While she stifled her laughter, Alex asked her, cold, “Why did you marry your husband?”
She felt her mirth drain and somberness cross her, shadowlike. She thought about his question — how she might answer it — for what felt like too long.
“There were several reasons,” she told him finally, “including how serious he was about music. Really committed and really talented. I thought we would have this life of music, even that we would be at the center of something, though I guess there hasn’t been anything to be the center of for a long time. Not like eighteenth-century Vienna, nineteenth-century Paris.” She paused before striking a more embarrassing truth. “I also thought he would take care of me. He was confident and from a stable family with some money. Old Charleston. And he seemed like he was going somewhere, that he could make me safe and take care of our children. You know how I grew up.”
Alex nodded, simple understanding.
The other reasons, which were even less tangible, she kept to herself, not so much to protect Alex’s feelings but because she had no words that wouldn’t get them wrong.
Alex sipped tea, then looked into the bottom of his cup. “I married my wife for a similar reason. She was competent and elegant. She knows how to organize the bills and cancel a magazine subscription and make sure the car gets properly serviced and the gutter cleaners are called the month they’re supposed to be called. She knows how to dress for a morning meeting versus a cocktail party. She knows how the world works and how you’re supposed to live in it — the things I didn’t know. When you have a childhood like ours, normalcy is irresistible, no?”
Suzanne nodded. “You want things to work like they’re supposed to.”
“You want the house to be warm in winter and things to start when you turn them on and turkey to be roasting in the oven on holidays.” He turned his eyes but not his head sideways before continuing in a voice carrying traces of the accent that he had all but eradicated but that returned when he talked about his childhood. “When I was a kid, what I wanted maybe as much as anything else was automatic sprinklers like I saw in the middle-class neighborhoods. I thought those people were rich and that they knew how to do things. Our yard was a patch of dirt with a little strip of dead grass. My wife knows how to open up the yellow pages and find a land-scaper. She knows how to program the automatic sprinklers. She buys flowers from the nursery and makes the front of the house look nice all the time. She has made my work possible, by and large, and she knows how to put herself together for a fund-raiser and how to talk to those people I can’t stand, how to ask them for money.”
Suzanne swallowed her jealousy not just of his wife but of him. “Then why are we here now?”
“Great sex or a nice lawn? Grass isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” He squeezed her hand over the table. “Seriously, automatic sprinklers is a pathetic goal, the bent dream of a poor kid. Anyway, I’d argue that our spouses didn’t fully deliver on their end of the bargain, though probably yours more than mine. But that’s not my reason, and I don’t think it’s why you’re here, either.”
His directness made Suzanne nervous. It was the sort of conversation that could be irrevocable, that could change her life if she wasn’t careful. And still she felt gnawing envy of Alex’s wife, of his success, of his entire life. Around them the good cheer from the shared birthday song lingered, and people’s words bounced, jovial. She set down her fork and waited for Alex to finish his answer, worried that he would describe their relationship as a symptom of mental illness or an act of self-destruction. “Why are we here?” she asked, her question almost a whisper.
“Because we fell in love,” he said, holding her forearm now, rubbing the inner crook of her elbow hard with his thumb. “We’re here because we fell in love.”
He asked her about her life’s other defining choice — why she had chosen the viola — and she told him the story of Charlene Ling.
“My mother put a violin under my chin when I was eight.”
“Two years too late,” Alex interrupted.
“An unrecoverable edge,” she continued. “But I had talent and a good teacher and I might have kept going with it, except I had the misfortune to attend middle school with Charlene Ling.”
“Arguably the best violinist in the country after Felder. But that’s good fortune that you switched. You were made for the viola.”
“Aside from all the jokes.” Suzanne smiled. “If you happen to play in the school orchestra with someone on her way to being the world’s best, you don’t think, ‘I’ll be second best in the world.’ You think there’s a Charlene Ling in every school in every city in every country and that the world doesn’t have enough orchestras for you to have a chair anywhere.”
She did not add that the greatest anxiety of many female musicians is not stage fright but the creeping fear that they will wind up spinster music teachers surrounded by instrument-wielding children who aren’t theirs and a pack of mewing cats who are.
“But you didn’t give up music.”
She shook her head. That had never been an option for her, not ever. “Switched to a less competitive instrument, at least at my school, and got to be first viola instead of second fiddle.”
Alex lifted his chin to acknowledge her small pun, but he let her continue talking.
“I figured I’d be visible, marry a visiting conductor, and travel the world happily ever after with my famous husband.”
“The cult of the conductor. Everyone wants us.” He paused from his food, spread his hands, grinned. “And now you have me.”
Suzanne shrugged, thinking still of his wife, the woman who knew how to dress, how to get things done, how to raise money. “I do and I don’t. Anyway, I was twelve then, prone to romantic fantasy.”
“And so then what happened?”
“I fell in love with the viola.”
Suzanne hears the door push open, a jangle of bells.
“Sorry I’m late,” Petra says, sitting down, grabbing the menu. “I’m starving.”
With sudden clarity that constricts her lungs, Suzanne remembers what Alex ordered that day: tomato-lentil soup and a rice dish with dried fruit and nuts. This is what she asks for when the old man comes to take their order.
Petra orders her meal and bread for the table. “Do you have a wine list?”
“Sorry, no liquor license,” he says, retreating with their menus. “I’ll bring you tea.”
“Is that why you picked this place?” Petra asks, joking but her voice stretched just a little tight.
“I’ll buy you a bottle on the way home if you’ll indulge a side trip.”
Suzanne tries to feel Alex in the smell of the steam rising from the raisin-studded rice, in the tanginess of the soup, in the texture of the soft, warm bread she tears with her fingers. She wishes she had asked that day, when she could have asked him, what he meant about his wife not holding up her end of the bargain. She wishes she had asked to see a picture so that now she could match a face to the voice she has heard through her phone. She wonders if Olivia simply wants to torment her or if there’s more, and she wonders how far she’ll go. A woman who knows how to get things done.
“It’s time to swallow, honey.”
Suzanne looks up. “What?”
“You’ve chewed that bite like sixty times,” Petra says. “Tell me it’s not a diet. You’re getting way too skinny.”
Suzanne shakes her head. “I’m not trying to lose weight.”
Twelve