Beautiful Inez

by Bart Schneider

  Christine faces him. “Is this a lot of trouble for you?”

  “No.”

  “There can be compelling reasons, you know.” Christine runs her tongue slowly over her lips, then draws on the cigarette.

  “She isn’t one for anything messy, anything unpredictable.”

  “And that’s what I am, Jake—messy and unpredictable?”

  Jake doesn’t answer but stares straight ahead.

  “Look, now I’ve gone and put a fright into you.”

  “Fright? What fright?” Jake says, snapping to. “Here’s an idea— how’s about we stay down here until the world’s over?”

  “I like it,” Christine says and leaves a trail of kisses across Jake’s brows.

  Jake closes his eyes. It would be nice, it seems to him, to keep them closed for a long while.

  the blindfold

  AFTER pasta and a couple of glasses of hearty house red, Hy suggests that they mosey over to a coffee shop on upper Grant.

  “You ever go over to The Blindfold on a Tuesday night?”

  “I’ve never been there.”

  “The place is filled with poets and artists, motorcycle guys and queers, every kind of degenerate you can imagine, and on Tuesday nights the audience is required to wear blindfolds while the poets read their poems. It’s quite a spectacle, especially if you don’t keep your blindfold on.”

  “I don’t believe you about the blindfolds.”

  “It’s true. They say it allows one to better hear the true essence of the words.”

  Sylvia snorts. “Why do you go?”

  “For the poetry, of course. I’ve become a connoisseur of bad poetry. And for the girls.”

  “You’re shameless, Hy.”

  “I tell you, there’s nothing like a roomful of blindfolded girls. They listen with their mouths, I swear to God. Sensual deprivation can have a profound effect. Take away their eyes and they open their mouths. The blindfold is meant to enhance the aural experience. That’s aural with an a,” Hy says, with a wink.

  “Yes, I got that.” She thinks aura, breath, breeze. From the Greek.

  As they walk up Grant, past the shuttered Shaman Shop, Hy tells Sylvia about the unfortunate proprietor, a man named Bockley who lost his shirt betting on long shots at Bay Meadows. Sylvia wraps her scarf tightly around her neck—there’s a chill in the air—and thinks of Inez, wishing that they were out in the night together. But she’s with her boss, Hy, who walks slightly ahead of her, his hands dug deep in his trouser pockets. He likes the idea of being her guide. Sylvia wonders what she’s doing with a man twice her age. It’s a little late in the day for digging up a father figure, especially in the form of a would-be hipster, a character more pathetic than she is, who still holds out a ridiculous hope of seducing her.

  Hy stops outside of another storefront. “The Infidelity Tea Shop,” he announces. Sylvia turns to face the lit window that, under the hand-lettered sign, INFIDELITY, features a number of teapots, suspended miraculously in the pouring position, their spouts tilted expertly toward the empty belly of the teacup in their neighbor’s pattern.

  “See,” Hyman Myerson says. “Infidelity is in the air.”

  “It may be in your imagination,” Sylvia says, leaning against the teapot window. “But that’s where it’s going to stay.”

  Hy takes his hands out of his pockets and looks at them in the light of the window. He seems surprised that they are his hands. Sylvia notices his hard, thick nails before he turns his hands palm up.

  “I’ve become an old man overnight,” says Hy.

  “You’re not an old man,” Sylvia says and thinks of her mother. Angela Bran didn’t give herself a chance to grow old, and did her best to smother Sylvia’s life. Her mother, the superstitious school nurse, who routinely recited a vocabulary of phobias as if it were her catechism, had grown afraid of everything and did her best to spread that fear. She warned Sylvia incessantly against moving to San Francisco. “It’s the loneliest place in the world,” she said. “You’ll end up with one friend, if you’re lucky, and he’ll be sitting next to you on a bar stool.”

