Beautiful Inez

by Bart Schneider

  “Of course. Mineral water or from the tap? I know we have mineral water, I just don’t know where it’s kept.”

  “The tap is fine; I’m not afraid of fluoride. Do you think it’s all a Communist plot, Christine—the fluoride?”

  Christine smiles at him. “No, I don’t think it’s a plot. What’s happened, Jake?”

  He watches her at the sink. A petite woman with high cheekbones and a swath of gray hair at her right temple, a woman so confident that she allows herself to go gray in front of your eyes, a sexy yet sensible hedonist who happens to be somebody else’s wife. She’s certainly delectable today in a floral dress, a shower of yellows and greens.

  “You probably want ice,” Christine says.

  She might as well be his accomplice in the stall. “Sure, I wouldn’t mind ice, and while you’re at it, how about a twist of lemon?”

  “Listen to you,” she says with a laugh. “You walk in here looking like you’ve been on a five-day binge and now you’re ordering me around as if I’m a barmaid.”

  “Hardly. I brought some barbecued ribs; that’s what’s in the sack. I’m not sure I’ll be able to eat them.” Jake can’t believe he actually went back to the barbecue shop for another order.

  “Tell me what happened,” Christine demands.

  “Can I have the water first?” Christine’s dress swishes as she comes toward him. He drinks the water in a gulp, wonders if she will offer him more. They could repeat the sequence ad nauseam. But Christine is not about to budge. A deal is a deal.

  “I was almost hit by a car,” he says. “A red Studebaker. A Silver Hawk. I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Oh. Jake.”

  “It doesn’t sound like much, but a thing like that can change the way you look at things. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Of course.”

  As Christine comes toward him, he sees she’s deciding how close to get. She is wary of him; she needs to keep a certain distance, as you would from any changed and unpredictable creature.

  “I was thinking of you,” he says.

  “Me?”

  “Of course. I’d just picked up a big platter of short ribs at Leon’s Barbecue. I was walking up here with the food. And I got to thinking . . . I got to thinking about the significance of a man bringing a woman ribs. Like Adam and Eve, although I realized that it wasn’t Adam’s plan to give Eve his rib. Believe it or not, this is the nonsense that was going through my head when I stepped off the curb at Geary and Fillmore.”

  He sneaks a look at Christine, trying to determine whether she buys his story.

  “You could have been killed,” she says, a hint of skepticism in her expression.

  “My thought exactly. You know what saved me? I think it was the ribs. I saw the flash of the radiator grille coming at me and I clutched the package of barbecue and jumped back to the curb. I was more concerned with not spoiling the ribs than I was with my own skin.”

  Christine brings him another glass of water now without his asking. He sips it slowly this time. “I sat on the curb for quite a while trying to remember who I was. People walked by me as if I wasn’t there. Just picture this: a white man sitting on the curb of a busy intersection in the Fillmore. You’d have thought that this was the most common thing in the world—to have a shaken white man on the curb clutching a package of barbecued ribs.”

  The curb he sat on, after the Studebaker nearly ran him over, wasn’t anywhere near Fillmore and Geary. He’d walked a half dozen blocks since picking up the ribs, and was at some quiet, no-man’s-land intersection between the Fillmore District and Pacific Heights when the Studebaker appeared. There wasn’t another pedestrian to be seen. It had been less than an hour since he’d left the hospital—the old man asleep with his frozen smile and Inez ready to camp out in the patient’s room for the foreseeable future. Jake had wandered a little through the Negro streets, picking up the food for his lunch with Christine, determined to go on with their Tuesday rendezvous. He didn’t want to think about his father and his father’s fate. Not yet. He didn’t want to think about Inez. Or Inez alone in the room with the old man. Or the terrible things she’d once told him about his father.

  As he walked through the Fillmore, he half expected to be noticed by somebody in the community because of the work he’d done there, but nobody recognized him, even as being a human being.

  Christine, judging him free of contagion, wraps an arm around his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m just a little shaken.”

  “I bet you are. What happened to your shirt and coat?”

