Two-Part Inventions Read online

  When she got out of the subway, she decided to stop in a coffee shop in the Village on her way home. It was an early evening in June, close to the solstice, just the kind of weather she liked—mild, the sky pale, nightfall not yet near. She’d sit outside with a magazine and think of nothing, just delay the moment of going home and reporting on her day.

  As she approached the Café Borgia she saw Richard sitting at a table outside. His back was to her but he was unmistakable. His hair was graying and there was a slight droop to his shoulders, but his body kept its grace and ease. Success agreed with him. His music was played often, and the reviewers called him one of the most innovative new composers. His opera opening in the fall was based on Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, he’d told her when they last spoke a few weeks ago. He was talking animatedly to someone across the table, but his body was blocking his companion. Suzanne quickened her step—surely he’d ask her to join them and she’d be distracted. She could forget the failed afternoon and relax. As a waiter came to his table, carrying a tray with two cups of coffee, Richard moved aside to give him room.

  Now she could see. The person facing him was Elena. Suzanne retreated into the doorway of a shop that sold men’s leather goods and paraphernalia: thick black belts, heavily studded black vests, pants festooned with sequins and chains. Two men came out, more boys than men, really, with spiky purple hair and bare tattooed arms, laughing, brushing against each other; one bumped into her and muttered a hasty apology. Elena tossed her hair off her face with a quick gesture. She was laughing at something Richard said, her mouth wide open, her lips red and glistening. She wore several ropes of heavy beads that glinted in the sun. She reached out her hand toward Richard’s on the table, and he clasped it. Then they opened their hands and he played with her fingers. Lovers’ gestures. Suzanne felt a wave of nausea and weakness. She turned onto a side street and hurried home. Philip was out. She flopped facedown on their bed, felt the whole front of her body sink into the mattress, sinking so deep that she felt part of the bed, merging with the coverlet.

  She herself had introduced them at Cynthia’s party—that was the worst of it. Well, not exactly. Elena strode over and introduced herself. But it made no difference. They would have met that night sooner or later, and because of her. How could he? He knew she and Elena were good friends. And she thought he didn’t . . . with women. But of course that was so naive, almost as naive as her not recognizing years ago, at seventeen, that Greg was his lover. Possibly the other men, too. And then there was Cynthia. How had she forgotten about that?

  She was supposed to meet Richard for lunch in a few days. She’d invited him over for dinner several times, but he preferred to see her alone rather than with Phil, whom he seemed not to trust. But she couldn’t live with this new knowledge until then. She called him the following morning.

  “Suzanne, how are things going? You’re running around a lot, aren’t you?”

  “I’m okay. I’m getting tired of it, though. I think I’m going to stop for a while.”

  “Do you still freeze up?” he said tenderly. But the tenderness was the kind he would use with a child.

  “Cut it out. You don’t have to keep being my protector. God knows I get enough of that.”

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “I saw you with her.”

  “With who?”

  “You know. With her. At the Café Borgia yesterday. You’re with her.”

  “Elena. You can say her name.”

  “How could you?”

  “What do you mean, how could I? You sound like a child. We’re all adults here.”

  “It was at my party that you met.”

  “Yes.”

  “I never imagined . . .”

  “Do you realize how you sound? It’s not as if you and I are married. You’re married to someone else. This is absurd.”

  “I thought . . . I thought . . . you know.”

  “For chrissake, Suzanne. You’re . . . what? Twenty-seven, twenty-eight? Do you know what you’re saying? At seventeen, okay—”

  “Please, don’t remind me of that.”

  “But it’s the same thing. How innocent can you be?”

  “Too innocent, evidently.”

  “Let’s get something clear. This is not a betrayal. I’m still your friend, the same to you as ever. I’m not taking anything away from you. This concerns my life, not yours.”

  But you chose her over me, she thought bitterly. “And what kind of life is it, anyway?”

  At that, he hung up without a word.

  As it turned out, there was no need to argue with Philip about future performances. A few days later she discovered an excellent reason not to continue traveling so often. She was pregnant. It was unplanned, but a relief, such a relief that she wondered why this escape route hadn’t occurred to her before. It explained the tiredness, the nausea, the fretfulness. Even Philip couldn’t expect her to go gallivanting about feeling this way.

  He received the news happily. “But once you’re over the first few months, we’ll go at it again.”

  “I don’t know. I’d rather wait.”

  “Okay, it’s up to you. But let’s not wait too long.”

  The pregnancy was like a gift: no more performances, no more fear or sickly dread, no more having to report to Philip when she came home.

  Philip was excited, giddy, like an expectant father on a TV sitcom. She had to laugh when he whispered sweet nothings in the direction of her stomach—who knew he could be so silly? He anticipated changes they’d have to make in the apartment: no sharp edges, no open electrical sockets . . . But of course he’d had a younger brother, Suzanne remembered, a brother he’d doted on. Billy. He’d already said that if it was a boy he’d like to name him Billy.

