Inez had never heard a violin called a fiddle, and after Mr. Roseman had her play for a few minutes, he said, “First thing we must do is to get this child a decent fiddle.”
Not long after Joey started playing the cello, Inez would hear him bowing for more than an hour on the open strings. Once she went into his bedroom and discovered that her son had perfected a method of open bowing that freed up his left hand. His bow arm operated with surprising fluidity, although the instrument was secured by nothing more than his knees; meanwhile, his left thumb was tucked snugly into his mouth, the small fingers curled around his nose.
JOEY begins, as he does each afternoon, with his scales. Then he launches into the Adagio from the Dvořák Cello Concerto. He stutters through the dark flower of the theme, as if he were circling the actual music with a thick dotted line. Of course, the Dvořák is too advanced for Joey, but his teacher, Mr. Samuels, who believes the boy’s a genius, offered it as an incentive. Now that Joey no longer cries and has stopped grabbing hold of her skirt or fingers, he’s attached himself to the cello. Today, feeling a bit expansive on account of the reporter’s visit, Inez leaves the bedroom door ajar so that she can hear a bit of cello music.
With Joey practicing, and thirteen-year-old Anna at an after-school babysitting job, Inez is free to go back to bed. It is where she likes to be best. Tonight, she won’t feel well enough to prepare dinner. She’ll call Chicken Delight instead, and, sooner than she can believe, the delivery boy will arrive. A miracle of the modern age, she’ll have a chicken dinner with all the trimmings unpacked and on the table before Jake arrives home.
attraction
ATTRACTION. Infatuation. Intrigue. Fetish. Obsession. Fixation. As a teenager, Sylvia wrote the words in her best hand, cut them from sheets of shiny white paper, and taped them in perfect rectangles to the walls of her room. She liked to stack the words in patterns. Rising doom. Mounting desire. Deepening languor.
Her mother forced the study of vocabulary on her once she hit the fifth grade. Angela, a school nurse, who’d have preferred to have been a French fashion designer or a courtesan from an earlier century, began her romance with words as a strategy for self-improvement, but it evolved into a manic study of civilization, a “lexicon for living,” as she liked to say, and a distinct mode of communication between mother and daughter.
Any given Saturday might be proclaimed “Legislative Strategy Day” or “Equestrian Day” or “Phobia Day,” and the kitchen walls would be splattered with lawmaking language or horsey terms or lists of things to be afraid of. Both Sylvia and her mother took a liking to phobias. “Learn them now or suffer them later” was Angela’s motto.
Bathophobia: the fear not of hygiene, but of depths. Gymnophobia: the fear not of gym class, but of nudity. Hamartophobia: the fear not of pork products, but of sin. Angela never tired of pointing out that if the list of phobias seemed long, the list of manias was longer.
Attraction. Infatuation. Intrigue. Sylvia turns over each word like a flavored lozenge in her mouth. The day after her interview with Inez Roseman, Sylvia strolls the perimeter of Union Square, looking at dresses in the shop windows, imagining how some of them would look on Inez, how the fabric would drape, whether the line would complement the violinist’s natural elegance or seem inhibitive. Sylvia rarely stops to imagine herself in such dresses. Although she spent hours as a child with paper dolls, dressing and undressing the figures of Gene Tierney and Maureen O’Hara, it is odd to picture their dresses on someone else. Sadly, little that she sees strikes her as worthy of Inez. The windows at Elinor’s feature a wash of pastel chiffons that don’t bear enough gravity for Inez, while the mannequins at City of Paris and Ransohoff’s are weighted down in winter wools that, though stately, call to mind matrons in fur stoles. And then at I. Magnin she has a vision: ah, beautiful Inez in a long, creamy rose satin cut on a bias.
Sylvia considers her own visage, reflected in a side window at I. Magnin. There she is—a bright-faced woman in a close-fitting black sweater atop a crisp gabardine skirt that once belonged to her mother. She looks like a woman brimming with intention, unlike her pose of yesterday, when she appeared more like a copy girl on the Sacramento Bee than a Chronicle reporter. It was an audacious act, her masquerade. She feared she’d lose her nerve at the doorstep and slink away. At first, she wasn’t sure she’d make it through the door. She doubted she’d even get a glimpse of Inez Roseman. But once she got there she took a deep breath and pressed the bell. Rather than the usual two-note summons, a mechanical phrase from Bach announced her. Bemused, she stood on her spot, ready to accept whatever awaited her.
