Yet Suzanne has always suspected the story is a half truth, an excuse authored by Schumann himself, or perhaps by history, to explain his choices. It was well and fine for Clara to play for the public, but Schumann would rather spend those hours composing new music or writing about it.
Suzanne wonders how they did it all. They were, after all, parents of eight children, five of whom survived childhood. It’s always mentioned that way in the history books: five surviving children. Maybe the thinking is that parents in the eighteenth century expected several of their children to die, but can it really be that they didn’t suffer as much? Suzanne has imagined the Schumann household in the days following the death of a child and wondered if music was played and, if so, which pieces and by whom. After she lost the baby, she couldn’t play for six weeks, and she and Ben barely spoke to each other for much longer.
“How’s your mother?” she asks him now.
“The same, okay, and my sister. They said hello.”
Petra takes the bag of groceries from Suzanne and drops a stack of mail on the cypress buffet in front of her.
“How’s Charlie?”
There’s a static-filled pause, as though Ben is calling from across the world.
“I don’t know. I guess he’s okay. He hurt his knee and couldn’t surf for a while, which my mother of course sees as providence.”
Suzanne musters a laugh, which is followed by another long pause. It grows longer, and Suzanne flips through the mail, determined not to speak first, not to carry the conversation that Ben initiated by calling. She sorts junk mail from the bills, which she stacks neatly, then pauses at a manila envelope with no return address and an Illinois postmark.
“I just called to say hello,” Ben says.
“Okay, thanks for that. I’ll see you soon, yeah? Or are you staying?”
“I think I’ll head back early next week, probably drive straight through.”
“Stay longer if you want.” She pulls at the envelope with her teeth, tearing it unevenly open in her hurry.
“I promised Kazuo I’d be back by weekend after this, so maybe I’ll stay on into next week, if you’re sure.”
“All under control here,” Suzanne says flatly.
They say good-bye, and Suzanne extracts the contents of the envelope with a shake and a pulclass="underline" a music score. It looks like any other computer-generated score except that it is smaller in size than most, with more lines to the page, and so rather elegant, its glossy black notes close together. There are a few penciled notes and instructions, written in two hands — one unknown to Suzanne and the other unmistakably Alex’s.
The page is trembling when Petra startles her from behind, her breath in her ear. “What do you have there?”
“I think I’m holding the score to a viola concerto,” she says because there is no other answer. “I’ve never seen it before.”
Petra plucks the sheet from her hand and takes it to the piano. Standing in the kitchen with her eyes closed, Suzanne hears Petra play the agitated opening theme.
In the four weeks since Alex’s death, Suzanne has survived minute to minute, breath by breath, muting herself, fleeing to the past as often and as fully as she can, hiding in the shallowest present she can make, as numb as she can will herself to be.
Now, on the one-month anniversary of the plane crash that killed her lover, as she listens to Petra play the horribly beautiful music, feeling returns to Suzanne like the excruciating tingle of blood circulating in a limb that has fallen asleep. Pain.
II. Agitato
Thirteen
She must have watched Suzanne come up the walk, because Olivia opens the door even as she knocks. Usually Alex called her my wife, or simply, with the power of an incantation, she. As in: She just pulled up; I have to go. Or: I can’t get out tonight to call; I think she is suspicious. Or, some days: She is making me angry enough to leave her; do you think the quartet would consider relocating?
Still, Olivia’s is a name Suzanne has heard often enough, and yet she is unprepared for the woman. She is unprepared for the elegant lines of her face or the way her straight posture, combined with her height, makes her regal. A Greek rendering of a goddess, an Athena, stepping past middle age with grace. Her hair is not graying or salt-and-pepper — the words Alex casually tossed — but gloriously silver and black, sleek, coiled into a smooth chignon at the nape of her long neck. Alex did not warn Suzanne that Olivia’s dark eyes are so large they relegate her other features and drain her face of specific age. Before her now, Olivia dwarfs Suzanne in inches, in poise, and, Suzanne fears, every measure that matters.
Suzanne feels like something flimsy and easily crumpled. Toss her in a can, or just light a match nearby.
She finds her voice. “Olivia,” she says, because “Mrs. Elling” seems even more preposterous.
Olivia wears her smile evenly, and someone else might take it for warm. Her handshake is cool yet full with touch and generous with energy as she says, “Ours is a peculiar meeting, no?”
Suzanne only nods. Under Olivia’s aggressive composure she feels frizzy and unkempt, lacking in grace, sour smelling from the too-warm airplane. Her once smart travel dress has lost its form through many washings and now hangs loose, a frumpy sheath that makes Suzanne look thick-waisted though she is not. Olivia wears gray trousers and a pale green blouse, both crisp and wrinkle free. As if to prove her unworthiness, Suzanne says, “You are not what I expected.”
“It’s funny that you should say so, because you are precisely what I expected.” Olivia pulls the door open wider, stepping back for Suzanne to pass.
As Suzanne penetrates the Elling residence, she recognizes objects often described to her, but the house is much larger than she anticipated, larger than the house she pictured when Alex told her that he loved his little place with its peek at the lake, that his little house was all he needed until she was all he needed.
I am sitting in the red chair, he would say. The plate glass is old, and so the gazebo in the yard looks like it is melting in the sun. Trace the lines of your right hand and describe them to me.
Or: I am sitting in the red chair, leaning back. Lie on your bed and tell me what you are wearing. Is your pillow soft or hard? Are you on your stomach or your back? Turn onto your stomach.
Or: I am sitting in the red chair. Take out your viola and play for me. Be sure to put the phone close so I can hear. Brahms today. I want to hear you play Brahms.
Olivia offers her the red chair, and Suzanne perches on it. The old plate-glass window looks wavy, and when the sun emerges from a passing cloud the gazebo in the yard looks as though it is melting. But Alex misled her about the house: it is not small. It is bigger than anywhere Suzanne has ever lived.
As Suzanne scans the living room, she notes that if Olivia failed to keep some part of the marital bargain, it is in an unseen way. The house is kept. The room mixes deep red, pale blue, and dark wood, a combination more attractive than Suzanne would have thought. The furnishings match in style and in proportion, as though planned and purchased at the same time — something Suzanne has never known outside Ben’s mother’s home, whose furnishings Suzanne finds overly ornate and oppressive, dusty feeling even when clean. The room she sits in now is airy and uncluttered, but the chairs and sofa are substantial within their clean lines. The colors are balanced, and the total effect is of composure. It is a very nice room, a place where someone would want to live, even more so if that someone grew up unhappy in a dingy row house in north Philadelphia.