Beautiful Inez

by Bart Schneider

  “I have no regrets.”

  “It’s only going to get better, Inez. Isn’t it?”

  Jake taps her arm. “Here’s another musical one. A polyphonic composition.”

  “Try ‘fugue,’ ” Inez whispers.

  Jake pencils the word into the puzzle. “Yep, I should have known that.”

  “What was that?” Sylvia asks.

  “I just gave Jake another word. Fugue.”

  “Are you forcing the man to do musical puzzles?”

  “It’s not quite as it seems.” Inez watches Jake bear down on the puzzle with his pencil stub. He’s figured out another clue.

  “It’s a lovely word, fugue,” says Sylvia. “It has the same root as fugitive.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Did you know that a woman can go in and out of a fugue state, that it sometimes involves wandering away from home?”

  “Do you propose that’s what I should do?”

  “I propose, so to speak. Let’s set up a time to see each other, Inez.”

  “You’re certainly persistent.”

  “It’s one of my virtues.”

  Inez glances at Jake, who’s nibbling on his pencil stub. “How’s next Tuesday, a little after ten? We’ve got an afternoon rehearsal.”

  “I don’t know if I can wait a whole week.”

  “Try. It will be good for you.”

  When she hangs up, Jake looks up from his puzzle.

  “Mafalda?” he says.

  “Yes,” she says. “Mafalda’s having man trouble.”

  “She’d do better to stay away from them.”

  “Yes, she would,” Inez agrees. She pictures Sylvia, sitting at her kitchen counter, mulling over the conversation just concluded, a jelly jar of wine in her hand.

  Inez eats a second molasses cookie, and, stale as they are, she can imagine eating a third. What’s gotten into her? Two is more than enough.

  “I think I have this solved,” Jake says, pleased as always when finishing a puzzle. “It’s a quote from George Szell. ‘In music one must think with the heart and feel with the brain.’ ”

  Inez pushes the plate of cookies aside. “That sounds like something a conductor would say.”

  “Yeah, but what does it mean?”

  “As long as it’s profound, it doesn’t need to mean anything.” Inez stands and gives Jake a kiss on his forehead.

  He smiles up at her from his puzzle. “You’re certainly in a chipper mood.”

  “Yes, that’s me, chipper. Rather scary, isn’t it?”

  “Well, I don’t imagine it can go on for too long,” he says.

  “You never know. I may decide to drive you crazy with good cheer.”

  “Go ahead, drive me crazy.” Jake reaches out and tries to squeeze her rump as she heads out of the room.

  INEZ climbs the stairs to Joey’s room and knocks on his door. After his exercises, the poor boy’s dug in to the Adagio from the Dvořák concerto again. A seven-year-old, no matter how talented, shouldn’t be playing the Dvořák, but Joey’s bonehead teacher, Charles Samuels, is so intent on impressing her with her son’s progress under his tutelage that he assigns music that’s beyond the boy.

  Inez ducks her head into Joey’s room. “Sounds good.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Well, you’re just finding your way through it,” she says, going into the tiny room and rubbing the small of her son’s back.

  “Sometimes I feel like killing my cello,” Joey says.

  “Really?”

  Joey nods his head a half-dozen times and then stands his cello on its side.

  Inez steps around Joey and sits facing him on the edge of his bed.

  “Hey, did you ever want to bomb your violin, Mom?”

  “Bomb it?”

  “Yeah, atom-bomb it into smithereens.”

  “No, I never thought of bombing my violin.”

  Joey stands and makes a series of bomb sounds, flailing his arms in the air.

  Inez laughs at her little bomb boy. “I used to think about jumping on my violin, though. Laying it on the floor, on the spot where I practiced, then climbing up on a chair and . . . Geronimo.”

  Joey climbs onto his chair. “That’s what you said when you jumped, Mom . . . Geronimo?”

  “I didn’t jump.”

  “But if you did? That was your blastoff word.”

  Inez shrugs, but Joey isn’t done with the game. He makes a flying jump off the chair, shouting his mother’s blastoff word, yet careful not to get too close to his cello.

  Inez wants to run a hand through Joey’s cowlick and holds out her arms to him, but he stands apart.

  “The good thing about a violin is that you could crush it with one jump. With a cello, it would take a few good jumps. I’d put on my cowboy boots.” Joey smiles at her and climbs into her lap. “What would happen to me if I did it?”