SYLVIA’S experience in journalism consisted more of wish than fulfillment. Although she’d spent a semester as an intern at the Bee, her only newspaper job—her first employment in the city—was a short-lived stint in the classifieds department of the Chronicle.
At present, she is employed primarily “under the table.” Under the table with the crumbs, the voice of her mother says in her head, how sub terra of you.
Saturdays, she plays show tunes on a Baldwin baby grand at Myerson’s, for which she receives free symphony tickets, a small hourly wage, and a not inconsequential bonus anytime a piano’s sold on her shift. She also works three nights a week at a cellar smorgasbord on Bush Street called The Little Sweden, where she gets to feast on shrimp and hard cheeses, herring and black bread. Although the patrons barely tip, she’s fond of the place—the owners treat her like family and look the other way whenever she fills a doggie bag during cleanup.
Sylvia had stayed too long in Sacramento. She told herself that her unstable mother needed her. She kept an apartment on Calavreas Avenue, subsisting on a small inheritance from her grandmother. Each morning she strolled past the capitol with a bag lunch, masquerading as a government worker. She spent most of her time polishing her piano skills in the practice rooms at Sac State. Nothing did more to cover Sylvia’s loneliness than a stroll through the music building’s corridors of practice rooms. She loved the bright din of the underground hallways, the sweet cacophony of rising scales and arpeggiated blasts, the earnestness of the enterprise behind each door. Sylvia often ate lunch with a few of the studious undergraduates—music majors, as she had been—who might as well have been missionaries, given their desire to become band or choral directors in little school districts filled with Mexican children in the Central Valley. She accompanied the students at their recitals and listened like a wise aunt as they talked about their checkered romances.
About herself, Sylvia revealed little. She told them that she’d been married—a harmless if enabling fiction—but that it hadn’t worked out. She told them that she wanted a future she couldn’t imagine, in a city rather than a town, a love who didn’t yet know that she existed. During her mornings in the practice rooms, drudging through her Hannon before playing any real music, Sylvia meditated on her future. How could she possibly reinvent herself while living in her mother’s shadow?
Angela Bran’s suicide, early in 1960, didn’t completely break her grip on Sylvia, but it influenced Sylvia’s decision to move to San Francisco. In her first year in the city, she drifted from one lowly office job to another, got temporarily trapped in a romance she could have done without, and began to entertain the notion that she preferred women to men.
On a foggy Saturday, Sylvia walked into Myerson’s, the fabled downtown music store, a branch of which was the site of Sylvia’s first piano lessons, and asked if they might need a piano teacher. The bohemian-looking gent on the showroom floor, who claimed his name was Myerson, snickered when she asked her question. “Everybody who can play a three-minute Mozart minuet thinks they’re a piano teacher. What we need is a genuine pianist for the showroom, somebody who can give a little flair to light classics, Broadway tunes, and new numbers on the Hit Parade.”
Sylvia smiled at the man, an offbeat creature wearing a devilish goatee and a string tie with a sterling silver treble clef. She enlisted one of her mother’s pet p
hrases: “Mr. Myerson, it sounds to me like you’re calling my name.”
Myerson sat her down at a gorgeous, ebonized Steinway and told her to make herself comfortable.
Sylvia began by running scales. She’d never played an instrument that responded so brightly and that had so fine a sustainer. “I’m a little rusty.”
“Aren’t we all,” Myerson said and gave a tug to the reins of his string tie. “The thing is, what we’re peddling here is illusion. Fella comes into the showroom, hears the piano, song he knows, big, rich cascading-waterfall sound. God almighty, he thinks, to play like that. Plant a little worm in his brain.”
Sylvia leafed through the music spread out above her and opened the score to My Fair Lady. “Should I play the overture?”
