“Really?” Sylvia gives Inez a sideways glance.
“Yes. I don’t just want you seeing me.”
“But you’re so beautiful,” Sylvia says.
Inez takes off her skirt and slip and sits down on the edge of the bed to roll down her nylons. She drags a couple of fingers along her thigh and is struck by the smoothness of her skin and the thrill she feels. The long, sustained F, her breath, that familiar vibration of the tight second finger on the D string, has miraculously changed timbres. Ah, the beautiful word. Could she possibly explain to Sylvia how a pitch, heard only in her mind, has changed qualities, how the immutable F has modulated to the supple frequency of bamboo, a timbre, if you will, consonant with a body that is about to offer itself?
Now she watches Sylvia quickly unclasp her pretty bra. She turns shyly toward Inez, her small, buttercup breasts giving a half bounce.
“You’re lovely.”
Sylvia shrugs.
Inez drapes her nylons over a bedside chair. “You should know, I have a couple of scars.”
“I won’t mind.”
“From having babies with some difficulty.”
“Would you rather I look away?”
“Only if you think it will upset you.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Jake pretends they’re not there.”
“That’s his problem.”
Inez smiles at Sylvia, who is naked and lies back against a pillow, her knees drawn up high, her breasts flattened into small plates.
“You’re very beautiful, Sylvia. Nubile.”
“Nobody’s ever called me that before.”
“Just don’t ask me to define the word. I’m not sure I know what it means.”
“No wonder.”
“I read it in an advertisement. Sounds like a lovely thing, though, doesn’t it?”
“It’s all in the eye of the beholder.”
Inez unbuttons her blouse and takes it off. “Now, I want you to see me, Sylvia. It’s funny,” Inez says, laying her blouse across the chair. She lifts her camisole over her head. “I hardly ever wear a black bra.”
“It’s very sexy.”
“I had to dig to the bottom of my underwear drawer to find this.”
“You must have known.”
“How would I know? You are a surprise, Sylvia.” Inez leaves her bra on for now and looks down at herself. Her belly button, the holy F note, winks up at her from its position between the two incision scars. “This was the first one,” Inez says, touching the left scar. “Anna. They made a little mess sewing me up, that’s why there’s more scar tissue. The only thing I really mind about it is the way the skin is discolored.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Not at all.”
Sylvia’s hands move instinctively toward Inez. “May I touch it? I won’t, if you’d rather not.”
“Jake never has.”
“Never. That man must have a problem.”
Inez laughs at that. Is she really happy to be here, nearly naked on a young woman’s bed? Sylvia drags her soft thumb lightly along the length of Inez’s Anna-scar. Inez closes her eyes. Sylvia traces the Joeyscar with the tip of her tongue, and Inez arches her back in response. She caresses Sylvia’s soft cheek and Sylvia turns, taking the fingers of Inez’s hand, one by one, into her mouth. She loves Inez’s hands. How can she help herself? It would be enough to make love to her hands. The fingers, so long and tapered, even with their nails trimmed to the nub. Each finger with its history of virtuosity.
“Hmmm,” Sylvia says. “You have such beautiful calluses on the tips of your fingers.”
“You’re a strange girl, Sylvia.”
“I’m not a girl anymore.” Sylvia has slipped her hand under Inez’s panties. “Like it or not, I’m a woman.”
“I think I like it.” Her thighs open.
Inez has nothing more to say. Sylvia’s fingers press firmly until—oh, this. Her pulse, her softest center, wet and wanting.
“May I?” Sylvia asks.
Inez nods and her breath quickens as her panties are tugged down over her hips and the clasp of her black bra is undone.
Sylvia has given up language, too. Swapped it for sensation. She would like to draw Inez down to the depths. To take her, blood and bone and heart. The both of them helpless, falling. What if they descend fathoms ? What if they can no longer fathom how deep they’ve gone? What if they never return?
The smooth butter-skin of Inez is the beach of a small island. Her hands. Her tongue. The flesh a swell of waves. The smell of her. Like someone roused from sleep. Fear. Desire. Salt air. The sharp smell of her privacy, of married woman, mother, heartbreaking beauty.
