Part 8 (1/2)

I am sitting in the red chair, he would say. The plate gla.s.s is old, and so the gazebo in the yard looks like it is melting in the sun. Trace the lines of your right hand and describe them to me The plate gla.s.s is old, and so the gazebo in the yard looks like it is melting in the sun. Trace the lines of your right hand and describe them to me.

Or: I am sitting in the red chair, leaning back. Lie on your bed and tell me what you are wearing. Is your pillow soft or hard? Are you on your stomach or your back? Turn onto your stomach I am sitting in the red chair, leaning back. Lie on your bed and tell me what you are wearing. Is your pillow soft or hard? Are you on your stomach or your back? Turn onto your stomach.

Or: I am sitting in the red chair. Take out your viola and play for me. Be sure to put the phone close so I can hear. Brahms today. I want to hear you play Brahms I am sitting in the red chair. Take out your viola and play for me. Be sure to put the phone close so I can hear. Brahms today. I want to hear you play Brahms.

Olivia offers her the red chair, and Suzanne perches on it. The old plate-gla.s.s window looks wavy, and when the sun emerges from a pa.s.sing cloud the gazebo in the yard looks as though it is melting. But Alex misled her about the house: it is not small. It is bigger than anywhere Suzanne has ever lived.

As Suzanne scans the living room, she notes that if Olivia failed to keep some part of the marital bargain, it is in an unseen way. The house is kept. The room mixes deep red, pale blue, and dark wood, a combination more attractive than Suzanne would have thought. The furnis.h.i.+ngs match in style and in proportion, as though planned and purchased at the same time-something Suzanne has never known outside Ben's mother's home, whose furnis.h.i.+ngs Suzanne finds overly ornate and oppressive, dusty feeling even when clean. The room she sits in now is airy and uncluttered, but the chairs and sofa are substantial within their clean lines. The colors are balanced, and the total effect is of composure. It is a very nice room, a place where someone would want to live, even more so if that someone grew up unhappy in a dingy row house in north Philadelphia.

Suzanne lets her weight s.h.i.+ft from her legs and leans back, sinking slightly into the red leather curved by a body larger than her own. She sits on Alex's chair, small within the depression made by his absent form, looking through his window, listening to his wife offer her coffee.

”No, thank you.” She settles further into Alex's depression, trying to feel the shape as his embrace, wondering if she will smell him if she presses her face into the leather. A dirty s.h.i.+rt A dirty s.h.i.+rt, she thinks, or his pillowcase or his pillowcase. She wonders if she might be able to take something with his scent.

”Not taking a cup of my coffee doesn't absolve you for sleeping with my husband,” Olivia says, her voice as cool as if she were talking about something that didn't matter. ”You did that. Maybe he was even going to leave me for you and you were going to let him. You know that, and I know that. You might as well have some coffee if you want some. You look tired.”

Suzanne feels the fatigue as gravity pulling at the corners of her eyes, as a weight in her cheekbones. On the plane-her first flight since Alex's death-she wanted to sleep but was afraid that if she relaxed her mind, she would imagine the crash, feel Alex's last terrible moments of life. And so she read with focus chapters of the autobiography of a man who lost his hearing and was fitted with a cochlear implant. A technophile, the author seemed most interested in how the implant made him a machine, in his need for software updates, in the pat irony that something artificial in the end made him more human. He was someone who grew up able to hear, who was restored rather than reinvented.

Suzanne read the description of the operation twice-how the surgeon bores through the base of the skull with a diamond-studded drill bit, how the nurse pours distilled water over the implant to protect it from static electricity, how the cut bone is reconnected with metal sutures. When she pictured not the man writing his story but instead the delicate place behind Adele's small ear, she decided not to give the book to Petra. She slapped it softy shut and felt the coming of sleep like a slip of satin across her face. But the wisp of irrational thinking that precedes a nap floated down too late, coming as the pilot announced the plane's final descent into Chicago, city of her lost lover, city of what she a.s.sumed was now her mortal enemy.

”I take it black,” she says. ”No sugar.”

Returned with the service tray, Olivia asks, ”What did you tell your husband this time?”

There is nowhere to set her cup without first standing, so Suzanne holds it on its saucer, a feat that requires both hands, and tries to sip the coffee down quickly, although it is very hot and the cup is very thin. ”Nothing yet. I left while he was out of town, but I'm going to tell him the truth.”

