Petra sits bolt upright. “No matter what?”
Suzanne nods and coaxes her back down. “No matter what.”
“I don’t deserve you,” Petra whispers, and Suzanne hushes her.
When Suzanne awakes in the middle of the night, dressed and on top of the covers, the lamp on her side of the bed is on, but the other has been switched off. Petra huddles against her, shivering in her tee-shirt and underwear. Without waking her, Suzanne works them both under the covers and darkens the room.
Facing away from her friend, toward the wall she can no longer see, she replays the night in San Francisco, the story she wanted to tell Petra but did not.
Almost exactly one year after his prediction that Felder would become the world’s most celebrated violin soloist, Alex made good on his promise for a private performance. He was guest-conducting the San Francisco Philharmonic, Felder as soloist, and Alex arranged an invitation for Suzanne to play with Symphony Silicon Valley the same week. Their last night, the night after they were both through with their musical responsibilities, Alex insisted that they leave the room to eat. “We’ll get depressed if we stay in all night. We’ll just be thinking about the airport.”
Back at the room, Alex made her wait in the hall. When he opened the door to let her in, she heard music. A single violin, unmistakably live. Alex put his fingers to his lips, and she entered quietly. In front of the floor-to-ceiling windows sparkling with the city’s lights sat Joshua Felder, blindfolded and bowing his elegant way through Bach’s Sonata 3 in C major. Alex pulled her hand, leading her to the edge of the bed, perhaps four feet from Felder. Suzanne studied the line of the young man’s jaw, the whiteness of his skin, the dark hair spilling over his blindfold. She gasped when he finished the piece and began the Bach-inspired violin sonatas from the humbly born Belgian composer Eugène Ysaÿe, perhaps her favorite violin music of any period. She felt Alex’s breath in her ear: “He’s going to play all six.”
Alex pushed her back on the made bed and slowly, quietly unbuttoned her blouse, undid her skirt, disrobed her completely. Again he put his finger to her mouth and she nodded, yes, they would make love in silence, the only sound Felder’s beautiful Stradivarius. She closed her eyes and listened to the long notes as Alex moved his hands and mouth down her body, slowly, taking time everywhere. She sealed her lips so she would not moan or cry out and felt that the entire world was touch and sound. She wanted time to pause, a permanent, exquisite caesura of pleasure.
When Felder finished the sixth Ysaÿe sonata, he set his bow on his knee for only a moment before lifting it and striking into Paganini’s caprices. Alex lay on top of her, settling his full weight on her in his attempt to be quiet as he entered her and they made love, though certainly Felder knew what was happening. The only mystery could be her identity. They moved together until a few bars before what Alex must have known was the end of the evening’s program, when he came violently, now making no attempt at silence.
Later, after Alex escorted the still blindfolded musician from the room, he said, “That’s something I’ve always wanted to do. At my age I’m not willing to wait much longer to do things I’ve always wanted to do.”
“But how did you convince him?”
“I have something he wants, and I have something on him.” Alex smiled, looking ruthless.
“I like being with a man who can call in favors,” Suzanne said. “Thank you.”
“I wanted to give you something you would never forget. Years from now, when you’re an old woman and I’m long dead, you can sit on the porch and tell your acolytes the story of the night you made love to the handsome conductor while Joshua Felder played the violin blindfolded.”
Eighteen
Ben returns the following evening as Suzanne, Petra, and Adele are finishing a small meal of eggs and salad. He’s tanned, just a bit, and perhaps thinner than when he left, a gauntness that shows in his neck and under his cheeks but nowhere else.
Adele jumps up when she sees him, and he hoists her into a large hug.
Suzanne registers his age in a way that she doesn’t when she sees him every day. He looked mature to her that first day she saw him hunched over his cello, but of course he was barely a man then, and now he’s one fully. There’s a line across his forehead, slight shadows in the parentheses that curve down from his nose, more thickness to his long neck. Despite the evident fatigue and the pressures that seem to press down on his shoulders, he is a handsome man. She stands and hugs him when he sets down Adele. She is surprised to recognize that she is glad to see him.
“One big happy family,” Petra says, a bit loud, patting them both on the back.
Suzanne makes more eggs and serves them to Ben with what’s left of the salad. The three adults share a bottle of wine, clean the kitchen, listen to Ives’s Second Symphony, and talk about music, politics, places they’d like to travel. It’s almost like the old days, except the things that aren’t said sit obvious and large between them.
Later Suzanne is half asleep when Ben emerges from the shower. Though she is tired, she feels his physical desire for her as such a strong presence in the room that she cannot pretend to sleep. She throws back the blanket and rolls into him, and he presses his mouth over hers so hard that it almost hurts. And she wants it to hurt, all of it, and to be something that she will never forget. And she wants to put everything back together again and make it all work and live happily ever after with Ben and Petra and Adele and a successful Princeton Quartet. In that moment, she wants her life exactly as it is but fully repaired and healed.
But she doesn’t know whether the road there means telling the truth or hiding it.
Several days later, she still vacillates. While she was at first grateful that Ben doesn’t ask her questions that would be hard to answer, she is surprised by how uninterested he is in her surprising new work.
“I’m glad you have something to work on that’s not Bach for a change,” he says.
If he pushed her, she thinks, she could do what she threatened on her last morning with Olivia: tell him everything. They would work through it, or they would divorce; either way it would be settled and Olivia would hold nothing over her and she could commence what would be the rest of her life. Maybe there would be happiness and children, maybe solitary important work, maybe nothing good at all. But she would know.
Sometimes she looks for opportunities to tell Ben, tries to drop a hint, pick a fight. “You’re so preoccupied with your composing you haven’t asked me about mine,” she says one morning as Ben pours a cup from the pot of coffee she has made for them.
“Sorry,” Ben says, looking up with surprise, as though her work simply hasn’t occurred to him.
She is seated at the table over the score. She runs her fingertips in a half circle around the rectangles of white paper. Though she has polished the table recently, her fingers graze circular stains from goblets, glasses, her own mug. A knife of light pierces a white shape imprinted by a hot dish, and she runs her hand back and forth through the beam.
Ben moves behind her and rubs her neck. “Is it any good?”
Suzanne nods, pulling her hands back onto her lap, trying to relax into his touch, her drive to speak the truth dissolving. “I was just hurt you didn’t ask.” She feels his lips on her temple.
“I would like to hear about it, look at it. Soon. I’m just really preoccupied. There’s so much work with this one. It was a mistake to go Charleston.”
While his music is almost ready, much of the business remains to be completed, from hiring additional musicians and technicians to designing and printing programs. Suzanne hopes Kazuo has more aptitude for the practicalities than Ben does. It is a distaste for this aspect of the composer’s trade that accounts for Ben’s lack of success after it seemed he was on the verge of a rare career.