Inez stands and walks over to the side table. “Not at the time. I was young and in love and I thought I could do anything. The decisions you hardly think about are the ones your life pivots around.” Inez slices a wedge of crumb cake large enough to choke the reporter. “Please, have another piece.”
“I shouldn’t, but it’s delicious. I’m afraid I’m making a pig out of myself.”
“I won’t tell anybody.”
Clearly, Sylvia Bran has experience interviewing the reticent. She knows when to back off and follow a lead. She eats a few more forkfuls of cake and keeps an eye on her host.
Inez draws a hand through her hair and considers the reporter. She guesses that Sylvia is twenty-five and lives with her parents. Not in the city, but in a modern rambler in San Leandro, Fremont, San Mateo. Perhaps she has a boyfriend named Ralph or Jerry who works in an electronics firm, who takes her bowling, who gave her a transistor radio for her last birthday.
As Sylvia takes her next bite of cake, Inez bombards her with questions.
“Where do you live?”
“Russian Hill.”
“In the city?”
“Yes, along the cable-car line on Hyde.”
“How old did you say you were?”
“I didn’t say.”
“Well, how old are you?” Inez is surprised by her own rudeness.
Sylvia swallows hard. She seems to have trouble remembering her age. “I’m thirty.”
“You don’t look twenty-five.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Sylvia says, with a certain pluck. “I was born in 1932—March 2, the night after the Lindbergh boy was kidnapped. My mother linked my birth with the kidnapping so often that I started to feel responsible for it.”
“Funny, I pictured you still living with your parents in your girlhood room.”
“I’ve already been married and divorced.” Sylvia shows her left hand—a chapped, nub-nailed paw that proves nothing at all except that a bit of moisturizer is in order. “I used to wear a ring, even after the divorce, but not anymore. Maybe I’ve made peace with the whole thing.”
Inez looks at her own ring, with its crescent of tiny diamonds. “How long were you married?”
“A couple of years.”
“Not so long.”
“Long enough.”
“Sounds like you made the right decision.”
The reporter nods and again fixes her large eyes on Inez. The kid, who might not be a kid after all, has a penetrating gaze. When was the last time someone paid this much attention to her? “Will you excuse me for a moment?” Inez says. “I’m beginning to feel a bit like a hausfrau sitting around in my robe. Help yourself to more cake.”
AFTER examining the half circles under her eyes, Inez brushes out her hair and applies a dab of red lipstick to each cheek, rubbing in a bit of color. With her visitor in the other room, Inez needs to prop herself up. She begins by slipping into the linen dress she’s recently picked up at Magnin’s.
“How would you describe this color?” she’d asked the saleslady, who wore a boxy suit and reminded her of the designer Edith Head.
“I’d call it aubergine,” the saleslady said, making an O of her thickly caked pink lips.
Inez snuck a look at the price. “It’s quite a lot of money to dress up like an eggplant.”
“Well, it is sleeveless,” the saleslady chirped, as if the minimum length of fabric justified the maximum price. More likely, it was the suggestion of Jackie Kennedy that upped its price. The saleslady smiled at Inez. “I think it will look lovely on you with your nice tan arms, your cute size. Try it on.”
When she returned from the dressing room she expected adoration, and Edith Head delivered.
“Oh, yes. Simple. Understated. But ravishing.”
Now she lifts her violin and bow from the open case in the bedroom and strolls, as a ravishing eggplant, into the living room. She makes a point of drawing her bow across a cake of rosin more times than she needs to. She wants the reporter’s undivided attention.
“My God,” the reporter says, staring even more intently than before, “what a beautiful dress.”
“Do you think so? I just picked it up for the concert. I thought I’d try it out on you.”
“It’s absolutely beautiful. Are you going to play a little from the Goldmark?”
“No, no. Forgive me, this is awfully pushy of me. This interview business has gotten me nervous. I thought a little music might relax me. You said you were born in 1932—how about I play something I performed in a recital that year?”
“I’d be honored. How old were you, if you don’t mind my asking, in 1932?”
