Suzanne took two steps back, then turned away, murmuring to be excused.
“But perhaps a fan of yours,” she heard the young woman say.
Fifteen minutes later Alex found her sitting on a bench at the side of the empty lobby downstairs. He was buoyant as he said, “I’ve been looking for you.”
“Not very hard,” she whispered.
“What are you talking about?”
She shrugged. “Let’s go, okay?”
He held open the door for her as they walked out to find dusk settling. She didn’t intend to, but when he put his arm around her bare shoulders, she condensed into herself. He dropped his arm and stepped in front of her, blocking her. “What’s wrong?”
“I feel like I can’t say anything about music to you, and then there you are pretending to like the concert.”
“What are you talking about?” His voice lifted, his father’s accent angling into his words. “I always ask your opinion about music, and I’m pretty sure we both thought that concert was about as bad as it gets.”
“But you were telling that woman otherwise.”
“Don’t be jealous. Don’t do that.”
“It’s hard to imagine you’d let her comment pass without a sneer if she wasn’t young and pretty.” Suzanne tried to step around him, but he held her shoulders tight with both hands. Her throat constricted as she softly croaked, “You let her make fun of me as though I wasn’t even there.”
“She’s a stupid girl. Stupid and pretentious. And I was ‘letting her comment pass’ because her father happens to be a philanthropist with a love of classical music. If you haven’t noticed, it takes money to run an orchestra. A whole fucking lot of money. Would you even have been interested in me if I wasn’t successful?” He dropped his grip on her shoulders and spun to the street, hailing a cab. “I can’t believe this.”
Two taxis passed before one stopped. In the back of the cab, Alex glared down his nose at her, then out the window, then back at her while the cab driver tried to make a left turn through heavy pedestrian traffic.
“Can’t you just drive around the block?” Alex yelled at the man.
“Almost got it, sir.”
“I’m sorry,” Suzanne said, her mouth heavy with silent crying. “But it was a fair response.”
“What the hell do you think I’m doing here? You think I flew to New York to see that crap? Or was it for the disgusting finger sandwiches?”
“I just want to be sure you’ll tell me if it’s ever over. I don’t want to be pathetic.” She was crying aloud then.
The cabbie made eye contact in the mirror as the car gained speed heading downtown. Out the window the street looked shiny with reflected orange light.
“It wasn’t ever going to be over,” Alex said.
“Wasn’t.” Her throat ached as she spoke. “I just don’t want to be a notch, one of many.”
“The last of many, Suzanne. You were going to be the last of many.” He turned from her, leaning forward, his arm a barrier. “Where are you from?” he asked the driver, cold and steady, as though Suzanne was not in tears, as though she was not in the car at all.
“Haiti,” said the man, “but now New York. I’ve been here a long time.”
Back at Alex’s hotel, Suzanne sat on the bed, contemplating catching the train back to Princeton even though she had made an excuse to be away for the night.
Alex sat at the desk, a map open under a lamp’s tight circle of yellow light, furiously writing on a notepad. He circled something with a flourish and threw the pad at her, its corner catching her leg. A tiny pain. “There,” he said.
On the lined paper he had written the location and date of every one of their assignations. There had been fourteen then, some lasting only a few hours and some spanning several days. The ink tallied the total miles driven, distances flown, circled the already staggering total. The precision of his memory stunned Suzanne. He remembered even a meeting she had forgotten: three hours in Wilmington, Delaware, on a bitterly cold January afternoon.
“The next time you have any doubts about how I feel about you, take a look at a fucking map.”
He’d grabbed her shoulders again then, removing her clothes with no hesitation, making love to her until neither of them was angry anymore. The next morning she woke to his renewed touch. His fingers combed her hair. His lips grazed her eyelids. “I’m sorry I get so angry,” he said.
She turned into him. “I’m sorry I get jealous.”
“I know my reputation, my track record, but you have to believe that I love you.”
“It’s not just jealousy, either, I think. It’s those people. When we were alone I felt beautiful.”
“You are beautiful.”
“But then we’re there and suddenly all I can think is that my pretty purple dress cost thirty dollars and everyone can tell.”
“There was no other woman in that room for me.”
She didn’t tell him that for almost a week before he arrived her concentration turned to powder, from the fear that he wouldn’t come and then from the excitement that he would. She didn’t tell him that she barely slept for several nights and had to force herself to eat, that she spent an entire afternoon trying on dresses before buying the purple one. She just nodded and said, “I also hate even the idea that this is some ordinary affair, that this is anything other than the love of my life.”
That night they had dinner with Piotr Anderszewski after hearing his airy Bach partitas from the center of Carnegie Hall’s tenth row.
“I am the love of your life,” Alex said when he put her on the train home, and she decided that she would refuse her jealousy from then on, that she would believe what he told her. She thought of it as a leap of trust, and the trust was no less firm for the size of the gap that had been crossed to land there.
Now the Haitian driver drops her in front of the Intercontinental, so she is alone when she realizes that the lie Alex told her that day in New York had nothing to do with the woman in the red dress. He lied to her about something more important than a flirtation: he lied to her about music. If he wasn’t already composing that day, certainly he was planning to, and he hid that from her even after she asked, “Is that why you don’t compose?”
She passes quickly through the heavy revolving door, around the central staircase leading to the mezzanine, across the lobby floor of mosaic tiles, embedded as tightly as memories. You are the last of many. When she checks in with a friendly woman in a blue blazer she smiles and says what she must: “I only need one key.”
Mercifully her assigned room has a different layout from the one she shared here with Alex, but the decor is similar enough to hurt her. Locked in, she realizes that she is fully alone for the first time in a long time, that there is no need to perform. She has held together in front of everyone: Ben, Petra, Adele, the quartet, the town, the people on the plane, Alex’s wife, even the cab driver. Now she dissolves. Her crying is as long as it is fierce, and when she is through she is dry of tears, more calm than tired. She unpacks her few things, folding her tee-shirt, setting her plane-sized cosmetics on the bathroom’s marble counter. She hangs her dress and, wearing panties and bra, slides the score from the envelope Olivia gave her.
Suzanne has never been a savant who can hear music in her mind by reading a score — she has never been able to compose, beyond the basics, without an instrument in reach — but visual score study was part of her training, and she can analyze written music by sight. She can skim for structure. In her hands is a concerto for viola and symphony. The solo is complete, but much of the orchestration is merely sketched.