husband only rarely and when unavoidable. But that was not true. Sometimes unavoidable means preventing pain in another, or loneliness in yourself. Sometimes unavoidable means doing what someone else wants because you are the kind of person who does what others want you to do. Sometimes unavoidable means only your own generalized desire, that strong human need for touch.
“This weekend.” Ben leans down, kisses her hairline.
“Don’t forget the deadline this Friday.” When he looks puzzled, she adds, “For the teaching position.”
His face closes, his jaw tightening and his eyes cooling like water becoming ice. “I thought we already decided that commuting wasn’t something I would do.”
“It sounds like you’ve already decided, anyway.”
While new to their marriage, they would argue late into the night. They did this less out of respect for the old adage against going to bed angry than out of their eagerness to engage with ideas and with each other. Now Suzanne knows the value of truncating a quarrel, if only in sleep gained, and her words are the last of their day. Tonight they do not even make eye contact again. As on many nights, they do not say good-night.
After the bathroom tap stops running and the bedroom light dims, Suzanne takes down the whiskey bottle from the high cabinet over the refrigerator. It’s the only sure bottle in the house, not because Petra has never looked up there but because she will not drink bourbon, not even when the house is otherwise dry. Suzanne pours the whiskey heavily into a tumbler of ice cubes. Only after twenty minutes, after the last cough or toss can be heard from the bedroom or from Petra’s part of the house, does she pull out Alex Elling’s last CD.
Most recent and final. His latest and his last.
She sits with these two inanimate companions—cheap plastic case and highball glass—in the big blue armchair that has traveled with her and Ben from Philadelphia to Charleston, from Charleston to St. Louis, from St. Louis to Princeton. How hard they laughed when they stood in line at the DMV, coming to terms with the fact that they would have New Jersey drivers’ licenses. “How did this happen to us?” they asked, pretending that they were still happy, that everything they had was good enough, Suzanne pretending that she wasn’t in love with someone else. “What’s next?” she said. “North Dakota? Alabama?”
A two-dimensional Alex looks out from the CD case, baton in his capable hand. As always, he looks as though he might have walked straight out of the Black Forest: dark hair going to curls only at the ends, unlikely green eyes, skin stained tan midwinter. Though he often wore a close beard, in this photo he is clean-shaven, the way Suzanne liked him best. His neck is slender, his jawline clean, and his nose so straight and strong that Suzanne can imagine him as someone who lived a long time ago. But not as someone who died a few hours ago. He stands still, prepared to conduct but not yet in motion.
She extracts the booklet inside the case, the one Alex signed, Everything for you. Ben, though a reader of liner notes, has never mentioned the inscription. Suzanne has turned this fact over, wondering whether Ben knew and decided to allow her the affair as the price of keeping her or merely from indifference—or whether the idea never occurred to him and he assumed this was how the great conductor signed albums for all his fans. Ben has never asked her what it was like to play under Alex, never asked whether they spoke of more than the music at hand, never asked, even, if he was a good conductor. Though this is just one of the many closed doors between them, she has always resented him for not noticing, or pretending not to, and hated herself for not knowing which and not being strong enough to ask.
It is the former, she tells herself now: he simply did not notice. And it is true that Ben has never held much interest in mainstream performance, even across the years it paid their bills, even though it is how Suzanne spends what time she spends away from him. He never asks. Of course he wouldn’t notice.
When she confessed to Alex that she kept the CD among their others, in the living room, he laughed. “You are no Mata Hari,” he said. “You obviously haven’t done this before.”