Free An Unfinished Score by Elise Blackwell

seemed removed. He walked a little farther from her than usual, sometimes even pulling ahead a step or two, leaving her to feel as though she were trailing him. As though she wanted him more than he wanted her. Finally, on a park bench where they stopped to watch a pair of inept wind-surfers in the bay, she said, “I can get disapproval at home. I can’t stand yours. I don’t want to watch every word that leaves my mouth. I don’t want to worry all the time that I’ll say the wrong thing.”
    “I know.” He patted her knee but rose to walk more, again outpacing her just enough that she felt as though she were following.
    Though his direction seemed aimless, she soon realized he had a destination in mind: a cab stand. He directed their cab to a small record store in Hyde Park. The clerk there knew him, chatting him up about rare recordings, mentioning a German import, a new recording of Grieg lyric pieces played on Grieg’s piano.
    Alex walked to a back corner, knowing the location of the music he sought. He paid while she poked around the store, checking to see if the Princeton Quartet CD was there, risking the disappointment that it would not be and finding herself cheered that it was.
    She forgot, at times, that some of her dreams had come wildly true.
    Outside Alex handed her the small bag that held his purchase, and she extracted a disc of Piotr Anderszewski playing the Bach partitas.
    “Remember?” Alex asked.
    “Of course I do. He played Chopin and Sibelius before intermission.”
    Alex stood looking at her, shifting his weight between his feet perceptibly. This was something she had never seen in him before—the impression that he was uncomfortable in his own body.
    “I’m a bastard. You know that.” He shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, moving that small amount closer. He raised his hands to cup her cheeks and grinned suddenly. “I don’t care for Berio, but I actually like baseball.”
    She nodded. “So let’s go back to the hotel and watch the end of the game.”
    He put an arm around her. “Somehow I don’t think we’ll ever have so much time together that we’ll spend even a minute watching a television. Maybe if we live together for twenty years we’ll feel like going to a game. Hell, maybe we’ll even go to a movie.”
    The shower beats warm water down on her. She tilts her head sideways to let a stream trickle into one ear and then the other. She doesn’t remember if her team won that day in Chicago, and she doesn’t care if they win today. Alex was right, even in his annoyed posturing. She has no need of false news when the real news has ruined her life.
    But then she smiles, just a little at the corners of her mouth. She’d been right about the quotation about music’s healing quality, right that Alex would never say something like that. He’d been hard to get to know, but she had done it. He had loved her, and let her inside his mind.

Six
Weeks of torn sleep follow the trip into New York. Suzanne’s nights shred like newspaper. In the middle of the night she bolts awake from dreams of her cell phone vibrating with Chicago’s area code.
    Her morning dreams, though, are mostly pleasant, and at dawn when she is half asleep she sees them rippling over the real bedroom like layers of mist. Alex’s whispers slip between Ben’s deep breaths, curling like vapor. She tries to roll herself back into the sweet fog, but always it dissipates quickly, abandoning her awake, too early, in a warm room, again facing a day that will feel too long.
    One week bleeds into the next while another seems to flow backward, but each day’s time is slow, its demarcations concrete. Minute by minute, left foot, then right . Seconds click by in painful increments, a metronome set on largo. Breathe , she reminds herself, coaxing her lungs to expand and then empty.
    She does the things that have to be done. She attends rehearsals. She practices. She brings food home from the grocery store, helps