Elise Blackwell - An Unfinished Score

“That’s a pretty mean thing to do.” Suzanne’s voice sounds weak, but at least it does not quaver.

“Journalists should know better, right? Check their facts.”

“I mean a mean thing to do to Alex Elling.”

“He’s dead, what the hell. I know you kind of liked him, but he was famously a jerk, right? I think it’s funny that someone put feel-good words in his mouth.”

Suzanne walks to the bathroom to shower away the city and to be alone, noting that she wasn’t interested in her favorite Phillies even before Petra told her about the false line in Alex’s obituaries. Things that mattered last week no longer matter, and she does not even know whom her team is playing.

One of her several fights with Alex was about sports, though only on the surface; it was really an extension of a disagreement about music.

They only fought in the first year or so and most often in Chicago, in the city where he lived and worked, where his wife lived, where he could never fully relax the way he did when they were together elsewhere. On an early-summer walk along the boulevard that passes the aquarium, Suzanne mentioned Luciano Berio. It had rained earlier, just enough to raise the smell of wet concrete and leave the air humid.

“He enabled John Cage, so that’s one strike,” Alex said, his voice louder than it had been all day. “Then he wrote a bassoon piece that requires fifteen minutes of circular breathing. That’s strikes two and three. Pretentious. Good music should not try to be physically impossible to play. You know how I feel about virtuosity.”

At Curtis, Suzanne had had a bassoonist friend who had worked on his circular breathing, his goal to play the Berio piece. It had inspired her to think of her own practice as a form of training, as a physical discipline. Yet insecure about Alex’s greater knowledge and experience, still desperate to please him always, Suzanne changed the subject, suggesting they catch an inning of the Phillies game at a bar, check in on the score.

“I might watch sports if time were unlimited,” Alex said, not looking at her, “but really it’s just false news — teams up one year or not, and nobody from the city they play in anyway. How many of your Phillies were born in Philadelphia?”

“ I was born there,” Suzanne answered, her hurt shifting to anger, adding, “It’s not like most people on the Chicago Symphony are from Chicago.”

He looked down the slope of his nose, eyelids half lowered — his look of disapproval. “Don’t do that.”

He let her change the subject again, but throughout the afternoon he seemed removed. He walked a little farther from her than usual, sometimes even pulling ahead a step or two, leaving her to feel as though she were trailing him. As though she wanted him more than he wanted her. Finally, on a park bench where they stopped to watch a pair of inept wind-surfers in the bay, she said, “I can get disapproval at home. I can’t stand yours. I don’t want to watch every word that leaves my mouth. I don’t want to worry all the time that I’ll say the wrong thing.”

“I know.” He patted her knee but rose to walk more, again outpacing her just enough that she felt as though she were following.

Though his direction seemed aimless, she soon realized he had a destination in mind: a cab stand. He directed their cab to a small record store in Hyde Park. The clerk there knew him, chatting him up about rare recordings, mentioning a German import, a new recording of Grieg lyric pieces played on Grieg’s piano.

Alex walked to a back corner, knowing the location of the music he sought. He paid while she poked around the store, checking to see if the Princeton Quartet CD was there, risking the disappointment that it would not be and finding herself cheered that it was.

She forgot, at times, that some of her dreams had come wildly true.

Outside Alex handed her the small bag that held his purchase, and she extracted a disc of Piotr Anderszewski playing the Bach partitas.

“Remember?” Alex asked.

“Of course I do. He played Chopin and Sibelius before intermission.”

Alex stood looking at her, shifting his weight between his feet perceptibly. This was something she had never seen in him before — the impression that he was uncomfortable in his own body.

“I’m a bastard. You know that.” He shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, moving that small amount closer. He raised his hands to cup her cheeks and grinned suddenly. “I don’t care for Berio, but I actually like baseball.”

She nodded. “So let’s go back to the hotel and watch the end of the game.”

He put an arm around her. “Somehow I don’t think we’ll ever have so much time together that we’ll spend even a minute watching a television. Maybe if we live together for twenty years we’ll feel like going to a game. Hell, maybe we’ll even go to a movie.”

The shower beats warm water down on her. She tilts her head sideways to let a stream trickle into one ear and then the other. She doesn’t remember if her team won that day in Chicago, and she doesn’t care if they win today. Alex was right, even in his annoyed posturing. She has no need of false news when the real news has ruined her life.

But then she smiles, just a little at the corners of her mouth. She’d been right about the quotation about music’s healing quality, right that Alex would never say something like that. He’d been hard to get to know, but she had done it. He had loved her, and let her inside his mind.

Weeks of torn sleep follow the trip into New York. Suzanne’s nights shred like newspaper. In the middle of the night she bolts awake from dreams of her cell phone vibrating with Chicago’s area code.

Her morning dreams, though, are mostly pleasant, and at dawn when she is half asleep she sees them rippling over the real bedroom like layers of mist. Alex’s whispers slip between Ben’s deep breaths, curling like vapor. She tries to roll herself back into the sweet fog, but always it dissipates quickly, abandoning her awake, too early, in a warm room, again facing a day that will feel too long.

One week bleeds into the next while another seems to flow backward, but each day’s time is slow, its demarcations concrete. Minute by minute, left foot, then right . Seconds click by in painful increments, a metronome set on largo. Breathe , she reminds herself, coaxing her lungs to expand and then empty.

She does the things that have to be done. She attends rehearsals. She practices. She brings food home from the grocery store, helps with Adele, tidies the house, writes checks to the water company and the phone company, buys stamps. She tries to keep up with her online life, answering emails, accepting Facebook friend requests, hunting for an interesting link to post. Yet she notices things slipping through the cracks in her concentration. She cleans the bathroom but forgets the shower or the mirror. An email from a music blog requesting an annotated list of her five favorite pieces in the viola repertoire goes unanswered; when the reminder comes, a day before the deadline, she types out a paragraph from the top of her head and hits send without proofreading. She fails to answer questions posed directly to her in the Twitter feed. One day she sees an online ad with a woman’s face, the caption reading, “This is what depression looks like.” She recognizes the sad expression from the mirror and remembers what she said to an acquaintance worried about her after her mother died: “Being sad about something sad is not depression. It’s human.” Twice she sits down with the idea of composing, thinking doloroso , but both times her focus is vague and she abandons the effort without really beginning, the second time without playing or writing a single note.