An Unfinished Score Read Online Free PDF Page B

holding a perfectly crisp apple missing one sweet bite, every foot of lost altitude a measure of how far he had risen.

Three
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.
    Though Suzanne never wears black offstage, not since she was twenty, today only the left side of her closet feels possible. She finds black pants that are not too dressy and a black silk tee usually worn under a shimmering sweater at a winter concert. She knows Petra will ask her what the hell is going on, but she cannot help herself. She tries to dress the clothes down with boots, with dangling silver earrings, with a face scrubbed clean.
    When the phone rings, she answers it. A woman’s voice says her name, more statement than question.
    Suzanne repeats her own name. “Yes, this is Suzanne.”
    “Suzanne, you owe me a great deal.” This is said so softly that Suzanne can hardly hear it. The woman hangs up, or maybe they are disconnected. Suzanne stands with the phone in her trembling hand, mouth growing dry until she breaks the frozen moment.
    She knows a phone call can change your life. It was a ringing phone that brought her into the quartet. When Petra called with the invitation, Suzanne had been mulling over the possibility of resigning her seat in St. Louis and moving to a place where Ben would be happier and perhaps have more opportunity. Without first identifying herself, Petra greeted Suzanne, as usual, with a viola joke: “How do I keep my violin from being stolen?”
    Suzanne delivered the tired punch line for her: “Put it in a viola case.”
    “But this time, I actually need a viola,” Petra said. “I told them we’d probably have to get someone else now that you’re rich and famous, but I have to ask.” She told Suzanne that Anthony, a classmate from Curtis, was starting a quartet in Princeton, that he’d married a woman with family money willing to float the ensemble for two years, that he had a serious business plan, that their friend Daniel had already committed. “Not that you’d be interested, not with your job, but there’s no one Daniel and I would rather have. Anthony’s still such an asshole, but we’d have him outnumbered. Plus there’d be more stuff for Ben to do—an hour from New York and Philadelphia.”
    “That already crossed my mind,” Suzanne answered.
    “Your dad still lives in Philly, right?” Petra paused. “Or maybe I shouldn’t have reminded you of that.”
    “It’s okay,” Suzanne said and asked if Petra thought working with Daniel would be all right, given his propensity to fall in love with whomever he played with.
    “Suz?” Petra paused again—a long silence. “I really need you. With Adele. I’m failing as a single mother. There are problems. I need help.”
    For four days, Suzanne kept Petra’s call to herself, knowing Ben would make the decision if she told him while she was still undecided. If it wasn’t her