“I was ten.” Inez stands in front of the reporter. “Do you know Paganini?”
“Barely. He was a virtuoso violinist.”
“Right, and only mad violinists play his caprices in public.”
“But you played them at ten?”
Has the reporter caught her lie? Can she possibly know that the hands of most ten-year-old girls are too small to play the caprices?
“This is number twenty, the Allegretto in D Major.”
Inez draws her bow across the D and the A strings, introducing the stately theme and the drone on the D string. There is an opening calm before the madness begins with a circular flurry on the A string. As she practiced these passages—and it could go on for hours in an empty house—she pictured the elaborate scrollwork of a medieval door. As a teen, after her breasts had begun growing out of control and forced her to alter her bowing posture, she often imagined someone touching her while she practiced, and a few times she actually climaxed, her legs twisted around each other like a modern sculpture or a wrought-iron plant stand.
A successful performer of Paganini turns herself into a machine that produces breathless linear bursts as distinctly articulated as the devil’s teeth. But standing before her guest at the breakfast room table, Inez mucks through a passage with a shameful smear of legato when it calls for tidy staccato. How pitiful a creature she’s become, trying to impress a chicky reporter she’s just met and doing so poor a job of it. Who else devotes so much time to confirming her imperfection? A simple man blessed with minor carpentry skills could have built a viable four-bedroom house in the time she’s spent trying to saddle the hysteria in this three-minute caprice.
“Beautiful,” Sylvia says. “Absolutely beautiful.”
Inez knows enough to keep quiet. “Thank you,” she says and puts her instrument down.
“What kind of violin do you play?”
“It’s a Landolfi. Pietro Antonio Landolfi,” Inez says in a robust Italian accent. “I’ve always loved saying his name. It’s quite a nice instrument. Circa 1770, Milan.”
“Such a beautiful sound.” Sylvia closes her eyes for emphasis.
“Thank you.”
“How old were you when you started playing?”
“What are you after—ancient history?”
“Our readers are curious about these kind of things.”
“I was five.”
“Is that when you started studying with the concertmaster, Mr. Roseman?”
“That was a few years later.”
The reporter gets busy with her shorthand again. “And he introduced you to his son?”
“No, that was Jake’s doing.”
“How do you mean?”
Inez sits down beside Sylvia Bran on the teak sofa as the reporter flips her pad to a blank page. “I’m curious what you have in mind with this story,” says Inez.
Sylvia doesn’t rush to answer. “We were thinking of a longer piece for the Sunday magazine section.”
Inez shrugs. “Why?”
Sylvia lifts her coffee cup and takes a dainty sip, her long nose tipping rather beautifully into the bell of the cup. Inez watches the reporter’s eyelids flutter a moment. “My editor thinks that you and Jake are among San Francisco’s most fascinating couples,” Sylvia says. “And with your solo concert coming . . .”
>
“So you’ll want to talk with Jake as well.”
“Yes, if he’ll talk to me.”
“Jake? He’ll talk with anybody.”
“I’m really more interested in you, Mrs. Roseman.”
“Why don’t I believe you?”
The reporter doesn’t answer. Nor does she smile. She challenges Inez with a steady gaze.
“What kind of ground rules can we establish?” Inez asks.
“What do you have in mind?”
“You promise not to print anything that I don’t approve.”
The reporter is silent. It seems as if she is considering the request. “I can’t do that.”
“Then I can’t talk to you.” Inez sighs.
Sylvia smiles. A disappointed smile. She rises briskly out of the Danish modern sofa.
The smart thing would be to let the reporter go. “Sit,” Inez says.
“I don’t want to force you to do anything you don’t want to do.”
“Sure you do.” Inez smiles at Sylvia, the urchin with the yellow pad. “I guess I’ll have to be careful what I say.”
And then Inez proceeds to be anything but careful. Growing up, she was the storyteller in her little family of three. Her meek father and older sister, Bibi, sheltered and unstable, listened to anything she cared to tell them about the wider world. Inez lifts her coffee cup and takes a short sip. She smiles at Sylvia the reporter. “Would you like to hear about how Jake and I met?”
