SUZANNE AND ELENA were the only pianists in the senior class who were selected for a final audition at Juilliard, which surprised no one. On a blustery, rainy morning, they were ushered into a small room by a pole-shaped woman behaving like an official guard, who waved them to chairs facing each other and told them to wait until they were called. There was nothing in the room but a half dozen plastic chairs, a water cooler, and a scratched, dented old desk, its top bare. This was the closest the two girls had been in nearly a year. To avoid Elena, Suzanne stared at the plain wooden door to the studio where the auditions would be held, as if behind it were a gallery of torture instruments. With her fingers on her knees, she practiced the pieces she had prepared.
Although not precisely torture, the auditions were a trial: The applicants were instructed to prepare a Beethoven sonata; a major Romantic work, meaning Chopin, Brahms, Liszt, or Schumann; an étude by Chopin, Scriabin, or Rachmaninoff; a Bach prelude and fugue, and a twentieth-century work. Cynthia, who had not only been through the process herself but later served on the admissions committee, was full of advice. “Don’t try to impress them with something flashy, just do a substantial thing well. Forget Scriabin, stick to Chopin; you’re good at that. And we’ll pick a difficult Bach prelude so they can see your fingers fly. Remember, the whole thing is only about fifteen or twenty minutes. You’re not going to have a chance to play everything; you’ve just got to be prepared. They’ll stop you when they’ve heard enough of one piece and tell you to go on to the next, so don’t be surprised at that. Look them in the eye when you first go in. Don’t give them the girlish charm—act like an adult.” And so on.
“So, what are you going to play?” asked Elena abruptly. She was wrapped tightly in a large nubby shawl, something she must have brought from Russia, Suzanne thought. The room was chilly. Elena had cut her golden hair last year; no longer wound in the old-fashioned coils, it was stylishly layered with wisps straying over her eyes. Every so often she brushed them away with a careless gesture. She had had her teeth fixed, as Suzanne had foreseen, and now they were perfect, her smile like a toothpaste ad. Suzanne’s dark hair was swept up in a beehive, and she wore a dark suit that her mother had helped her pick out, with stockings and heels. In her school clothes she looked younger than her age, and she hoped the suit would give her an air of maturity, of readiness for serious study.
Elena’s voice startled her.
“Come on, Suzanne, it’s silly not to talk. I mean, after all, here we are, going through the same thing. We’re both scared shitless. It’s better to talk.”
Elena’s English was almost perfect now, too, not only barely accented but full of colloquialisms. A quick learner, Suzanne thought.
Suzanne recited her list of selections. For the Beethoven sonata she’d chosen the Waldstein, hoping the memory of Rudolf Serkin would sustain her; for the major Romantic work she would do the first Chopin ballade; then a Liszt étude; the D-minor Bach prelude and fugue; and, for the essential twentieth-century piece, a movement from Prokofiev’s third War Sonata. Elena’s choices, when she answered in turn, sounded impressive. Rather than the sober Waldstein, she’d picked the showier Appassionata. For her étude she was doing one by Scriabin, notoriously difficult. And the modern work was by Hindemith, whose work Suzanne barely knew: one of the interludes and fugues.
It didn’t matter, she told herself; this kind of thinking was so petty. Elena was sure to get in no matter what she played, because of her stepfather. Although she was good enough on her own—no one could deny that.
“You have more variety,” Elena said. “Mine is too pretentious. Like I’m trying too hard.”
“Well, it’s too late now to worry. They’ve seen hundreds of people go through this. They’re used to every type.” Suzanne turned away again, but there was nothing on the walls to look at, as if the room were deliberately unadorned to keep the students fixed on their fear.
They would be playing for four teachers, two of them legendary. One was the imperious Marina Kabalevsky, not only a renowned teacher but a dynamo of activity who at sixty-nine had begun a brilliant concert career, and also Joseph Bloch, less flamboyant but equally august, who had taught the history of the piano repertory to every pianist who passed through Juilliard.
“Suzanne, can’t we behave like adults now? I only went out with him for a month or so. We didn’t ever really get . . . you know, close. Philip Markon!” The rhythms of Elena’s speech had taken on a curt New York dismissiveness. The way she uttered his name and grimaced made Philip sound too trivial to bother about. “Anyhow, it was finished a year ago. I’m sorry. I would have been glad to give him back to you”—she giggled, as if she realized she was discussing Phil as if he were a package—“but you wouldn’t even look at me or speak.”
“I didn’t want him back by that point. He never even said a word to me about it. Just started not showing up.”
“He tried. He said you wouldn’t listen.”
Suzanne shrugged. “I hardly even remember anymore. Honestly, I never think about it. When I was a camp counselor last summer, I met someone I liked a lot better.”
“Well, good. But still, I’m sorry for the way it happened. I shouldn’t have done it. I didn’t really understand he was seeing you, I mean, in that way, you know, exclusively. But I knew very soon that it wouldn’t last long. He was so superficial. That’s what my mother said the first time he came over. He tried to impress her, talking about the concerts he’d been to and the museums and so on, like he was a precocious intellectual, and after he left she said he was all surface and just showing off. Pretty soon I realized she was right.”
Could it be? Did that charm and fluency on tap, that ready competence, mean superficiality? Surely his grief over his lost family, his resolve to escape from his aunt and uncle’s grim depression, weren’t superficial.
Her own mother had been impressed with Phil, and Gerda’s instincts were usually good. What a bright boy, she called him. A really cultured boy. Elena’s mother must be far more worldly, a woman who could see right through people. That was another expression Suzanne’s father liked to use: I could see right through him, he sometimes said of business acquaintances. While she and Gerda were innocents, deluded by surfaces. Even Richard had called her an innocent, that mortifying night when . . . she couldn’t bear to think of it, even now. What made her an innocent? Was there something missing in her? Why didn’t she see what others saw?
“That doesn’t seem totally fair. I think he’s more than surface.”
“Okay, maybe superficial isn’t quite right. I know he suffered, losing his family and all. And he was very smart and could do a lot of things. But there was something not quite . . . like he wasn’t totally what he pretended to be. Like the surface was hiding something. Or maybe nothing—maybe surface was all there was. Anyway, it’s ancient history now. What does it matter? Can’t we be friends?”
“All right, we can try,” Suzanne said. Elena was right. It was history. Before it had happened, they’d liked each other. Elena might be the only person she knew at Juilliard—assuming she passed the audition. They could help each other, although Elena never seemed to need much help.
“It’s going to be so great. These are the real musicians,” Elena said breathlessly. “I used to hear about them back home. And they’ll be teaching us. It’s fantastic. Did you know that just last week Madame Kabalevsky had this fabulous concert with the New York Philharmonic? She played the Schumann Concerto in A Minor, the same piece she played when she graduated from the Moscow Conservatory. She’s in her eighties now and still going strong. I was there, I mean last week, not sixty years ago,” she added, laughing, the teeth flashing. “It was totally amazing.”
