“One of these days,” Jake said, breaking the silence, “I’m going to get a car of my own.”
Inez nodded in agreement. “I bet you will.”
“Jacob,” Mr. Roseman called from the front seat, “how do you propose to pay for this automobile?”
“With cash money.”
“Oh, cash money.”
“And if you’re lucky, I’ll give you a ride.”
Mr. Roseman laughed. “If I’m lucky, he’ll give me a ride.”
“And, in case you want to know something else,” Jake said, “I’m going to marry Inez.”
Mrs. Roseman gasped at the absurdity of Jake’s pronouncement.
“Nonsense,” Mr. Roseman said. “That is nonsense, Jacob. Don’t embarrass the poor girl.”
Inez accepted the news of her forthcoming marriage to Jake Roseman with remarkable equanimity. She rather liked the idea, even though she hardly knew the young man. It made an odd sense. Who else was she going to marry? Clearly, the son was nothing at all like the father. Jake smiled at her in the backseat and she found herself smiling back. The deal, strange as it seemed, had been made. They hadn’t even touched each other, hadn’t yet held hands, but Jake blew her a kiss and she blew one back.
Inez finishes her little tale and looks up at Sylvia the reporter and then down at the ruins of pencil marks on Sylvia’s notepad. Sylvia is rubbing her eyes, poor girl. What the hell kind of reporter gets tears in her eyes?
zen studies
THE first time Jake visited Christine Newsome in her Pacific Heights mansion, she’d greeted him at the front door. But in the half-dozen years since, he’s always approached the home, at Christine’s request, via the trade entrance, which, though a curious form of slumming, became part of the ritual with Christine. Jake liked walking up the brick alley behind the mansion and sometimes donned a brimmed tradesman’s cap to enhance the effect. Passing the trash bins in the alley even inspired a bit of vandalism. One Tuesday during the 1960 presidential campaign, Jake snuck out to the rolling front lawns of the Newsome mansion, ripped two Nixon-Lodge signs from their stakes, and buried them in the trash bins. That act of conscience, not related to the lady of the house, made his afternoon with Christine all the more pleasurable.
Christine had been his client at one time, so Jake could rationalize the trade entrance on those grounds as well. She’d hired Jake to look over business papers her husband had prepared involving property in her name. Christine was afraid that her husband, Derek, a top executive at Holmes Newsome, the accounting firm his grandfather founded, was trying to screw her. This was just one of the complications that arose when two family fortunes lived side by side in the same house. Not exactly Jake’s specialty. He would have referred Christine to someone more skilled in this area, if he hadn’t found her so charming. “I admire Derek’s ardor,” she’d said of her husband, “but I’m afraid he reserves it all for his business deals.”
Every second or third Tuesday—the servants’ day off—Jake makes arrangements to visit Christine. There never seems to be a hitch. In the span of two hours away from the office, Jake assembles lunch, cabs over to Pacific Heights, engages in a satisfying conversation or two, has a tasty meal, screws his heart out with Christine, and is swept back to his office, pulsing with vigor. No other ritual in Jake’s life operates with such efficiency and offers such pure pleasure. Not long after they began seeing each other, Christine entrusted Jake with a key to the trade entrance of the Jackson Avenue Tudor and even explained the intricacies of the security system.
On the appointed Tuesdays, Jake often strolls up Market Street and plucks delicacies from the food marts—poached salmon fillets and ripe, lime-scented avocado halves stuffed with chilled cocktail shrimp. Some days he’ll go pure aphrodisiac, picking up a dozen oysters on the half shell or a pint of Siamese seviche, with the fruit of the sea pickled in equal parts lime juice and soy. Almost always he dips into Slavin’s Tropical Health Mart for a quart of their house salad: guava, mango, and cherimoya, with pomegranate seeds and slices of blood orange and fried plantain. As he gathers treats on Market Street for his lover, Jake feels like a sport of twenty, whistling Thelonious Monk riffs among the throngs of bargain shoppers and the gaggles of greaser punks and the anxious tourists who have lost their way. He sidesteps winos outside the twentyfive-cent theaters and hustles past flanks of dreamboy sailors, those poor, uniformed fools who always seem to be on the prowl, in twos or threes, for something better than they’ll ever find.
