An Unfinished Score (3 page)

She remembers every day of the week of rehearsals, Alex’s stern instructions to the orchestra.
Clarity, clarity, clarity. The timbres are separate. Stop that damn blending
. But for her there was no scolding, only the one time when he added direction to her copy of Berlioz’s score.
Doloroso
, he wrote over the beginning of the andante, saying, “Play it like your heart is being squeezed of its blood, so great is your pain. Play it like you are mourning for the beautiful life you might have led but were denied.”

His accent fluctuated between a thud that fell with his words and a faint whisper underneath them, depending on whom he’d been talking to, how much he had been drinking, and—she learned—what effect he wanted to have. When he spoke to her that day his inflections were at their oddest, as though he and not his parents had fled small-town Bavarian poverty.

After those words, there were no instructions for her, only the watching like burning and then nodding, recognition. He saw her. Early on she wondered whether he thought she played perfectly because he already loved her or whether he loved her because she played perfectly. “There may be better violists in the world,” he said later, “but no one plays
Harold
as beautifully as you do.”

The applause approached wildness and the stage shook with it when Alex, again staring at her, both of them already consumed, turned his open hand for her to stand as St. Louis bid her farewell. Because she wanted to halt time but could not, she experienced the coiled happiness and remorse as though the moment had already passed, as though she was looking back on an earlier self.

Now she plays the thirty bars of the theme without error, but she is quaking and bails out before striking the 6/8 of the allegro.

Even Ben, who finds Berlioz’s
Symphonie Fantastique
gaudy, admires
Harold
. He likes the story of Paganini commissioning a viola concerto and then being disappointed in the piece because his Stradivarius would not be a technical superstar but a quiet, melancholic voice. Then, after its triumphant premiere, Paganini allowed Berlioz to believe he’d paid him for the composition when really the money had been merely funneled through him—a ruse that allowed the composer’s friends to keep him fed.

Yet Ben loves the music as well as the story, comprehending that the flamboyant, large-handed Romantic struck an ore of the sublime despite himself. So many musicians accomplish what they do in spite of themselves; it is dangerous to read the biography of a composer you love.
More dangerous still to marry one
.

In love Berlioz was passionate, misguided, faithful only in his way. Love inspired his music and often drove him feral. The
Fantastique
swelled from his obsession with the Irish actress Harriet Smithson. Over this object of his desire he wept in public and scrawled pages describing his immense anguish. Once Liszt, Mendelssohn, and Chopin searched the suburbs of Paris for their love-struck friend, convinced that he might kill himself over a woman he had never met and to whom he wrote frightening letters, bitterly jealous of her stage lovers as well as of the men who actually saw her chambers. In the final movement of his symphony, he represented her as a whore at the witches’ Sabbath.

“And so it was,” Alex once told her, taking the pedagogical tone he sometimes used with her, perhaps intentionally calling attention to the difference in their ages, “that sexual obsession resulted in one of Romantic music’s innovations: the wedding of music and story.” In the flawed, brilliant, highly autobiographical
Fantastique
, the hero thinks of his beloved always in association with a musical theme. Without words, the music tells a story.

After six years of bizarre courtship, occasionally broken by brief fixations on other women, Berlioz convinced Harriet Smithson to marry him. She proved shrewish and hard-drinking. They bickered for more than two decades until her death freed him to marry the mistress he’d taken almost immediately after his wedding, at about the time he composed
Harold in Italy
: a singer of no real talent.

About two and half years after the St. Louis performance—two and a half years into the four years of her affair with Alex—Suzanne offered herself to a recital series at Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre because Alex would be in Paris. He told her she was too good for the series—
Chopin butchers all of them
—but when she told him the date, his voice lifted, as close as he ever came to happy.

The church was domed but built to a more human scale than a cathedral. It still smelled of wet stone, as it must have in the twelfth century, when its presence tempted French peasants fresh from the countryside to choose faith amid squalor. She played well to several dozen people, a small audience but one appreciative of the music and a place to sit for two hours on a frozen January night.