  Suzanne allowed herself to relax; it was as if her emotions were lying in a hammock whose slow, gentle swaying lulled her. She kept up her lessons, kept playing for the ballet classes, but there were no more hurried trips to Penn Station or to the airport with an overnight bag containing the required elegant but simple noncreasing dress, the shoes, the all-important music. That was over. Forever, if she had her way.

  To go along with the baby, they needed a house, he decided. He was doing well enough to afford a house now, the kind of house he had dreamed of ever since he was so abruptly exiled from his suburban home. He suggested the idea to Suzanne and she nodded without much interest.

  “Sure, if that’s what you want.”

  She didn’t care to go house hunting with him, so he went by himself and found a modest but attractive three-story remodeled Victorian with solid old mahogany wainscoting, high ceilings and fine woodwork, a small back porch, and space for a garden in front and back, a house far larger than they needed even with the baby—or two babies—but he planned to turn one room into a studio so he could work at home. It was in Nyack, right in town—he knew Suzanne hated new tract developments—only a half hour’s drive from the city.

  “You’ll love it,” he said.

  She agreed almost too readily. She wasn’t even eager to drive up and see it, but Philip insisted.

  “You’re right,” she said. “It’s a lovely house. Let’s do it.” She knew very little about babies, had rarely been with one up close. Almost everyone could have one; in that she was hardly special. Several of the girls she’d grown up with had already accomplished that: Eva, Paula. (Suzanne had sent the requisite gifts, feeling sorry for Eva’s baby—what a mother.) Suzanne could do it, too, even if she hadn’t especially craved one. She couldn’t yet picture the baby as a reality, just the way she hadn’t been able to pay attention when Mrs. Gutterman in the fourth grade had explained what the prime meridian was, or when the science teacher in junior high had explained the whys and wherefores of precipitation. It was as if their voices faded into the walls and at the same time a dark curtain descended between her and the sound, and she withdrew into her own head until a bell rang to rouse her. There would be no bell this time,
but a needy baby who must be attended to. She would love it once she had it, she was sure of that. But she would rather have had the other—she couldn’t lie to herself.

  When Richard called to wish her well, she was surprised.

  “I heard your news,” he said. “That’s lovely. You’ll make a wonderful mother. You’re patient and gentle. I’m looking forward to seeing you with a baby.”

  How had he heard? From Elena? Were they still together? She couldn’t possibly ask, after their last conversation. And how would Elena have known? Well, one way or another, the rumor mill in the classical-music world was still functioning efficiently. “Thank you. But it’s been weeks since we spoke. I thought you were still angry, or I would have called to tell you myself.”

  “We’ve been friends too long for me to stay angry when I hear something as nice as this. Let’s just get past it.”

  “I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am that I spoke that way. I didn’t mean it.”

  “Sure you meant it. But that’s okay. I remember how you were brought up.”

  “I’ve tried so hard to escape all that.”

  “Well, keep trying. Meanwhile, I want to take you out to lunch to celebrate. Before you get too big to sit at a table.”

  “That’s a ways off,” and she laughed. They made a date for the following week. Being in his presence, sitting opposite from him, brought out more truth than the telephone had.

  “Richard, how will I ever do this? I don’t know the slightest thing about babies. I never even wanted one.”

  “Well, is it too late to have an abortion?” he asked calmly.

  How could he consider that, after his warm congratulations? “Oh, no, I don’t want to do that either. There’s no reason to. And Phil is so happy about it. No, I guess it’s just nerves. I’ll be fine.” There was no one, it seemed, to whom she could talk about her bewilderment at the whole enterprise.

  Two months passed, they prepared for the move, and then, abruptly, one rainy night, the need to talk about the baby collapsed. It began with waking in the night to a feeling of wetness, wallowing in a puddle, and when she nudged Phil awake and he turned on the lights, they saw that the wetness was blood. Then the rushing about, the towels, the taxi ride through the dark streets, and finally the blessed injection, the falling into darkness.

  Better not to think of the baby anymore. Yet once they had put away the catalogs of nursery furniture and the books of advice on how to get a night’s sleep, she found she couldn’t stop thinking about it, imagining what and who it might have been, how it might have felt to hold it, watch it sleep, feed it, see it learn to walk, to talk . . . all the things that had never interested her before.

  She mourned for the baby as if she had really wanted it, and Phil, who had really wanted it, mourned with her. Suzanne knew she was grieving over her life, the failure she had accepted with stiff resignation but never cried over. Phil’s grieving was edged by memory, too: a reenactment of the long-ago grief he had dreamed would somehow be compensated by the child, his only close blood relative. Their griefs, different as they were, brought them together, especially when the doctor told them there would be no more children. There was damage to the fallopian tubes or the uterus—Suzanne never quite understood the technicalities; she only understood the result, irreversible.

  And now what? they both thought as they came home the next day, pale and shaken. Now what? Phil didn’t dare suggest more performances, certainly not until Suzanne was stronger. But he knew what was ahead for him: He would work harder than ever. He was gradually building up the recording business, with recommendations from satisfied clients like Cynthia, who’d recently signed on, and some young artists she’d introduced him to. Besides that, he would devote all his spare time to establishing an independent label and promoting his own recordings. CDs were taking over the market, and he would work on them until he became the best in the business. He could do it, he was sure. And of course he must take care of Suzanne.