“Why not? Play the overture.” As Sylvia started to play, Myerson leaned against the side of the piano. “I tell you, you can spot these guys as soon as they walk in. They’ve got the wounded-puppy look. They’re weak-minded, full of cheap sentiment. Want the quick fix. Used to be, you could set them up with a player piano, nothing was expected of them. Now we have to baby them, teach them how to play ‘Chopsticks,’ before we sell them an instrument.”
Myerson turned and smiled at Sylvia. “What do you know, she can play. She walks right in off the street and gets the job.”
Sylvia bit her lower lips as she kept her left hand going.
“Tell you what I like about you, kid, you have a strong mind. You came in here and decided you wanted a job. Took a hard look at the impressive gent, who carries on the Myerson family tradition of musical excellence and spellbinding value, without blinking an eye. That shows me something. A person like you can do anything you want in this world. You want power over people, you have it. The beauty of a young lady such as yourself is that you don’t even know how powerful you are. You’re like the Mississippi River. Do you think the Mississippi River knows how big it is?”
Sylvia lifted her hands off the piano and folded them in her lap.
“Look over there,” Mr. Myerson said, pointing across the showroom to a man standing in a gray suit. “That’s Miller Beem, the most pathetic salesman you’ll ever meet. I brought him on anyway. I am not a man without a heart. Okay, you want to know the truth about Miller? I was overcome with a rash of arrogance. I thought, if I can teach this guy my method of salesmanship, I can teach anyone. I found out that I’m mortal. Miller’s my daily reminder. You, on the other hand, have another kind of future ahead of you.”
Uncertain whether Mr. Myerson was a lunatic or just a big talker, Sylvia flipped a few pages of music and began playing “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.”
“Lovely. Now, I’m going to give you the advance course in sales in the time it takes to play a baby minuet. Listen closely now. Your hands are important because they play the notes. Your heart is vital because it makes music of the notes. But it’s your mind that brings us the customer. Your mind becomes a lasso that is both supple and strong. Do you follow me? Now, let’s take our prospective customer. He might be looking forward to getting married; let’s say he wants to bring a little music into the hearth. So he’s come in to pick up the sheet music for Oklahoma. Give himself a real challenge on his ancient upright. You lay down three bars of ‘Surrey with the Fringe on Top,’ and as you’re playing, hands in place, heart open, your mind becomes a lasso. You play three bars of ‘Surrey,’ toss the lasso, and, before you know it, our guy’s on his knees, ready to genuflect. That’s where I come in. I go up to him and offer him a cigarette. Light the man’s cigarette, nod to the music. ‘It’s a wonderful sound,’ I say, poised and ready for the guy’s automatic response. Most of the time, he’ll say, ‘She can really play.’ ‘Her? She’s little more than a beginner. Come on, we’re not talking about Arthur Rubinstein here. A few lessons, a little practice, and with an instrument of this quality, not the priciest piano, mind you, but still, an instrument with an extraordinarily rich sound, that could be you.’ ”
SYLVIA picked up a couple of thrift-shop dresses and now, on Saturday mornings, wears either a chambray-blue rayon with a square collar or a swing-era teal shirtwaist and sits barelegged in Capezios at the piano. Some mornings she actually watches for the phantom gentleman, the one she’ll lasso, as the notes of “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” fall miraculously under her fingers.
According to Hy, the genuine celebrities at Myerson’s aren’t the notables who routinely walk through the showroom on the way to signing their new records—so far Sylvia has laid eyes on Andy Williams, the Negro diva Leontyne Price, and the darling trumpeter Ronnie Reboulet—no, the real celebs are the phantom gents, the guys who may plunk down solid cash for the privilege of taking a baby grand home with them.
A couple of weeks into her job at Myerson’s, Hy offered her a ticket to the symphony and let her know that there were more where they came from—four for every Friday night concert. “The reason those tickets always go unclaimed,” Hy said, pausing to cough unpleasantly into a handkerchief, “is that you work with philistines, Sylvia. I count myself among them. What can I say? I’ve always preferred the open-face harmonies of Broadway tunes to the classics. You, you’re a girl with a little more class, Sylvia. You have an affinity for the sophisticates.”
