Now he and Christine walk hand in hand down the stairs. Although he tries not to be attached to either the guilt or the glory, he can’t help but feel a little of each. After all, he is a married man with chafed knees and a pleasantly throbbing prick who’s just been screwing another man’s wife on the carpet. Is it all a wondrous game of Clue—with his prick, from behind, in the billiard room? Much as he’d like to shoulder a little guilt—hasn’t he been soiling the sacrament of marriage for years?—he’s more adept at reminding himself that he’s only human. Will his guilt arrive one day via special delivery? He expects it will.
Meanwhile, his Zen mistress leads him, without a word, along the first-floor hallway and through the massive kitchen, fragrant still with the detritus of their cozy lunch. Christine gives him a damp kiss on the forehead, as his hand touches the knob to the service door.
perfect pitch
EXCEPT for half a piece of crumb cake, Inez hasn’t eaten anything all day. She has no appetite. She rarely has an appetite anymore. She eats only to keep up her strength—if she goes without eating on concert nights, she begins to feel faint after the intermission. She imagines the public horror of collapsing onstage. She’s lost weight, but not enough to be concerned about. Jake has another view. At dinner, he’ll sometimes taunt her about it. With a forkful of meat in his mouth, he’ll turn toward the kids: “Your mother is wasting away.”
“Nonsense,” Inez says. “You’re thinking of me pregnant.”
“The hell I am. That was years ago. You should see a doctor,” her husband says.
“I don’t need a doctor.”
“Look at how thin your arms are getting. If I wanted to marry Olive Oyl, I’d have married Olive Oyl.”
When his father mentions Olive Oyl, Joey pipes up: “You better start eating your spinach, Mom.”
At times, Inez sees the food on her plate the way an unwilling child might: gray clumps, overcooked foothills of meat and starch and vegetables. She’ll take small portions and push them around strategically, as if, pea by pea, she were thinning a forest. Now, with the reporter gone and the day yawning ahead of her, she forces herself to think of something she’d like to eat. Perhaps later in the afternoon, when Joey gets home from school and has his snack, she’ll fix herself a cheese sandwich.
Inez pulls off her linen dress and camisole, then climbs back into bed. She rarely had time off like this in her twenties and early thirties. The parts of her day that weren’t given to practicing and rehearsing went to private students, classes she taught at San Francisco State, and a stream of occasional jobs that had an uncanny way of finding the gaps in her datebook. It was a point of honor for a young musician to be in demand and perpetually working. Inez also liked contributing more money to the household than Jake could during the period he was getting his law practice off the ground.
After her first, Anna, was born, it took her months to bounce back and, when she finally did come around, she found herself buried at home with a baby girl and a tardy diaper service, constantly arranging for nannies and babysitters, feeling guilty every time she went to work, yet sure she’d die of boredom and despair if she abandoned her career and stayed home. After Anna’s first birthday, Inez returned to work with a vengeance, and it wasn’t until Joey’s birth, six years later, that the wheels came off the cart.
On some days off, Inez can lie in bed, half-sleeping with scarcely a thought for the time that is passing. But today, after the reporter’s visit, Inez stews in a fever of reflection, remembering the night she discovered that she was pregnant with Joey. It was nearly eight years ago, ages now. The news had pitched her into a spiral of remorse. Why would she possibly want another child? She’d been thinking of it as the fetus because that sounded impersonal and might as easily describe something dead as alive.
The night she told Jake the news, he pranced around and insisted that they find a babysitter for Anna and go celebrate. He dragged her out that night to a jazz club called The Black Hawk. There was a piano trio playing, but Inez hardly heard the music. She focused, alternately, on how she could get rid of the baby and on how evil she was for having such thoughts. Jake, as was his habit, got friendly with the musicians between sets and brought the bass player to the table to meet her.
The man’s name was Reamy. He was a slightly built Negro in a checked sport coat. He couldn’t have been much more than thirty. Inez wondered how such a small man ended up playing a string bass. Jake invited Reamy to join them at the table, then ordered a round of drinks.
