Two-Part Inventions (3 page)

“Still, wouldn't you say there was some sense of competition
between you and Suzanne Stellman? After all, you'd studied at professional school together, one might say you were neck and neck in a very competitive world, you'd been involved with the same men, at least according to gossip, and it might be said that you attained the career she wanted.”

“No, I wouldn't say that at all. We weren't competitive in the least. We were good friends, even after that gap. She always let me know she was pleased at my successes, and I did the same with her. I can speak for myself and, I think, for Suzanne, too, when I say that the main thing on our minds was always the music, not any kind of competition. It's not like the Olympics, you know. Getting the music right was what we cared about most.”

She was obviously taking the high road, Phil thought, as he finished what was left of his drink. Well, good for her. She did always have dignity, he had to grant her that. And so far the interview hadn't been too bad. It could have been worse.

“Now, I'd like to ask, what was your reaction to the recent article in the
New York Times
regarding certain sections of Ms. Stellman's CDs?”

“Well, I was surprised, naturally.”

No, you weren't, Philip thought. She'd fail a lie-detector test on this one. Now was where the interview would get sticky. He was at the bottom of the screen, his finger on the down arrow. He got up and went back to the kitchen. He needed some more bourbon before he scrolled down to see what she would do next.

The interview made him remember the day the idea had come to him, more than ten years ago. He was working in the studio he rented in the city, frustrated with the performance
of a Polish pianist, Kosinski, who was in the United States on his first tour—no concerts in New York, but in several smaller cities. It hadn't been difficult for Philip to persuade him to do a recording for Tempo. Kosinski was barely known, and though he was promising, the bigger record companies were hesitant: They'd rather sign an artist after a public success than before. But Philip, although no longer a beginner—he had a solid reputation by then—was ever eager for business and was a good persuader. A good businessman, too, as he'd known he would be. All those hours spent listening to Uncle Mel hadn't been in vain, as well as the patient years learning the ropes and technology at RCA. When he first went out on his own—a phone and a bridge table in the bedroom of their Greenwich Village apartment—he rented studio space by the hour. In time he had no trouble affording his own place. Besides the recording work, the independent classical label he'd begun years ago was picking up. He never doubted that he could make a go of that; everyone he dealt with was impressed by his enthusiasm and competence. And no wonder. Besides doing an excellent job technically, he was never late, never impatient, and always returned calls. He knew exactly how to handle everyone, including himself.

He'd spent the previous two days with Kosinski, recording a selection of Chopin nocturnes, over and over. Though Philip kept his cool, the Pole grew more anxious by the minute, pausing to smoke French cigarettes whose bitter smell hung in the air, and drinking endless cups of coffee Philip brewed in the next room. Kosinski badly needed a shave, and by the second day his collar was curling at the tips. He had an irritating habit of tugging his ear before beginning each new take, as if he
could correct his fumblings by clearing his ear. Philip had to use all his charm to keep him at it until they had a usable take. Like so many musicians, Kosinski didn't like to begin in the middle of a piece to repeat a few measures; he wanted to go back to the beginning each time, like a child who can't recite a memorized poem starting anywhere but the first line.

Philip recorded hours of repetitions. Sitting at the console with the score open before him after Kosinski left, his equipment lit up, he was attempting to piece together the best takes, adjusting the volume here and there. After several hours, he was nearly done, except for a few bars in the Nocturne in C Sharp Minor that were still not quite right on any of the takes. The dynamics were slightly off, the forte and fortissimo not clearly enough distinguished, though he might be able to fix that.

It was a warm late-October afternoon. Through his open windows wafted the delectable leafy aroma of autumn, but not yet its chill. The studio was in a brownstone on a narrow, tree-lined street in Chelsea. The leaves outside his third-floor window were just starting to turn, had reached a dun nameless color between green and gold. Tomorrow, if there was no rain or wind, the gold would emerge and dominate. It would be like gazing into a sun at eye level, just outside the window.

