Elise Blackwell - An Unfinished Score

ALSO BY ELISE BLACKWELL

Hunger

The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish

Grub

Elise Blackwell

This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2010 by Elise Blackwell

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,
may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Blackwell, Elise, 1964
An unfinished score / Elise Blackwell.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-936071-66-1
1. MusiciansFiction. 2. AdulteryFiction. I. Title.
PS3602.L3257U55 2010
813.6dc22
2009053805

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Book Design by SH CV

First Printing

For Meredith Blackwell

She hears the words on the radio. It is the radio that announces her lovers death. His is not a household name, not in most households, but he happens to be the most famous person on the plane that went down. The planes wreckage, strewn across Indiana farmland, is being examined for clues. Crews search for the voice recorder, the black box that holds the secret of two hundred seventy-one deaths. Two hundred seventy, plus one.

Suzannes rib cage shuddersa piano whose keys are struck all at onceyet she does not cry. She does not cry, but only closes her eyes and presses her palms flat on the cool counter. None of the facts of Alexs life suggests that it ends in a soybean field.

At the dining room table, playing a board game and separated from her by the counter on which she works, sit the other members of her household, a household in which Alexs name at least rings a bell. Her husbands dice clack against the wood; her best friend sighs as her game piece is sent back to start; Adeles hands clap three times.

Starting over isnt all bad, Ben says, and Petra does not respond.

Suzanne lifts onto her toes to search the high cabinet for the olive oil, her hand grabbing only the air the bottle usually occupies. She spies it on the counter, where she obviously set it earlier. It has been right in front of her all along. She minces the cloves of garlic that she peeled before she knew her lover was dead, heats oil in a wide skillet, salts a pot of roiling water. The simple sounds of knife on wood, of water rising to slow boil, of onion sizzling become the distinct tones of grief.

If she lives, this will be how: moment to moment, task by task, left foot then right, breathing in then out. An eternal present in which every sound is loud. This is something she should be good at, if anyone can be. For four years she has practiced pretending that everything is fine, that she is what she seems to be.

Ben, who has been listening to the broadcast, who has heard the honey-voiced announcement, says from the table, Thats sad. Dont we have a couple of his recordings?

I think so. Chicago Symphony playing Brahmss Double Concerto and some other stuff. Suzanne presses her voice flat, passing for normal. I played under him in St. Louis that time, right before I moved to the quartet.

Why is death always sad? Petra says. I mean, wasnt he a total asshole, even for a conductor?

I kind of liked him. Suzanne shakes water loose from the greens, tries to dry her hands on the oily dishcloth. Moment by moment, left foot, right foot, breathe. Can you clear the table after the next round of turns? Dinners almost ready. She breathes in and out again, short on oxygen, lungs shallow and on the edge of panic. Such as it is. A sputtered almost joke.

While Petra and Adele pack away the game, Ben sets out white plates. His form contradicts the domestic setting: his strong forearms bared by rolled-up sleeves, flexing as he folds the cheap paper napkins on the diagonal.

Adele signs something, and Petra interprets for Ben: She says shes never seen you do that beforefold the napkins. Usually you just toss them out. She says they look like sails.

Ben spells party letter by letter, but he knows the sign for hats. Adele claps and makes one of her unconscious noises, a chirp of delight.

Suzanne watches them, grateful that they are safe on the ground yet also afraid of their emotional compasses, each tricky in its different way, each seeming to point at her all the time as though she is true north.

Bens absorption with fact and music rarely extends to interest in the breathing world, and never outside their small, odd family. It is a distance that feels studied, as though he made a decision in some formative year not to be touched by other people. He shields his emotional barometer so well that even Suzanne and Petra often take it for an absence, for some hole in the fabric of his nature, and their surprise borders on fright when he names some human truth, extracting the insight from his emotional hollow like a magician pulls a ribbon from the thin air.

Petras moods slide across her face all dayintense, shifting, and mostly short-lived. They rule her though she cannot name them, yet she easily measures the feelings of others, taking the pulse of one person or an entire room, if only so shell know whom she can make angry and when to run the other way.

Yet it is Adele Suzanne most fears. Adeles emotional compass is keen because she is still a childno one spots a liar faster than a smart childand unrelenting because she must watch people closely or she will lose the world.

Suzanne turns to drain the pasta, hot streaks of steam pelting the side of her neck and face.

Ben does not set out wineglasses, so Suzanne does not uncork the bottle she picked up earlier, reading labels against price tags, the sun filtering through the stores filmy window warm on the back of her neck, the clerk watching her with slight interest. She does not open the wine she chose before she knew her lover was dead. Before he was dead, or at the moment he died? The radio has not said what time the plane dropped from the sky.

Like a stone in water. The witness voices an accent so Midwestern that it sounds Southern. Suzanne turns the dial, clicks off the cheap radio. Without the word survivor, and there isnt one, the details can do her no good tonight.

Suzanne distributes water glasses, and they take their usual seats around the food. Adele lifts her glass, leaving behind a wet circle she traces with a fingertip. She looks at the food, at each of them. Had they been a household of three, which for a while it seemed they might be, family dinners would have been shaped by sound. Rising or falling or stalled, but always sound or its absence. But Ben and Suzannes baby did not arrive, and after Petra and Adele made them a quartet, they worked to make a world defined by sight, touch, smell, taste rather than by sound and not-sound.

In their deep concern for Adelethe child who never turned to Petras violin, who never winced at sudden noise, the child with wide eyes but only a small seal of a mouththe three musicians do the best they can. Suzanne has trained her eyes and hands to move with some fluency. Now that Adele can follow the shapes and motions of lips, Suzanne speaks slowly and faces her squarely. Of course none of their hands are so nimble in language as Adeles. The swift precision of hers is that of a conductor who knows the music so well that he does not use a score.