Two-Part Inventions (22 page)

“No, not at all.” She introduced them. “Philip, this is Richard
Penzer, the composer and friend of my youth. I wouldn't be standing here if not for him. And Richard, you must have heard me talk about Philip Markon? Well, you might not remember, why should you? The boy who ditched me in high school for the glamorous Russian? Who is somewhere on the premises, by the way.”

“Ah, the teen heartbreaker.” Richard shook hands with a brief, reserved laugh, as if he still harbored a touch of resentment on Suzanne's part.

“I see I'll never live it down. It was my biggest mistake,” Philip replied. “Of course I've heard about you. Suzanne used to talk about you as if you were a god. And now the reviewers do, too. I saw
David and Jonathan
. It was marvelous.”

Richard nodded, like one grown accustomed to praise.
David and Jonathan
, his opera based on the biblical tale, had recently played in an East Side hall to rave reviews. After so long, he'd been discovered. Next season it would be produced at the New York City Opera, though, as he told Suzanne when it happened, “These discoveries are always a joke. I've been here all along. They act as if I sprang yesterday from the head of Zeus. But now at least I can get anything I want produced, for as long as it lasts. I've got a drawer full of scores I worked on, back in Brooklyn and before.”

“The god and the devil,” Suzanne said, “brought face-to-face.” The silliness of the words made it all right. The residue of sour gall she'd buried for so long evaporated, and she looked at Philip with a fresh eye. He did seem to have more substance. Seeing him side by side with Richard made him more acceptable—as if their occupying the same room, the same world, at
least to the extent of being at the same party, legitimized him. And he knew Richard's work—another point in his favor. He couldn't be all surface.

Suddenly Elena was beside her, draped in a flowing coral dress that hung low on her hips. She gave Philip a perfunctory greeting, a hug so light it barely merited the name. “Sweetheart,” she said to Suzanne, “you're the belle of the ball. You're not only talented, but you look fantastic and you've got all the best men.” Before Suzanne could speak, she turned to Richard. “You must be Richard Penzer. I know you're an old friend of Suzanne's. She's spoken so much about you. In fact, she's made you sound superhuman.”

“Richard,” Suzanne interrupted, “this is Elena Semonyova, my friend from Juilliard. A wonderful pianist, as I've told you before.”

They shook hands. Suzanne's heart filled with an unaccustomed gladness. She was surrounded by her three closest friends—why not count Philip, in the spirit of generosity, of deference to the past? Well, at least the people who had most believed in her and encouraged her. Who knew her. She was lucky indeed. Looking at them, one by one, as they carried on the ordinary party chatter, she felt blessed, wrapped in warmth that would carry her into the future.

She forced herself to stop daydreaming and pay attention. Richard and Elena were engaged in lively banter, dropping the names of composers and performers she hadn't heard of, and now Philip was speaking to a beautiful older woman in red who'd just appeared and embraced him. For a moment she felt left out. But she brushed that feeling aside: It was the foolishness of the old, childish Suzanne. Philip no longer mattered,
and it was wonderful seeing Richard and Elena together, all because of her.

Then abruptly the perfect little grouping was over. Someone sidled up to talk to Richard, who gave her a quick kiss good-bye and moved off; he'd call during the week to make a date. Elena drifted in his direction. Cynthia brought two more guests to meet her, a flute player from the Metropolitan Opera orchestra and an administrator of a downtown performance space, and Suzanne kept up her enthusiasm as best she could. She knew Philip must be nearby, watching, waiting for his opportunity.

When the party thinned out and she'd thanked Cynthia, it seemed natural that they should leave together. Philip was hungry and suggested a pizza. She agreed that though the alcohol had been plentiful, the food had been rather scanty. Just the opposite of the way it had been when they were growing up.

And so it began again. Only this time it didn't start with tentative fumblings in the back of movie theaters. After the pizza she went with him to his apartment in the Village, to his bed, which would eventually become her apartment and her bed. Even as a boy he had had an instinct for making love, and as a man he was even better, the kind of good lover who seemed almost trained for the role, or perhaps just very experienced: slow and attentive, lavish with words as well as gestures, and despite the touch of deliberation in his moves, he was effective. He was generous by nature. Suzanne didn't tell him that none of the few men she'd known before him had made her feel as glorious as he did. She held something back. Perhaps the small residue of bile had not dissipated entirely.

It became an affair. Affairs had not yet been replaced by the more antiseptic “relationships,” and she liked whispering the
word to herself, breathy with sophistication. A good affair. Good times, good sex, good feelings. Her first really serious one, after several that had sputtered out for lack of oxygen. Plenty to talk about. With Philip you never lacked for conversation. The slight leftover resentment, aged like a Chinese egg, only added spice and vinegar to their lovemaking: Suzanne played a game of resisting, and Philip liked using his powers of persuasion, even if it was only pretending.

There were moments, later on, when she believed it should have remained an affair, should have run its course like the rest. Serve as experience. There might have been more like it, who knew for how long, until she subsided into marriage. Or not.

