Elise Blackwell - An Unfinished Score

“Curtis also?”

Olivia stands. “Julliard.”

“Of course you went to Julliard,” Suzanne says, not hiding her smile.

“I suppose you needn’t even have asked,” Olivia says, “And now I will leave you to your work.”

When she withdraws Suzanne is again alone in the room in which Alex composed the concerto that she fights to decipher. Today she concentrates on the strange second movement.

When evening comes Olivia makes a dinner of trout, new potatoes, roasted asparagus, sliced tomatoes with fresh basil. The meal is simple but perfectly prepared with good ingredients.

“She’s a good cook, I’ll give her that,” Alex often said. Suzanne never, not once, cooked a meal for Alex.

The two women eat the food outside on the patio, encircled by border gardens of herbs and flowers. The lake smell is not stale and fishy, as Suzanne sometimes imagined it would be, but something fresh carried in on a cooling breeze. Strategically positioned citron candles and a ceiling fan attached to the overhanging roof keep away the mosquitoes. Again it hits Suzanne: this is a lovely home, a place someone would want to live. She reminds herself that it is kept by someone who does not have to work, but still it makes her feel inferior. It’s no wonder that Alex never left Olivia and that Suzanne never quite believed him when he said he would leave her the day his son graduated from college.

Olivia draws a bottle of wine from an ice bucket and pours them each a glass. The wine tastes like grapefruit and minerals, expensive. They finish eating and together clear the table of Olivia’s nice white plates and blue cloth napkins before returning to the patio.

As the sun recedes, Suzanne feels sponginess above the bridge of her nose, in the spot on her forehead where she always feels alcohol. She hears her voice: a little loud, some words indistinct, the occasional unfinished sentence. She tries to correct herself so she will sound as clear-headed as she still feels, but she cannot rid her speech of its slight slur. Her hostess drains the bottle into her glass, and Suzanne suspects that Olivia has not drunk her fair share.

“I tidied your room while you were working,” Olivia says. “I couldn’t help but notice that you are reading a book about cochlear implants. A deaf child? Do you have children?”

Suzanne fixes Olivia with her eyes, seeking to discern her intention, to understand the degree of pain she is capable of inflicting. Blurry with the wine and thrown by Alex’s concerto, she does not trust her instincts. She mouths the words carefully: “A friend’s child.”

Olivia nods.

Suzanne decides to bare another weakness, to distract this woman from the fragile point she has laid her finger on. She says, “Alex’s concerto is not what I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“To be Clara Schumann to Alex’s Brahms,” Suzanne says, hoping it will stand in for the more complicated thing she means.

“Brahms and Clara had a pure friendship,” Olivia says.

“The analogy was yours, in the first place.”

“You have to understand that I spent almost four years hating you, the woman stealing the man I loved. My husband . There were others; you know that?”

Suzanne nods, determined that she will not defend herself.

“Many others. But I do admit you were different, that he might really have left me for you.” Olivia laughs, then shrugs — a rare spontaneous gesture. “Or maybe not. He did like it here.”

“What’s not to like?” Suzanne worries that Olivia can read her mind. She looks out at the lake, which shines like real silver, and breathes in the citron candles, the mint, rosemary, and sweet olive. Quietly she says, “So you loved him, then. Can I ask if that’s why you married him, if you married for love?”

“Wouldn’t you have married him?”

Suzanne massages her earlobe, something Petra taught her to do to relax. “You and I aren’t a whole lot alike. I’m asking why you married him.”

“He wasn’t a conductor yet, you know, not when we met. He was a pianist. A handsome, charming pianist who couldn’t quite hide his working-class accent and appalling table manners. I got the starter kit, and I made something of him. He was so very, very good on the piano, such expression and creativity in interpretation. He was wilder then, before the conductor’s precision took over. You knew he was a piano talent, yes?”

“Yes,” Suzanne repeats, her glass at her lips.

“So very good. But not quite good enough to take the world. I saw it if he didn’t, though I think he knew, too, deep down. So I gave him something else to be, something better for him and longer lasting. I put the idea in his head, a baton in his hands, and all my money and friends at his disposal.”

“Not that he needed much help.”

Olivia’s laugh is higher than her speaking voice. “Everyone needs help. Though I’ll grant you all the talent and ambition were there when I found him. But plenty of talented people amount to nothing at all. Plenty of ambition goes unfulfilled. It wasn’t even the money and the connections so much, though you need those to conduct. It was the direction.”

“Behind every great man is a great woman?”

“There’s truth to that, you know. It’s not enough to be supportive. Anyone can be supportive.”

Suzanne’s ear is for music alone, so she cannot tell whether Olivia’s accent is Connecticut or Massachusetts or Maryland. But it is certainly moneyed.

“Why did I marry him? He was irresistible, that magnetic pull. It’s that simple, and the rest is extraneous.” She leans back, sets her arms evenly on the arms of her chair. “If I decide to forgive you, that will be why — because I know he was irresistible, and all the more so after I made a success of him.”

If I decide to forgive you . In this moment, for just a moment, they could be friends. Olivia could choose forgiveness over this — whatever this game she is playing amounts to. And Suzanne could forgive Olivia for being right, for marrying Alex, for having a child, for owning everything Suzanne now sees and touches. She seeks Olivia’s eyes, trying to exchange something unspoken, the way she does with Petra when they lock gazes. But if they were ever accessible, already Olivia’s beautiful eyes have gone opaque, and Suzanne cannot find her at all. Suzanne pushes back her chair to stand, and the difficulty of doing so tells her that, yes, she has indeed drunk too much of Olivia’s fine wine.

Her sleep is light and fitful, sprinkled with dream fragments that feel only one beat from real life. In one she dreams she is watching a deaf bird fly into a wall, though she has just learned from her book that deaf birds do not exist.

The dream is followed by two hours of wakefulness and apprehension, in which Suzanne thinks about the new research on birds, whose ears naturally regenerate hair cells. But mostly she worries. She worries about the important things: the meaning of Alex’s concerto, whether Olivia will destroy her marriage. She also frets over problems she knows daylight will make trivial: whether she watered her own scraggly herb border before she left, when Daniel’s wedding will be if it happens, whether the purchase of a shed would allow the pantry to become a small office, what she will wear opening night of the Black Angels . Eventually she submerges, again just below the surface of sleep, and her eyes open early. She is exhausted but irrevocably awake and relieved to be rising rather than still suffering through the night.

In the absolute quiet she thinks Olivia is still sleeping, though she smells coffee. Perhaps Olivia set it up last night, or maybe she was up early and has gone out. Suzanne pads around the house, thinking she might sneak a look into Alex’s closet or at the son’s room but deciding that she wants to see neither. What she wants is to go home, so she showers and packs and practices until she hears Olivia return, calling out, “I’m ready if you are.”