An Unfinished Score Read Free

often wore a close beard, in this photo he is clean-shaven, the way Suzanne liked him best. His neck is slender, his jawline clean, and his nose so straight and strong that Suzanne can imagine him as someone who lived a long time ago. But not as someone who died a few hours ago. He stands still, prepared to conduct but not yet in motion.
    She extracts the booklet inside the case, the one Alex signed, Everything for you . Ben, though a reader of liner notes, has never mentioned the inscription. Suzanne has turned this fact over, wondering whether Ben knew and decided to allow her the affair as the price of keeping her or merely from indifference—or whether the idea never occurred to him and he assumed this was how the great conductor signed albums for all his fans. Ben has never asked her what it was like to play under Alex, never asked whether they spoke of more than the music at hand, never asked, even, if he was a good conductor. Though this is just one of the many closed doors between them, she has always resented him for not noticing, or pretending not to, and hated herself for not knowing which and not being strong enough to ask.
    It is the former, she tells herself now: he simply did not notice. And it is true that Ben has never held much interest in mainstream performance, even across the years it paid their bills, even though it is how Suzanne spends what time she spends away from him. He never asks. Of course he wouldn’t notice.
    When she confessed to Alex that she kept the CD among their others, in the living room, he laughed. “You are no Mata Hari,” he said. “You obviously haven’t done this before.”
    No, she told him, she had done nothing of the kind before. Afraid of igniting his easy anger, yet also afraid of the answer that might follow, she did not ask him how many times he had done something of the kind.
    The night of her lover’s death—already she thinks of it this way—Suzanne drinks harsh whiskey and cries and holds the CD in its case as though the plastic square holds the coded answer to life’s hardest questions. Her fatigue fights the clicking roll of the digital clock that sits atop a row of books in the bookcase as she tries to stay awake past midnight. She wants to feel every minute of this day. Alex was alive this morning, and that will never be true again.
    It is three in the morning when she wakes in the chair, strangely bent and groggy but never forgetting, not for a sweet second, that Alex is dead, that this day does not begin with him alive. She finds her way to the bed she shares with Ben and presses herself down into sleep. She barely stirs when he slips from the room early, just as the grayest morning light seeps through the crooked slats in the blinds, leaving with gym bag and briefcase. She slides back into sleep, into a dreamy world that is beautiful because in it Alex breathes, touches her, tells her stories, and commands her to play the viola for him.

Two
When Suzanne does rise she has only shaky legs for support. As on most mornings, Adele is up but Petra is not. Through the blunt headache and the whiskey aftertaste that survives toothpaste and mouth-wash, she fixes Adele’s favorite breakfast of oatmeal with walnuts and too much brown sugar. She sits with her as she eats, a few quiet moments before Adele withdraws to dress for school.
    Petra shuffles into the kitchen wearing flannel pajama pants and a tank top. She stands at the coffee maker, back to Suzanne, jumping up and down with her hands in the air, blond braid shimmying on her back like a fat, happy snake. Even in the morning Petra jangles. She pours herself coffee and spins around, revealing the kind of good looks that Suzanne grew up wanting: tall blondness, skin like a white peach, cheekbones giving structural elegance to small features. When Petra plays her violin, she bows long stretches with her eyes closed, and her lashes are so long and thick that they make fringed fans visible across the room despite