Preceding the concerto’s three movements is the introduction Petra tapped out that first day, an opening whose ending upbeat is rhythmic. Perhaps it is a nod to Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra because throughout the first movement the main theme is prepared by a long crescendo that repeats the initial part of its motive over a subtonic rising through the orchestra — another move found in the Bartók. Suzanne sees it as the stretched curl of a wave, the kind of surf Charlie dreams of.
She senses as well the influence of Hindemith and nods to the nineteenth century in particular uses of sonata form. An interesting twist to Alex’s fundamental conservatism? Clever. Toward the end of the first movement, there is space for an improvised cadenza. A direct challenge to the violist, perhaps.
The second movement is one of the strangest stretches of music she has ever read. It is traditional in its use of suspense-generating techniques, but it lacks the formal symmetry and stability suggested by the first movement, the symmetry and stability she would have expected from Alex. The articulation into sections is at best partial, due not only to open, even deceptive cadences but also to elision in the viola line itself. This elision denies respiration to the soloist as well as to the audience. Another challenge, this one as much physical as creative. No catching your breath. The movement is further destabilized and made unpredictable by the inclusion of significant new material, even in the stretches of recapitulation. Music that makes its own rules only to break them.
Merely seeing the music in black and white, Suzanne knows that it calls for incredible virtuosity. Alex was ever skeptical of the virtuosic, nearly disdainful. No Liszt fan, he. She stops breathing, as though she is in a real wave, and finally inhales sharply, a gasp. If Alex was writing for the viola, he was writing for her. She cannot guess whether this piece was supposed to be a challenge or a tribute, or whether it was written in sheer overestimation of her ability. Her hands tremble as she reads on, the movement animating the pages she holds.
As the final movement rises to its climax, it covers an increasingly wide register — again the Bartók influence — but it also raises harmonic tension. Yet the ending is false, and the piece moves on to a modified Beethoven scherzo, a small pow, followed by a diminishing line in which the orchestra slowly disappears, leaving the viola alone in a bizarre fall that halts before it fully fades away. Piling it on, Alex would say if someone else had written it.
Suzanne has never seen a piece of music like this. She understands now why Alex might have kept this work to himself, and she fears learning whether he was even more brilliant as a composer than as a conductor and arranger or whether he misguidedly assembled a clumsy bag of tricks. For you. She imagines a great poet, a formalist, writing his worst, most sentimental and sloppy poem out of love and then finding it published against his will because he is famous.
She will know whether the music works or fails absurdly only when she hears it, but already she knows that the piece is nearly unplayable. Perhaps, she thinks, he was taunting her, paying her back for defending Berio’s circular-breathing excesses. Even at the basic physical and technical level, even with the emotional terror locked away, it will take her full skill.
She takes her viola from its case and stands over the score laid out on the high bed, the sheets of paper now looking almost harmless against the red bedspread. She plays through as best she can, straining to sustain the highest note her instrument is capable of, exhausting herself with the complicated fingerings and hand shifts, elbow pinching from the acrobatic bow work, patching through to the final eerie note.
An impossible piece of music, yes, but if she can ever play it well, then gorgeous, disturbing, harrowing genius.
Fifteen
Suzanne does not remember the dream, yet waking feels like escaping someone else’s brain, as though she’s been imprisoned in another head and is running down a foreign tongue, panicked to breathe fresh air before she is closed in forever.
After showering she dresses in jeans and tee-shirt, sandals and silver hoops. Fuck Olivia. She will go as herself, wear her regular uniform into battle; she doesn’t have to pretend to be a better self, a put-together self, a composed woman. Alex loved me.
Downstairs she carries a paper cup of coffee across the lobby and down the hall to the business center, which is cramped in comparison to the otherwise extravagantly spacious hotel. In the breezeless room, she returns a short message from Adele: “I miss you, too!”
There is also an email from Daniel. “I’m in love, really in love. Don’t worry, it’s not with you this time, or even Petra. I know I just met her, but I’m going to marry her. You’re a romantic still, right? So tell me you’re happy for me.”
“You know me,” Suzanne writes back. “Sucker for a happy ending. Send me an invitation. p.s. Who the hell is she?” As she hits send she remembers seeing Daniel walking toward Linda at the party as she played with her daughter and Adele. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. Maybe Daniel’s proposing to her, to the only widow Suzanne knows, other than Olivia.
The next new email is from Petra. Suzanne scrapes her teeth over her bottom lip. Olivia asked what she’d told Ben, but the person Suzanne lied to about this trip was Petra. Her story was fabrication: she needed to lay filler to finish up some old studio tracks in order to be paid for work she’d done before the founding of the Princeton Quartet. So she not only lied to Petra but asked Petra to lie by not telling Anthony, who might not approve of her taking outside work at this point in their performance cycle. Her story was plausible enough, and certainly it wouldn’t cost Petra much to withhold a small secret from Anthony. Petra agreed to do so if the lie was one of omission. “I hate saying things that aren’t true,” she said. Still Suzanne’s stomach pinches at the idea, and she knows she will have to figure out a way to seem to have more money than she did, to cut some hidden corner and offer the savings to Petra for Adele’s surgery. She lowers her head, realizing the worst of what she’s done: she has used Adele, telling Petra they needed the time alone because Adele was becoming more attached to Suzanne than to Petra. She stares at her hands on the keyboard, hands that belong to someone who would manipulate the affections of other people. Perhaps this is how it happens: You slip along and have your reasons, and one day you wake up as a bad person.
She opens Petra’s email, which holds news: Anthony has run the numbers. Princeton is against the war, or at least against war. “He wants to perform the Black Angels Quartet, with maximum publicity and a live recording.” He’s calculated that it’s a risk but not much of one if they work very hard and play very well and look very good doing it. “He thinks there could be real money in it, that this could make us nationally,” Petra concludes. “He’s already asked for you and me to wear our hair down for the performance. Asshole!”
Relieved that Petra seems to be herself again, Suzanne writes, “You know me, slut like you. I’ll play anything, and I’ll have fabulous hair.”
The next email, from Anthony himself, links to a list of ideas for increasing concert attendance. Developed by members of a children’s orchestra in Texas, the list includes guerrilla performances in public places, door prizes, costumed events, and the participation of pop singers. “Just throwing it out there,” Anthony’s note says. “Keep an open mind, you guys.”