Elise Blackwell - An Unfinished Score

She knows that it is a Tuesday when she opens the gray shoebox. The box is so ordinary that no one would bother to look inside. She keeps it casually on the closet floor, under a small pile of socks and scarves — the only jumble in the house that belongs to her, its neatest companion. Suzanne: made tidy by living her life in a series of small rooms in small flats and tiny houses whose only freedom was the space she made by keeping her belongings few and carefully placed. One thing under her control.

This box — unremarkable, on sight not worth opening — houses the tangible evidence. A small, private museum, it holds a history of particular love. A hiding place secret because visible and mundane, of four illicit and extraordinary years. It conceals no love letters. Those exist in ether, in whatever cyberspace contains deleted emails. And maybe also on Alex’s computer . The thought thumps inside her chest like a missed heartbeat, but she tells herself, no, surely Alex — experienced in infidelity — was the more careful lover, covering his tracks, deleting their incriminating messages. Still, she wonders whether internet service providers and webmail accounts give passwords to bereaved spouses.

She rests her hand on the shoebox holding the material stubs of romance: concert tickets, boarding passes, train receipts, program notes, restaurant matchbooks palmed by a nonsmoker, flyers, hotel pens, and other small souvenirs of fraught geography, drives across hundreds of miles, aching airport good-byes.

Alex and Suzanne made love the day of the final of three performances of Harold , both before and after the Sunday matinee. His plane left that night, and he was scheduled to leave a week later for a two-month tour of Europe. So a few days later they each drove four hours just to have a long lunch in Bloomington, Illinois, talking music over the worst Indian food Suzanne had ever eaten but afterward would from time to time crave. He called every day from his tour, not missing one, and she holds now the scraps of paper with the phone numbers of hotels in London, Paris, Munich, Brussels, Amsterdam, Rome, Sienna, Madrid, Barcelona. She touches a small stack of transatlantic calling cards whose minutes were drained by long conversations. One of them ran out during a call to Berlin, from where Alex told her the story of Ovid, banished by the hypocritical Augustus for his scandalous writings on love. Ovid lived in exile on the Black Sea, without his beloved third wife, to whom he wrote for the remaining decade of his life but never saw again. There the poet lived without a library sufficient to do his work among a people whose language he could not understand. Over time his heartache did not heal, but he did learn the language well enough to compose a eulogy for the still living Augustus. “The eulogy and the language it was written in were lost centuries ago. Not a word survives,” Alex told her.

“That’s one of the saddest stories I’ve ever heard,” she said, to which he replied, “Precisely.”

She moved to Princeton while Alex was in Europe. The day after he landed they each drove five hours to meet midway.

Suzanne dresses for practice, veering from black so that Petra will not interrogate her more. The jeans she once had to wriggle into slip on easily. She pulls on a tee-shirt and sandals, pins up her hair, skips makeup when faced with her reflection’s pointed watching. She does not want to see herself.

She almost doesn’t answer the phone, but after years of waiting for audition calls — and then Alex’s — it is hard for her to ignore a ringing phone. There’s always the chance that the news is good, that the voice is beloved.

The voice on the other end says her name, repeats it and then asks, “Do you know who this is?”

“Who?” Suzanne echoes, but her chest tightens because she is almost certain that the voice she is hearing belongs to Alex’s wife, that this is not good news at all.

“I need to see you.”

Her chest squeezes itself, a vise, and her stomach contracts. “That’s not a good idea. It’s better that we don’t.”

“We have shared something important, no? There’s a connection between us whether you want there to be or not.” The woman pauses. “I need to see you. You need to come to Chicago.”

“I have to go right now, somewhere to be.”

“All right, but I’m going to call back if you don’t call me soon. I assume you’ve dialed this number before? Talked to my husband in our home?”

“Yes,” Suzanne whispers and hangs up.

Petra and Anthony are arguing when she enters the practice room, but their words lack heat. Suzanne unpacks her viola, tunes, rosins her bow, still trembling as she watches these two people capable of arguing ideas without emotion. Daniel, for whom all arguments are personal, has not arrived. When they were students at Curtis, Petra made the mistake of sleeping with Daniel. He struggled with her moral philosophy, with her assertion that she could be a loyal friend even as she was an unfaithful lover. “If you’re going to ask me to sleep with just you, then we’re breaking up immediately,” Petra told him. A rough stretch followed: Daniel throwing rocks at the windows of the apartment, Daniel phoning drunk in the middle of the night, Daniel wetting Suzanne’s shoulder with his real tears. It took about a month for his understanding that Petra was a friend worth having outweighed his desire to sing lead in a tragedy quickly turning trite.

Suzanne learned something about Daniel that Petra does not understand: for him everything is personal. If Petra and Daniel argue over politics or movies, and certainly if they argue over music, the differences in their opinion are, for him, indicators of moral difference. He either assumes she’s inferior or fears he is. It’s something Suzanne understands, feels herself when Ben mocks a piece of music she loves or makes a cutting comment about performance as a goal in itself.

But for Petra, arguments can be sport, and she and Anthony push back and forth the idea of performing the Black Angels Quartet .

“I think it’s a perfect time to play an antiwar piece. Don’t you agree, Suzanne?” Petra spins her gaze, glances at Suzanne.

Suzanne once played the piece, subtitled Written in a Time of War , in a course in which the professor was trying to teach his students about gesture, both physical and musical. She shrugs under her viola as she places her fingers on the strings, trying to steady herself as she warms up. Her right wrist feels weak, her biceps tired. There is a sharp pinch just inside her left shoulder blade.

“You don’t have many opinions of late,” Anthony says. “Funny thing is that I’m not sure it’s such a bad idea. I’d like to feel some people out.”

“Poll our electorate?” Petra asks. “See whether it would gain us more donors and audience members than it would cost us?”

Anthony takes no offense at Petra’s words. “It’s Princeton,” he says, “so it’s hard to say how it would play — I’m talking aesthetically more than politically.”

Forcing herself to participate, Suzanne enters the conversation. “If we were to perform Black Angels , would we present it as a museum piece or translate it? I mean, the directions say amplify as much possible. Back then Crumb didn’t have any idea what that would mean today. We’d blow out the back of the room.”

“The huge score,” Daniel says as he enters, “is reason enough for me to sign on. I like big pieces of paper.”

“The physical size of the score could be a conversation piece for our,” Anthony pauses as he searches for the word, “for our base.”

“Well,” Petra says, taking her seat, “you smell which way the money’s blowing and let us know.”