The grief is for Alex, mostly, but it bleeds into the sadness she feels every time music is made and then gone — something real and loud in the air that disappears from all but memory. Sometimes Suzanne strains to imagine the music still living, playing on in some version of reality not organized by time, all its notes together like colors in black paint or white light. It might be a place, she thinks now, in which you can love two people without diminishing either.
As they pack their instruments, Petra’s whisper is a hiss: “Coffee.”
“Don’t you have to pick up Adele?” Suzanne says, folding a flannel swathe around the viola’s neck, careful with eye contact.
“You know the schedule. We have over an hour.”
They agree to walk the short diagonal to the edge of campus and then the half block to the coffeehouse on Witherspoon, which they both like even though the coffee is as thick as syrup. Daniel lingers, watching them leave, but they do not invite him to join them. Though the breeze is cool, under it sits a hot day — the summer to come — and Suzanne’s back feels slick by the time they climb the three stone steps into the shop.
Exiting as they enter is her friend Elizabeth. “It’s a small world,” she says, making an easy pun of the coffeehouse’s name.
She embraces Suzanne, pressing her into the large breasts that can only be called a bosom. Elizabeth’s maternal exuberance is how they met, at the public library, where Elizabeth spotted her as new in town and invited her to the first of many potlucks, warmly adopting her and Ben into Princeton community life despite their oddities, despite Ben’s cool reserve, despite their lack of children.
“I haven’t seen you in too long, Suzanne. Call me,” she says, certainly knowing as well as Suzanne does that she’ll have to make the call, understanding that Suzanne usually accepts but rarely initiates social interaction.
Petra and Suzanne take their coffee to a back table. The hour is odd, so they have a bit more privacy than is usual in their small town. Still, the place is noisy with coffee grinder, espresso machine, multiple conversations, someone humming, street sounds.
“Why the hell are you wearing black and not looking anyone in the eye? And your playing …” Petra trails off.
“Something wrong with my playing?” The viscous coffee tightens Suzanne’s hungover stomach as she sips through its heat.
Petra shakes her head. “You played beautiful but different.”
Suzanne shrugs, tells her that she isn’t sleeping well. “Besides, you know, Bartók.”
“You love late Bartók. You lobbied for that piece.”
“It’s the same as Prokofiev. I love it, but it puts me on edge.”
“That doesn’t explain the black clothes. Or you. You were very weird at dinner last night. You are weird today.” Petra’s accent thickens as she speaks, and then her words halt.
Suzanne watches the young men and women behind the counter steaming drinks and manipulating tongs to select pastries for the people in line. She scans the tables of professors — dressed as awfully in Princeton, land of the knee-socked laureate, as in any town — and the klatches of students and friends and mothers. She feels her cell phone buzz in her pocket, extracts it, and reads the caller’s number. The Chicago area code flips her stomach again. Chicago has always meant Alex, but it is not Alex’s number and the caller does not leave a message. Her throat constricts, and it feels like minutes before she can speak again.
When she does, her voice is half of itself. “Don’t you sometimes miss the anonymity of living in a city? Sometimes I think I need to live in a city again.”
Petra clenches Suzanne’s forearms with cool fingers and forces eye contact. “I tell you everything, and now you won’t tell me what the hell is going on with you.”
It’s true, what she says. Petra has always told Suzanne everything since the day they met, both new students at the Curtis Institute. Suzanne had deferred entry for a year so that she could nurse her mother through the final months of her illness while trying to cobble together a bank account with part-time jobs. No student pays tuition at Curtis, but she didn’t know how she was going to live and was contemplating the drastic step of offering to care for her crazy father in exchange for a cot in his South Philly flat. She was granted a reprieve in the form of a need-based fellowship for expenses and the phone number of a new violin student wanting a roommate.
Suzanne sold the only thing her mother had left behind that had worth to anyone else (an eight-year-old Pontiac) and moved in with Petra sight unseen.
The first thing Petra said to her was, “Are you a tramp?”
Suzanne shook her head. “Practically a virgin.”
“Then I’ll take the bedroom and you can have the sofa bed. I don’t mind paying extra, and that will spare you from seeing the naked men.” She laughed. “It’s worse than that, even, because I mostly date ugly guys. Really nothing you’d want to see.” She paused, maybe looking to see if she’d shocked her new roommate. “And sometimes it’s not a man, but the women are always good-looking. I don’t sleep with ugly women.”
Suzanne unpacked her suitcase of clothes into the dresser Petra had already moved into the living room. Later, over the first bottle of wine that Suzanne had ever partaken in, Petra shamelessly recounted her adventures and become the best friend Suzanne had ever had.
When Petra arrived in the country, a man offered her a free place to live in exchange for letting him photograph her legs spread. “He promised me anonymity,” Petra laughed, “because he was going to take very close-ups.” She’d turned him down, but kept a version of the idea. She called a company selling “adult services” and told them no intercourse. A lot of girls probably try that — getting paid as a call girl without having sex — but Petra had long legs, blond hair, and a real Swedish accent. They hired her on her terms. “When I have sex, it’s always for free. Because I want to.”
Growing warm and bold with the wine, Suzanne asked her for details about the work. Petra told her the stories: the young man who wanted her to teach him how to give oral sex, the tiny woman who wanted to spank her in old-fashioned underwear, the guy who wanted to be whipped. The one who wanted her only from the ankle down, the one who masturbated while she crawled around the room and talked like a baby, the one who wanted her to dance in dim light wearing a red dress he had hanging in his closet. “It was his wife’s dress,” she told Suzanne, her eyes glazing wet. “She had died and he missed her. That was too much, the last time. After that I got a job making cocktails.”
“Mixing.” Suzanne put her arm around her, almost a hug. “It’s called mixing drinks.”
Petra wiped her tears with her forefinger until the streaks on her face were dry, laughing. “Crazy, no? Diapers, sure, no problem, but not a dead woman’s dress to make a widower feel better.”
Now, after years of Petra’s confidences, Suzanne feels guilty for not reciprocating, for separating herself from her best friend with deceit. She’s used to it, though, used to feeling distant from others because she has a secret. For four years she hasn’t been able to tell anyone why she is so happy when she is happy or why so sad or worried when she is sad or worried. For four years she’s been lying to her best friend, to her husband, to everyone she meets.
Now she shrugs. “I’m expecting my period.”
Petra surprises her by saying, “So you’re sure you’re not pregnant again?”
The lightbulb above their table flickers, and Suzanne looks toward the front of the shop, watching people pass the plate-glass window. She grips her drink. “Petra, we’re not even trying anymore. You know that.”