Afterward, Sylvia studies Inez’s face—the feather of moisture over each blond brow, how Inez’s eyes seek Sylvia as soon as they open. Shy. Surprised by who she’s become in the last hour. The violinist has sculpted circles under her eyes. There is a papery translucence to her skin. She is so fragile, she could disappear into herself. Sylvia bends toward her and gently kisses her mouth.
INEZ feels a flash of shame as she stands beside Sylvia under the saucer-sized showerhead. The shame is like a patch of warm skin with a glow at the center of it. The water washes over her twin scars. She expects her shell to return and cover her as quickly as it departed. This time it’s bound to smother her. Any time now, a blistering F, a sonic boom of a vibration will issue forth. It’s one thing to be a lousy wife, a bad mother, and an inferior violinist, but now she’s stooped to a new level of degradation: allowing herself to get inebriated in the middle of the day and then seduced by a beatnik girl in an apartment that smells of incense. The fact that her body is still ringing with pleasure cannot erase her shame.
Sylvia smiles at Inez and hands her a tube of Breck. “Would you mind giving me a shampoo?”
The girl has a lot of nerve.
“There’s nothing I love more than having my hair washed by somebody. My mother used to do it. When I was a girl. It was about the only intimacy with her I could stand.”
“I’m not your mother.”
“I’m well aware of that.” Sylvia blinks quickly as if she might cry.
Inez hadn’t intended to hurt the reporter, or had she? She closes her eyes and listens to the blast of water from the showerhead. The surge hits the top of her head and runs over her breasts, her belly, down her legs. The swirling pool near her feet drains in a swoosh. Inez opens her eyes. “I’d be happy to wash your hair, Sylvia.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t.”
“Are you sorry that you enjoyed yourself so much?”
“I don’t know that I’m sorry,” Inez says.
Inez squeezes a little too much shampoo into her hands and rubs it into Sylvia’s scalp. She allows her sudsy hands to trail across Sylvia’s small, upturned breasts and around her hips. Her right hand—her bow hand, which seems to have a mind of its own—slides slowly down between Sylvia’s legs. Pleasure. Is this pleasure?
The reporter closes her eyes. Inez is fully sober now. Neither out of her mind nor subject to illusion. She is absolutely sober, standing in a shower of her free will, fully naked, without the weight of her shell or the ringing of the long sad note in her body. In front of her is a woman of whom she has become uncommonly fond, who moans softly as Inez strokes her.
STEPPING out of the shower, Inez thinks about her kids. Surely, they’re safe at home. She walks barefoot into Sylvia’s front room and sees, through the window on Hyde, that there is still plenty of light in the day. If for some reason Anna wasn’t able to meet Joey, he could get into the house by himself. They’ve gone through the drill innumerable times. Joey wears a key to the back door around his neck; he also wears a dog tag with his name and address. This, she’s learned, is a dangerous combination—the house key and the identification necklace. A criminal who gets ahold of these two items has access to your house. Once, she cautioned Joey against wearing the two together and he said, “Don
’t worry, Mom; this is a back-door key, and robbers are dummies—they’ll never figure it out.” What is at risk? A few possessions, her Landolfi, which is fully insured. The only thing to be concerned about is the children’s safety. And isn’t she the key to their safety? Barefoot, wrapped in an orange towel, Inez reaches up and touches her bare neck. Maybe she should be the one wearing the dog tag.
By the time Sylvia strolls into the living room, Inez is dressed and standing at the front window watching a few nimble passengers climb off the cable car at the corner. She listens to the rhythmic volley of bells, watches the car jerk forward before gliding through the intersection.
Sylvia comes up to the Inez and puts her arm around the violinist’s waist. “Do you have to rush off?”
“It doesn’t seem like I’m rushing. But I’ve got to get dinner started at home.”
“I bet you’re a good cook.”
Inez laughs. “I’m not good at all. I’m not even adequate. I’m a disgrace. I can’t even make a decent meal out of a book. But they’re stuck with me.”