Occasionally, as today, Jake calls ahead to one of his favorite restaurants, Vanessi’s in North Beach, and has them prepare a dish for take-out. This slight detour in the cab, and the fragrant ride to Christine’s, only heighten the anticipation. It’s just these cosmopolitan jaunts through the city that have convinced Jake that he’s better off leaving his car at home, that taking buses and cabs at his pleasure actually affords him greater freedom.
AFTER Jake unlocks the back door and climbs the inner steps to the pantry, he notices Christine, dangling her bare feet from a tall, black director’s chair positioned beside the double refrigerator. This is her usual perch on their Tuesdays. Jake guesses that it’s the only time all month she spends in the kitchen. Now Christine looks up from the book she’s reading, as if she’s a bit surprised to see him, as if she’s momentarily torn between the book and Jake. This is also a bit of the ritual that he doesn’t mind observing. Nothing should seem automatic. Why should she rush to him the moment he steps into the kitchen? He sets his package down on the massive butcher block and watches Christine sniff the air as she rises to come to him. She drops her slender arms over his shoulders and kisses him on the forehead.
“Missed you,” he says.
“What did you miss?”
“What, you’d like a catalog of your riches, Christine?”
“Yes, give me the Song of Songs.”
“If I could whistle it, I would.”
Christine nods to the fragrant package on the butcher block. “What do you have in there?”
“Salad, with a Green Goddess dressing. Do you mind anchovies?”
“You know I love them.”
“And a saltimbocca à la Romana.”
“You didn’t pick that up on Market Street.”
“No, Vanessi’s.”
“Mon dieu. You must be expecting something special this afternoon.”
Jake winks at her and slowly lifts the food containers out of the sack. “So what’re you reading?” Christine gathers silverware and a couple of plates. He wants to believe that she hasn’t really been reading at all, that the book is simply a prop, a small part of their make-believe adventure that has them now slumming in the kitchen, two plates set at the servants’ side table.
“Bellow,” she says, “his latest. Or at least his latest to me. Henderson the Rain King. It’s a wonderful romp.”
“Like Augie March?”
“Altogether different. This is . . . I don’t know what you’d call it . . . intellectual fantasy adventure. Henderson goes to Africa.”
“Like all manly men.”
“You have nothing to worry about in that area, Jake.”
“Nice of you to say.” Jake picks up the copy of Henderson the Rain King and flips through it absently. He used to read. He was a great reader through his teens and twenties. He assumed it was his natural state, but at some point adult life intervened in the form of a wife and children; work; an aging, impossible father; and the goddamn Republicans. Despite seeming to the world like a happy-go-lucky soul, he is an anxious man, overmatched by work and family. How can such a man expect to sit quietly and read? Jake does word puzzles, that’s his diversion; a half an hour of word puzzles are about his speed.
As Christine fixes their plates with food, he glances at her: a small, pretty woman with dull blue eyes, the cheekbones of a model, and an enchanting beauty mark above her upper lip. In the years he’s known Christine, Jake’s watched a wedge of gray hair broaden across her temple. Altho
ugh he’s tremendously fond of her, he sometimes finds her privilege a bit galling. It must be nice, he thinks, to have your days to yourself, attend the occasional charity luncheon or ballet company board meeting, drop a couple of notes to your teenage sons at boarding school, have some working stiff bring you lunch at the mansion, fornicate for a leisurely half an hour, and then spend the rest of your day reading an intellectual fantasy adventure, whatever the hell that is.
Christine smiles at him. “I’ll loan it to you when I’m finished. Henderson reminds me of you, Jake. Maybe that’s why I’m enjoying it so much. Seems to me, you need to have an adventure like he has.”
Jake shakes out a cigarette and lights it. “A trip to Africa or an intellectual fantasy?”
