Inez wonders if she could actually live in a house without a man. What would become of her and the children? Would they each shut themselves up in their own rooms for a generation, a trio of sad sacks, subsisting on Anna’s macaroni, Joey’s boiled hot dogs, her own overcooked broccoli?
Jake is staring at her, waiting for a response.
“I thought you were so busy with your public life that it would hardly matter to you if you were married or not.”
“What are you talking about?” Jake asks, furious. “Did you plan to surprise me? Were you going to have some shyster lawyer serve me with divorce papers?”
Jake barks at the waiter who’s come over to see if they want anything else to drink.
Inez turns her chair to face a broader stripe of the ocean.
“I want to know something,” Jake says, bitterly.
“Yes.”
“Why are you telling me this now? You are so twisted. I don’t understand how your mind works, you and your irrational moods. Anybody else would be thrilled to have a nice weekend with her husband . . .”
“Who’ll have a new girlfriend by the end of the week.”
“Is that what this is about?”
“No. It’s more than that.” And it is. But still, she finds herself thinking about the infidelities. They began not long after Anna was born. Inez was in the midst of a period of gloominess, not as boundless as the one that followed Joey’s birth, but debilitating nonetheless. She had little interest in Jake, who became, during that period, a shadowy figure who left the house in the morning and returned rumpled and weary before bed.
Up until then, she barely had a concept of infidelity. It seemed a thing that happened to people in far-off places—unstable individuals, unnatural characters, not people like her and Jake, who came from good families.
In the early days, after discovering one of Jake’s infidelities, she’d tell the nanny she was sick and stay in bed all day. She’d pull the covers over her head and want to die. Later, she’d confront Jake and he wouldn’t deny a thing. Contrite and kindly, he’d say that the girl didn’t mean a thing; he’d gladly give her up. He was sorry for the pain he’d caused Inez. His holy calm and essential guiltlessness drove her into a rage. She wanted to know everything. With baby Anna sleeping in her crib, or toddling through the living room, Inez whispered a round of mean and greedy questions. How’d you meet her? Is she a real blonde? Are her breasts bigger than mine? Does she read more than movie magazines? Where do you take her to do whatever you do? Do you buy her presents? Does she call you Jakie? Or does she have another pet name for you? What does she do for you? Then she’d cry for days and Jake would bring her tall bouquets of gladiolas, always gladiolas, a flower she can no longer experience without the dark reference of tears.
During these periods, Jake would prepare a little supper for them— a cheese omelet, a plate of toast and herring, something like that. He’d feed Anna in her high chair, clean up after her, put her in her playpen. Then he and Inez would sit at the red Formica table in the kitchen. It was a silent business. Jake sipped from a tall glass of milk, boyish still at thirty. Sometimes he’d take her hand. And later, after Anna was tucked in for the night, Inez would let him lead her to the bed, where she’d lay stiff and wounded for a biblical age, while Jake composed little speeches about his love for her and fondled her breasts. At first, this was the only way she knew to deal with Jake’s treachery.
By the time of Joey’s birth and the long misery that followed, Inez no longer cared about Jake’s new girlfriends. She simply noted a change in him. It was like discovering that a building of the charmless, prefabricated variety had gone up in an empty lot since the last time she’d driven through the neighborhood. It became a thing she expected rather than something that surprised her.
NOW the waiter brings two snifters of cognac and sets them down on cardboard coasters bearing the image of Neptune. She lifts her glass not to drink, but to get a better look at the mischievous god of the sea as he appears on the coaster, his trident aimed forward like a champion spearfisher. Is Neptune the devil in disguise? The theme from “The Devil’s Trill” floats into her head. How programatic of her. The violinist Tartini had a dream in which the devil appeared at the foot of his bed playing a virtuoso sonata. Did Tartini trade his soul for the chance to transcribe the sonata? What would she trade hers for? Does she even have one to trade?
