Elise Blackwell: An Unfinished Score

Again Suzanne raises her viola, tucks its familiar hard cradle under her chin. She swipes the bow across the strings. Without planning to, she begins again the theme from Harold . The sound is sweet — always it has been sweet. The vibrating strings feel abnormally thick, as though they have been submerged, bloated by water. Despite their thick feel under her callused fingerprints, and though she grips her bow harder than usual, the run-through is clean. Her right tricep is sore when she finishes.

She will never perform the piece again. Perhaps she will play it, probably she will, if not for a long time, but she will never again play it when she is not alone. Its performance belongs to the past, when her lover breathed air in and out of his lungs, told her ear that he loved her as if it were a secret between him and it. This is the present and not the past, when she was certain that she and Alex would return to the Théatre des Champs-Elysées after again paying homage to Berlioz in a Montmartre cemetery.

She pictures Hector Berlioz alone, seeking refuge from the Italian heat in the cool chambers of Saint Peter’s, his volume of Byron heavy on his lap. Suzanne has never been to Saint Peter’s, but she imagines it as Notre Dame, as Saint Paul’s, as the Cathedral de San Juan and the one in Seville — all the cathedrals Alex ever pulled her into. Alex shared Berlioz’s love of them, though less for their cool sanctuary than for the ambition they represent — that human desire for height and beauty and something better. When they entered a cathedral he would stand at its center, put his hands to his hips, nod satisfaction, as if to say, This is good enough .

Once Alex drove Suzanne through the neighborhood where he’d grown up, past the cheap house where his father had hit him with too many fists to count and more than once with a full bottle of beer. Down the street from the house swelled a large church, made huge by the stinginess of its surroundings. “You could see it from every street. It was like a cathedral to us, and it saved me.” But Suzanne knew that the building had not saved him. Alex had escaped his childhood with his brilliance intact through music and through pure will. He built his own invisible cathedral and rose from the ground.

Suzanne was born to parents afraid of height. She remembers her mother, pinned against the panel between two elevator banks, unable to take one step toward the glass walls of the Empire State Building’s observation floor while Suzanne walked its circumference, looking to the ground for her father, who had been unable even to enter the building, who has been unable to do many things in his life.

Yet Suzanne sighted in Alex something beyond her own absence of fear — a passion for altitude, a desire to ascend from the filth and stupidity that hulked over his childhood. He had a friend who took him up in a small plane. It scared her when he told her, and she understood why he had been so alarmed when she’d told him about a high school boyfriend who’d taken her on fast motorcycle rides.

“I don’t even want to think about your having died before I met you,” he said.

Flirting more than anything, not really thinking, she said, “But you wouldn’t have known what you were missing.”

He turned toward her, staring hard, voice angry. “Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that.”

When he told her about the friend with the small plane, she said, “That’s the kind that goes down. But it’s back-page and not front-page news because only four people die at a time.”

“I’m not afraid of dying in that sort of plane crash,” he explained. “It’s not like being hit by a bus. How awful that would be, everything just smashed and over before you knew what hit you. Going down in a small plane would be visceral. Falling and thinking, This really isn’t happening, except it is. This is a great thrill, and now I am dying. Look how high we are, how far we have to fall .”

Suzanne despised the image, but she understood and told him so.

“But I would hate to die in a big plane,” he said. “No view. Dying knowing that the last thing you’d see in life is some Tom Cruise movie or a fat woman in a pink track suit.”

It was a full-sized jet, the one he’d gone down in.

After dialing the 800 numbers advertised for family members, Suzanne spends the hour she is on hold cleaning the house with one arm, a crick in her neck. The phone is uncomfortable in the hollow of her chin. Unlike her viola, it is small and easily dropped. Its hardness feels cheap.

Using lemon oil, she polishes the single piece of furniture she has from her mother: a heavy cypress buffet, plain except for its three drawers engraved with intricate leaves. She spends a long time in the depression of each leaf and accesses her clearest memories of the woman who hid birthday presents in the drawers. Avoiding the overwhelming new grief by returning to the old, Suzanne clicks through the mental pictures like a slideshow. Her mother, about a year after the Empire State Building visit, hair disheveled, fending off Suzanne’s father with a skillet as they back out the porch door for the last time. Her mother through a fogged passenger-side window, standing in the front yard of a tract house she desperately wants to sell so she can pay the rent on their apartment and continue Suzanne’s private lessons. Her mother, beauty evaporated by difficulty and illness, dying at home like Suzanne promised. But there are as many images of her mother not there: concert-hall seats filled by people who aren’t her mother. The vacant front-row seat at Suzanne’s graduation recital at the Curtis Institute, the empty seats in Charleston, the seated strangers at all her performances in St. Louis. Her mother didn’t live to see her succeed, though it was a future she always believed in, even when Suzanne did not.

A young woman’s voice comes though the line, startling Suzanne from her crooked housework.

“What was the movie on the plane, on the plane that dropped like a stone from the sky?” Suzanne’s words tumble into one another as she rushes them. “Do you know who the actor was?”

“You’re horrible,” the high voice answers. “People died. Their wives and children are trying to find out information, and you’re playing pranks.”

Suzanne thinks of Alex unwrapping his tray of food, struggling with the cellophane to extract the disposable fork, fumbling with the paper salt packet that might make the portions edible. “Wait,” she says, trying to suppress the crazed tone she hears. “This is more important. Was there a meal or a snack box? Was there a choice?”

“You’re either a bad journalist or a bad person,” the young woman on the other end of the line says, her voice lifting and tight. “You’re a sick woman. You need help.”

She hangs up before Suzanne can explain that it isn’t a prank, that it matters to her what her lover saw and tasted in the last minutes of his life. She hangs up before Suzanne can tell her that, yes, she is a bad person, that she is not Alex’s wife, but that she mattered to him and needs to know. She wants to say that Alex should have gone down in his friend’s plane, toward a screen of greenery, holding a perfectly crisp apple missing one sweet bite, every foot of lost altitude a measure of how far he had risen.

There is no black on the right side of her closet, the side of her days. The clothes there are gray, white, blue, green, and tan. On hangers are a purple blouse, a red tee-shirt, and a pair of maroon pants — a gift from Petra she has worn only once.

The left side of her closet is monotonous night: solid black, the attire of performance. Like a widow in eternal mourning, Suzanne has pairs of black trousers, black skirts, black jackets, and black shirts. She has a black sweater, long- and short-sleeved black dresses, the formal black dresses of the soloist and plain orchestra dresses, black dresses designed to be seen from the opera boxes and those seen to best advantage from the floor. They seem extravagant in quantity, but each piece has been with her for years, worn many times, a fact once mentioned — a gratuitous cruelty — in a Charleston weekly whose music reviews were penned by a wealthy man’s wife who fancied herself a critic and likely had no idea what she cost Suzanne, a young woman born poor, pressed to pass among those who assume that people who wear the same outfit twice in a season lack self-respect.