Having squandered too much on yesterday’s taxis, and because she is up early, Suzanne navigates Chicago’s public transportation. After a ride in a crowded L-car that smells weirdly like sugar, a bus carries her from the urban to the suburban. Its belly is empty save for half-a-dozen young women who speak to each other in Spanish. They disperse at Suzanne’s stop, which is the end of the bus line. Suzanne has about a mile farther to walk, but the day is pleasant and she wishes the walk would take forever. The idea of returning to Alex’s house — Olivia’s house — is as frightening as being trapped in the mind she awoke from.
The houses she passes proclaim upper-middle-class respectability. Though Suzanne knows that unhappiness can invade any home, seeping through its cracks as easily as the scent of honeysuckle or skunk, and that all people are deeply strange when you really know them, it’s hard to imagine anything but perfectly browning apple pies, badminton games in the backyard, dinners eaten in the comfortable knowledge of growing stock portfolios.
Books romanticize the starving composer who survives on half a loaf of bread, but Suzanne suspects that comfort, or at least stability, are better friends to art than is squalor. Bach was poor, feeding all those mouths on an organist’s take-home pay, but the income was regular, and feed the mouths he did. Suzanne thinks of George Crumb, composer of the antiwar music they will soon prepare for performance. He taught at Penn State for three decades before retiring to the comfortable home in which he and his wife of fifty years raised their children. A wonderfully ordinary life from which he wrote some of his century’s most interesting music.
Despite Doug’s biographical theories, Suzanne wonders if music doesn’t exist outside its circumstances, standing alone across time, carried into the future by its score, its origins and motivations and even subject matter ultimately irrelevant. Its composer’s life irrelevant. So why not a long, happy marriage? Why not a nice home with well-adjusted children, funded by a dependable salary? Ben always asks why happiness should be anyone’s primary goal, but can’t someone write great music and lead a normal, happy life? Crumb is not the only example, yet Suzanne has never expected to be happy. Even her relationship with Alex was more about compulsion than the pursuit of joy. And now — now she does not deserve to be happy.
Again Olivia seems perfectly ready for her. In a long, simple dress she looks even more elegant than she did yesterday, and the house smells of baking, of something yeasted and sweet. A guest bedroom has been prepared: tightly made bed with towel and washcloth folded on its corner, fresh irises, water pitcher, and magazines on the nightstand. Everything suggests a welcome visitor.
Suzanne sets her suitcase and viola on the taut bed, startled when she realizes that Olivia has reappeared behind her, in the doorway.
“I’ll give you the tour before you get started.”
As they walk through the house, Suzanne cannot hear her own footsteps. A ghost haunting Alex’s house, she feels in long moments that he is the one alive, merely away on a short tour, about to phone home from Vienna.
Olivia leads her first to the music library, which comfortably holds a Bösendorfer baby grand at its center. In one corner is an armchair, a small stereo system, and, held upright by stands, two violins, a viola, and a cello. An inanimate quartet. In another is a cabinet, which Olivia opens to reveal smaller wind instruments, metronomes, wood blocks, papers, clips, pens. The room’s side walls and most of the near wall, save for the doorway, are fully shelved, filled top to bottom with CDs, books, score binders. The far wall is split by French doors that open into the backyard. Suzanne sees the gazebo, Olivia’s gardens, a sliver of Lake Michigan.
“This is where he worked and where you will work, in the conservatory.”
The conservatory.
Alex always called it the library or the music room. His jump in class — a leap achieved partly through self-manufacture but also through marriage — was not singular and clean, though he said he sometimes felt more relaxed with the upper class than the middle. “So many eccentrics, and such good educations.”
Despite his soft spot for Verdi, Alex mocked the composer’s self-proclaimed anti-intellectualism. Verdi, born five months after Wagner, writing at the age of fifty-six: “There is hardly any music in my house. I have never gone to a music library, never to a publisher to examine a piece. I keep abreast of some of the better contemporary works not by studying them but through hearing them occasionally at the theater.” He insisted, “I am the least erudite among past and present composers.”
“Can you imagine admitting that, much less bragging about it?” Suzanne once asked, Alex’s hand on the small of her back as she lay on a hotel bed. Now she can remember the bed, what the room looked like, but not which city they were in.
“Sure,” he answered, hand following the curve, “because he was lying through his teeth.”
Olivia shows Suzanne every room except the son’s closed bedroom. There are many, including three bathrooms. Each room is clean, airy, and decorated with both taste and real money. They reach the far end of the house. “Our bedroom.”
Suzanne absorbs the high queen-sized bed, the matching nightstands, the reading chair and ottoman, the elaborate draperies — a cool green. Alex and Olivia’s bedroom. Suzanne points to the head of the bed, to the pillow on left-handed Alex’s preferred side.
“I suppose you’ve washed the sheets.”
“What a peculiar thing to say.” Olivia runs her hand over the bedspread, back and forth, the bed high enough that the action does not require her to bend. “Do you imagine that I’m not in the habit of washing the sheets every week?”
“His smell,” Suzanne whispers. “I was hoping there would be something with his smell.”
Olivia looks at her, her expression changing but unreadable. Her eyes don’t exactly narrow, but they seem to pull long, as though she has control of facial muscles that other people cannot access. “I was about to wash his pajamas when I heard the news on the radio,” she says, her gaze cast to her long-fingered hand. The nails are manicured but unpainted. “That’s how I found out, you know, on the radio.”
Suzanne feels no need to say, “Yes, I know what that’s like; me, too.” She is wondering if the radio is better or worse than any other way, if the form matters even a little.
“So I stopped. They were right over the machine, and I almost dropped them in the hot water, but I didn’t.”
“I want the shirt,” Suzanne says. “You have everything else left of him. I want the shirt.”
Olivia lifts her gaze, and now Suzanne can read her expression. Hatred. “I have everything because I was his wife. You have nothing because you were not.”
“I want the shirt,” Suzanne repeats.
“I’ll let you have it after you finish the arrangement. A performance-night gift. No flowers for you.”
“Performance night,” Suzanne says, registering what Olivia is asking her to do, her dread swelling into something nearly unbearable.
Olivia’s hand now sits still on the bed where she slept with Alex for more than twenty years. “You will be like Clara Schumann for Brahms, playing his music for the public.”
Suzanne spends most of three days in the conservatory. She spends most of three days working through the viola part section by section, deciphering each movement phrase by phrase and then stringing them like beads. She spends most of three days in the music, most of three days trapped in Alex’s mind. Unlike her nightmare, it is not damp, dark, and terrifying. But neither is it familiar or expected; it offers none of Alex’s comfort.