Elise Blackwell - An Unfinished Score

If she can play this score, breathe life into the composition, she can resuscitate Alex, at least an Alex. The music in Olivia’s hand promises a communion between the living and dead, a way to share time with the man she loved. She takes the envelope.

“It will be difficult,” Olivia says, “to fill in another person’s gaps, figure out what someone else meant, was thinking and feeling. He’d only just begun the orchestration. But it shouldn’t be too hard for you.” Olivia produces again the full but flat smile. “Since you knew him so very well.”

Suzanne gestures to the coffee cup, to be polite, to deflect Olivia’s clinical gaze.

Olivia waves away the suggestion. “I’ll take care of it. It’s nothing, in the scheme of things,” she says. “And you, you will start work tomorrow and stay until you can play the solo for me. Then you’ll go home and work on the arrangement, and then we’ll see about getting an orchestra.”

“You’re asking me to do something I can’t do. I can play the solo for you, but I’m not a composer.”

“You started to be; you wanted to be. You’ve had the theoretical training. You help arrange music for your quartet.”

“A full orchestra has eighty instruments. I don’t know what to do with the brass, the winds, the percussion.”

“You took advanced instrumentation and orchestral writing. I’ve seen your transcript; did you know that? I know every retreat and fellowship and residency you’ve ever been offered.”

Suzanne does not want to respond to this, but instinctively she mouths, “How?”

“Did you think I wouldn’t want to know whom my husband was sleeping with?” Olivia shrugs. “You do the best you can, and we’ll see if we can get it premiered. Maybe here — his orchestra — or else Philadelphia. Which do you think for Alexander Elling’s unveiling?”

“You are deluded if you think a major orchestra is going to perform anything I arrange.”

“Maybe your husband can help you.” Her whisper is loud. “So Chicago or Philadelphia?”

“Chicago — that’s an easy choice.” But even as Suzanne says this, she hesitates. Maybe Alex would have wanted it performed in Philadelphia, after everything, despite his venom for the city of his scarred childhood. Maybe he would have viewed it as the ultimate triumph over that childhood.

She is already considering Olivia’s question — where the concerto will be performed and not whether it should be. That, she understands, is how powerful Olivia is.

Because she does not want to ask Olivia to use her phone, or even to have Olivia see her phone for help, Suzanne walks several blocks with viola and roller bag so that she is out of view when she uses rationed cell phone minutes to call information and then for a taxi. This is not a neighborhood of taxis, except perhaps those arranged by homeowners for early-morning trips to the airport, and the wait is nearly thirty minutes. The minutes sag as Suzanne sits on her suitcase at the corner she named for the dispatcher by reading the street signs, imagining in each upstairs window of each house a pair of eyes, watching her. She looks as though she has been evicted, or perhaps as though she is fleeing an unstable marriage.

The driver, a large, dark man, smiles broadly at her, taking the trouble to get out, put her bag in his trunk, open the back door for her. She keeps her Klimke and Alex’s score, resting them on her lap. She names a hotel where she has been with Alex — emotionally dangerous, and probably expensive, but there’s comfort in the familiar and relief in having a place to name, as though she belongs somewhere and is doing what she is supposed to be doing. She sinks back, her hands lightly weighting the score on her viola, and gazes out the side window. Her view crowds as they move from the large, widely spread estates near the lake to the smaller and more varied houses of the inner suburbs, which give way to the less orderly shapes of the city itself, a city that still feels small to Suzanne, who grew up knowing wide Philadelphia and tall New York. Occasionally she meets the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Finally she asks him where he’s from.

He grins and says, “Haiti” in a series of short syllables, three or four of them rather than two.

“Port-au-Prince?”

He shakes his head, the gesture large and amused. “No, no, I am a village boy.”

“But now Chicago,” Suzanne says.

On the night of one of her ugliest fights with Alex, their taxi driver had been Haitian, though they had not talked to him enough to find out if he was from capital or village.

The evening had started well, the weather beautiful enough to walk to the Upper West Side venue from Alex’s Murray Hill hotel, where they’d spent the entire day. They were on their way to a performance that Alex had to attend. It would be awful, he warned her, but it was one of the reasons he was in town and a favor to a friend as well.

In a dark purple sleeveless dress, Suzanne felt as she often did walking next to Alex: beautiful and important. Whenever she turned a man’s head, Alex put his arm around her or reached to hold her hand, and she felt specially claimed. Mostly, though, they walked with a slight gap between them, a space that felt not empty but magnetized. “Anyone who looks at us can see that we are lovers,” Alex said, and she believed it was true.

As they crossed Central Park, Alex asked her about Ben’s work.

“He’s working on something new,” she told him. “He wants to extend some of what Janáček was after in his last pieces. He’s connecting largely through the math, using certain identity permutations.”

“You husband sounds like an interesting guy.”

Suzanne faltered in her response, unsure what Alex was after. Finally she settled on a quiet “Yes.”

“Is he good? Is he a real composer?”

Suzanne nodded because yes, Ben was a talent.

“At least he’s not into minimalism.”

“No one really is anymore,” Suzanne offered.

“It’s still played enough. Just yesterday I saw that guy advertised in the Voice as ‘being on a first-name basis with Philip Glass.’ Made me ill just reading that.”

“The public’s always a bit behind the game, no?” Suzanne drifted closer so that her arm brushed Alex’s, hoping to bring him back from his line of thought with her physical presence.

“It’s as big a problem in music as in art. Once you’re about an idea and not about the medium, you’re in trouble. Composers should leave the concepts to the philosophers and writers, who might have the talent for it. Take a look at what’s being performed. Operas based on David Lynch movies — is that all they can come up with?”

She wanted to tell him about the beautiful composition she’d played at a conductors institute the previous summer — penned by a young music professor in South Carolina — but she didn’t know how to make a space for her own ideas in Alex’s black-and-white pronouncement. She imagined him disparaging academics and thinking her naive. It wasn’t until later in their relationship that she realized he valued her opinions, that he wasn’t testing her to see if she was smart, that she didn’t always have to be on her intellectual toes the way she had to be with Ben. So on that day she laughed and held his arm, wanting only to maintain their closeness. “Is that why you don’t compose?”

“That’s part of it,” he said, and they walked on, exiting the park and heading farther west to the small auditorium, which was located in a 1970s office building whose exterior in no way suggested that it held a performance space.

Even when they were not in Chicago, people at concerts recognized Alex, and Suzanne was already practiced in being with-but-not-with him. When two men came to shake his hand, she excused herself to the bathroom. Between conversations he slipped her a ticket, and she went first into the auditorium, Alex joining her just moments before the lights dimmed. He did not take her hand but pressed his leg against hers in the dark.