Beautiful Inez

by Bart Schneider

  Jake draws on his cigarette, then touches her hand. “So how are you?” he says.

  “I don’t know.”

  Jake takes hold of her hand.

  Inez thinks to pull away, but breathes a moment instead. She notices the blue hydrangeas. They have no fragrance. She closes her eyes and tries to imagine a smell for them.

  “You look like you’ve been doing some serious thinking,” Jake says.

  “I’m always thinking, Jake.”

  “I know. You do enough thinking for the both of us.” He takes a deep drag off his cigarette and slowly exhales smoke out through his nostrils. “So tell me, Inez, how’s your soul?”

  Inez chuckles at the glibness of his question—a Jake Roseman specialty, and yet she finds herself wondering. She faces him. “I wish I knew.”

  Jake snuffs out his cigarette in the grass, then kneads her shoulders—a light massage. “I’ve missed you,” he says. “You’ve been gone so much, and now with the old man . . .”

  “It’s a difficult time,” she says, hoping to cut things off. When Jake is this genuine, he’s hard to resist.

  Jake leans over and kisses her, not on the lips but on the bridge of her nose. It’s a gentle, cautious act. A man dipping his baby finger into the water to test the temperature before fully partaking. She reaches out and takes hold of Jake’s face, that large globe of expression, hoping to control in her hands whatever intimacy might pass between them.

  She used to wonder if their sex life might have been salvaged had she been the one who regulated the pace of the foreplay. The concept was like a foreign language to Jake—he referred to it as the stall— and by the time she realized that she could have a voice in the matter, that she could demand that Jake slow down and include her spirit in the act as well as her body, it was too late for them. She used to wonder if Jake hurried through sex with his bimbos. They must be made differently than she is. Or maybe Jake’s discovered a new breed of rocket-age women who roar off instantly to orgasm. She prefers to believe that each of Jake’s girls aches like she does. But being inferior beings—which is the only way that she can conceive them—their cheap agony is short-lived and hollow.

  Jake has a hand under her nightgown now and she clamps her thighs around it before he can get where he wants.

  “Aren’t you getting enough from whoever your latest is?”

  “You’re the one I always want.”

  As Inez opens her legs to Jake, she feels herself shiver. From the night air, or from the touch of him?

  “Let’s see how slow you can go.”

  “You talk too much,” he says.

  With that, they both laugh, because it’s always the other way around. She lets Jake slide her nightgown up over her head. She’s naked in the backyard. She lets him kiss her. He runs his hand down her side, along her ribs.

  “My violin,” he says, softly.

  “I am not your violin,” she says, as quietly.

  Jake curls up beside her. This is a new strategy. He is going to make her want him. She does want him, but she can’t let him know that. As soon as she lets him know, he’ll be on top of her. She won’t be ready for him. Then he’ll get angry that it always turns out the same.

  Her hope, her foolish hope, is that if they lie there together long enough, they’ll arrive at some sort of mutual desire. But all he is really doing is counting: one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, just like the boys playing football on the street. Late afternoons, before a symphony, when she forces herself to lie down and take a little rest, she sometimes hears these football boys hollering: one thousand one, one thousand two . . . Once, when she asked Jake, he told her that the boys had to count to a certain number before they rushed the quarterback. Now she feels herself go tense beside Jake as she anticipates his coming to the end of his count.

  What’s most frightening is how ordinary it seems. When Jake climbs atop her, she consents. She is a willing participant. Or, more accurately, a participant without will. But did she say no? Of course not. Without saying yes, without saying no, the wife of twenty years is laid in the backyard.

  One time, years ago, when Jake was angry after a particularly listless session in bed, he called her a Swedish ice queen. She thought it had a rather nice ring to it.

  “You mean I strike you as frigid?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Jake said.