 

 

In the midst of the good affair, Suzanne's father suffered a fatal collapse, briefcase in hand, while walking from his car to the furniture store, right in front of the newsstand where he bought his daily
New York Times
. Uncannily, this manner of death was what Gerda had warned Joseph of so often and so emphatically that the children, when they were young, used to snicker at her words. “If you keep driving yourself that way, you'll drop dead of a heart attack,” she'd say when he went to the store on weekends to check on the employees, or sat up late at the dining-room table, poring over orders and receipts and catalogs.

“You want this house, don't you?” he'd answer. “You want Suzanne to be able to study. That won't happen by itself.” The boys' expenses were not taxing; they had gone to Brooklyn College under protest and gotten through with minimum effort. Neither one had wanted to join him in the business. Fred took
a low-level job in an insurance company and Gary worked in a stationery business, neither of which position could give their father much gratification.

Now Gerda's predictions were confirmed. Suzanne had always imagined that at his death, which she'd seen as far off, she would feel relief: The burden of continuing to prove herself “special” and bring glory to the family would drop away. She would never stop craving success, but maybe the density of the craving—her own now, not his—would weigh less heavily on her. She could live the way others lived. She didn't really know how others lived, what they felt inside, but envisioned it as a kind of serene drifting through the days, something she had never known. Whatever her life would feel like, it would be minus her father's urgings, forever at her back like a gust of wind even though she no longer lived at home or saw him often. He was there behind her, stalking.

At the funeral she was too preoccupied with trying to comfort her mother to feel her own grief. Philip was there, of course, being unobtrusively helpful, being kind to Gerda, who was even fonder of him now than she had been long ago. After all, now he was a grown man with a growing business. He remained at the house throughout the day, helping them receive visitors, making coffee and conversation, joining forces with Suzanne's brothers to fetch chairs and carry platters of food the neighbors had brought. As if he were part of the family, Suzanne thought, and she both appreciated this and resented it. He was digging in too deep, establishing himself as a fixture in her life. Sex and good times and friendship were one thing, but this—her family, the Brooklyn house, her complex feelings about her father—came from another part of her
life she didn't want invaded. In fact, she preferred to shut it up behind closed doors.

Afterward, her grief at Joseph's death was overshadowed by simmering anger. For all the pride her father took in her, he hadn't really known her. Her talent had stood between them like a screen. Maybe they wouldn't have known each other in any event; he wasn't a man given to intimacy. He was all bluster, all display; whatever was inside remained heavily veiled.

Joseph had chosen to be cremated, and Gerda hated the idea. Not only did it seem alien—no one she knew had ever been cremated; it seemed to her a primitive and disreputable rite. Moreover, she told Suzanne, she had read in the paper just a few months ago about a crematorium somewhere in Pennsylvania that was discovered to have sold bodies to some weird illegal operation, a cult, she couldn't remember what, and given the bereaved families the ashes of animals instead. Or maybe only a small part of the ashes they were entitled to.

“Come on, Mom, that sounds too crazy to be true,” Suzanne said. The three of them, she, Gerda, and Phil, were sitting around the kitchen table, drinking coffee late at night after all the visitors and Suzanne's brothers and their wives had left. It seemed accepted, tacitly, that Phil would spend the night. She certainly wouldn't make any pretext of having him sleep in her brothers' old room.

“But I read about it in the
New York Times
.”

“Remember what Dad used to say? Don't believe everything you read in the papers? Anyhow, that was in Pennsylvania, and the place we're using is in New York.”

“Maybe they all do that. How do you know?”

“I don't think you need to worry about that, Gerda,” Philip said.

Suzanne shrugged. “Does it really make any difference?”

“What do you mean?” Gerda retorted. “Whether we get his ashes or some stray dog's? You don't think it makes any difference?”

“Ashes are ashes, Mom. It's not the real person. It's just symbolic. And if you never know what you've got on the shelf . . .”

“You're just saying that to upset me. Phil,” Gerda appealed to him, “don't you think it matters? Whether I have the real ashes or not? Tell me—you've known loss. Wouldn't it matter to you?”

“My parents and brother were buried, so I don't know how I'd feel about ashes,” he said. “But I can see your point. On the other hand, they are mostly symbolic, as Suzanne says.... It's what you feel in your heart that matters. But anyway, I doubt you're in any danger. Since that article appeared—I saw it, by the way, really shocking—all the places are going to be very scrupulous for the next few months.”

Gerda listened carefully but still looked doubtful.

“Look, we have to follow his instructions,” said Suzanne, getting up to load the dishwasher. “I'll take care of the whole thing tomorrow and you won't have to think about it. Meanwhile, I could use some sleep.”

“You'll have to keep them then, the remains, I mean. I'm not keeping anything on a shelf that isn't authentically him.” Gerda started toward the stairs.

“Not remains. Cremains, they're called,” Suzanne corrected.

“Don't get funny with me now,” and her mother turned and shook her head as if to throw off a buzzing hornet.

 

 

She didn't feel the expected relief after his death. If anything, the “drive” her father had spoken of so vehemently was even stronger, as if with him so vastly unreachable, she had to go to even greater lengths to prove herself, like shouting to someone way out of range. His ambitions had lodged in her, wormed their way in like a parasite, a toxic substance; they were his immortality, which she carried within her. He had bequeathed it to her.