“You were actually there?” Suzanne had read about the concert in the paper, but as something that might have taken place on the other side of the globe. To her it was a dream world she might hope to enter after years of work, while Elena was already in it.
“Paul got complimentary tickets.” Paul was her stepfather, the cellist. “The audience went wild. I heard Horowitz say it’s all in her phrasing and her tone, that those are the most important things for a pianist. Anyway, you know how everyone says she’s such a scary teacher, so strict and demanding, she taught Van Cliburn and all sorts of people? But she’s really very nice. Not arrogant at all.”
“You know her?” Suzanne whispered.
“Not well, no. But she’s come over a few times, like after concerts. There are always these parties, sometimes at our house. I’ve barely said more than hello, but I could tell she’s not as tough as they say. All her old students loved her. You just have to get used to her.”
Clearly there was no need for Elena to be “scared shitless” about the audition, thought Suzanne. For her it was more of a formality, an opportunity to show off.
The curriculum they began in September was even more rigorous than it sounded in the catalog. Professor Bloch’s required course in the history of the piano repertory—a hallowed tradition for decades—was only the beginning. The former director, William Schuman, had left a few years ago to become the president of the brand-new Lincoln Center, but during his tenure he instituted changes that made the course of study more demanding: programs combining history, theory, and music literature in order to produce what he regarded as educated musicians rather than highly trained technicians. Then there were language classes, as well as group and master classes where students would play for each other and learn how to offer critiques. But the core of the program for the piano students was the teacher they were assigned to study with once a week for the entire four years.
Suzanne would be in the care of the formidable Mme. Kabalevsky, who had gazed at her soberly, with an assessing eye, during her audition. Everyone knew her story. She was an older cousin of the well-known Dmitri Kabalevsky, a major figure in the Soviet world as both a composer and a teacher, who eventually joined the Communist Party and held official posts. Marina Kabalevsky, meanwhile, left at the time of the revolution with her family. Before that, though, she won the coveted gold medal at her graduation from the Moscow Conservatory and married a fellow student, a tenor who went on to sing in the Mariinsky Opera. He was the performer while she remained the helpmeet, teaching and of course attending all of his performances. He was most celebrated for the role of Lensky in Eugene Onegin. After the Russian Revolution they lived in various European cities and eventually came to New York to join the faculty of Juilliard, then called the Institute of Musical Art. Mme. Kabalevsky continued teaching there after her husband’s death in 1950, and shortly gave in to her colleagues’ urgings that she play in public, making a spectacular debut at sixty-nine. Twelve years later, she was still performing and teaching, a tall, regal woman with short gray hair, a composed, determined face, and piercing eyes. Suzanne was terrified.
“You should be flattered that you were assigned to her,” Elena said. “It means they think you have real potential.” This did not make her any less tense when she knocked on Mme. Kabalevsky’s door for the first time.
She greeted Suzanne kindly, and with no preliminaries sent her over to the piano. “I remember you from the auditions. You did well on the Chopin, and also the Bach prelude and fugue. So now show me something different. Let me see what else you can do.”
Suzanne, who had not spoken, fumbled with the opening of a simple Mozart sonata, and Mme. Kabalevsky stopped her immediately.
“You can do better than that. I see you’re afraid of me. That’s the trouble—my reputation follows me and it scares you. You can’t play the piano if the fingers are tense—the most essential thing is to relax. The greatest pianists have the most relaxed touch, they caress the keys, they don’t batter them. Remember that.” She paused as if for a response, so Suzanne nodded. “Now, we must get one thing straight if we are to stay together: You must not be afraid of me.” She smiled mischievously, aware of the absurdity of issuing such a command, and Suzanne had to smile back despite herself.
“I’ll try.” She noted that unlike Elena, Mme. Kabalevsky had made no effort to lose her thick accent. Of course, she was in her thirties when she came here. And it did contribute to her uniqueness.
“Trying isn’t enough. Just make up your mind and do it. Whatever I say to you doesn’t matter personally. I like you. I’ll like you more and more as time goes on. I get attached to my students, especially the good ones. When I criticize your playing, it’s about the music. All right? You will not be afraid? You will relax? Pretend you are in your home, playing for yourself. Or your mother. You have a mother who appreciates your playing?”
She nodded again.
“All right, there’s no one home but you and your mother, and she’s in the kitchen. You’re alone.”
Strangely enough, her command worked. Suzanne willed herself to rout her fear, and very soon she was thriving during the strenuous lessons. Maybe under Mme. Kabalevsky’s care, her stage fright, which had grown worse, not better, since childhood, would disappear, like adolescent acne or leg cramps. Maybe Mme. Kabalevsky would work a miracle; there was a touch of the sorceress about her. After a few months, when they knew each other better and Suzanne felt more free to speak, she asked, “How come they didn’t assign Elena to you? I would think since you’re both Russian, you’d be a good match . . .”
Mme. Kabalevsky didn’t answer for a moment, and Suzanne feared she’d gone too far. Then the teacher said, “It would be too easy for her. Too comfortable. We can’t make things comfortable. Obstacles are good.”
Elena had been assigned to the stern and unsmiling Mr. Mitchell, who seemed unmoved by her élan and was attempting to restrain her tendencies toward excessive romanticism and the too-liberal use of rubato.
It wasn’t long before Suzanne and Elena were best friends. The perspicacious Mme. Kabalevsky noticed this and took to calling them Snow White and Rose Red, Elena with her blond hair and fair skin and Suzanne darker, more sultry-looking. The famous teacher greeted them in the halls this way, as if they were semimythical creatures out of a story. “Snow White and Rose Red with talent,” Mme. Kabalevsky would say, smiling, and then walk on.
Once, Elena had the nerve to stop her and ask what the story was. “Oh, it doesn’t signify. An old tale of the Grimms’. Two sisters take care of a bear who turns out to be a prince. And then one marries him.”
“Which one?” Elena asked.
“I think Snow White,” and Mme. Kabalevsky went on her way.
“You can have the bear,” Elena said. “I don’t plan to marry anyone.”
“And who says I do?” Suzanne retorted.
Elena was the closest friend Suzanne had ever had, apart from Philip. Her confidence and enthusiasm were contagious; everything seemed brighter in her presence, brighter and more manageable. Suzanne never troubled to wonder—as she had with Philip—why Elena had chosen her. She knew. It had to do with each one’s tacitly recognizing not only the talent of the other, but the enormous ambition, what the music meant to them and what their success would mean—though they were still too young to make a clear distinction between the two. What Philip’s companionship had accomplished in high school, Elena’s did at Juilliard: It quickly felt like home. They compared notes on what they were studying, they listened to each other play and gave advice, they played pieces for four hands, and they agreed they were among the most promising students, although there were a few, like Emanuel Ax or Misha Dichter or Garrick Ohlsson, who might be as good or better. Together they sat in the student lounge and took part in the talk, the endless talk about teachers, technique, and music-world gossip.