The next day she and Alex walked the city, mile after shivering mile, and finally stood in front of Sacré-Coeur, all of Paris spread yellow-gray below them. “Is this why we fought the tourists to come up here?” she asked. He shook his head, and they ambled down through Montmartre, a walk that seemed aimless until they entered the cemetery squashed into the bottom of the hill. As they walked its narrow pedestrian avenues, Suzanne read aloud the names of the families interred in the idiosyncratic mausoleums, some of which looked shiny-new though they were centuries old. She was reciting one such name when Alex hushed her, pointing to a simple black crypt, an oversized coffin sitting on the pale dirt. Suzanne stepped toward it and saw the beaked face of Hector Berlioz etched into the dark marble, his name, the dates of his birth and death.

“This is why we came out to Montmartre,” Alex said.

That night he surprised her again, producing tickets to a concert at the Théatre des Champs-Elysées. As she sat in the art deco cylinder she could feel its history, imagine the rioting audience at the 1913 premiere of
The Rites of Spring
.

That night’s program was less scandalous and more appreciatively received: a Russian pianist with horrible hair who so delighted the French concertgoers with Schumann, Chopin, and an unusually human Prokofiev that they stamped their feet until he played four encores. Even Alex, who believed the encore destroyed a program’s integrity, clapped loudly, stamped his foot, laughed with Suzanne. “They’re going to have to turn up the houselights,” she said, “before the French ruin this poor guy’s wrists.” But she knew the pianist didn’t mind; what musician doesn’t want to be adored? “Promise me we’ll come back to Paris together,” Alex said, his tone stern and a little alarmed. “I promise,” she said, but it was a lie. It was made a lie by a plane crash in the American Midwest.

Again Suzanne raises her viola, tucks its familiar hard cradle under her chin. She swipes the bow across the strings. Without planning to, she begins again the theme from
Harold
. The sound is sweet—always it has been sweet. The vibrating strings feel abnormally thick, as though they have been submerged, bloated by water. Despite their thick feel under her callused fingerprints, and though she grips her bow harder than usual, the run-through is clean. Her right tricep is sore when she finishes.

She will never perform the piece again. Perhaps she will play it, probably she will, if not for a long time, but she will never again play it when she is not alone. Its performance belongs to the past, when her lover breathed air in and out of his lungs, told her ear that he loved her as if it were a secret between him and it. This is the present and not the past, when she was certain that she and Alex would return to the Théatre des Champs-Elysées after again paying homage to Berlioz in a Montmartre cemetery.

She pictures Hector Berlioz alone, seeking refuge from the Italian heat in the cool chambers of Saint Peter’s, his volume of Byron heavy on his lap. Suzanne has never been to Saint Peter’s, but she imagines it as Notre Dame, as Saint Paul’s, as the Cathedral de San Juan and the one in Seville—all the cathedrals Alex ever pulled her into. Alex shared Berlioz’s love of them, though less for their cool sanctuary than for the ambition they represent—that human desire for height and beauty and something better. When they entered a cathedral he would stand at its center, put his hands to his hips, nod satisfaction, as if to say,
This is good enough
.

Once Alex drove Suzanne through the neighborhood where he’d grown up, past the cheap house where his father had hit him with too many fists to count and more than once with a full bottle of beer. Down the street from the house swelled a large church, made huge by the stinginess of its surroundings. “You could see it from every street. It was like a cathedral to us, and it saved me.” But Suzanne knew that the building had not saved him. Alex had escaped his childhood with his brilliance intact through music and through pure will. He built his own invisible cathedral and rose from the ground.

Suzanne was born to parents afraid of height. She remembers her mother, pinned against the panel between two elevator banks, unable to take one step toward the glass walls of the Empire State Building’s observation floor while Suzanne walked its circumference, looking to the ground for her father, who had been unable even to enter the building, who has been unable to do many things in his life.

