“Don’t get caught up in the thrill — or in the agony — of hearing your work. Listen as dispassionately as you can to what you are actually hearing, not what you think you are going to hear or want to hear or what you are afraid of hearing. What you are actually hearing — that’s its own skill — and be open to alterations as needed. This part is as important as the original setting down of notes on the page or whatever you thought you heard in your mind that day inspiration hit you while you were eating your oatmeal or—” he pauses and finds the spot where Greg is sitting. “Or while you were drinking your third scotch.”
Suzanne sits through the compositions of the other composers, assuming the weight of Alex’s name is the reason they are scheduled last. Eric and Lisa-Natasha are up first, and Eric leaves immediately afterward, as though there is nothing to learn from the others. Their two pieces have some similarities, including evidence of mathematics-based training, reliance on percussion and bass to drive rhythm, and certain uses of atonality and line fracture that have become stock in any music wanting to proclaim itself postmodern. There are differences, too, mostly in mood, with Lisa-Natasha’s piece having a bit more fun than Eric’s, which is almost uniformly dark and, Suzanne guesses, self-pitying. Wishing Doug were at her side, if only for entertainment value, she jots down a few personality notes for him.
Bruce’s piece is also unsurprising given what she knows about him. It shows his classical training, his lifetime of experience in full orchestration, dependence on the violin roles, a pleasing if safe sense of symmetry, and a bright, exuberant sensibility. Paul’s work is more complicated and interesting. The ubiquitous note-counter tabulated his piece as having the fewest notes of all the compositions, and he draws many of them out, letting them reverberate in the hall’s still, cool air, reverberate in the listener’s ear. The composition is titled “Water,” and in it Suzanne feels water in a multitude of its forms. The music trickles, babbles, bubbles, sinks, gathers, roars, moves tidally in and out. Yet there’s nothing obvious or easy about how he’s done it. There is a bit of cleverness, but depth, too. Mostly it is lovely, nearly everyone agrees, and Suzanne looks at Paul with more respect, nodding when she catches his eye, glad that he seems pleased by his audience’s enjoyment.
Suzanne appreciates the institute’s willingness to produce such disparate works of music, its understanding that style is so often temporary in young composers, its desire to look beyond that for a more fundamental talent. All four pieces have been quite good, and she suspects the best is yet to come after the break, with Greg’s short symphony.
The music proves her right. Greg’s piece jumps in quality above everything else they’ve heard, and so she is surprised when two of the guest faculty voice sharp criticisms — not merely suggestions for the performance but actual dismissals of the work as a whole, words that cannot possibly help anyone a single day before a public performance. An older man leaps up to defend the piece, saying, “You can’t criticize it just because it’s a hundred times better than anything you ever wrote.”
Greg, who sits two rows in front of her, spins around and puts his hand alongside his mouth. “Oh, good, we get to hear a battle of the Old Schools. I don’t know whether it’s worse to be attacked or championed.”
“Your piece,” Suzanne says as the speaking men continue to argue. “Your piece is really great.”
His answer is simple — no puffing up but no false modesty, just an honest confidence. “Thank you.”
Maybe she’s so suggestible that Greg’s turning to talk to her prompts her to imitate the move, or maybe she can feel the gaze on the back of her head. She turns, and there is Olivia. Suzanne does not know how long she has been there, presumably since the end of the break, throughout Greg’s symphony and the discussion afterward.
There is something off about Olivia, or maybe on, some natural wildness she usually sleeks back, places under control. Maybe it’s just her hair, which now sprays loose about her shoulders. But there’s also again a strange set to her mouth. Though it’s not crooked, it reminds Suzanne of Ben’s mother on the boat at the scattering of Charlie’s ashes. Someone with a plan gone astray, someone letting something out of herself that she’s carefully hidden before.
“We’re up next,” Suzanne says just loudly enough to carry two rows. She spins back to face the orchestra, taking the deep inhalation that she has taken before every performance since her first recital in a church in South Philadelphia, wearing a dress her mother found at a consignment store, playing the Beethoven-for-kiddies piece well enough that everyone in the room knew she was different, knew she had something the rest of them didn’t.
The violist barely keeps up with the technical difficulty, but he gets through, and the double reeds play beautifully — better than she’s hoped or, more true, exactly as she’s hoped. She closes her eyes and tries to hear the relationships between the solo line, her moving line, and the full orchestra.
One of the guest faculty members halts the peculiar second movement and suggests a stronger entrance by the brass. “Also,” he says, “the strings are trying to rush the crescendos. Is that what you want?” he asks, turning to Suzanne. “It’s your job to speak up.”
From behind her she hears Olivia call out to the orchestra. “Let the conductor hold you, even slow down the crescendo at D. Too slow is better than too fast.”
Suzanne’s throat constricts, and she feels a twitch in a small muscle on the right side of her face. For that brief moment she thinks she is having a stroke. Her recovery is immediate, but still she remains silent, listening to the orchestra play out the Viola Concerto by Alexander Elling and Suzanne Sullivan. With full orchestration and herself in the audience instead of with bow in hand, she hears it for the first time. The concerto was written not to show her off but to ruin her. It was written not out of love but out of hatred.
Again her face twitches, followed by a crushing weight on her chest, and this time it feels not like a small stroke but like the end of everything. She has been wrong all along, spectacularly, humiliatingly, unbearably wrong. And now she has been undone.
As the conductor and concertmaster discuss strategies to prevent the audience from being fully duped and so angered by the false ending. Suzanne stands to leave.
She sees concern on Greg’s face and on Bruce’s, but only fascination on Lisa-Natasha’s as she tries to back away but instead leans over and vomits all over the empty seat in front of her.
Thirty-one
Alone in her room, her stomach empty and her arms weak, Suzanne raises her viola and plays the viola line as if for the first time. Just to be sure, she tells herself, though she already knows. She digs her bow hard into her strings, makes every crazy turn, every rise and fall, twisting at the waist so she will not miss a note. Her breath fails her more than once, her right arm aches, and her neck pinches. No matter how much she wants to distrust her instincts, the music is now obvious to her. The concerto is an act of retribution.
Suzanne feels stripped even of profound grief, and the emotion she is left with is shallow and pale, thin as gauze, its color washed away. Doloroso. But nothing more.
She can think of only two ways to stop the farce that Olivia has cast her in: she can call the music director or she can call Olivia. She spins out each scenario. The first one unfolds predictably: there is anger, a scratched program, upset musicians, public exposure, humiliation. The second she imagines in several alternatives, but the truth is that she cannot imagine what will happen if she confronts Olivia because she cannot imagine what Olivia will do. She has overestimated Olivia’s humanity and underestimated her brilliance. She does not know if Olivia cares if her whole plan is exposed — maybe the publicity is even what she wants. Almost certainly she will threaten to talk to Ben. She will tell Ben, and Suzanne will lose him, too.