Twenty-one

On Sunday Suzanne and Petra help Adele get ready for Ben’s concert. Adele turns from her closet holding a dress in each hand, eyebrows raised. Petra points to the lavender dress, Suzanne to the dark blue one. Adele looks uncertain—a child who likes to please others caught in a bind. With her hands occupied, language is only in her facial expression.

“Actually,” Suzanne signs, “the lavender one is perfect.”

Adele smiles her relief and dresses. She sits on the bed between Suzanne’s knees. Suzanne brushes and gathers her hair, cupping it in her left hand in a loose ponytail as she brushes with her right, releasing the honey smell of baby shampoo. Suzanne is looking not at the silky hair but at the swell of bone behind Adele’s left ear—the place the surgeon will puncture with a loud drill, boring a hole straight through, a procedure during which a small error would be devastating. Suzanne’s stomach retracts to a tight pit. No wonder Petra took so long to decide.

Suzanne tips her head to kiss the precise spot where the drill will enter Adele’s lovely egg-shaped skull. After she secures the ponytail, she spins Adele by the shoulders and signs, “You’ll look absolutely beautiful as soon as you brush your teeth!”

“That’s the part I always forget.” Petra leans into Suzanne and waits until Adele leaves the room to say, “Tell me again that it’s going to be all right.”

“It’s going to be all right,” Suzanne says steadily, though the tight circle of her stomach quivers as it releases with her breath.

“And you’ll be there for Adele no matter what I do.”

“You sound like you have a one-way ticket somewhere.”

Petra looks up, alarmed. “I would never leave her, not that. I don’t ever even think that, not even for a second.”

Suzanne runs her hand down Petra’s hair, a thicker, lighter version of Adele’s, just as silky.

“But I’m not a nice person. I could do something awful that would make you hate me, and that would be terrible for Adele.”

“Petra, you’ve done lots of awful things, and I never hate you.”

Petra’s laugh is a small snort. “True. But promise me you’ll always love Adele.”

“I’ve already promised you that. The promise is still good.”

Once Adele is ready, they walk down Leigh Avenue and turn up Wither-spoon, walking in their dresses in front of Princeton’s most run-down rentals and then the little market. A man standing in the doorway says, “Que bella!” as they walk by, and Suzanne nods at him. Across from the new library, they stop at the bakery for brioche. Petra chooses a chocolate-walnut stick. Adele points to a round brioche with a peach half as its center. Suzanne serves herself a cup of coffee from one of the large thermoses. The sound of the coffee flowing into the cup is reassuring, a reminder that the laws of physics are still in place. She breathes its rich-smelling steam before securing the lid.

Twenty minutes later they enter Richardson Auditorium holding hands, Adele between Suzanne and Petra, and take their seats near the back of the main floor. Suzanne is surprised: more seats are occupied than empty, even in the balcony. Scanning the audience, she recognizes a few of Ben’s associates and some friends from Elizabeth’s parties, Daniel with Linda, Anthony with Jennifer. Mostly, though, the crowd is the anonymous audience a musician desires: people who have come to listen to the music.

A few more arrive. Ben and Kazuo take their center seats. The musicians file onstage—an orchestrated entrance—stand in place, then sit en masse. The lights dim. Hush spreads.

Suzanne watches Adele as the music begins. A deaf child at a concert many adults couldn’t sit through, she looks not bored but rapt. Her chest rises and falls slowly with her deep breathing, and her eyes open fully to take in the darkened scene. Since she was a baby Adele has been a serious watcher of people—so serious that her only lapse in etiquette, seemingly ever, is this tendency to stare.

Suzanne presses her small hand between her own, but she distances herself by closing her eyes and giving herself over to the auditory world that is shut to Adele. Something Alex often said when she called him at an unexpected time and asked if it was okay: I am all ears.

Suzanne listens. She has heard Ben discuss the composition, and she has heard individual lines and pieces, but she has not attended a rehearsal and has never heard the music as a whole. Now its surprising beauty saturates her. There is no experiment for experiment’s sake any longer, no exclusion of the audience, yet Ben and Kazuo have invented something. They have not abandoned history, nor have they simply reclaimed it; they have extended music’s long, fascinating past into the new.

As she listens to the fugue, she remembers what Doug guessed about the composer of the music: emotionally restrained but not without effort. Someone who uses intellect to translate emotion. Fair-minded but stubborn and sometimes blinded by it. A deep point of pain. Someone not unhappy with how his life has turned out, though maybe only because he expected no more.

