Beautiful Inez

by Bart Schneider

  “It happens to everybody,” Christine says.

  “It hasn’t happened to me. At least not with you.”

  “Then you’re Superman. You were thinking about your wife. You don’t think about her when you should, and you do when you shouldn’t.”

  “How do you know what I’m thinking?”

  Christine fastens the top frog of her blouse. “I don’t know. I guess. It’s better than knowing. Knowing carries a certain arrogance about it. Guessing is a much more fluid affair.”

  “Thanks for the treatise.”

  “Anytime.”

  Jake pulls on his second sock and stands up in his boxer shorts. “Hey, I’d really prefer if you wouldn’t talk about my wife.”

  “Me? It seems like you were the one who brought up your wife— screwing her in the backyard. I was just making conversation.”

  Jake bows his head. “I’m sorry, Christine.”

  “You don’t have to tell me you’re sorry. Tell it to your wife.”

  Jake pulls up his slacks, buttons his shirt. He looks toward the mannequin in the window. “By the way, does the woman over there have a name?”

  “No, I’ve never named her.”

  “I think she should have a name,” Jake says.

  “I’ll think about that. See if I can come up with something for her.” Christine finishes fastening the frogs on her blouse. She comes over to Jake and drapes her arm around his waist. “I’m sure it won’t happen next time, Jake.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I can’t. I guess it won’t happen again. Don’t be an asshole, Jake. Maybe it will happen next time, and the next, and the next after that. Maybe you’ll retire from sexual activity altogether and decide to race cars or take up Zen Buddhism.”

  “Or tarot cards,” Jake says.

  “You could do worse.”

  Jake lightly runs the back of his hand over Christine’s cheek, then unbuttons the top two frogs of her blouse and reaches inside, taking gentle hold of one of her breasts.

  everything precious

  EARLIER in the week, a couple of days after her father-in-law had spied on her, Inez told Sylvia about the horrid incident. The old man had a way of killing something in her and now, as he creeped around the house in his soiled pajamas and flannel robe, downright raffish with the spirit of recovery, Inez backed into a quiet world and began to grow her protective skin again.

  At first, the prospect of seeing Sylvia frightened her. What if Sylvia struck her as an oddity, a gnomish freak of nature who had no business being in her life? Her alternate fear—that she was slipping back into a shell from which she might never emerge—was as much responsible for propelling her to Sylvia’s apartment as her foot on the gas.

  Sylvia, who’d been distant and suspicious the last time they were together, was kind and even forgiving when Inez called early in the morning to see if Sylvia might be free at midday. Barefoot in a black leotard and purple pedal pushers, her young lover greeted Inez warmly and embraced her. In a moment they were petting and talking baby talk. At the window, they watched cable cars trundle by in each direction. After Inez confessed her tale of woe, Sylvia told her that senile old men have no more power than what you’re willing to give them. Although Inez knew the business with her father-in-law was more complicated than that, she let herself spend a couple of hours, in the middle of a Thursday, feeling beloved. They made love, as they had the first time, to Ravel, but this time to a new recording of his rhapsodic Daphnis and Chloé. Inez, thinking it better to tell everything that she could bear telling, even confessed to making love with Jake in the backyard.

  Sylvia curled her nose.

  “He is my husband, after all.”

  “Was it good?” Sylvia wanted to know.

  “No, it wasn’t good. It’s never been as good as with you.”

  Later, Sylvia served an elaborate lunch. After eating, Inez wanted nothing more than to stay on, cuddle with Sylvia on the twin bed, listening to the hi-fi. Yet she had no choice but to return home.

  THIS morning, Inez awakes with a simple thought: everything in this life is precious and I don’t want any of it. It strikes her as the type of proverb a suicide might carry around with her. She hears it in her head as if it were a fragment of a Schubert lied. Once Jake and the kids are gone, and she is alone in the house with the old man, she wishes she could stay in her room all day and hum the lied. Everything in this life is precious . . .