Olivia's composure breaks just slightly, a subtle collapse of her chin and slight alarm in her cool gaze. ”The truth?” she repeats.

”A version of it.” Suzanne wants to stop there but knows that Olivia has brought her here to get something from her. She hopes that the more she gives Olivia up front, the less she will take in the end. ”I'm going to tell him that I've been asked to arrange a posthumous viola concerto by Alex Elling. He'll ask why me, and that I will lie about.”

When Olivia leaves the room to get the score, Suzanne rises and sets her cup and saucer on a side table across the room. She lifts a throw pillow from the sofa, presses it to her face, breathes in fabric. No Alex No Alex. She turns to the small fireplace, its narrow mantel, and there, in a dark wood frame, is Alex's son. She has feared this son, terrified that he will look like his father and crack her heart. This is only his picture, and already it is worse than she feared: he does not look like his father but rather an even blend of his father and mother. Half Alex and half Olivia-proof of their union, proof of Alex's permanent connection with Olivia, who has his pillow case, his dirty s.h.i.+rts, his chair, his large house, his child.

Olivia, who has returned holding a large folder. ”You didn't know he was composing.”

Suzanne shakes her head as she turns. Olivia reestablishes herself on the sofa, trousers holding their perfect center crease, blouse fresh. She is not a woman who rumples, and again Suzanne feels unkempt. Slovenly, her father once called her mother, who was working too hard and succ.u.mbing to the flu. Once Petra called herself a salope salope. ”You know,” Petra said, ”French for sloppy. Even sounds like it.” But later Suzanne read the definition in a French dictionary: b.i.t.c.h, s.l.u.t, wh.o.r.e b.i.t.c.h, s.l.u.t, wh.o.r.e. She tries to smooth her hair with her hands, hoping their oil will calm the frizz, wis.h.i.+ng she had taken the time to put it up.

”Do you suppose he told you everything?” Olivia does not quite face Suzanne as she speaks, offering instead a three-quarter view.

”Most things, yes, I did think that.”

”Did.” Olivia's mouth pulls to one side, but the expression seems too sympathetic to be a smirk.

Suzanne presses a little harder; she wants to understand more than she wants to protect herself from this woman who certainly means her harm. ”I don't know why he would keep such a thing hidden from me.”

Olivia runs her hand up and down the envelope in her lap, just once in each direction, a tic almost under control. ”Maybe he was embarra.s.sed, insecure of the quality of his composition.”

”Alex wasn't subject to self-doubt. He was one of the most a.s.sured men I have ever met.”

”Part of the attraction, I'm sure, but maybe he valued your opinion even more.”

There is some truth in this. It took a long while for Suzanne to overcome her belief that she wasn't good enough for Alex, that he would leave her for someone more sophisticated, prettier, more talented, better bred. But finally she noticed that Alex depended as much on her as she depended on him. If she was critical or even neutral about a program he was considering he would grow agitated, or sometimes sullen, and later she would discover he had swapped pieces to win her approval. Once when he mused that he was going to start a program with Franck's ”The Accursed Huntsman,” Suzanne laughed and said, ”Didn't Franck's students call him Pater Seraphicus?” The final program did not include the piece. And, more and more, particularly in the last year-the final year-Alex asked her opinion about questions of orchestration. How necessary is the bra.s.s strength? Heavier on the percussion? Can you hear the timpani? Would it work with strings only? How necessary is the bra.s.s strength? Heavier on the percussion? Can you hear the timpani? Would it work with strings only? She wondered sometimes if he was trying to push her to start composing, if despite his stated objections to composition he wanted her to do what she aspired to do. Now she wonders if he asked because he was the one beginning to write his own music. She wondered sometimes if he was trying to push her to start composing, if despite his stated objections to composition he wanted her to do what she aspired to do. Now she wonders if he asked because he was the one beginning to write his own music.

Olivia watches her, raptor-like. ”Or maybe you didn't know him quite as well as you thought you did. Maybe you misread him.”

Yes, Suzanne thinks; she has spent her life getting everything wrong, not understanding what was right in front of her. She's always felt like that: everyone else receives a graduation-from-childhood key to decipher human nature, but no one ever told her to get in line.

”Why didn't you just send me the whole score?” Suzanne asks, returning to her chair, Alex's chair. ”Why make me come here?”