“You choose.” Christine hands him an ashtray, a cute brass artifact shaped like a kitchen sink.
NO matter which room she leads him to, they make love on the floor. Always on carpets or on thick-pile rugs. Each time they enter a room, they pretend it’s the first time they’ve been there together. Jake used to keep a running tally in his mind of all the different rooms they’d screwed in, but once they’d crossed a dozen thresholds and started to make return trips, he gave up counting.
One time, they even screwed in a long hallway under a painting—an Indian miniature that expertly depicted a royal couple making love. That was early in his affair with Christine. He remembers rolling onto his back, once he was done, and noticing the Indian couple, poised inside the netted canopy of their marriage bed. You couldn’t help admiring the elegance with which their bodies bent in and out of their silken garments. He wasn’t in their class. There he lay, fucked out, his boxer shorts dangling around his feet. Christine smiled at him, showing off her regal beauty mark. She smoothed the black slip over her waist. “You were wonderful . . .”
“Was I?”
“For someone so distracted. Were you thinking about Inez?”
She’d caught him, but he would neither confirm nor deny. Actually, Jake had been thinking less about his wife than about their marriage bed, how bereft it seemed compared to the Indian couple’s.
“Inez doesn’t take lovers, does she?”
Jake did not bother to answer. He didn’t like having Christine speak of his wife by name, but Christine wasn’t about to pretend she didn’t know who Inez was. She and her husband, like most longtime patrons of the symphony, were well aware of the presence of Inez Roseman. Christine also spoke about her husband, from time to time, without shame. “This isn’t about not loving Derek,” Christine said, once. “It’s about sex being better with you than it is with him. And I imagine that if I were married to you, sex would be better with him.”
“I’m afraid you’re too modern for me, Christine,” he’d said.
“What’s modern? I simply know what I like and am honest about it.”
“But you’re not honest with your husband.”
“What would be the point of that? I don’t want to hurt him. Anyway, he knows.”
“He knows?”
“Derek’s not a stupid man, Jake. He knows as much as he wants to know.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
Christine shrugged and described how her approach to infidelity derived from her study of Zen Buddhism.
“You live a charmed life, Christine.”
“And your suffering is great, Mr. Roseman?”
“Epic.” He watched her grin and then push the hair out of her eyes. Despite knowing better, Jake wondered if he loved her. Christine, who had a good instinct for detecting wayward sentiment, closed her eyes for a moment and said, “I want to teach you my motto, Jake: ‘No attachment to either the glory or the guilt.’ ”
“No attachments, huh?”
“No attachments,” Christine echoed.
TODAY, after dining on the lukewarm saltimbocca à la Romana and doing the deed on the floor of the billiard room, both of them are quiet for a while. Although Jake may not have absorbed the great Zen teachings of Christine Newsome, he has taught himself to be free of thought during the act and even lets himself fall asleep in Christine’s arms for a few moments after. This, he thinks, rousing himself slowly, is as close as he and Christine ever come to genuine intimacy.
Jake watches Christine open her eyes. Sleepy, sated, she blushes for a moment at being watched. Even the master Zen adulteress is capable of the occasional blush.
“Saw you on the news last night,” she says, as if they’d just run into each other at the supermarket. “You looked really cute in your Bermuda shorts.”
“Are you laughing at me?”
“Not at all. It’s refreshing to see a political man with a sense of humor.”
“I think more people laugh at me than with me, but appearing like a goofball makes for a good decoy.” Jake stands and pulls on his underwear. During the last year, Jake has taken to wearing Bermuda shorts to work whenever he is so moved. They are an odd enough garment for the tropics, but truly absurd in cool San Francisco. Sure, the shorts are an affectation, but he enjoys the attention they bring and the way they get people’s dander up.
Christine runs a hand through Jake’s hair. “So how’s the political work going?” she asks.