“I bet you’re not so bad.”
“I am bad. Nobody ever showed me how to cook. My family treated me like a little princess, me and my violin. My other problem is I rarely have much of an appetite, which makes it hard to cook.”
Sylvia takes hold of Inez’s hand. “What happened to your appetite?”
Inez shrugs. “It vanished. I think my babies took it from me.”
“I’m going to cook for you, Inez.”
“I’m afraid it isn’t worth the effort.”
As Sylvia leans to kiss her, Inez turns aside.
“Do you think it’s terribly unnatural?” Sylvia asks.
“What?”
“Two women.”
“Yes.”
“How can you say that after we’ve just been together?”
Inez shrugs. “I didn’t say it. You said it. Or suggested it. Or wanted me to confirm it. So I was just being obedient. I’m a married woman, for God’s sake.”
“Happily married?”
“No, but that’s beside the point.”
Sylvia takes hold of Inez’s arm now. “I’m not going to let you go.”
“Let’s not be absurd.”
Inez kisses the young woman lightly on the head.
“You’re going to love me,” Sylvia whispers. “You are.”
Inez says the words over in her head. Love me . . . you are. The words are searching for a pitch to attach themselves to. They follow her down the steps to the street. They may as well be grace notes, the tidy embellishments in an overture that reveal little of what will follow.
the art of the fugue
TONIGHT, despite having nearly destroyed the lamb chops in the pressure cooker, Inez has a surprising appetite. Instead of moving the food around her plate—hiding the meat as usual behind the potato—she’s gotten everything she can off the bone and is tempted to excuse herself from the table. She’d love to take her plate into the kitchen so that she can gnaw on the bone in privacy, as stray thoughts of her afternoon with Sylvia float around her.
Instead, Inez grabs hold of the dining room table and smiles across at Joey, who is slathering a slice of French bread with butter.
“You want the butter, Mom?”
Inez shakes her head and looks Anna’s way. Her daughter is a strange sight—plagued with a fresh rash of acne, Anna has pulled her beige turtleneck over her chin to cover up the worst of the sores.
“I only got a B on my Merchant of Venice paper, Dad,” she says and pushes a forkful of zucchini into her mouth, the turtleneck slipping off her chin. “All my friends got As,” Anna whines.
“What do you think the problem was?” Jake asks.
Anna tugs on the turtleneck so that it covers her chin again. “Miss Harrington said that though my heart might be in the right place, I was wrong about the Portia speech and that my argument was out of control.”
“What did you say?”
“That the quality of mercy is more important than any man-made law, that mercy is more important than any law, and that if Shylock had gotten his way he’d be no better than the executioners who sent Caryl Chessman to the gas chamber at San Quentin.”
Jake has a bite of lamb; he seems to be thinking over what his daughter has just said.
“Hey, Mom,” Joey says and stuffs a slice of bread in his mouth. “Is Chessman that guy they killed in the jail near Marin Town and Country Club?”
“Yes,” Inez says, sadly.
Although Chessman’s execution two years ago had been a huge story, Inez is surprised that he entered her seven-year-old’s awareness, and that Joey managed to align San Quentin with the nearby pool club the family has been to a couple of times. Inez still gets upset when she thinks of Chessman. It affected her even more than the Rosenberg executions. Two of Inez’s heroes—Eleanor Roosevelt and Pablo Casals— were among the luminaries who wrote pleas on Chessman’s behalf. Jake had led one of the many protests outside the prison gates. Inez remembers the morning in 1960 when she drove out to San Quentin with Jake. There was a vigil of twenty-five or thirty people. Jake, dressed in a Pendleton shirt, stood in front of the small crowd. The look of sadness on Jake’s face embodied the mood of the vigil. “This man took nobody’s life,” Jake said softly, “but the state plans to take his. The state prefers to bury its problems than having to face them or finding a way to solve them.”
Inez turns toward her daughter. “Caryl Chessman sounds like a really apt example to use in your paper.”
