Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
voyant
future perfect
zen studies
perfect pitch
attraction
god of the sea
command performance
as if he means it
depraved
the other half
the art of the fugue
the mythological beast
jake’s ribs
some loss
the whole hand
betrayal
new happiness
the news
c rations
the blindfold
circumstances
toy soldiers
the mind lasso
night picnic
skeleton key
everything precious
benediction
bigamy
the sharper, the kinder
old home
human
little bird
play me a song
the right of first refusal
hang up already
intervention
olympian poise
bubbles
lantern
the splintered white
countdown
matchmaker
chef’s choice
force of habit
living fish
the torah
the chignon
hidden
Acknowledgments
THE STORY BEHIND THE BOOK
AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR
Reader’s Group Guide - ABOUT THIS GUIDE
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
About the Author
NOVELS BY BART SCHNEIDER
Copyright Page
To my father, David Schneider, a generous and
compassionate man, who has always played Bach
with his eyes closed.
Such beauty that for a minute death and ambition, even love, doesn’t enter into this.
—RAYMOND CARVER
voyant
LANGUAGE, as Sylvia’s mother was fond of saying, mimics the human condition. What is harmless one moment can become fatal the next. Drop a prefix, and, before you know it, what was innocuous has grown noxious, dispensing fumes that are certain to kill you.
Take voyeur, which derives from the French voir— to see. A powerless or passive spectator. You might define it that way, if you were willing to strip away its unsavory meanings and free it from the clutches of Peeping Toms.
Consider this: as a girl in Sacramento, Sylvia liked to climb trees. She started out in the fruit and nut trees of her neighborhood and then branched out, if you will, to the spreading oaks on the capitol grounds. Innocuous enough, you might say. Yet the physical pleasure she took in scrambling from limb to limb and hoisting herself into a hidden hollow was more than matched by her exhilaration with what she saw: a long-legged woman mowing her lawn in a pair of powder-blue shorts, a pair of terrier mutts humping in the early morning, the opened mouth of an ingenue as a sailor squeezed one of her smallish breasts.
Now, as a woman in San Francisco, Sylvia takes a heightened pleasure in what she sees, but she no longer worries about concealing herself. When Sylvia moved to San Francisco last year, she found a one-bedroom apartment, three flights up, situated along the Hyde Street cable-car line. Home in the evenings, she watches the corner of Washington and Hyde through her curtainless front window. Sipping a glass of cheap burgundy and listening to a Bobby Darin record, Sylvia watches her neighbors, briefcases and sacks of groceries in tow, climb on and off the cable car.
She’s particularly fond of the balletic passengers, who spring onto or off of the car’s running board, even when it’s in motion. So far she hasn’t witnessed a single mishap among the leapers. Catlike, on their way to their various rendezvous, they bound from curb to running board with the grace of the man leaping a puddle in the famous photograph by Cartier-Bresson. Sylvia used to imagine that she was the Parisian in the photograph, her long, open-scissored leap, reflected in the pooling water, an emblem of decisiveness.
Despite Sylvia’s good high-school French—her mother used to tell her that she was born to be a linguist or an impostor, maybe both—the closest Sylvia has gotten to Paris is through a monograph of Cartier-Bresson photos, a sampling of Debussy and Ravel recordings, and the lovely baguettes at Simon Brothers, flown in every other day from Paris, that she occasionally slips under her raincoat. Sometimes she pretends that it is Paris she’s watching out her window.
Watcher might be another word she could apply to herself. Socially, it would make her more acceptable, but who wants to settle for a word so bereft of nuance? Anyway, watchers have become as common as birds in 1962, now that every man, woman, and child in America has a television of their own. Those few citizens not spending their leisure time watching TV are scanning the skies for orbiting chimpanzees or astronauts. Sylvia prefers more intimate curiosities.
ONE evening, shortly after moving to San Francisco, Sylvia took a random stroll down Van Ness Avenue and saw a symphony crowd billowing out of cabs and town cars and up the grand stairway to the lobby of the War Memorial Opera House. Although she was no more dressed for a concert than a woman walking her dog, she let herself get swept along with the crowd and, with neither dog nor ticket, climbed the stairs with the concertgoers and milled about the lobby, underdressed but unrepentant.
She remembered how not long after the Second World War, as a seventh grader from Sacramento, she visited the Opera House, where delegates of fifty nations had drafted and signed the United Nations charter. She’d imagined herself as a delegate from Ceylon, one of the exotic nations from which she had postage stamps. Seventeen years later, as she milled about in the lobby without a ticket, dressed in pedal pushers and a navy blue car coat, a voice in her head announced: The delegate from Ceylon, Sylvia Bran.
In September, as the anniversary of her first year in San Francisco nears, Sylvia gets an opportunity to attend a symphony concert at the Opera House. Her boss at Myerson’s—“The grand piano store of the West”—offers her a complimentary ticket. Although the ticket has a hole punched through it, Sylvia is ushered through a velvet curtain to a freestanding upholstered chair in a box of her own. She might as well be the queen of Ceylon.