  Inez nuzzles the boy’s neck and then draws a hand through his hair, slowing over the stiff cowlick. “I’d probably yell at you.”

  Joey looks directly into her eyes. His face is an inch from hers, and he’s staring, like he did as a baby, right through her. “For how long?”

  “I don’t know; I’d probably yell at you for a half an hour.”

  “That’s all? I could stand that.”

  Inez feels Joey’s warm breath on her brows. “So are you going to jump on it?”

  “No,” he says, impishly. “I was teasing you.”

  Inez looks around Joey’s room. It’s sometimes hard for her to believe that he’s just seven. How many seven-year-olds have a picture of Pablo Casals on their walls? Whose idea was it to tack Pablo’s picture to the wall? Certainly not hers. Another wall is covered with pictures of ballplayers whom she can’t identify. And there are photographs of Jake and her. Inez once asked Joey why he had no picture of his sister on the wall. “You’re the only girl,” he’d said, “that I want on my wall.” It strikes her that she doesn’t deserve to have her image enshrined on Joey’s wall. She would have sold the boy down the river if she’d only been a little more clever. If she hasn’t yet broken the boy’s heart for good, she’s bound to do it.

  Joey starts to climb off her lap and she’s reluctant to let him go. “Hey, Mom, you ever have a dream where you’re playing a piece and your fingers get stuck on the strings?”

  “No, I can’t remember ever having a dream like that. You?”

  He bounces over to his practice chair and picks up his cello. “No, but a daydream. I have a lot of daydreams. You want to hear my favorite one?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m playing a recital in front of a big audience and my fingers are stuck to the strings with airplane glue! And then I have to pee, and I run off the stage with the cello stuck to my fingers and then I’m flying with angel wings to this big bathroom, and the funny thing is that because of the airplane glue, the cello just flies with me, too.”

  “Do you spend a lot of time thinking about things like that?”

  “All the time, Mom.” Joey steadies the cello between his legs and takes firm hold of the bow.

  “Maybe you’re practicing too much, Joey.”

  “I’ve got to practice, Mom, if I want to be really good.” He turns his head toward the fingerboard as he bows slowly through a D scale.

  “You’re already really good.”

  “Come on, Mom. You know what I mean.”

  Inez watches Joey’s chunky fingers follow the path of an A scale. “I’ve told you what happens if you practice too much.”

  “Yeah, you become a nut.”

  Inez nods. It seems a strange caution to be offering a seven-year-old boy, but she wishes somebody had offered it to her.

  “The thing is, Mom, I’ve learned how to practice and daydream at the same time.”

  “That’s great, honey.”

  “That’s what Mr. Samuels told me to do.”

  As Joey talks, Inez has a picture of her son as a man. She can see him perfe
ctly: tall and handsome like his father. A grin on his face. Pleased, perhaps, by what he can imagine.

  “Do you think Mr. Samuels daydreams when he practices?”

  “I wouldn’t know.” It is the most comforting image: Joey as a man. Living beyond her, without her. It is practically a certainty: Joey, with his wit and wise soul, making his way successfully in the world. What more could she hope for than having her youngest child survive her? Even if she lived to be eighty, Joey, at forty-seven, would bury his aged mother. The image of a middle-aged Joey, surviving her, helps her cope with the idea of her son bereft at seven.

  Inez bends to kiss Joey good night. “Will you promise to let me know before you jump on it?”

  “Sure,” he says, winking at her like a little man.

  By the time she reaches the stairs, Joey’s started up with the Dvořák again.

  the mythological beast

  ON Tuesday morning there’s a call from the hospital. Isaac Roseman—Jake’s father and Inez’s longtime teacher—has had a stroke. Isaac’s weekly chess buddy found him lying in the hallway of his building, beside a bag of trash meant for the garbage chute.

  The end doesn’t appear to be close at hand. A young doctor named Colton greets them in the hallway at Kaiser. He shakes hands with Jake—he must have recognized the attorney from the news—and flashes Inez a supercilious smile.

  “I see a decent recovery here,” Dr. Colton says. “He has his functions. He was alert this morning. Eager, I’d say, to get up. We think he got himself a little too excited and now he’s exhausted. He’s resting nicely.”