  They both knew that the F word was a no-no. If you uttered it, it might prove irrevocably true. The self-fulfilling prophecy. But she was way past the point of being spooked by such things. In fact, she’d wanted to say it, not that she even knew what the word meant. She could have talked all night about her peculiar lack of responsiveness, which was maybe not so peculiar after all. She’d sure spent a long time thinking about it. Far more time than Jake had. He’d pretty much shoot his wad and roll over. A moment later he’d have ferried out to deep sleep and she’d prop up a couple of pillows and consider her condition. Jake seemed to have made peace with it, as if he’d had the misfortune of marrying a woman with multiple sclerosis.

  After Jake called her a Swedish ice queen, she said, “Oh gosh, I always wanted to be royalty.”

  They’d been married for ten years by then, and she’d spent so many nights wondering what was wrong with her that she’d gotten a little bit bored with the question. She either needed another participant in the discussion or it was time to turn the argument on its head. What if Jake shared some of the responsibility for her frigidity? That was the kind of ridiculous thinking that reading Dr. Kinsey led to.

  NOW Jake, sated, climbs off her and turns over to sleep, naked as a baby on the blanket. Nature boy. Inez is tempted to leave him outside, but she doesn’t want to be party to the scandal it would cause if he was discovered by the children, or worse, by his father, sprawled without his clothes in the backyard. With a little effort she gets his shorts on and drags him to his feet.

  “Want to do it again?” he mumbles, his eyes not even open, but his pink prick making its way through the slit of his shorts.

  “Inside, inside,” she says, urging him forward.

  The house is quiet. Asleep. Fortunately, Jake is also asleep once he hits the bed. Inez is afraid of sleep just now. If she slept now, she might slip back into her role as the long-married wife and never be able to climb out. She turns the bedside lamp on and looks at Jake, peaceful in his sideways sleep, his lips bunched as if he means to kiss the air. The man is sated. At rest. Should she take some credit for this? Hardly.

  Sometimes after sex with Jake, a profound aversion sets in. Tonight, she’s unable to rid herself of his smell. Even after she’s washed herself, showered, the air around her is filled with his particular odor. She used to love his smell—an earthy caraway, or so she imagined, rising through a light blanket of whiskey and tobacco. Now she finds the smell cloying. She thinks of Sylvia, the touch of her skin, the cool glow of it. How happy she’s been, luxuriating in the province of Sylvia’s smell: the knotty fragrance of sex glazed with the clean floral tinge of a surprisingly good perfume. Sometimes the smell of a floral soap rising. Of lavender. Talc. Salt. The intimate, randy taste of Sylvia’s vagina. The faint but comforting smell of dry blood. A tinge of some Givenchy fragrance rising from her lover’s skin.

  But now Inez is oppressed by the smell of her sleeping husband. He’d hardly been on top of her a moment, a train passing through the station, and yet his imprint is insoluble. She could stand under the shower for an hour, to no avail. How to wash away twenty years that haven’t gone the way she wanted? What exactly had she wanted? That’s the hitch. She hadn’t known what to want, had imposed little will. And Jake? Jake had simply been Jake. Find a vacuum and fill it. Who could blame him? Wasn’t he probably a better man than most? She’d become the vacuum. Does she think she is unique in this? The only woman in America waiting for divine inspiration? Wishing that her husband, although no better trained in sacrificing his pleasure and convenience than she is in satisfying herself, will lead
her to the promised land? Why hasn’t she learned to be content with her emptiness or, like other women, to be practical: to measure what she has and doesn’t have in other ways?

  She could spend the rest of the night making an inventory that would look good on a balance sheet. Two beautiful children. A pleasant house. An enviable career, employing a bit of her talent. A husband who provides, in a manner of speaking. And what does she provide? Who exactly is the ingrate here?

  Inez steers her mind to Sylvia’s apartment. Who’d have guessed that you could make a paradise out of two rooms filled with cheap wicker chairs and jelly jars, three floors above the cable-car tracks? The photograph in Sylvia’s bathroom of a red door, a glorious color that makes her shiver every time she sees it, perhaps because it reminds her that the world is more various than she ever imagined. Ravel, Satie, Sinatra on the hi-fi. Dancing in the middle of the big room. A striptease in the bedroom. Love on the small bed. A meal of lamb chops and Swiss chard. Succulent.

