Beautiful Inez

by Bart Schneider

  “Oh, he had a frame shop, and, because of the neighborhood, he always had a Japanese assistant. I remember one of them very well. George Kogowa.”

  Sylvia pushes herself back from the table and assumes the posture of a professional listener.

  “My father really liked George. They hardly ever spoke, but when their work was done, they played chess together or carved animals from blocks of alder. During the war, when they put the Japanese in the camps, my father got very angry. He said they were the most loyal people he’d ever known. He wanted to give George the chess set they’d carved together, but George and his family were gone before he had a chance. I never saw my father so angry or so sad.” Inez bites her lip. “You know, I can go for weeks without thinking about him, but then suddenly—” She smiles at Sylvia. “My father came to love Japanese food, which is saying a lot for an old Swede. They tend to be set in their ways—they like their fish the way they’ve had it all their lives.”

  ONCE they’ve ordered, the old woman brings steaming bowls of miso. It seems a small miracle to be sitting with Inez Roseman, each of them lifting lacquered bowls of steam and cloudy broth to their faces. Sylvia puts her soup down and watches Inez, who is still tipping hers. The violin bruise under her chin is more lovely than ever.

  “I want to tell you again how wonderful your performance was. You played beautifully.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I can’t imagine how powerful a feeling it must be, standing up there in front of a huge audience.” Sylvia shakes her head. “And playing with such mastery.”

  “You don’t need to flatter me, Sylvia.”

  “That wasn’t my intention.”

  “Then what is your intention?”

  “I don’t know that I have one.”

  The violinist lifts her bowl of miso again. “That can’t be true. I’ve decided that everybody is up to something. Even my seven-year-old. Or should I say, especially my seven-year-old.”

  “And what’s he up to?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. This may sound strange, but I think that practically everything he does these days is focused on making his mother happy.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “He knows where his bread’s buttered.” Inez smiles cryptically. “But you, you’re a mystery, Sylvia. I’d like to know what you’re planning. You’re a good reporter; you have a way of drawing people out. But I’m not going to talk anymore. I’m just going to listen to you.”

  When the hunch-shouldered waitress approaches with their orders, Inez asks for a carafe of sake. “We might as well celebrate your day off.”

  SYLVIA nearly rises with pleasure off her pillowed seat at the sight of the Deluxe sashimi, a bounty of raw fish: yellowtail, snapper, salmon, mackerel, even octopus, along with a swell of pickled ginger shavings. Sashimi was her mother’s favorite food, and when she felt flush they haunted Sacramento’s one Japanese restaurant. But Sylvia has never had such an abundant plate in front of her. She’s a bit embarrassed to realize that a luxury so modest can make her swoon. But it isn’t the sashimi alone that’s responsible for that.

  A moment later, the old woman returns with the sake. Inez is uncommonly graceful, it seems to Sylvia, filling both their cups while holding a piece of tempura aloft. She looks deft enough to pick a fly out of the air with her chopsticks. And yet Inez hardly eats a thing. She holds the tempura between her chopsticks, gesturing with it, but barely eats.

  “You’re not talking, Sylvia. You’re supposed to talk. By the way, you mentioned something on the phone about your . . . analyst.”

  Sylvia lifts a slice of yellowtail with her chopsticks. “Yes.”

  “I’ve always been curious about how that works. Do you just talk about yourself for hours?”

  “Not all at once.” Sylvia drops the tender slice of yellowtail onto her tongue without dipping it in the tamari sauce.

  Inez sips her sake. “I don’t know if I could talk and talk to a man who hadn’t told me a thing about himself.”

  “You’d be surprised how easy it becomes,” says Sylvia.

  “So you like your analyst?”

  Sylvia lifts a shaving of ginger to her tongue. “Yes, I like him very much.”

  “I hope you don’t mind my being so forward, Sylvia.”

  “Not at all.”

  Inez deftly breaks a piece of tempura in half but doesn’t lift it from her plate. “How long have you been seeing this man?”

  “Since I moved to the city; a little more than a year now.”

  “Will you see him forever?”