The students would gather in clumps in the lounge late in the day, their instrument cases at their feet, scores sticking out of tote bags, the plastic tables covered with cardboard coffee mugs and crumpled napkins, cigarettes burning in ashtrays. Some were recovering after a grueling session with a teacher, others waiting their turn in the practice rooms, which stayed open until ten. They gossiped about the teachers’ eccentricities—who used too much aftershave and who needed a complete makeover—and methods: the motherly encouraging ones and the coolly distant, the patient and the impatient, those who praised too much or never, those who might be alcoholic or homosexual, or who were rivals, or the few who came on to students, male or female . . .
The pianists, especially those in their first year, compared the teachers’ contradictory demands and instructions. Frank Wallace’s teacher was always urging more pedal, he reported: “She says the piano is not naturally a legato instrument. You have to make it sound like one. And don’t wear shoes with thick soles—you have to really feel the pedal under your feet.” Frank was the only black student in the class, a southern boy from Georgia with astounding technique, so his comments were given special attention. But according to Steve Henderson, a corn-fed boy from Nebraska who looked more like a football player than a musician, his teacher advised just the opposite: “Too much pedal blurs the sound and makes it murky. That’s his mantra. Try for a clean, crisp sound. Crisp, he snaps his fingers. Use the pedal only when you absolutely must. Learn to stretch your fingers instead.”
Or the teachers differed on the best way to practice. A few demanded their students do scales and arpeggios and chromatics before playing any real music, while Elena’s Professor Mitchell said to forget the exercises. “He says we can get all the technique we need from Bach or Chopin or Liszt. Ruth Laredo never practiced an exercise in her life. Or so he claims.” One required that they play each hand slowly and separately before trying them together, while another found that a waste of time. “Just sit down and sight-read it up to speed. Any decent pianist should know how to sight-read. If you can’t, then practice it until you can,” said Rose Chen’s teacher, Professor Brent. Still another teacher thought that good natural sight-reading—always considered an enviable gift—could be a mixed blessing: “It makes the learning too easy, he says. You’re in danger of a superficial interpretation.” Tanya Borowitz’s teacher was even against practicing slowly, which they had all been taught to do as children. “He says once we can read it through, we should practice it faster than it’s supposed to be, so when you do it at the correct tempo it feels easier.” Some wanted them to read through the score first and analyze it, before even trying it on the piano.
A few insisted that the wrists be held high, with the fingers forming an arc over the keys, while others preferred the hands held lower, but Simon Valenti’s teacher, the venerable Adele Marcus, said it didn’t matter how they held their hands—whatever was comfortable, as long as the sound was right. “Look at Glenn Gould, those flat hands. Gould says you don’t play the piano with your fingers, but with your mind. And that low chair he uses! You know he cuts several inches off the legs of his chairs? But she said I better not try that here.” And some teachers didn’t mind what fingering they used, so long as it was comfortable, while others seemed personally miffed if they ignored the composer’s fingering notations—why would he have included them if they weren’t important?
How were they to figure all this out? Suzanne, who dropped in to see Richard whenever she could find time, asked him about the confusing advice. He agreed with Adele Marcus that any technique was fine as long as the music sounded beautiful and faithful. As they all grew more experienced, they would naturally find the methods that suited them best. Meanwhile, he said, they should do what their teachers asked.
Given the degree of talent and the magnitude of the burgeoning egos assembled in one building, the atmosphere at school was less rawly competitive than might be expected. Perhaps the love of music, such a benign passion, tempered the sharp edges of rivalry. But after the gossip and complaints and talk of the music itself, much of the chatter in the lounge was about what became known jokingly as “the tree falling in the forest,” code words for their own yearnings and doubts and ambitions. “The tree falling in the forest” meant, if it turned out that you spent your life accompanying singers and teaching students, or, even more extreme, as a stockbroker or a travel agent (not unheard of among the graduates), playing alone evenings and weekends in your living room, what did your devotion to music mean then? What reality did your playing have if no one ever heard it, like the tree falling in the forest? Could you still call yourself a musician?
“Of course you can,” said Simon Valenti, a strapping boy from the Bronx with Italian immigrant parents. “That’s not even a valid question. It’s not the audience that matters. It’s the music, the feeling it gives you, the sound you strive for. For yourself, for the composer. That’s enough.”
“You say so now,” said Elena. “But would you still think that if you kept trying and no one wanted to hear you? Would you still be so idealistic?”
“Sure. There’d always be someone who wanted to hear. My family. My students,” said Simon. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t enjoy playing in Carnegie Hall—maybe even the same season as you, Elena. But if I couldn’t, I’d still be happy to have a life with music. I just want to be with the piano, to feel it and touch it. It’s almost like a love relationship—I miss it if I don’t stroke it every day.”
“I feel exactly that way,” Suzanne broke in. She loved the instrument itself, she said, beyond the music she could coax from it. She loved the look and the feel of it; it was a friend, even a lover. When she said “lover,” a giggle rippled through the group—it wasn’t a word they used or heard very often.
Despite the purity of Simon’s argument, and however modest the students appeared, almost all of them privately nursed fantasies of standing onstage in a few years, taking their bows to rousing applause. Only a few honestly felt otherwise. Tanya Borowitz, the timid freckled redhead from New Hampshire, who had memorized the Goldberg Variations when she was still in high school, said at the outset, “I’m going to teach. I can’t go out there onstage. They were always making me do it in high school, and each time I almost passed out from fright. It was no fun at all. The rewards aren’t worth the stress.” The others nodded sympathetically—it made for that much less competition.
Only a few were bold enough to openly claim their future. Elena was one. “I plan to succeed, and I don’t see why most of us shouldn’t make it. We’re here, after all. If we’re good enough and work hard and cultivate the right connections, plus a little bit of luck . . .”
They started laughing as her list grew longer. “Is that all?” Rose Chen asked. “Would there be enough stages to accommodate all of us?”
Though Elena never flaunted her connections, everyone knew she wouldn’t hesitate to use them. Who would? Not that she isn’t really good, they whispered among themselves, but it can’t hurt to have Horowitz and Serkin—yes, the very Rudolf Serkin Suzanne had heard at her first real concert—coming over for dinner every now and then.
Suzanne listened intently to these conversations, and when she spoke it was with a fervor that she regretted immediately. It embarrassed her to show how ambitious she was, like confessing to some shameful flaw. Yet she was glad to know she wasn’t the only one driven by relentless need. In Brooklyn, from earliest childhood, she’d been regarded as the prodigy. She was used to moving through the neighborhood with her reputation on her sleeve, like an insignia by which people could recognize her. But her classmates here had been hometown wonders, too. The collective fervor in the room was like a cloud that sustained them on a magic carpet.
Tanya’s mother was a writer. Or called herself a writer. She’d published a novel twenty years ago and nothing since but a few stories in obscure magazines. She worked as a paralegal in a law firm and wrote for two hours every night, Tanya said. She did it for the pleasure of writing itself. She believed in it like a religion, like someone going to Mass every morning.