Yet Suzanne sighted in Alex something beyond her own absence of fear—a passion for altitude, a desire to ascend from the filth and stupidity that hulked over his childhood. He had a friend who took him up in a small plane. It scared her when he told her, and she understood why he had been so alarmed when she’d told him about a high school boyfriend who’d taken her on fast motorcycle rides.

“I don’t even want to think about your having died before I met you,” he said.

Flirting more than anything, not really thinking, she said, “But you wouldn’t have known what you were missing.”

He turned toward her, staring hard, voice angry. “Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that.”

When he told her about the friend with the small plane, she said, “That’s the kind that goes down. But it’s back-page and not front-page news because only four people die at a time.”

“I’m not afraid of dying in that sort of plane crash,” he explained. “It’s not like being hit by a bus. How awful that would be, everything just smashed and over before you knew what hit you. Going down in a small plane would be visceral. Falling and thinking,
This really isn’t happening, except it is. This is a great thrill, and now I am dying. Look how high we are, how far we have to fall
.”

Suzanne despised the image, but she understood and told him so.

“But I would hate to die in a big plane,” he said. “No view. Dying knowing that the last thing you’d see in life is some Tom Cruise movie or a fat woman in a pink track suit.”

It was a full-sized jet, the one he’d gone down in.

After dialing the 800 numbers advertised for family members, Suzanne spends the hour she is on hold cleaning the house with one arm, a crick in her neck. The phone is uncomfortable in the hollow of her chin. Unlike her viola, it is small and easily dropped. Its hardness feels cheap.

Using lemon oil, she polishes the single piece of furniture she has from her mother: a heavy cypress buffet, plain except for its three drawers engraved with intricate leaves. She spends a long time in the depression of each leaf and accesses her clearest memories of the woman who hid birthday presents in the drawers. Avoiding the overwhelming new grief by returning to the old, Suzanne clicks through the mental pictures like a slideshow. Her mother, about a year after the Empire State Building visit, hair disheveled, fending off Suzanne’s father with a skillet as they back out the porch door for the last time. Her mother through a fogged passenger-side window, standing in the front yard of a tract house she desperately wants to sell so she can pay the rent on their apartment and continue Suzanne’s private lessons. Her mother, beauty evaporated by difficulty and illness, dying at home like Suzanne promised. But there are as many images of her mother not there: concert-hall seats filled by people who aren’t her mother. The vacant front-row seat at Suzanne’s graduation recital at the Curtis Institute, the empty seats in Charleston, the seated strangers at all her performances in St. Louis. Her mother didn’t live to see her succeed, though it was a future she always believed in, even when Suzanne did not.

A young woman’s voice comes though the line, startling Suzanne from her crooked housework.

“What was the movie on the plane, on the plane that dropped like a stone from the sky?” Suzanne’s words tumble into one another as she rushes them. “Do you know who the actor was?”

“You’re horrible,” the high voice answers. “People died. Their wives and children are trying to find out information, and you’re playing pranks.”

Suzanne thinks of Alex unwrapping his tray of food, struggling with the cellophane to extract the disposable fork, fumbling with the paper salt packet that might make the portions edible. “Wait,” she says, trying to suppress the crazed tone she hears. “This is more important. Was there a meal or a snack box? Was there a choice?”

“You’re either a bad journalist or a bad person,” the young woman on the other end of the line says, her voice lifting and tight. “You’re a sick woman. You need help.”

She hangs up before Suzanne can explain that it isn’t a prank, that it matters to her what her lover saw and tasted in the last minutes of his life. She hangs up before Suzanne can tell her that, yes, she is a bad person, that she is not Alex’s wife, but that she mattered to him and needs to know. She wants to say that Alex should have gone down in his friend’s plane, toward a screen of greenery, holding a perfectly crisp apple missing one sweet bite, every foot of lost altitude a measure of how far he had risen.

Three

There is no black on the right side of her closet, the side of her days. The clothes there are gray, white, blue, green, and tan. On hangers are a purple blouse, a red tee-shirt, and a pair of maroon pants—a gift from Petra she has worn only once.

