An Unfinished Score (16 page)

Twenty-three

Charlie’s letter arrives two days after Ben and Suzanne return home. The sense of strangeness is immediate because the envelope is addressed to Suzanne and because Charlie never sent letters. He’d call occasionally and talk to whomever answered. Sometimes he would forward an email with a surfing joke—once even a viola joke that not even Petra knew—but he never mailed paper.

Suzanne sits on the porch stairs. She waves at the neighbor across the street, who tends her yard guarded by her dogs, and watches a couple of cars pass. She hears them slow briefly at the stop sign at the end of the street, then turn onto the 206. Finally she opens the envelope, conscious that it is one of the last things that Charlie may have handled: folding the sheet, licking the seal and the stamp, writing her name and address in blue ballpoint.

The letter begins with a sweet salutation, followed by an apology for pain inflicted on her and on Ben. It is a suicide note, because it was written by a suicide, but it lacks the explanation for the act that such letters are supposed to provide. “I’m going to blow off my head so there can be no revision of the cause of death. I am sending you this so that my mother cannot destroy it and make everyone pretend it was not suicide, which is what she did when my father killed himself. She denied us his last words. Now you have mine. I have lived. I have loved saltwater. Warm or cold, sunny or overcast or raining, I love surfing. In the ocean I feel at home. On land I do not. Soon I will be in the ocean forever.”

Suzanne inhales and exhales to slow her speeding heartbeat. She hears light footsteps coming from the kitchen and folds the letter, flipping the envelope to make it anonymous.

“What are you looking at?” Adele signs.

For maybe the first time Suzanne feels compassion for Ben’s mother, a woman who tried to protect her children from an ugly truth. “More junk mail,” she signs, forcing a smile with the lie. “Will you help me make dinner if your mom doesn’t need you? I missed you while we were gone. Meet me in the kitchen. I’ll be right there.”

In her room Suzanne hides Charlie’s letter in her box of secrets, setting it on top, next to the shell he gave her at Folly Beach. She feels shame because she is both hiding the letter and making sure it’s the first thing Ben will see should he open the box. She winces at what this tells her about herself, wonders how she became a person she does not even like.

The kitchen is noticeably bright with the lengthening days of midsummer. Dust motes are visible in the streams of light that slink through the blinds over the sink. Suzanne soaks in the warmth, trying to fix the simple pleasure in her mind.

Under her direction, Adele washes and spins the lettuce, peels the shrimp, measures and mixes the dressing ingredients. Because Adele cannot easily sign while she cooks, their work is mostly wordless.

Once Adele pauses to say, “Next summer I’ll be able to hear.”

Suzanne smiles at her, and the worry must be evident on her face because Adele adds, “Not really hear, I understand, but I like to say that.”

Suzanne returns to slicing the red onion, then looks at Adele straight on. “Are you scared?”

Adele shrugs, makes the signs for
yes
and
no
. She opens a can of mandarin oranges and drains the syrup into the sink. Due to the cut of her tank top, her wing-like shoulder blades are visible, and Suzanne can think only of a bird—delicate but strong enough to survive—though she knows it is wrong to reduce Adele to anything other than who she is.

“That seems right,” she says. “It’s normal to be scared before an operation, but you’re right there’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s something you have to go through once to get where you want to be.”

An hour later they are eating the supper with Ben and Petra. Petra opens a bottle of white wine and grows chatty with her second glass.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “A violist was crying and screaming at the oboe player sitting behind him. I’m making it a
him
, Suzanne, just for you. Okay, so this violist was crying and screaming at the oboe player. Finally the conductor asked him why he was so upset, and the violist said, ‘The oboist reached over and turned one of my pegs, and now my viola is out of tune.’ The conductor nods and asks him doesn’t he think he’s overreacting, and the violist screams, ‘I am not overreacting! He won’t tell me which peg he turned!’”

Suzanne smiles and nods her recognition; of course she has heard it before.

“Absolutely hilarious,” Ben says softly, staring stonily at Petra.

“Here’s one,” Suzanne says. “A viola player is finally tired of being so unappreciated, and she’s tired of all the stupid viola jokes, so she decides it’s time for a change and walks into a shop and says, ‘I’d like to buy a violin.’ And the shopkeeper says, ‘You must be a violist.’ So the viola player says, ‘How can you tell?’”

“Because it’s an ice-cream shop!” Petra exclaims.

Adele looks around to gauge everyone’s reactions, to see if she is supposed to laugh now. Her expectant face collapses when she sees Ben push away his plate and stand. “Excuse me.”

A minute later Suzanne hears the front door fall shut. She continues to eat, encouraging Adele to do the same.

“What’s with him?” Petra asks.

Suzanne looks at her while Adele is looking at her plate and whispers, “His brother just died, in case you forgot.”

