Ben was not surprised when Suzanne said she would never live in Charleston. Neither was he surprised that she relented, easily, when, upon their graduation from Curtis, his mother offered them a spare house to use while Ben composed. They lived off the small trust fund from his father and Suzanne’s tiny salary with the Charleston Symphony. Suzanne endured the social hierarchy of a city you aren’t from unless your grandparents were born there, the politely delivered criticisms from Ben’s mother, the feeling that she wasn’t living the life marked out for her. It would be better, she told herself, for their children to be raised like Ben had been than like she had been. And then came the hints of inheritance. “Of course,” his mother would say, “Ben will need to be better provided for in the will if he’s to be a family man.”
When she lost the baby — late, after a room had been cleared for a nursery and girls’ names had been short-listed — the house mocked her. Ben’s mother’s comments about her ethnicity became more frequent. Italian and Irish; how quaint. Did you go to mass every Sunday? And then there was Ben himself, avoiding her tears, disappearing into his workroom, its heavy door closed. It was worse when he did try to talk about it. “Maybe it’s for the best,” he said one night while they ate at the dining room table — a huge piece of furniture that had come with the house. “Music requires sacrifice. You’d have to give up a lot, and we’d have to think about money.” Suzanne’s food stuck in her esophagus and she thought she might choke in silence, turning blue and cold, Ben never noticing.
Later he softened and said, “Maybe we can try again in a few years, after we’ve accomplished more.”
When she auditioned for St. Louis, she told herself it was for the practice. She wanted to test herself, to see if she’d make the first cut past the blind performance and through the finger workouts of the grueling week of semifinals and finals. She didn’t think she had any real chance, not at first, but as the week moved along she could hear herself playing well — very well — reading along without hesitation, her tone the best it had ever been. And she could tell that people liked her. “Most viola players are so goddamn moody,” the music director told her, “but you’re a normal person.” He laughed at her wisecracks, introduced her to people, showed her the neighborhoods where a musician could afford to live. And so she won the job and went from third chair of the Charleston Symphony to principal violist of one of the country’s best orchestras, where she was happy. But Ben was not.
When she was offered the job, she knew she would take it. Ben asked her if it was ego, and she admitted that was part of it. To his credit, he never believed they wouldn’t move. When he saw her salary — more than triple her poverty-line wages in Charleston, where so many of the musicians were the talented offspring of serious old money or part-timers with day jobs — he merely nodded and said he would tell his mother. Since the Minnesota premiere of his first symphony, he’d burned all of his completed compositions except one full-length work and a few short pieces, none of them performed save a partita at a college student’s recital. They had watched the numbers in their checkbook register tick down like an odometer running in reverse.
“You’re making a mistake,” was all Ben’s mother said, and Suzanne wanted to prove her wrong. Suzanne had overheard her telling Ben’s sister, Emily, that she was a heavy chain, making Ben follow her to a crime-ridden city so she could fulfill the ambitions of a girl who’d grown up on the wrong side of the tracks. The wrong side of every line: city, religion, immigration year. Suzanne pushed into the room where they chatted over coffee, saying, “Find Ben a job he’ll take, and we’ll stay.” Or, she thought but did not say, make good on that other offer. “I would never interfere,” his mother answered, her back straight and her voice modulated. Good breeding, the Charlestonians said of her, someone whose grandparents’ grandparents had been born in their city.
After the move Ben was miserable, though he was kind enough to pretend they were happy when his mother phoned every other Sunday at three. Suzanne saw him shrivel, his sullenness giving way to something more self-destructive, living across the river in an Illinois suburb, despising all things Midwestern and hating her for taking him there. Her work was more intense than it had been in Charleston, of course, with a longer season, some travel, and frequent rehearsals.
Sometimes, looking back, she thinks they could have made it work. Ben could have tried harder to make friends and contacts in St. Louis. They could have moved across the river into the city after they realized the suburb was a mistake, after they realized they were not the kind of people who could live comfortably next door to people who do not listen to music. But when the symphony announced an ambitious tour schedule, Suzanne imagined Ben alone in their house, dying. A melodramatic vision, but she believed in it. Also, she told herself, the life they were making there would never accommodate children. So when Petra called, she figured it was for the best. Perhaps Ben’s mother was right about her: she’d always had a smart poor girl’s desperate desire to succeed and have the world notice.
Over time Suzanne heard in Ben’s remarks a disdain for the work that paid most of their bills. And she wondered if he heard in her sentences conformity, utilitarianism, a lack of the kind of imagination he equated with intelligence. Always she was too tired to debate the subjects that really interested him, the theories that sparked his fire. Once she started to tell him that she still thought about those ideas, but she didn’t get around to saying it. If she had, would their life have unfolded in a different, better shape? Or would he have heard only the accusation? Over time they talked of music less and less; like other couples they knew, they spoke of other people, of household lists and chores, of money in and money out.
Now, about twice a year Suzanne tries to bring up the future, to discuss what they will do when his trust fund runs out, if the quartet doesn’t make it, when her performance days are waning, at what point it will be too late to have a child. Even if the quartet succeeds, they aren’t many years away from using only soft-light photos on their CD covers — if CDs survive or classical musicians figure out a way to profit from downloads. And if they make it more than a few years, then there will be no photos at all. What will happen the day Anthony tells Suzanne and Petra to pin their hair up?
Suzanne hopes that Kazuo will be able to help Ben into a teaching position more permanent than the occasional course he teaches at the Westminster Choir College. She considers it for herself sometimes as well. She could be happy teaching at Curtis; she knows this. She might even be willing to teach children for supplemental income, in order to have children of her own. She’d been willing to give up on children to lead an extraordinary life, but since Alex’s death, the pull has returned. It feels impossible, though, even without Olivia’s long shadow. When Suzanne wakes in the middle of the night, as she does every night, the fear that gnaws at her after she sorts through her quotidian worries is that her life will be a paltry version of ordinary. It will be unremarkable yet lacking the common rewards of living like everyone else.
And then comes the deeper, colder fear, the one that stops her from telling the truth and starting over clean: that she will wind up alone, her only solace being able to play, rather well, music written by people who are dead.