Two-Part Inventions (18 page)

“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.

 

S
UZANNE 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.