She repeats her question when she realizes he hasn’t answered it. “So why tell me now?”
“It was killing Petra — she was really cracking up, drunk all the time, going crazy. You know she doesn’t lie, and I’m starting to think it’s because she can’t, not without making herself sick.”
“So you’re telling me for her sake?”
Ben shakes his head. “I wouldn’t do that. I’m telling you because she’s making me. I’m telling you because she was going to tell you if I didn’t.” He runs his fingers through his hair, smoothing it down and then messing it up, taking a long time to speak again. “I don’t know what to say except that I’m really, really sorry. I kept trying to make things better between you and me and it never worked and then, I don’t know. It didn’t mean that much, you know.”
“It means all kinds of things.”
Suzanne imagines Ben at home, black pen making notes across page after page while she is at a concert with Alex in Chicago, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Cleveland, London. She should tell Ben; she knows this. She should let him off the hook, relieve his guilt and herself from her lying. She always figured he must know, at least generally — but if he did, wouldn’t he bring it up now? Wouldn’t he fling it in her face, defend himself, blame her infidelity for his? She flips it over and back, but still she doesn’t know the answer because Ben isn’t like other people, and even if he was it’s increasingly plain that Suzanne doesn’t understand anyone at all, that she has misjudged everyone who matters to her.
“But not that much,” he says, his voice insistent. “It doesn’t mean that much.”
She turns, looks down to where he sits, now slumped, and into his eyes. “Do you think we’ll be able to find a way to start over?”
Ben shakes his head, and again she shivers. This is not what she wanted, not really, not now.
“No, Suzanne. People don’t get to start over. And even if we could, I don’t think I would want to undo everything just to undo a couple of the worst things. I don’t want to start over; I want to just keep going.”
“Keep going with me?”
Ben nods. “I want us to keep going.”
She steps toward him and shoves his shoulders back as hard as she can, pushing him off balance, wishing she had the nerve to punch him in the face. “I am really, really pissed off, so pissed off I can’t see straight.” She squints to release her tears.
“I know,” he answers, righting himself. “I can tell.”
She leans back against the wall and slides down halfway into a squat, her feet pressing down and her back flat on the wall. Her thighs, parallel to the floor, burn with the effort. For just a moment she feels something opening between her and Ben. And for a moment their whole predicament seems funny. She laughs. “That’s progress, right? You being able to tell what I’m feeling?”
“Yeah.” Ben nods, finds her eyes and holds them. “That and you telling me straight out.”
He is not laughing, and now she isn’t either.
She braces herself tighter, concentrating on the strength of her legs, the muscular pain. “I’m going to think while I’m away. I’m going to Minneapolis.”
“You’re running away from me.”
He stands and holds out his hands to help her up, but she uses her legs to slide up the wall without his assistance. She folds her arms and looks past him, across the bed at his nightstand, noting with part of her attention that it’s covered with a fine layer of dust except for the circle where his water glass sits at night and the rectangular shape indicating a book’s phantom presence.
“I’m not running away Ben. I actually have to go to Minneapolis, and then I’m coming back. I will come back, and we can see then. I can’t do anything now anyway.”
“You shouldn’t leave. It’s a mistake.”
“It has nothing to do with this, or you. It’s about the music. Of all the people in the world, you should be able to understand that.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“I don’t know. A week. And you need to keep Petra away from me until I get back. Tell her not to call me because I won’t be answering.” She opens her closet to pull out her suitcase. “And when I get home I want to run the goddamn air conditioning at night. I can’t sleep when it’s hot, and I don’t think our marriage can survive another night of me listening to you sleep while I can’t.” She doesn’t speak her other thought, which is that Petra should stay away not just from her but from him.
Ben sits back down, watching her pack. “If it means we can keep going, we can run the air conditioner more.”
Suddenly calm and focused on what she is about to do, she says, “I’m not promising that, and neither can you. We’ve let things go pretty far.”
“But maybe not too far. We’re not like other people.”
“No,” she admits, “we’re not much like most other people.”
“I feel like I’ve always been waiting for you, so what’s another week?”
She peers back into her closet, wondering what a person is supposed to wear at a composers’ institute. She grabs jeans, shirts, and black dress and drops them on the bed next to the suitcase. “You’ll work while I’m gone?”
“Of course,” he says. “It’s what I do.”
Twenty-eight
The composers are housed in a large hotel. They are six, if Suzanne counts herself and Alex as one. She feels dwarfed by the huge lobby but even more so by the other aspirants. One of the young men wears a Hawaiian shirt and an eagerness for friendship, but most are reserved. Two — one man and one woman — seem frankly hostile. Suzanne remembers the competitiveness from Curtis and from her summer at Marlboro, but it was friendlier there. Even Anthony knocked off with only a comment or two, not actually wanting others to fail but only himself to succeed.
Or maybe it only seemed friendlier, given her naïveté and the more youthful stakes. Maybe she just didn’t know enough to feel threatened or to wield her own knife. Occasionally Ben was accused of a cutthroat attitude, but she understood immediately that this was a misreading. There was a confidence there, verging on arrogance, and a disdain for laziness and shortcuts of any kind. And aloofness always. But no malice. He could be fairly accused of ignoring other people, of failing to notice them, of frowning openly at their musical tastes, but not of wishing anyone else failure or harm. Even before she knew much about him, she could feel that there was no aggression. He never schemed. And even now, when she has learned that so much about him is not what she thought, she knows she was right about that. He is not a mean person.
What she does know now that she didn’t know when she was a student is that some people are indeed mean, with no compassion. Perhaps they are the least dangerous of all people, the least likely to hurt you, because you know they would if they could. That’s what she thinks when she meets Lisa-Natasha and Eric. Though she doesn’t think they are a romantic pair, and maybe not even allies, they are sticking together for now, and Suzanne thinks of them as joined, as male and female halves of the same taut ambition. They even look alike in their dark skinny jeans, black shirts, and streaky hair, with their fast-moving eyes, with their speedy assessments and dismissals of the people they introduce themselves to, never shaking hands or asking much.