Anna shrugs. She’s only interested in her father’s response.
“Hey, Mom,” Joey says, chewing on another hunk of bread.
“Finish chewing,” she says.
Jake, restless from sitting so long at the table, stands up and digs his hands into the pockets of his army surplus shorts. “You can’t confuse mercy with the law,” he says to his daughter. “One has nothing to do with the other.”
“What did the guy do to make them kill him?” Joey asks.
Inez butters a slice of bread. “They say he kidnapped and robbed and hurt some people.”
“But he didn’t kill anybody?”
“No,” Inez says and takes a bite of bread. She turns to watch Jake pacing in his shorts.
“Don’t you remember the last two lines in Portia’s speech, Dad?” says Anna.
Jake comes back to his place at the table. “I’m afraid not.”
Inez tries to recall how many stays of execution Chessman had. Eight. She remembers a comment somebody made after they killed him—Chessman’s not a cat after all; he only got eight lives.
No longer worried about her acne, Anna raises her chin, poised to recite. “ ‘And earthly power doth then show like God’s / When mercy seasons justice.’ ”
Jake finishes chewing a slice of meat. “Poetry is like mercy, Anna; in the end it has nothing to do with justice.”
“I don’t believe you,” Anna says, then clenches her teeth.
“What I mean,” Jake says gently, “is that we can’t count on mercy.”
“We should be able to,” says Anna, her lips curling into a frown.
Inez stands up and looks at her family. Jake, his mouth open, regards Anna, whose head is hung, with concern. Joey, ever watchful, has slipped, his thumb into his mouth for the first time in ages. Inez loves them all. Mercy is certainly easier to feel toward others than to herself. Now she wants to lift a lamb chop to her mouth and gnaw on it. “Excuse me,” she says and carries her plate to the kitchen.
AWHILE later, Inez returns to the dining room with coffee and a plate of stale molasses cookies. She sits across the table from Jake and idly dips a cookie into her coffee. Jake sits across the table from her, smoking and doing a fancy crossword puzzle in the Saturday Review, a double-crostic, which yields a wise saying once he breaks the code. She can hear Joey, upstairs in his room, playing scales on the cello. Anna is finishing up the dinner dishes. These are the moments of family life she most enjoy
s— when everybody has marked a territory and is on their own.
When the phone rings, nobody in the house shows any interest in answering. Anna finally picks it up. Sudsy from the dishes, she brings the phone to her mother with an exaggerated huff.
“Hello?”
Inez hears her soft breath first, and then her voice—“It’s Sylvia.”
Inez says nothing. She presses the phone closer to her ear.
“I love you, Inez.”
“Hmmm.” Inez glances at Jake, who’s hovering like a big shadow over his magazine puzzle.
“I mean it—I love you.”
“Well, that’s an interesting development.”
She can hear Sylvia swallow hard. “That’s not what I expected you to say.”
“What did you expect?”
“I don’t know. Are you angry at me for calling you? I bet I’ve made you angry.”
“Not especially. I’m just sitting here dawdling over my coffee. Jake’s dawdling, too, doing a crossword puzzle. His is at least thoughtful dawdling.”
Jake looks up and smiles at her, not the least bit interested in who she’s talking with.
“Should I hang up?” Sylvia whispers.
“You don’t have to.”
“Was that your daughter who answered?”
“Yes, that was Anna.”
“She sounds very grown-up.”
“She’s certainly trying.”
Jake raises his eyebrows. He has a question.
“The composer of Turandot?” he whispers.
“Puccini.”
“Perfect,” he says and jots the letters down with his pencil stub.
“Puccini?” Sylvia asks.
“Jake’s puzzle.”
“Is he right there?”
“Spitting distance.”
“When can I see you?”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Inez says.
“Why?”
“It’s the kind of thing where everybody’s miserable in the end. Don’t you think?”
“I don’t care. I want to see you.”
“Yes, you’ve made that clear.”
“But not you?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Are you sorry for what happened?” Sylvia asks, her voice turned wistful.
Beautiful Inez Page 12