Brahms, Olivia said, and Brahms is what Suzanne would have expected from Alex. Brahms, dismissed by many contemporaries as stodgy, a holdover who would be flattened by the Wagnerian train to the future. Brahms, a brutal tongue and sour disposition hiding a deep generosity for those he respected. Brahms, brilliant but conservative in his use of counterpoint and sonata form, ever skeptical of program music, a man who never wrote an opera. Brahms, suspicious also of virtuosity, beloved by musicians instead of by fascists, whose music transcended its moment and outlasted its critics by centuries. Brahms, temperamental and emotionally difficult in life, elegant and restrained in his music. Sublime Brahms.
Yes, a reincarnation of Brahms would have made sense from Alex, but this difficult music is nothing like Brahms. In Alex’s concerto, emotion is barely restrained, virtuosity is required, and a story seems to thread the movements. Almost always when Suzanne works with the score, her chest feels tight, constricted. She grows breathless quickly with the physical exertion required to play the piece and suffers mild tinnitus when trying to fall asleep at the end of each long day.
In this discomfort, painstakingly though sometimes with bright flashes of insight, Suzanne tries to decipher Alex’s intentions in the black marks on paper. She tries to discern which sections are joyous and which written out of pain, which reflect desire and which satisfaction. If she can put them all together, she thinks — get each segment right and play the piece through — then she will have Alex’s narrative of their love affair to twine with her own. Then maybe the story will become whole, the larger sum of her memory fragments, the parts of the story she failed to understand. Through Alex’s music, she will know what happened to her.
Sixteen
On the second morning, Suzanne rises early and walks through the damp neighborhood, looking at the wide floral borders surrounding homes centered on their own half-acre or more. A man in a robe waves to her as he bends to pick up his paper. A woman runs past her, next a jogging couple, and Suzanne turns around.
Even at the front door she can hear the piano: Liszt’s Csárdás macabre, its clashing harmonies, desolate sonority, bizarre parallel fifths. Written late in his life, a time when he began to fear death, which had already come to his son-in-law Wagner. A time when he told the last of the many women who befriended him, “I carry a deep sadness of the heart which must now and then break out in sound.”
Suzanne guides the door gently closed behind her, treads softly through the foyer and down the hall. Holding back, nearly holding her breath, she watches Olivia play. Some people assume that Liszt’s retreat from virtuosity makes his later music easier to play, but Suzanne knows well from piano-playing friends that this is true only superficially. Olivia’s back and neck curve — regal posture gone — bringing her face close to the keys. Her hands are dramatic, lifting high and striking with surprising strength. A piece of hair sprung loose from her chignon stripes her face, stuck to her cheek with the sweat of her effort.
Suzanne waits after she finishes the seven-minute piece, waits to see if she will begin something else, but Olivia closes the piano, tucks back the errant strand of hair, straightens her spine, sets her hands lightly on her thighs, and turns to look out the window at the dewy yard, the morning sun glancing off her small piece of the huge lake.
“Your talent is exceptional.”
Olivia doesn’t startle but turns slowly, as though she already knew Suzanne has been standing behind her. “My talent isn’t small, but it’s certainly not exceptional. You know how much talent is out there, how little of it is truly special.”
“Curtis also?”
Olivia stands. “Julliard.”
“Of course you went to Julliard,” Suzanne says, not hiding her smile.
“I suppose you needn’t even have asked,” Olivia says, “And now I will leave you to your work.”
When she withdraws Suzanne is again alone in the room in which Alex composed the concerto that she fights to decipher. Today she concentrates on the strange second movement.
When evening comes Olivia makes a dinner of trout, new potatoes, roasted asparagus, sliced tomatoes with fresh basil. The meal is simple but perfectly prepared with good ingredients.
“She’s a good cook, I’ll give her that,” Alex often said. Suzanne never, not once, cooked a meal for Alex.
The two women eat the food outside on the patio, encircled by border gardens of herbs and flowers. The lake smell is not stale and fishy, as Suzanne sometimes imagined it would be, but something fresh carried in on a cooling breeze. Strategically positioned citron candles and a ceiling fan attached to the overhanging roof keep away the mosquitoes. Again it hits Suzanne: this is a lovely home, a place someone would want to live. She reminds herself that it is kept by someone who does not have to work, but still it makes her feel inferior. It’s no wonder that Alex never left Olivia and that Suzanne never quite believed him when he said he would leave her the day his son graduated from college.
Olivia draws a bottle of wine from an ice bucket and pours them each a glass. The wine tastes like grapefruit and minerals, expensive. They finish eating and together clear the table of Olivia’s nice white plates and blue cloth napkins before returning to the patio.
As the sun recedes, Suzanne feels sponginess above the bridge of her nose, in the spot on her forehead where she always feels alcohol. She hears her voice: a little loud, some words indistinct, the occasional unfinished sentence. She tries to correct herself so she will sound as clear-headed as she still feels, but she cannot rid her speech of its slight slur. Her hostess drains the bottle into her glass, and Suzanne suspects that Olivia has not drunk her fair share.
“I tidied your room while you were working,” Olivia says. “I couldn’t help but notice that you are reading a book about cochlear implants. A deaf child? Do you have children?”
Suzanne fixes Olivia with her eyes, seeking to discern her intention, to understand the degree of pain she is capable of inflicting. Blurry with the wine and thrown by Alex’s concerto, she does not trust her instincts. She mouths the words carefully: “A friend’s child.”
Olivia nods.
Suzanne decides to bare another weakness, to distract this woman from the fragile point she has laid her finger on. She says, “Alex’s concerto is not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“To be Clara Schumann to Alex’s Brahms,” Suzanne says, hoping it will stand in for the more complicated thing she means.
“Brahms and Clara had a pure friendship,” Olivia says.
“The analogy was yours, in the first place.”
“You have to understand that I spent almost four years hating you, the woman stealing the man I loved. My husband. There were others; you know that?”
Suzanne nods, determined that she will not defend herself.
“Many others. But I do admit you were different, that he might really have left me for you.” Olivia laughs, then shrugs — a rare spontaneous gesture. “Or maybe not. He did like it here.”
“What’s not to like?” Suzanne worries that Olivia can read her mind. She looks out at the lake, which shines like real silver, and breathes in the citron candles, the mint, rosemary, and sweet olive. Quietly she says, “So you loved him, then. Can I ask if that’s why you married him, if you married for love?”
“Wouldn’t you have married him?”
Suzanne massages her earlobe, something Petra taught her to do to relax. “You and I aren’t a whole lot alike. I’m asking why you married him.”