Two-Part Inventions Read online

  “But don’t they know?”

  “I don’t know who knows what. I try not to pay attention. It’s not easy. I’ve no wish to make it any harder.”

  “I’ve got to go now.” She stood up and moved toward the door.

  “Hold on. Don’t run away. That’s what you always do when there’s something you don’t want to face. Remember when you were a kid, with your parents? Or after your father made you perform? You’d dash out like a pianist rushing offstage and come here. You can’t always walk out of a room or a situation you don’t like. I’ll make you a cup of coffee.”

  She remembered the heavy yellow ceramic mugs from which she had drunk so many cups of coffee; they felt like a part of her childhood she must leave behind. “I’d rather have a glass of wine.” She thought he might object, but he opened a bottle of red and poured some for both of them. “What’s wrong with walking out on a situation you don’t like?” she asked. That was exactly what she had done with Philip, never spoken another word to him after she saw him walking with his arm around Elena. It hadn’t occurred to her that there was a better way.

  “Everything is wrong with that. Look what’s happened here. You’ve learned something you didn’t know before. That’s always a good thing, at any age. When I met you, I was an adult, and I learned I could get really excited about the talent of a young child. That was something I hadn’t known before. I’d always worked with older students, but you had some kind of uncanny instinct about music I’d never seen in so young a kid. So I followed it. That’s all I meant. That we became friends meanwhile was a bonus. I never meant it to bring you any pain.”

  She sat back down on the piano bench and hid her face in her hands. “I’m so embarrassed. I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been. How blind. How can I ever live in the world if I can’t see what’s right in front of me?”

  “Just sit here awhile and calm down. Don’t flee—that’s the main thing. Now you’ll start looking at the world more closely. There is a world out there, you know. It’s not all in your head.” He drank half of his wine. “Talk to me.”

  “What’s there to talk about now?”

  “Plenty. Does this change how you feel about me? I mean, now that you know. Do you feel deceived?”

  “No, I don’t think you ever tried to deceive me. And about the other, you know, what you are, your life, that doesn’t matter to me. Oh, I’m saying it all wrong. I don’t mean I don’t care about your life. I mean you’re the same to me as ever. But I’m not the same. And here I was thinking . . .”

  “Suzanne, you’re not in love with me. You just want to be in love with someone. You suffered over the boyfriend, so naturally you look to someone you trust, who’s never betrayed you. And I never would. But that’s not being in love. It’s being grateful, and comfortable, and all sorts of good things.”

  “How do you know who I’m in love with or not? You talk like you know everything. You’re the only person who . . .” She drank and wept.

  “I’ve been the only one for some things. And I can still be. But you’ll have plenty of others. You’ll see. You’re just at the beginning—”

  “Oh, stop. At least stop being so banal. That’s what I liked about you, that you weren’t as banal as everyone else.” She’d wanted to say “loved,” not “liked,” but the word wouldn’t come out.

  “Okay.” He was silent for a while, smoking. “My parents didn’t speak to me for a long time. I’m an only child. I was their hope for more family, grandchildren, the real deal. But that was the lesser part of it. They couldn’t bear the idea of my . . . life. What I did. They found it disgusting. As many people do. It was hard. Terrible, in fact.”

  “And now?” she asked.

  “Now they need me. They’re old and not well. They need help, and I guess a queer son can do that as well as anyone else. If not for that, they might still not be speaking to me. Oh, unless some of my compositions get played or the opera I’m working on gets produced. That would make them happy. They’d think maybe it was all part of the artistic temperament.”

  “How do you stand it?” It struck her how narrow her world was, how minuscule her conception of human behavior, human suffering. She’d felt the same jolt—this sense of enlargement, of enlightenment—when Philip told her about the death of his family. Once again she glimpsed how little she knew of the world outside her head, what people endured in that world. Would she ever know that breadth of pain? She both dreaded it and longed for it, curiosity vying with fear.

  Part 2

  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 bette
r 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 . . .”