“I know who the hell he is,” Doug interrupts her, his goofy grin winning out again. “I didn’t know he composed.”
Suzanne returns her viola and bow to their case, fastening the locks with a close attention unwarranted by a manual task she has completed thousands of times. “No one did except his wife, apparently. There’s only this piece, and she’s asked me to arrange it. He started to orchestrate it, but there’s some stuff left to be written. For the life of me, I can’t quite get a hold of it.”
“So you came to me as a last resort?”
“Something like that. I thought you could give me some insight into him, or at least the part of him that he put into the composition. Please don’t be mad at me. I really couldn’t take it right now.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, okay?” His deep voice pauses, and he waits for her to answer by meeting his kind eyes and nodding. “Don’t take this the wrong way because I think you are as beautiful as ever — maybe more so because I’ve always gone in for the anemic look. Remember that girl Helen, the one I went loopy for? But you look tired to the bone. I thought you were going to fall down while you were playing.” He stands behind her, hands pressing down into her shoulders. “I’m going to buy you a sandwich, fries and milkshake not optional, and then I’m going to put you on the train, and you’re going to go straight home and sleep all the way through until tomorrow.”
She nods her compliance, her relief. Since Alex died and Petra regressed, no one has taken care of her. Once, early in their courtship, she asked Ben if he took her for granted, and he said he did. “Isn’t it a good thing to be counted on?” he asked, waiting for her to say yes.
Exhausted, she tries to sleep through the trip home, but she is bombarded by cell-phone talkers, by music she doesn’t like seeping around cheap earphones, by the intercom announcements of train cars and stops. For a moment she envies Adele; in the next she castigates herself for the thought. Better to hear everything than nothing — just ask Beethoven, Fauré, Boyce, Vaughan Williams.
On the walk home from the Dinky, Suzanne takes the slightly longer route down Witherspoon, stopping at the little market, ducking in under the “Wire money to Mexico” banner to splurge on a tamarind soda for Adele.
Twenty-one
On Sunday Suzanne and Petra help Adele get ready for Ben’s concert. Adele turns from her closet holding a dress in each hand, eyebrows raised. Petra points to the lavender dress, Suzanne to the dark blue one. Adele looks uncertain — a child who likes to please others caught in a bind. With her hands occupied, language is only in her facial expression.
“Actually,” Suzanne signs, “the lavender one is perfect.”
Adele smiles her relief and dresses. She sits on the bed between Suzanne’s knees. Suzanne brushes and gathers her hair, cupping it in her left hand in a loose ponytail as she brushes with her right, releasing the honey smell of baby shampoo. Suzanne is looking not at the silky hair but at the swell of bone behind Adele’s left ear — the place the surgeon will puncture with a loud drill, boring a hole straight through, a procedure during which a small error would be devastating. Suzanne’s stomach retracts to a tight pit. No wonder Petra took so long to decide.
Suzanne tips her head to kiss the precise spot where the drill will enter Adele’s lovely egg-shaped skull. After she secures the ponytail, she spins Adele by the shoulders and signs, “You’ll look absolutely beautiful as soon as you brush your teeth!”
“That’s the part I always forget.” Petra leans into Suzanne and waits until Adele leaves the room to say, “Tell me again that it’s going to be all right.”
“It’s going to be all right,” Suzanne says steadily, though the tight circle of her stomach quivers as it releases with her breath.
“And you’ll be there for Adele no matter what I do.”
“You sound like you have a one-way ticket somewhere.”
Petra looks up, alarmed. “I would never leave her, not that. I don’t ever even think that, not even for a second.”
Suzanne runs her hand down Petra’s hair, a thicker, lighter version of Adele’s, just as silky.
“But I’m not a nice person. I could do something awful that would make you hate me, and that would be terrible for Adele.”
“Petra, you’ve done lots of awful things, and I never hate you.”
Petra’s laugh is a small snort. “True. But promise me you’ll always love Adele.”
“I’ve already promised you that. The promise is still good.”
Once Adele is ready, they walk down Leigh Avenue and turn up Wither-spoon, walking in their dresses in front of Princeton’s most run-down rentals and then the little market. A man standing in the doorway says, “Que bella!” as they walk by, and Suzanne nods at him. Across from the new library, they stop at the bakery for brioche. Petra chooses a chocolate-walnut stick. Adele points to a round brioche with a peach half as its center. Suzanne serves herself a cup of coffee from one of the large thermoses. The sound of the coffee flowing into the cup is reassuring, a reminder that the laws of physics are still in place. She breathes its rich-smelling steam before securing the lid.
Twenty minutes later they enter Richardson Auditorium holding hands, Adele between Suzanne and Petra, and take their seats near the back of the main floor. Suzanne is surprised: more seats are occupied than empty, even in the balcony. Scanning the audience, she recognizes a few of Ben’s associates and some friends from Elizabeth’s parties, Daniel with Linda, Anthony with Jennifer. Mostly, though, the crowd is the anonymous audience a musician desires: people who have come to listen to the music.
A few more arrive. Ben and Kazuo take their center seats. The musicians file onstage — an orchestrated entrance — stand in place, then sit en masse. The lights dim. Hush spreads.
Suzanne watches Adele as the music begins. A deaf child at a concert many adults couldn’t sit through, she looks not bored but rapt. Her chest rises and falls slowly with her deep breathing, and her eyes open fully to take in the darkened scene. Since she was a baby Adele has been a serious watcher of people — so serious that her only lapse in etiquette, seemingly ever, is this tendency to stare.
Suzanne presses her small hand between her own, but she distances herself by closing her eyes and giving herself over to the auditory world that is shut to Adele. Something Alex often said when she called him at an unexpected time and asked if it was okay: I am all ears.
Suzanne listens. She has heard Ben discuss the composition, and she has heard individual lines and pieces, but she has not attended a rehearsal and has never heard the music as a whole. Now its surprising beauty saturates her. There is no experiment for experiment’s sake any longer, no exclusion of the audience, yet Ben and Kazuo have invented something. They have not abandoned history, nor have they simply reclaimed it; they have extended music’s long, fascinating past into the new.
As she listens to the fugue, she remembers what Doug guessed about the composer of the music: emotionally restrained but not without effort. Someone who uses intellect to translate emotion. Fair-minded but stubborn and sometimes blinded by it. A deep point of pain. Someone not unhappy with how his life has turned out, though maybe only because he expected no more.
Maybe, she thinks, but what she mostly hears is the thing she values most in the world: perfect music. She sees colors with her eyes closed, mostly blue and purple but also orange, red, green, white. The music sounds beautiful, looks beautiful, is beautiful. It holds her, and when it comes to its end, she doesn’t understand why she was deaf to it before. All of Ben’s promise and talent are still there. For a moment she understands that it is worth everything to have this music in the world, whether the world wants it or not.