He was eager to get home to Suzanne, who hadn't been feeling well when he left in the morning. She lay in bed staring at the ceiling, pale, her dark hair stark against the white pillow.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Can I get you anything before I go?”

“No, I'm fine. I'll be getting up in a minute. Go on.” But five minutes later when he came to kiss her good-bye she hadn't
stirred. He'd tried calling in the afternoon, but she hadn't picked up, was probably with a student—that was the most optimistic explanation. He hoped it wasn't one of those days when she barely dragged herself from bed; on those days, when he got home, he could tell by her slowness and vagueness that she'd just gotten up, for his sake. It had been going on like this for a long time now, the weeks drifting into months and then years, all of them the same. He didn't know how to break the pattern. Suzanne didn't even seem unhappy anymore about her dashed hopes, and that bothered him even more than the intermittent spells of apathy and weakness. She was agreeable and compliant, always interested in knowing how his business was doing, but the pianist part of herself, at least the ambitious part, seemed to have been stowed away in some attic of the soul.

The damn Pole was giving him grief. It looked like he'd have to return, and of course he, Phil, would be blamed. Unless there was some other way—shit, it would be so easy to drop in those few troublesome bars.... No one would ever know. He rummaged around the shelves and found an older recording of the nocturnes—another pianist, but luckily done here in the same studio, same room sound. He listened: It was a flawless performance. Tempting, and so easy, but no, he didn't dare. Things were going too well. His CDs were getting excellent reviews; there was no need to take such chances. He'd keep trying. Another half hour . . .

He played around with Kosinski's takes for ten more minutes, adjusting the volume and the reverb, and then he couldn't resist. Just on a whim, just to see how it sounded, with a cavalier flourish he got out the other Chopin CD, a Korean pianist,
very fine but not very well-known, and plugged in the measures to cover Kosinski's awkward bit. It took almost no time. Amazing! A seamless job, and the touch was so similar that no one could ever detect the substitution. He wouldn't detect it himself if he hadn't done it. It was like a game, and he was master of it, a backstage wizard.

But enough of this wasting time. He wanted to get home. Just an experiment, he told himself as he shut down the equipment and got his jacket. Just fooling around, to test his skill. It was astounding what could be done nowadays. Same as with photography. Before the Berlin wall came down a year ago, he'd heard that in the former communist countries, in Kosinski's very own Poland, it was possible to lop off the image of a functionary who'd gone out of favor. Press a few buttons and the fellow was eliminated from memory as he'd probably been eliminated from life. Phil had seen the same kinds of wonders—though not of such grave import—in a photo shop on Madison Avenue where customers could play around with snapshots they brought in, killing off pesky relatives or wiping out their exes from the honeymoon. Sure, that sense of power was thrilling, but it was dangerous, too.

He left everything as it was—the Korean's CD out on the desk—so he'd remember to fix it in the morning. He'd have fresh energy for Kosinski; he'd get back to his editing and do the best he could.

Outside, on the way to his car, he felt again the warm, benign glory of the waning day. When he got home he'd take Suzanne out to dinner, maybe first a walk in the park near their house to look at the leaves. It was a number of years now since they'd moved from the Village apartment to the house in Nyack.
They'd stripped wallpaper and stained floors and gone around to garage sales, shopping malls, thrift shops, a few avid months of devotion to the house that brought them closer together again. It wasn't the kind of house he'd envisioned for so long—something like the house in Great Neck where he grew up—but Suzanne wouldn't want a house like that; in fact she probably would have preferred to stay in the city, though she didn't say so. This house was more distinctive than the one he grew up in, but he couldn't picture his parents and his brother, Billy, in it, as he might have done with a more ordinary house. But it did have grass around it, and Suzanne had taken to growing flowers on the front lawn and in the backyard.

