as painted by Ingres, but few hear his music. Yet in his day he was considered by Beethoven to be one of the immortals. He was admired by musicians for his technique and was financially successful during a time when the Parisian scene was all about money.
Cherubini. A way for the quartet to think about Anthony, who plays his violin with a rare and sturdy clarity and is capable of originality of interpretation—particularly of Debussy—that baffles those who know him away from his instrument. His tastes, when he steps away from questions of money, when he considers the Princeton quartet’s critical as well as monetary success, are fine if a bit cold. His choices for the quartet have been mostly wise, including bringing in Andres Flanders to perform Bocherinni’s fifth guitar quintet as part of last year’s February program. He’s also made a name as a reviewer, his exertions toward fairness giving decency to his fastidious judgments. Ben should hate him, yet does not, which Suzanne supposes suggests something good about them both. And because Anthony functions by reason and not by feeling, he is easy enough to work with. He holds no grudges. Suzanne arrives on time, works hard, and knows what to expect.
Too often, though, Anthony stays near safe musical shores. The quartet plays Beethoven and Bach, of course, and sometimes Brahms or Ravel. Never Janáček and never the Shostakovich string music that Suzanne loves. Anthony is cautious about including contemporary composers, keeping them occasional and unassailable. All too often the quartet’s programs include some piece of pretty-headed, many-noted brunch music by Haydn or Telemann—music written at the behest of someone who could pay for it. Suzanne fears that one day the quartet will wind up playing “Happy Birthday” for some snarling old woman or unctuous child before she realizes what is happening in time to stop it.
“At least you play for a living,” Ben said when Suzanne complained about a Vivaldi quartet, a piece of music she knew Ben despised. So many times at Curtis she had heard him say, “Vivaldi is the enemy of music’s future—and its past.”
Alex always called Vivaldi supermarket cake frosting—pretty if you don’t know better, unpalatable if you’ve eaten freshly whipped cream on real pastry. Like Suzanne, he loved Fauré, that undervalued treasure, the musician’s composer. Though they broke on new music, she and Alex shared some peculiarities of taste, including an adoration of Janáček, his seemingly reckless juxtapositions, his refusal to comfort with transitions of either melody or silence, his controlled anger, his generosity, his respectful demands on the musicians who would play him, their finger pads be damned. And they shared an unlikely soft spot for Schubert, poor drowned boy who should have been stronger but whose music is so bright it sparkles. Suzanne understands that weakness is a fact of her art but knows it is not true that Schubert and the great composers wrote out of their insanity and indulgence. They wrote around it, despite it, as best as they could in the midst of it.
Today the quartet works on a piece surprising from Anthony: Bartók’s sonorous but disturbing final quartet, written while the composer was changing publishers after refusing to answer a Nazi-authored questionnaire about his race. He was contemplating the larger decision of changing countries, though he would wait to move until the death of his mother, whom he supported. No doubt Anthony—who might well have filled out that paperwork to protect his position—chose the Bartók as a show-off piece. He hopes they will impress the audience with their glissandos, with the ponticello and con legno bowings, with the acrobatic stoppings and the notorious Bartók pizzicato. They will play the piece first, to a still fresh audience, or perhaps sandwich it between intermission and some problem-free piece that will let the people leave happy.
They repeat brief and long segments, hammer a few measures at a time, begin anew. They finish with a full run-through, playing through their small errors of timing as though they have to, as though they are on stage. This reminds Suzanne of the funniest thing Rachmaninoff ever said. Playing with the famous composer in music’s most famous venue, violinist Fritz Kreisler lost his place and whispered, “Do you know where we are?” Rachmaninoff, the story goes, didn’t wait a beat before saying, at a volume audible to several rows of the audience, “Carnegie Hall.”
The quartet works hard today, but the music’s difficulty brings pleasure and absorbs the hours, even for Suzanne. Like most musicians, they turn into children when they play pizzicato. Daniel grins, bobs his head, exaggerates the movements of his hands and the tapping of his big foot. Just as Suzanne realizes she, too, is smiling, the piece is over and she returns to herself. Grief floods her, her smile now just a strange shape on her face.
The grief is for Alex, mostly, but it bleeds into the sadness she feels every time music is made and then gone—something real and loud in the air that disappears from all but memory. Sometimes Suzanne strains to imagine the music still living, playing on in some version of reality not organized by time, all its notes together like colors in black paint or white light. It might be a place, she thinks now, in which you can love two people without diminishing either.
As they pack their instruments, Petra’s whisper is a hiss: “Coffee.”
“Don’t you have to pick up Adele?” Suzanne says, folding a flannel swathe around the viola’s neck, careful with eye contact.
“You know the schedule. We have over an hour.”
They agree to walk the short diagonal to the edge of campus and then the half block to the coffeehouse on Witherspoon, which they both like even though the coffee is as thick as syrup. Daniel lingers, watching them leave, but they do not invite him to join them. Though the breeze is cool, under it sits a hot day—the summer to come—and Suzanne’s back feels slick by the time they climb the three stone steps into the shop.
Exiting as they enter is her friend Elizabeth. “It’s a small world,” she says, making an easy pun of the coffeehouse’s name.
She embraces Suzanne, pressing her into the large breasts that can only be called a bosom. Elizabeth’s maternal exuberance is how they met, at the public library, where Elizabeth spotted her as new in town and invited her to the first of many potlucks, warmly adopting her and Ben into Princeton community life despite their oddities, despite Ben’s cool reserve, despite their lack of children.
“I haven’t seen you in too long, Suzanne. Call me,” she says, certainly knowing as well as Suzanne does that she’ll have to make the call, understanding that Suzanne usually accepts but rarely initiates social interaction.
Petra and Suzanne take their coffee to a back table. The hour is odd, so they have a bit more privacy than is usual in their small town. Still, the place is noisy with coffee grinder, espresso machine, multiple conversations, someone humming, street sounds.
“Why the hell are you wearing black and not looking anyone in the eye? And your playing …” Petra trails off.
“Something wrong with my playing?” The viscous coffee tightens Suzanne’s hungover stomach as she sips through its heat.
Petra shakes her head. “You played beautiful but different.”
Suzanne shrugs, tells her that she isn’t sleeping well. “Besides, you know, Bartók.”
“You love late Bartók. You lobbied for that piece.”
“It’s the same as Prokofiev. I love it, but it puts me on edge.”
“That doesn’t explain the black clothes. Or you. You were very weird at dinner last night. You are weird today.” Petra’s accent thickens as she speaks, and then her words halt.
Suzanne watches the young men and women behind the counter steaming drinks and manipulating tongs to select pastries for the people in line. She scans the tables of professors—dressed as awfully in Princeton, land of the knee-socked laureate, as in any town—and the klatches of students and friends and mothers. She feels her cell phone buzz in her pocket, extracts it, and reads the caller’s number. The Chicago area code flips her stomach again. Chicago has always meant Alex, but it is not Alex’s number and the caller does not leave a message. Her throat constricts, and it feels like minutes before she can speak again.
When she does, her voice is half of itself. “Don’t you sometimes miss the anonymity of living in a