Two-Part Inventions Read online

  When they asked how she liked being here she smiled ruefully, though not with condescension. She was so self-absorbed, Suzanne would soon discover, that it would not occur to her to condescend: These Americans were not yet real enough to merit condescension, though they would become so soon enough. She hadn’t been unhappy, Elena said, despite the living conditions. She wasn’t at home that much; she had her friends. And she would have gone to the Moscow Conservatory, a peerless place, the pinnacle of achievement for music students. “Like the Bolshoi school for a dancer,” she said. But she was here and she would make the best of it—that was her way. “It is good here. It is excellent school and teachers are good to me. And not for long. Later I will hope to go to Juilliard, almost like Moscow Conservatory.” That was probably settled already, Suzanne thought; very likely she’d be spared the ordeal of applications and auditions.

  It was Chekhov’s stories Elena had been reading, Suzanne found out when she asked, and she immediately took a collection out of the library and read the stories late at night in bed. They reminded her of Elena, wry yet accepting, with a kind of melancholy good cheer.

  Things changed after that first day in the cafeteria. Philip wanted them to have lunch with Elena every day. He shifted into performance mode, Suzanne noted, as he had with her mother, only this was quite a different performance. He tried to impress Elena, amuse her, give her advice about school and about the city—a one-man tourist agency. Elena was a fine audience: She laughed at his anecdotes about the teachers; she listened to his advice about what to see and where to go.

  “Have you been to the Metropolitan Museum yet? You must go. They have a great Impressionist collection.” Suzanne was surprised. He’d never mentioned the Metropolitan Museum to her; she didn’t know he had any interest in art. “And the Museum of Natural History is a lot of fun, too, if you like dinosaurs and whales and Indians.”

  One day he suggested a ride on the Staten Island ferry. “It just costs a nickel, and it’s a great view of the skyline.”

  “What do you do there on that island?” Elena asked.

  “Nothing.” He laughed. “That’s part of it. There’s not much there. You just stay on the boat and ride back and look at the skyline. We’ll do it one of these Sundays. Maybe next week.” He turned to Suzanne—he was sitting between them. “Okay? We’ve never tried that.”

  On Friday afternoons Suzanne went straight from school to Greenwich Village for her lesson with Cynthia Wells, a young pianist and Juilliard graduate Richard had recommended when Mr. Cartelli retired the year before. On the other days, if Phil wasn’t staying late to take care of the instruments or paste up the student paper (he’d arranged for an interview with Elena, “Russian Prodigy Lands at Music and Art”), he and Suzanne would take the subway to Brooklyn together. Now he began leaving her notes saying he had to stay in the principal’s office or work an extra hour in the practice room. On one of those days when she received a note, she saw him leaving school with Elena, his arm around her shoulder.

  She grasped that it was ending as abruptly, though not as unaccountably, as it had begun. That he had many facets she knew, but he had never seemed duplicitous—in fact, she’d thought him too transparent in his eagerness to please, to help, to be appreciated. Probably Elena appreciated him more explicitly than she did, or he found her more deserving of his help.

  Jennifer murmured advice in the girls’ locker room. “It hasn’t gone very far yet. You can still get him back. Keep him, I mean, if you play your cards right.”

  “What ‘cards’?’” Suzanne said. “I’m not playing any card game. And I don’t want to keep him. Why should I, if that’s what he’s like?”

  Jennifer looked at her, incredulous at the naive question. “That is very immature. Think about it before you do or say anything rash.”

  There was nothing to think about. She scrawled a note saying good-bye in the briefest possible way and slipped it into the pocket of the jacket hanging from the back of Phil’s chair, wrapped around his keys so he’d be sure to find it. At the end of the day she left through a side exit in case he was waiting for her in front, trying to make it up. The term had only a few weeks left—already the trees were in lush bloom and the classroom windows were wide open, with the scent of honeysuckle wafting in—and during those few weeks she never spoke to Phil or Elena again. Each of them tried several times to stop her in the hall or in the cafeteria, but she walked past as if she didn’t recognize them. She found a sealed envelope slipped into her school bag and on the front, in capital letters, PLEASE LET ME EXPLAIN. She tore it up without opening it and tossed the pieces in a trash can in the subway station.