But lately she looked pale and weary. She needed to get out, get fresh air, the world, people, activity. If she was reluctant, as she so often was during these bad spells—they lasted days, sometimes weeks—he'd think up something to be celebrated. He could tell her he'd gotten the contract to record the Atlantis String Quartet—that would do it. The deal was virtually settled; they only needed to iron out the final details. She took such pleasure in his successes. And why not, he thought with a tinge of satisfaction as he approached his car. It helped give her the time to practice, though he didn't really know how much time she spent practicing while he was gone all day. Or whether she even wanted to anymore.

She couldn't refuse a festive dinner, even if she didn't feel altogether well. Her illness—what they had gradually and tacitly agreed to call her illness—was mysterious, a combination of physical and mental symptoms, weariness, listlessness, weakness, pains that migrated from one part of her body to another, thankfully never to her forearms and hands. They'd been to
several doctors but never gotten a precise diagnosis. The doctors, not surprisingly, still called it depression and she dutifully took the pills, but they didn't seem to alleviate her pains or weakness, just made her feel swaddled in gauze, she reported. Philip tried to be unfailingly sympathetic. He
was
sympathetic. Over the years his love for her, at first a mixture of passion, the desire to possess, and admiration for her gift, had become layered over with a protective sympathy, the kind of sympathy one feels for a child, unjustly handicapped, wistful, unable to run around with the others.

He had to park on the street because there was an unfamiliar car, a black Toyota station wagon, in the driveway. Most likely one of her students, though he'd never seen the car before. He heard the piano as he went up the front steps. In the foyer, pausing to hang his jacket on the rack, he knew at once it couldn't be Suzanne playing. The sound was without luster; it was the second movement of Beethoven's
Waldstein
Sonata—he remembered that had been on the program the day they first met, as teenagers at a Serkin concert. This was a far cry from Rudolf Serkin: The triplets were uneven, too loud and uncontrolled, with pauses and stumbling. Suzanne's students were usually more proficient. She got referrals from Cynthia, her old teacher, and from the faculty at Juilliard, who still remembered her as one of the star students. Great things had been expected of her.

Not wishing to disturb the lesson, Philip tiptoed down the hall and stopped at the archway of the living room, where Suzanne, dressed in snug dark slacks and a gray cashmere sweater he'd bought for her birthday last month, was standing slightly behind and to the left of the woman seated at the piano.
The woman's back was to him. Under her polyester pink shirt she had hefty, fleshy shoulders that sloped heavily into thick arms. Her hair was strawberry blond and curly, floating down to her shoulders. The triplets continued to give her trouble; she paused, her shoulders rising with a deep breath, and began the passage again.

Suzanne must have heard him, or sensed his presence. She turned and gave an abstracted nod and a faint wave of the hand, the long fingers fluttering in greeting. Although her face revealed nothing, he could imagine the frustration she must be feeling. Also the resignation. He raised his eyebrows and made a puzzled face, as if to comment on the woman's playing, but Suzanne simply turned back toward the piano. She stood erect, patient, alert, but that resigned impassive face gave him a twist in his gut.

Outrageous, he thought as he went into the bedroom to change. Criminal, that so gifted a pianist should spend her time on students like this one. There was no possible gratification to be found teaching someone on that level. That woman didn't need Suzanne; anyone would do. His Suzanne was meant for better things.

He went quietly into the kitchen to get a cold beer. Good. No elaborate dinner preparations; the kitchen was tidy, untouched. He stared into the refrigerator, braced by the chill. Then the idea came to him. Followed immediately by the wonder that he hadn't thought of it before. It must have been the Chopin nocturnes that sparked the notion. She could play those nocturnes every bit as well as Kosinski, even now. Better. She was a natural for Chopin—fluid, forceful, complex emotion delivered
with subtlety and rigor. He'd heard her play the ballades and nocturnes dozens of times at home. It was only in front of an audience that she froze.

He had the means to do it. All he needed was her cooperation. Recording in the studio was nothing like playing in public; she knew that, of course, but he would reassure her. No one would be there but him, nothing at all to fear. She'd be at her best. And he'd take care of all the editing. She didn't even need to listen to the finished product if she didn't want to.