Two-Part Inventions (16 page)

Some found her a figure of comedy and snickered, not always behind her back. Other students were intrigued, found her exotic, and wanted to get to know her, as if it would be an honor. But they were put off by her manner: stuck-up, they called it, as Suzanne had occasionally been called as a child by the girls on her block. Meaning, Elena didn't seem sufficiently grateful for their tentative approaches. They expected her to be humble, and she was not humble. She behaved as though school were a place where she turned up daily because it was required of her. She didn't realize how privileged she was to be attending this special school to which the others had worked so hard to be admitted.

With all that, they were curious. There were few foreign students, and none from the Soviet Union. Who was she, and how come she had suddenly appeared among them in the middle of the term? It was Philip, with his sources of information and access to file drawers, who found out the facts. Having gotten what advantage he could from Mr. Sadler of the math department, who'd kept his promise about dropping a word to his friend in the Columbia admissions office, Philip now spent his free periods working in the principal's office and was chummy with the principal's secretary, who was bored and enjoyed a bit of gossip.

It was a romantic story. Elena's mother, who was widowed young, was a Russian–English interpreter, often assigned to
visiting dignitaries who came through Leningrad. (That might account for Elena's odd English, Phil suggested; she'd probably learned it from a book, with her mother's help, but hadn't had much chance to speak. In the middle of the Cold War, English probably wasn't a high priority in the schools.) The mother was assigned to translate for a famous American cellist on tour in the Soviet Union; fortunately, some cultural exchanges still survived, despite the icy political relations. The cellist, also a widower, fell in love with his interpreter, married her, and brought her and Elena back to the States. Elena hadn't taken his name, Phil noted, which showed a sort of modesty—she wasn't trying to profit from his renown. Her fellow students would have recognized it right away. Though no doubt the connection helped her get into Music and Art so quickly.

Not that she couldn't have been admitted on merit alone. Back in the Soviet Union she'd been a child prodigy at the piano. Her mother was eager at the chance to leave—who wouldn't want to get out of there? Phil said—and thought her daughter's opportunities would be better in the United States. As the story spread through the school, Elena came to be regarded with awe, which made the others keep their distance. She walked through the halls alone and sometimes could be seen chatting with the teachers, especially with Mr. Shukov, the history teacher, who spoke Russian; they would make extravagant gestures while uttering their harsh, unintelligible phrases. An aura of untouchability was cast onto her, compounded of remoteness and vague resentment, a resentment she had done nothing to earn except own the facts of her life.

Phil and Suzanne were carrying their trays through the cafeteria, looking for a good seat, when he spied Elena alone at a
table for four, eating a bowl of soup and reading, or pretending to read, a battered, hardcover book. They were too far away for Suzanne to see if the book was in English or Russian.

“Let's go sit with her,” Phil said.

“You think so? She looks like she doesn't want to be disturbed.”

“Of course she does. I bet she wishes people would come over and talk to her. She's new. We ought to help her out. Come on.” He led the way, and Suzanne had no choice but to follow.

“Is it okay if we join you?” he asked in his most winning manner, while Suzanne, slightly behind him, smiled tentatively and stole a glance at the book. It was in Russian.

“Yes, please, of course,” Elena said, and put the book away. As she smiled Suzanne noticed that her bottom teeth were crooked. Now that she was here with a rich stepfather, she would surely have them fixed.

After that opening moment they all relaxed. Elena was quite ready to talk, not stuck-up at all, though it was something of a struggle to understand her. Even she herself laughed at the mispronunciations Phil and Suzanne discreetly pointed out. But how she'd improved since she'd first arrived a month ago! They should have heard her then!

And so they became friends. Philip possessed the magic touch: Whoever he befriended was rescued from foundering in the chill waters of anonymity and attained the gilded shores of popularity. As it had happened with Suzanne, so it happened with Elena. The other girls, and, soon after, the boys, clustered around her. They didn't call her aloof anymore; she was simply, well, different. She seemed older, as if she had endured more
of life, or at least more of life that was notable. She was willing to answer their questions about the Soviet Union but didn't play on their sympathies or exploit the exoticism of deprivation. Certainly life there was harder; things taken for granted here were not so easy to come by. But of course they knew all that, didn't they? She smiled as she spoke. Of course they read the papers. The people, however, were not the monsters represented in the Western press.

Her new friends nodded knowingly, but few of them actually did read the papers. They knew about the Cold War, but it had been going on for so long—since before they were born—that it was accepted as an immutable global fact, nothing that touched their lives. Even the Cuban missile crisis of a few years ago had largely evaporated in the mists of adolescence.

They asked her about the famous cellist Paul Manning, now her stepfather, and life in his Park Avenue apartment. He was wonderfully kind, she said, and really not all that rich, at least by American standards. “At home we were required to share our apartment with another family, so this feels like . . .” She searched for a word. “Luxury,” Phil supplied. “Yes, that is right. Luxury.” The other family were boorish people who drank all the time and kept the TV on incessantly and left their dirty dishes in the sink.

Her stepfather was unpretentious and spent most of his time practicing, preparing for concerts. She was happy above all for her mother, who had worked so hard to make ends meet and now could finally rest. There was even a maid who cleaned the apartment, something they'd never dreamed of.

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?”