Two-Part Inventions Read online

  As the students jostled behind her in the hall, she made a show of studying the notices pinned to the bulletin board, then began reading them in earnest. One offered free tickets to a Sunday matinee concert at Carnegie Hall. Suzanne had never been to Carnegie Hall. Richard had taken her twice to recitals at Brooklyn College—her parents had let her go, provided he escorted her to her front door immediately afterward—but never to anything in Manhattan. Why not? She plucked up her courage and stepped into the office. Trying to keep her voice firm, she inquired about the tickets.

  “Sure, and you can have two if you like,” the secretary said brightly. “Maybe you want to bring a friend.”

  “No, one is fine. Are they really free?”

  “Of course.” The secretary had two spots of rouge on her cheeks and gray ringlets, and on her smooth empty desk stood a cut-glass vase with a single flower. She reminded Suzanne of Mrs. Gardenia, and like Mrs. Gardenia, she smiled too much. “Are you a freshman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you’re in luck. They don’t often give away something as good as this. Rudolf Serkin. I’d go myself, but I’ve got to take care of my grandchildren. Here you are.” She handed her the ticket. “Enjoy it. And keep checking the bulletin board. You never know what might turn up.”

  Suzanne tucked the precious ticket in her wallet. She could tell her parents it was a required assignment. Her mother still fussed about the subway and warned her every morning to be careful. Careful of what, she didn’t say.

  She arrived twenty minutes early on Sunday afternoon and ambled up and down Fifty-seventh Street, though it was hardly suitable for ambling. The rattling, incessant traffic made the manhole covers rumble; trucks and taxis blared; caravans of green buses slogged along. Next door to Carnegie Hall was the Russian Tea Room, with a gleaming gold samovar in the window, flanked by reproductions of ancient icons. Peering inside, she glimpsed velvet curtains and waiters dressed in embroidered tunics. Farther down the block was an enormous bookstore, and beyond that, a Bickford’s cafeteria where solitary people sat over cups of coffee, looking dejected and aimless, reading newspapers or staring into space.

  Back inside the lobby a crowd had gathered, women with faces caked in makeup, moving gingerly in high heels, draped in furs though the weather was still mild in September, and gray-haired, clean-shaven men in dark suits. She felt shabby in her nondescript gray jacket and Cuban heels. No one else was alone.

  She edged her way through the crowd toward a woman taking tickets, who directed her up a flight of dingy stairs with dingy, pale green walls. The staircase continued endlessly, round and round. After several flights she showed her ticket again and was told to keep climbing. As the stairs continued, the crowd thinned out and she stopped counting. At last, when there were no more steps, she was handed a program and directed to a seat in the center of a row, fortunately not yet filled, so she didn’t have to step over too many people.

  The hall was immense, a fairy-tale palace, its luscious cream-colored walls and ceiling adorned with elaborate curlicued carvings. High up were suspended magnificent chandeliers with glittery crystals that stirred faintly in the air currents. Everywhere was red velvet and a heady scent of opulence. On the stage hung a heavy crimson curtain, and on each side were the box seats with their red plush chairs. She had never been in such a huge theater before. Years ago, when she was a tiny girl, her parents had taken her to see Peter Pan and, a few years later, The Sound of Music, but those theaters were not as large or glamorous, as richly garnished and decorated, as here, and her parents had flanked her like bodyguards. Here she was alone. Not lonely anymore in the crowd. Yet she was trembling at the newness of it all, as if something would be required of her. There was nothing she need do, she reminded herself. Only sit still and wait, look and listen.