  It wasn’t easy to maintain her pose of calm indifference, but she managed by force of will. By force of anger. Except for Fridays with Cynthia, she went straight home, her face stiff on the subway as she studied the textbooks she liked the least, trigonometry and chemistry, memorizing formulas for the coming Regents Exams. Once she got home she dashed upstairs to weep into her pillow, and she refused Gerda’s attempts at consolation.

  It had been almost three years. She’d been so sure of him. He had told her he loved her. He had promised her things and had fulfilled his promises, gotten her free passes to concerts and rock clubs in the Village, where he had contacts. He’d even told her she kept him sane, that without her the miseries of home and his lost family would overwhelm him. She had never believed that; he’d been fine before they started. He would always be fine. That was his fate and his nature. She liked thinking in large terms like those.

  When she thought of the things they had done together—once in the principal’s office after everyone had left for the day, and a few times in her own bedroom on a Sunday afternoon, when her parents had driven out to New Jersey to visit relatives—she blushed with shame. She hadn’t wanted to do it; it was so hugely forbidden. And what if she got pregnant? But Phil persuaded her. They were getting too old to be fooling around like kids; they’d been together so long. He’d use protection. She’d been afraid to face her parents after the first time, as if it were written on her face. Gerda surely would know—she had uncanny instincts. But facing them proved easier than she anticipated, and Gerda didn’t seem to notice any difference. At sixteen, nearly seventeen, Suzanne decided she could never be sure of anyone again. She would always be on her guard for hints of betrayal.

  For a while Suzanne’s plight was the talk of the junior-class girls, most of them siding with her. Although Elena had her defenders, too: You’ve got to take what you can get, some of the girls declared. All’s fair in love and war. As for Phil: Boys do that, they’re fickle, they don’t know what they want. Fortunately for Suzanne, who shrank from notoriety, the affair was soon overshadowed by a plagiarism case. One of the girls in her circle of the popular, Helene, was discovered to have plagiarized a paper on Jean-Jacques Rousseau for a class in modern European cultural thought. That sort of cheating was almost unheard of at Music and Art, or at least almost never surfaced, and Helene was the new topic of conversation, also with her supporters and detractors. Rumors flew, of how she had been discovered—it happened that the teacher had recently read the book she’d cribbed from—how she had been sent to the principal and lectured. “And the worst part of it, Helene,” her teacher had allegedly said, “is that it was so unnecessary. You could have written an excellent paper on your own. You probably didn’t even save much time. What on earth possessed you, such a good student?”

  In public Suzanne sympathized with Helene. She truly felt sorry for her, knowing how painful it was to be the topic of whispered conversation. Privately she was shocked, even offended, at what Helene had done. This wasn’t some childish prank with no consequences to speak of, as when she herself had passed off a Rachmaninoff prelude as her own work, and anyway, that was four years ago—she certainly wouldn’t repeat it today. No, this was serious; this was school. There was one’s permanent record to think of, and moreover it was shamefully dishonest. But Helene’s troubles,
for Suzanne, were only a minor distraction. Always foremost in her mind was Philip and his betrayal.

  Friday afternoons were a relief, because of her lesson with Cynthia. It was a busy time. Suzanne had to prepare for the end-of-term recital required of all juniors and seniors. She’d chosen a Haydn sonata that had looked simple at first glance but showed its subtleties the more she worked on it; she was also required to do a chamber piece, and together with a violinist and cellist was practicing the first of the two Mendelssohn piano trios. It would never do to break down in front of Cynthia, so exasperatingly serene, so sophisticated, so reasonable. Lessons with Cynthia meant only work and more work.

