Two-Part Inventions

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  Suddenly Elena was beside her, draped in a flowing coral dress that hung low on her hips. She gave Philip a perfunctory greeting, a hug so light it barely merited the name. “Sweetheart,” she said to Suzanne, “you’re the belle of the ball. You’re not only talented, but you look fantastic and you’ve got all the best men.” Before Suzanne could speak, she turned to Richard. “You must be Richard Penzer. I know you’re an old friend of Suzanne’s. She’s spoken so much about you. In fact, she’s made you sound superhuman.”

  “Richard,” Suzanne interrupted, “this is Elena Semonyova, my friend from Juilliard. A wonderful pianist, as I’ve told you before.”

  They shook hands. Suzanne’s heart filled with an unaccustomed gladness. She was surrounded by her three closest friends—why not count Philip, in the spirit of generosity, of deference to the past? Well, at least the people who had most believed in her and encouraged her. Who knew her. She was lucky indeed. Looking at them, one by one, as they carried on the ordinary party chatter, she felt blessed, wrapped in warmth that would carry her into the future.

  She forced herself to stop daydreaming and pay attention. Richard and Elena were engaged in lively banter, dropping the names of composers and performers she hadn’t heard of, and now Philip was speaking to a beautiful older woman in red who’d just appeared and embraced him. For a moment she felt left out. But she brushed that feeling aside: It was the foolishness of the old, childish Suzanne. Philip no longer mattered, and it was wonderful seeing Richard and Elena together, all because of her.

  Then abruptly the perfect little grouping was over. Someone sidled up to talk to Richard, who gave her a quick kiss good-bye and moved off; he’d call during the week to make a date. Elena drifted in his direction. Cynthia brought two more guests to meet her, a flute player from the Metropolitan Opera orchestra and an administrator of a downtown performance space, and Suzanne kept up her enthusiasm as best she could. She knew Philip must be nearby, watching, waiting for his opportunity.

  When the party thinned out and she’d thanked Cynthia, it seemed natural that they should leave together. Philip was hungry and suggested a pizza. She agreed that though the alcohol had been plentiful, the food had been rather scanty. Just the opposite of the way it had been when they were growing up.

  And so it began again. Only this time it didn’t start with tentative fumblings in the back of movie theaters. After the pizza she went with him to his apartment in the Village, to his bed, which would eventually become her apartment and her bed. Even as a boy he had had an instinct for making love, and as a man he was even better, the kind of good lover who seemed almost trained for the role, or perhaps just very experienced: slow and attentive, lavish with words as well as gestures, and despite the touch of deliberation in his moves, he was effective. He was generous by nature. Suzanne didn’t tell him that none of the few men she’d known before him had made her feel as glorious as he did. She held something back. Perhaps the small residue of bile had not dissipated entirely.

  It became an affair. Affairs had not yet been replaced by the more antiseptic “relationships,” and she liked whispering the word to herself, breathy with sophistication. A good affair. Good times, good sex, good feelings. Her first really serious one, after several that had sputtered out for lack of oxygen. Plenty to talk about. With Philip you never lacked for conversation. The slight leftover resentment, aged like a Chinese egg, only added spice and vinegar to their lovemaking: Suzanne played a game of resisting, and Philip liked using his powers of persuasion, even if it was only pretending.

  There were moments, later on, when she believed it should have remained an affair, should have run its course like the rest. Serve as experience. There might have been more like it, who knew for how long, until she subsided into marriage. Or not.

  In the midst of the good affair, Suzanne’s father suffered a fatal collapse, briefcase in hand, while walking from his car to the furniture store, right in front of the newsstand where he bought his daily New York Times. Uncannily, this manner of death was what Gerda had warned Joseph of so often and so emphatically that the children, when they were young, used to snicker at her words. “If you keep driving yourself that way, you’ll drop dead of a heart attack,” she’d say when he went to the store on weekends to check on the employees, or sat up late at the dining-room table, poring over orders and receipts and catalogs.

