Suzanne lets her weight shift from her legs and leans back, sinking slightly into the red leather curved by a body larger than her own. She sits on Alex’s chair, small within the depression made by his absent form, looking through his window, listening to his wife offer her coffee.
“No, thank you.” She settles further into Alex’s depression, trying to feel the shape as his embrace, wondering if she will smell him if she presses her face into the leather. A dirty shirt, she thinks, or his pillowcase. She wonders if she might be able to take something with his scent.
“Not taking a cup of my coffee doesn’t absolve you for sleeping with my husband,” Olivia says, her voice as cool as if she were talking about something that didn’t matter. “You did that. Maybe he was even going to leave me for you and you were going to let him. You know that, and I know that. You might as well have some coffee if you want some. You look tired.”
Suzanne feels the fatigue as gravity pulling at the corners of her eyes, as a weight in her cheekbones. On the plane — her first flight since Alex’s death — she wanted to sleep but was afraid that if she relaxed her mind, she would imagine the crash, feel Alex’s last terrible moments of life. And so she read with focus chapters of the autobiography of a man who lost his hearing and was fitted with a cochlear implant. A technophile, the author seemed most interested in how the implant made him a machine, in his need for software updates, in the pat irony that something artificial in the end made him more human. He was someone who grew up able to hear, who was restored rather than reinvented.
Suzanne read the description of the operation twice — how the surgeon bores through the base of the skull with a diamond-studded drill bit, how the nurse pours distilled water over the implant to protect it from static electricity, how the cut bone is reconnected with metal sutures. When she pictured not the man writing his story but instead the delicate place behind Adele’s small ear, she decided not to give the book to Petra. She slapped it softy shut and felt the coming of sleep like a slip of satin across her face. But the wisp of irrational thinking that precedes a nap floated down too late, coming as the pilot announced the plane’s final descent into Chicago, city of her lost lover, city of what she assumed was now her mortal enemy.
“I take it black,” she says. “No sugar.”
Returned with the service tray, Olivia asks, “What did you tell your husband this time?”
There is nowhere to set her cup without first standing, so Suzanne holds it on its saucer, a feat that requires both hands, and tries to sip the coffee down quickly, although it is very hot and the cup is very thin. “Nothing yet. I left while he was out of town, but I’m going to tell him the truth.”
Olivia’s composure breaks just slightly, a subtle collapse of her chin and slight alarm in her cool gaze. “The truth?” she repeats.
“A version of it.” Suzanne wants to stop there but knows that Olivia has brought her here to get something from her. She hopes that the more she gives Olivia up front, the less she will take in the end. “I’m going to tell him that I’ve been asked to arrange a posthumous viola concerto by Alex Elling. He’ll ask why me, and that I will lie about.”
When Olivia leaves the room to get the score, Suzanne rises and sets her cup and saucer on a side table across the room. She lifts a throw pillow from the sofa, presses it to her face, breathes in fabric. No Alex. She turns to the small fireplace, its narrow mantel, and there, in a dark wood frame, is Alex’s son. She has feared this son, terrified that he will look like his father and crack her heart. This is only his picture, and already it is worse than she feared: he does not look like his father but rather an even blend of his father and mother. Half Alex and half Olivia — proof of their union, proof of Alex’s permanent connection with Olivia, who has his pillow case, his dirty shirts, his chair, his large house, his child.
Olivia, who has returned holding a large folder. “You didn’t know he was composing.”
Suzanne shakes her head as she turns. Olivia reestablishes herself on the sofa, trousers holding their perfect center crease, blouse fresh. She is not a woman who rumples, and again Suzanne feels unkempt. Slovenly, her father once called her mother, who was working too hard and succumbing to the flu. Once Petra called herself a salope. “You know,” Petra said, “French for sloppy. Even sounds like it.” But later Suzanne read the definition in a French dictionary: bitch, slut, whore. She tries to smooth her hair with her hands, hoping their oil will calm the frizz, wishing she had taken the time to put it up.
“Do you suppose he told you everything?” Olivia does not quite face Suzanne as she speaks, offering instead a three-quarter view.
“Most things, yes, I did think that.”
“Did.” Olivia’s mouth pulls to one side, but the expression seems too sympathetic to be a smirk.
Suzanne presses a little harder; she wants to understand more than she wants to protect herself from this woman who certainly means her harm. “I don’t know why he would keep such a thing hidden from me.”
Olivia runs her hand up and down the envelope in her lap, just once in each direction, a tic almost under control. “Maybe he was embarrassed, insecure of the quality of his composition.”
“Alex wasn’t subject to self-doubt. He was one of the most assured men I have ever met.”
“Part of the attraction, I’m sure, but maybe he valued your opinion even more.”
There is some truth in this. It took a long while for Suzanne to overcome her belief that she wasn’t good enough for Alex, that he would leave her for someone more sophisticated, prettier, more talented, better bred. But finally she noticed that Alex depended as much on her as she depended on him. If she was critical or even neutral about a program he was considering he would grow agitated, or sometimes sullen, and later she would discover he had swapped pieces to win her approval. Once when he mused that he was going to start a program with Franck’s “The Accursed Huntsman,” Suzanne laughed and said, “Didn’t Franck’s students call him Pater Seraphicus?” The final program did not include the piece. And, more and more, particularly in the last year — the final year — Alex asked her opinion about questions of orchestration. How necessary is the brass strength? Heavier on the percussion? Can you hear the timpani? Would it work with strings only? She wondered sometimes if he was trying to push her to start composing, if despite his stated objections to composition he wanted her to do what she aspired to do. Now she wonders if he asked because he was the one beginning to write his own music.
Olivia watches her, raptor-like. “Or maybe you didn’t know him quite as well as you thought you did. Maybe you misread him.”
Yes, Suzanne thinks; she has spent her life getting everything wrong, not understanding what was right in front of her. She’s always felt like that: everyone else receives a graduation-from-childhood key to decipher human nature, but no one ever told her to get in line.
“Why didn’t you just send me the whole score?” Suzanne asks, returning to her chair, Alex’s chair. “Why make me come here?”
Olivia’s expression lowers. “I knew about you all along, you know, even your name, almost from the very beginning. I’ve heard your CD, seen your picture. Now you have to know who I am, what I look like.”