“He has a terrific ear, doesn’t he?” Jake said, indicating the bass player.
“Yes,” she agreed, though she’d hardly heard anything the man had played.
“My wife has perfect pitch,” Jake bragged.
“And she’s a beauty to boot.” Reamy offered Inez a smile more polite than flirtatious. “I’m sorry to say I’m not blessed with it. Best I can do is walk around in my little purgatory with halfway decent relative pitch.”
“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” Inez said.
The bass player leaned toward her and she noted the way his bald spot shined at the crown of his head. “I’ve heard that perfect pitch can be a bit of a burden,” he said. “I know some musicians say the problem with p.p. is that the whole world is constantly out of tune.”
“It’s true,” she said, offering a crooked smile. “If you choose to pay any attention to the rest of the world.”
Now the bass player turned toward Jake. “I see that on top of everything else, your wife is clever.”
“Inez is a first violinist with the San Francisco Symphony,” Jake said with pride, “second stand, outside.”
“Stop, Jake.”
“Now you tell me, and with p.p. to boot!” Reamy winked at Inez and coughed a guttural laugh. “How do you expect me to play my next set with her listening in on me?”
Inez loved the way the bass player had reduced her curious attribute to p.p. It had always been spoken of as if it were a noble gift from God, as if she’d been blessed with the ears of an angel. Inez found herself watching the Negro’s long, tapered fingers as he lifted his tumbler of Scotch. He glanced up at her. What a useful stranger he was, an unforeseen ally. She wished that she could spend five minutes alone with him. She’d tell him everything that was going on with her, and then never have to see him again.
“The secret to a long and happy life,” he said, holding her with his glance, “is to learn how to expect less of the world than you would have expected to expect.”
“That hits it on the head,” Jake said.
“I know what it’s like to be alone,” the bass player said, hoisting his Scotch. “Alone in a restaurant, alone in your bed, alone inside your own ears.” He paused to sip his drink. “I was a college boy, you know. Studied music in college. Not too many of us back then.”
Inez glanced over at Jake, who was in his glory, listening to the bass player. It quickly stopped being the night that they went out to celebrate the seed of a baby she didn’t want to have and became the night a Negro bass player told them a story.
“I got a job when I was just out of school, backing Dinah Washington—first time I went out on the road. Thought I was hot stuff.” Reamy stopped and smiled. “We did a gig in Philly along with Dizzy Gillespie’s big band. Dinah and her trio with Dizzy’s band—and Dizzy’s bari sax player was way out of tune. Ooh, it was ugly. So I raise my hand in the air and Dizzy says, ‘What’s the matter?’ I point to the bari player. Dizzy stares at me. ‘He’s outta tune,’ I say, finally. Dizzy stares at me some more and says, ‘How you so sure it’s him?’ ” The bass player let loose a deep laugh.
“The thing was, nobody would talk to me for the rest of the gig. I was off-limits, ostracized, a nonentity. If my mama was there, she’d have turned her back on me. So, you see, I don’t need to be messing around with any p.p.; I got all the ear I can handle as it is.”
Jake patted the bass player on the back. “Reamy,” he said, “you have tim
e to have a glass of champagne with us? I’m going to order a bottle of champagne. Inez and I are celebrating. We’re having a baby!”
The Negro turned to face her. It was clear the man didn’t care much for Jake. “Congratulations. Your first?”
She shook her head, close to tears. “Our second.” Surely, the bass player could see what was going on with her, or so she imagined.
“No time for the bubbly, but here’s to you.” Reamy tossed back the rest of his Scotch, then made his way back to the bandstand. He nodded at Inez as the pianist played a lush introduction to “Stella by Starlight.” She forced herself to listen closely to the bass player, to his good ear that had gotten him into trouble. He had a warm, muscular sound. Inez closed her eyes to listen to the dark wood of his bass, how the timbre of a single, held note could provide shelter, a room to hide in. She opened her eyes and watched Reamy’s long fingers pluck the thick strings. He was the engine driving the little band. He kept the beat, yet masked it in a dully polished coil of sound. There was something surprisingly unswerving about his method. It made him indestructible. Like the baby, she thought.