  Inez would like to think that she has found herself in those rooms, found a true if crooked love in Sylvia. A tenderness outside of her experience. Perhaps what she loves most about Sylvia is that for all the woman’s trickiness, she’s as sincere as anybody she’s known aside from her own children. She’d hand Sylvia her heart, if she could, and be done with it.

  What would Inez have to trade to stay in those rooms above the cable-car tracks? Everything, is the humble answer. And what price to remain where she is? Live the second half of her life as the respected wife of Jake Roseman. She can see how it would unfold. Mother of two grown children, grandmother, grown weepy waiting for her children to call, her facility on the violin waning, life dissolving slowly through the shadows, the aches and pains. She hasn’t a choice. A woman like her isn’t brave enough to walk away from her family, her children, and go on living. She cannot make so sharp a left turn in her life, nor can she sit idle.

  Inez touches herself under the covers. She thinks of Sylvia’s tongue, the taste of Sylvia. The smell of Jake diminishes. Inez slowly pushes the covers off her side of the bed and begins to rub herself in earnest. For once, her body is determined to triumph, as she lies naked atop the sheets, glowing in the lamplight, slowly bringing herself to climax.

  The door to their room, which may not have been properly closed, is now ajar. Inez cannot bear to think that one of her children is lurking in the doorway. She looks up, in quivering fright. Isaac, her father-in-law, her old violin teacher, is leaning crookedly in the doorway, taking it all in.

  skeleton key

  YOU want to hear something amusing?” “Of course.”

  “The other night, Inez and I made love in the backyard.”

  “In the backyard, huh?” Christine pushes her plate to the side, her sandwich barely touched. “You’re getting awfully adventurous for an old married couple.”

  Jake isn’t sure why he’s brought this up. He’d been telling her about his father, the fact that the old man is now living in the house. He takes a bite of his pastrami sandwich. “We’ve run out of privacy in the house.”

  “And you’ve discovered it under the stars.”

  “Mmm-hmmm.”

  He and Christine are sitting at a sewing table in a large third-floor room. The presence of the single bed covered in a rose-patterned quilt pleases Jake. On the side of the bed is a geriatric sewing machine sunken in an oak cabinet. A slim-waisted mannequin in a snug summer dress is facing out the room’s only window.

  “There’s something awfully sweet about this room,” Jake says, quickly gazing around it.

  “I used to spend hours up here,” Christine says wistfully. “When the boys were little I liked to make them outfits—velvet overalls, pajamas in a wild zebra pattern.”

  “She reminds me of you,” Jake says, pointing toward the mannequin at the window.

  “I hope I’m a little more expressive than she is,” Christine says.

  “Indeed.” Jake reaches across the table and pats Christine’s cheek affectionately.

  “So how was it?” Christine asks, keeping her eyes trained on Jake.

  “How was what?”

  “Your backyard party with Inez.”

  “Oh . . . it was fine.”

  “Fine,” Christine says, with a smirk. “That’s not a very descriptive answer.”

  “Did you expect a blow-by-blow?”

  “Well, I figured you brought it up for one reason or another.” Christine picks up a wedge of pickle from her plate and takes a bite. “But, really, I don’t expect a damn thing, Jake. That’s the secret to my happiness.”

  “You seem to have a lot of secrets.”

  “You have no idea. You’ve only heard the ones I’m willing to share. So tell me about Inez in a general, nondescript way. You can leave out all the body parts. Have you figured out what’s going on with her? Is it still going on?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know what?”

  Jake lights a cigarette. He doesn’t want to be badgered by Christine. He blows a stream of smoke off to the side and hopes her eyes will follow it, but it’s he who watches the smoke.

  “Well?” Christine says.

  “I still don’t know what’s going on with her.”

  “Have you asked?”

  “What am I going to ask her?”

  “Ask her who’s betraying whom. Isn’t that the question we’re always at the point of asking our spouse? Or have we already decided? It’s them.”

