Two-Part Inventions (27 page)

“You'll love it,” he said.

She agreed almost too readily. She wasn't even eager to drive up and see it, but Philip insisted.

“You're right,” she said. “It's a lovely house. Let's do it.” She knew very little about babies, had rarely been with one up close. Almost everyone could have one; in that she was hardly special. Several of the girls she'd grown up with had already accomplished that: Eva, Paula. (Suzanne had sent the requisite gifts, feeling sorry for Eva's baby—what a mother.) Suzanne could do it, too, even if she hadn't especially craved one. She couldn't yet picture the baby as a reality, just the way she hadn't been able to pay attention when Mrs. Gutterman in the fourth grade had explained what the prime meridian was, or when the science teacher in junior high had explained the whys and wherefores of precipitation. It was as if their voices faded into the walls and at the same time a dark curtain descended between her and the sound, and she withdrew into her own head until a bell rang to rouse her. There would be no bell this time, but a needy baby who must be attended to. She would love it once she had it, she was sure of that. But she would rather have had the other—she couldn't lie to herself.

When Richard called to wish her well, she was surprised.

“I heard your news,” he said. “That's lovely. You'll make a wonderful mother. You're patient and gentle. I'm looking forward to seeing you with a baby.”

How had he heard? From Elena? Were they still together?
She couldn't possibly ask, after their last conversation. And how would Elena have known? Well, one way or another, the rumor mill in the classical-music world was still functioning efficiently. “Thank you. But it's been weeks since we spoke. I thought you were still angry, or I would have called to tell you myself.”

“We've been friends too long for me to stay angry when I hear something as nice as this. Let's just get past it.”

“I'm so sorry. I can't tell you how sorry I am that I spoke that way. I didn't mean it.”

“Sure you meant it. But that's okay. I remember how you were brought up.”

“I've tried so hard to escape all that.”

“Well, keep trying. Meanwhile, I want to take you out to lunch to celebrate. Before you get too big to sit at a table.”

“That's a ways off,” and she laughed. They made a date for the following week. Being in his presence, sitting opposite from him, brought out more truth than the telephone had.

“Richard, how will I ever do this? I don't know the slightest thing about babies. I never even wanted one.”

“Well, is it too late to have an abortion?” he asked calmly.

How could he consider that, after his warm congratulations? “Oh, no, I don't want to do that either. There's no reason to. And Phil is so happy about it. No, I guess it's just nerves. I'll be fine.” There was no one, it seemed, to whom she could talk about her bewilderment at the whole enterprise.

Two months passed, they prepared for the move, and then, abruptly, one rainy night, the need to talk about the baby collapsed. It began with waking in the night to a feeling of wetness, wallowing in a puddle, and when she nudged Phil awake and he turned on the lights, they saw that the wetness
was blood. Then the rushing about, the towels, the taxi ride through the dark streets, and finally the blessed injection, the falling into darkness.

Better not to think of the baby anymore. Yet once they had put away the catalogs of nursery furniture and the books of advice on how to get a night's sleep, she found she couldn't stop thinking about it, imagining what and who it might have been, how it might have felt to hold it, watch it sleep, feed it, see it learn to walk, to talk . . . all the things that had never interested her before.

She mourned for the baby as if she had really wanted it, and Phil, who had really wanted it, mourned with her. Suzanne knew she was grieving over her life, the failure she had accepted with stiff resignation but never cried over. Phil's grieving was edged by memory, too: a reenactment of the long-ago grief he had dreamed would somehow be compensated by the child, his only close blood relative. Their griefs, different as they were, brought them together, especially when the doctor told them there would be no more children. There was damage to the fallopian tubes or the uterus—Suzanne never quite understood the technicalities; she only understood the result, irreversible.

And now what? they both thought as they came home the next day, pale and shaken. Now what? Phil didn't dare suggest more performances, certainly not until Suzanne was stronger. But he knew what was ahead for him: He would work harder than ever. He was gradually building up the recording business, with recommendations from satisfied clients like Cynthia, who'd recently signed on, and some young artists she'd introduced him to. Besides that, he would devote all his spare time to establishing an independent label and promoting his own
recordings. CDs were taking over the market, and he would work on them until he became the best in the business. He could do it, he was sure. And of course he must take care of Suzanne.

They had to delay the move for several weeks. Suzanne was slow to recover from the miscarriage, even though the doctor pronounced her fine in every way. Only she must try not to get pregnant—it could be dangerous. She knew very well how not to get pregnant—she'd been doing it for years. What she didn't know was how to pull herself out of the pit of despair. Less the loss of the child—though that weighed heavily—than the loss of a future. The years ahead had always seemed too few and too short to accomplish all she had to do. Now they were too long, and too many. Time to be filled, no different from the ordinary people she had grown up with. No longer special.

She was tired yet suffered from sleeplessness, various aches and pains, sometimes spasms in her lower back. And she was barely thirty. If she felt this worn-out now, she wondered, how would it be at sixty? How would she pass all those years?

Gradually she resumed her teaching and returned to the ballet class for which she was the accompanist; the adolescent girls, it seemed, had not only grown taller but grown more proficient in the weeks she'd been away. They were aspiring to join the company, buoyed by the kinds of hopes she had once nurtured. She thought about them while she played bits from Bach and Mozart for their barres. Later in the class she gave them lively selections from Prokofiev and Milhaud as they whirled and leaped across the floor in their complex patterns; while she played, she wondered how many of them would be able to live their dream. It was an advanced class, and to her
they all looked superb; she didn't know enough to distinguish between degrees of excellence. Had they been musicians, she could have spotted the chosen ones in an instant. Meanwhile, to them she barely existed, was simply the accompanist, providing the music they needed. She didn't need to be real.

