Elise Blackwell - An Unfinished Score

“Don’t worry,” she says when Petra calls, “I washed the eggs before I cracked them.”

“Can I meet you and Adele there?” Petra asks.

An hour later Suzanne drives across Princeton with Ben and Adele, as though they are a nuclear family. The entire car is fragrant with the still warm cake. “What’s going on with Petra?” Ben asks, and Suzanne appreciates that he tips his face down so Adele cannot read his lips in the rearview mirror.

“The usual, I guess.”

“She seems a little more out of control than usual.”

Suzanne shrugs. She knows Petra is struggling with the decision about the cochlear implant and does not want to raise the subject again with Ben.

At Elizabeth’s house, Ben presents the cake to the hostess.

“I wish Henry could cook!” Elizabeth says, and Adele and Suzanne exchange elbow pokes. Elizabeth hugs each of them in turn, pressing Suzanne into her pillow of a chest, kissing Adele on both cheeks, quickly embracing Ben.

The house and yard teem with chatting mothers, children hard at play, husbands arriving from work — most from jobs in New York and some from local employment — to meet their families for the start of the weekend. One of Elizabeth’s children takes Adele by the hand, pulling her away to play. Suzanne makes her way through the house to the backyard, where adults talk in groups and children roam in small packs. Along the way she chats with people she recognizes. As always, making conversation with people she knows only a little feels like work, but she does that work. “A musician, yes. Viola,” she says more than once. She wishes she could be more like Ben and Petra — wishes she didn’t care — but she wants to fit in. If she cannot live an extraordinary life, a desire that crashed with Alex’s plane, then she’ll take the ordinary life she craved as a child. She needs to belong in this town, to be one of its families, to live a normal middle-class life. And so she tries. She answers the questions, compliments the women’s dresses, inquires about the husbands’ jobs, asks people about their tennis games and running times and where they take yoga. She finds a cooler on the porch and pours herself a glass of wine from a thick-walled, wet bottle.

In a far corner of the backyard is a quartet of chairs. One appears to wait for Suzanne; the others are occupied by Petra, Daniel, and Anthony in their usual arrangement.

“Can’t you at least sit in different seats?” Suzanne asks as she approaches.

“We just can’t get enough of each other,” Petra says, patting the empty chair.

Suzanne sits and looks out to her right, where she can hear but not see a small brook on the other side of a boxwood hedge.

“A viola player and a cellist are standing on a sinking ship,” Petra says. “The cellist calls for help, says he can’t swim.”

Suzanne finishes Petra’s joke: “‘That’s okay,’ says the viola player, ‘just fake it like I do.’”

Petra lifts the outsized bottle of wine leaning against her foot and tops off Suzanne’s glass, though it is still nearly full. “Keeping it close so we don’t have to get up and down just to stay liquidated.”

“Hydrated,” says Daniel.

“And so I don’t have to talk to those women. It’s not like I even want anything to do with their stupid husbands, and if I did they should thank me. If one more of them says how ironic it is for a musician to have a deaf child, I’m going pistol.”

“Postal,” says Daniel.

“Right,” says Petra, “homicidal.”

The timbre of her laugh straddles the border between lighthearted and reckless. Suzanne knows, from experience, that this means Petra is a couple of hours into her drinking. She knows it’s why Petra didn’t come home, why she wanted to meet at Elizabeth’s. Suzanne angles her chair so she can see the group of kids Adele is playing with. Adele seems to have given up trying to lip read — something difficult in groups and impossible with moving children — yet she appears happy in the company, handing toys back and forth with a boy her age, smiling.

“What do you think, Suzanne?” Daniel’s off-center gaze suggests that he has drunk plenty of wine as well.

“We’re recycling the argument over performing Black Angels ,” Anthony says.

Suzanne shrugs. “I’ll play anything.”

“Even Tchaikovsky?” Anthony exaggerates the lift of his eyebrows.

Suzanne smiles, though she feels as though she is watching them from far away. “Let’s not get carried away.”

“We know your theories,” Petra says to her. “Romanticism yes, sentimentality no.”

“My theories?” She wonders if Petra is angry with her or just wined-up and in the mood to quarrel with anyone. She reminds herself that Petra’s arguments are rarely personal, but her friend’s sentences have sharp points tonight, and her voice is pitched higher than usual. Theories is a word they usually reserve for Ben — a shared defense disguised as mild disdain.

“I think we should play the Black Angels .” Daniel speaks without looking at any of the others. “If we can’t do something, say something, about what’s going on in the world, then what use are we?”

Petra shrugs. “Either way. There’s always a war somewhere, no? Besides, this isn’t my country. I have the luxury of being an observer.”

Suzanne listens to their arguments but continues watching Adele at play. Adele interacts through objects — handing the other children found leaves and flowers, accepting a bubble-blowing wand. Suzanne wonders if she will always have to give to fit in, and how that giving will change as she grows up. She imagines Adele with the implant, almost hearing, learning to speak but still noticeably different. She wonders whether Adele will be more fully accepted or instead rejected. With the implant, she’ll be neither hearing nor deaf but instead an inhabitant of the one category children will not tolerate: indefinably different. Suzanne is not sure adults accept that kind of difference much better than do children, even as she hopes that children are nicer these days than they used to be, that better parents have made better kids.

Anthony waves for her attention. “Suzanne, what do you think?”

She sips her wine, which tastes too much of its cask. “Here’s my opinion, then. The contribution of art to society is its existence more than its content. It’s not the job of art to comment on current events. It should matter, but it should inspire by existing, by exploring what’s beautiful, what’s timeless.”

“Oh, my god, you sound exactly like Ben.” Petra’s words slur and she blinks frequently, her expression prickly. “I think I’m going to puke.”

Years of experience with her drinking father tell Suzanne that it’s useless to reason with Petra now, but she is tired of one-way niceness, of covering for Petra with Adele, of defending Petra and Ben to each other, of always being the grown-up. “You wanted to know what I think, and that’s what I think. Take the Holocaust, the role of music. What was miraculous wasn’t people writing music about how awful the camps were. What was miraculous was the people in the camps playing Bach, saying, You can’t take this away from us , saying, This is beautiful no matter what .”

“So no music can ever comment on the world? Just itself? That’s masturbation.” Petra says the word too loudly, and a nearby couple look over their shoulders, the woman shifting them away.

“Let the rock stars protest war,” Suzanne says. “People actually listen to them anyway.”

Petra looks straight at her and pauses before she says, “You’re such an elitist.”

“If you’re mad at Ben, Petra, then argue with him. But, sure, I agree with him on this. We live in a culture that doesn’t value what we do. To meet it halfway is to give up. If holding up the best music ever written as a great human accomplishment makes me an elitist, then I am a snob, a monk in the tower protecting the books from barbarians.”