  Jake reaches to the floor and picks a large red pincushion out of an open sewing basket. He pulls out a few pins and needles and, one at a time, jabs them back into the cushion.

  “I hope you’re not performing voodoo on me,” says Christine.

  Jake shakes his head and drops the pincushion back in the basket. He picks up a thimble and fits it on his baby finger. “No, you’ve just got me thinking. Inez still has this glow about her. It’s as if she’s on her way somewhere.”

  “But you don’t know where?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “And you don’t want her to go?”

  “Not especially.”

  Christine reaches into the sewing basket and pulls out a spool of white thread, breaking off a length with her teeth. “Have you thought about telling her that?”

  “What’s to tell? That I’d rather she not go, though I’m not sure she’s going at all, to a place I can’t imagine.”

  “You could tell her that.”

  “Right.”

  Christine takes a small needle from the pincushion, wets the end of the thread, and guides it through the needle’s eye. “Women happen to find men attractive when they admit that they’re confused, when they admit anything, really, but especially when it shows that they’ve been paying attention.” Christine looks up at Jake, then takes his hand.

  Jake faces her. “What are you going to do with that needle and thread?”

  “I have a loose button. Why the strange look?”

  “I don’t know. I once knew a woman who hurt herself with a needle and thread.”

  “Anybody I know.”

  “No.”

  “I have no intention of hurting myself, Jake.”

  “Good.”

  Christine begins to unbutton her blouse.

  Jake turns and looks at the mannequin in the window. He wonders if she has a name. Inez. There’s a name for you. Inez and Bibi. A pair of names. There’d been a letter from Bibi recently and Inez mentioned a desire to visit her sister. It’s been awhile since Jake’s thought about his sister-in-law and what she did to herself with a needle and thread. He and Inez never talk about Bibi. They rarely talk about anything from the past. It’s an unwitting strategy to leave things unmentioned. The burial mounds of a long married life. And now Christine talks to him with an unnerving frankness. It feels wrong to talk with her about Inez, as if he is betraying both of them.

  Jake lights a cigarette and watches Christine drawing the needle and thread through the bot
tom button of her blouse. He takes in the pale skin of her belly, her small breasts, cupped away in the snug black bra.

  Jake wouldn’t mind being in a room like this by himself. A smaller room. As a boy, he used a skeleton key to lock himself in an attic room that nobody ever went in. A maid’s room in a house without a maid. There was a small bed in there with a metal frame. It creaked when he lay down on it. After he’d locked himself in the room, he’d sprawl out on the bed and weep. Nobody in here, he’d say, but us skeletons. The weeping could go on for hours. It was all he ever did in that room. He never did it anywhere else. When the time came that he no longer cried, he stopped going into the room altogether, but for years, until he went off to college, he carried the skeleton key in his pocket.

  Christine smiles at him, kindly. It’s as if she’s caught a glimpse of him in the little room.

  “You know, Jake, for such a bright, lovely man, you really are a fool.”

  Not exactly what he expected from Christine. He gives her a sideways glance.

  “Hey, there’s a lot to be said for the fool, Jake. He’s the one who survives in the end. Think about his image in the tarot cards. This guy walking along merrily, not worrying about where he’s going to step next, because he’s pretty sure the sidewalk’s going to rise to meet him.”

  A HALF hour later, Jake’s angry. Angry at Christine. Angry with himself. He sits on the bed, one sock on, one in his hand, and watches Christine dress with no particular interest, yet he watches her closely. She stands bare breasted and pulls on her panties. Her tiny feet are splayed on the straw mat. She smiles at him as she steps into her black drawstring pants. She goes to the closet and hangs the blouse she’s just sewed a button on. He hears her shuffle through the rack of clothes. The whole house, it seems to Jake, is a game for Christine and when he’s here he’s just another part of her game. She brings out a red silk blouse and slips it over her bare breasts. The blouse has a Mandarin collar and frogs for buttons, but Christine leaves the blouse unbuttoned, her small breasts slightly fallen, lovely banded in red silk.