Suzanne remembers one of her early assignations with Alex, an orchestrated meeting in the improbable city of Cleveland. She thinks of Olivia home alone, or with the son, knowing where her husband was, why and with whom.
Olivia’s sideways smile returns, and now it looks as though it could be a smirk. “And we are just getting started.”
Since retreat does not seem open, Suzanne pushes forward. “Can I see more of the house?”
“Tomorrow, after my son leaves town and you come back. I do apologize about the hotel, but you should have waited until tomorrow, as I said. I would have paid the difference in flights. Money is nothing for me in this.”
Suzanne nods, though the idea of money being meaningless is not something she has ever understood. Maybe the closest she has come were those times with Alex, those times she said, Let’s get the real champagne or This meal is on me as though she were a person who could say such things all the time.
“And tomorrow, when you come back,” Olivia says, “I’ll show you his study. I’ll show you where he ate the breakfast I cooked for him every morning he was at home. I’ll show you our bedroom.” She says bedroom slightly more slowly than her other words and then pauses. “I imagine he told you we rarely slept together.”
The word rarely bites Suzanne. Never is what Alex told her. I haven’t slept with my wife in seven years, and I will never sleep with her again. She believed him, nearly completely, even as she knew it was the kind of lie people tell in situations like theirs, even though she could not say the same thing. Still she believes him, and she suspects that Olivia is trying to trip her up, to erode her faith in Alex. She is trying to inflict pain.
“It’s not a subject that came up. It was never about you.” Suzanne can feel the small square of her own chin, pointed straight to the ground instead of lifted as it is when she curves over her viola. It is pointing down so she will give away nothing. In her posture she holds her version of Alex away from his wife, holds it for herself.
“Really?” Olivia asks, gazing through the glass waves of the window as if, though surely not, she is disinterested. “Because for me it was always very much about me. A difference in perspectives, no?”
“We just didn’t talk much about other people, except for musicians.” Suzanne steps forward to take the envelope with Alex’s score, anxious to be alone with it, the one thing Alex may have left that is hers alone: music written by him for the instrument she plays.
People often call a musical score a piece of music, but of course it is only the two-dimensional representation of a complex experience. Yet unlike a photograph or a birth certificate, it is a representation that preserves not just a moment but the full music itself, protecting it intact through years of neglect or disinterest, making it possible at any moment, allowing it to be played centuries later. Cryogenics for songs and symphonies, Alex said once. Are not lost Verdi operas found and played? Do not university choirs perform chorales not heard by any ear since sung by medieval priests?
If she can play this score, breathe life into the composition, she can resuscitate Alex, at least an Alex. The music in Olivia’s hand promises a communion between the living and dead, a way to share time with the man she loved. She takes the envelope.
“It will be difficult,” Olivia says, “to fill in another person’s gaps, figure out what someone else meant, was thinking and feeling. He’d only just begun the orchestration. But it shouldn’t be too hard for you.” Olivia produces again the full but flat smile. “Since you knew him so very well.”
Suzanne gestures to the coffee cup, to be polite, to deflect Olivia’s clinical gaze.
Olivia waves away the suggestion. “I’ll take care of it. It’s nothing, in the scheme of things,” she says. “And you, you will start work tomorrow and stay until you can play the solo for me. Then you’ll go home and work on the arrangement, and then we’ll see about getting an orchestra.”
“You’re asking me to do something I can’t do. I can play the solo for you, but I’m not a composer.”
“You started to be; you wanted to be. You’ve had the theoretical training. You help arrange music for your quartet.”
“A full orchestra has eighty instruments. I don’t know what to do with the brass, the winds, the percussion.”
“You took advanced instrumentation and orchestral writing. I’ve seen your transcript; did you know that? I know every retreat and fellowship and residency you’ve ever been offered.”
Suzanne does not want to respond to this, but instinctively she mouths, “How?”
“Did you think I wouldn’t want to know whom my husband was sleeping with?” Olivia shrugs. “You do the best you can, and we’ll see if we can get it premiered. Maybe here — his orchestra — or else Philadelphia. Which do you think for Alexander Elling’s unveiling?”
“You are deluded if you think a major orchestra is going to perform anything I arrange.”
“Maybe your husband can help you.” Her whisper is loud. “So Chicago or Philadelphia?”
“Chicago — that’s an easy choice.” But even as Suzanne says this, she hesitates. Maybe Alex would have wanted it performed in Philadelphia, after everything, despite his venom for the city of his scarred childhood. Maybe he would have viewed it as the ultimate triumph over that childhood.
She is already considering Olivia’s question — where the concerto will be performed and not whether it should be. That, she understands, is how powerful Olivia is.
Fourteen
Because she does not want to ask Olivia to use her phone, or even to have Olivia see her phone for help, Suzanne walks several blocks with viola and roller bag so that she is out of view when she uses rationed cell phone minutes to call information and then for a taxi. This is not a neighborhood of taxis, except perhaps those arranged by homeowners for early-morning trips to the airport, and the wait is nearly thirty minutes. The minutes sag as Suzanne sits on her suitcase at the corner she named for the dispatcher by reading the street signs, imagining in each upstairs window of each house a pair of eyes, watching her. She looks as though she has been evicted, or perhaps as though she is fleeing an unstable marriage.
The driver, a large, dark man, smiles broadly at her, taking the trouble to get out, put her bag in his trunk, open the back door for her. She keeps her Klimke and Alex’s score, resting them on her lap. She names a hotel where she has been with Alex — emotionally dangerous, and probably expensive, but there’s comfort in the familiar and relief in having a place to name, as though she belongs somewhere and is doing what she is supposed to be doing. She sinks back, her hands lightly weighting the score on her viola, and gazes out the side window. Her view crowds as they move from the large, widely spread estates near the lake to the smaller and more varied houses of the inner suburbs, which give way to the less orderly shapes of the city itself, a city that still feels small to Suzanne, who grew up knowing wide Philadelphia and tall New York. Occasionally she meets the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Finally she asks him where he’s from.
He grins and says, “Haiti” in a series of short syllables, three or four of them rather than two.
“Port-au-Prince?”
He shakes his head, the gesture large and amused. “No, no, I am a village boy.”