Olivia's expression lowers. ”I knew about you all along, you know, even your name, almost from the very beginning. I've heard your CD, seen your picture. Now you have to know who I am, what I look like.”

Suzanne remembers one of her early a.s.signations with Alex, an orchestrated meeting in the improbable city of Cleveland. She thinks of Olivia home alone, or with the son, knowing where her husband was, why and with whom.

Olivia's sideways smile returns, and now it looks as though it could be a smirk. ”And we are just getting started.”

Since retreat does not seem open, Suzanne pushes forward. ”Can I see more of the house?”

”Tomorrow, after my son leaves town and you come back. I do apologize about the hotel, but you should have waited until tomorrow, as I said. I would have paid the difference in flights. Money is nothing for me in this.”

Suzanne nods, though the idea of money being meaningless is not something she has ever understood. Maybe the closest she has come were those times with Alex, those times she said, Let's get the real champagne Let's get the real champagne or or This meal is on me This meal is on me as though she were a person who could say such things all the time. as though she were a person who could say such things all the time.

”And tomorrow, when you come back,” Olivia says, ”I'll show you his study. I'll show you where he ate the breakfast I cooked for him every morning he was at home. I'll show you our bedroom.” She says bedroom bedroom slightly more slowly than her other words and then pauses. ”I imagine he told you we rarely slept together.” slightly more slowly than her other words and then pauses. ”I imagine he told you we rarely slept together.”

The word rarely rarely bites Suzanne. bites Suzanne. Never Never is what Alex told her. is what Alex told her. I haven't slept with my wife in seven years, and I will never sleep with her again I haven't slept with my wife in seven years, and I will never sleep with her again. She believed him, nearly completely, even as she knew it was the kind of lie people tell in situations like theirs, even though she could not say the same thing. Still she believes him, and she suspects that Olivia is trying to trip her up, to erode her faith in Alex. She is trying to inflict pain She is trying to inflict pain.

”It's not a subject that came up. It was never about you.” Suzanne can feel the small square of her own chin, pointed straight to the ground instead of lifted as it is when she curves over her viola. It is pointing down so she will give away nothing. In her posture she holds her version of Alex away from his wife, holds it for herself.

”Really?” Olivia asks, gazing through the gla.s.s waves of the window as if, though surely not, she is disinterested. ”Because for me it was always very much about me. A difference in perspectives, no?”

”We just didn't talk much about other people, except for musicians.” Suzanne steps forward to take the envelope with Alex's score, anxious to be alone with it, the one thing Alex may have left that is hers alone: music written by him for the instrument she plays.

People often call a musical score a piece of music, but of course it is only the two-dimensional representation of a complex experience. Yet unlike a photograph or a birth certificate, it is a representation that preserves not just a moment but the full music itself, protecting it intact through years of neglect or disinterest, making it possible at any moment, allowing it to be played centuries later. Cryogenics for songs and symphonies Cryogenics for songs and symphonies, Alex said once. Are not lost Verdi operas found and played? Do not university choirs perform chorales not heard by any ear since sung by medieval priests?

If she can play this score, breathe life into the composition, she can resuscitate Alex, at least an an Alex. The music in Olivia's hand promises a communion between the living and dead, a way to share time with the man she loved. She takes the envelope. Alex. The music in Olivia's hand promises a communion between the living and dead, a way to share time with the man she loved. She takes the envelope.

”It will be difficult,” Olivia says, ”to fill in another person's gaps, figure out what someone else meant, was thinking and feeling. He'd only just begun the orchestration. But it shouldn't be too hard for you.” Olivia produces again the full but flat smile. ”Since you knew him so very well.”

Suzanne gestures to the coffee cup, to be polite, to deflect Olivia's clinical gaze.

Olivia waves away the suggestion. ”I'll take care of it. It's nothing, in the scheme of things,” she says. ”And you, you will start work tomorrow and stay until you can play the solo for me. Then you'll go home and work on the arrangement, and then we'll see about getting an orchestra.”

”You're asking me to do something I can't do. I can play the solo for you, but I'm not a composer.”

”You started to be; you wanted to be. You've had the theoretical training. You help arrange music for your quartet.”

”A full orchestra has eighty instruments. I don't know what to do with the bra.s.s, the winds, the percussion.”

”You took advanced instrumentation and orchestral writing. I've seen your transcript; did you know that? I know every retreat and fellows.h.i.+p and residency you've ever been offered.”