  They had to delay the move for several weeks. Suzanne was slow to recover from the miscarriage, even though the doctor pronounced her fine in every way. Only she must try not to get pregnant—it could be dangerous. She knew very well how not to get pregnant—she’d been doing it for years. What she didn’t know was how to pull herself out of the pit of despair. Less the loss of the child—though that weighed heavily—than the loss of a future. The years ahead had always seemed too few and too short to accomplish all she had to do. Now they were too long, and too many. Time to be filled, no different from the ordinary people she had grown up with. No longer special.

  She was tired yet suffered from sleeplessness, various aches and pains, sometimes spasms in her lower back. And she was barely thirty. If she felt this worn-out now, she wondered, how would it be at sixty? How would she pass all those years?

  Gradually she resumed her teaching and returned to the ballet class for which she was the accompanist; the adolescent girls, it seemed, had not only grown taller but grown more proficient in the weeks she’d been away. They were aspiring to join the company, buoyed by the kinds of hopes she had once nurtured. She thought about them while she played bits from Bach and Mozart for their barres. Later in the class she gave them lively selections from Prokofiev and Milhaud as they whirled and leaped across the floor in their complex patterns; while she played, she wondered how many of them would be able to live their dream. It was an advanced class, and to her they all looked superb; she didn’t know enough to distinguish between degrees of excellence. Had they been musicians, she could have spotted the chosen ones in an instant. Meanwhile, to them she barely existed, was simply the accompanist, providing the music they needed. She didn’t need to be real.

  When they finally moved to Nyack she spent time on furnishings, something she had never taken the slightest interest in. She learned to cook seriously and began preparing elaborate dishes, greeting Phil in the evening in an apron dotted with flour and spots of sauce. “It’s great, of course,” he said, “but when did you have time to do this? Aren’t you practicing? You know, you’ve got to start again one of these days.”

  “Why?” she said flippantly. “Why can’t I just cook? It’s a very respectable life. My mother did it. Thousands of women did it and still do. We have a house now. Where is it written that I have to achieve something? Some people just aren’t suited to that.”

  “What’s this? Your evil twin talking? You’re not the same girl I once knew.”

  “Sorry to have to spoil your dream, but it looks like that’s who I am now. If you wanted to hook up with a sure thing, you should have stayed with Elena.”

  She was furiously pulling the dishes out of the new dishwasher. Phil was expecting that some would land on the floor. He had never heard her raise her voice this way, but from his experience in the studio with many frustrated artists, he knew enough not to answer, to let the fit play itself out. He couldn’t believe she was serious about cooking; it was simply the most contrary image of herself she could conjure up.

  To Philip’s surprise, he began to see cookbooks of all nationalities appear on the kitchen shelf, formerly bare except for a New York Times cookbook. He discovered that Ralph Nader’s mother had written a Lebanese cookbook with a charming essay at the end about bringing up her large family. Under Mrs. Nader’s influence, Suzanne spent a great deal of time scouring the county for greenmarkets, and in the refrigerator Phil would find odd-looking raw vegetables whose names he didn’t even know.

  He didn’t dare arrange any more concerts, but he did venture to ask, one evening after an excellent couscous dish at their new dining-room table, whether she was still practicing.

  “Oh, of course,” she said. “Hours and hours. I’ve always practiced. My mother never had to nag me, either.”

  “I hope you don’t think of me as a mother.”

  “Sometimes I do. You’d make a good mother.”

  More and more she left him speechless. She grew quiet and withdrawn. Though she sa
id she was practicing, sometimes the music spread out on the piano didn’t change from one day to the next. He heard she had babysat a couple of times for the young couple next door. When she was sitting down, her restless fingers drummed musical phrases on the tabletop; he wanted to ask her what she was hearing in her head, but he hesitated. He knew she still went into town to accompany the dance classes. Then, one Sunday morning, as he was bringing in the newspaper from their front steps, she announced that Richard had asked her to help him rehearse the singers for his new opera, to open in the fall. This would be a lavish production based on the life and death of Roger Casement, the Irish patriot, something on a scale Richard had not yet attempted.

  “Sounds great,” said Phil. “So, you’re going to do it?”

  “Sure, why not? It should be fun. And I haven’t worked much with singers before.”

  “I thought you and Richard had some kind of quarrel. You haven’t mentioned him in ages.”

  She’d never told him about finding Richard with Elena at the café, and about the awful thing she had said to him on the phone. She was too ashamed. “I wouldn’t call it a quarrel, exactly. Anyway, he called a while ago and we both apologized, and it’s over now. We were too close to be on the outs for long.”

  “Well, that’s good. By the way, in case you’re interested, he and Elena are no longer an item,” Phil said. He was getting out his tools, preparing to work on the back porch he was building. He wanted it to be ready for the summer.

  “I didn’t know you knew about that.”

  “I know everything. I have my sources. Anyhow, it wasn’t a big secret. Why should it be? They’re both free to do as they please. It didn’t last long. He’s back to men and she’s got a new interest. Or so they say.”