“Absolutely.”
It surprises Inez how well she remembers the day, after twenty-five years. It was a sunny afternoon in the fall, and Jake was sitting on the front steps of his house, barefoot in dungarees and a T-shirt, whistling “Lovely to Look At,” a song she knew from the Hit Parade. She’d never before spoken to the boy, but she knew that he was nearly seventeen years old, almost two years older than she was.
“You’re Inez,” he said, standing as she approached. “I don’t believe we’ve ever been introduced. I’m Jacob Roseman. Jake.” He stuck out his hand to shake, and Inez already felt at a disadvantage, as she had the violin in one hand and her music in the other.
As Jake began running his charms and Inez managed to consolidate her things to shake hands, she looked down at Jake’s bare feet—his long, beautifully shaped toes—and felt desperate to get away. The music room with Mr. Roseman wasn’t necessarily a relief, but it was at least familiar. An hour with the Bruch concerto might cure the distraction. When she lifted her eyes, Jake smiled at her.
“My father talks about you all the time. Inez . . . Inez . . . It’s like a holy word in our house and, in case you haven’t noticed, it’s not a very holy house. Inez . . . Inez . . . He’s very proud of you. You’re the best student he’s ever had. I’ve heard him say that. No fooling. And, you know, he’s been teaching for a hundred years. Methuselah is his first cousin on his mother’s side. Another thing, if you don’t mind my saying, you’re very pretty. Exceptionally so.
“But my father never mentions your beauty. I noticed that myself. The truth is, I’ve watched you come and go for years, but I never paid a whole lot of attention. You know how it is; this place is like the ferry terminal with baby violinists coming and going all day. You see people but you don’t really see them. It’s like watching a plant grow. Then one day you realize that beauty has been walking into your house for years.”
“Oh, c’mon,” Inez said.
“Forgive me. Let me tell you a secret: I’ve been jealous of you since my father mentioned that you don’t go to school.”
“I have a tutor. It’s the only way I can get my practicing in.”
“A likely story,” Jake said and smiled like the boy in the Colgate tooth powder advertisement of the day, his large white teeth gleaming.
Inez had seen Jake at his father’s recitals. She sometimes overheard the older students talk about him. He was an only child and a willful boy who told his father that he’d have no part of the violin. But he was also very bright, a chess wiz and captain of the Lowell High debate team. He’d just graduated from high school, at sixteen, and was on his way to Cal in the fall.
Jake swayed back and forth like a boy playing tag, daring her to tag him. “I don’t care if you’re just playing hooky,” he said. “I still think you’re quite a dish.”
“Can you imagine somebody saying that?” Inez asks Sylvia, who’s never been a dish, nor ever will be. The reporter bends over her yellow pad, scrawling in shorthand.
At fifteen, Inez continues, she was beginning to realize that her looks were pleasing. Teenage boys and young men showed uncommon attention. She never quite knew what to make of this phenomenon, but she wasn’t going to be bullied by a frisky-boy debate champ. She lifted her head and looked directly into Jake Roseman’s green eyes.
“Please don’t speak to me like that. I don’t like to be embarrassed.”
“Sorry,” Jake said, shaken by her forthrightness. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”
Inez was also taken aback by her bluntness. It reminded her of the time, two years earlier, when she’d spoken to Mr. Roseman in anger.
“I’m sorry, Inez,” Jake repeated, truly contrite.
Right then, Mr. Roseman opened the front door.
“Are you harassing my student, Jacob?” Her teacher popped open his pocket watch. “Is that why we’re running off the timetable? Inez, you come in here and tell me how you got that boy to apologize to you. This is unheard of. I’ve never heard it myself. I bet he was expounding his political theories, my son the anarchist.”
AFTER Inez’s lesson, Jake was waiting in the front hall. “I wanted to apologize again,” he said.
“No need.”
“You don’t hold grudges?”
“Not usually,” she said, putting her left hand behind her back and crossing her fingers.
