For a while she works under the theory that the movement is about sex. She never deluded herself about that: her relationship with Alex started because of her looks and was always saturated with sex. It wasn’t only sex — neither of them ever thought that — but every aspect of their friendship was colored by physical attraction, by the warmth that spread in their chests upon sight, by the things they tried in bedrooms in dozens of cities, by the fact that those acts were stolen from their real lives and always wrapped in music.
So for a time she thinks she has found the key to the movement in sex, even placing the night Felder played while they made love. She believes this will allow her to fit the pieces together, to produce a whole that coheres and has broader meaning. She lets it guide her tentative decisions about instrumentation. More brass, she thinks, than she would have considered otherwise. It alters, too, the way she thinks about dynamics as she considers the ways that love is loud and soft, remembers how it felt when Alex made love to her noisily when he was angry, the intensity of her silent orgasm the night Felder played in the room.
But her theory breaks down halfway through the movement. Besides, she tells herself, Alex disliked not only program music but any music guided by extramusical ideas. He was like Ben in that, saying, “Music is its own language. It should not take its grammar from any other.”
So she starts over, taking the movement apart again, measure by measure, even slower. Once she and Alex attended a concert in which the pianist added a full ten minutes to the usual length of Beethoven’s third sonata. It was at the cathedral in San Juan, and afterward Alex and Suzanne sat across the street in a small park made strange by a statue of a penguin sailing a boat, the balmy tropical air soft on their skin. A man with a parrot on his arm rode up on a bicycle and offered to take their picture with his bird for five dollars. “Hola!” Suzanne greeted the bird, who answered “What a pretty lady.”
After Alex paid the man to leave them alone, Suzanne said, “I thought parrots could only repeat a line, not converse.”
“He was repeating a line, just not yours. I think they even imitate punctuation and speed. Unlike that pianist. It took him forty-one minutes to get through the thing.” Alex tapped his watch. “I guess he thinks he can find something in Beethoven that no one else has ever noticed if he just plays it slow enough.”
Now she finds that slowing down doesn’t help her any more than did learning to play the concerto faster. Over and over the work whispers, You never really knew me; you never understood.
She determines to do what forlorn and failing women often do; she decides to consult a psychic.
“I’ve got to see Doug about a bow issue,” she tells Ben, thinking that between this partial lie and the Chicago trip she is lying as much as she did when she was having an affair with a living man.
When he opens the door to his Hell’s Kitchen shop, Doug greets her with his full bass voice. “Don’t tell me there’s a problem with the bow. My work is always perfect.”
“It’s kind of embarrassing, but I’m here for your other talent. I need you to look into your crystal ball, or whatever it is you do.”
He puts a hand on her shoulder, looking down to make direct eye contact. “That’s not nice, my dear. It’s not quackery, and it’s not magic. I guess you could call it emotion theory, but really it’s about music. Go on back. I’m going to step out for a quick smoke while you tune.”
Alone in the crowded repair room, Suzanne strokes her viola, tightens the E string, rosins her bow. She notes the soreness under the calluses of her finger pads from playing more than usual. She needs to take a couple of light days before the Black Angels performance.
When Doug returns smelling of fresh cigarette, he takes a seat on a stool, crosses his long legs, places his hands palm up in his lap, closes his eyes, nods his readiness.
Suzanne almost laughs and tells him he’s taking his new vocation too seriously, but she stops before she speaks. She wants him to take it seriously. This is her life: the concerto is the story of her past, the reality she lives in now, the possible ruin of her future. There’s nothing at all funny about being here. Being here may save her life, which, when she closes her eyes, she envisions as ancient ruins crumbling in a stony Irish field. She inhales as deeply as her lungs allow and plays the solo voice all the way through, pausing in silence between the first and second movement and again between the second and third. After she plays the last falling note, she smiles because she has never played the composition better. The concerto almost comes together, the answer to its riddle on the tip of her tongue.
“I’ll save you a little trouble,” she says to break the silence. “He’s contemporary. Trained in performance more than in composition. Favorite composers Bach and Brahms, though with wide-ranging tastes, except not a fan of serial music.”
“I could have told you all that.” Doug grins, but his mouth falls back into the downward tug of the rest of his face, and the corner of one eye twitches. “But this is a tough one. Really tough. Shostakovich’s last work was his Sonata for Viola, and everyone always says that’s fitting because of the viola’s timbre, because it’s so melancholic. But this, wow, no simple melancholia.”
Suzanne paces along the back wall, examining the instruments and bows set out for repair. The light coming through the barred windows is striped, giving the room an oddly modern look. It is like looking at a new photograph of an old place.
“Many contradictory impulses. A lot of emotion, that’s for certain.” Doug rubs his forearm as he looks at her. “A lot of negative emotion mixed in, but not simply sadness.”
Suzanne’s rib cage contracts, an internal wince that she fears shows on her face. Sadness at my absence, her mind’s voice insists.
“The composer was confused. There’s passion but also a lot of anger. A serious wound there, but there’s control, too, a kind of patience. Brilliant but a bit of the overestimation of the autodidact. You said he wasn’t trained in composition?”
Suzanne nods. “But he was trained in music.”
“So many broken rules. I’m not sure this is someone I would ever want to meet.”
His reading stings as Suzanne hears its truth. The childhood cuts that Alex’s ascendancy sealed off but didn’t heal. His love sometimes mixing with an anger that turned him cold. His self-assurance bleeding into sheer narcissism at his most manic. His vast musical learning telling him that he could compose without specialized theoretical training.
Fonder memories of Alex rise in her, drowning out the difficult man Doug has described. Alex with his hands in her hair and a smile beginning to curl his lips. Alex walking down Sixth Avenue eating an unlikely icecream cone in midwinter, the prop turning the serious, distinguished man into someone playful. Alex leaning back into a stack of pillows, reading a book in silence but still tapping his foot. Alex weeping openly over a wasted half hour of a weekend in Seattle, now irretrievable. Alex with his baton, about to set loose a perfectly prepared orchestra on an audience.
“No,” she says.
“I could be wrong. I don’t often say that, you know, but this really is a tough one. Very hard to decipher, not a straightforward person at all. It’s not another collaboration, is it?”
She shakes her head, rueful.
“So who is it? You know?”
It surprises her to realize there is no reason to lie. “Alexander Elling,” she says, starting to add, “the conductor” and “Chicago” and “who died.”