  Sylvia turns away from the shop window to face her friend. Hy seems like he’s been as busy with his thoughts as she’s been with hers. He extracts a wrapped toothpick from his coat pocket, pushes it through its paper wrapping, and pokes mercilessly at his gums. Sylvia looks at Hy’s yellowing teeth, dotted with gold fillings, and is reminded of a photograph she once saw from World War II. A man dead on the street in London after a bombing. The photograph focused on the man’s shoes, which had been patched multiple times. Despite the dead man’s sincere and humble efforts to persevere, to keep his life patched together as well as he could, it was erased in a random moment. That’s what she’d thought when she’d seen the photo. Now, seeing that he’s raised blood from his gums, it strikes her that Hyman Myerson is dying.

  Sylvia turns back to the window and studies the hearty spout of an orange Fiestaware pot pouring its ether into a delicate floweret-bordered porcelain cup. Infidelity. She isn’t interested in giving the word a gloss. Her mother would be disappointed. Angela Bran would have had her believe that words were what mattered in the end, that commentary was more important than action. Commentary takes precedence, Sylvia supposes, if the only action that inspires your imagination is to take your own life. To hell with her mother. To hell with her mother’s words. To hell with her mother’s suicide threats. Her grisly attempts. Her final achievement. Sylvia glances at Hyman, her dying friend. She decides to confide in him.

  “What?” he says. “You’re looking at me funny.”

  “There’s something I want to tell you.”

  “So tell me.”

  “There’s this person.”

  “What person?”

  “This certain person.”

  “So what about him?”

  “I think I’m in love with this person.”

  Hy puts his hands back in his pockets. “I take it you’re not speaking about me.”

  Sylvia shakes her head.

  “So tell me about this guy.”

  “Well, this certain person . . .”

  “He doesn’t have a name?” says Hy. “What’s his name?”

  Sylvia looks into Hy’s face, his blotchy skin, the great leathery pouches hanging under his eyes. In all the time she’s spent with him—on the showroom floor at Myerson’s, sharing a pasta dinner, sitting beside him at the symphony—she’s never allowed herself to guess how old the man is. The sadness in Hy’s face sits naturally in his sunken eyes and among the folds. Why hasn’t he shown her this face before? The beautiful gloom of Hyman Myerson.

  “Can I confide in you, Hy?”

  “That’s up to you,” he says, raising his chin to signal his willingness to listen.

  “I’ll be interested to see how you respond.”

  “A little test of character, huh?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “That’s a relief.” Hy runs his tongue across his gums and seems to savor the taste of his own blood.

  “Anyway, this person . . . this person happens to be a woman.”

  “A woman. Goddamn.” Hy, waving his hand toward Sylvia, dives into another spasm of coughing. “It’s not what you said,” he gasps. He reaches into his pocket for a handkerchief, excuses himself, turns his back, and spits into the handkerchief. Once he’s collected himself, he turns back around and to Sylvia. “I didn’t know you had it in you, dear.” His eyebrows go up. “So what’s her name?” he says, turning away to cough again.

  “Hy?”

  “I’m fine. What’s her name?”

  “Are you okay with this, Hy?”

  “If you think it bothers me that you go that way, you’ve got that wrong. Live and let live is what I think. So am I going to meet this person?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Keeping her for yourself?”

  “For the time being.”

  Hy nods his head a moment and then g
ets caught up in the rhythm of his nodding. “Look, Sylvia, I got a confession to make to you.”

  “What?”

  Hy tugs on the strings of his tie as if that might dislodge his words.

  Sylvia looks past Hy—a yellow Studebaker, a later model than Inez’s, races past them up Grant Avenue. Sylvia feels light-headed and leans against the shop window.

  “I’ve wanted to tell you . . . wanted to give you a heads-up . . .”

  Sylvia forces herself to look directly at Hy. “That you’re dying?”

  “How did you know? Toby tell you?”

  “Nobody told me.”

  Hy sighs.

  “What is it?”

  “Cancer. Emphysema. The lungs are shot. The breathing mechanism is about to go kaput.”

  Sylvia lays her head on Hy’s shoulder.

  “Let’s not get maudlin here.”

  Sylvia whispers: “How long have you known?”

  “A year. You?”

  “A few minutes.”

  “For a psychic, you’re a little slow on the draw.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “No more than everybody else these days.” Hy turns and begins walking up the street.

