Two-Part Inventions (5 page)

The first ballade went beautifully: She was in fine form, in full possession of her gifts. He wished there were an audience to hear her. What would those reviewers think now? Afterward, as they put on earphones and listened together, they agreed on a couple of places where repeats were needed, a chord held a tad too long, a wrong note, a phrase just slightly rushed. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that would have marred a performance, but CDs had to be perfect. Superhumanly perfect—that was the tradition that had evolved. Misleadingly, as listeners ought to know but didn't.

She didn't object to the repeats, nor did she mind starting in the middle. She was wonderfully accommodating. He was impressed by how easy she was to work with, easier than most of the performers who came to the studio. Very soon he was sure he had enough to put together a perfect whole for each of the first two ballades.

But by the third she was starting to flag. Her energy level had sunk. She was playing too fast, as if she were trying to get it over with. She knew it, too. She stopped abruptly and
looked at him behind the glass, where he sat at the controls. He switched everything off and came out to join her.

“Time for a break, right?”

“Yes, I think so,” she said.

He made coffee, and when she asked about the technical apparatus, he was happy to show her how it worked, the elaborate board with its lights and switches and buttons, the undulating colored waves on the screen. She'd never shown any curiosity about it before, the few times she'd visited. Now she looked and nodded as if she were taking it all in, though he doubted she was following his explanations. She was trying to please him, doing it all for him. Well, she'd see. He'd put together something spectacular and make sure it got to the right places, and next time she'd be doing it for herself.

But when they began again he could tell she was too tired. She was straining against the music, concentrating too hard, and it showed. He suggested they try again tomorrow. No, wait, not tomorrow, he was booked all day. In a couple of days. Again she agreed, but frowning, clearly disappointed in herself.

“This is taking so much of your time,” she said.

“What are you talking about? There's nothing I'd rather do. Anyway, you wouldn't believe how many times people have to come back.”

“Really?”

“Really.” That was not entirely true. People did have to come back, yes. But they usually lasted longer than this. All day, sometimes.

He and Suzanne had a late lunch at the café around the corner, and then she headed home. When she returned three days later, it was the same. She played well—wonderfully—on
and off for nearly two hours. They did a few brief repeats, and that was all she could manage. “Don't worry,” Phil assured her. “What we've got here is fine. Maybe one more session, and that'll wrap it up.”

If he asked her to keep returning, she'd be worn-out and, worse, she'd lose confidence. That was the last thing he wanted. Especially as she had nurtured her ambitions for so long, long before he met her in high school. As far back as when she was a small child, she'd told him. No, he'd work with whatever he had, Philip decided. Anything that didn't pass muster, well, he'd have to find a way to fix it. He'd fixed Kosinski's well enough, hadn't he?

 

I
N HER EARLY years—alarmingly early, it would strike her later on, six, maybe five?—she was troubled by the notion that she might not be real. Everyone around her appeared to be real, her parents, her twin brothers, the children and teachers at school. Everything she touched was real. But she herself, just possibly, was not. She couldn't see herself moving through the world as she saw others. The mirror didn't count. The mirror was a tricky piece of furniture or a toy like a jackin-the-box: There you are, move aside and there you aren't.

How could you be sure you weren't just a mind dreaming moment to moment, a mind dreaming up a mind? If she put her head on the pillow, it made a dent. When she dug her fingernails into the soft skin just above her wrist, white marks appeared, then vanished. If she ate a slice of bread, it was no longer on the plate but inside her. So there must be a “her” that could accommodate a slice of bread. She had an effect on the material objects of the world. But was that enough to make you real? What was “real”? What was “you,” for that matter?

Real did not mean the ability to alter, or even ingest, objects in the physical world, which might itself be a dream. Her own dream. Real, she imagined later on, was something else; it had nothing to do with things you could touch. Real was being
seen, noticed, acknowledged, and later remembered. Real was people thinking about you when you weren't in the room. If others thought about you, then you must be more than a made-up dream. You needed other people in order to be real, she decided. Otherwise you might be just a speck, an atom, inventing an elaborate story. It seemed like a paradox, yet it must be so. She knew other people were real because she thought about them. Her thinking of her parents and her brothers, her school friends, was proof that they were real. They were both outside and in her head. But how could she be sure she was in anyone's head?

When she played the piano, her doubts subsided. The music was undeniably real—it never occurred to her to question that. And if she was producing it, well, then, the music conferred its reality on her. Even more, her touching the notes in a certain way made something in the world happen—sound, music—and that in turn made something happen in people's minds. They listened and heard, they nodded, they smiled with pleasure and appreciation. If they were more than simple clods, they even felt something. The sounds she produced changed them. The making of the music and the hearing of it, and what happened inside the listeners—that was all real beyond a doubt. That was the kind of reality she could trust and rest in. It was
she
who made it happen, and it was their knowledge of that fact that confirmed her existence.

So when her father would summon her from downstairs, make her leave off reading on her bed or dressing her paper dolls, meticulously folding the little tabs at the shoulders and wrists and feet—the shoes were especially hard to do—and call her to entertain the visiting friends and relatives, even though
she hated being displayed like a rare piece of merchandise that had miraculously fallen into his possession, she was lured as well. She slumped down the stairs slowly, like someone anticipating an ordeal, yet she knew that at the end of the ordeal would come the irresistible reward. It was not so much the attention, the astonished faces, the praise. It was the hugely satisfying certainty of her own existence—the music being heard, received, responded to. And so she colluded with her father at the same time as she resented his pressure, his vulgarity, his overweening pride in what he had nothing to do with. He was a musical dullard; the music genes came from her mother's side of the family, all of them good singers, a distant uncle even a cantor in a Queens synagogue.

