else wants because you are the kind of person who does what others want you to do. Sometimes unavoidable means only your own generalized desire, that strong human need for touch.
“This weekend.” Ben leans down, kisses her hairline.
“Don’t forget the deadline this Friday.” When he looks puzzled, she adds, “For the teaching position.”
His face closes, his jaw tightening and his eyes cooling like water becoming ice. “I thought we already decided that commuting wasn’t something I would do.”
“It sounds like you’ve already decided, anyway.”
While new to their marriage, they would argue late into the night. They did this less out of respect for the old adage against going to bed angry than out of their eagerness to engage with ideas and with each other. Now Suzanne knows the value of truncating a quarrel, if only in sleep gained, and her words are the last of their day. Tonight they do not even make eye contact again. As on many nights, they do not say good-night.
After the bathroom tap stops running and the bedroom light dims, Suzanne takes down the whiskey bottle from the high cabinet over the refrigerator. It’s the only sure bottle in the house, not because Petra has never looked up there but because she will not drink bourbon, not even when the house is otherwise dry. Suzanne pours the whiskey heavily into a tumbler of ice cubes. Only after twenty minutes, after the last cough or toss can be heard from the bedroom or from Petra’s part of the house, does she pull out Alex Elling’s last CD.
Most recent and final. His latest and his last.
She sits with these two inanimate companions—cheap plastic case and highball glass—in the big blue armchair that has traveled with her and Ben from Philadelphia to Charleston, from Charleston to St. Louis, from St. Louis to Princeton. How hard they laughed when they stood in line at the DMV, coming to terms with the fact that they would have New Jersey drivers’ licenses. “How did this happen to us?” they asked, pretending that they were still happy, that everything they had was good enough, Suzanne pretending that she wasn’t in love with someone else. “What’s next?” she said. “North Dakota? Alabama?”
A two-dimensional Alex looks out from the CD case, baton in his capable hand. As always, he looks as though he might have walked straight out of the Black Forest: dark hair going to curls only at the ends, unlikely green eyes, skin stained tan midwinter. Though he 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 their pale color. When the eyes fly open, always without warning, Suzanne is startled, every time, by their sea blue, by Petra’s old-fashioned Swedish beauty. Yet when Petra stands to her full height, bends at the waist and not the knees to return her violin to its case, her look is thoroughly modern.
Sometimes when Suzanne looks at Petra, she wonders why she doesn’t hate her on sight, as many women do. It helps that Petra thinks she looks common. Though perfectly posed when holding her violin, without her instrument she is no more coordinated than a cloth doll, and Suzanne loves her for her awkwardness. Many men look at Petra as if at cased jewelry, with appreciation for a beautiful thing they have no use for. When a man approaches the two of them at an after-concert reception, he speaks first to Suzanne, turns to Petra, and then, in a shift once surprising that now feels inevitable, refocuses his attention on Suzanne until she excuses herself to go home to her husband. There’s something about Petra’s blatant good looks that reveals Suzanne’s more obscured beauty. But the real reason Suzanne doesn’t hate or envy Petra is simple: Petra is her best friend.
“Hey,” Petra says, “I thought today was supposed to mark your return to composition. Why aren’t you composing?”
“Why aren’t you?”
“I have a kid.”
“Whose breakfast I just made.” Suzanne hears something in her voice under the humor, feels the hangover pressing into her forehead.
Petra blows on her coffee, then looks up. “What’s going on with you?”
“I’m