The left side of her closet is monotonous night: solid black, the attire of performance. Like a widow in eternal mourning, Suzanne has pairs of black trousers, black skirts, black jackets, and black shirts. She has a black sweater, long- and short-sleeved black dresses, the formal black dresses of the soloist and plain orchestra dresses, black dresses designed to be seen from the opera boxes and those seen to best advantage from the floor. They seem extravagant in quantity, but each piece has been with her for years, worn many times, a fact once mentioned—a gratuitous cruelty—in a Charleston weekly whose music reviews were penned by a wealthy man’s wife who fancied herself a critic and likely had no idea what she cost Suzanne, a young woman born poor, pressed to pass among those who assume that people who wear the same outfit twice in a season lack self-respect.

Though Suzanne never wears black offstage, not since she was twenty, today only the left side of her closet feels possible. She finds black pants that are not too dressy and a black silk tee usually worn under a shimmering sweater at a winter concert. She knows Petra will ask her what the hell is going on, but she cannot help herself. She tries to dress the clothes down with boots, with dangling silver earrings, with a face scrubbed clean.

When the phone rings, she answers it. A woman’s voice says her name, more statement than question.

Suzanne repeats her own name. “Yes, this is Suzanne.”

“Suzanne, you owe me a great deal.” This is said so softly that Suzanne can hardly hear it. The woman hangs up, or maybe they are disconnected. Suzanne stands with the phone in her trembling hand, mouth growing dry until she breaks the frozen moment.

She knows a phone call can change your life. It was a ringing phone that brought her into the quartet. When Petra called with the invitation, Suzanne had been mulling over the possibility of resigning her seat in St. Louis and moving to a place where Ben would be happier and perhaps have more opportunity. Without first identifying herself, Petra greeted Suzanne, as usual, with a viola joke: “How do I keep my violin from being stolen?”

Suzanne delivered the tired punch line for her: “Put it in a viola case.”

“But this time, I actually need a viola,” Petra said. “I told them we’d probably have to get someone else now that you’re rich and famous, but I have to ask.” She told Suzanne that Anthony, a classmate from Curtis, was starting a quartet in Princeton, that he’d married a woman with family money willing to float the ensemble for two years, that he had a serious business plan, that their friend Daniel had already committed. “Not that you’d be interested, not with your job, but there’s no one Daniel and I would rather have. Anthony’s still such an asshole, but we’d have him outnumbered. Plus there’d be more stuff for Ben to do—an hour from New York and Philadelphia.”

“That already crossed my mind,” Suzanne answered.

“Your dad still lives in Philly, right?” Petra paused. “Or maybe I shouldn’t have reminded you of that.”

“It’s okay,” Suzanne said and asked if Petra thought working with Daniel would be all right, given his propensity to fall in love with whomever he played with.

“Suz?” Petra paused again—a long silence. “I really need you. With Adele. I’m failing as a single mother. There are problems. I need help.”

For four days, Suzanne kept Petra’s call to herself, knowing Ben would make the decision if she told him while she was still undecided. If it wasn’t her decision, she might hate him forever. So she decided on her own, and then she told him. She resigned her chair, with apologies, helping to arrange the auditions for the lucky player who would replace her, trying not to care who it was. She, Ben, and Petra emptied their penny jars and made an offer on the cheapest house for sale in Princeton. By the time Alex conducted her in
Harold in Italy
, it was too late to stop, and Suzanne’s life changed again.

Anthony did indeed have money, and he had a solid plan. Suzanne, Petra, and Daniel committed to stay with the quartet for at least two years and to accept no other work that would interfere with the quartet’s schedule—no playing in other ensembles, no session work in season, no solo performances without an okay. The contract each signed was so fastidiously crafted as to include practice schedules. In exchange, each would receive a modest but reliable salary. At the end of two years, the salaries would stop. If the quartet was not yet solvent through a combination of grant money, donations, CD sales, and performance income, it would dissolve. “It’s a business,” Anthony said when they gathered to sign the papers in the presence of his wife’s family lawyer.