  “You want this house, don’t you?” he’d answer. “You want Suzanne to be able to study. That won’t happen by itself.” The boys’ expenses were not taxing; they had gone to Brooklyn College under protest and gotten through with minimum effort. Neither one had wanted to join him in the business. Fred took a low-level job in an insurance company and Gary worked in a stationery business, neither of which position could give their father much gratification.

  Now Gerda’s predictions were confirmed. Suzanne had always imagined that at his death, which she’d seen as far off, she would feel relief: The burden of continuing to prove herself “special” and bring glory to the family would drop away. She would never stop craving success, but maybe the density of the craving—her own now, not his—would weigh less heavily on her. She could live the way others lived. She didn’t really know how others lived, what they felt inside, but envisioned it as a kind of serene drifting through the days, something she had never known. Whatever her life would feel like, it would be minus her father’s urgings, forever at her back like a gust of wind even though she no longer lived at home or saw him often. He was there behind her, stalking.

  At the funeral she was too preoccupied with trying to comfort her mother to feel her own grief. Philip was there, of course, being unobtrusively helpful, being kind to Gerda, who was even fonder of him now than she had been long ago. After all, now he was a grown man with a growing business. He remained at the house throughout the day, helping them receive visitors, making coffee and conversation, joining forces with Suzanne’s brothers to fetch chairs and carry platters of food the neighbors had brought. As if he were part of the family, Suzanne thought, and she both appreciated this and resented it. He was digging in too deep, establishing himself as a fixture in her life. Sex and good times and friendship were one thing, but this—her family, the Brooklyn house, her complex feelings about her father—came from another part of her life she didn’t want invaded. In fact, she preferred to shut it up behind closed doors.

  Afterward, her grief at Joseph’s death was overshadowed by simmering anger. For all the pride her father took in her, he hadn’t really known her. Her talent had stood between them like a screen. Maybe they wouldn’t have known each other in any event; he wasn’t a man given to intimacy. He was all bluster, all display; whatever was inside remained heavily veiled.

  Joseph had chosen to be cremated, and Gerda hated the idea. Not only did it seem alien—no one she knew had ever been cremated; it seemed to her a primitive and disreputable rite. Moreover, she told Suzanne, she had read in the paper just a few months ago about a crematorium somewhere in Pennsylvania that was discovered to have sold bodies to some weird illegal operation, a cult, she couldn’t remember what, and given the bereaved families the ashes of animals instead. Or maybe only a small part of the ashes they were entitled to.

  “Come on, Mom, that sounds too crazy to be true,” Suzanne said. The three of them, she, Gerda, and Phil, were sitting around the kitchen table, drinking coffee late at night after all the visitors and Suzanne’s brothers and their wives had left. It seemed accepted, tacitly, that Phil would spend the night. She certainly wouldn’t make any pretext of having him sleep in her brothers’ old room.

  “But I read about it in the New York Times.”

  “Remember what Dad used to say? Don’t believe everything you read in the papers? Anyhow, that was in Pennsylvania, and the place we’re using is in New York.”

  “Maybe they all do that. How do you know?”

  “I don’t think you need to worry about that, Gerda,” Philip said.

  Suzanne shrugged. “D
oes it really make any difference?”

  “What do you mean?” Gerda retorted. “Whether we get his ashes or some stray dog’s? You don’t think it makes any difference?”

  “Ashes are ashes, Mom. It’s not the real person. It’s just symbolic. And if you never know what you’ve got on the shelf . . .”

  “You’re just saying that to upset me. Phil,” Gerda appealed to him, “don’t you think it matters? Whether I have the real ashes or not? Tell me—you’ve known loss. Wouldn’t it matter to you?”

  “My parents and brother were buried, so I don’t know how I’d feel about ashes,” he said. “But I can see your point. On the other hand, they are mostly symbolic, as Suzanne says.... It’s what you feel in your heart that matters. But anyway, I doubt you’re in any danger. Since that article appeared—I saw it, by the way, really shocking—all the places are going to be very scrupulous for the next few months.”

  Gerda listened carefully but still looked doubtful.

