An Unfinished Score by Elise Blackwell Page B

Adele, saying, as she always says, “She’s a pretty good lip reader if you look her square on.”
    He faces Adele, kneels, kisses her hand, says hello. Adele looks away and then back, uncomfortably pleased by the attention.
    Doug straightens, stands again. “I’m checking out the condition of a stolen violin. Someone came in to have it appraised, and I recognized it from the registry. Told the guy I’d give him two hundred dollars and had him write down his name and address. I figured it would wind up being a donation, or maybe the musician would pay me back, but the guy actually wrote down his real address, and the police found him there.”
    “An idiot?’
    “He bought it online and said he didn’t know it was stolen. The owner plays for the Pittsburgh Symphony. I told her I’d check it out for her.”
    “She leave it in the car?” Suzanne asks.
    “Don’t know, but the guy who stole it had no idea how much it was worth. Banged it around a little and sold it cheap. But I think it’s all right—lucky violin.” Doug taps the instrument, front and back, with a rubber ball held by two stiff wires, a crude tool but his favorite for detecting open seams. “I really don’t get people who steal instruments. It’s not like taking money. It’s like stealing someone’s wife or husband. You just don’t do it. I like women—you know me—but when I hear the words I’m married or my husband , then it’s all off the table.” He looks up to wink. “Lucky for you.”
    “I guess some people are just wired differently.” Suzanne watches his work, feels Adele’s thin arm twine into hers. “Something for your biographical theories.”
    Across two years, Doug has expounded and refined a theory that all music is autobiographical, even for performers and certainly for composers. “As autobiographical as memoir,” he says, “though much harder to tease out.” Once he showed Suzanne a sketch of his ideas about the relationship among a composer’s life, basic temperament, historical period, and influences. He’d been trying to refine his thoughts into a formula, accounting for the fact that some life events are more overpowering than others, that some musical periods particularly reward conformity, that certain personality traits are most likely to influence a composer’s music. “Can you be a brilliant composer and an asshole?” he asked her once, and was surprised by the speed of her “Of course.”
    Occasionally Suzanne tests Doug, playing a piece he’s unlikely to know and asking him to tell her about its composer. He’s accurate in broad strokes. It’s not hard to tell if a composer is generally intelligent or a musical savant, cool or expressive, happy or sad. It’s the fortune-teller’s art, and Suzanne’s never been tricked by a good palm reader. But lately Doug has been peculiarly right, spooking Suzanne like the time a state-fair psychic told her that her mother was dead and her father was a conspiracy theorist.
    Suzanne and Adele watch as Doug rehairs Petra’s bow and then Suzanne’s. “They don’t kill the horses to get their tails,” Suzanne says as Adele fingers the two black tails hanging among the many white ones—a stable with no bodies—explaining the difference in sound between black and white, answering that yes, everyone in the quartet uses white hair, but a lot of bassists use black for a rougher sound.
    “I say it every time, but this is a beautiful bow.”
    Suzanne nods, slowly. “I’m very lucky with bow and viola.”
    “Almost as good as being lucky in love. Which would you trade if you had to, Ben or the Klimke?”
    A few years ago, Suzanne would have said Ben to make the quick joke, but now she thinks of the other choice, her stomach a heavy ball. She’ll never know whether she would have left Ben for Alex. She went back and forth so many times, and now she’ll never know what she would have done had she been forced to decide. What she says is about her viola: “I