Free An Unfinished Score by Elise Blackwell Page A

with Adele, tidies the house, writes checks to the water company and the phone company, buys stamps. She tries to keep up with her online life, answering emails, accepting Facebook friend requests, hunting for an interesting link to post. Yet she notices things slipping through the cracks in her concentration. She cleans the bathroom but forgets the shower or the mirror. An email from a music blog requesting an annotated list of her five favorite pieces in the viola repertoire goes unanswered; when the reminder comes, a day before the deadline, she types out a paragraph from the top of her head and hits send without proofreading. She fails to answer questions posed directly to her in the Twitter feed. One day she sees an online ad with a woman’s face, the caption reading, “This is what depression looks like.” She recognizes the sad expression from the mirror and remembers what she said to an acquaintance worried about her after her mother died: “Being sad about something sad is not depression. It’s human.” Twice she sits down with the idea of composing, thinking doloroso , but both times her focus is vague and she abandons the effort without really beginning, the second time without playing or writing a single note.
    She knows that it is a Tuesday when she opens the gray shoebox. The box is so ordinary that no one would bother to look inside. She keeps it casually on the closet floor, under a small pile of socks and scarves—the only jumble in the house that belongs to her, its neatest companion. Suzanne: made tidy by living her life in a series of small rooms in small flats and tiny houses whose only freedom was the space she made by keeping her belongings few and carefully placed. One thing under her control.
    This box—unremarkable, on sight not worth opening—houses the tangible evidence. A small, private museum, it holds a history of particular love. A hiding place secret because visible and mundane, of four illicit and extraordinary years. It conceals no love letters. Those exist in ether, in whatever cyberspace contains deleted emails. And maybe also on Alex’s computer . The thought thumps inside her chest like a missed heartbeat, but she tells herself, no, surely Alex—experienced in infidelity—was the more careful lover, covering his tracks, deleting their incriminating messages. Still, she wonders whether internet service providers and webmail accounts give passwords to bereaved spouses.
    She rests her hand on the shoebox holding the material stubs of romance: concert tickets, boarding passes, train receipts, program notes, restaurant matchbooks palmed by a nonsmoker, flyers, hotel pens, and other small souvenirs of fraught geography, drives across hundreds of miles, aching airport good-byes.
    Alex and Suzanne made love the day of the final of three performances of Harold , both before and after the Sunday matinee. His plane left that night, and he was scheduled to leave a week later for a two-month tour of Europe. So a few days later they each drove four hours just to have a long lunch in Bloomington, Illinois, talking music over the worst Indian food Suzanne had ever eaten but afterward would from time to time crave. He called every day from his tour, not missing one, and she holds now the scraps of paper with the phone numbers of hotels in London, Paris, Munich, Brussels, Amsterdam, Rome, Sienna, Madrid, Barcelona. She touches a small stack of transatlantic calling cards whose minutes were drained by long conversations. One of them ran out during a call to Berlin, from where Alex told her the story of Ovid, banished by the hypocritical Augustus for his scandalous writings on love. Ovid lived in exile on the Black Sea, without his beloved third wife, to whom he wrote for the remaining decade of his life but never saw again. There the poet lived without a library sufficient to do his work among a people whose language he could not understand. Over time his heartache did not heal, but he did learn