  Instead, she cooks a large breakfast for her father-in-law—her own appetite has deserted her again—and leaves it, as he sleeps, to turn cold on the breakfast room table. After she showers, she dresses for success— although she doesn’t want any of it—in a tailored suit, an imitation Coco Chanel, with rose piping.

  As soon as she sees Sylvia, waiting under her building’s front awning, the Schubert lied comes back into her head and she tries to force it out. Dear Sylvia is clearly precious. Dressed in a pleated skirt with black tights, a rayon blouse the color of ripe cantaloupe, and a string tie like the one her boss wears—a silver ornament embossed with a treble clef—Sylvia, hidden behind a pair of dark glasses, looks like a beatnik girl on her way to the rodeo. How better to dress for a visit to a mental asylum? At her side, Sylvia holds a straw sun hat adorned with a moss green ribbon. For a moment, Inez wishes she could drive off right now and abandon Sylvia, in her cowpoke getup, under the awning. Instead, Inez pulls up to the curb.

  Sylvia presses her freshly painted lips together and walks to the open window.

  “Am I all right?”

  “You look fetching.”

  “I wasn’t sure how to dress.”

  “Yes, the nuthouse is a fashion challenge, but you’ll be a genuine hit.”

  “Inez, you look lovely.”

  Inez looks down at her Chanel knockoff. “Thank you.”

  “I can change.”

  “Don’t be silly. Get in.”

  Once Sylvia is seated in the Studebaker, Inez tries her best to give herself over to Sylvia’s charms, to everything precious she has to offer. “Where’d you find the hat?”

  “It’s from a little shop on Maiden Lane. Hy gave it to me. He gave me the string tie, too.”

  “How is he?”

  “He’s failing. I think he’ll go quickly now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you.”

  Sylvia drops the straw hat on her head and then turns the rearview mirror to have a look at herself.

  “It’s darling.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Yes, and it provides perfect cover.” Inez dips her head under the brim and kisses Sylvia on the corner of her mouth. “Bet you never expected me to do that in the light of the day.”

  “Not exactly.” Sylvia, playing the tart with a certain majesty, slips the tip of her tongue out of her mouth and lets it roam back and forth across her red lips. “I’d love to go to bed with you right now. You could park the car and we could go up to my apartment and make love like men and women do—really quickly.”

  “We better not. It’s so hard for me to get up to see my sister. If I go upstairs, I’m going to want to stay.”

  “You’re a tease,” Sylvia says, slipping a hand on Inez’s thigh.

  “You should talk.”

  The bells of an approaching cable car begin clanging a block behind them.

  “Let me steal one more,” Inez says, craning her neck again under Sylvia’s wide brim.

  IT’S a Monday morning without much traffic, and Inez is going quite a bit faster than the speed limit. Sylvia keeps an eye on the driver, uncertain whether to ask her to slow down. She’d rather not be included in Inez’s suicide plan, if such a plan is in the works. She doubts it. Not now, not this way anyway. She’s grateful for her sunglasses. They remind her of the distance she needs to keep from Inez. She can do anything she wants behind her sunglasses. Cry, if she must. She may never again take off her dark glasses in Inez’s presence. She imagines Inez is worried about
the visit with her sister. But perhaps she’s thinking about nothing more than the woman sitting beside her. The fact that she loves her. As if such a thing could be a fact or stay a fact. Her eyes begin to water, and she looks out the window to her side. The hills of Sausalito, Mediterranean dream houses, a brushstroke of woods, the deep blue of the bay. People live in boathouses down there. Where will she live in ten years, when she’s Inez’s age? Where will she live when she stops knowing Inez? It’s a strange question to ask, her love of Inez so ripe, now as she sits beside her.

  Inez slows the car down to something close to the speed limit and it feels to Sylvia as if a fever has broken.

  Inez turns toward her. “Sylvia?”

  “Yes.”

  “This isn’t meant as a loaded question, but have you ever been inside a mental hospital?”

  “No, but my mother used to tell me that that’s where I’d end up.”

  “She said that?”

  Sylvia nods.

  “What a terrible thing to say to your daughter.”

