word survivor, and there isn’t one, the details can do her no good tonight.
Suzanne distributes water glasses, and they take their usual seats around the food. Adele lifts her glass, leaving behind a wet circle she traces with a fingertip. She looks at the food, at each of them. Had they been a household of three, which for a while it seemed they might be, family dinners would have been shaped by sound. Rising or falling or stalled, but always sound or its absence. But Ben and Suzanne’s baby did not arrive, and after Petra and Adele made them a quartet, they worked to make a world defined by sight, touch, smell, taste rather than by sound and not-sound.
In their deep concern for Adele—the child who never turned to Petra’s violin, who never winced at sudden noise, the child with wide eyes but only a small seal of a mouth—the three musicians do the best they can. Suzanne has trained her eyes and hands to move with some fluency. Now that Adele can follow the shapes and motions of lips, Suzanne speaks slowly and faces her squarely. Of course none of their hands are so nimble in language as Adele’s. The swift precision of hers is that of a conductor who knows the music so well that he does not use a score.
Suzanne watches Adele’s fingers through dinner, sometimes forgetting to answer, forgetting to mouth or sign, “Yes, I had a good day, too.” She is thinking of Alex’s hands at work, and that today feels like the worst day of her life.
Petra carries the conversation with Adele, chatting away like an older sister, asking Suzanne if Adele can have soda with dinner, as though it is Suzanne and not Petra who is the mother. Suzanne does what Petra wants her to do: she says no for her.
Away from her violin Petra’s long fingers lack the speed and clean sweeps of her daughter’s, but they share their exuberance, the beguiling lack of self-consciousness. They move without her watching them, like Suzanne’s fingers when they press and release the strings of her viola but at no other time. Suzanne envies this fundamental honesty, this fluency in a speech not yet divorced from action and feeling by time and intent. For all her faults, Petra doesn’t lie. She says she doesn’t have to, an advantage of not giving a flying fuck what other people think. Suzanne wonders what it is to lie in gesture, whether it is easier to detect deception in a first or second language, in spoken or signed speech. Hands caught in the act. She folds hers in her lap, resting from eating the food she cannot quite taste.
She remembers to ask Ben about his work. He is collaborating on a composition with a man who is both a mathematics professor and on the adjunct music faculty, and they are arranging it for a small orchestra.
Ben nods, stabbing tubes of pasta. “We decided to cut the faux-scherzo.”
“Too obscure? The joke that isn’t?”
His hair, recently grown out from a self-inflicted haircut, flops side to side as he eats. He looks at Suzanne as though there is food on her face, more amused than annoyed but at least a little annoyed. “I argued that it pandered, and Kazuo agreed. The whole point of this staging, of using his contacts to get this performed for an audience, is to create an uncompromised piece.”
“No such thing!” says Petra.
Ben ignores her. “I want the listener to have a distilled experience, something pure.”
The listener. Suzanne pictures Richardson Auditorium one-third full: small clumps of math professors, music students, the odd mother taking a too-young child for a little culture after church, widows and widowers with the small hope of meeting one another and nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon. Empty seats divide them.
She swipes her mouth with her napkin. “To experience the beauty of music intellectually, stripped of emotion,” she says, a refrain from one of Ben’s oft-spoken theorems.
Widows with nothing better to do. The thought recurs, means something new in its second iteration. Alex’s wife—now a widow. Her carotid arteries tense, as though there is too much blood in her body, and her pulse is all she can feel.
Adele’s eyes are fixed on Suzanne’s mouth, trying to read her words. Petra’s stare is about something else. In these faces she loves, Suzanne sees only danger. Her head feels heavy, engorged with grief beginning to swell.
Ben again shakes his head, hard, caring so obviously that his body discloses his passion. It is how they used to feel about the music—and each other—all the time, even back when they were students, when they were only posing as musicians and adults, rehearsing the people they wanted to be.
Now sarcasm sharpens his laugh. “Not stripped of emotion. Without emotional interference. No directions in the first place—no agitato, no appassionato, no doloroso—just the sublime.”
“Isn’t the sublime emotional?” Petra asks.
Suzanne closes her eyes and sees Alex. She opens them because if she thinks about Alex she will break like a glass shattered by perfect high pitch. She concentrates on what is being said at the table, tries to close the distance fast opening between her and where she sits. Even her plate seems far away, Petra’s voice oddly distant. When Ben launches into his long answer, his voice comes to Suzanne as if through a tunnel.
She knows his premiere will have three reviews. The local paper will send a cheerleader who knows nothing about music and will write up something sweet with the assistance of a music dictionary, a thesaurus, and the photocopied program. A more expensively educated and stealthy presence from the Times or the Inquirer will yield a scathing piece that neglects the composition itself in a jeremiad against the off-to-sea, out-to-lunch academy and its impenetrable, navel-gazing, masturbatory self-indulgences. The reviewer will use some of these very words.
The third review will be written by one of those several professors who knock between music and mathematics departments—a friend or admirer or enemy or former lover or teacher or student of Kazuo. It will appear, months later, in a journal carried by Princeton’s Fireside Library but not by the libraries of universities with less funding and smaller collections. The review will be positive or negative or—most likely—mixed, but it will be dense and detailed, and Ben will pronounce that at least the reviewer understood what he and Kazuo were seeking, that the reviewer got it.
“You can call it Subliminal,” Suzanne says.
Though he rarely joked himself, Alex always smiled at her silly puns, and the thought of his smile constricts her throat even to air. When it releases, she hears herself gasp, though only Adele looks up as though she has heard the sound of Suzanne desperate for oxygen.
“You know it can’t be titled,” Ben says, his voice like salt, the last of his amusement evaporated.
After dinner the evening pulls long like elastic, and Suzanne is relieved to cross the stretched time, moment by quivering moment, left foot then right. She volunteers to make Adele’s school lunch while Adele and Petra withdraw to their part of the house—two bedrooms linked by a bath—for their nighttime rituals. She makes the sandwich, puts dried apple slices in a plastic bag, tucks a vitamin in a paper napkin, and stows the lunch in the refrigerator. She reminds herself, as she has promised herself she would, that Adele is not her child.
“I’m going to stay up and read a bit,” she says when Ben turns in early. The lines traversing his forehead hold hurt, or maybe she imagines this. “We’ll spend some time this weekend.” She bends her mouth in a curve that is almost a smile.
Both times that he asked, once early in the affair and once two years in, Suzanne told Alex that she made love to her husband only rarely and when unavoidable. But that was not true. Sometimes unavoidable