“But does she still try to publish?” asked Jason Shaw, a skinny violinist who already, as a freshman, had been selected for one of the school’s two orchestras.
“I’m not sure. She doesn’t talk about it, though she does still have an agent she’s in touch with. But publication isn’t the whole point. That’s what she says, anyway. You don’t work for fame. You work for the process itself, for the product.”
“Ugh, don’t call it a product,” said Elena. “That makes it sound like canned soup or toasters. It’s art.”
Art. The two times Suzanne had used that word at home, her father had snorted and even her brothers, visiting for Sunday dinner, smirked. They wanted her to be a musician, but they didn’t like the changes her training would bring. She must remain the agreeable girl who never did anything questionable or “out of line”—her father’s expression. And avoid pretentious words like “art.”
“That may be okay for a writer,” said Peter Jackson, a native New Yorker who was studying the clarinet. “My father’s an actor. He’s been in commercials and a lot of off-Broadway shows. But he can’t make a living acting. He has a day job in the gift shop at the Met. I feel sorry for him, always going to auditions, always waiting for the callback. You can’t act alone in a room, the way you can play music or write. There’s not even any tree to fall in the forest with an actor. You need the stage and the audience in order to do your thing. As a matter of fact, you can’t do too much alone with a clarinet, either—there’s not much solo stuff. But at least I can get work in an orchestra.”
“For pianists, too,” said Elena, “it’s either solo performing or accompanying or teaching.”
“That’s not so,” said Simon. “There are chamber groups. Look at the Beaux Arts trio, or the Istomin-Stern-Rose Trio. Those are terrific pianists. I wouldn’t complain if I could be in a group like that.”
Some nights, in a coffee shop near school, Suzanne and Elena and a few of the other pianists—Rose, Tanya, Simon—would play a game where they each made up reviews of their debut recitals, striving to outdo each other in extravagant, fulsome praise. Their creations inevitably ended up in parody and raucous laughter. “Maybe we should try the worst possible reviews for a change,” Elena suggested, but Suzanne was against that. “You never know—they might come true.”
In her fourth month at school, a notice posted all through the corridors announced that the great pianist Anthony Dawson was coming to give a master class. The class would be a major event, held in the largest auditorium and publicized in local papers; the public was invited to attend. Rumors flew, speculating on which fourth-year students would be selected to play for him.
Dawson’s visit was scheduled for two o’clock on a bright November day. By one thirty the piano students had already found seats toward the front, and the rest of the student body—instrumentalists, singers, dancers—was not far behind them. The first few rows were reserved for faculty and for the three students who would be playing. They sat stiff and silent as if frozen; Suzanne, with her usual jumble of emotions, envied them and pitied them, and was glad she wasn’t one of them. She looked around: The auditorium was filled, and about a third of the crowd weren’t students—amateur musicians, most likely, or local music lovers come to see and hear the great Anthony Dawson.
Just as the audience was growing restless, Dawson entered at the back, escorted by Mme. Kabalevsky and Mr. Hofmann. Heads turned; the teachers rose to greet him. “Did you ever meet him?” Suzanne whispered to Elena, beside her.
“No,” she replied, “and even if I had, I’d never walk over with all the faculty surrounding him. That would be very bad form.”
Finally the greetings were over and the teachers settled into the front row seats. The first to play was Amit Mukherjee, who had come all the way from Calcutta and was among the school stars; everyone predicted a brilliant career for him. He played Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 26, Les Adieux, one of the most difficult. After the first movement he paused and glanced at Dawson, who waved him to continue. Amit had the mannerisms of famous pianists Suzanne had seen: a swaying of the shoulders, a shaking of the head, too artificial, overconfident.
Dawson let him play to the end of the piece. This might bode well or ill. Suzanne thought his playing lacked the poignancy and delicacy the music required, and she waited curiously to see what Anthony Dawson would say. Amit finished with a flourish and turned to face the audience with a look of satisfaction. But in a few moments, he seemed to shrink in his elegant clothes.
“We can see that technically you’re quite the wizard,” Dawson began.
“Uh-oh,” Elena murmured.
This was not a good sign. Dawson went on to praise Amit’s facility and mastery of the notes, the pedaling, the phrasing. “But your presentation was a little hard, don’t you think? By hard, I mean heavy. Brusque. Crisp.”
“He’s one of the tough ones,” whispered Elena. “I went to a few of his master classes while we were still in high school—sometimes I cut class to go. He may be right, but he’s harsh. I’m glad it’s not me sitting up there.”
Finally Dawson sat down and played a section of the opening. As he began, the audience stirred, as if gathering its attention, and indeed the music was transformed, with nuances and a tenderness that had been submerged before.
He asked Amit to repeat the second half of the final movement. While Dawson played Amit had stood to one side, holding himself very straight, and now, as he took the seat again, he nodded and smiled at the famous pianist. He had collected himself; this, too, was part of his performance. To Suzanne’s surprise, he played with far greater delicacy and warmth of expression: In ten minutes, in exchange for his pride, he had learned how to give life to the sonata. Not a bad exchange, she thought. It wasn’t that Anthony Dawson was unkind. Rather, he was intimidatingly cordial, dauntingly thorough.
The next student, Pete O’Brien, was a boy from Queens who had already won a minor contest and given a few local recitals. He did not have Amit’s irritating mannerisms, but rather approached the piano like a gladiator seeking to conquer it. He played Brahms’s B-minor Rhapsody. Whether it was nerves or whether he was not as wonderful as reputed, his playing was noticeably forced. Effortful. Suzanne could feel his effort in her fingers, it was so tactile.
He was lowering his head to begin a new passage, when Dawson spoke from his seat in the front row. “Just one moment,” and he stepped up to the stage, holding the score. “Well, that was fine,” he said kindly. “That was well done. You’ve worked hard, obviously. Just a few things to point out.” And there followed ten minutes of close, unsparing criticism. “You must give the notes their full value,” he said. “Just because they’re played presto doesn’t mean you can slide over them.” Then he talked about the various forms of staccato: Secco staccato, he explained, was not the same as staccato. And then about shading and nuances, playing a couple of bars here and there to illustrate. And on it went, while Pete, in a dark suit and tie for the occasion, seemed to shrink exactly as Amit had done. Anthony Dawson played a section from the opening, and again all the shades in the music became brighter.
There was a short break after Pete finished, so short that the audience was advised not to leave their seats—just long enough for Dawson to “catch his breath,” as Professor Hofmann said. While Elena chatted with the person on her right, Suzanne spent the few minutes wondering how she could possibly withstand such public criticism. Under Mme. Kabalevsky she had gained courage and learned self-control. She could tolerate the biweekly critiques held for the students fairly well; the listeners were her teachers, her classmates, her peers. She knew she was one of the outstanding pianists and that others knew it, too; in this tight milieu, reputations were quick to develop. But nothing could thicken her skin; every critical word still seeped into her pores. Elena was just the opposite. Suzanne had seen it in class. She took in the comments, nodded, and forged ahead. She never appeared wounded—she had an impervious surface. Elena had no trouble distinguishing between her performance and herself.