  Hope you never end up in a place like this is what her mother actually said. Sylvia was fourteen, the first of several times her mother was kept on suicide watch in the psychiatric ward at Sac General. Her mother’s boyfriend, Ricky Benoit, a sportswriter, whom she wished her mother would marry, brought Sylvia to visit. Poor Ricky seemed defeated by her mother. “Your mother has troubles,” Ricky said on the ride over. “Real or imagined, I understand this. But I don’t see what’s the matter with her talking them over with me. Thing about Angela, thing about your mother, she thinks even her troubles are too good for me.”

  Her mother sat in a bathrobe with long sleeves so Sylvia wasn’t able to see what she’d done to her wrists. At least she wasn’t chained to the bed the way they show in the movies. They kept her sedated instead. They didn’t want her to become manic and start chanting exotic vocabulary. Someone had talked her mother into putting on makeup. Her face had sharp edges and rouge had been worked into her cheeks.

  “Why do you keep looking at me like that?” her mother said. Sylvia trained her eyes on Ricky Benoit, who wore a green plaid sport coat and had his wavy black hair slicked back with Vitalis. He usually looked like a no-nonsense guy who could sell a lot of used cars or Fuller brushes. But in the hospital room, Ricky was nervous and couldn’t help jiggling something in his coat pocket.

  “You got nothing to worry about here, Angela,” Ricky said, “nothing to worry about.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her mother shrug. Her mother wasn’t worried about worrying.

  “Nobody needs to know about this thing,” Ricky said. There was some concern that her mother would lose her job if the school found out what she’d done to herself. Nobody wants a suicidal school nurse. “And I’ll be looking in on Sylvia. She’s a big girl, can take care of herself, but I’ll be looking in. So, you see, things are all right there.”

  That’s when her mother said it. It was an innocuous thing to say, yet highly noxious. Hope you never. It planted a seed. Became a mantra — Hope you never. It sharpened Sylvia’s instincts. As they were about to leave, Sylvia asked her mother a question, posed less out of curiosity than to keep the thin strand of communication with her mother intact for another moment. Angela Bran’s eyelids were beginning to droop over her eyes—the latest round of sedative doing its work—when Sylvia asked, “What’s the worst thing about this place, Mom?”

  At first, her mother looked like she was going to sleep on the question, but then she turned her head sideways and made a frightfully cogent statement. “The worst thing about this place is that the people here are afraid of language. They think that language is evil, that it’s going to come out and strangle them. Not only are they afraid of words, they’re afraid of ideas. They’re afraid of opinions, they’re afraid of personality. If they could eat little capsules and shit little capsules and think little capsules, that’s what they’d do, which doesn’t make it that much different from the outside. But still. Hope you never end up in a place like this.”

  NOW, as the highway climbs away from the bay, Sylvia looks down the embankment with sadness. She turns toward Inez, whose eyes are fixed on the centerline. She seems abstracted and tightly coiled.

  “Is there something I should know about the hospital, Inez?”

  “The hospital?”

  She watches Inez’s face soften as she makes sense of the question.

  “Not really. Strange things can happen in there. A few of the patients may start conversations with you as if you’ve been talking together for years.”

  “Do you think your sister will know when she sees us?”

  “Know what?”

  “That we’re lovers.”

  “How would she know?”

  “I don’t know. She might. If she’s sensitive.”

  “She won’t know.”

  Sylvia is hurt by Inez’s response. Perhaps she was fishing for affection, but Inez didn’t have to be so cool about it. Sylvia blinks back tears. “Maybe your sister is gifted with special perception.”

  “Do you actually believe crazy people are clairvoyant?”

  “It isn’t about clairvoyance, Inez. The fact is, anybody could see that you’re nuts about me.”

  This makes Inez chuckle in the deep-throated way that Sylvia loves.

  “Would you care to make a wager?” says Sylvia.

  “What’s to wager?”

  “I say your sister figures us out in the first fifteen minutes we’re with her.”

  “Not unless you tell her.”

  “I won’t say a word. Here’s how it works. If I win the bet, and there’s no question that I will win, we go to a motel directly after the visit and make love.”

  “And if I win?”