  Sylvia falls in step behind him.

  “I’ve been dreaming a lot lately . . .” Hy turns aside to cough and spit into his handkerchief. “Dreaming these phone conversations with friends I haven’t seen for years. They’re not conversations. More like I dial them up and they don’t answer but I can hear them on the other end and I can tell what they’re doing. Sitting on the beach, playing pinochle, ordering a beer at a bar. Whenever I want to say something to one of my old pals, a voice says: Leave him alone, just listen.”

  Hy stops at the corner and leans against the street sign—Grant and Vallejo. “And something else that’s really strange,” he says, his eyes brightening.” All I want to do—I mean besides having sex—all I want to do anymore is sell pianos. Give a guy a death sentence and all he wants to do is more of what he’s done his whole life. Who knew? Maybe it’s a homing instinct. I think of my father all the time now, and my grandfather, who was one of the great Jewish pioneers of California. One of the big three, in my estimation. Levi Strauss sold denim for work clothes. Zellerbach sold toilet paper. And Moses Myerson sold the first pianos to the brothels of California. Heh. Hence our motto: A Myerson for every house. As luck would have it, the family business ends with me. Nobody to pass it onto.”

  “What about your children?” Sylvia asks.

  “Don’t make me cry—neither of them is suited. It’s just as well. The industry has gone to hell. Used to be, folks either had a piano or a player piano. Now they have a hi-fi. I call it death by high fidelity. If I had my way, I’d die on my feet selling every last instrument in the store.”

  Sylvia turns aside as her eyes brim with tears.

  “Chin up, girl. For all we know, World War Three is bearing down on us a lot faster than my little cancer.”

  “Oh, Hy,” she says, “you have a real knack for solace.”

  SYLVIA had imagined neat rows of audience members wearing uniform eye covers like the 3D shades she once wore on a date with Colleen at the Coronet Theater on Geary. But in The Blindfold Café people’s eyes are covered with scarves, and scraps of fabric and leather of every imaginable hue. Some are sunken into overstuffed monstrosities, others sit on the edge of creaking straight-back chairs, turned toward the stage. A long-haired blond woman in sandals and a sundress is chanting a barely audible poem about the uses of nectar. To make up for their visual deprivation, people seem to be going out of their way to make gleeful sounds of assent, as they smoke and gulp coffee or grope for paper sacks with bottles of wine being passed to them by a friend. The floor is sticky with spilled coffee and who knows what else.

  Sylvia and Hy find a pair of vacant stools toward the back of the room under a painting of a brooding Negro bassist. On a wall to their side is a series of crude but glowing landscapes painted on cracked canvas window shades still attached to their rollers. Sylvia unknots her scarf and lets it fall open. With its pattern of prehistoric fish on an aqua ground, the scarf reminds her of a Paul Klee painting. She stole it from Magnin’s a couple of weeks after first visiting Inez. She’d wanted to see if the violinist’s sleeveless aubergine dress was still available so that she could hold it up on its hanger and muse about Inez. But she never got back to the dresses. After stealing the scarf, she sensed that a store detective was following her. Sylvia draws the scarf over her eyes and knots it. As her last bit of thievery before a self-imposed rehabilitation, the scarf is doubly precious.

  The smell of smoke seems stronger with her blindfold on. Hy erupts into a spasm of coughing.

  “Too smoky for you, Hy?”

  “Nah,” he says, hacking. “You look grand in a blindfold, Sylvia.”

  “Shh. Just let me know if you want to go.”

  “No, no, I’m all right. Just getting used to the atmosphere. Pardon me.” Sylvia hears him spit into his handkerchief. “You fit right in,” he whispers, momentarily recovered. “You’re born to be a beatnik. Me, I’m too old. If they ask me why I’m not playing along, I’ll tell ’em I’m the fuzz.”

  Sylvia puts two fingers over her lips and tries to hear the words the poet is chanting, but in their back corner spot it is difficult to make out any more than a smear of amplified language.

  Hy taps her on the wrist and whispers. She can hear him pushing off his stool. “Listen, I’m going to go to the bar and pick up a drink. Can I get you something?”