  “I wasn’t wearing a coat.”

  “And your shirt?”

  There are times when Christine is like a mother, the way she expects things to be accounted for. “My shirt got torn when I fell and there was some grease on the pavement. I just took it off and left it there. Anyway, I wanted to see what would happen if I came to your door with a pile of ribs, looking like a hobo. Will she let me in or will she pretend she doesn’t know me?”

  “You know you’re always welcome, Jake.”

  “On the days that the help is off.”

  “This is my life,” she says and gazes at him steadily. “Is there anything I can get you?”

  What he’d like most would be to lie down with Christine and have her hold him.

  “Can I get you a cup of instant coffee?”

  “That’d be lovely.”

  Jake had been thinking of his father when the red Studebaker nearly ran him over. But once he scrambled back to the curb, he thought of Inez—how little he knew his wife, that he didn’t begin to know what made her tick. He was often struck by the precision of her mind, which was a result, no doubt, of all the hours of practice. Her mind seemed to work overtime, as if it was charged with keeping time for the entire world. Despite her physical beauty, which had deepened with age, Jake sometimes thought of Inez as a woman without a body, always thinking and remote.

  It’s amazing all that can pass through a mind in an instant. As Jake fumbled the package of ribs, which exploded on the pavement, he thought about how Inez drove a Studebaker. He remembered that in the way you know, upon waking, that a curious figure in a dream is really your father. For as long as Inez has had her own car, she’s driven a Studebaker, although her current model, a yellow Scotsman Sedan, is a far cry from a red Silver Hawk, with its large, round hawk on the radiator grill. Jake can still see the blazing emblem from the grille.

  Meanwhile, the dark, rusty barbecue sauce had seeped onto Jake’s shirt and the stray dogs found the scent. After fifteen minutes on the curb, Jake walked back down to Leon’s Barbecue on Geary and Fillmore and ordered another large platter of short ribs to go. Then he did what he should have done in the first place: he stepped prudently to the curb and hailed a cab.

  “You want anything in your coffee?” Christine asks.

  “Black. I’ll take it black.” As he puts out his latest cigarette, he counts a half dozen butts in the ashtray.

  Christine hands him a mug of coffee. “My survivor.”

  That, it seems to Jake, is an interesting way to think of himself. “I don’t know what I’ll be good for today,” he says.

  Christine takes a hold of Jake’s hand and gently separates one finger from another. “We’ll find some use for you,” she says.

  some loss

  IN the late afternoon, Inez calls home to make sure the kids are safe. She doesn’t bother to tell Anna, who is uncharacteristically chatty on the phone, about her grandfather.

  “I got Miss Harrington to change my grade,” she says.

  “That’s terrific, honey.”

  “She gave me an A−. Showed me a little mercy, Mom. Don’t worry about being late; I’m going to make some popcorn for Joey and me, and then he’s got his chocolate banana.”

  Inez returns to Isaac’s room. In a while another doctor, a red-haired gnome of a man named Hintz, comes in and takes a long look at Isaac’s chart. Then he peels back
Isaac’s sheet and blanket and Inez gets her first terrifying look at Isaac’s twisted right arm, his hand frozen, claw-like. Although Isaac hasn’t played for years, Inez is stunned to see the condition of his beautiful bow arm.

  “Will he ever get his arm back?” she asks.

  “Perhaps, to a degree,” Dr. Hintz says, his thin lips settling into a smirk.

  Inez wonders what’s so amusing. Dr. Hintz adjusts Isaac’s IV and scribbles something onto his chart. Inez asks whether Isaac has suffered a massive stroke, without knowing what she hopes the answer will be. During the doctor’s discursive answer, her mind wanders oddly to Sylvia. Pleasure is more appealing than this.

  Dr. Hintz is in teacher mode. “Although the word’s commonly used, massive is really a misnomer. I suppose we have to define our terms. Personally, I object to it. It’s not a medical term. Rather, if you ask me, it’s architectural. Not to worry,” Dr. Hintz concludes, “massive or not. This is not the real issue. There has been some loss, but much can be regained.”