Inez lifts her snifter and looks again at Neptune. Often when she pictures herself dead, she’s in the sea. A nautilus bobbing effortlessly in the depths. A part of nature, after all. She swishes the cognac around the glass the way Jake showed her years before.
“Would you look at me, please?” Jake snaps.
“Of course.”
Jake’s face is red with anger. Inez feels a curious pleasure at seeing him so put out. No matter how hot he gets, she can get cooler. That is their real song and dance.
“So you’re serious about this?” Jake asks, using his handkerchief to pat his forehead.
“Yes.” Inez dips her nose into the glass of cognac. She doesn’t want to torture the man, but neither does she want to renege. Does he think that his anger will force her to take it all back?
Jake lights a fresh cigarette, inhales deeply, blows a long, even stream of smoke, and then faces Inez. “How do you expect to tell the children?”
“I haven’t thought about that yet.”
“Well, maybe you should.”
In fact, she thinks about the children all the time. Inez takes a sip of her cognac and enjoys the way it burns down her throat.
“Look, can we talk about this?” Jake says.
“Seems like we are.”
Jake loosens his tie and opens the top button of his shirt. “I won’t see other women anymore.”
Inez doesn’t say anything for a moment. She looks at the stripe of ocean. How nice it would be to be out there. Finished.
Jake is waiting for her to respond.
“You can see all the goddamn women you want, Jake.”
“I’m not going to see any other women.”
“Whatever makes you happy.”
“I’m not going to see any.”
He doesn’t get the point—she really doesn’t care. She smiles at him and follows his eyes as they narrow again.
“Now,” he says, “I want you to do something for me.”
She laughs out loud. Does he actually believe that his false promise merits a favor in return?
“I want you to give this a year. You feel like divorcing me a year from now, I won’t try and stop you.”
That, she thinks, is a grand play. The man is a skillful negotiator. She picks up her snifter and smiles down at brother Neptune.
Jake gulps his cognac. “You know, I think about when I fell in love with you, Inez. It was the first time I ever spoke with you. God, I made a fool out of myself. That was twenty-five years ago. You were the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen and now you’re the most beautiful woman.”
“Come on, Jake.”
“I’m not kidding. I’ve always loved you, Inez.” Jake snuffs out his cigarette and turns both of his hands palm up on the table. “What do you say, Inez?”
“What do I say?” Inez looks into Jake’s open hands—all the slanting lines are supposed to tell something about the man’s life.
“Will you give it a year?”
She’s surprised that he’s so anxious to keep his house in order. “All right,” she says, allowing him to take her right hand in his. When a man’s cheated on you for years, she thinks, you’re hardly obliged to honor a promise to him.
Jake leans across the table to kiss her, but Inez dips her nose toward the dark bell of the snifter. It’s been a long time since she’s been on equal footing with Jake. Her foot is on the pedal.
Jake nods his head meaningfully and takes a gulp of cognac. “Do you believe in God, Inez?”
She laughs out loud, then holds up her coaster. “I believe in Neptune, the god of the
sea.”
Jake swirls the cognac around his glass but doesn’t bother to inhale it before emptying his glass. “I always imagined that musicians have made some kind of spiritual pact, that that’s part of the compensation for doing your type of work. I mean, after you’ve played your hundredth Messiah, doesn’t it start to sink in—all that hallelujah business?”
“You’re putting me on.”
“Yeah, I am.”
She laughs again as Jake winks at her. Is he trying to make her love him again, now that he figures he’s won her back for a year?
Jake lifts his empty snifter and swirls the air around. “Where’s the damn waiter when you need him?”
She watches Jake loosen a second shirt button, then roll the cuffs of his shirt to his forearms. Her mind drifts off again to Sylvia the reporter. Does Sylvia believe in God? When the kids were young, Inez and Jake used to talk about religion quite a bit. She enjoyed playing the heathen. No God, no nature. She’d been brought up without religion and was happy to keep it that way. Jake feared that given the same lack, the children would drift aimlessly through the cosmos. “Be my guest,” she’d say to Jake. “They can be Jewish. I won’t stand in your way.”