  Sylvia forces a laugh. She swills her sake and holds out her little cup for a refill. “I don’t know. It’s not like in the movies. I don’t lie down on a couch. He told me that most people he sees come in to confirm the fact that they’re perfectly normal and don’t need him at all.”

  “Is that why you go?”

  Sylvia lifts a slice of salmon and swishes it through the tamari sauce. She’s surprised by this line of questioning. If it’s a game they’re playing, it’s not to be taken lightly. That’s just as well. She’s delighted by how supple her imagination is. She drops the salmon on her tongue. “I’m not sure. Maybe I’m trying to confirm that I’m a better person than I previously imagined. My analyst doesn’t treat me like I’m insane or anything.”

  “That’s good. How did you find him?”

  Sylvia separates a shaving of ginger with her chopsticks. “An advertisement in the newspaper.”

  “They advertise. I didn’t know they advertised.”

  Sylvia lets herself enjoy the fresh bite of the ginger. “It was for a study he was doing. Divorced women wanted at Langley Porter; small stipend o fered.”

  “So he pays you.”

  “He did, until the study was over. To tell you the truth, I . . . I kind of liked the idea of being studied.”

  “It sounds awful.”

  “I don’t know; he told me that I was different from most of the women in his study.”

  “How?”

  “Stranger.”

  “He didn’t say that.”

  “Not in so many words. Unconventional would be more like it. Now that the study’s completed, and the fee arrangement’s been reversed, I do my best to study him.”

  Inez smiles broadly. “You’re very funny, Sylvia.”

  “Not so funny.” Sylvia smiles at Inez. Are they flirting? She wants to put her left hand down on the table and see if Inez will take it. Instead, she reaches for a slice of snapper.

  “Have you always been so amusing, Sylvia?” Inez Roseman’s eyes seem to be shining.

  “Have you always been so easily amused?”

  Inez grins at her. “If you asked Jake, he’d tell you that I’m rarely amused.”

  Sylvia thinks suddenly of Colleen Hass, the first friend she made in the city. They worked together in the classifieds department at the Chronicle. Colleen told her that she had pretty eyes and a great sense of humor. “You could be a comedian,” Colleen said, “because you’re offbeat like those guys—you know who I mean—Shelley Berman and Mort Sahl. They’ll say anything that comes into their head, just like you.”

  She and Colleen often walked home from work together. Colleen lived at a residence club, the Monte Vista on Pine Street, and a few nights a week she’d sneak Sylvia into the dining room for free suppers. At first, it seemed an ideal relationship, like having a big sister to look after her. A half-dozen years her senior, Colleen was tall and chatty and drank copious amounts of Regal vodka.

  Sylvia lifts the plate of sashimi toward Inez. She would like to see Inez take a slice of salmon or mackerel and place it on her tongue, but Inez demurs. Her plate is still filled with tempura.

  “What do you talk about with him?” says Inez.

  “Who?”

  “Your analyst.”

  “I talk a lot about my mother.”

  “Tell me about your mother.”

  “You don’t want to hear about her.”

  �
�Sounds like you don’t want to talk about her, at least not with me.”

  “My mother was an interesting woman.”

  “She’s no longer with us?”

  This strikes Sylvia as a very strange idiom, since it seems that her mother is always with her. Certainly as much now as she ever was. “No, she isn’t with us any longer.” It’s a good thing to say out loud from time to time.

  “When did she die?”

  “A couple of years ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” Inez says. “A long illness?”

  “You could say that. Still, her death was sudden—an absolute shock.” Sylvia pauses, wondering if she should say any more. She opens her mouth again, undecided. Then she says it. “My mother took her own life.” She watches, not without pleasure, as Inez’s blond eyebrows point upward, revealing that she’s taken aback by the disclosure.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry. That must have been hard.”

  Sylvia nods.

  “And you think of suicide as an illness?” Inez asks, not shying from the subject.

  “Maybe not every one, but I believe my mother was touched.”

  “Touched?”

  “It’s a euphemism for mentally ill.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Sylvia is surprised how calmly she can talk about her mother. It feels good to take a clinical approach.

  “Would you rather not talk about her?”