At first, it is hard to reconcile the formality of the setting and occasion with the casual, backstage banter that follows the musicians to their seats. Some of them tune their instruments on the fly amid a cacophony of scales and eighth-note passages. Then Inez Roseman appears onstage with her violin. Of course, Sylvia doesn’t yet know who the exquisite violinist is, but talk about regal. She wears her hair—a shade of blond that can’t have come out of a bottle—brushed back, with a silver comb at each temple. Surely this tall and graceful figure is cut from another cloth. The knots of standing musicians seem to part for her as she makes her way, without a word, toward the front of the first violin section. Is the stunning violinist contemptuous of her joking colleagues? Do they despise her for acting as if she’s too good for this world?
Sylvia pays close attention to the violinist’s gestures—the lovely way she brushes a hand under her skirt before sitting; her manner of dropping a square of silk onto her left shoulder and shrugging it into place before lifting the violin and clamping it with her chin. The other violinists all seem to have more elaborate devices or padding to protect their chins and shoulders. This one, with her square of silk, is, in effect, riding bareback. The violinist closes her eyes as she begins to tune her instrument. Sylvia imagines the inner ear against which the violinist measures her A and pictures a flower within a flower. Clearly, the violinist has perfect pitch, a kind
of magnetic north that draws her to its incontrovertible center. In college, Sylvia had known a French horn player with perfect pitch, and she’d always wondered what it was like for him to live among the common folk with wavering intonation.
The dashing Brazilian conductor, João Bonfa, gives his downbeat, and the opening measure of an orchestral suite by Berlioz rises to Sylvia’s box. She is sitting close enough to study the supple grace of the violinist’s bow arm, and, gradually, locks into the breathing pattern of the silk-shouldered beauty.
At intermission, Sylvia asks an usher the name of the first violinist sitting second stand outside.
“That’s Inez Roseman; beautiful Inez.” The elderly matron, whose white hair is slipping out of its chignon, turns her head dismissively. Is the gesture meant as a comment on the violinist or on the philistine posing the question? Sylvia decides the latter. Maybe the usher remembers her complimentary ticket, the one with the hole punched through it, and holds that against her.
“Has she been with the symphony for long?” Sylvia persists.
“Yes,” the usher says, turning toward Sylvia. “She’s been in the symphony for nearly twenty years.”
“How could that be? She doesn’t look like she’s much past thirty.”
“Well, I’m not lying to you. Some of us age better than others.” The usher takes a linen hanky from her clutch and, unfolding it, reveals a small stash of lemon drops. She offers one to Sylvia.
“No, thank you.”
The matron plucks a lemon drop from her linen wrap and drops it on her tongue. “Of course, Inez got into the symphony when she was very young.”
“She’d have had to.”
“And you know who she’s married to,” the usher says, in a stage whisper.
“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Jake Roseman.” The usher puckers her lips around her lemon drop. “You know, the attorney who’s creating all the fuss with the colored.”
Sylvia has read about him in the Chronicle. He seems to be something of a sensationalist. A white lawyer working on behalf of the Negroes, a favorite of the liberal columnists.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” the usher says, “the man has no feeling for music, even though his father played in the symphony for years.”
“His father played?” Sylvia asks.
“His father was the first concertmaster under Monteux. He was Inez’s teacher. But you never see the husband here. Maybe he’ll come next month when Inez plays her solo. If we’re so lucky.”
“What will she be playing?”
The usher puts her hands on her hips. “My, you ask a lot of questions. You ought to be a reporter.”
“I am a reporter,” Sylvia says, tasting the words as she speaks them.
“What do you know?” The matron’s eyes brighten—everything seems to make sense to her now.
“But you haven’t answered my last question,” Sylvia says.
“Your last question?”
“What will Mrs. Roseman be playing?”
“Oh, yes, the Goldmark Concerto.”
“I’m afraid I’m not familiar with Goldmark.”
“Karl Goldmark.”
“And when did he live?”
The usher looks flustered. “When did he . . . ? He was . . .” Her hands go up to her hair and flutter in their crooked, arthritic way around the loose knot of her chignon. “He was a Romantic.”
“Of course.”
Now the old woman, a flirt at heart, narrows her eyes and offers a gamine smile. She holds out her hand to Sylvia. “Elizabeth Mier. That’s Mier, MIER.”
Does Elizabeth Mier expect her to jot down the correct spelling of her name? Sylvia takes her hand. “Pleased to meet you,” she says without offering her own name. The power of the press.
By the time the voyeur-turned-reporter is back in her box, the curious constellation of the Roseman family has woven itself around her. The French have another word, a first cousin of voyeur that hasn’t really crossed over into English. Voyant. We do have clairvoyant, but how much more elegant to be a voyant, a simple seer.
Back in her seat, Sylvia Bran’s career as a voyant is about to begin. As the lovely violinist walks back onstage and drops her square of silk onto her shoulder, Sylvia holds her breath.
future perfect
IT so happens that Inez Roseman is a trusting soul—a fact that might surprise her husband and even her children, who, young as they are, know plenty about trust. The common error is to confuse trusting with trustworthy, qualities that don’t necessarily go hand in hand. Can “a woman of moods,” as her husband puts it, be anything but unreliable? Maybe not. But there’s nothing to stop her from believing that salvation, if there is to be any, might come as unexpectedly as a stranger to her front door.
