Two-Part Inventions (26 page)

It was the sight of fat Arnie and the memories he called up that roused Suzanne from her stupor. It wasn't over yet. She'd managed her escape from that cocoon, and she must not go back. She was not Francine; she had inner resources. She'd let Philip make plans and would do what he proposed. If that was why she'd married him, so be it. He promised, and he would keep his promise. It was his way of propitiating the gods who had ruined his childhood. If he did well enough, they would not ruin his adulthood as well. Or was it his way of ensuring his reality, just as her father had had to show her off? She would help him, as she had helped her parents when she was a child.

She told him she was ready to try again, and he hugged her. “That's my girl,” and a shudder snaked through her.

 

O
N THE STRENGTH of her winning the contest, and of that single New York appearance, disappointing but fortunately not lethal, Philip again began arranging appearances for her in small towns all over the East Coast, places Suzanne had never heard of. No matter that it felt like a step backward. She must keep going—that was the main thing. She traveled; she kept a bag packed with necessities; she got used to folding up her concert clothes (she exchanged the severe navy blue dress for a red one that showed more leg and less cleavage) at short notice and heading for the train station or the airport. She got used to nights alone in motels with plaid bedspreads and paintings of dogs and horses on the walls, to bad coffee, to playing on unfamiliar instruments, to meeting people and behaving like a professional—polite, cooperative, self-sufficient. She dreaded each new performance, each new trip. The bookings were in smaller and smaller places: a party for a volunteer ambulance squad; a benefit for a local Little League team held in a high school gymnasium for an audience of unwilling teenagers and their teachers; once, a ticket to her recital was the reward at a silent auction for a nursery school.

But the panic didn't change, and this she could not get used to. Every time she came onstage it was the same: the ice
creeping up her legs, the sweating, the sense of distance and unreality, her fingers moving of their own volition. She did the exercises, the breathing, the mind games, and she managed to play adequately while battling the panic, but she could take no pleasure in it.

She no longer yearned for the panic to disappear; it was a part of her, something she carried with her like the nightgown and toothbrush permanently packed. Each time, she thought she couldn't go through it again, but she kept going because she could see no other path. She was hardly aware that over the years of practice she had developed a will of steel.

After a matinee performance with a string quartet in Silver Spring, Maryland, a benefit for a Catholic charity, she'd hardly been able to stand up and take her bows, her legs were so shaky. The charity's director, an elderly man whose finely tailored suit hung loosely on his bony frame, asked if she was all right, if he could get her anything. It was mortifying, he so old and frail, so courtly and concerned, and she so young and strong, barely able to move. She was fine, she said, trying to smile, and yes, maybe he could get her a glass of water. He was planning to take her out for an early dinner with the other performers, but she pleaded a family emergency. He was disappointed; she regretted offending him but couldn't explain. They barely spoke as he drove her to the station.

This must stop, she thought as she left the train at Penn Station. She'd tell Phil she needed a break. She wouldn't go home right away, not until she could summon her strength. She knew what his arguments would be, and his ceaseless encouragement, which had begun causing her mild nausea.

“Why don't you give it up?” she said to him once, nearly a
year ago. There was no need to explain what she meant. He looked at her with a stunned face. He was holding a container of milk, about to pour some, and he put it down because his hand shook. “Give it up? This is what we planned from the very beginning. Things are moving along. All you need is patience. Do you want to waste your God-given talent?”

God-given. She'd never expected to hear a word like that from him. If anything, the talent had begun to feel demonic. “Sometimes plans don't work out. If I can accept it, why can't you?”

“You don't have to accept it so fast.” He came over and took her in his arms. “I know it's hard. But try just a little longer. One of these days the panic will simply go away, and then you can do what you were born to do.”

He didn't understand. When she was in high school, then at Juilliard, she'd thought she would want to die if she couldn't play the piano onstage. Now she was ready to relinquish it. Not happily, but with resignation. What she had planned to do all her life was simply not within her powers. She wasn't one of the lucky ones, like Elena. She had the talent, but not the grit. Very well, she had no choice but to accept it. But there was no arguing with him.

When she got out of the subway, she decided to stop in a coffee shop in the Village on her way home. It was an early evening in June, close to the solstice, just the kind of weather she liked—mild, the sky pale, nightfall not yet near. She'd sit outside with a magazine and think of nothing, just delay the moment of going home and reporting on her day.

As she approached the Café Borgia she saw Richard sitting at a table outside. His back was to her but he was unmistakable.
His hair was graying and there was a slight droop to his shoulders, but his body kept its grace and ease. Success agreed with him. His music was played often, and the reviewers called him one of the most innovative new composers. His opera opening in the fall was based on Marguerite Yourcenar's
Memoirs of Hadrian
, he'd told her when they last spoke a few weeks ago. He was talking animatedly to someone across the table, but his body was blocking his companion. Suzanne quickened her step—surely he'd ask her to join them and she'd be distracted. She could forget the failed afternoon and relax. As a waiter came to his table, carrying a tray with two cups of coffee, Richard moved aside to give him room.

