Part 9 (1/2)

He held open the door for her as they walked out to find dusk settling. She didn't intend to, but when he put his arm around her bare shoulders, she condensed into herself. He dropped his arm and stepped in front of her, blocking her. ”What's wrong?”

”I feel like I can't say anything about music to you, and then there you are pretending to like the concert.”

”What are you talking about?” His voice lifted, his father's accent angling into his words. ”I always ask your opinion about music, and I'm pretty sure we both thought that concert was about as bad as it gets.”

”But you were telling that woman otherwise.”

”Don't be jealous. Don't do that.”

”It's hard to imagine you'd let her comment pa.s.s without a sneer if she wasn't young and pretty.” Suzanne tried to step around him, but he held her shoulders tight with both hands. Her throat constricted as she softly croaked, ”You let her make fun of me as though I wasn't even there.”

”She's a stupid girl. Stupid and pretentious. And I was 'letting her comment pa.s.s' because her father happens to be a philanthropist with a love of cla.s.sical music. If you haven't noticed, it takes money to run an orchestra. A whole f.u.c.king lot of money. Would you even have been interested in me if I wasn't successful?” He dropped his grip on her shoulders and spun to the street, hailing a cab. ”I can't believe this.”

Two taxis pa.s.sed before one stopped. In the back of the cab, Alex glared down his nose at her, then out the window, then back at her while the cab driver tried to make a left turn through heavy pedestrian traffic.

”Can't you just drive around the block?” Alex yelled at the man.

”Almost got it, sir.”

”I'm sorry,” Suzanne said, her mouth heavy with silent crying. ”But it was a fair response.”

”What the h.e.l.l do you think I'm doing here? You think I flew to New York to see that c.r.a.p? Or was it for the disgusting finger sandwiches?”

”I just want to be sure you'll tell me if it's ever over. I don't want to be pathetic.” She was crying aloud then.

The cabbie made eye contact in the mirror as the car gained speed heading downtown. Out the window the street looked s.h.i.+ny with reflected orange light.

”It wasn't ever going to be over,” Alex said.

”Wasn't.” Her throat ached as she spoke. ”I just don't want to be a notch, one of many.”

”The last of many, Suzanne. You were going to be the last of many.” He turned from her, leaning forward, his arm a barrier. ”Where are you from?” he asked the driver, cold and steady, as though Suzanne was not in tears, as though she was not in the car at all.

”Haiti,” said the man, ”but now New York. I've been here a long time.”

Back at Alex's hotel, Suzanne sat on the bed, contemplating catching the train back to Princeton even though she had made an excuse to be away for the night.

Alex sat at the desk, a map open under a lamp's tight circle of yellow light, furiously writing on a notepad. He circled something with a flourish and threw the pad at her, its corner catching her leg. A tiny pain. ”There,” he said.

On the lined paper he had written the location and date of every one of their a.s.signations. There had been fourteen then, some lasting only a few hours and some spanning several days. The ink tallied the total miles driven, distances flown, circled the already staggering total. The precision of his memory stunned Suzanne. He remembered even a meeting she had forgotten: three hours in Wilmington, Delaware, on a bitterly cold January afternoon.

”The next time you have any doubts about how I feel about you, take a look at a f.u.c.king map.”

He'd grabbed her shoulders again then, removing her clothes with no hesitation, making love to her until neither of them was angry anymore. The next morning she woke to his renewed touch. His fingers combed her hair. His lips grazed her eyelids. ”I'm sorry I get so angry,” he said.

She turned into him. ”I'm sorry I get jealous.”

”I know my reputation, my track record, but you have to believe that I love you.”

”It's not just jealousy, either, I think. It's those people. When we were alone I felt beautiful.”

”You are beautiful.”

”But then we're there and suddenly all I can think is that my pretty purple dress cost thirty dollars and everyone can tell.”

”There was no other woman in that room for me.”

She didn't tell him that for almost a week before he arrived her concentration turned to powder, from the fear that he wouldn't come and then from the excitement that he would. She didn't tell him that she barely slept for several nights and had to force herself to eat, that she spent an entire afternoon trying on dresses before buying the purple one. She just nodded and said, ”I also hate even the idea that this is some ordinary affair, that this is anything other than the love of my life.”

That night they had dinner with Piotr Anderszewski after hearing his airy Bach part.i.tas from the center of Carnegie Hall's tenth row.

”I am the love of your life,” Alex said when he put her on the train home, and she decided that she would refuse her jealousy from then on, that she would believe what he told her. She thought of it as a leap of trust, and the trust was no less firm for the size of the gap that had been crossed to land there.

Now the Haitian driver drops her in front of the Intercontinental, so she is alone when she realizes that the lie Alex told her that day in New York had nothing to do with the woman in the red dress. He lied to her about something more important than a flirtation: he lied to her about music. If he wasn't already composing that day, certainly he was planning to, and he hid that from her even after she asked, ”Is that why you don't compose?”

She pa.s.ses quickly through the heavy revolving door, around the central staircase leading to the mezzanine, across the lobby floor of mosaic tiles, embedded as tightly as memories. You are the last of many You are the last of many. When she checks in with a friendly woman in a blue blazer she smiles and says what she must: ”I only need one key.”

