those Curtis days, when she thought of Robert and Clara Schumann, it was not the later marriage, when he was inst.i.tutionalized and being driven mad by a constant A in his ear-an inescapable thrumming note he swore was real-and his virtuoso wife left her children with relatives to support the dest.i.tute family by touring. And she did not think much about the mature Clara Schumann, outliving first her husband's sanity and then, by another forty years, his death. Rather she imagined the young, happily married Schumanns triumphing over the obstructions of Clara's father, writing scores, using their newspaper to decry the cheap and commercial while championing the innovations of Chopin and shoring up the reputation of Bach, opening their home and their piano to the likes of Johannes Brahms. Suzanne pictured a busy home, filled with children and visitors and new music. She pictured people at the center of the musical world of their day-contributing, shaping, weighing in. They mattered to music, and music mattered to them.
Of course Ben is not like Robert Schumann at any age, though they hold in common three traits: a disrespect for received notions of form, the choice of the cello's voice to soothe anxiety, and the decision to eschew performance for composition. The story goes that Schumann ruined a hand with a home-rigged metal device he crafted to shorten the time it would take to develop finger independence. It's a tale often repeated by piano teachers to ill.u.s.trate the truth that shortcuts don't work, that music accommodates no cheating.
Yet Suzanne has always suspected the story is a half truth, an excuse auth.o.r.ed by Schumann himself, or perhaps by history, to explain his choices. It was well and fine for Clara to play for the public, but Schumann would rather spend those hours composing new music or writing about it.
Suzanne wonders how they did it all. They were, after all, parents of eight children, five of whom survived childhood. It's always mentioned that way in the history books: five surviving children. Maybe the thinking is that parents in the eighteenth century expected several of their children to die, but can it really be that they didn't suffer as much? Suzanne has imagined the Schumann household in the days following the death of a child and wondered if music was played and, if so, which pieces and by whom. After she lost the baby, she couldn't play for six weeks, and she and Ben barely spoke to each other for much longer.
”How's your mother?” she asks him now.
”The same, okay, and my sister. They said h.e.l.lo.”
Petra takes the bag of groceries from Suzanne and drops a stack of mail on the cypress buffet in front of her.
”How's Charlie?”
There's a static-filled pause, as though Ben is calling from across the world.
”I don't know. I guess he's okay. He hurt his knee and couldn't surf for a while, which my mother of course sees as providence.”
Suzanne musters a laugh, which is followed by another long pause. It grows longer, and Suzanne flips through the mail, determined not to speak first, not to carry the conversation that Ben initiated by calling. She sorts junk mail from the bills, which she stacks neatly, then pauses at a manila envelope with no return address and an Illinois postmark.
”I just called to say h.e.l.lo,” Ben says.
”Okay, thanks for that. I'll see you soon, yeah? Or are you staying?”
”I think I'll head back early next week, probably drive straight through.”
”Stay longer if you want.” She pulls at the envelope with her teeth, tearing it unevenly open in her hurry.
”I promised Kazuo I'd be back by weekend after this, so maybe I'll stay on into next week, if you're sure.”
”All under control here,” Suzanne says flatly.
They say good-bye, and Suzanne extracts the contents of the envelope with a shake and a pull: a music score. It looks like any other computer-generated score except that it is smaller in size than most, with more lines to the page, and so rather elegant, its glossy black notes close together. There are a few penciled notes and instructions, written in two hands-one unknown to Suzanne and the other unmistakably Alex's.
The page is trembling when Petra startles her from behind, her breath in her ear. ”What do you have there?”
”I think I'm holding the score to a viola concerto,” she says because there is no other answer. ”I've never seen it before.”
Petra plucks the sheet from her hand and takes it to the piano. Standing in the kitchen with her eyes closed, Suzanne hears Petra play the agitated opening theme.
In the four weeks since Alex's death, Suzanne has survived minute to minute, breath by breath, muting herself, fleeing to the past as often and as fully as she can, hiding in the shallowest present she can make, as numb as she can will herself to be.
Now, on the one-month anniversary of the plane crash that killed her lover, as she listens to Petra play the horribly beautiful music, feeling returns to Suzanne like the excruciating tingle of blood circulating in a limb that has fallen asleep. Pain Pain.
II. Agitato
Thirteen.
She must have watched Suzanne come up the walk, because Olivia opens the door even as she knocks. Usually Alex called her my wife my wife, or simply, with the power of an incantation, she she. As in: She just pulled up; I have to go She just pulled up; I have to go. Or: I can't get out tonight to call; I think she is suspicious I can't get out tonight to call; I think she is suspicious. Or, some days: She is making me angry enough to leave her; do you think the quartet would consider relocating? She is making me angry enough to leave her; do you think the quartet would consider relocating?
Still, Olivia's is a name Suzanne has heard often enough, and yet she is unprepared for the woman. She is unprepared for the elegant lines of her face or the way her straight posture, combined with her height, makes her regal. A Greek rendering of a G.o.ddess, an Athena, stepping past middle age with grace. Her hair is not graying or salt-and-pepper-the words Alex casually tossed-but gloriously silver and black, sleek, coiled into a smooth chignon at the nape of her long neck. Alex did not warn Suzanne that Olivia's dark eyes are so large they relegate her other features and drain her face of specific age. Before her now, Olivia dwarfs Suzanne in inches, in poise, and, Suzanne fears, every measure that matters.
Suzanne feels like something flimsy and easily crumpled. Toss her in a can, or just light a match nearby.
She finds her voice. ”Olivia,” she says, because ”Mrs. Elling” seems even more preposterous.
Olivia wears her smile evenly, and someone else might take it for warm. Her handshake is cool yet full with touch and generous with energy as she says, ”Ours is a peculiar meeting, no?”
Suzanne only nods. Under Olivia's aggressive composure she feels frizzy and unkempt, lacking in grace, sour smelling from the too-warm airplane. Her once smart travel dress has lost its form through many was.h.i.+ngs and now hangs loose, a frumpy sheath that makes Suzanne look thick-waisted though she is not. Olivia wears gray trousers and a pale green blouse, both crisp and wrinkle free. As if to prove her unworthiness, Suzanne says, ”You are not what I expected.”
”It's funny that you should say so, because you are precisely what I expected.” Olivia pulls the door open wider, stepping back for Suzanne to pa.s.s.
As Suzanne penetrates the Elling residence, she recognizes objects often described to her, but the house is much larger than she antic.i.p.ated, larger than the house she pictured when Alex told her that he loved his little place with its peek at the lake, that his little house was all he needed until she was all he needed.
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