Maybe, she thinks, but what she mostly hears is the thing she values most in the world: perfect music. She sees colors with her eyes closed, mostly blue and purple but also orange, red, green, white. The music sounds beautiful, looks beautiful, is beautiful. It holds her, and when it comes to its end, she doesn’t understand why she was deaf to it before. All of Ben’s promise and talent are still there. For a moment she understands that it is worth everything to have this music in the world, whether the world wants it or not.

Deaf to. She opens her eyes, kisses Adele’s temple. Adele is smiling and indeed looks to Suzanne as though she, too, is suffused by the music she cannot hear, as though she, too, has rediscovered the meaning of what they do, the reason they live and work and live lives that others think are strange.

Adele wriggles her hand, and Suzanne realizes she has been holding it too tight. She remembers Evelyn Glennie, deaf since the age of twelve, playing percussion barefoot in order to feel the music. And those case studies, those deaf people whose brain waves when listening to music mimic the patterns of the hearing, perhaps because they sense a percentage of the sound through their skin. Adele and Suzanne raise their hands to clap simultaneously. Suzanne leans back to tell Petra, again and this time sure of it, that everything is going to be all right, that Adele has the ability to hear music at least in her mind.

But she halts her voice when she sees Petra staring ahead stone-like, tears jagging her face. She is looking not at Adele but still at the stage, her expression illegible save for the tears, which Suzanne cannot interpret.

The applause in the auditorium is heavy, even ecstatic, but Petra’s hands remain in her lap.

The reception on campus is Kazuo’s doing, but Ben has agreed to go. He seems even to be enjoying the attention, at least a little. He seems lighter, a weight lifted like a stone from atop his head, and his smile comes more readily. From across the room, Suzanne sees him shake hands, nod in response to passing comments, make conversation with Anthony, with Daniel, with people from the music department. He accepts Petra’s quick hug. Suzanne holds her distance, supervising Adele as she scours the refreshments, getting her to eat a sandwich half and some fruit before she raids the selection of petits fours.

“Congratulations,” she says to Daniel and Linda as they approach.

“I know it’s fast,” Linda says, “but we’re in love, and I’m getting too old to wait.”

“You’re not anything old,” Daniel says, putting his arm around Linda’s slim shoulders.

Anthony joins them, saying, “So that was very good, and very well-received.” He’s surveying the room, nodding approval, comforted by success.

Suzanne discovers that she is smiling, perhaps over their shared surprise that the music was obviously appreciated.

It is late in the day when Suzanne finally tells Ben what she thinks. She leaves out the fact that she was surprised, saying, “Don’t be insulted by this because I don’t mean beautiful in any kind of simple or stupid way, but it was absolutely beautiful.”

“Or beautifully absolute?” He is smiling, playing with his words, staring at her breasts as he parts her blouse. “Did you really think I’d be insulted if you called my music beautiful?”

“You never know.”

He grabs her wrist as she reaches for the light switch, tells her he wants to see her standing naked. He strips her and walks around her in a circle before lifting her, completely, and carrying her to the bed. He kisses her mouth, stomach, legs, back, arms. When he pauses, just for a moment, he lingers at her ear and whispers, “It’s beautiful because I composed it for you. I don’t care what those other people think. It’s you I wanted to like it.”

She tries to make her sobbing silent. She does not want him to ask her why she is crying because she could not explain it. Ben kisses the tears on her face, her crying mouth, but he asks nothing, says nothing, and when they are done they fall asleep hard.

It is just dawn when they are awakened by a ringing phone. Suzanne bolts up, thinking, Olivia, grabbing a robe so she can hurry down the hall to answer first. But Petra has already risen to answer it and is calling, “It’s for you, Ben. Some woman.”

Suzanne throws down the robe and puts on jeans and a tee-shirt. She uses the bathroom, brushes her hair and teeth. If this is it, she does not want to be undressed. She feels each step as she walks to the living room, which is suffused in dawn’s pinkish gray light as the streetlight in front of the house clicks itself off. She hears the phone receiver set down in its cradle, the sound of her husband crying.

This is the first time she has heard him cry, ever.

She sits next to him on the sofa, lightly places her hand on the back of his head, trying to fashion words to explain, if indeed it was Olivia who triggered his tears. “Ben,” she whispers.

He turns into her, wetting her shirt with his tears. She waits, stroking and holding his head. “Ben,” she says again with her breath.

“It’s Charlie,” he says when he lifts away from her.

Her loud and involuntary response brings Petra back to the room. “Are you—” she begins, but she backs away when she sees them.