When they finally moved to Nyack she spent time on furnishings, something she had never taken the slightest interest in. She learned to cook seriously and began preparing elaborate dishes, greeting Phil in the evening in an apron dotted with flour and spots of sauce. “It's great, of course,” he said, “but when did you have time to do this? Aren't you practicing? You know, you've got to start again one of these days.”

“Why?” she said flippantly. “Why can't I just cook? It's a very respectable life. My mother did it. Thousands of women did it and still do. We have a house now. Where is it written that I have to achieve something? Some people just aren't suited to that.”

“What's this? Your evil twin talking? You're not the same girl I once knew.”

“Sorry to have to spoil your dream, but it looks like that's who I am now. If you wanted to hook up with a sure thing, you should have stayed with Elena.”

She was furiously pulling the dishes out of the new dishwasher. Phil was expecting that some would land on the floor. He had never heard her raise her voice this way, but from his experience in the studio with many frustrated artists, he knew enough not to answer, to let the fit play itself out. He couldn't believe she was serious about cooking; it was simply the most contrary image of herself she could conjure up.

To Philip's surprise, he began to see cookbooks of all nationalities
appear on the kitchen shelf, formerly bare except for a
New York Times
cookbook. He discovered that Ralph Nader's mother had written a Lebanese cookbook with a charming essay at the end about bringing up her large family. Under Mrs. Nader's influence, Suzanne spent a great deal of time scouring the county for greenmarkets, and in the refrigerator Phil would find odd-looking raw vegetables whose names he didn't even know.

He didn't dare arrange any more concerts, but he did venture to ask, one evening after an excellent couscous dish at their new dining-room table, whether she was still practicing.

“Oh, of course,” she said. “Hours and hours. I've always practiced. My mother never had to nag me, either.”

“I hope you don't think of me as a mother.”

“Sometimes I do. You'd make a good mother.”

More and more she left him speechless. She grew quiet and withdrawn. Though she said she was practicing, sometimes the music spread out on the piano didn't change from one day to the next. He heard she had babysat a couple of times for the young couple next door. When she was sitting down, her restless fingers drummed musical phrases on the tabletop; he wanted to ask her what she was hearing in her head, but he hesitated. He knew she still went into town to accompany the dance classes. Then, one Sunday morning, as he was bringing in the newspaper from their front steps, she announced that Richard had asked her to help him rehearse the singers for his new opera, to open in the fall. This would be a lavish production based on the life and death of Roger Casement, the Irish patriot, something on a scale Richard had not yet attempted.

“Sounds great,” said Phil. “So, you're going to do it?”

“Sure, why not? It should be fun. And I haven't worked much with singers before.”

“I thought you and Richard had some kind of quarrel. You haven't mentioned him in ages.”

She'd never told him about finding Richard with Elena at the café, and about the awful thing she had said to him on the phone. She was too ashamed. “I wouldn't call it a quarrel, exactly. Anyway, he called a while ago and we both apologized, and it's over now. We were too close to be on the outs for long.”

“Well, that's good. By the way, in case you're interested, he and Elena are no longer an item,” Phil said. He was getting out his tools, preparing to work on the back porch he was building. He wanted it to be ready for the summer.

“I didn't know you knew about that.”

“I know everything. I have my sources. Anyhow, it wasn't a big secret. Why should it be? They're both free to do as they please. It didn't last long. He's back to men and she's got a new interest. Or so they say.”

“What do you mean? Who?”

“Well, I'm not sure if there's any truth to it, but they say she's been going around with Paul Manning.”

“Her stepfather? I can't believe it.” She moved the heavy newspaper over and sat down next to him on the couch.

“Yup. The cellist. They go to concerts and parties together, and she hangs on his arm. They make a good-looking couple, too—she's still snazzy and has her hair either piled up like a tower or hanging down to her ass, and he's the distinguished, gray-haired older gentleman. You should come into town with me more often at night, you'd certainly run into them. You do
know her mother died recently? I should have said that first. She had an aneurysm.”

“I didn't know. When?”

“Close to a year ago, I guess. So this is not as outrageous as it sounds. Only a little bit outrageous.”

“I wish you'd told me about her mother, Phil. I would have written a note or something.”

“Well, it was during the time you weren't very communicative, and I just forgot. Anyway, what does it matter who she's going around with?”

It mattered, but she couldn't say quite why. Elena's sheer audacity had always troubled her, made her feel wanting. A sexual adventurer, too. Could this have begun while her mother was still alive? If it was true, that is. No, even Elena wouldn't do that. Elena was always up for adventure, even risk, but not for crass subterfuge. She'd told Suzanne when one of the professors at Juilliard had pursued her with extravagant promises, but she made it clear she wasn't interested. He was married, for one thing. And too short, for another, she said, giggling. Hairs in his ears. Suzanne had laughed along with her, recalling all the while that Elena didn't need to do anything for favors, not with Paul Manning for a stepfather. Now, with her busy concert schedule, when did she find the time? An affair probably took less time than a marriage, especially if Elena had remained in the apartment after her mother died. How convenient.

Phil had gone outside and was standing on the raw wood of the unfinished porch, cutting swaths of screening—a typical Sunday suburban homeowner, she thought impassively. Where had he learned to build a porch? Or to make the fireplace work, or refinish the basement, or install new storm windows and
hook up the washer and dryer? He was really extraordinarily gifted. He could do anything with his hands. She ought to appreciate him more. When the porch was finished, he said, she could use it in the hot months, to read or study scores.

Or just lie on a chaise, if that was what she preferred.