WHATEVER her affinity, Sylvia feared she had made a fool out of herself the first time she interviewed Inez, but what she saw frightened her: Inez Roseman was even more beautiful in her kitchen than onstage at the Opera House. Sylvia wanted to do nothing but stare. She stuffed her mouth with dry coffee cake, the only thing that seemed to provide cover for her watching. Sylvia would have happily spent the morning admiring the bruise under Inez’s chin, the marbled patch of skin, smaller than a half dollar, against which the violin rested. Did the square of silk she laid on her shoulder prevent her from having a like bruise there?
Who’d have guessed that Inez would be so easy to talk with, so vulnerable? And what did the comely violinist think of her? Enough to change into a fancy dress and get her violin out, enough to play a Paganini caprice, to tell things about herself that she’d barely tell her diary.
On the morning of their second meeting, Sylvia modifies her appearance. She gives her hair a light henna rinse, puts on a bit too much eye shadow, and dresses in a charcoal sheath that shows off her clavicle. “A classy man,” her mother was fond of saying, “is as moved by a woman’s clavicle as by her cleavage.” Sylvia also wears her favorite necklace, a strand of silver pearls spaced with small medallions of abalone shell.
Sylvia picks up a fancy dessert on the way to Inez’s house. Armed with the bright pink package in her string bag, she travels under a halo of invulnerability.
Inez greets her with an amused smile at the door. “You’re all dressed up, dear.” Inez didn’t look too shabby herself. Dressed smartly in a tweed skirt and a white blouse with pearled buttons, she leads Sylvia back to the breakfast room.
“I brought something to thank you for the crumb cake.”
“Crumb cakes don’t need to be reciprocated, silly.”
Sylvia is surprised to find Inez so affectionate on their second visit. Would it be easier if she were hostile?
“Well, what is it?” Inez says, pointing her small nose toward the pink pastry box.
“It’s a berry tart from Fantasia’s.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know,” Sylvia says, feeling herself turn rosy with pleasure at her own extravagance.
Awhile later, as she finishes her slice of tart, she realizes that, before pushing her plate aside, Inez has barely dented the crust of her tart. Not to her liking? Sylvia pulls out her pad and pencil and reminds herself that her purpose is to get the violinist to talk, that as long as Inez is responding to questions the contract between them is viable.
The problem for Sylvia is that she’s not particularly interested in the questions and answers. She has come to admire the violinist in silence. Sylvia turns her head sideways to signal a shift toward business. “So how�
��s the concerto coming?”
Inez takes a moment to consider the question. “I’m a little nervous, but I think it will go well. Will you be there?”
“With bells on.”
“Please, not bells.”
“Of course not. But speaking of bells,” Sylvia says, pleased that she’s managed to steer her single-mindedness back to business, “tell me what your wedding was like.”
“My wedding?”
“Yes; did you have a big wedding?”
“You mean, you’re still interested in doing this story?”
“Of course. Why do you think . . . ?”
“I thought you just wanted to come over and eat cake,” Inez says, with a wink.
“Tell me about your wedding.”
“Look, nobody wants to hear about our wedding.”
“I do.”
“I don’t know why anybody would—”
“Human interest.”
“Are you trying to turn Jake and me into a sideshow?”
Sylvia has no strategy except to appear hurt.
“I just can’t imagine that anybody’d be interested. You’re a scoundrel asking all these questions about ancient history.”
“In my experience,” Sylvia says, stalling, “people are fascinated . . . truly fascinated by the genesis of things that turn out to be big.”
“What’s so big about a couple getting married?”
Sylvia faces the violinist with an even gaze. “You aren’t just any couple.”
Inez nods, acknowledging either the truth of Sylvia’s statement or its effectiveness as a ploy. “We actually had two weddings within a few weeks of each other. We were married just after I turned twenty.”
Sylvia tries to imagine Inez at twenty, how lovely she must have been.
“The first time was at City Hall. Nobody was with us but my sister, Bibi. We decided against a formal wedding—Jake being Jewish, me not. But then we had a fairly elaborate folk version, a few weeks later.”
Beautiful Inez Page 5