  “It’s all right; I’ve made my peace, more or less.” The violinist appears to have an appetite for the morbid. How much to feed her? Should she describe the death scene, what it was like to come upon? Just how much titillation of this sort does Inez Roseman go in for?

  “I’m always fascinated by people’s mothers, perhaps because I never knew my own.”

  “That’s right, you said your mother died . . .”

  “Yes, at my birth.” Inez deflects the focus back to Sylvia. “How exactly was your mother interesting?”

  The intensity Inez has brought to bear on the conversation is breath-taking. And how strange that Sylvia’s mother has become the centerpiece. “My mother spent a lot of time reading vocabulary books. I think she believed a superior vocabulary would give her an advantage over others.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Of course not. But we had some fun.”

  “You too?”

  “Yes, words were our sport. So you better watch out, I have a sizzling vocabulary. I try to keep it under wraps.”

  “Why?”

  “I think it’s a bit depraved. That was my mother’s word for us. Depraved. She liked to think of us as sisters. The two depraved ones. We used to make lists of words and hang them on the walls.”

  “It doesn’t sound depraved to me,” says Inez, nibbling on a small piece of tempura. “I wouldn’t call it depraved. It just sounds like you and your mother were close.”

  Sylvia lifts a cluster of octopus from her tray and, as she chews on a bland, rubbery tentacle, wonders how the violinist would define the term.

  WITH Colleen, she felt as if she were depraved. After an evening meal at the residence club, sometimes they’d head down the hills through a couple of seedy blocks in the Tenderloin, past Oreste’s on Jones Street—a fabled restaurant that had been there before the neighborhood soured— and get a whiff of a better meal than the one they’d just eaten. “I’m going to take you in there some time, Sylvia,” Colleen would say, “and buy you an order of baked green lasagna. It’s their specialty.” At Geary, as the traffic and excitement picked up, they’d stroll along the theater belt to gawk at the crowds stepping out of cabs in front of the Alcazar, the Geary, the Curran. Colleen liked going into art galleries and pretending that she knew things about art, as they flipped through the bins of signed lithographs by Dalí and Chagall. Colleen was especially fond of the Keanes in one gallery, paintings of large-eyed waifs that the tourists also loved.

  The first time she and Colleen got into “trouble,” as she used to think of it, Colleen had been going on about one of the Keanes. The painting of a dark-haired girl, with sad, moony eyes, was featured in the gallery window. Colleen made a few comments about the artist’s palette and then said, “You know who she reminds me of? You!”

  “What are you talking about?” Sylvia asked. “Am I that pitiful looking?”

  “No, you’re that beautiful.”

  The comment surprised her. She’d never thought of herself that way. Beauty had passed her by, and she’d accepted it. Was it a cruel joke— Colleen calling her beautiful?

  They walked up the hills back toward the residence club. On Pine, Sylvia would veer west toward her apartment. But Colleen wanted Sylvia to come up to her room in the Monte Vista; she had something to show her. Once they were in the tiny suite, Colleen poured herself a large tumbler of Regal vodka and diluted it with a few dribbles of tap water from the bathroom sink. Sylvia declined an offer of the same. It was the nastiest drink she could imagine. Colleen took a catalog of Keane paintings from the pine bookshelf and lay down with it on her bed, resting her tumbler of vodka on the bedside table. “Come here,” she said. “Look at these with me.”

  Perhaps the novelty got the better of her, but Sylvia lay down on the twin bed beside Colleen and dutifully flipped through the paintings of gypsy waifs. A curious calm came over Sylvia as Colleen took off her glasses and smiled. There was a single lamp in the room on the bedside table. Colleen reached over and turned it off. Without light, Sylvia was suddenly conscious of the noise from the street. Sylvia heard the traffic heading out Pine Street, the cars braking as they inched down the steep hill on Taylor, the ta-ling-a-ling of cable-car bells on California Street, the animated conversation of a couple walking down the street. At least the world would be present during whatever was going to happen to her. This was a comfort. Even in the dark, she could see the dull rose of Colleen’s puckered lips move toward her brow—a soft kiss landed there, then another on her eyelid.