Now she faces Jake. “You’ve heard of the agnostic, whose God he doesn’t believe in is Jewish. That’s you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You believe that everything that happens is actually supposed to mean something. You don’t have a true agnostic bone in your body, Jake.”
“And nothing means anything to you?” Jake snaps.
That’s one she can’t answer. She hears the disappointment in Jake’s voice. After all the early promise—the blooming lovesong of their courtship and marriage—he holds her responsible for what went wrong because she’s not a believer. Maybe it was only the virus of youth, the rush of hormones, that gave her the hopeful blush that’s been missing for so long. Jake can’t understand her moods, the depth of her melancholy. Maybe he would have been better off with a bighearted, happy-go-lucky girl named Roxie who would tell him how wonderful he was and never tire of having sex with him. But hadn’t Jake chosen Inez, at least in part, because she was complicated? She remembers sitting with Jake on the ocean wall, on the afternoon of her sixteenth birthday. Jake was pointing toward the Farallon Islands on the horizon. “You can’t really see them most of the time,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. It’s like you, Inez. There’s so much more to you than anybody can see. You’re not simple like most of the girls I know. There’s nothing simple about you, and that’s why I love you.”
JAKE is still trying to get the waiter’s attention. She watches him wave his hand at the man, who looks too young for the walrus mustache gracing his upper lip. After ordering a tequila on the rocks with a twist of lemon, Jake says, “I need a change of pace, something to lighten up my spirit a little.”
Once he’s gotten his drink, Jake tries to surprise her. “I don’t believe in God either. And the God I don’t believe in has no particular denomination. What I believe in is you . . . you and the children.” He takes a sip of tequila and smiles at her. “I want to make love to you tonight, like the old days.”
Inez tries to remember the old days. Love in the old days. Perhaps it wasn’t as perfunctory as it’s become in recent times. She’ll try to honor their pact for at least one night.
“What do you say?” Jake asks.
“It’s our second honeymoon, isn’t it?” Inez says, smiling.
command performance
IF she had it to do all over again, Sylvia wouldn’t have stolen the bottle of Arpège. Who, in her right mind, going out on a big night, wants to smell like her mother did? She should have chosen a fragrance of her own. Next time, at City of Paris, she’ll glide the perimeter of the fragrance counters, engaging the salesgirls on the relative qualities of this or that perfume. Can you describe its high notes? How about the fruit in it, its woody undertones?
To make things worse, she doused herself with the Arpège. You’d have thought she was a toddler at her mother’s perfume tray. If only she’d mimicked her mother’s method: discreetly dabbing a couple of drops behind the ears, another on the sweet spot of each wrist.
Skunked in the odor of her late mother, Sylvia has arrived at the Opera House at six thirty, an hour and a half before the concert. Most of the musicians won’t even show up for another hour. Sylvia waits on a cement bench in the courtyard, spying distance from the backstage door. She wants to say a word to the violinist before she goes in. A blessing. A prayer. No matter that Inez has probably forgotten all about her in the two weeks since their last meeting.
As Sylvia waits, she deconstructs the word that seems to be guiding her actions. Anticipation. She isolates the Latin units, or Latin eunuchs, as her mother liked to say—ante for “before” and capere, meaning “to take,” “to capture.” Was that why she was here—to capture her future?
Sylvia enjoys watching the musicians arrive with so little fanfare for their night’s work. It surprises her how ordinary many of them look as they approach the stage door—a French horn player with a prodigious double chin, a violinist with a frayed overcoat, another with a Band-Aid on his chin, a flutist who looks as if he might be inebriated. Sylvia watches the approach of an elegant figure of a man in a dark coat and beret. Another violinist. How many women would love to unwrap the white silk scarf from his neck? Maybe he’s forty-five, the type who improves with age. He smokes with so profound a nonchalance that you’d think the world was already over. European, no doubt. Viennese, she guesses. For all his worldliness, his sangfroid, she bets he spends twice as long as she does standing in front of the mirror. Vanity, her mother used to say, isn’t reserved for women. And what does this cold-blooded Detlev, or whatever he’s called, think of his colleague Inez Roseman? Is he jealous of her? Does he question her superior talent? Would he like to make love to her?