If she were to play for a pianist like Dawson in two years, if she were ever to play for an audience at all, she must find a way to get over her fear. Her friends all bemoaned their anxiety, but Suzanne’s terror, she knew, was different. It would not permit the life she had dreamed of since childhood. Watching the master class, she couldn’t deny that any longer.
The last to play was Laura Duvenek, also a star student with great expectations. She was a narrow reed of a girl, unprepossessing in looks, with stringy blond hair, and unlike the boy students, she hadn’t bothered to dress for the occasion but wore a drab everyday shirt and skirt with shoes that were down at the heel. She’d have to get someone to fix her up before she appeared on a New York stage, Suzanne thought. But it was evident from the start of Haydn’s Sonata in E Flat Major, one of the simpler ones, that she was the most accomplished of the three. Dawson stopped her only once, in the first movement, the allegro. He suddenly leaped from his seat and onto the stage. “No, wait, stop right there. You’re losing the shading, the nuance. It’s those triplets. They’re much too slow.” He was excited; he practically shoved her from the bench and played the passage with the triplets, and at his quicker pace they were entirely new, brilliant, rousing. He got up and waved her to the chair.
“Now you. Do what I did.”
Laura did not seem disconcerted in the least, or troubled by the several hundred people focused on her. She played the passage again, and the triplets at the rapid speed took on the luster that had been missing. She stopped and looked up at him, without the slightest hesitation. “Like that?” she asked.
“Yes. Precisely like that,” he said, smiling, and returned to his seat. She played the rest of the sonata uninterrupted, and Anthony Dawson returned to the stage and praised her as he had not praised the others. The audience applauded, but Laura seemed indifferent to anything but Dawson’s words. If only I could be like that, Suzanne thought. But not look like that, she added quickly, in case any nameless gods of music students could hear her prayer.
What with the headiness of Juilliard, her new friends and teachers, that old affair with Philip shrank to almost nothing. A childhood incident. She had a couple of brief flings with fellow students—Simon, for one—but they all knew it wasn’t serious; it was recreation, a relief from the weight of their studies, and less intense than the studies. She barely thought of Philip at all; the grief he had caused her dissipated. She and Elena never mentioned his name. He was not even history, for history is remembered and recorded. He was obliterated.
After a year of commuting up to Morningside Heights an hour twice a day on the subway—such a waste of precious time—Suzanne persuaded her parents to let her live close to school. She found a room for rent in an airy apartment facing the Hudson River, belonging to the widow of a Juilliard professor. Mrs. Campbell was mild and unobtrusive and spent most of her time painting watercolors of Riverside Park scenes and volunteering in the local church’s preschool program. She liked having a music student in the apartment and charged a low rent, which she made even lower when Suzanne agreed to take on some errands and household tasks. Best of all, she had a grand piano in the living room and said Suzanne could use it whenever she wished, so she didn’t have to worry about signing up for practice rooms—there were never enough. Suzanne was content with her simple room—narrow bed, desk, bookcase, and chair—and she hung bright Dufy prints on the walls. She was even more content with school, despite its occasional terrors. Her turn in the master classes with visiting pianists had not yet come, but it would; there was no evading it. Still, she would remember those years at school and in Mrs. Campbell’s apartment as the happiest of her life: There was work she loved and did well, and despite her fears, extravagant hope.
“I’m as good as most of them,” she told Richard breathlessly on the phone. She had so much to do, was always in a rush. “I’m probably one of the best. There are a couple of guys who are really good, and also this one girl, this Russian, the one I met back in high school. She’s the one who took my boyfriend, I told you about that. But now we’re close friends. She might be slightly better than me. But a tiny bit on the splashy side.”
“It’s not a competition, you know,” he answered. “Or shouldn’t be. You’re there to study. In the Olympics there’s only one gold medal. But there’s room for all different kinds of pianists. If you’re any good, and you know you are, you’ll do fine.”
He was wrong, she thought. He was the one sounding innocent now. Of course it was a competition. Getting into Music and Art had been a competition, playing in front of three stone-faced teachers, each taking notes on a clipboard—she could remember the scratching of their pens—and then another competition to get into Juilliard. The halls here were lined with bulletin boards posting notices of contests. Everyone talked about the contests—how they ranked in importance and prestige, which they should enter and when they would be ready, which recent graduates or even the few current students had won and were already embarking on recitals. Winning a major or even lesser contest assured you of a year or so of bookings, not to mention the goodwill, however transient, of eager managers and a welcoming public. You had to win something, no matter how obscure, or at the very least be a runner-up, to get started. The competition never let up. Didn’t Richard know that? B+ was not good enough.
Her final year was the most pressured. She, along with many others, was preparing to enter the contests. There were so many, she could hardly keep track of them. She dreaded the auditions, but Mme. Kabalevsky insisted she try, if only for the experience. She said if Suzanne could overcome her stage fright, she would be sure to win sooner or later. And with all that, Juilliard was in the midst of a major move, three miles downtown to Lincoln Center: There were the disruptions of instruments being crated and loaded onto vans, of cartons of files stacked in the hallways, and the students’ anxiety about what the new quarters would be like. Suzanne and her friends were glad they would be completing their studies in the slightly seedy but appealing neighborhood uptown, adjacent to Columbia University and Riverside Park, where in all seasons they loved to walk, watching the river and the passing boats. In winter sometimes the ships stayed in the same place for days, clogged by ice floes, and in summer small pleasure crafts, sailboats, even sailfish, would skim by, and the occasional kayak.
Juilliard’s home in Lincoln Center was above a huge stone plaza, relieved only by the fountain in the center. It was surrounded by buildings housing a theater, the opera, and the ballet, and the faculty all welcomed this. But the upperclassmen were dubious. “Slick,” Elena called it, over and over, her word of greatest opprobrium, and Suzanne tended to agree with her. “We’ll be the last living relics of the good old days,” Simon Valenti said, putting his arm around Suzanne; she couldn’t tell whether it was nostalgic camaraderie or if he hoped to resume the very brief affair they’d had early on. She hoped it wasn’t the latter. She had succumbed in a moment of lassitude. He was very attractive, she had to admit, with his long lanky body and shock of black hair almost like an Indian’s; when she got bored it had taken several weeks to extricate herself.
“No, there’ll always be the teachers,” Elena said, glancing at the two of them with slightly raised eyebrows. “Madame Kabalevsky will be here forever, and so will Mr. Schell and Adele Marcus and most of the others.”