Jake has been leading actions during the last few months on behalf of Negro hotel workers downtown. He glances at Christine. Despite her pronouncements to the contrary, he wonders if she’s a closet Republican. Isn’t her true alliance through wealth and family with the GOP? Sleeping with the enemy—he rather likes the idea.
“So?” Christine says, waiting for an answer.
“It looks like we have a decent compromise in the works. The Palace has offered to hire a dozen Negroes.”
“Are you going to settle for that?”
“Probably. It’s better than we expected. And I like being agreeable.”
“You’re very agreeable, Jake.”
Jake watches her drop a slip over her head, her small breasts disappearing, the little pucker at the center of her slim belly suddenly sheathed in black silk. He looks down at her small feet. He loves how tiny they are. The wonder of a diminutive woman is how small she remains even as she ages.
“I’m afraid you’re going to become too famous for me, Jake,” says Christine.
“I’m not in it for the fame.”
“So you say.”
Jake pulls up his trousers and walks over to the billiard table, takes a couple of balls out of the leather net pockets, and slowly rolls one ball, then the other, the length of the table.
“There’s nothing wrong with a little fame, Jake.”
“I suppose not.”
Christine strolls up to Jake and slides an arm around his waist. “You’re good for your people, Jake.”
“I’m not Moses, for Chrissakes.”
At the time of Jake’s political awakening in the late fifties, he’d run a solo law office for many years and begun to feel mired in a professional rut. He’d discovered almost by accident that he had a certain talent for articulating what was at stake in a social conflict, and that this talent was best served when he brought it to the street. In order to be an effective advocate for causes he believed in, work for which he was rarely compensated, he needed to draw attention to himself. The press liked an articulate kook and portrayed with sympathy the issues he championed.
As Jake bends over the billiard table, Christine kisses his neck. “I wouldn’t mind calling you Moses, though.”
“Don’t.”
“All right, I won’t. So,” Christine says, “how is Inez feeling about her solo concert?”
“Pretty good, I think.” Jake isn’t happy to have Inez mentioned as he’s about to leave, but Christine is paying him back for being bristly.
“She must be practicing all the time.”
“I suppose. She doesn’t play much when I’m around in the evenings.”
“Derek and I plan to be there for the big concert.”
It seems to Jake that his method of keeping his worlds apart—
a blotting out of one while the other is in play—is a far cry from Christine’s Zen detachment.
Jake turns to face Christine. She is more tempting than ever, barelegged in a fitted jersey knit dress and a pair of ballet slippers. He wouldn’t mind driving a bit of a wedge between Christine and himself. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, he thinks, sleeping with the filthy rich. At what point does he simply rate as another servant? Hasn’t Christine had him in his place for years? And yet, as much as he’d like to wallow in his role as a victim, it’s hard to cry foul when he considers the pleasure he gains in providing service.
“I’m taking Inez on a little trip,” he says. “The weekend after next.”
“Where are you going?”
“Just down to Carmel. Get her mind off the music. We had our twentieth anniversary awhile back and have been meaning to do something.”
“How romantic.”
“I don’t know.”
“You still love Inez, don’t you?”
He’s not sure how to answer, not sure of the truth.
Christine steps closer to him, and he takes her in his arms. His hand runs across the jersey covering her smooth waist. “How about we make love again? A quickie.”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
“Au contraire.” He nibbles at the corner of her wide lips, then plants a tender kiss atop her beauty mark.
“You know that you love her, and that’s as it should be.”
“You’re a strange woman, Christine, do you know that? Thank goodness I don’t love you.”
“Thank goodness you don’t. That would really get us in trouble. We’d be finished in a moment.”
Jake steps away from Christine and takes a long look around the billiard room. He wonders when they’ll be back here. There are a series of framed prints on the wall. A dozen ducks. This is Derek’s room, the one room in the mansion completely given to his aesthetic, the most goyish room in America. Jake has always wanted to shoot a quick game of billiards in here and then make love to Christine atop the green felt. The sound of the billiard balls cracking against one another in their webbed, leather pockets—what lovely music to fuck by.
Beautiful Inez Page 3