“It’s a job,” said Daniel.

Anthony watched him. “No drinking before practice or performance. I put it in the contract, so make sure you read what you’re signing.”

Petra put a long arm around Suzanne’s shoulders. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “It’s music, too.”

At the end of two years, the quartet was solvent, if barely, and after four, its members’ earnings are just about what they were when they received salaries—sometimes a little more.

Now Suzanne risks arriving late, and they all promised never to be late. She walks fast to stop her shaking, but she thinks about the voice coming through the receiver, the voice entering her ear without permission:
Suzanne, you owe me a great deal
.

The practice room of the Princeton Quartet is almost subterranean, its only natural light coming from the long horizontal windows just below the ceiling, the rectangles that show only the moving shoes of passing students, often shoes of a kind and quality that Suzanne still never splurges on and could never have owned while in school. When she notes this, she recognizes the old bitterness of want and reminds herself that she does not have to work in an office or, like her mother, try to sell starter homes on the side in an effort to make something better. Suzanne plies her art for a living. She is a musician, which is what she has always wanted to be.

She drops the last step both feet at once and stands in the open doorway. Petra faces a far corner, jumping up and down with her hands in the air, still getting her jangles out. Daniel hunches his six feet three inches over his cello, his glossy head sagging. To someone who doesn’t know him, he might look relaxed, but Suzanne knows before she looks that his right hand is tense with his bow, his pinky finger rigid. He looks up at her, his face softening as though he is seeing her for the first time after a long absence. Suzanne worries that the crush that has wavered from her to Petra to her to Petra to her and most recently back to Petra is about to alternate again.

Though they joke about it, it really isn’t funny, and Suzanne feels too tired for it, for the delicacy and compassion it requires of her. Yet sometimes she wishes that she had fallen in love with Daniel, who lets his passion guide his choices and who lucked into the best halves of his Manchurian father and Canadian mother. He’s dark and tall, made sensual by large eyes and curving lips. With Daniel, she never feels as though she has said the wrong thing and is being judged for it. With Daniel, she almost always knows what he’s thinking and how he’s feeling. With Daniel, she never feels as though she is alone in the room and he is far away.

Suzanne is staring at him when Petra, without looking around from the corner she faces, asks why the viola players were found standing outside the party. She spins around to deliver the punch line before Suzanne can. Instead she freezes and says, “You’re wearing black. What the hell is going on?”

Daniel meets Suzanne’s eyes. “You look beautiful in black.”

“We’re almost late,” Anthony says, closing the door. “Two minutes.”

Handsome but effete, with a flourish of freckles high on his cheeks and forehead, Anthony is, as ever, well-dressed above the ugly tasseled loafers he was partial to even as a student. His pants hike as he sits, exposing two inches of extravagantly thin sock—an effect Suzanne suspects is planned.

Suzanne takes her seat. Now there is nothing but the familiar smell of wood and rosin, the sound of string being slackened and tightened, the asymmetrical weight of the bow in her right hand, the familiar plate of the chin rest, still cool under her jaw.

Playing chamber music involves an intimacy between people that is no weaker than the closeness of love or sex. To play with others is to be bound by and respond to their rhythms and desires without sacrificing your own. Like sex, great music can be made with someone you know well or not at all—and with someone you loathe so long as there is passion in your hatred. Yet, unlike sex, great music can be made even with someone you merely dislike. This explains why Petra, Daniel, and Suzanne play well with Anthony, even when they find his arrangements too facile. There is some other, unnamable sensibility they share.

Having married a domineering woman from a rich family whose wealth has been diluted but not drained by generational expansion, Anthony thinks always of the books and of appearances. He is a man who subtracts tax and wine before figuring a tip, who divides a four-way bill not into quarters but by calculating the exact cost of each person’s meal. The sole time Suzanne saw him pick up a whole check—at a luncheon with his father-in-law and a potential donor—he figured the tip in odd cents to make the total charge an even number, leaving the poor server to count out from the till her too-few dollars and sixty-seven cents. “Makes the ledger much cleaner,” he announced as he produced the loops of his elaborate signature.