  “We go to a motel directly after the visit and make love.” Sylvia tugs on her string tie in the manner of Hyman Myerson, then dips the wide brim of her hat over her face. What lengths she must go to, to hide the fact that she’s in tears.

  IT feels strange to Inez, walking through the long, polished halls of Napa State Hospital, toting a violin. They march up the center hallway of Building Three, the walls painted a creamy lime. Her stomach is already knotted. She can sense herself trying to disassociate. Sylvia, looking like an oddball with her string tie and dark glasses, strolls along beside her. Was it a mistake to bring her? She doesn’t need anybody else to worry about. “This place sure makes you want to mind your p’s and q’s.”

  “Haven’t you been minding them?” Sylvia asks.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Inez says, a bit distracted.

  Although the building isn’t familiar to Inez, it is predictably sterile and forbidding. On this floor, there’s little sign of life. Along either side of the hallway are rows of shut white doors. A mausoleum of madness. Inez marches forward with little thought to Sylvia.

  “You seem to know where you’re going.” Sylvia needs to hurry along to keep up.

  “I know we’re in the right building; this is the one they said she was in.”

  They stop at a reception station and a small, hawk-nosed woman in a black-and-white uniform—name-tagged Iris—neither nurse nor social worker, consults a thick directory of names while puffing on a Lucky Strike.

  “She’s not in this building,” the woman says.

  Before thrusting a directory at Inez, the small woman puts a hand over her pack of Lucky Strikes, as if Inez’s query has only been a ruse to steal her cigarettes. Inez scans the list up and down for Bibi’s name and panics when she doesn’t see it, as if Bibi herself has disappeared. But there she is on the next page: Building Two, Ward D.

  They pass through a courtyard, a couple of benches facing a dry fountain, and make their way toward another monstrosity.

  Once inside Building Two, Sylvia begins chattering. “After my mother suggested that I might end up in a nuthouse, I fantasized about the kind of place I wanted it to be. I imagined a lovely garden, with clusters of bougainvilleas droopin
g all year long.”

  “There is no such place.”

  “Oh, there must be some private hospital like that somewhere.”

  “Well, this isn’t it.”

  Sylvia stops her by a wall of high windows. Not to look out—the windows are covered in steel mesh—but to talk without the brisk pace of their footsteps.

  “I think I got the idea about the beautiful madhouse after seeing Lust for Life,” says Sylvia. The filtered light reflects in her sunglasses. “It played in downtown Sacramento for so long I went to see it three times. There’s a scene in which van Gogh—or Kirk Douglas in a terrible red beard—is committed to a charming nuthouse in Provence. He’s got his easel set up in a pasture. It’s very bucolic.”

  Inez can’t believe that Sylvia is telling her a story, as if they were in a department store or museum, as if Bibi wasn’t close by and the baroque afternoon wasn’t about to unfold.

  “I can’t remember if there were any bougainvilleas, but there’s this young nurse or nun there to serve just him, to bring him wine and plates of grilled trout. I wanted to be in that place. I wanted the young nurse to look after me. I wanted the grilled trout.”

  “Why are you telling me this now, Sylvia?”

  “I wanted you to be privy to my nuthouse fantasies.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Inez, don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  “Thank you. I’d like to believe you.” Inez turns back toward the hallway, leaving Sylvia dazed in the filtered sunlight.

  ONCE they find the station leading to Ward D, where Bibi lives, they are told to make themselves comfortable in the visitor’s room across the hall. A thin, mustached guard in a starched white shirt and pants nods to them as they walk into the room, a large, sunny space, its windows also covered with wire. The puce-colored walls are shiny from countless coats of semigloss. The man in white stands against one of the walls.

  Sylvia and Inez each take a seat along the wall. As they wait, Sylvia studies some of the others in the room. A tall, slender woman, whose hair falls into her face, stands beside the window, writing furiously with a pencil stub on a large pad of yellow paper. She scrawls an intense streak, filling a page, then flipping it over with a grandiose gesture before leaping to the next page. Sylvia can see that Inez’s attention is fixed on the scribbler as well.