Sylvia moves from her perch and plants herself against the wall beside the stage door. She wishes she smoked. She tries to imagine that the world is already over, that she exists only as an afterthought, a hollow echo, a bit of commentary. And then Inez turns the corner in a pair of white heels, holding her violin. Even from a distance, she is a picture of grace. Sylvia’s surprised to see her walking alone. Where is her family? Why haven’t they accompanied her on this of all nights?
Inez wears a long camel cape, buttoned to the neck, and a magnificent felt hat, a conical affair in a rich caramel hue. If Jackie Kennedy were to wear a Robin Hood hat, this would be it.
Inez doesn’t look up until she’s nearly to the door and the surprise she registers seems genuine. “Sylvia.”
The name remembered.
“I told you I’d be here.”
“I’m pleased.” Inez steps away from the door so that other arriving musicians can pass through. A few whisper greetings to Inez. Sylvia is amazed that her presence has slowed Inez’s progress.
“I wanted to wish you well, though I’m sure you don’t need it.”
“I don’t know what I need.”
“You’re going to do wonderfully.”
Inez closes her eyes and then opens them in a flash, a curiously childlike gesture that seems uncharacteristic. “Do you like the hat?”
“I love it.”
“Isn’t it outrageous? I wish I could wear it onstage; then it wouldn’t matter how I played.”
Inez, it occurs to Sylvia, is caught up in the adrenaline of the moment. She might have been as friendly to anybody who’d stopped to wish her well. Sylvia wants to remind her who it is that’s standing beside her. She wants to leave an imprint on the soloist, so that when her feet are spread onstage, her body might quiver with the slightest of after-shocks. Sylvia reaches out her open hand, as she did at Inez’s house, and lets it fall on the violinist’s cheek. Startled, but not wanting to appear so, Inez breathes in through her nose and offers a stage smile. Sylvia, her hand turned cool from the soloist’s cold cheek, retu
rns the smile, but leaves her hand in place. Sylvia is pleased by her audacity. From the Latin audere— to dare. Finally, Inez, with a little twist to the corner of her mouth, pulls away. She parts her lips to say something she doesn’t say. Maybe it was never intended to be said. Somebody calls Inez’s name, or at least part of it. “Nez . . . Nez.”
Sylvia watches a short, bright-faced woman with a viola approach Inez and kiss her on the cheek.
“This is your night, Nez,” the violist says.
“Mafalda!” Inez bows her head toward the violist.
“Look at that hat,” Mafalda says. “What a thing of beauty. You brought it for me, didn’t you? You really have an extraordinary feeling for my taste in hats.”
“Go on,” says Inez, draping her arm around the violist’s waist.
Sylvia feels a twinge of jealousy as she watches the two musicians together. But as the violinist turns on her white heels and steps with Mafalda through the open door, Sylvia is happy to know that there are others who adore beautiful Inez.
HOW to describe the Opera House crowd tonight? Flamboyant. Ostentatious. Redoubtable. Stately. Beguiling. Anticipatory? Not exactly. Sylvia doesn’t see anybody pulsing, as she is, with anticipation.
Instead of going to her seat and reading up on the Goldmark Concerto, as she’d planned, Sylvia promenades across the grand lobby. Nobody in the lobby is as nervous about Inez’s performance as she is. In fact, the crowd of concertgoers, leaning toward each other in clusters of two and three, seem inordinately pleased with themselves. Sylvia had hoped the crowd would distract her from her anxiety, but it only redirects it.
Beautiful Inez Page 7