  “Yes,” Sylvia says, delighted at the thought of adding alcohol to the sensory adventure of this night. “Bring me a Bloody Mary.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “Goody. I may have to peek at it when it gets here.”

  AFTER Hy leaves, Sylvia slips her scarf beneath her eyes and gazes around the room. What an ideal spot for a voyant—a world in which everyone else is wrapped in blindfolds. Sylvia sees an open table far closer to the stage and moves toward it. Surely Hy will find her. Sylvia settles into a bentwood chair and pulls her scarf over her eyes. Now, for better or worse, she can hear the poet.

  “Why not gather up our sweet holdings?

  Why not climb onto each other’s shoulders?

  Why not penetrate the city’s bloodless marrow with a

  needle of nectar.”

  A silence follows and Sylvia isn’t sure whether the poem is finished. Then comes a smatter of applause. Sylvia sneaks a look at the blond poet as she climbs off the platform and embraces a Negro in overalls and an Abe Lincoln top hat. The Negro steps onto the platform chanting. “Red is under your work boots, under your trowel, under your bed.” Sylvia blinds herself again with the scarf, enjoying the poet’s sweet and witty drawl, the words a glowing vapor in her mind.

  “Red is under you, underwood, and undercover.

  Red your memory and red your heart.

  Red your mama’s throat calling your name.

  Red the petaled lips of your lover whispering.

  Red her tongue in the jelly and yours in the jam.

  Red the color of your firstborn’s head, bursting from his

  mama’s womb.

  Red is who you are, who you aren’t, who they want you

  to be.

  Your personal trail of blood, the crooked lines of your

  humiliations.

  Red is your eyes grown weary in winter.

  Red is your unctuous undertaker, licking his rosy lips as

  he lays you out.”

  A loud cheer goes up as the red poem draws to a close. Sylvia sneaks a look at the top-hat poet as he nods happily and waves his hat in front of him. “I call that poem ‘Red Scare,’ ” he says. “I happen to favor the color red and think it’s about time we take it back from the politicians.”

  Sylvia remembers her Bloody Mary and wonders what’s keeping Hy.

  “It’s one thing to be color-blind,” the poet says, “but another to sit blindfold
ed in a country without justice. Now they’re trying to make Cuba into the villain. They have already done that with the Russians. But I look at Cuba and all I see is a bunch of poor colored people trying to live their lives. I wrote this next poem this morning out of my worry.”

  Sylvia, her scarf now tied around her neck, looks around for Hy.

  “A fanciful collaboration, if you will,” says the poet, “with Ezra Pound. I call it ‘One Missile, Two.’ ”

  A hoot goes up from the blindfolded crowd. Sylvia stands, beginning to grow worried about Hy. The poet, in a deeper voice now, blasts his words through the microphone.

  “And then went down to the ship

  to drink rum and smoke Cubans.

  Set keel to breakers: the brown mama rolled

  tobacco leaf on her thigh as I ate her pie.”

  The crowd cheers after each of the poet’s lines. Where the hell is Hyman Myerson? Sylvia sees guys in leather, guys with beards and torn jeans, barefoot girls in leotards and wool skirts, most of them in homemade blindfolds of one sort or another. She begins to weave toward the bar through the motley throng of beatniks. The top-hat poet is whipping the crowd into a frenzy. Sylvia hears bursts of amplified language as she pushes her way toward the bar.

  “Man of no fortune . . . fortune hunter . . .”

  The bartender wears a black leather patch over one eye, leaving himself enough vision to get his job done. She needs to holler to get the bartender’s attention.

  “Hold your horses, chicky.”

  “Unsheathes his narrow sword . . .”

  She tries to stay calm, boosts herself onto a stool.

  “His nuclear missile . . .”

  “Have you seen a man, an older man?” she asks the bartender.

  “Unguarded, unprotected, unrepentant.”

  “Old guy, string tie?”

  “Yes.”

  “He goes up the long ladder.”

  “In the head. Passed out for a moment.”

  “Peers down on the cadaverous dead.”

  “Oh, no. He wasn’t drinking.”