  Cynthia was twenty-seven but seemed to Suzanne much older, with her own apartment, her grown-up clothes: She never wore jeans but dressed for lessons as if she were going to the theater. She was starting to play in recitals in small venues and was destined for success, Suzanne could tell. Certain people were, like Phil, and perhaps Elena. It had nothing to do with talent. Such people moved in the world as if it were theirs to manipulate, not hesitant or apprehensive. Cynthia was glamorous, though not beautiful. Striking, rather, with her prominent features, her dark hair cut short like a boy’s, and her heavy jewelry, necklaces and glinting earrings, but no bracelets or rings on her large hands, which could stretch two notes past an octave. She asked Suzanne nothing personal and told nothing about herself, except to explain once in a while how she had mastered a difficult passage. Suzanne had no idea whether she had a boyfriend or lover—she lived alone, that was clear—but if she did, she would never let herself be dropped. She would do the dropping. “You might find her cold,” Richard had said when he first suggested her, “but don’t be put off by that. She’s an excellent teacher and really a kind soul at heart, only she doesn’t like to show it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, you know, some people are afraid of being hurt. Of getting attached.”

  Something about the way he spoke—too self-consciously offhand—made her think they had been a couple. They’d make a good pair: Cynthia’s chill and Richard’s warmth, her sleekness and his nonchalance. Suzanne couldn’t imagine Cynthia hesitant about anything. Certainly she was no one Suzanne could confide in, except as her feelings emerged through her playing. When she pounded out Chopin’s twelfth étude or the passionate Brahms Intermezzo from Op. 118, she felt all her rage going into the music. Cynthia liked that. “I heard real passion there,” she said. “That’s fine. That’s how it should be. Only don’t get carried away. Remember, passion with control. You want to move your listeners to feel emotion, not to be overwhelmed by it yourself. Just because people call it the Revolutionary Étude doesn’t mean you should be in attack mode.”

  At those moments, when they felt close purely through music, Suzanne would have liked to ask Cynthia how she recovered from love affairs—for surely she must have had many—but Cynthia, unlike Richard, did not encourage such liberties.

  Suzanne found a job working as a music counselor in a summer camp far enough from home that she needn’t visit on weekends, and there, on neutral territory, she made friends easily. There was an older boy, also a counselor, pursuing her, whom she liked well enough, and with a nonchalance quite new to her, she didn’t need much persuasion to sleep with him, sneaking out to his bunk while his roommate was on kitchen duty after dinner. He seemed impressed by her experience and her responses, and she let him think it was his own appeal. In reality, and this surprised her, when the boy moved inside her, it wasn’t Phil she envisioned, but rather Richard. At first she tried guiltily to banish those fantasies, then after a while gave up and indulged them; they worked so well. This continued all summer, a colorful backdrop to the daily duties, yet she was relieved to know the boy was from Seattle so they wouldn’t be seeing each other again. Parting was not hard.

  She felt as if she, too, had learned to play roles the way Phil did, and, for all she knew, everyone else as well. She had met people from all over the East Coast and unearthed a bolder Suzanne from a repertoire she hadn’t known she possessed. She returned for her senior year feeling grown-up. And Phil was gone, off to Columbia, she heard; now she was ready to see what else the world had to offer. This fall she would apply to Juilliard—the auditions would be dreadful, but she believed she’d get in—and then her true life would begin. What she had now only with Richard and Cynthia would spread and fill the rest of her days.

  She found solace in visiting Richard and in playing for him. Aside from her family, he was the only listener who didn’t make her feel queasy with anxiety, the stage fright that dogged her more and more the older she grew. He was her one true friend, the one person with whom she could show her real self.

  “You are the genuine article,” he said one evening. She’d hardly come in when he said, “Play something for me. Nothing fancy, just something to settle me. It’s been a long day.” Without a word, she sat down and played one of the intermezzi Brahms wrote for Clara Schumann.