Mercifully her a.s.signed room has a different layout from the one she shared here with Alex, but the decor is similar enough to hurt her. Locked in, she realizes that she is fully alone for the first time in a long time, that there is no need to perform. She has held together in front of everyone: Ben, Petra, Adele, the quartet, the town, the people on the plane, Alex's wife, even the cab driver. Now she dissolves. Her crying is as long as it is fierce, and when she is through she is dry of tears, more calm than tired. She unpacks her few things, folding her tee-s.h.i.+rt, setting her plane-sized cosmetics on the bathroom's marble counter. She hangs her dress and, wearing panties and bra, slides the score from the envelope Olivia gave her.

Suzanne has never been a savant who can hear music in her mind by reading a score-she has never been able to compose, beyond the basics, without an instrument in reach-but visual score study was part of her training, and she can a.n.a.lyze written music by sight. She can skim for structure. In her hands is a concerto for viola and symphony. The solo is complete, but much of the orchestration is merely sketched.

Preceding the concerto's three movements is the introduction Petra tapped out that first day, an opening whose ending upbeat is rhythmic. Perhaps it is a nod to Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra Concerto for Orchestra because throughout the first movement the main theme is prepared by a long crescendo that repeats the initial part of its motive over a subtonic rising through the orchestra-another move found in the Bartok. Suzanne sees it as the stretched curl of a wave, the kind of surf Charlie dreams of. because throughout the first movement the main theme is prepared by a long crescendo that repeats the initial part of its motive over a subtonic rising through the orchestra-another move found in the Bartok. Suzanne sees it as the stretched curl of a wave, the kind of surf Charlie dreams of.

She senses as well the influence of Hindemith and nods to the nineteenth century in particular uses of sonata form. An interesting twist to Alex's fundamental conservatism? Clever Clever. Toward the end of the first movement, there is s.p.a.ce for an improvised cadenza. A direct challenge to the violist, perhaps.

The second movement is one of the strangest stretches of music she has ever read. It is traditional in its use of suspense-generating techniques, but it lacks the formal symmetry and stability suggested by the first movement, the symmetry and stability she would have expected from Alex. The articulation into sections is at best partial, due not only to open, even deceptive cadences but also to elision in the viola line itself. This elision denies respiration to the soloist as well as to the audience. Another challenge, this one as much physical as creative. No catching your breath No catching your breath. The movement is further destabilized and made unpredictable by the inclusion of significant new material, even in the stretches of recapitulation. Music that makes its own rules only to break them.

Merely seeing the music in black and white, Suzanne knows that it calls for incredible virtuosity. Alex was ever skeptical of the virtuosic, nearly disdainful. No Liszt fan, he. She stops breathing, as though she is in a real wave, and finally inhales sharply, a gasp. If Alex was writing for the viola, he was writing for her. She cannot guess whether this piece was supposed to be a challenge or a tribute, or whether it was written in sheer overestimation of her ability. Her hands tremble as she reads on, the movement animating the pages she holds.

As the final movement rises to its climax, it covers an increasingly wide register-again the Bartok influence-but it also raises harmonic tension. Yet the ending is false, and the piece moves on to a modified Beethoven scherzo, a small pow pow, followed by a diminis.h.i.+ng line in which the orchestra slowly disappears, leaving the viola alone in a bizarre fall that halts before it fully fades away. Piling it on Piling it on, Alex would say if someone else had written it.

Suzanne has never seen a piece of music like this. She understands now why Alex might have kept this work to himself, and she fears learning whether he was even more brilliant as a composer than as a conductor and arranger or whether he misguidedly a.s.sembled a clumsy bag of tricks. For you For you. She imagines a great poet, a formalist, writing his worst, most sentimental and sloppy poem out of love and then finding it published against his will because he is famous.

She will know whether the music works or fails absurdly only when she hears it, but already she knows that the piece is nearly unplayable. Perhaps, she thinks, he was taunting her, paying her back for defending Berio's circular-breathing excesses. Even at the basic physical and technical level, even with the emotional terror locked away, it will take her full skill.

She takes her viola from its case and stands over the score laid out on the high bed, the sheets of paper now looking almost harmless against the red bedspread. She plays through as best she can, straining to sustain the highest note her instrument is capable of, exhausting herself with the complicated fingerings and hand s.h.i.+fts, elbow pinching from the acrobatic bow work, patching through to the final eerie note.

An impossible piece of music, yes, but if she can ever play it well, then gorgeous, disturbing, harrowing genius.

Fifteen.

Suzanne does not remember the dream, yet waking feels like escaping someone else's brain, as though she's been imprisoned in another head and is running down a foreign tongue, panicked to breathe fresh air before she is closed in forever.

After showering she dresses in jeans and tee-s.h.i.+rt, sandals and silver hoops. f.u.c.k Olivia f.u.c.k Olivia. She will go as herself, wear her regular uniform into battle; she doesn't have to pretend to be a better self, a put-together self, a composed woman. Alex loved me Alex loved me.