  Inez could get a more useful answer from a fortune-teller out in the Mission District.

  Dr. Hintz is not deterred. “It’s going to take some work on his part. Plenty of work.”

  Isaac snorts in his sleep. Perhaps he doesn’t like being discussed in the third person.

  “Is Mr. Roseman a disciplined man?”

  The question offends Inez. She stands out of the bedside chair. “Mr. Roseman was a great violinist.” Great? Perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration.

  The doctor nods, then smiles at her again. His eyes, Inez notices, rest on her breasts. “What we once were,” he says, “and what we are now, can be as far removed as sleeping and waking.”

  Inez looks down at the doctor’s feet, laced into a pair of tiny brown brogues. What does he wear, size five? She thinks about how small his penis must be and smiles back at him. “I’m not expecting Isaac to play Paganini again, Doctor.”

  “No, not Paganini,” he says, bowing his copper head toward Inez before he turns and leaves the room.

  SITTING with her hands folded in her lap, Inez notices that, as the afternoon light pales toward dusk, Isaac Roseman has finally lost his smile. She considers the twisted fingers of his left hand and has a shadowy memory of the man touching her. The Mendelssohn Concerto always helped her forget. It’s hard to say why the Mendelssohn. She hums a run of eighth notes from the Presto. The Mendelssohn was just one of many pieces from the standard repertory that she studied with Isaac. She played the concerto with the San Francisco Honor Orchestra, a select group of high school students. It was her first major triumph.

  Her edition of the Mendelssohn was annotated by a character named Heinrich Dessauer, who offered copious explanatory remarks that she committed to memory. The first solo is to be commenced with warm, sinceretonal production, and integrated in plain, straightforward but not brilliant or virtuoso-like style.

  She was twelve years old. In order that the necessary increase in speed at the piú presto and the last presto may be produced to best advantage . . . and her teacher would place his hand on her waist . . . the tempo should begin to grow quicker very gradually from this point.

  When Inez was fourteen, she told Mr. Roseman to stop touching her. A year later, she started to see his son and put everything about the father out of her head. Mr. Roseman talked about how to approach a passage of Brahms, and Inez would think about petting with his son, and how Jake would try to slip a hand under her skirt when they went for rides in his borrowed Chevy. She’d listen to the rise and fall of Isaac Roseman’s voice and yearn for his son. Now she thinks about Sylvia. How Sylvia kissed her on the little bed. The potency of each kiss. Delicious. And Inez like a bride at forty, surrendering to so unknown an experience.

  Inez sits beside her father-in-law and hums the Mendelssohn. She sees herself with Sylvia—two women sitting together on the edge of a girl’s bed. She wants to open her legs to Sylvia. Legs, she tells herself, not heart, as if it were an acrobatic matter, as if she could discipline herself to give one part but not the other. The acrobatics of the living. A way to stay alive. You are no better than a man, she thinks. Isaac Roseman’s eyelids flutter. Does he have a comment? She watches him sink deeper into his sleep, the hand that touched her gnarled atop the blanket.

  the whole hand

  AT times her mother called her insatiable, but it was hardly true. Give her a finger, Angela Bran liked to say, and she wants the whole hand. If anything, Sylvia had trained herself to ask for as little as possible. Her mother trotted out another cute phrase from time to time: The way you behave, Sylvia, you’d think you were an orphan. It wasn’t until her mother had actually orphaned her that Sylvia discovered the concept of projection. She picked up a dog-eared psychology text in Sacramento and read as much as she could absorb about her mother, in clinical terms. On a gray Saturday in the fall, as the smell of burning leaves permeated the neighborhood, Sylvia walked toward the capitol and lit the psychology book on fire in a trash can bearing the seal of the great state of California.