BABY Joey was delivered by cesarean section, just as his sister had been. The doctor who performed the surgery visited her the next day and told her, with not a little pride, that Joey had been his 157th successful cesarean delivery. She wondered how many failures he’d had and why this couldn’t have been one of them. He then proceeded to outline the tortured history of the operation back to Civil War days. The stout, mustached doctor sat on the empty bed beside her and said, “Seventy-five years ago, a woman in your situation, a woman with a spastic uterus, with muscles that operate more keenly on one side than the other, would most surely have died during delivery. Infection. They didn’t understand much about infection then.” Dr. Covey was the man’s name. In her half-drugged state, Inez thought of fat Dr. Covey and his 157 cesarean births as a mother with a covey of partridges.
A week later, Inez returned home with baby Joey. One day, when he actually slept for a few minutes, she lay naked on her side in front of the bedroom mirror. She now had two long, vertical scars, stretching nearly from womb to ribs. Dr. Covey mentioned that there was too much scar tissue from the first birth to open the same place again. When she was on her side, the twin scars looked like parallel stave lines that a music student may have drawn in his haste. Her belly button was situated perfectly at the center of the stave, like the F above middle C. A whole note that would last forever. And when she saw herself thus—depressed, doubly scarred, spastic-wombed, baby-hating, with enormous, engorged breasts hanging above her ribs like dead weights—she hummed an F and held on to it for the longest time. The virtues of perfect pitch. It would become the pitch of her breathing. F for fucked, as in you’re fucked, she told herself, and, for the first time in her life, she uttered the obscenity out loud.
Her regular obstetrician, Dr. Seymore, called it Baby Blues and said the mood would pass within a couple of weeks. It did not pass. She wasn’t able to sleep at night. She and Jake built as cozy a spot as they could in the basement, with a sofa and a remnant of Belgian carpet and a soft lamp, and Jake slept with the baby down there so she wouldn’t hear the crying. That is when she began curling into a ball and became a shelled creature, armored with a layer of invisible parchment that she still wakes with every morning.
The Baby Blues became a virus, as virulent, she believed, as polio. It would not leave her. Not in a couple of weeks, not ever. There were no outer signs. That would be too easy. If it were polio, they could put her in an iron lung, let something else breathe for her. Although not physical, her paralysis was certainly grave. She had no interest in trying to explain it. How could she explain? She had a beautiful baby she could barely stand to hold in her arms. At least her own mother had the good sense to die in childbirth.
The parchment, that extra layer of skin that covered her muscles and bones and nerve endings, became the symptom by which she gauged her condition. Each morning, whether she’d slept only a wink or truly fallen off for hours, she checked to see if the extra skin was still there. It always was. She had yet to be cured and no longer expected to be.
Three months after Joey’s birth, a nanny was found and Inez went back to work, a shadow of herself, perhaps, but functional enough to hold her seat in the symphony. She was forced to cut the odd jobs and the teaching, which she really enjoyed, to a minimum. All these years later, even though Jake again slept in the bed beside her, she still woke inside a skin of parchment.
INEZ dresses herself again, just before Joey is due home from school. Joey likes his rituals. A hug at the front door. Slices of French bread, buttered or with cream cheese, once in a blue moon topped with smoked salmon left over from a Sunday brunch. Then he’ll sit alone at the kitchen table for the longest time, nibbling on his favorite treat, a frozen chocolate-covered banana. Inez used to wonder what went through his mind while he sat there with his banana. Did he know that she hadn’t wanted him, that she could hardly stand to be in his presence for the first couple of years of his life? Of course he knew. Sometimes she asked her son what he was thinking about.
“God,” he once said, without a beat’s hesitation. This in a household in which religion was rarely mentioned.
“You’re thinking about God?”
“Yeah, whether he ever rode a horse. He’s supposed to be the best at everything, so I guess he’s a good rider. Maybe God’s been in a lot of rodeos. Do you think he ever rode a bucking bronco?”
