“But now Chicago,” Suzanne says.
On the night of one of her ugliest fights with Alex, their taxi driver had been Haitian, though they had not talked to him enough to find out if he was from capital or village.
The evening had started well, the weather beautiful enough to walk to the Upper West Side venue from Alex’s Murray Hill hotel, where they’d spent the entire day. They were on their way to a performance that Alex had to attend. It would be awful, he warned her, but it was one of the reasons he was in town and a favor to a friend as well.
In a dark purple sleeveless dress, Suzanne felt as she often did walking next to Alex: beautiful and important. Whenever she turned a man’s head, Alex put his arm around her or reached to hold her hand, and she felt specially claimed. Mostly, though, they walked with a slight gap between them, a space that felt not empty but magnetized. “Anyone who looks at us can see that we are lovers,” Alex said, and she believed it was true.
As they crossed Central Park, Alex asked her about Ben’s work.
“He’s working on something new,” she told him. “He wants to extend some of what Janáček was after in his last pieces. He’s connecting largely through the math, using certain identity permutations.”
“You husband sounds like an interesting guy.”
Suzanne faltered in her response, unsure what Alex was after. Finally she settled on a quiet “Yes.”
“Is he good? Is he a real composer?”
Suzanne nodded because yes, Ben was a talent.
“At least he’s not into minimalism.”
“No one really is anymore,” Suzanne offered.
“It’s still played enough. Just yesterday I saw that guy advertised in the Voice as ‘being on a first-name basis with Philip Glass.’ Made me ill just reading that.”
“The public’s always a bit behind the game, no?” Suzanne drifted closer so that her arm brushed Alex’s, hoping to bring him back from his line of thought with her physical presence.
“It’s as big a problem in music as in art. Once you’re about an idea and not about the medium, you’re in trouble. Composers should leave the concepts to the philosophers and writers, who might have the talent for it. Take a look at what’s being performed. Operas based on David Lynch movies — is that all they can come up with?”
She wanted to tell him about the beautiful composition she’d played at a conductors institute the previous summer — penned by a young music professor in South Carolina — but she didn’t know how to make a space for her own ideas in Alex’s black-and-white pronouncement. She imagined him disparaging academics and thinking her naive. It wasn’t until later in their relationship that she realized he valued her opinions, that he wasn’t testing her to see if she was smart, that she didn’t always have to be on her intellectual toes the way she had to be with Ben. So on that day she laughed and held his arm, wanting only to maintain their closeness. “Is that why you don’t compose?”
“That’s part of it,” he said, and they walked on, exiting the park and heading farther west to the small auditorium, which was located in a 1970s office building whose exterior in no way suggested that it held a performance space.
Even when they were not in Chicago, people at concerts recognized Alex, and Suzanne was already practiced in being with-but-not-with him. When two men came to shake his hand, she excused herself to the bathroom. Between conversations he slipped her a ticket, and she went first into the auditorium, Alex joining her just moments before the lights dimmed. He did not take her hand but pressed his leg against hers in the dark.
The first piece was an appalling exaggeration of serial music. The composer played electric violin and was accompanied by a dancer of sorts — the program called him a movement artist — encased in black leggings and turtle-neck. Summoning her natural compassion for any performer, the empathy borne of kinship, she kept her eyes forward, afraid that her smile might turn to laughter if she glanced at Alex. To make time pass, she counted the ratio of heads to empty chairs in the rows in front of them: the theater was not quite half full.
The beginning of the main fare suggested something better. The composer-pianist had broken apart Bartók’s piano sonatas, filling in the spaces with his own measures. The music was beautiful and made new, as though the composer had cracked open a geode, separating the sparkly, faceted pieces, revealing something previously hidden. But then the silent woman standing near him onstage made a circle of her mouth and let out a chilling note before chanting in a strangely high monotone: a poem by Wallace Stevens, word by slow word. She could imagine Ben, an opera hater who believed that words and music were incompatible, noncomplementary languages, standing indignantly and huffing from the room before the chanter made it through the poem’s first stanza. She felt Alex, who usually sat preternatu-rally still at concerts, flinch in the seat beside her, a spontaneous aversion he covered by switching the cross of his legs, folding his arms, sinking back further in his chair as though anxious for an extra inch between him and the horror on stage.
The reception was held on the second floor of the same building, in a large conference room whose burgundy, blue, and rose paisley carpet belonged in a movie-theater lobby. The swirling patterns and the quick glass of inexpensive champagne tilted Suzanne’s perception, and she felt ill at ease as the room filled. She skirted its circumference, sampling warm grapes and cheese and miniature quiches, hoping the food would serve as ballast. She determined to be happy and charming, to be what Alex wanted her to be, to be the woman he had flown from Chicago to be with.
When she felt a little better, and when enough time had passed that she and Alex could slip away, she found his head among the crowd and wove her way to the center of the room, where he was talking to a tall brunette in a red dress. The young woman was pretty in the way that Suzanne had been at twenty-two. Her hair was the same unusual shade of brown, and she had narrow hips and breasts of a certain shape and lift, though she was half a foot taller than Suzanne had ever hoped to be.
Suzanne felt her pulse in her carotid artery, felt fingers of heat climbing her neck, touching her face, which she knew must look red. Jealousy, she named for herself, hoping to douse it by identifying it. She felt low to the ground. She’d worn ballet flats instead of heels because of the long walk, but now she had blisters on the backs of her heels anyway. She tried to smile.
“I don’t think I ever understood that poem until today,” the young woman was telling Alex.
The comment would ordinarily have infuriated Alex, but instead of walking away, instead of soliciting Suzanne as a mocking conspirator, he discussed the poem and delivered trivia about Stevens. He was smiling more than usual — it was something he usually forgot to do — and smoothing his hair with his free hand the way he had those first few times he’d spoken to Suzanne. She’d been warned right away, by one of the bassists in St. Louis, about Alex’s reputation as a womanizer.
Alex turned to her now. “And what did you think of the Bartók?”
Suzanne wanted desperately to say something smart, but her mind felt wavy. She tried to assemble a sentence to explain how she felt the composer had cracked open the sonatas to find something new and beautiful inside.
“But the poem,” the tall young woman said. “Don’t you think that’s where the real innovation lies? Anyone can do deconstruction.”
Her pulse still throbbing in her neck, Suzanne reached for something to say. “I think words and music are incompatible, noncomplementary languages.”
The woman laughed, tossing her hair behind her shoulder in a move that elongated the triangle between them, bringing her closer to Alex and making Suzanne the outlier. “It seems we’re not in the presence of an opera fan.”