Elena won the Tchaikovsky Competition right before she graduated. And though they were still good friends and she tried not to be envious, Suzanne couldn’t help thinking, Always a few steps ahead. Everything came easily to her. Not only a new high school, but a new country. A new language. She sailed through it all as if a benevolent breeze were propelling her. It would probably be that way forever, Suzanne thought. She might as well get used to it.
During her first few years out of school, Suzanne remained in Mrs. Campbell’s apartment and took odd jobs accompanying singers, playing for dance classes, teaching—anything that could bring in some money. Meanwhile, she returned to studying with Cynthia and occasionally took a lesson with Mme. Kabalevsky, to prepare for still more contests. For two of them she had to make a hasty trip abroad, so short and so marred by anxiety that she hardly felt she’d been away. Her stage fright interfered with the auditions. She would start out brilliantly, and the judges would straighten up and scrutinize her, sometimes making notes. But after a few moments the loathsome panic would grip her, and no matter how hard she tried to control it, using the mind games Mr. Cartelli and Cynthia had taught, it would get the better of her, so that by the end she was trembling and struggling to stay in control. Even so, she played remarkably well, but never as splendidly as the first few minutes had promised.
Then finally she did win one, three years after she graduated from Juilliard, not the most distinguished but still a respected one, the Busoni Competition in Bolzano, Italy, which Alfred Brendel had won in its first year. The panel of judges this time was wiser than most. As in so many contests in the arts, often the winner was of the satisfies-all-and-delights-none variety—it was a risk to choose an erratic, unpredictable unknown. But this time Suzanne had managed to dazzle the judges enough to make her a topic of prolonged discussion. Nothing mediocre about her, the notable pianist Aida Rinaldo said—she’s either brilliant or paralyzed by fright. I’d go for that one over ordinary competence any day. It happened that La Rinaldo, as she was known, had suffered from stage fright as well and had undergone a series of treatments, from Rolfing to hypnosis to psychoanalysis, in order to overcome her fear. Her insistence won the others over. “We have enough decent pianists all over the place,” she said. “Let’s take a chance on someone special. If she doesn’t work out, I’ll take the blame.”
Now, thought Suzanne, maybe the life of her fantasies would begin. The concert in Bolzano flew by like a dream. And as in her dreams, she played well, buoyed up by having been chosen and by the kindness of La Rinaldo, who befriended her.
Cynthia was in the habit of giving parties. It wasn’t only because she enjoyed seeing her apartment crowded with well-dressed people. Each party was a triumph over the shabbiness she had grown up in and would never reveal to anyone by word or deed or furnishing. Even more important, she wanted her best students to get used to being out in the world, meeting people, making connections. Sad but true, she told them: Success was not simply a matter of playing well. It had to do with whom you knew and how you behaved and how eager you appeared; all these things she had discovered and mastered through arduous experience. Suzanne was smart enough to know those truths, but perhaps not aggressive enough to act on them. She must be helped. Cynthia felt a special sympathy for Suzanne, not only because of her talent and ambition—the ambitious recognize each other as if by a secret code—but because her own background was not too different: as provincial as Suzanne’s, only poorer.
It was inevitable, then, that after Suzanne won first prize in the Busoni Competition, Cynthia would give a congratulatory party. “Invite anyone you like, everyone you know,” she said, “and I’ll do the same. This is really a big moment.”
Suzanne hadn’t realized Cynthia’s apartment could hold so many people. The party was similar to the ones she’d been to before: the women shiny, polished, colorful, the men a trifle less sleek, freer to appear eccentric, and everyone holding glasses and negotiating minuscule hors d’oeuvres passed around by a couple of first-year Juilliard students. Only this time the crowd was larger and she couldn’t retreat to a quiet corner with a few friends. She was the guest of honor. Everyone wanted to meet her. Cynthia kept bringing people over; Suzanne tried to keep track of their names and who they were, but very quickly it was all a muddle. “Don’t worry,” Cynthia whispered. “You can’t remember them all. We’ll go over it later. Meanwhile, just act pleased and excited. Treat everyone well—you can’t always tell by appearances who’s important.”
She had no chance to talk to her own guests: Elena, who was, naturally, making the most of the occasion, the others from Juilliard, and aspiring musicians she’d met since. During a rare instant when she was on her own, in between introductions, came a tap on the shoulder. She turned around. Her first response was one of puzzled familiarity—she almost couldn’t place him. He was smiling broadly, looking older, totally grown-up in a well-tailored suit, utterly changed from the lanky boy in neatly pressed chinos. But she wasn’t completely sure until he spoke her name; then she knew the voice instantly.
“Suzanne! You’re so gorgeous and elegant! Not that you weren’t before, but this!” Philip let his eyes wander appraisingly over the narrow black silk dress, then grasped her shoulders and bent to kiss her lightly on the lips before she could pull away. “Tell me how you are.”
She wanted to turn and run, but she was too old for that now. And where could she run in this crowd? Anyhow, he would follow her or find her later. There was no escape.
“I’m fine.” She couldn’t help the tone of insinuation in her voice, almost accusatory. These days he didn’t cross her mind for weeks at a time, yet here was that bitterness rising again, like an acrid taste. For God’s sake, let him not talk about the past.
“Is it possible you’re still angry? I can see you are. For chrissake, Suzanne, we’re not in high school anymore. I’m sorry. I was an idiot boy.”
She smiled unwillingly. The words were satisfying, as if indeed she were still in high school. “You were. You lout.” It came out sounding flirtatious, though she hadn’t meant it to.
“I agree. Let’s make believe we’ve never met. I just saw you across a crowded room. Who’s that girl? I asked myself. I’ve got to meet her. And congratulate her. It’s great news! I can’t say I’m surprised. I always knew you had it in you. Now all sorts of doors will start opening. Oh, but no, I can’t say that—we’re pretending we’ve never met.”
“Don’t we know each other too well for that?”
“No, you don’t know me at all anymore. I’ve changed. I’ve developed depth and substance,” he declared with an ironic smile. “Are you still working with Cynthia? I remember you started in high school.”
“Yes. I stopped when I was at Juilliard—Madame Kabalevsky was as much as I could handle, and after that I went back. She’s been awfully good to me. How do you know her?”
“I know everybody. Remember? I always did. I’ve been working as a recording engineer with RCA for four years now, ever since I graduated from the business school. Still learning, but I get to do a lot on my own, tapes, song demos, presentations for new artists, even film scores. I started working for them as an intern while I was still at Columbia and found out I had a knack for it. Editing, especially. Tape and razor are almost all you need. And an ear, of course. I’ve recorded Cynthia’s recitals.”
“Really? She never mentioned that.” But why should she? Suzanne thought. Cynthia never confided about her life.
“Oh, yes, a Brahms piano trio and also the Dumky with Kinsky and Paul Manning—you know, Elena’s stepfather. I’m starting my own business on the side too. Artists’ management. I haven’t lured Cynthia yet, but I have a few promising beginners and I’m pretty good at getting them gigs. I don’t mind doing the small stuff, and it leads to bigger things if you have patience. One client recommends another, and so it goes.”
