She tightens her arm over the bows, having heard the stories of musicians leaving instruments in cars or on street corners. The violist who left his four-million-dollar Stradivarius in a taxi and celebrated its recovery by playing a concert for the Newark airport cabdrivers. The most famous missing American viola left on a Chicago curb as its owner climbed into a limo, an instrument that reappeared years later in a murder-for-hire scheme. The Italian virtuoso who lost two separate Amati violins — a decade being time enough, it seems, to forget a hard-learned lesson.
She cannot imagine New York without sound — the city is sound — but she tries to give Adele a day for her senses. They start with taste at an outdoor café across from Lincoln Center. Crunchy granola parfaited with creamy yogurt and fruit. Suzanne closes her eyes, feels the textures in her mouth, notices which part of her tongue tastes sour, which sweet.
The café is next door to an Italian restaurant where she once ate with Alex after a Friday morning Philharmonic performance. Joshua Felder was the soloist that day, playing Bartók’s unalloyed violin concerto. Afterward Alex told her that Felder would be the world’s top violinist within a year and that once he was he would give them a private performance. “Not really going out on a limb with that first claim,” she answered as they sat facing the street, autumn sun on their faces.
“But the second?” Alex asked.
“Far-fetched.”
“Maybe I have the goods on him.”
They laughed, and Suzanne forgot the remark until it came true, about a year later, when she entered Alex’s hotel room in San Francisco and the blindfolded Felder began to play.
Her throat trembles and her hand is shaking. Adele looks up at her, her alarm visible, and Suzanne closes the memory and throws away their almost empty parfait cups.
They walk west through Central Park. At the small zoo, they breathe in the musky smell of mammals and dirty-straw avian smells of the bird pens. At the Met they see the jeweled colors of the Asian tapestries, the intense pastels of the Impressionist paintings, the dark shadings of the German Expressionists, the panoramic view from the rooftop sculpture garden, where Alex once bought her a glass of good champagne served in a plastic flute. Up the street, Suzanne lets Adele choose from the case of pastries at the café in the Neue Gallery: a forest-fruit torte that feasts first their eyes and then their mouths. They stop next to ride the carousel. The air swirls as the carousel spins faster and faster and their animals rotate up and down amid the turning. Suzanne tries to imagine how the ride would feel if she couldn’t hear the calliope music, the cries and gasps of delighted children. She closes her eyes, shutting down one sense, but she knows that’s not the same thing at all.
When it’s time for the appointment, they make their way back down the city, to one of the few neighborhoods that still offers such ordinary goods and services as sewing-machine repair, pet supplies, and hardware. Doug’s shop is unmarked save for a simple name plate; he does not advertise, and he does not need to. There is an old-fashioned bell apparatus, and Adele pulls the cord, smiling when she sees the movement of the bells that she cannot hear. Suzanne once saw a catalog with a baby monitor for deaf parents; a light shines over their pillows when their baby cries at night.
Doug ushers them down the tight hallway and into his small, stuffed shop. He’s tall and muscled like a swimmer, noticeably handsome though his face sags a little, hound-like as if from gravity, and his skin has gone gray from two decades of nicotine. “I can’t quit now,” he always says in his bass speaking voice. “I’m no good to anyone with shaking hands. But I never smoke around the instruments. It alters the humidity.”
“The dangers of secondhand smoke,” Suzanne says before introducing him to Adele, saying, as she always says, “She’s a pretty good lip reader if you look her square on.”
He faces Adele, kneels, kisses her hand, says hello. Adele looks away and then back, uncomfortably pleased by the attention.
Doug straightens, stands again. “I’m checking out the condition of a stolen violin. Someone came in to have it appraised, and I recognized it from the registry. Told the guy I’d give him two hundred dollars and had him write down his name and address. I figured it would wind up being a donation, or maybe the musician would pay me back, but the guy actually wrote down his real address, and the police found him there.”
“An idiot?’
“He bought it online and said he didn’t know it was stolen. The owner plays for the Pittsburgh Symphony. I told her I’d check it out for her.”
“She leave it in the car?” Suzanne asks.
“Don’t know, but the guy who stole it had no idea how much it was worth. Banged it around a little and sold it cheap. But I think it’s all right — lucky violin.” Doug taps the instrument, front and back, with a rubber ball held by two stiff wires, a crude tool but his favorite for detecting open seams. “I really don’t get people who steal instruments. It’s not like taking money. It’s like stealing someone’s wife or husband. You just don’t do it. I like women — you know me — but when I hear the words I’m married or my husband, then it’s all off the table.” He looks up to wink. “Lucky for you.”
“I guess some people are just wired differently.” Suzanne watches his work, feels Adele’s thin arm twine into hers. “Something for your biographical theories.”
Across two years, Doug has expounded and refined a theory that all music is autobiographical, even for performers and certainly for composers. “As autobiographical as memoir,” he says, “though much harder to tease out.” Once he showed Suzanne a sketch of his ideas about the relationship among a composer’s life, basic temperament, historical period, and influences. He’d been trying to refine his thoughts into a formula, accounting for the fact that some life events are more overpowering than others, that some musical periods particularly reward conformity, that certain personality traits are most likely to influence a composer’s music. “Can you be a brilliant composer and an asshole?” he asked her once, and was surprised by the speed of her “Of course.”
Occasionally Suzanne tests Doug, playing a piece he’s unlikely to know and asking him to tell her about its composer. He’s accurate in broad strokes. It’s not hard to tell if a composer is generally intelligent or a musical savant, cool or expressive, happy or sad. It’s the fortune-teller’s art, and Suzanne’s never been tricked by a good palm reader. But lately Doug has been peculiarly right, spooking Suzanne like the time a state-fair psychic told her that her mother was dead and her father was a conspiracy theorist.
Suzanne and Adele watch as Doug rehairs Petra’s bow and then Suzanne’s. “They don’t kill the horses to get their tails,” Suzanne says as Adele fingers the two black tails hanging among the many white ones — a stable with no bodies — explaining the difference in sound between black and white, answering that yes, everyone in the quartet uses white hair, but a lot of bassists use black for a rougher sound.
“I say it every time, but this is a beautiful bow.”
Suzanne nods, slowly. “I’m very lucky with bow and viola.”