Consider this: a young reporter comes to the house this morning, as completely unannounced as the Avon lady, and Inez opens the door for her. When the chimes ring, Inez is curled half-naked in a fetal position on her bed. She takes a quick inventory. The kids are off to school, and Jake made his way out the back door an hour ago, tiptoeing half-blind with an armful of shirts for the cleaners. Between his teeth he held an English muffin smeared with boysenberry jam—this to ensure that whatever garment was not stained when it walked out the door would be by the time it reached the cleaners. The reporter, it turns out, made arrangements last week, but Inez has done her best to put it out of her head.
Inez throws on a robe and opens the front door to the newspaper woman, who is hunched on the doorstep in her black trench coat. A chicky girl, as Jake would say, straight out of central casting. It is all that Inez can do to keep from laughing. Why has she agreed to such nonsense?
“I’m Sylvia Bran from the Chronicle.”
“How do you do? Inez Roseman.”
“Of course.”
“You’ve missed him.” She wants to play with the girl.
“No, no . . . I don’t want him, Mrs. Roseman.” The young woman blushes. “I called last Tuesday? . . . We spoke briefly?”
The reporter states this as a question. Inez isn’t about to help her.
“I want . . . I want to talk with you, Mrs. Roseman.”
“Well, now that we have that established, would you like to come in?”
Inez leads her guest into the living room and has her sit. Once she has a moment to study the reporter, Inez takes a liking to her. You wouldn’t go out of your way to describe the girl as attractive. She has a pointy nose and wears her dirty-blond hair in bangs. She comes across as intelligent, perhaps even a little cunning. Her green eyes are quite pretty and not at all shy about taking in what she wants. Inez offers her coffee and a slice of crumb cake.
“You don’t need to bother.”
“Not at all. I have a pot of Folger’s on and a cake left over from last night.”
When Inez returns with a tray from the kitchen, the reporter gives a quick couple of claps to her hands. “I’m really excited to do this story.”
“What story?”
“About your solo performance.”
“It hardly seems to warrant . . .”
“I understand it’s quite rare for a section player to be given a chance to play a concerto.”
“Rare, but not unprecedented.”
“My editor . . .”
“I’m sure your editor would prefer a story about my husband.”
Sylvia Bran takes a breath and curls up her bottom lip and chin in a fetching, comic-book expression of disappointment. Then she fixes her eyes on Inez. “Would you prefer that we not do this?”
Of course, Inez would prefer not. She’d prefer to be back in bed. She’d prefer to do nothing at all. She watches the reporter push two fingers through her bangs. For some reason, Inez doesn’t want to disappoint her. “No,” she says. “I’m happy to talk with you.”
The young woman is sitting on the yellow teak sofa, which, despite the beauty of its lines, is not particularly comfortable. Inez hands her a cup of coffee and
a piece of cake. Sitting upright, Sylvia Bran seems anxious to start the interview.
“Why don’t you catch your breath for a moment?” Inez says, hoping to study the young reporter a little longer.
Sylvia wants to make a good impression. She forces a smile, takes a quick bite of cake; a sprinkling of crumbs spills onto her lips. Then she pushes her plate aside and takes a walloping gulp of black coffee. A girl could burn her gullet like that.
After performing a curious exercise in concentration, shutting her eyes and breathing very deliberately, like an athlete under pressure, the reporter flips open her notebook. “Before we talk about the concert,” she says, finally, pencil in hand, “I’d like to ask a few questions to put things in context. Tell me, what’s it like to live with Jake Roseman?”
The reporter might have employed a little finesse. Of course, Sylvia Bran only wants to talk about Jake, Inez’s famous mate.
“Subtle question,” the reporter says, offering a wonderfully melodious laugh.
Inez shrugs. “Oh, it isn’t that bad.”
Sylvia goes at her slice of crumb cake with a sudden ferocity. Not quite finished chewing, she says, “You don’t have to answer that question if you don’t want.”
“So what’s the question?” Inez says in a nasal imitation of Groucho Marx. She wants to make the reporter laugh again.
“I asked what it was like—”
“Yes, to live with Jake. Here it is in a nutshell: everything becomes public with Jake. He’s an extrovert, and I’m quite the opposite. I find the public part difficult.”
Sylvia flips open her notebook and starts to dash and dot along in a remarkable shorthand. The reporter pushes a final forkful of cake into her mouth and chews for a moment. “But your husband hasn’t always been in the public eye,” Sylvia says, “and you’re on the stage all the time.”
“You’re right,” Inez says. “I was trained early to perform in front of an audience; groomed, you know, to have a solo career. Perhaps my temperament wasn’t right for it. Jake, on the other hand, has always been a public event waiting to happen.”
“So you decided against pursuing a solo career?”
“Right.”
“Was that a hard decision?”
Beautiful Inez Page 1