He was still the same, she thought, the boy who knew everyone, was competent at everything. Making his accomplishments known, yet somehow not boastful, rather matter-of-fact. The boy who would always need to prove himself. She didn’t know how long he might have gone on, if she hadn’t been tapped on the shoulder again. This time it was Richard.
“Suzanne! I congratulated you on the phone, but that’s not enough for something like this!” He embraced her in a huge hug. “This is the most wonderful news. It was bound to happen. I want to hear all about it, every note. We’ll have lunch. But I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“No, not at all.” She introduced them. “Philip, this is Richard Penzer, the composer and friend of my youth. I wouldn’t be standing here if not for him. And Richard, you must have heard me talk about Philip Markon? Well, you might not remember, why should you? The boy who ditched me in high school for the glamorous Russian? Who is somewhere on the premises, by the way.”
“Ah, the teen heartbreaker.” Richard shook hands with a brief, reserved laugh, as if he still harbored a touch of resentment on Suzanne’s part.
“I see I’ll never live it down. It was my biggest mistake,” Philip replied. “Of course I’ve heard about you. Suzanne used to talk about you as if you were a god. And now the reviewers do, too. I saw David and Jonathan. It was marvelous.”
Richard nodded, like one grown accustomed to praise. David and Jonathan, his opera based on the biblical tale, had recently played in an East Side hall to rave reviews. After so long, he’d been discovered. Next season it would be produced at the New York City Opera, though, as he told Suzanne when it happened, “These discoveries are always a joke. I’ve been here all along. They act as if I sprang yesterday from the head of Zeus. But now at least I can get anything I want produced, for as long as it lasts. I’ve got a drawer full of scores I worked on, back in Brooklyn and before.”
“The god and the devil,” Suzanne said, “brought face-to-face.” The silliness of the words made it all right. The residue of sour gall she’d buried for so long evaporated, and she looked at Philip with a fresh eye. He did seem to have more substance. Seeing him side by side with Richard made him more acceptable—as if their occupying the same room, the same world, at least to the extent of being at the same party, legitimized him. And he knew Richard’s work—another point in his favor. He couldn’t be all surface.
Suddenly Elena was beside her, draped in a flowing coral dress that hung low on her hips. She gave Philip a perfunctory greeting, a hug so light it barely merited the name. “Sweetheart,” she said to Suzanne, “you’re the belle of the ball. You’re not only talented, but you look fantastic and you’ve got all the best men.” Before Suzanne could speak, she turned to Richard. “You must be Richard Penzer. I know you’re an old friend of Suzanne’s. She’s spoken so much about you. In fact, she’s made you sound superhuman.”
“Richard,” Suzanne interrupted, “this is Elena Semonyova, my friend from Juilliard. A wonderful pianist, as I’ve told you before.”
They shook hands. Suzanne’s heart filled with an unaccustomed gladness. She was surrounded by her three closest friends—why not count Philip, in the spirit of generosity, of deference to the past? Well, at least the people who had most believed in her and encouraged her. Who knew her. She was lucky indeed. Looking at them, one by one, as they carried on the ordinary party chatter, she felt blessed, wrapped in warmth that would carry her into the future.
She forced herself to stop daydreaming and pay attention. Richard and Elena were engaged in lively banter, dropping the names of composers and performers she hadn’t heard of, and now Philip was speaking to a beautiful older woman in red who’d just appeared and embraced him. For a moment she felt left out. But she brushed that feeling aside: It was the foolishness of the old, childish Suzanne. Philip no longer mattered, and it was wonderful seeing Richard and Elena together, all because of her.
Then abruptly the perfect little grouping was over. Someone sidled up to talk to Richard, who gave her a quick kiss good-bye and moved off; he’d call during the week to make a date. Elena drifted in his direction. Cynthia brought two more guests to meet her, a flute player from the Metropolitan Opera orchestra and an administrator of a downtown performance space, and Suzanne kept up her enthusiasm as best she could. She knew Philip must be nearby, watching, waiting for his opportunity.
When the party thinned out and she’d thanked Cynthia, it seemed natural that they should leave together. Philip was hungry and suggested a pizza. She agreed that though the alcohol had been plentiful, the food had been rather scanty. Just the opposite of the way it had been when they were growing up.
And so it began again. Only this time it didn’t start with tentative fumblings in the back of movie theaters. After the pizza she went with him to his apartment in the Village, to his bed, which would eventually become her apartment and her bed. Even as a boy he had had an instinct for making love, and as a man he was even better, the kind of good lover who seemed almost trained for the role, or perhaps just very experienced: slow and attentive, lavish with words as well as gestures, and despite the touch of deliberation in his moves, he was effective. He was generous by nature. Suzanne didn’t tell him that none of the few men she’d known before him had made her feel as glorious as he did. She held something back. Perhaps the small residue of bile had not dissipated entirely.
It became an affair. Affairs had not yet been replaced by the more antiseptic “relationships,” and she liked whispering the word to herself, breathy with sophistication. A good affair. Good times, good sex, good feelings. Her first really serious one, after several that had sputtered out for lack of oxygen. Plenty to talk about. With Philip you never lacked for conversation. The slight leftover resentment, aged like a Chinese egg, only added spice and vinegar to their lovemaking: Suzanne played a game of resisting, and Philip liked using his powers of persuasion, even if it was only pretending.
There were moments, later on, when she believed it should have remained an affair, should have run its course like the rest. Serve as experience. There might have been more like it, who knew for how long, until she subsided into marriage. Or not.
In the midst of the good affair, Suzanne’s father suffered a fatal collapse, briefcase in hand, while walking from his car to the furniture store, right in front of the newsstand where he bought his daily New York Times. Uncannily, this manner of death was what Gerda had warned Joseph of so often and so emphatically that the children, when they were young, used to snicker at her words. “If you keep driving yourself that way, you’ll drop dead of a heart attack,” she’d say when he went to the store on weekends to check on the employees, or sat up late at the dining-room table, poring over orders and receipts and catalogs.
“You want this house, don’t you?” he’d answer. “You want Suzanne to be able to study. That won’t happen by itself.” The boys’ expenses were not taxing; they had gone to Brooklyn College under protest and gotten through with minimum effort. Neither one had wanted to join him in the business. Fred took a low-level job in an insurance company and Gary worked in a stationery business, neither of which position could give their father much gratification.
Now Gerda’s predictions were confirmed. Suzanne had always imagined that at his death, which she’d seen as far off, she would feel relief: The burden of continuing to prove herself “special” and bring glory to the family would drop away. She would never stop craving success, but maybe the density of the craving—her own now, not his—would weigh less heavily on her. She could live the way others lived. She didn’t really know how others lived, what they felt inside, but envisioned it as a kind of serene drifting through the days, something she had never known. Whatever her life would feel like, it would be minus her father’s urgings, forever at her back like a gust of wind even though she no longer lived at home or saw him often. He was there behind her, stalking.