“That bodes well for our future.”
“What future?”
“The future perfect,” Jake said, flashing his white teeth. “It’s a tense that I adore.”
Nobody had ever flirted with her so openly. Inez told herself to stand up straight. “You’re odd,” she said.
“Thank you.” Jake bowed broadly like a circus clown. “Hey, there’s something I want to ask you.” He leaned back against the wall, disturbing a framed publicity photograph of Pierre Monteux. Inez watched the image of the fabled conductor swing on its hook. Monteux, the man who’d premiered Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps in Paris, had just completed his third season in San Francisco. The photograph must have been new to the wall or she’d have noticed it before.
Sylvia the reporter looks up from her pad and smiles. “Sounds like you were noticing a lot of things for the first time.”
The photograph was inscribed to Inez’s teacher.
To Isaac Roseman, my shining light in San Francisco.
PIERRE MONTEUX, 1937.
Inez let out a little gasp. Perhaps it was the picture of Monteux, or the idea that she was aligned, no matter how indirectly, with musical history. More likely, it was the handsome young man standing in front of her.
“He has a lot more trophies like that,” Jake said. “You should have him show you sometime.”
That was about the last thing Inez would do. She gave an impatient shake to her violin case. “Did you have something else to say to me?”
“Yes.” Jake stood off-balanced on one foot. She half-expected him to hop. “You know about my dad’s concert next month? The first of the Mozart cycle.”
Inez nodded. Isaac in his tireless desire to stay active as a soloist was presenting a three-concert series of Mozart sonatas at the Legion of Honor’s new theater. Jake squared off with both feet on the floor. “I wondered if you’d like to go with me.”
“With you?” Inez said, momentarily flustered. “Why?”
“Why? Because I’d like to get to know you. And I get kind of lonely, you see, going to my dad’s concerts.”
Inez tried to imagine Jake Roseman being lonely. It had
never occurred to her that sixteen-year-old boys got lonesome, and this one seemed so capable of keeping himself entertained. She imagined that Jake traveled with a personal entourage of good cheer even when he was by himself.
“So how about coming with me?” Jake said. He lifted his chin and looked as if he was about to start whistling again.
“All right,” Inez said and steered herself and her violin toward the front door.
From her father’s car, she could see that Jake was standing in the picture window watching. He neither smiled nor waved, which did not strike her as peculiar. Perhaps a bit of her stoic sensibility had rubbed off on him.
A week later Jake telephoned to say that he’d be by with his family the following Friday night to pick her up, if she was still game. Inez’s sister helped to pin up her hair. She wore a dress, a silk voile that Bibi had made for a recital Inez had given the year before. She’d refused to wear it then because it seemed too fancy. Now it looked wonderful to her.
Inez catches Sylvia’s eye. “I know this goes against the popular perception,” Inez says, “but I think that children grew up faster in the thirties than they do now.” Certainly, more was expected of them, she thinks, though maybe it was just that way for her and Bibi because they didn’t have a mother. By fifteen, Inez was a young woman. Well-mannered and poised. Her future as a violinist was set before she was ten. She realized that much in her little family was being sacrificed for her benefit, to pay for her tutor and violin lessons. Her father worked twelve hours a day in his frame shop. The only time he took off was to drive to lessons or recitals and occasionally to have a Sunday walk with his daughters at Aquatic Park or the wharf. Bibi became a skilled seamstress before she was out of junior high. Most evenings their small den served as a fitting room while Inez practiced. Bibi said that the women loved the bright meanderings of the violin, that it gave them the feeling that they were having their dresses fitted in Paris or Vienna.
The night Isaac Roseman’s Buick pulled up, Inez and Bibi watched from the upstairs bedroom. “Enjoy yourself, Nez,” her sister said. “You look beautiful.”
Inez hadn’t pictured a first date like this: sitting in the backseat with Jake while her teacher, dressed in his shiny tuxedo, chattered with his wife in the front. It was quiet in the backseat. She didn’t mind the quiet. She never minded quiet.
Beautiful Inez Page 2