  In the orchestra below were rows and rows of heads, many of them gray-haired. If she squinted, the heads looked like marbles lined up on a Chinese checkerboard. Looking down made her dizzy, like the Cyclone in Coney Island a few short months ago, sitting with Arnie Perchusky. That had been dreadful, the sickening pitch downward and the tremulous ascent, but here the dizziness was almost pleasant, like the time last May when she got tipsy at her cousin Sandra’s wedding. Uncle Simon brought her a glass of champagne that she drank too quickly, as if it were soda; she felt a frothing deep inside that excited her, as if something uncontrollable, unpredictable, was about to happen. She giggled, and when Uncle Simon escorted her onto the dance floor, she moved as if she were floating, almost levitating. When the dance was over her mother knew right away something was different. “What did you give her?” she asked Simon accusingly. “She’s barely fifteen.” But Gerda’s voice was amused, too, almost flirtatious. She must have drunk some herself, Suzanne thought. “Time for her to have a little fun,” Simon said with a wink. “You make her work too hard.”

  She studied the program. The pianist would be playing Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata, the Bach C-minor Toccata, the first set of Schubert’s Impromptus, and, to close, Brahms’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel. The Waldstein was a happy coincidence; she had just begun studying it with Mr. Cartelli. So far she had worked on only the first two movements. Mr. Cartelli had told her to get the first movement up to speed and in the second, to use the pedal more sparingly. He didn’t praise her often; he was sober and demanding and not given to conversation, a change from Mrs. Gardenia and her chatter, but they had grown to understand each other. He’d said at first that he rarely took students so young—Suzanne was ten when they began—but after hearing her play he relented, warning that if she was serious, she must follow his instructions to the letter and practice at least two hours a day.

  A middle-aged couple sat down on her right and smiled. The woman had stiff sprayed blond hair and purple lipstick and wore a black tailored suit and a print blouse with a big bow at the neck. The man was bulky and had trouble squeezing himself into the seat. He kept squirming and adjusting his body; Suzanne was glad he wasn’t beside her.

  “Are you by yourself?” the woman asked.

  Suzanne nodded.

  “Well, you must love music. Isn’t that nice?” she said to her husband. “A girl who loves music so much that she comes on a Sunday afternoon. It’s very high up, but don’t let that worry you. In Carnegie Hall you can hear everything perfectly, down to the last note, even up here. We have a subscription to the whole series.”

  Suzanne nodded again. She didn’t know if you were supposed to talk to your neighbors at a concert, the way you would at a party or a wedding. Luckily the woman opened her program and so Suzanne could continue reading about the pianist, Rudolf Serkin. He was from Czechoslovakia and had been a child prodigy, had played all over the world and won prizes. She wondered how much he’d practiced in his youth. Probably hours and hours each day.

  When all the seats were filled, the hall very gradually grew still, as if the audience understood it was time, that something momentous was about to happen. The curtain parted to show an enormous black grand piano in the center, on a gleaming wood floor. The piano and the floor caught the light from the chandeliers and shimmered. When the hall was utterly silent, a small gray-haired man in a black cutaway and shiny shoes appeared from the wings. Suzanne was too far away to see his face, but she noticed his deft movements and the way he inclined his head slightly, acknowledging the audience. He sat down and adjusted the stool by turning a knob below. Then he raised his hands over the keys.

  The woman was right. She could hear every note; they emerged from his fingers like clear crystals. Yet she barely recognized the Waldstein Sonata: How could these be the same notes she struggled with? They had motion and coherence and shape, motion above all. The repeated triads of the opening, which she couldn’t manage to make sense of, became a hammering, insistent demand. The first movement climbed compulsively, as if the music were being pursued, chased by more music, each phrase impatient to assert itself and rush on. She tried to follow along with her fing
ers on her knee, but he went too fast. She needed all her concentration simply to listen.

  The music was being made right this minute by his skimming hands, which looked, at so far a distance, like pale fleet fish glimpsed underwater. The notes had been written down centuries ago, and now they were rising from the instrument as if they were brand new. Mr. Cartelli had tried to tell her something like that. The composer hears something in his head, he said, and writes it down, but it lies there inert until someone rouses it, and then it’s as alive as the day it was written. Do you understand? The notes were more than a technical challenge to be mastered, a series of difficulties that should result in a beautiful sound. They were a dream of the ear, and playing them was giving that dream sound and texture, the dream of a dead man passed on to living listeners.

