Elise Blackwell - An Unfinished Score

Suzanne swallowed her jealousy not just of his wife but of him. “Then why are we here now?”

“Great sex or a nice lawn? Grass isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” He squeezed her hand over the table. “Seriously, automatic sprinklers is a pathetic goal, the bent dream of a poor kid. Anyway, I’d argue that our spouses didn’t fully deliver on their end of the bargain, though probably yours more than mine. But that’s not my reason, and I don’t think it’s why you’re here, either.”

His directness made Suzanne nervous. It was the sort of conversation that could be irrevocable, that could change her life if she wasn’t careful. And still she felt gnawing envy of Alex’s wife, of his success, of his entire life. Around them the good cheer from the shared birthday song lingered, and people’s words bounced, jovial. She set down her fork and waited for Alex to finish his answer, worried that he would describe their relationship as a symptom of mental illness or an act of self-destruction. “Why are we here?” she asked, her question almost a whisper.

“Because we fell in love,” he said, holding her forearm now, rubbing the inner crook of her elbow hard with his thumb. “We’re here because we fell in love.”

He asked her about her life’s other defining choice — why she had chosen the viola — and she told him the story of Charlene Ling.

“My mother put a violin under my chin when I was eight.”

“Two years too late,” Alex interrupted.

“An unrecoverable edge,” she continued. “But I had talent and a good teacher and I might have kept going with it, except I had the misfortune to attend middle school with Charlene Ling.”

“Arguably the best violinist in the country after Felder. But that’s good fortune that you switched. You were made for the viola.”

“Aside from all the jokes.” Suzanne smiled. “If you happen to play in the school orchestra with someone on her way to being the world’s best, you don’t think, ‘I’ll be second best in the world.’ You think there’s a Charlene Ling in every school in every city in every country and that the world doesn’t have enough orchestras for you to have a chair anywhere.”

She did not add that the greatest anxiety of many female musicians is not stage fright but the creeping fear that they will wind up spinster music teachers surrounded by instrument-wielding children who aren’t theirs and a pack of mewing cats who are.

“But you didn’t give up music.”

She shook her head. That had never been an option for her, not ever. “Switched to a less competitive instrument, at least at my school, and got to be first viola instead of second fiddle.”

Alex lifted his chin to acknowledge her small pun, but he let her continue talking.

“I figured I’d be visible, marry a visiting conductor, and travel the world happily ever after with my famous husband.”

“The cult of the conductor. Everyone wants us.” He paused from his food, spread his hands, grinned. “And now you have me.”

Suzanne shrugged, thinking still of his wife, the woman who knew how to dress, how to get things done, how to raise money. “I do and I don’t. Anyway, I was twelve then, prone to romantic fantasy.”

“And so then what happened?”

“I fell in love with the viola.”

Suzanne hears the door push open, a jangle of bells.

“Sorry I’m late,” Petra says, sitting down, grabbing the menu. “I’m starving.”

With sudden clarity that constricts her lungs, Suzanne remembers what Alex ordered that day: tomato-lentil soup and a rice dish with dried fruit and nuts. This is what she asks for when the old man comes to take their order.

Petra orders her meal and bread for the table. “Do you have a wine list?”

“Sorry, no liquor license,” he says, retreating with their menus. “I’ll bring you tea.”

“Is that why you picked this place?” Petra asks, joking but her voice stretched just a little tight.

“I’ll buy you a bottle on the way home if you’ll indulge a side trip.”

Suzanne tries to feel Alex in the smell of the steam rising from the raisin-studded rice, in the tanginess of the soup, in the texture of the soft, warm bread she tears with her fingers. She wishes she had asked that day, when she could have asked him, what he meant about his wife not holding up her end of the bargain. She wishes she had asked to see a picture so that now she could match a face to the voice she has heard through her phone. She wonders if Olivia simply wants to torment her or if there’s more, and she wonders how far she’ll go. A woman who knows how to get things done .

“It’s time to swallow, honey.”

Suzanne looks up. “What?”

“You’ve chewed that bite like sixty times,” Petra says. “Tell me it’s not a diet. You’re getting way too skinny.”

Suzanne shakes her head. “I’m not trying to lose weight.”

After Suzanne wrestles the car from its tight space, she heads not to the freeway but up Broad, toward Temple and then beyond into the monolithic slum that is north Philadelphia. This is the place that inspired Alex to get the hell out, that forged his strength as it scarred him, giving him a place to be from and to overcome. She shudders at how easily he might have been stuck, the terrain of his childhood as much quicksand as mud. How different his life would have been if his talent had been less enormous, if he’d been a sliver less obstinate, if his music teacher hadn’t tossed him a life rope, if his aunt hadn’t owned a piano and three classical records.

He’d listened to those scratchy records — the Chicago Symphony playing Beethoven’s Ninth, Horowitz playing the Beethoven sonatas, and the Berlin Philharmonic playing Brahms’ Third Symphony — again and again on an old Magnavox record player that looked like a suitcase, risking his father’s formidable wrath, insatiable for the music whatever the consequences.

Every chance he got or could make, he was at his aunt’s piano. At nine he was picked up by the police for breaking in to play while she was at work, after which she gave him a key and told him to hide it from his father. At fifteen he spent nearly every dollar he earned washing dishes at a Bavarian restaurant to take the train downtown to volunteer as an usher at the Academy of Music. At thirty — already prominent, in some circles famous — he attended the funeral lunch of his father at the same haus of strudel and beer, a smirk on his face, the weight of childhood terror beginning to lift.

Suzanne navigates her way to Olney, the once working-class German neighborhood now solidly destitute and black and not a place visited by people who look like she and Petra. Alex told her she was the only person he knew he could take on a date to a ghetto. She started to joke, to say she wasn’t that low-maintenance, but instead she held his hand and said there was no place she would rather be. He had that effect on her, made her want not to sound like everyone else. Sometimes she was careful with her words because she was afraid of disappointing him — boring him, losing him — but more often it was because she felt different with him. Like him, she had come from common, seeking something more, something harder. They were not like most other people. She and Alex came together because they fell in love, but their shared class was part of that. Not many people from any class but the top really make it, not in music, not in anything.

Suzanne parks in front of the row house where Alex endured the slow years of his youth.

“Did you ever live here?” Petra asks.

Suzanne says yes, she did, and it’s true in its own way. It is that much like places she did live, although her run-down neighborhoods were south of the city instead of north, and not often did she and her mother rent an entire house.