Petra’s voice has no tone that Suzanne can interpret as sarcasm, but it’s hard to accept at face value when she says, “I’m sorry. I did forget.”

Suzanne watches Petra drain her glass and refill. “I’ll clear the table.”

Ben is gone for hours. After Petra and Adele go to bed, Suzanne waits for him out front, the porch light off but the living room behind her still lit. When he returns, she waits for him to go inside and come back out before she asks him about his father. The humidity slows their already careful words.

It is as Suzanne suspected: Ben has always known his father’s death was a suicide.

“I knew but I didn’t always know, if that makes sense.” He looks at her when he talks, and this, in its unfamiliarity, is as disarming as anything. “Sometimes I let myself believe my mother’s version of events, though of course I always really knew.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” She cannot stop herself from asking.

He shrugs, then holds his head in his hands, elbows propped on his knees as they sit side by side on the porch steps. “I didn’t want you to think I was genetically predisposed to be weak or crazy. I thought you’d be afraid of the Schumann biography and run from me. I thought you might be afraid to have children with me.”

“You’re the one who stopped that.”

He sits quiet for a moment. “Maybe my wanting to wait did have something to do with my father. I don’t know.”

Suzanne pauses, biting into her lip, crying now. “I’m really sorry about your father. And Charlie. I loved Charlie. And I know I should be better than this, but I don’t understand why you let me believe I wasn’t good enough for your family. And why you didn’t tell me.”

This is, she thinks, the most honest conversation they’ve ever had.

“Suzanne,” he says, disbelief shading his voice, “I have never thought I was better than you, ever. I’ve admired you from the beginning. I’ve always felt like you saved me by marrying me. I would be lost without you; don’t you know that?”

She shakes her head, her mind yelling,
No, no, no
. She has no idea whether he is lying now or misinterpreting the week’s emotion, or whether she’s misunderstood all along.

Finally they lean into each other, shoulder to shoulder, still in the thick summer air, in a neighborhood quiet with night except for the orchestra of insect life, the occasional car sweeping down the 206, the electric buzz of the streetlight as it struggles to life.

After a long time Ben puts his arm around her shoulders, pulls her weight into him. “I always wanted to tell you about my father. It was never that I didn’t trust you. I just—I just could never say it.”

Suzanne has been supporting some of her own weight; now she lets the tension holding her spine drain and collapses into Ben, breathing in his smell.

They can start over, she thinks. They can still have everything, get everything right, even if they cannot undo what they’ve already done. In this moment she wants to wind back all the world’s clocks, send its calendars fluttering in reverse. Where she would stop them, she isn’t sure, but it might be that first day she saw Ben, who was wrapped over his cello and looked at her with mournful eyes, all his sadness there for her to see if only she’d really looked.

III. Appassionato

Twenty-four

Intermission is over, and they are playing the
Black Angels Quartet
. All four musicians know it: they are playing extremely well, so well that the music holds them and not the other way around. The nearly full auditorium belongs to them, to the piece. They possess the audience. The air itself vibrates, electric with the loud music.

Anthony and Petra make their violins scream, sawing away during the section that represents insects swarming the Vietnamese jungle. Daniel plays with his eyes closed, his outsized score but a stage prop. His gestures are large and loud—music on high volume even for the hard of hearing. Suzanne’s heart beats wild and hard in her chest, and sweat drizzles down the back of her neck, between her breasts, along her slick waist. But her hands are steady even as the veins running down her forearms buzz. At the end she gasps audibly; they all do.

The applause falls hard, breaks into the exuberant. Suzanne sets her bow on her lap and pulls sweat-matted hair back from her forehead and temples. She is grinning. Petra is grinning, and Daniel, too. Anthony stands, bows, extends his right forearm for them to follow suit, which they do. Before she takes her bow, Suzanne looks up to the facets of the concave ceiling, the design that allows their music to find its ears at just the right angles. The manic pride and relief she feels remind her of that night in St. Louis, the night she played
Harold in Italy
, and Alex’s absence stabs her.

She wishes he had heard her play tonight, that he was watching now, that his hands contributed to the applause that continues. She closes her eyes and listens to that clapping, trying to discern particular people from the group of mostly strangers. Friends pepper the audience, and surely other people she sees around town. Ben is out there, she knows, with Adele and maybe, just possibly, her father. No, not her father.
And not Alex
. Suzanne opens her eyes and the applause again becomes communal, an audience clapping in unison. She searches for Ben and spies him in an aisle seat halfway back, looking right at her, his hands clasped but now still.

Jennifer has planned an extraordinary party at her parents’ stately Nassau Drive home. The sign-in sheet will be a glorified order form designed to secure advance sales of the CD before enthusiasm wanes and forgetting begins. It’s not long after the final curtain call that Anthony assures them the recording was a technical success and tells them about the guest book.