  Once she and Jake are alone in the room with the sleeping Isaac, Jake reacts to Dr. Colton’s prognosis: “Just our luck. Pretty soon he’s going to be drooling from all of his orifices.”

  “Stop, Jake.”

  “I’m not going to stop.” Jake makes a slurpy sound. They both laugh for a moment, even though it’s not funny. Even though it’s anything but funny.

  In his prime, Isaac Roseman had a certain charm that Inez learned not to trust, but after his wife died and he had nobody left to dote on him, Isaac became a bitter man. A lifetime ago, when Inez was Isaac’s prized student, he’d misbehaved toward her, occasionally touching her young body. For years at a time, she’d managed to put Isaac’s behavior out of her mind, especially during the early years of her relationship with Jake. What little she now remembers survives as a bare abstraction.

  After pacing the perimeter of his father’s hospital bed, Jake remembers a string of meetings he can’t miss. “What the hell am I going to do, stand around and watch the old man sleep? He looks like some sort of mythological beast. You going to just sit here?”

  “For a while.”

  “What good is that going to do?”

  “Probably none; I just want to sit here.”

  Jake’s hands are on his hips. Petulant like a child. She’d like to stand up and slap his face. For what? Does she have to know a reason? She folds her hands in her lap and listens to Jake’s disingenuous apologies for leaving.

  “Sounds like you better go,” she says and watches her husband as he backs out of the door.

  CURIOUSLY, Inez finds solace sitting alone with Isaac Roseman. It’s almost like sitting with the dead. The sleeping Isaac has a slight smile fixed on his face. Like a baby after he’s passed gas. She wondered exactly when Isaac’s stroke happened. Could it have been when she was lying in Sylvia’s arms? Could he have been leveled in the moment of her deepest pleasure? She tends to think like this when uncommon things happen. Like pleasure. In a rapture of grandiosity, she imagines herself to be at the center of the world, the trigger of all things, good and evil.

  There’s a knock at the door and Inez meets Silvio Manatelli, Isaac’s friend, the man who found him.

  “You’re his daughter?”

  “His daughter-in-law.”

  “Oh, yes. Heard about you,” Mr. Manatelli says, touching the brim of his worn baseball cap. “The violinist, the daughter-in-law, all rolled into one. I come over to play chess and whenever it’s my move, he talks. Maybe he’ll talk about you, maybe he’ll talk about his son. He makes me dizzy. I forget what I’m doing. Not that I’m doing so much. ‘What’s a matter, Manatelli?’ he says. ‘It’s your move.’ He beats me. Almost every time, he beats me. He says, ‘Read the books, Manatelli; that’s your only hope to beat me. Read the books.’ But I don’t read the books. If I want to read, I read. If I want to play chess, I play. So, how is he?” Mr. Manatelli glances over her shoulder toward the man in the bed inside. “What do the doctors say? They won’t let me in there. If you’re not family, you can’t go in. You might as well be a garbage man off the street.” The stubby man tugs on his sport coat turned shiny with age.

  “They gave him some medication. He’s sleeping with a smile on his face.”

  “He’s telling himself a joke,” Mr. Manatelli says. “Who else is he going to tell? I never listen to his stupid jokes.”

  Inez thinks of Isaac’s stupid jokes. Something off-color. Or racist. Isaac became a bigot in his old age.

  Mr. Manatelli looks up at her—hoping for some assurance?

  “The first tests look good. They say he may recover most of his functions. But maybe you’ll be able to beat him in chess now.”

  Mr. Manatelli nods his head and smiles. He reaches into a pocket and pulls out a small spiral notebook and a pen that he clicks a dozen times. Satisfied, he rests the pad against the wall and, creaking a bit, leans toward it. He nods to her again. “I’ll write him a note.” Manatelli prints each letter very deliberately. He gives his pen a final click, rips the sheet out of his pad, and hands it to Inez. “Please give this to Roseman, and if he says, ‘Where’s the flowers from Manatelli?’ tell him I took a De Soto cab over here and that cost more money than three bunches of blue carnations.”

  “Thanks for coming, Mr. Manatelli.”

  Back in Isaac’s room, Inez peeks at the note.

  Get better, Roseman. I got a word for you. Say it to yourself a hundred times. Better get used to the sound. CHECKMATE.