  Now, Sylvia has begun to fear that she is insatiable. Since the afternoon that Inez came to her apartment Sylvia’s floated in the ether of their hours together, from the first, disorienting moments in the Japanese restaurant to the weave of the Ravel quartet and the surprising passion of their kisses, how Inez fell back, her throat long and vulnerable as she moaned with pleasure, Sylvia’s private concert, and their shower together after, water turning from hot to lukewarm as they negotiated the early terms of their intimacy. The next day, Sylvia found herself in the surprising position of standing on her cable-car corner, looking up at her apartment in which so much had happened. She was dazed the whole day, but actually went to her restaurant job at The Little Sweden in the evening. Whenever an image of Inez surfaced, Sylvia bit her lower lip and did her best to replenish the shrimp, or keep track of her orders at the bar, or bring used plates to the kitchen without incident. Inez drinking cheap wine, her legs curled under her in the wicker chair; Inez on her back on the bed, revealing her scars; the stunned gratitude in Inez’s eyes, after making love. It wasn’t until today that the genuine worry began to kick in—what will become of Inez and Sylvia? What future does she hope for? How much can she demand?

  Tonight when Hyman Myerson calls to ask if she’d like to go out for a drive in his new Impala, she jumps at the chance. She enjoys Hy’s company but, more than anything, welcomes the opportunity to have a couple of hours free of worry about Inez.

  “HOW are you, lovely?” Hy says, after she climbs into his shiny black Impala.

  “Fine.”

  “You look beautiful tonight.”

  “Come on, Hy.”

  “No, I mean that. Beautiful in face, beautiful in spirit.”

  Sylvia flicks the foam dice hanging from his rearview mirror. “I didn’t know you went in for dice.”

  “You like ’em? I picked them up after I got the car.”

  “Aren’t you a little old for driving around with a pair of giant dice?”

  Hy shrugs. “I am old.” He pulls gently on his string tie, so gently that it seems that he is tuning an instrument, or synchronizing, by some miracle of puppetry, his mind and his body. Then he grins at her. Sylvia told herself that when she left her apartment tonight, Inez Roseman wasn’t coming with her, that once she got into Hy’s car, she was giving herself to another experience.

  “Everything these days is about age, Sylvia. Age and attitude. Age and attitude and analysis.”

  Sylvia winks at Hyman. “Have you ever been in for analysis, Hy?”

  “You mean, psychiatric analysis? You think I need that?”

  Sylvia shrugs. “Maybe.”

  Hy bursts into a raw, biting laugh. “Naw, you’ll never catch me doing that kind of stuff. If anybody’s going to do any analysis on this old bean, it’s going to be me.” Hy’s laughter sets off an ugly cough that forces him to pull out a handkerchief and spit.

  Sylvia hasn’t been paying any particu
lar attention to where they are driving until she realizes that they are headed out California Street toward the Richmond District, close to Inez’s neighborhood.

  “The Impala drives nice,” she says.

  “It certainly does.”

  Hy pulls a small hand-rolled cigarette out of his jacket pocket and lights it up. “You ever go in for marijuana?”

  She shakes her head.

  “It won’t grow hair on your chest,” he says tightly before exhaling.

  “Good,” Sylvia says, taking the cigarette from him.

  “Go ahead, give yourself a little lift.”

  She takes in a long puff of smoke.

  “I’ll say this for you, Sylvia, you’re certainly a willing wench.”

  Wench, she thinks, from the Middle English wenche, meaning child. “Am I too easy, Hy?”

  “No, you are a joy, Sylvia. Listen, when you inhale, suck the smoke in and hold onto it.”

  “Where are we going?” she asks, after nearly choking on her attempt.

  “Wherever you want to go.”

  Sylvia shrugs and passes the little cigarette to Hy. She enjoys the faint ribbon of gauze wrapped around her forehead now and the way the houses on California Street seem to be going by faster than the car is traveling, as if there is one speed inside the car and another outside.

  Hy sucks on the cigarette and then composes his face in a stoic expression. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” he says, in a deep Alfred Hitchcock accent.

  “Good evening, sir.”

  Hy blows out smoke, goes into a little coughing fit, and passes the marijuana to Sylvia. “Don’t worry, I’m not contagious. It’s smoker’s hack, from two packs of Camels a day. Since February I’ve given up smoking anything but this.”