But that’s the only tacky aspect of the party. Everything else speaks class, from the good chocolates to the excellent pianist sliding lightly across Debussy and Chopin. Suzanne and Petra enter together, still in their black dresses, though Suzanne has brushed her sweaty hair and spun it into a chignon.

“Nice house,” Petra says, “but the people are going to be really annoying, aren’t they? Anthony told me I have to be on my best behavior, no fun at all.”

“Who was that pianist?” Suzanne asks. “He was hired to play at a party for the Vanderbilts or some family like that? And Mrs. Vanderbilt offered him a thousand dollars and told him that he was not, under any circumstance, to mingle with the guests.”

“Yeah.” Petra nods. “So did he tell her to go to hell?”

“He told her, ‘In that case, madam, you only have to pay me five hundred.’”

“That’s actually funny,” Petra says, dropping her arm around Suzanne’s shoulders as they move in and around the large downstairs rooms, which have been cleared of their usual furniture and set up for the party.

After she and Petra separate, Suzanne drinks a glass of champagne. She eats crab puffs and strawberries dipped in chocolate. She talks to small groups of people: Elizabeth and some of her friends, Jennifer’s parents, Anthony and a man who teaches at the Institute for Advanced Studies, people she does not know, Daniel and Linda.

“It’s soda water,” Daniel says, lifting his drink. “Proof positive that love changes people.”

“You guys are sickeningly sweet, and you look irritatingly good together,” Suzanne says. “I’m very happy for you.”

Linda continues looking up at Daniel’s face as she speaks to Suzanne. “I can’t believe I found him. What are the chances?”

It is just beginning to feel late when Suzanne steps into a conversation boiling over between Petra and Jennifer, who beckons her to join something she would prefer to avoid.

Jennifer wears what Petra calls “a big black dress” with a double strand of pearls. As Suzanne steps close enough to make the conversation a triangle, Jennifer is saying, “When someone cheats, they’re not just cheating on their spouse. They’re cheating on their children.”

“You’re so American.” Petra’s voice is sloppy and sharp all at once.

“If by ‘American’ you mean I know the different between right and wrong, then yes. Guilty as charged.”

“By ‘American’ I mean that sex is too important to you, so you have less of it. It just doesn’t mean as much to me, for instance. It’s not a big deal, just two bodies for a little while. No big deal.”

“If it’s not a big deal, then why do people bother to promise fidelity? Isn’t it a big deal for a man to know his children are actually
his
children? If it’s not a big deal, then why do so many couples break up over it?” Jennifer’s face glows with her certainty.

“Because they’re American!” Petra’s words are loud enough to attract attention from nearby conversations.

As if sensing trouble, the pianist launches into a suddenly louder piece: a Liszt transcription from Gounod. Suzanne remembers reading once, in a biography of Liszt, that at each performance he would toss his glove to his choice for that night’s pleasure, a different recipient every night.

“You and Liszt have similar appetites,” Suzanne says, losing patience with having to secure Petra when she drinks too much.

Petra strides away.

Suzanne shrugs at Jennifer. “Sorry about her. I think maybe she’s had a little too much champagne.”

“Nothing new, I suppose, but so vehement. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was seducing Anthony.” Jennifer laughs now, fingering the beads of her pearl strands, adding, “It’s not that I don’t trust him, necessarily—he is a man—just that I keep his leash very short. I read that the number-one predictor of infidelity is opportunity.”

Suzanne looks anew at Jennifer, seeing in her broad face a woman more self-aware than she’d noticed before. Jennifer is one more person, Suzanne thinks, whom she has misjudged or at least misunderstood.

“I’d better find Petra and get her out of here before she talks to a potential donor.”

Jennifer’s hair swings at her shoulders as she nods. She touches Suzanne’s shoulder. “Thank you for coming, and thank you for getting her out of here before she does any damage.”

Getting Petra into the car is easier than Suzanne expected. Petra has gone docile with a turn in mood, though now she is crying and her tears are fierce.

“Honey,” Suzanne whispers, “if it’s not such a big deal, why are you so upset?”

“She’s a stupid woman. Stupid and fat,” Petra exclaims before going submissive again. “I’m sorry. I just drank too much on an empty stomach. The performance and all. We were really good, weren’t we?”

“Yeah.” Suzanne grins. “We were really good. Really, really good.”

“We rocked!” Petra high-fives her. “We were awesome!” The American slang or the champagne exaggerates her ordinarily slight accent.

After Suzanne maneuvers the car through the narrow driveway and into its space, moving the gear to
park
, Petra slides herself out of the car and totters toward the back door. She points to her shoes. “I’m not actually drunk. I’m just tall.”

“You are definitely too far from the ground.” Suzanne slams shut both car doors and then follows her friend inside, where she assumes not only Adele but Ben is deep in sleep.