“She’s a stupid woman. Stupid and fat,” Petra exclaims before going submissive again. “I’m sorry. I just drank too much on an empty stomach. The performance and all. We were really good, weren’t we?”
“Yeah.” Suzanne grins. “We were really good. Really, really good.”
“We rocked!” Petra high-fives her. “We were awesome!” The American slang or the champagne exaggerates her ordinarily slight accent.
After Suzanne maneuvers the car through the narrow driveway and into its space, moving the gear to park, Petra slides herself out of the car and totters toward the back door. She points to her shoes. “I’m not actually drunk. I’m just tall.”
“You are definitely too far from the ground.” Suzanne slams shut both car doors and then follows her friend inside, where she assumes not only Adele but Ben is deep in sleep.
Twenty-five
The quartet’s performance now part of her past, Suzanne returns to work on the concerto. She works the way she used to, the way she worked when she still believed the world was hers for the taking if she just tried hard enough.
But still it is not enough. Working with Alex’s score, her hands and mind in his measures of music, was supposed to keep him close to her, in her. But the harder she seeks him, the more remote he becomes. She cannot find herself in his work, not even herself as violist. Maybe he knew you as little as you knew him. As she works, grief reverberates in her ears, an inaudible sound felt rather than heard. Grief not that she has lost him but that she is losing him always, over and over. It is the sensation of abandonment, of being left alone and not knowing in what form you will survive it.
She tries every theoretical approach she learned at Curtis and through her own studies, and she tries the more personal, remembering Alex’s reactions to other concertos. Once, in Seattle, they heard Vassily Primakov play Chopin’s first piano concerto. Flawed and brilliant, the work has been criticized since its premiere for its elementary orchestration. “But the piano itself!” Alex said, eyes lit with excitement.
But that does not apply to his viola concerto — the solo line is not enough.
The best concertos are relational; their very subject matter is the relationship between the soloist and the rest of the orchestra. She doesn’t want to write a second-rate piece of music, and she doesn’t want Alex to have conceived of one. There has to be a key, she thinks, to open the door between the brilliant and difficult viola score and the rest of the instruments.
Again and again she wants to throw down the work. Yet she continues, clinging to the belief that she will restore Alex to herself, that if she follows him around enough corners, she will reach the end of the maze and find something of him to grab. Then she will understand — the music, the person Alex was, the person she was with him, what she is without him.
She also knows, when she lets herself think about it, that she works because she fears Olivia. Suzanne does not want her life undone. She does not want Ben hurt more, and she does not want to lose him. Her life may not be the life she wanted, but it could be much worse.
Or perhaps it is the challenge that keeps her working: the old ambition, the deep desire to compose and now, at last, a chance to start that part of her life, to be alone and see in what form she will survive it. So she comes back to the work every morning and most nights.
It is midmorning on a very hot Tuesday when she breaks through. It is the most mundane of moments. She is sitting in her living room, cross-legged in shorts and a tank top, her hairline and back damp with sweat because they cannot afford to run the air conditioner all the time. She is eating grapes, slowly because they have seeds.
Understanding doesn’t come in a single flash, but it does develop quickly, building like a strong wave. She stares at the score and in her mind hears what is missing from the concerto: an elegiac echo against the viola line. Alex left space for it but left it unwritten, almost as though he foresaw his own death. Holding the dead and the missing in her mind — her mother, Charlie, her baby, Robert Schumann, the Adele born with hearing ears, but mostly Alex — she writes for the orchestra an elegiac line, a subdued but emotion-saturated voice to accompany and answer the viola. Less than an equal conversation but a clear voice that she allows to snake among the double reeds and the cello. Mostly it will be carried by the bassoon, that comic tragedy of a tone, an instrument like a man with the face of a clown and a heart aching with unrequited love.
There is more than one solution to every musical conundrum, yet Suzanne believes she has found Alex’s true intention, or something very close. It solves for her the mystery of a concerto written by a man who found most concertos distasteful. The viola does not perform a virtuosic solo, though virtuosity is required, but is the stronger half of a duet before the crowd of the orchestra. The central voice is witnessed, and it is answered. She spits out a grape seed and nods.
Twenty-six
After Suzanne completes her work on the concerto and sends it off to Olivia, she returns to full-time practice. When playing alone, she finds a new lightness and pleasure in her instrument, its look and feel, smell and sound. She plays whatever she feels like, including some frothier baroque tunes, some Roma dance music, Debussy, moving from one thing to the next according to mood or whim.
With the quartet she practices portions of the regular repertoire, and the members discuss their next moves. Anthony is working on the marketing of the Black Angels CD and has accepted some invitations that suggest the quartet’s swelling reputation. They agree to a performance in Montreal and to appear at festivals in Salt Lake City and Austin. As they consider their future programs, Petra continues to advocate for the Ravel quartet and Anthony shows signs of softening on the point. Domestic bliss has made Daniel unusually easygoing. “Sounds good,” he says a lot, regardless of who is proposing what. One day Petra suggests a Christmas CD, just to see if he’s listening, but he catches on and grins, giving Petra what can only be called a bear hug. “I’m not quite that far gone. Linda has made me happy but not stupid.”
The news arrives by certified letter when Suzanne is home alone, practicing. She is playing Hindemith and eyeing the angle of her elbow crook when the doorbell rings. Her arrangement of Alexander Elling’s Viola Concerto, Op. 1, has been accepted into the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute. If she accepts the invitation — and they hope she will — there will be breakouts and rehearsals, analysis and feedback, instruction in the business of composing, dinners with other aspiring composers. At the end of the grueling week will be a full public performance of “the work.” Compliments of Olivia’s industriousness and cunning, Suzanne will hear the composition, fully orchestrated.
She rereads the letter, her body tingling. It is the sort of letter she fantasized about receiving when she was younger, when she still thought she might make her way as a composer as well as a performer. It is Alex’s piece that has been accepted, she understands, and the weight of his name is heavy. But the concerto is her work. too, in its interpretation and execution. Suzanne wrote the second line, did much of the orchestration.
Yet when her excitement slides away, soon, the emotion gripping her is cold, quaking fear. Not insecurity or stage jitters but true fright — the terror of free fall. Olivia may be trying to destroy her, beginning with her marriage, but only beginning there and ending in something even larger and darker. That night Suzanne wakes over and over, each time in a sweat, seeing every hour the clock passes at least once: eleven fifty-eight, twelve sixteen, one forty, two ten, two fifty-six, three twenty, four o’clock. She rises for the day shortly after five, exhausted but relieved to be out of bed, away from the twisted sheets, away from the sound of Ben’s even breathing as he sleeps through the hot night.