“I think the change of tone is a good idea,” says Greg.
Bruce nods his agreement. “I’m actually studying jazz more and more. It was completely missing from my training.”
“That’s because you’re a violinist,” Lisa-Natasha says with salad in her mouth.
“As opposed to brass?” Bruce asks, looking genuinely confused.
Lisa-Natasha swallows the salad, then waits another moment. “As opposed to a composer.”
Greg glares at her. Bruce simply whispers, “Ouch.”
“We have a session,” Olivia says, scooting back her chair. “Suzanne?”
Suzanne rises and follows her to the lobby, where they are greeted by the driver who will take them to the university music school. On the way Olivia says, “We’re required to use the orchestra musicians, but at the real premiere you will be the soloist, of course.” It had crossed Suzanne’s mind to request to play, not because she wants to but simply because she can play the piece, which is not something that will come readily to anyone who gets less time with the music. Or cares less about it. But her not wanting to won out, as did her desire to participate as a composer, to hear her music played rather than to be heard playing.
The practice room looks like every practice room Suzanne has ever known, with the superficial exceptions of the black-and-white-striped floor and one wall painted red behind the large green chalkboard. The viola player is a young man who is immensely talented and has worked on the music in advance. Still he stumbles on the technical difficulty, particularly during the second movement’s most difficult passages.
Suzanne says what she can say: “I understand.” She adds, “If we need to, we can amend the music in a few places to make it more natural for you. But give it one more try as is, okay?”
He looks lovely when he plays. His dark, longish hair is mostly straight, but a few locks curl over his forehead, a flourish over his wire-framed glasses. Though he is thin, he owns a wiry strength, and there is a great smoothness to the movements of his bow arm. Nothing flashy, just pure competence and an obvious love for the viola.
It hits her, watching him, that the solo isn’t merely a part but a role, and one intended for a female player. It’s not a thought she likes — that music can be male or female. It took anonymous auditions behind opaque screens before the musical powers would accept that women have the lung capacity to play brass, and, still, after so much time, the hiring of female conductors is protested by whole orchestras, including the female musicians.
But the truth of the matter here is not self-loathing but something simple: Alex wrote the music for a woman to play. He wrote it for her to play. She looks back at Olivia, who sits behind her, eyes closed as she listens. It doesn’t matter, Suzanne decides; the piece has to stand on its own. Whatever Alex’s late conversion to program music was about, the music has to work without the story.
At the end of the day she is so tired that she skips the dinner and sinks into another night of sleep with no dreams, waking sprawled diagonally on the huge bed. In her prewaking moments she imagines a warmth next to her before she shakes off the sleep.
Day two is more business. At breakfast the conductor tells them, “I know all you can probably think about is your music. We put this stuff first so you can move on to that but also because it’s in many ways the most important thing you will take away from this week. I cannot emphasize that enough.”
Today business means a seminar with one of the orchestra’s artistic planners, a good-looking woman, perhaps in her early thirties, groomed and dressed for the corporate world. “My title says artistic, but it’s really about the planning, and the planning is about the money. In many ways I have the best job of all because I get to make the ideas and dreams of the conductor, the music director, the concertmaster, and so on, a reality.” She dims the light and uses PowerPoint to tell them about working with unions, about the relative virtues of renting versus owning everything from a building to flower vases, about production costs and the least painful ways to slim down orchestration if your budget won’t stretch to match your vision, about new marketing. Suzanne is surprised by the small nuts and bolts: from the risks of cost-tiered seating to labor costs on different days of the week, at different times of day.
They move to a larger room for the seminar on copyrights, to which the public is admitted provided they are orchestra donors or members of the American Composers’ Guild. Suzanne spies some of the usual types — guys with briefcases carrying pages of their unpublished and quite likely unfinished scores who will ask detailed questions about protecting their copyright to music no one wants to steal.
Yet she listens as closely as she can, jotting notes when an intellectual property rights attorney and someone from the American Music Center advise the young composers on commissioning fees, managing risk, payment considerations when considering hard and soft deadlines, and responding to plagiarism accusations or suspected plagiarism of your own work.
When Suzanne steps out, she scans the lobby. Relieved that Olivia is nowhere in sight, that Olivia’s presence is only the invisible mantle always heavy on her shoulders, Suzanne pushes through the revolving door. For four years travel to a new city almost always meant Alex — concerts, paintings, restaurants, long walks — and she feels her solitary stroll sharply. Her senses have returned, and the air feels like hands on her face. The shifting smells of evergreens, car exhaust, hot-dog stand, and newsprint alter her breathing, making it deeper or more shallow, more or less pleasant. She walks a loop of a few blocks, perhaps twenty minutes, before returning to the hotel, walking through the taxi circle, nodding to the young doorman, pushing back through the revolving door, feeling as though it did indeed spin her out and back in.
Standing in the center of the lobby, back to Suzanne, blond hair shiny, is Petra. Petra spins, tucks her hair behind one ear, and stares directly at Suzanne, as though she saw her coming in a mirror that Suzanne cannot see.
“It’s about time. I’m buying you a drink.” Petra laughs and adds, “I promise mine will be cranberry juice.”
“Why, are you pregnant?” Suzanne asks, her voice more bitter than she feels.
Petra shakes her head, and Suzanne follows her into the hotel bar, to a table in a dark far corner, a table perfect for secret assignations. True to her word, Petra orders juice. “But you should have a real drink,” she says and tells their waiter to bring Suzanne a whiskey.
They wait for the drinks to arrive and the server to leave before they start their conversation. Petra starts with a joke: “Why don’t viola players play hide and seek?”
Suzanne sips her drink and says nothing.
“Well?”
“You’re really going to make me answer a joke so old?”
Petra nods.
“Fine. Viola players don’t play hide and seek because they know no one will look for them.”
Petra reaches across the table and squeezes Suzanne’s forearm. “Except we did look for you. That’s what we were mostly doing, you know, looking for you.”
Suzanne decides to hold her own words until she hears more. “We were lonely. We were lonely for you. That’s mostly why we did it.” Petra tips her head to the side and smiles. “That and the fact that I’m a slut.”
“The girlish charm isn’t going to work on this, Petra. And it’s not likely that I’m going to buy into the explanation that you and my husband slept together to be closer to me.” Suzanne pauses. “That’s kind of a question.”
Her answer is simple: “Yes. We did.”
“That’s bullshit.”