  During the intermission, while the people around her made their way down the aisles, she stayed in her seat. Where could she go? There was no one to talk to. What if she didn’t get back to her seat in time and had to climb over the entire row of people? She studied the program, read about the lives of the composers and the music, but was too distracted to grasp any meaning. She couldn’t wait for the small man to appear again, to pass the dream along.

  She listened to the rest of the program, especially the gorgeous Schubert Impromptus, in rapture and despair: I could never play like that. And then she thought, I will. She would practice even harder, longer hours, until she could do what this man, this Rudolf Serkin, was doing. He was not a B+. He was beyond all ordinary ratings.

  When it was over, he rose slowly, as if exhausted, and came to the center of the stage to accept the clamor of applause. He looked diminished, shrunken into his black suit, the magic gone from his person yet still hovering in the air around him. He disappeared into the wings, but the audience kept clapping. He returned, a bit more briskly, as if in that one instant he had gathered his strength, and bowed again and again. They wouldn’t stop clapping. Even from so far away she could see him smile. The applause made him happy, happier than he could show. All at once everyone was standing up, clapping for the small man, and he, in the bright light below, seemed to grow larger. All those people were thinking of nothing but him, and their applause made him occupy more space in the world. There was no doubt that he was real, no chance that he would shrink away. The more they admired him, the larger he became, the more firmly rooted.

  Suzanne’s eyes filled with tears. She realized, with shame, that the glory showered on him moved her even more than the music had moved her. It was the music that should matter. And yet it was as if his gift, his performance, were merely the preliminaries needed to achieve the praise. The glory. He was drenched in the brightness of the world’s love. Wrapped in glory.

  She would show them. She had a gift, too. She would do nothing but practice for the rest of her life, for that reward. She would do the chromatic scales in reverse, the triads and fifths and sevenths, the arpeggios Mr. Cartelli believed in like an article of faith. She would harden her will; she would do whatever was necessary to have that.

  Again and again he disappeared into the wings, but they wouldn’t stop calling him back, and now he appeared weary, even impatient. He had had enough, all that he needed. And still there was more.

  The woman standing next to Suzanne turned to her excitedly. “Now, wasn’t that fantastic? Isn’t he just a genius? It’s like that every time!” All Suzanne could do was nod. If she tried to speak, she might burst into tears. This was too enormous to speak about. All the people in the hall would be thinking about him long after he left the stage; days later they would be remembering the music, remembering him. Every single person in the huge hall knew his name. How many people? Thousands, maybe. The woman next to her waved good-bye and turned away, and Suzanne rubbed her fists against her eyes so no one would see her tears. She would have that. She must. What else was there worth having?

  It took longer to go down the stairs than up, the crowd was so dense. But Suzanne barely felt the press of bodies against her. The image of Rudolf Serkin, bathed in light, bowing again and again, remained with her, and she could still hear the closing bars of the Waldstein as if they were rising from the piano behind him. When someone tapped her on the shoulder, she almost tripped.

  “Hi. Aren’t you in my French class?” It was a tall boy with longish straight hair, sandy brown shading into blond, and he was dressed for the occasion in a dark sports jacket. He was gazing down at her as if they were old friends.

  “I don’t know. Am I?”

  “Third period? Mr. DeLuca?”

  “I guess so.” So she’d been noticed, though she’d never noticed him before.

  “I always sit far back. But I’ve seen you up front. You’re a freshman, aren’t you?”

  She laughed. “How could you tell? I don’t carry a sign.”

  “I haven’t seen you around, and you have that look, kind of dazed, you know. Oh, I don’t mean it in any bad way, you just look like you’re finding your way around. It is confusing, so much going on, so many people. You must have had French before, to be in intermediate.”

  “I had it in junior high. It seems like an eternity ago.”

  “I know what you mean. Are you here by yourself?”

  She nodded.