Now she could see. The person facing him was Elena. Suzanne retreated into the doorway of a shop that sold men's leather goods and paraphernalia: thick black belts, heavily studded black vests, pants festooned with sequins and chains. Two men came out, more boys than men, really, with spiky purple hair and bare tattooed arms, laughing, brushing against each other; one bumped into her and muttered a hasty apology. Elena tossed her hair off her face with a quick gesture. She was laughing at something Richard said, her mouth wide open, her lips red and glistening. She wore several ropes of heavy beads that glinted in the sun. She reached out her hand toward Richard's on the table, and he clasped it. Then they opened their hands and he played with her fingers. Lovers' gestures. Suzanne felt a wave of nausea and weakness. She turned onto a side street and hurried home. Philip was out. She flopped facedown on their bed, felt the whole front of her body sink into the mattress, sinking so deep that she felt part of the bed, merging with the coverlet.

She herself had introduced them at Cynthia's party—that was
the worst of it. Well, not exactly. Elena strode over and introduced herself. But it made no difference. They would have met that night sooner or later, and because of her. How could he? He knew she and Elena were good friends. And she thought he didn't . . . with women. But of course that was so naive, almost as naive as her not recognizing years ago, at seventeen, that Greg was his lover. Possibly the other men, too. And then there was Cynthia. How had she forgotten about that?

She was supposed to meet Richard for lunch in a few days. She'd invited him over for dinner several times, but he preferred to see her alone rather than with Phil, whom he seemed not to trust. But she couldn't live with this new knowledge until then. She called him the following morning.

“Suzanne, how are things going? You're running around a lot, aren't you?”

“I'm okay. I'm getting tired of it, though. I think I'm going to stop for a while.”

“Do you still freeze up?” he said tenderly. But the tenderness was the kind he would use with a child.

“Cut it out. You don't have to keep being my protector. God knows I get enough of that.”

“What's the trouble?”

“I saw you with her.”

“With who?”

“You know. With
her
. At the Café Borgia yesterday. You're with her.”

“Elena. You can say her name.”

“How could you?”

“What do you mean, how could I? You sound like a child. We're all adults here.”

“It was at my party that you met.”

“Yes.”

“I never imagined . . .”

“Do you realize how you sound? It's not as if you and I are married. You're married to someone else. This is absurd.”

“I thought . . . I thought . . . you know.”

“For chrissake, Suzanne. You're . . . what? Twenty-seven, twenty-eight? Do you know what you're saying? At seventeen, okay—”

“Please, don't remind me of that.”

“But it's the same thing. How innocent can you be?”

“Too innocent, evidently.”

“Let's get something clear. This is not a betrayal. I'm still your friend, the same to you as ever. I'm not taking anything away from you. This concerns my life, not yours.”

But you chose her over me, she thought bitterly. “And what kind of life is it, anyway?”

At that, he hung up without a word.

 

 

As it turned out, there was no need to argue with Philip about future performances. A few days later she discovered an excellent reason not to continue traveling so often. She was pregnant. It was unplanned, but a relief, such a relief that she wondered why this escape route hadn't occurred to her before. It explained the tiredness, the nausea, the fretfulness. Even Philip couldn't expect her to go gallivanting about feeling this way.

He received the news happily. “But once you're over the first few months, we'll go at it again.”

“I don't know. I'd rather wait.”

“Okay, it's up to you. But let's not wait too long.”

The pregnancy was like a gift: no more performances, no more fear or sickly dread, no more having to report to Philip when she came home.

Philip was excited, giddy, like an expectant father on a TV sitcom. She had to laugh when he whispered sweet nothings in the direction of her stomach—who knew he could be so silly? He anticipated changes they'd have to make in the apartment: no sharp edges, no open electrical sockets . . . But of course he'd had a younger brother, Suzanne remembered, a brother he'd doted on. Billy. He'd already said that if it was a boy he'd like to name him Billy.

Suzanne allowed herself to relax; it was as if her emotions were lying in a hammock whose slow, gentle swaying lulled her. She kept up her lessons, kept playing for the ballet classes, but there were no more hurried trips to Penn Station or to the airport with an overnight bag containing the required elegant but simple noncreasing dress, the shoes, the all-important music. That was over. Forever, if she had her way.

To go along with the baby, they needed a house, he decided. He was doing well enough to afford a house now, the kind of house he had dreamed of ever since he was so abruptly exiled from his suburban home. He suggested the idea to Suzanne and she nodded without much interest.

“Sure, if that's what you want.”

She didn't care to go house hunting with him, so he went by himself and found a modest but attractive three-story remodeled Victorian with solid old mahogany wainscoting, high ceilings and fine woodwork, a small back porch, and space for a garden in front and back, a house far larger than they needed
even with the baby—or two babies—but he planned to turn one room into a studio so he could work at home. It was in Nyack, right in town—he knew Suzanne hated new tract developments—only a half hour's drive from the city.