At the funeral she was too preoccupied with trying to comfort her mother to feel her own grief. Philip was there, of course, being unobtrusively helpful, being kind to Gerda, who was even fonder of him now than she had been long ago. After all, now he was a grown man with a growing business. He remained at the house throughout the day, helping them receive visitors, making coffee and conversation, joining forces with Suzanne’s brothers to fetch chairs and carry platters of food the neighbors had brought. As if he were part of the family, Suzanne thought, and she both appreciated this and resented it. He was digging in too deep, establishing himself as a fixture in her life. Sex and good times and friendship were one thing, but this—her family, the Brooklyn house, her complex feelings about her father—came from another part of her life she didn’t want invaded. In fact, she preferred to shut it up behind closed doors.
Afterward, her grief at Joseph’s death was overshadowed by simmering anger. For all the pride her father took in her, he hadn’t really known her. Her talent had stood between them like a screen. Maybe they wouldn’t have known each other in any event; he wasn’t a man given to intimacy. He was all bluster, all display; whatever was inside remained heavily veiled.
Joseph had chosen to be cremated, and Gerda hated the idea. Not only did it seem alien—no one she knew had ever been cremated; it seemed to her a primitive and disreputable rite. Moreover, she told Suzanne, she had read in the paper just a few months ago about a crematorium somewhere in Pennsylvania that was discovered to have sold bodies to some weird illegal operation, a cult, she couldn’t remember what, and given the bereaved families the ashes of animals instead. Or maybe only a small part of the ashes they were entitled to.
“Come on, Mom, that sounds too crazy to be true,” Suzanne said. The three of them, she, Gerda, and Phil, were sitting around the kitchen table, drinking coffee late at night after all the visitors and Suzanne’s brothers and their wives had left. It seemed accepted, tacitly, that Phil would spend the night. She certainly wouldn’t make any pretext of having him sleep in her brothers’ old room.
“But I read about it in the New York Times.”
“Remember what Dad used to say? Don’t believe everything you read in the papers? Anyhow, that was in Pennsylvania, and the place we’re using is in New York.”
“Maybe they all do that. How do you know?”
“I don’t think you need to worry about that, Gerda,” Philip said.
Suzanne shrugged. “Does it really make any difference?”
“What do you mean?” Gerda retorted. “Whether we get his ashes or some stray dog’s? You don’t think it makes any difference?”
“Ashes are ashes, Mom. It’s not the real person. It’s just symbolic. And if you never know what you’ve got on the shelf . . .”
“You’re just saying that to upset me. Phil,” Gerda appealed to him, “don’t you think it matters? Whether I have the real ashes or not? Tell me—you’ve known loss. Wouldn’t it matter to you?”
“My parents and brother were buried, so I don’t know how I’d feel about ashes,” he said. “But I can see your point. On the other hand, they are mostly symbolic, as Suzanne says.... It’s what you feel in your heart that matters. But anyway, I doubt you’re in any danger. Since that article appeared—I saw it, by the way, really shocking—all the places are going to be very scrupulous for the next few months.”
Gerda listened carefully but still looked doubtful.
“Look, we have to follow his instructions,” said Suzanne, getting up to load the dishwasher. “I’ll take care of the whole thing tomorrow and you won’t have to think about it. Meanwhile, I could use some sleep.”
“You’ll have to keep them then, the remains, I mean. I’m not keeping anything on a shelf that isn’t authentically him.” Gerda started toward the stairs.
“Not remains. Cremains, they’re called,” Suzanne corrected.
“Don’t get funny with me now,” and her mother turned and shook her head as if to throw off a buzzing hornet.
She didn’t feel the expected relief after his death. If anything, the “drive” her father had spoken of so vehemently was even stronger, as if with him so vastly unreachable, she had to go to even greater lengths to prove herself, like shouting to someone way out of range. His ambitions had lodged in her, wormed their way in like a parasite, a toxic substance; they were his immortality, which she carried within her. He had bequeathed it to her.
She handled the arrangements and became the possessor of a cardboard box holding a plastic bag of ashes—sifted, as the crematorium advised; that way there would be no large chunks of bone. The contents of the bag that arrived in the mail were surprising in their whiteness and fineness; they resembled the small mounds of plaster the workmen had left each day when their house was painted, just before she moved to Mrs. Campbell’s apartment. Despite her mother’s doubts, she trusted that the ashes were her father’s, and she didn’t know what to do with them. Joseph had never specified. “Burn me up!” was all he’d ever said on the subject. So she stashed the box in a corner of the closet, behind her shoes. Of course, she would never tell Mrs. Campbell what was back there, and felt faintly guilty about harboring the box. One of these days she’d think of a good place to scatter the ashes. Maybe on a beach out in Brooklyn where they’d mingle with the sand. Or she could go down to the Hudson River during one of her afternoon walks and dump them in. On weekends she took long walks through Riverside Park, staring out at the river and the ships. It was hard to get right down to the river without crossing the highway. Meanwhile, the ashes remained in the closet, and when she finally agreed to move into Philip’s apartment in Greenwich Village, she took them with her.
And soon after that it was more than an affair. Indeed, the opposite of an affair. He asked, he implored; he said it had been fated since high school; he gave his best performances and she couldn’t find the will to resist. She was agreeable, as Richard had told her long ago; she went along. She married him. There were no good reasons to resist, and he had been so kind all through this stressful time. She wasn’t sure she was in love; the only time she had been in love was with Richard, and even about that she had her doubts. But there was no one she liked better. Philip was so familiar that there could not be the succulent delight of discovery. She did love sleeping with him, though, loved it more than she had expected or known was possible. She gasped with pleasure, she moaned, she felt what women were supposed to feel, didn’t she?
Only sometimes when they made love she had a sense that something was wrong. She couldn’t say quite what, but it expressed itself as a petulant voice in her head that contradicted her words and acts. Like the voice when she was a young child, insinuating that maybe she wasn’t quite real. That old voice had quieted, but this one seemed a more mature version of it, a menacing voice that wanted to undercut her pleasures. She believed the words she murmured to him, the words that said she was happy, that said what she liked or what she wanted. But the voice inside whispered, Are you really happy? Is this really it? And on the sheets her restless hands would be playing phrases from Schubert or Liszt, difficult phrases.
Philip did everything to please her. (And why wouldn’t he? the voice whispered. He wants you.) There would be ease in a life with him, emotional ease, an ease that would leave her free to face the difficulties of work. He knew her, that was the main thing, and what she craved was to be known, in every sense. He knew her talents and he knew her ambitions; now he knew her body. He liked to look at every part—there was no hiding anything from him. While he looked, he spun elaborate fantasies of how he would help her move ahead, but to him they weren’t fantasies. She tried not to let herself be influenced by these, but they worked on her cravings like fairy tales on susceptible children. What more did she want? She wanted the doubting voice to cease. She married him despite the voice, and she trained her ears to shut it out.