  In her limited experience with men, Sylvia was usually overcome with dread in the moment before sex. She wasn’t so afflicted with Colleen. She seemed to know how to respond. After both lids of her eyes were kissed, she opened her mouth. As Colleen reached under her blouse, tracing with a warm hand the mild curves of her side, Sylvia considered the possibility that she might be beautiful.

  NOW, in the corner restaurant, Inez Roseman is the one staring, as large-eyed as the subject of a Keane painting. Inez must think she’s mad, the depraved girl with the hidden vocabulary. Sylvia finds herself admiring the small mole on Inez’s right cheek; she is afraid to look into her eyes. She studies Inez’s eyebrows, faint blond ribbons that point upward as she smiles.

  Inez reaches for a strip of salmon from her plate. “I’d be happy to be your friend, Sylvia.”

  Is Inez playing with her?

  “Would you care for some tempura?” Inez asks.

  “Yes; it looks good.” Sylvia plucks what appears to be a piece of breaded broccoli from Inez’s plate. She nibbles it slowly. She is trying to see how long she can go without looking at Inez. She lifts her sake cup— a lovely puce-colored ceramic dimple with a Japanese character brushed on its side—and takes a long sip from it.

  the other half

  AS she drives Sylvia home in the yellow Studebaker, Inez peppers her passenger with questions about her work as a reporter. “What kind of stories do you like doing best? Do you ever find out things you’d prefer not to know? How much of your time is spent at a desk as compared with out in the field?” Sylvia offers a few halfhearted responses that lead Inez to a curious thought—what if the reporter is not who she appears to be? Surprisingly, Inez finds the prospect of fraud delicious, even if she happens to be its victim.

  Inez glances across at Sylvia and pitches another question to test her theory: “Have you ever had to report on a death scene?”

  Sylvia nods her head slowly and then looks directly into Inez’s eye. “Unfortunately, I have. A couple of times. The worst was a murder-suicide out in the Sunset District.�
�� Sylvia turns to look out the side window. “It was a neat little stucco house with wedding-cake steps. The thing that got me was that there was a roast in the oven.”

  Inez is taken aback. So much for her silly idea.

  “The bodies were in the bedroom. The detective didn’t want me to see. I didn’t really want to see, but I thought I should. I was filling in for someone on the police beat, but I knew that the only way to keep my stomach was to take a clinical approach, to study it.”

  Inez grabs the steering wheel tightly as she maneuvers around a double-parked car on Divisidero. “You’re brave, Sylvia.”

  “I don’t know about that. The place was enough of a mess without me adding to it. The poor woman was sprawled across a yellow quilt, dressed in a pair of dungarees and a factory work shirt. She had a big, fluffy slippers on her feet and a gunshot through her neck.” Sylvia folds her hands in her lap.

  “You don’t have to tell me anymore about it, Sylvia.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make you squeamish. You know, they found some guy to fill in right away. I don’t think they like the idea of women covering murders.”

  “Maybe it’s something women shouldn’t do,” Inez says. Stopped at the top of Fillmore, where some droll soul has altered the yellow street sign that once said HILL, to CLIFF, Inez smiles at Sylvia and asks, “What’s your department now?”

  Sylvia inhales slowly. “The society page.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m afraid not. I gather items that somebody else compiles. I pitched the Variety editor the story about you and Jake and he said, ‘See what you get.’ You see what I got.”

  “That explains why I’ve never seen your byline.”

  Inez eases the Studebaker across the intersection, considering, as she often does when heading down steep hills, what it would be like to have her brakes go out, or to give the car an extra surge of gas.

  Now she’d sail through the intersections of Broadway, Vallejo, Greenwich, down to the flat streets in the hollow—Union and Chestnut— colliding with what? A delivery truck? A fire hydrant? An unfortunate knot of pedestrians? She could always steer the car wide, she reasons, if pedestrians came into her path. But not now, not with the society reporter along for the ride. Jake never likes to drive with her; he says that she’s a herky-jerky driver. Once, when she was driving a long stretch on a trip to Los Angeles, Jake hollered at her—“Inez, you can’t play the gas pedal like it’s the pedal on a bass drum.” Jake had hurt her feelings, but she knew he was right—she is a herky-jerky driver. Now she shifts down to second and taps the brakes.