“Cherubini,” Petra whispered, not softly, making Suzanne smile though she tried not to.

Maria Luigi Cherubini
. As
directeur du conservatoire
he was dictatorial, demanding separate entrances for men and women and once chasing Berlioz around the library tables for using the wrong one.
Cherubini
. Timid in his harmonies, known to history as a textbook composer of white-key music of no great significance, now a man seen but not heard: the Louvre’s millions of visitors see his face, as painted by Ingres, but few hear his music. Yet in his day he was considered by Beethoven to be one of the immortals. He was admired by musicians for his technique and was financially successful during a time when the Parisian scene was all about money.

Cherubini
. A way for the quartet to think about Anthony, who plays his violin with a rare and sturdy clarity and is capable of originality of interpretation—particularly of Debussy—that baffles those who know him away from his instrument. His tastes, when he steps away from questions of money, when he considers the Princeton quartet’s critical as well as monetary success, are fine if a bit cold. His choices for the quartet have been mostly wise, including bringing in Andres Flanders to perform Bocherinni’s fifth guitar quintet as part of last year’s February program. He’s also made a name as a reviewer, his exertions toward fairness giving decency to his fastidious judgments. Ben should hate him, yet does not, which Suzanne supposes suggests something good about them both. And because Anthony functions by reason and not by feeling, he is easy enough to work with. He holds no grudges. Suzanne arrives on time, works hard, and knows what to expect.

Too often, though, Anthony stays near safe musical shores. The quartet plays Beethoven and Bach, of course, and sometimes Brahms or Ravel. Never Janáček and never the Shostakovich string music that Suzanne loves. Anthony is cautious about including contemporary composers, keeping them occasional and unassailable. All too often the quartet’s programs include some piece of pretty-headed, many-noted brunch music by Haydn or Telemann—music written at the behest of someone who could pay for it. Suzanne fears that one day the quartet will wind up playing “Happy Birthday” for some snarling old woman or unctuous child before she realizes what is happening in time to stop it.

“At least you play for a living,” Ben said when Suzanne complained about a Vivaldi quartet, a piece of music she knew Ben despised. So many times at Curtis she had heard him say, “Vivaldi is the enemy of music’s future—and its past.”

Alex always called Vivaldi supermarket cake frosting—pretty if you don’t know better, unpalatable if you’ve eaten freshly whipped cream on real pastry. Like Suzanne, he loved Fauré, that undervalued treasure, the musician’s composer. Though they broke on new music, she and Alex shared some peculiarities of taste, including an adoration of Janáček, his seemingly reckless juxtapositions, his refusal to comfort with transitions of either melody or silence, his controlled anger, his generosity, his respectful demands on the musicians who would play him, their finger pads be damned. And they shared an unlikely soft spot for Schubert, poor drowned boy who should have been stronger but whose music is so bright it sparkles. Suzanne understands that weakness is a fact of her art but knows it is not true that Schubert and the great composers wrote out of their insanity and indulgence. They wrote around it, despite it, as best as they could in the midst of it.

Today the quartet works on a piece surprising from Anthony: Bartók’s sonorous but disturbing final quartet, written while the composer was changing publishers after refusing to answer a Nazi-authored questionnaire about his race. He was contemplating the larger decision of changing countries, though he would wait to move until the death of his mother, whom he supported. No doubt Anthony—who might well have filled out that paperwork to protect his position—chose the Bartók as a show-off piece. He hopes they will impress the audience with their glissandos, with the
ponticello
and
con legno
bowings, with the acrobatic stoppings and the notorious Bartók pizzicato. They will play the piece first, to a still fresh audience, or perhaps sandwich it between intermission and some problem-free piece that will let the people leave happy.