There was no use protesting, in any case, at least not when she was so young. She could be stubborn but was no match for her father, older, bigger, with that deep hoarse voice. He never actually threatened her with any punishment if she refused—his worst punishments were the glares, the muttered words of his displeasure—but in the face of his badgering, sometimes accompanied by the badgering of the guests, her child's will deflated and collapsed.

When she was older, ten or eleven, she bitterly resented the command performances. The allure was gone; she no longer needed them. She could do it for herself, confirm her own reality, anytime she chose. But still she obeyed; it was habit, the easier path. And she was old enough and cunning enough to grasp that possessing her and putting her on display was her father's way of reassuring himself of his own reality. Still, when the brief performances were over—one piece was usually enough to prove his point—she was flushed with excitement.
Her eyes shone, her skin was lustrous. She was Suzanne, the prodigy, the child who had the special gift. Her gratification was utterly unlike her father's, more inward, more simple, less selfish.

Her mother had used that word, “gift,” when she first discovered it. “She has a gift. A natural gift,” she announced to the family. At the time, Suzanne was barely four. She thought a gift was something you were given on your birthday, wrapped in paper and tied with ribbons. A toy, a book, something to wear. You tore it open, shredding the noisy colorful paper, while people watched, and then you were supposed to say thank you whether you liked it or not. But this, she realized, was a different kind of gift. Something you already possessed without knowing it, something inside that you'd taken for granted as part of who you were. And there was no giver. It was just there, mixed in with the rest of you, the parts that were like everyone else's, but not everyone else had this. It made you special.

And so, after she played for people who recognized her gift, she could accept that she was real. It must be true. This was who she was: the girl with a gift. Then her native diffidence would peel away, she could smile and accept their praise and happily, even giddily, high on her own success, join them around the table to eat the platters of food her mother set out. And as she grew older she suspected that the food, which disappeared so quickly, to praise that almost equaled the praise for her music, was her mother's way of confirming her own existence. The notion that grown-ups, even her parents, perhaps everyone, needed some display to assure themselves that they were real and not mere pretenses, was consoling. She was not alone in her doubts. She played, she ate, she chattered. She would do
her part in the great game, everyone tacitly agreeing to grant one another their reality.

They had begun, these command performances, a few years after the notable day her mother often referred to, talking to friends about Suzanne. Gerda was in the kitchen, singing as she often did as she went about her work, sliding a roasting pan holding a chicken into the oven. Gerda Stellman had a rich, husky voice, dense with emotion; the women she played bridge with urged her to try to get on one of the TV amateur shows, but she had no interest in performing in public. She was singing “Santa Lucia.” Near the end of the verse she reached the high note, then the melody took a series of steps down, then back to the high note again. That was how it sounded to Suzanne, playing with dolls on the floor in the adjacent living room. She could see in her mind the melody tripping down and then up a staircase. Lately she had experimented at the piano, trying to pick out tunes, nursery rhymes
,
“Three Blind Mice,” figuring out how the staircase of notes worked, how the white keys and the black corresponded to the notes of a sung melody, but she did it mostly when Gerda was out on errands, leaving her with her older twin brothers. They were willing enough to look after her but had an intense private fantasy life, replete with monsters, pirates, mercenaries, and the accompanying plastic paraphernalia, and so were glad when she could amuse herself.

As she listened to Gerda sing, Suzanne went to the piano and found the note that was the top step and then moved the index finger of her right hand down the keyboard, making the notes imitate the song's journey along the flight of stairs.

Her mother stopped singing and came into the living room,
wiping her hands on a dish towel. Gerda was a plump, fair-haired woman—colorful, Suzanne thought, with her pink cheeks and green eyes and not quite orange-gold hair. There was something doll-like about her—the creamy porcelain skin, the rounded cheeks, the wide-open eyes always looking surprised, or anticipating surprise, something like the dolls Suzanne dressed with care. Suzanne was nothing like her. She could see in the mirror—it might not be trusted for reality, but about appearances it did not lie—that she resembled her father, tall and olive-skinned, with black hair, the bangs reaching down to her eyes like a curtain. Sometimes her father's rough hand brushed the bangs away. “How can you see with all that hair in your face?” Joseph Stellman's body was heavy and coarse, though, and Suzanne was slender and would remain so.

“What are you doing, sweetheart?” Gerda asked.

“Playing the song.”

“Let me hear it again.”

“I don't remember it exactly. Sing it.”

The melody lasted long, with much climbing and descending, but Suzanne listened intently and made it stay in her head the whole way through. Reproducing it was easy. The hard part was keeping it all in her head, like a story with many turns of the plot.

She couldn't understand why her mother got so excited. Gerda dropped her towel, hugged and kissed her and fussed over her. Then she asked her to play other tunes, simple ones: “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” “Frère Jacques.” All perfect! The ear of a musical genius! Gerda couldn't stop exclaiming. How could she not have known until now? True, Suzanne could
carry a tune remarkably for a four-year-old. But everyone in Gerda's family could sing. Even the boys could sing, though they had never shown any interest in music; their piano lessons had been given up after two pointless years of fumbling scales and arpeggios. But this, Suzanne at the piano. This was special.