  MANATELLI

  INEZ snoozes in the bedside chair. After she shakes herself awake and sees sleeping Isaac in his hospital bed, she remembers seeing her father in the hospital following his first heart attack. All the blood had gone out of his face. She and Bibi had come to the hospital together. They were young women by then. Inez was already married and playing in the symphony. It frightened Inez to see her father so compromised. He’d been sedated, but his eyes brightened when she and Bibi walked into the room. He couldn’t yet speak, but Inez thought she saw him mouth the words, “My girls.”

  During much of her childhood, her father drove her to Isaac Roseman’s house for lessons three times a week. He’d sit in front of the house in his Hudson and work on one of his carvings. Once a month her father walked with her to the door and handed Mr. Roseman an envelope with cash for the month’s lessons. Her father didn’t want her to have to handle money when she was a child. When Isaac Roseman opened the door, her father bowed to him. She always wanted to tell him not to bow, because he was the better man. Sometimes when Mr. Roseman touched her, she’d think of her father sitting out in the car with his knife and his block of alder.

  INEZ strolls out into the waiting room again and sorts through the magazines. She picks up a discarded Life from August, with Marilyn on the cover. “Remembering Marilyn.” Everybody’s favorite suicide. Inez has already put in her time with this issue. She doesn’t need to look at the pictures of Marilyn again. It happened just six weeks ago now and the death’s fixed incontrovertibly in the public imagination. The story’s been told: Be careful what you wish for. The little girl made into a goddess. Fame and glory and loneliness. The queen of peroxide and barbiturates who slipped quietly out of her life. It’s an escape route that’s never appealed to Inez. Who wants to fade away like a lower form of life, a dog put to sleep, too mush-brained to look open-eyed at her fate?

  Inez flips past M
arilyn, through a series of ads. Spun-lo panties claim to be “Runproof! Zipper proof! Ring proof! Fingernail proof! Toenail proof! Even hook and eye proof!” Chung King invites her to keep a great Chinese chef in her freezer. The new GE clock radio will transport her “from Brahms to bongos and Bach again.” And because “fun is more fun when the pictures you take are finished in 10 seconds,” it just may be time to get a Polaroid Land Camera. Right here in page after page of advertisements—all the reasons to stay alive.

  jake’s ribs

  AND now the old man’s a shell of himself,” Jake’s thinking, as he steps into the intersection and the grille of a red Studebaker Silver Hawk bears down on him. He lurches back toward the curb, stumbles into a parked Rambler, and falls on his rear. He takes a few slow breaths and whistles a half dozen involuntary notes—no song he recognizes. The damn Studebaker might have killed him—he can still feel the breeze of it shaving past him at thirty-five or forty miles an hour. There’s a chill at the back of his neck. The package of barbecued ribs he just bought is all over the street. He stretches out his legs. Whistles something a little more coherent—“The Sunny Side of the Street.” Grab your coat and get your hat.

  Somehow, as Jake boosts himself onto the curb, his oxford-cloth shirt rips right up the back. It must have gotten attached to the rusty bumper of the Rambler. His back is sore. His pants are soiled. He’d like to sit on the curb and cry. Cars drive by, a few pedestrians seem to notice him. Does he look like a bum? A couple of stray dogs are nosing up to Jake. He unbuttons his ripped shirt, which is splattered with barbecue sauce. One dog, a black Labrador mutt with white markings on its neck, is chewing on a barbecued rib. The other, some kind of spaniel, seems more interested in Jake than in the ribs. Jake stands—a little creaky in the legs—and waves his shirt at the spaniel.

  THE look on Christine’s face brings back the hollow fear of the event.

  “Sit down,” she says. “Tell me what happened.”

  He slowly walks over to one of the tall kitchen stools. A guy arriving at his wealthy lover’s door—even if it is the tradesman’s entrance— wearing a white T-shirt and a soiled pair of slacks, needs to do what he can to stall. He wants to tell her, Alas, Christine, there are no pee stains on my underwear. Jake lights a smoke and thanks Christine as she hands him an ashtray. He loves this one shaped like a kitchen sink with teeny, protruding faucets that a guy can rest his cigarette on. If he had money to burn, he thinks, chuckling to himself, he’d buy a dozen of them. Christine has her eyes fixed on him, but he’s not ready. “Can I have a drink of water?”