“I don’t know,” Inez said. “I’ve never thought about it. Do you think about God a lot?”
Joey shook his head and took a long lick of his banana. “Nay,” he said, using the negative his sister had recently been bandying about.
Usually, Inez leaves Joey to his thoughts. She’d started bribing him with the frozen bananas when he was around five: he could have a chocolate-covered frozen banana on a stick for each day that he didn’t suck his thumb. Now, more than two years later, he still holds her to it.
Jake sometimes accuses her of spoiling the boy. Of course she does. She’d wanted him dead before he was born. When she brought him home, he cried constantly. What little purchase she had on her life disappeared each morning with the baby’s first, probing yelp, a single-note inquiry that quickly devolved into a storm of despair. Only Anna, just six at the time, cooed at the baby.
In the first year, when the nanny was off, Inez locked herself in the closet while the baby cried, or she stood on a spot with her violin, playing a fierce Bartók sonata at fortissimo. Little Joey Roseman may have been the most tearful baby and toddler the world had ever seen. At three, he still cried up a storm. At four, when she took him to the swings at Sutro Park, he clung to her. Whenever she tried to drop him into a basket swing, he’d wriggle and fuss for longer than she could bear. He refused to let go of her fingers. Every other child in the playground ventured as far from his mother as he could. The way Joey clung to Inez, you would have thought he was an orphan.
Today, after Joey watches The Three Stooges, he begins his cello practice. Inez had done everything she could to discourage Joey from playing an instrument. He started begging for a violin at four, but his mother wouldn’t hear of it. She’d begun playing at five and became a practicing monster as soon as she learned how to hold the bow. The last thing she wanted was a fresh version of her child-self, the one-dimensional automaton who could stand on a practice spot, inflicting measured torture on herself for hours. But Joey’s grandfather wouldn’t leave the business alone and sat the boy down to the piano to determine if he had a decent ear. “It’s too early to know for sure,” Isaac Roseman said. “The boy may have perfect pitch, he may not. But I’m telling you, it’s too good an ear to squander.”
When Joey turned five, Inez relented. She brought home a quarter-sized cello on loan from her violin dealer, Jan Smetna. She laid white tape on the fingerboard to help guide her son’s way and gave him a few short lessons on how to hold and draw the bow. She gue
ssed he’d lose interest in the cumbersome instrument within a week, but before long he was playing clear, coherent scales. During his second month with the instrument, Joey made a point of ripping the white tape from the fingerboard. When she asked why he had done that, her five-year-old son said, “Tape’s for babies. I know where to put my fingers.”
And indeed he did. The damn kid had an ear on him. Although a little clumsy with his fingers at first, he made swift corrections when he landed a fraction north or south of the pitch he was after.
“He’s just like you,” Isaac Roseman said, “a quick study.”
As his grandfather demonstrated the virtues of long-bowing to the boy, Inez thought of the first time she’d had a lesson with Isaac Roseman. Her father had walked with her into the Roseman house. She remembers him looking down at his feet as he took off his felt hat and bowed to the new teacher. For weeks, her father had been telling her what a great man Mr. Roseman was, and how kind he was to consider teaching her. Dressed in striped tuxedo trousers with a pair of suspenders strung over a wrinkled white shirt, Mr. Roseman looked like he’d forgotten anybody was coming for a lesson. He led Inez and her father to a music room in the back of the house. It was the largest house Inez had ever been inside of, but she trained her eyes to look straight ahead so she wouldn’t get lost in anything she might see. Mr. Roseman motioned for her father to sit on the piano bench. Her father lifted a hand to protest: “I’m sorry; I don’t play the piano.”
“I wasn’t going to ask you to play,” Mr. Roseman said.
It made Inez sad to see her father sit creakily on the piano bench and balance his hat on his knee. Inez was just seven years old, but she knew how to stand still for a long time.
Mr. Roseman smiled at her. “Well, are you going to take out your fiddle or are you going to just stand there looking pretty?”
Beautiful Inez Page 4