  “Look, we have to follow his instructions,” said Suzanne, getting up to load the dishwasher. “I’ll take care of the whole thing tomorrow and you won’t have to think about it. Meanwhile, I could use some sleep.”

  “You’ll have to keep them then, the remains, I mean. I’m not keeping anything on a shelf that isn’t authentically him.” Gerda started toward the stairs.

  “Not remains. Cremains, they’re called,” Suzanne corrected.

  “Don’t get funny with me now,” and her mother turned and shook her head as if to throw off a buzzing hornet.

  She didn’t feel the expected relief after his death. If anything, the “drive” her father had spoken of so vehemently was even stronger, as if with him so vastly unreachable, she had to go to even greater lengths to prove herself, like shouting to someone way out of range. His ambitions had lodged in her, wormed their way in like a parasite, a toxic substance; they were his immortality, which she carried within her. He had bequeathed it to her.

  She handled the arrangements and became the possessor of a cardboard box holding a plastic bag of ashes—sifted, as the crematorium advised; that way there would be no large chunks of bone. The contents of the bag that arrived in the mail were surprising in their whiteness and fineness; they resembled the small mounds of plaster the workmen had left each day when their house was painted, just before she moved to Mrs. Campbell’s apartment. Despite her mother’s doubts, she trusted that the ashes were her father’s, and she didn’t know what to do with them. Joseph had never specified. “Burn me up!” was all he’d ever said on the subject. So she stashed the box in a corner of the closet, behind her shoes. Of course, she would never tell Mrs. Campbell what was back there, and felt faintly guilty about harboring the box. One of these days she’d think of a good place to scatter the ashes. Maybe on a beach out in Brooklyn where they’d mingle with the sand. Or she could go down to the Hudson River during one of her afternoon walks and dump them in. On weekends she took long walks through Riverside Park, staring out at the river and the ships. It was hard to get right down to the river without crossing the highway. Meanwhile, the ashes remained in the closet, and when she finally agreed to move into Philip’s apartment in Greenwich Village, she took them with her.

  And soon after that it was more than an affair. Indeed, the opposite of an affair. He asked, he implored; he said it had been fated since high school; he gave his best performances and she couldn’t find the will to resist. She was agreeable, as Richard had told her long ago; she went along. She married him. There were no good reasons to resist, and he had been so kind all through this stressful time. She wasn’t sure she was in love; the only time she had been in love was with Richard, and even about that she had her doubts. But there was no one she liked better. Philip was so familiar that there could not be the succulent delight of discovery. She did love sleeping with him, though, loved it more than she had expected or known was possible. She gasped with pleasure, she moaned, she felt what women were supposed to feel, didn’t she?

  Only sometimes when they made love she had a sense that something was wrong. She couldn’t say quite what, but it expressed itself as a petulant voice in her head that contradicted her words and acts. Like the voice when she was a young child, insinuating that maybe she wasn’t quite real. That old voice had quieted, but this one seemed a more mature version of it, a menacing voice that wanted to undercut her pleasures. She believed the words she murmured to him, the words that said she was happy, that said what she liked or what she wanted. But the voice inside whispered, Are you really happy? Is this really it? And on the sheets her restless hands would be playing phrases from Schubert or Liszt, difficult phrases.

  Philip did everything to please her. (And why wouldn’t he? the voice whispered. He wants you.) There would be ease in a life with him, emotional ease, an ease that would leave her free to face the difficulties of work. He knew her, that was the main thing, and what she craved was to be known, in every sense. He knew her talents and he knew her ambitions; now he knew her body. He liked to look at every part—there was no hiding anything from him. While he looked, he spun elaborate fantasies of how he would help her move ahead, but to him they weren’t fantasies. She tried not to let herself be influenced by these, but they worked on her cravings like fairy tales on susceptible children. What more did she want? She wanted the doubting voice to cease. She married him despite the voice, and she trained her ears to shut it out.

