Elise Blackwell - An Unfinished Score

She blinks, and the visual static clears. Staring at the small squares of her knees, she thinks that this is something she can understand, that she should understand. Still she says, “You just happened to take your clothes off with my best friend?”

Ben surprises her by saying, “More or less.”

“How many times?”

“I’m not sure.” He shrugs, looking helpless, looking like he wants to run from the room. He breathes a few audible breaths, settles into himself a little. “About five, I guess.”

“Each time that memorable?” She hears the ugliness in her voice, the predictability, the easiness and wrongness of the hypocritical path she is starting down.

“They kind of blur; they’re part of one thing.”

Suzanne swallows, tries to soften her voice. “Would you tell me when the first time was? Maybe it doesn’t matter, but I would like to know.”

“About a year ago, maybe. It wasn’t any particular day or event. You were out of town, and we were drinking — we were pretty drunk — and it just happened. It wasn’t a big deal, and we promised that it was just a fluke and we wouldn’t be weird about it. The next day or so we avoided each other, and then you came home, and it actually felt like it never even happened. Like it was a movie I saw once.”

“Until it happened again.”

“Not for a long time, not until a few days before that party at Elizabeth’s, a day you went into the city for some reason. I don’t remember exactly.”

“Is that why she was drunk and belligerent at the party?”

“It was different the second time, maybe because it was the second time, and she wanted to tell you right away and beg forgiveness.” Ben rubs his forearms, which are clenched, their veins three-dimensional and blue. “I told her not to, that I didn’t want you to know, not ever.”

“When was the next time?”

His voice is faded, not so much a whisper as his full voice eroded and made rough. “Don’t do this. To yourself, don’t do it.”

Suzanne stands, leans her forehead into the door of her closet, rests her weight there even though it hurts a little. “So why tell me now if you didn’t want to tell me ever?”

“I did want to tell you the truth, but I didn’t want to hurt you. And then Charlie died and I told Petra never again and she agreed and so I decided not to tell you. I didn’t want to hurt you, and I didn’t want you to leave. I was afraid you were going to leave when you found out I lied about my dad, and I figured you’d definitely leave me if you found out I was lying about something less … less sympathetic.” He shakes his head the way he does when he steps out of the shower and gulps a large breath.

She repeats her question when she realizes he hasn’t answered it. “So why tell me now?”

“It was killing Petra — she was really cracking up, drunk all the time, going crazy. You know she doesn’t lie, and I’m starting to think it’s because she can’t, not without making herself sick.”

“So you’re telling me for her sake?”

Ben shakes his head. “I wouldn’t do that. I’m telling you because she’s making me. I’m telling you because she was going to tell you if I didn’t.” He runs his fingers through his hair, smoothing it down and then messing it up, taking a long time to speak again. “I don’t know what to say except that I’m really, really sorry. I kept trying to make things better between you and me and it never worked and then, I don’t know. It didn’t mean that much, you know.”

“It means all kinds of things.”

Suzanne imagines Ben at home, black pen making notes across page after page while she is at a concert with Alex in Chicago, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Cleveland, London. She should tell Ben; she knows this. She should let him off the hook, relieve his guilt and herself from her lying. She always figured he must know, at least generally — but if he did, wouldn’t he bring it up now? Wouldn’t he fling it in her face, defend himself, blame her infidelity for his? She flips it over and back, but still she doesn’t know the answer because Ben isn’t like other people, and even if he was it’s increasingly plain that Suzanne doesn’t understand anyone at all, that she has misjudged everyone who matters to her.

“But not that much,” he says, his voice insistent. “It doesn’t mean that much.”

She turns, looks down to where he sits, now slumped, and into his eyes. “Do you think we’ll be able to find a way to start over?”

Ben shakes his head, and again she shivers. This is not what she wanted, not really, not now.

“No, Suzanne. People don’t get to start over. And even if we could, I don’t think I would want to undo everything just to undo a couple of the worst things. I don’t want to start over; I want to just keep going.”

“Keep going with me?”

Ben nods. “I want us to keep going.”

She steps toward him and shoves his shoulders back as hard as she can, pushing him off balance, wishing she had the nerve to punch him in the face. “I am really, really pissed off, so pissed off I can’t see straight.” She squints to release her tears.

“I know,” he answers, righting himself. “I can tell.”

She leans back against the wall and slides down halfway into a squat, her feet pressing down and her back flat on the wall. Her thighs, parallel to the floor, burn with the effort. For just a moment she feels something opening between her and Ben. And for a moment their whole predicament seems funny. She laughs. “That’s progress, right? You being able to tell what I’m feeling?”

“Yeah.” Ben nods, finds her eyes and holds them. “That and you telling me straight out.”

He is not laughing, and now she isn’t either.

She braces herself tighter, concentrating on the strength of her legs, the muscular pain. “I’m going to think while I’m away. I’m going to Minneapolis.”

“You’re running away from me.”

He stands and holds out his hands to help her up, but she uses her legs to slide up the wall without his assistance. She folds her arms and looks past him, across the bed at his nightstand, noting with part of her attention that it’s covered with a fine layer of dust except for the circle where his water glass sits at night and the rectangular shape indicating a book’s phantom presence.

“I’m not running away Ben. I actually have to go to Minneapolis, and then I’m coming back. I will come back, and we can see then. I can’t do anything now anyway.”

“You shouldn’t leave. It’s a mistake.”

“It has nothing to do with this, or you. It’s about the music. Of all the people in the world, you should be able to understand that.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“I don’t know. A week. And you need to keep Petra away from me until I get back. Tell her not to call me because I won’t be answering.” She opens her closet to pull out her suitcase. “And when I get home I want to run the goddamn air conditioning at night. I can’t sleep when it’s hot, and I don’t think our marriage can survive another night of me listening to you sleep while I can’t.” She doesn’t speak her other thought, which is that Petra should stay away not just from her but from him.

Ben sits back down, watching her pack. “If it means we can keep going, we can run the air conditioner more.”

Suddenly calm and focused on what she is about to do, she says, “I’m not promising that, and neither can you. We’ve let things go pretty far.”

“But maybe not too far. We’re not like other people.”

“No,” she admits, “we’re not much like most other people.”

“I feel like I’ve always been waiting for you, so what’s another week?”