“Since when do you swear?”
Suzanne takes three large gulps of the whiskey, burning her tongue, palate, the left side of her throat. “Since you screwed my husband.”
Petra is shaking her head. “Maybe he wants the part of you I have, and I want the part of you he has.”
Suzanne waits, but Petra offers no more, so finally she says, “So you slept with my husband because you wanted to sleep with me.” Forgetting for a moment everything but that Petra is her best friend, who has always told her the worst about herself, she laughs.
“And if I asked you to, what would you say?” Petra returns her grip to Suzanne’s forearm.
Suzanne leaves her arm still, consciously, but ignores the question, and ultimately it is Petra who retreats from the physical contact.
“What I know and Ben doesn’t understand,” Petra says, unwrapping and removing the scarf around her neck, “is that those parts aren’t even half of you. You checked out on us a while ago, Suzanne. You left us alone, and we took comfort in each other.”
With nothing to say, no words coming at all, Suzanne feels the hollow in her neck, that ache that can be filled only with chin rest and wood. She wants Petra to leave so she can go upstairs and play music and think about nothing.
“I always figured that part of you died when you lost the baby, or maybe you saved a little of that and poured it into Adele. But it’s been gone from me and I’m pretty sure gone from Ben, and even he’s not so emotionally thick that he wouldn’t notice, even if he can’t name it.”
Suzanne begins shaking her head vehemently. “No,” she says. “You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to make this my fault. You don’t get to use Adele like that, and you don’t get to talk about my baby, not ever. If you ever say that again, if you ever even mention it in passing, you will never see me again.”
“Does that mean I will if I don’t?” Petra’s lips are stained a sheer bright pink from her juice.
What Suzanne wants, more than anything, is for her marriage to be happy and Petra to be her best friend. She wants Alex alive and perfect and unharmed — someone she admires but has never met. She says, “I would like you to leave.”
Petra is not stricken, as once she would have been. Or maybe she is stricken in some unseen way, because her transparency has clouded and Suzanne cannot read her. She merely nods, drains her juice, and shoulders the straps of her purse. “Call me if you change your mind. I have a room here. I can’t help but think you’re here because of me, because of me and Ben, and I’m not having you here alone.”
Suzanne drinks the rest of her whiskey in a few short sips. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you, or with that. Not the way you think. I really would like you to leave. Leave all the way.”
“I already paid for my room.” Petra shrugs and starts to leave, but she turns around and steps close to the table, bending over, making Suzanne look at her. “You know I’ve always liked you more than him, even during.”
Petra’s words make her physical presence stronger, and Suzanne looks at the thin white pipe that is her neck, the collarbones revealed by the scoop-necked shirt, the shape of her shoulders underneath. It is now that she imagines Ben and Petra actually together. She has seen each of them naked many times, and now she fits them together. His hand tracing the line where Petra’s small, perfect breasts become her armpits, the V-shaped lines of her thin stomach, the scant hair between her legs, the slight inward curve where her long thighs join her body. Ben, just a little taller, lining up chest to chest, hips to hips, feet to feet. Eyes to eyes. She blinks and sees them other ways, the ways she has been with him: Petra straddling him on a chair, pinned by his weight against the wall, on her tiptoes in the shower, on top of him but facing backward. She pictures Petra under him, over him, in front of him. Stop.
Petra tries to smile, but it doesn’t hold. “Anyway, I hope you’ll call me.”
Suzanne closes and opens her eyes, slower than blinking. “I’m not going to change my mind, but we’ll talk when I get home.”
She watches Petra as she walks up to the bar and signs for the bill. The server asks her something and she stays for a moment, talking to him, and Suzanne sees something new in Petra’s body language, in the angle at which she stands, in the position of her shoulder — a slight reserve. It’s not just that Suzanne hasn’t noticed it before; it is utterly new. Suzanne looks down and is surprised by her own forearm, unmoved from the place it rested when Petra held it tight, sitting on the table as though it doesn’t belong to her at all but is just something someone left lying there.
Twenty-nine
The third day of the institute marks the serious turn to the compositions. After a score seminar with a master copyist, the day will be spent in reading sessions with various sections of the orchestra, beginning for Suzanne with percussion and ending with the full strings. Throughout the day Olivia watches and writes copiously with a blue pen on a yellow legal pad, but she says little, leaving it to Suzanne to listen, guide, negotiate. Suzanne tries to ignore her, to forget her as much as that is possible, but Olivia’s silence makes her presence louder. If the concerto is the story of Alex’s love with Suzanne, then Olivia is entirely the wrong audience.
The most challenging reading of the day is the requested special section with the principal cellist and double reeds. This is the music that Suzanne has not merely filled in, arranged, or embellished. This is the music that she herself created from scratch, summoned into existence from whatever void holds music that is unwritten.
It is nearly impossible to notate music completely. Marks on a page are but an elaborate shorthand, an approximation of the language the composer imagines hearing, desires to hear. There is always room for interpretation and so misinterpretation, but Suzanne finds that the young oboist with dark circles under her eyes understands her intentions, using dynamics to represent various states of sadness and agitation, following the tempo Suzanne wants. The bassoon player, despite his obvious talent, has less feel for the piece. His changes in dynamics are overstated, almost clumsy, making Suzanne’s compositional moves sound hackneyed and amateurish.
She recalls the concertmaster’s advice: “We want to play what you wrote, but we want to sound good.” She needs to make the music make sense to the bassoonist, to help him find the best tonal color, to help him feel the timbre. She tries to describe it in words, remembering a children’s book she used to sign to Adele that described sadness as a single petal fallen from a flower, a seal stranded on a beach while his family rode the current back out to sea, a marble that rolled under a sofa and was forgotten.
Olivia looks up from her pad, speaking softly but with audible, crisp words. “To give a less childish example, perhaps it would help to imagine a woman home alone while her husband goes to hear her favorite tenor with another, younger woman.”
Suzanne remembers that concert. She didn’t like the program at all, and she and Alex left early and went instead to a blues bar, where they drank gin and smoked cigarettes — two things she hasn’t done since — and watched people dance, their bodies close and sweaty, taking the dark room’s permission to move lewdly.
Suzanne tells herself that it isn’t due to Olivia’s analogy, but nevertheless the bassoon player’s reading of his part improves. She is relieved because she feels too exhausted to make it through more than once after that. “One final go at it,” she says, and she puts up her feet to listen.
Before she goes up to her room to rest before dinner, Olivia taps her shoulder. “Who was that woman — the blond — you were with yesterday at the bar? She’s not one of the composers.”