  AS BOTH PHILIP and Mme. Kabalevsky had predicted, a number of small gigs resulted from the contest Suzanne won. A few came from people she’d met at Cynthia’s party, and others were arranged by Philip, who had become, tacitly, her manager, even before they decided to marry. She had never sought a manager, didn’t need one yet, she thought, despite Elena’s urgings. Elena, who had been taken on by her stepfather’s manager, was busy touring in the Midwest, but she prodded Suzanne regularly by phone.

  The gigs were in local halls in Westchester and Rockland Counties or Long Island, small towns in Connecticut and Rhode Island. Never mind small, it was a start, Phil said. It got her name around. Richard agreed: Play wherever they’re willing to have you. That’s what a professional does. It would be good for her, Richard said, to get used to the traveling, the unfamiliar instruments and settings, to learn all she could. Suzanne played better in these places than she expected, or rather, her nagging stage fright was more manageable. Along with her talent, she had a streak of condescension born less of snobbery than of naiveté. Such places were too reminiscent of her own origins to be more than mildly threatening. They were not the kinds of places that figured in her dreams; still, out of pride, she always tried to give her best.

  She got excellent reviews in local papers, her name got around, and after a few months, through his growing connections, Philip arranged a recital at a good hall downtown, part of New York University, where he had friends in the music department. With that one “under her belt,” as he put it, there would be many more, he assured her.

  On Philip’s advice, she rehearsed in the hall twice, so that the place would feel familiar. It was larger than most of the others she’d played in. By the time the Thursday evening arrived, she knew its high ceilings, the severe cream-colored walls with Doric columns in low relief, the rows of maroon plush seats, slightly canted, the balcony. She arrived early and sat in a small dressing room with Philip, suffering the agonies of anticipation. So it was a relief at last to be called by the stage manager.

  Despite her visits, she’d never seen the hall lit for a performance. As she entered from the wings, the lights assaulting her eyes were so bright that for an instant she saw nothing but bursts of color like fireworks, low to the ground. She paused, blinked, then moved toward the large dark object in the center of the flaring colors: the piano. The floorboards beneath her feet, waxed to a high sheen, shimmered faintly as if in a mirage, their parallel lines appearing to bend. Lining the rim of the stage were more balloons of color; it took her an instant to grasp that they were flowers in la
rge pots. Hydrangeas, like the ones leading up to the row houses on her childhood block.

  Her instinct was to turn and run, but she did what she knew she must—this was what she had worked for all these years. At center stage, slightly in front of the piano, she bowed. Philip and Cynthia had told her she must also smile, but she couldn’t force it. How could you smile out into darkness, at people you couldn’t even see? The only way she knew they were there was the clatter of applause. As her eyes adjusted to the light, blobs of heads appeared, patches of bright clothing here and there, but no clear faces.

  She couldn’t see them, but they were all watching her. Why couldn’t she be happily in the audience, too, looking forward to someone’s playing music? Why must she be the chosen one, the sacrifice? As they watched her, her dress, a long navy blue evening sheath, simple, sleeveless, with a V-neck, suddenly seemed all wrong, both too fancy and too austere. Her shoes, high heels with a T-strap, were wrong, too. She might trip and fall. But what nonsense was she thinking? Surely Rudolf Serkin didn’t think about the fit of his suit or the color of his tie when he went onstage. Or, who knows, maybe he did. Never mind. She must focus on the music. You must know the music so well, Mme. Kabalevsky said, that you don’t need to think about it. And yet you must think of nothing else. But those pieces of advice were contradictory, weren’t they?

  As the coughing and fussing of the audience ceased and Suzanne turned to sit down, she was startled by footsteps behind her. It was the page-turner, a student dressed in black, modest and unobtrusive. The girl glided to her seat to the left of the piano bench. Suzanne had met her before, had seen her backstage a moment ago, and yet her presence onstage felt like a burden. As a student, she herself had been a page-turner on occasion: She remembered well the pleasure of sitting onstage, so close to the music, but knowing the audience was not thinking of her, barely noticed her. Had her presence disturbed the pianists? That had never occurred to her. It had been a combination of full exposure and extreme solitude, hiding in plain sight, which suited her. Perhaps she should have remained a page-turner.