  “Me too. I like to get away on weekends. I live with my aunt and uncle, and they’re a drag. And I love to listen to music, especially people who play the way I’ll never come near playing. Frankly, I don’t know how I got accepted in the first place. Anyway, so, what did you think of this?”

  What did she think? How could she possibly say what it meant to her without telling her whole life story? “It was fantastic,” she said lamely. “He’s amazing.” She wanted to say that it was her first time in Carnegie Hall, but she held back—it would sound so naive, and this boy had such a knowing air.

  “Yeah, well, Serkin is always amazing. I never heard him in person before, though, only on records. So, you play the piano?”

  They had reached the lobby at last and stood awkwardly in the center, the crowds pushing past them toward the exit.

  “Yes. But at school, as the second instrument, they assigned me the violin. I don’t know why. I’m still learning how to hold it. I can’t seem to get that right.” She smiled again. “What about you?”

  “Piano, too. I got assigned to trumpet. But at the end of last year I did get into the second orchestra—they probably don’t have enough trumpet players. Do you want to stop somewhere for a coffee or something?”

  Was he actually asking her out? He wanted to spend more time with her. “I don’t know. I mean, yes, I would, but I ought to call my mother and tell her I’ll be late. She always worries when I go to the city alone, like God knows what might befall me.”

  “Befall you? Ha! I like that. There’s a phone booth on the corner. You can call from there. Where do you live?”

  “Brooklyn.”

  “Me too. We can ride home together on the subway. My name is Philip, by the way. What’s yours?”

  Before she quite realized how it happened, they had become a couple. Despite her good looks—she had become unusually pretty, she could see for herself: the sleek long hair, the perfect skin, the long eyelashes and large eyes she had just learned to outline with a dark pencil (nasty Eva had some uses)—she had never had a boyfriend before. She hadn’t wanted a boyfriend before, at least not any of the boys she knew in school. The ones who approached her were not the ones she wanted, and she brushed them off as not worth her time.

  She dreamed of older, sophisticated boys, closer to men, the kinds of boys she would never find in her neighborhood. Still, observing other girls, the flashy girls, she wondered how it came about, how the terms of the pairing were negotiated. Was it a tacit arrangement, something you drifted into, or were there open declarations, as in the movies and on TV? And now it was happening to her, practically overnight. At school she went from being the mysterious-looking pretty girl no one knew, the girl who walked alone from clas
s to class, avoiding meeting people’s eyes, to a girl who was attached, and to someone clearly important. Phil knew everyone, it seemed. Even the teachers paused to greet him in the hallways. And he introduced her to everyone, forthrightly, like someone he was proud to be with. They sat together in French class; in the cafeteria, whichever of them arrived first would save an extra seat, and quickly their table would fill up with friends.

  And because everyone recognized that they were a couple, she found herself, in between classes or after school, standing in the midst of a clump of kids, chattering, giggling, gossiping. It was a marvel to her, how simply being attached to a boy, a boy everyone knew, could give her this instant status.

  What she wondered at, above all, was why he had chosen her when he could have anyone he wanted, any of the popular girls who waved to everyone who passed. It wasn’t only his lightweight, understated charm; he was good-looking, too, with his long thin face and regular features and odd gray-green eyes, intelligent eyes that always seemed to be assessing what was before them. With so many advantages, he still wanted her. She knew her own advantages: Besides being pretty, she had begun to dress carefully, in the style taken up by girls who wanted to be seen as arty or bohemian, a word they liked but whose meaning they were not entirely clear about, either geographically or culturally. Dark tights, turtlenecks, long flowery skirts, long hair, dangling earrings. She would often add something distinctive, colored tights or a looping scarf or oddly shaped beads she bought in Greenwich Village. But her looks alone couldn’t explain it. There were plenty of attractive girls. The only special thing about her was her talent, and she didn’t think that was something that would matter to a boy like Phil. Though she might be mistaken. At the very start, before they were firmly joined, he had begged her to play for him in one of the practice rooms and had seemed genuinely awed.