“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 was lucky to get in on a Klimke early. Got one just before they went through the roof.”
Suzanne signs the story of Marcus Klimke, tells Adele how he models his violas not on Stradivarius dimensions but on Amati: just a bit smaller yet wider across the base. A darker, deeper sound. “Perfect for playing Harold in Italy.”
“Will I ever go to Italy?” asks Adele, who has been reading about the Venetian canals.
Suzanne answers in both sign and speech. “I think you’ll go everywhere you want to go, but be careful because everyone says Venice smells bad.”
“Done!” Doug rosins the bow, holding it by the ebony frog. “And now you must play, even though I don’t have a Klimke on hand for you. Let’s see.…” He peruses the instruments lying on his work table, hanging from the walls and ceiling, in cases on the floor. “Just a minute.”
Suzanne hears his steps climb the other side of the wall and then move overhead, in the apartment above his shop. He returns in a few minutes, handing a viola to Suzanne as casually as he would pass an umbrella. The instrument’s most unusual feature is its scroll, which is carved to resemble a young woman with large, almond-shaped eyes and a slim waist. But she sees the viola is also notable for the quality of its finish and color—a strangely bright amber.
“A Stainer replica?” she whispers, her pulse quickening.
“The real thing. Your hand already knows it. So play us something pretty and don’t tell anyone I let you touch it.”
“Whose is it?”
Doug grins. “Lola Viola’s.”
It was only a week or so ago that Suzanne heard Lola Viola interviewed on the radio, saying, “I traded my real name for real fame” and talking about her new record and her million Twitter followers.
Doug’s eyes tilt, just barely, toward Adele. He tips his chin at her, looks down, his smile winning against the gravity always dragging at his face. “It’s tuned and everything.”
Suzanne holds the viola to her chin, the bow to the strings, and opens Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Second Sonata for Solo Violin. A test for Doug, who listens with head cocked. When she finishes she tells him what a beautiful thing he has let her play.
“You know the story, right?” he asks. “About Jascha Heifetz? Someone walked up to him and said, ‘What a beautiful violin you have.’ He held it to his ear and said, ‘I don’t hear anything.’”
“Sometimes it is the player, but the instrument sure helps. I’d never let anyone but you near my viola with a mallet, that’s for certain.” Suzanne tucks her hair behind her ear, bow still in hand. “But you’re stalling. Tell me about the composer.”
“Let’s see. A deep sadness tempered by innate buoyancy, though some of the sadness was coming from you, I think. So hard to subtract out the performer.” He pauses to make eye contact before continuing. “A man—definitely a man, which makes it easier of course. A man with a deep desire for repair. A taste for the programmatic, possibly because of his time but also maybe because he likes stories or comes from a storytelling culture. Or he uses stories to make sense of his life. A Jew? Definitely listened to Shostakovich, maybe even in person.”
“Bingo,” Suzanne says. “Family members killed in pogroms and then most of the rest in the Holocaust. Emigrated to Russia, proved remarkably resilient, found some happiness in life and marriage, and mostly avoided trouble for a while.”
“And Shostakovich?”
“Loved Shostakovich, who later tried to get him out of jail, but what saved Weinberg was Stalin’s death. He was out in a month. You already knew that stuff, right? You recognized the piece?”
Doug is already reaching for the Stainer. “Nope. You know me, I don’t know my music history hardly at all. I’m just a technician.”
“No just about that, but, Doug, you’re all theory these days anyway. Seriously, did you really glean all that from the music itself?”
“It’s as good a way as any. I’m not always right, of course, and the women composers are much harder, more complicated, but I’m getting better and better. I think I’m going to write a book on it.”
“Just don’t start writing letters to the editor.” Suzanne smiles. “Anyway, it’s a game composers would hate, don’t you think?”
“Not to mention music critics.”
It feels good to be talking to someone she knows but not too well, to share some banter, to be thinking about something other than her own life. Yet she cannot help herself and says, “Up for one more?”
He hands the viola back to her, and she plays a stretch of the music she continues to think of as Subliminal, mimicking its thrust as best she can with a single instrument. The viola is suited to the task. She understands