  “You are the genuine article.” He said it as if he hadn’t been totally sure before but now there was no doubt. She swiveled on the piano bench to look at him sprawled on the couch, his forgotten cigarette smoldering in an ashtray. He was smiling broadly, with satisfaction, and she smiled back. His hair was unruly and he needed a shave and he wore an old black sweatshirt she’d seen dozens of times, and yet he managed a casual elegance. He looked all at once beautiful to her. She felt something stirring in the air between them, and she longed to get up and touch him. She had turned seventeen over the summer and felt that her childhood—so prolonged—was at last over.

  She didn’t go over to touch him. She sat on the bench staring for so long that he finally asked, “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. Or at least nothing I could talk about.”

  “Try. Is it anything at school? The teachers?”

  She shook her head.

  “I know you broke up with your boyfriend last spring. Is it still that? Is he really worth months of pining?” He had just the hint of a smile, as if he were afraid to sound mocking.

  She’d never gotten around to introducing Philip to Richard. Maybe she knew he wasn’t worth it, that he didn’t deserve Richard, he was a lower order of being. Her own thought startled her—exactly the kind of bigotry she scorned in others.

  “No, it’s not him anymore. I’m over him.” She hoped that was true. Her feelings were such a tangle that she couldn’t tell whom or what she wanted. But she wanted something. And she had to speak, though she was shivering with embarrassment. Children were powerless, but adults could claim the world. Certain adults. Why shouldn’t she be one of them?

  “It’s you,” she began, then paused while he waited, looking puzzled. “We’ve known each other such a long time. You’ve done so much for me. But you still think of me as a child, don’t you?”

  He grinned as he would at a child. “No. You’re a woman of the world now. Especially after a summer of staging musical comedies. I wish I’d seen them. I bet you were a fantastic director. I think you have a touch of the martinet, beneath your charming good manners and appealing nature.”

  “Oh, stop teasing. That is the worst. Don’t you think I have feelings?”

  “I know very well you have feelings. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. But I really don’t get it. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “How can you not get it? All right. It’s you. I mean, you and me.” She stared at him helplessly, willing him to read her mind.

  It was a while before he spoke. He sat looking down at the patterned rug at his feet. “Oh. Oh, I see. I am so, so sorry. I never meant to give you the impression . . .” He spread his arms out as if to encompass the room, as if to indicate the obvious, then got up and paced to the window and back.

  “It’s not simply that I’m so much older. I won’t even use that. But . . . you didn’t know, after all this time, after all the people you’ve met here?” He stopped and faced her squarely. “You are a very innocent girl in
deed. Look, you’ve met Greg here so many times. You mean to say it never occurred to you . . . ?”

  Something inside her, a vital organ, seemed to drop into free fall, leaving her weak. Whispers, rumors, nasty words she’d heard at school flickered through her mind. “A fruitcake, that’s what he is,” Philip had once said about Mr. Sadler. “I can tell by the way he looks at me.” She knew what he meant, but had never given a thought to Mr. Sadler.

  How on earth could I have been so stupid? she thought. She had a flash of anger at her parents as well. Why hadn’t they told her? They must know. Everyone must know. That must be why they treated him with such distance, such suspicion. Of course. She flushed with shame. It was bad enough to have declared herself as she did, but to someone who didn’t even like women, in that way, at least. She’d been prepared for him to say he was too old, she must put away that sweet but impractical idea, they would forget all about it and go back to being good friends. She had almost hoped he would say that; it would forestall the complication and entanglement, yet leave her with a grief to harbor, sad but tender, grief like a secret, soothing companion. But this! There was nothing soothing about this.

  She couldn’t account for what she said next. “I always thought there was something between you and Cynthia.”

  “Well, yes, there was, briefly.” He looked away and his eyes closed for an instant, as if recalling a specific memory. “Can’t you understand? I’m not that . . . what shall I say? Exclusive. Sexual choices are complicated, Suzanne. Cynthia and I shared a lot. One thing leads to another. It just happened.”

  “But not with me.”

  “No, not with you. Use your head. I’m more than twice your age. I’m a teacher. You’re a student. It would be wrong. I’d be justifying your parents’ bad opinion, doing exactly what they always feared.”