“Aren’t you coming in?”
Sylvia drops a foot into the pool. “It’s hot.”
“Hey, you’re the great adventurer.”
She’d like to remain the watcher but, wincing, eases herself in.
Inez smiles at her. “Isn’t it nice? I wonder if death is anything like this.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you love the way your body goes numb and your head feels like . . . I don’t know . . . nothing more than an incidental orb?”
“You think death feels like this?” Sylvia asks, watching Inez as closely as she can through the steam.
“No, I don’t think death feels like anything. That’s the value of death; it’s beyond feeling.”
“I happen to like feeling.”
“You’re a sensualist, Sylvia.”
“And you’re not?”
“Not like you. Anyway, there’s something about being in here, maybe it’s the heat of the water, maybe the minerals, that makes me feel as comfortable as if I were dead.”
What a strange thing to say, Sylvia thinks.
“It must be the minerals,” says Inez, contentedly.
“Yes,” Sylvia says and considers the word. Mineral. From the Old French and the Middle English. Her mother’s favorite compound of languages. Mineral, something precious from the mine. Her mother tried to bring her down into the mine with her. Was she supposed to be the canary? Was she supposed to sing at the first breath of danger? She didn’t sing, she only watched.
“If you let it,” Inez says, “the water can take away your worries.”
There is nobody else in the pool area. Sylvia would like to put her arms around Inez, but she doesn’t. She must be the vigilant observer. She sidles next to Inez so that their steaming wet skin touches, but barely. She tries to imagine them as a seamless whole, inseparable as a pair of girls who don’t believe there’s anything wrong with loving each other. She closes her eyes and pictures a pair of teens after a swim meet, panting, invincible, in love with themselves and their bodies. But she and Inez are not schoolgirls.
Sylvia boosts herself out of the pool. The bones of her body have lost their edge; they’ve been rounded by the heat and have grown weightless.
“You’ve already had enough?”
“Yes, I’ve had enough.”
“It takes a little longer for the mineral’s healing powers to kick in.”
“I guess I’ll have to miss out for now.” Sylvia sits on the edge of the steaming pool, drops a towel around her neck, and dangles her legs in the water.
SYLVIA offers Inez a towel once she boosts herself out of the pool, but Inez isn’t interested in drying off. She never wants to dry off. How long can her skin glisten in the cool air? In the pool she’d begun humming the Schubert lied and making her plans. As much as she’d have liked to have gotten home before the final planning began, she couldn’t stop herself anymore than she could stop the steam from swirling around her. Now, out of the pool, the lied has grown faint, but she can still hear it. How long can she suspend this moment? Sylvia, who is not foolish, has read the mood. Inez closes her eyes. The end of the world would have been easier if it had begun with a Cuban missile. She opens her eyes. Sylvia, reclining now in a chaise lounge, has a wistful expression on her face.
“What you thinking about?” Inez asks.
“My mother.”
“Do you think about her often?”
“Lately I have.”
“You’ve never told me how she died.”
“Pills, lots of them.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. It could have been much messier, but my mother was fanatical about keeping the house tidy. The strange part is that she put on makeup just before, a kind of mask. Mother hated makeup, but there she was in heavy foundation, raccoon-eyed with mascara.”
Inez walks over and stands beside Sylvia in the chaise. “You found her?”
“I did. A dazzling sight, my mother, Cleopatra in Sacramento.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry for me, Inez.”
The comment hurts her. What’s surprising is how tender she feels. Just when she believes that any emotion has departed, it finds a way of streaming into the dark room like a final burst of evening sun. She faces Sylvia again, back to business.
“Can you let her go? Your mother?”
“I’m letting her go.”
“Can you forgive her?”
“I’m working on it.”
Inez places her hand gently over Sylvia’s shoulder strap. “I want to tell you something important. An irreversible decision I’ve come to.”
“No decision is irreversible.”
“This one is. Please. I need to talk to you . . . I need to tell you . . . you may have a hard time accepting what I tell you, especially after what you’ve been through. I’m not asking for your blessing, but if you could just try . . .”
“I know what your plans are, Inez.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I know.”
“You may think you know.”
Sylvia stands and walks toward the mineral pool.
Inez notices that her breath has become constricted. “Where are you going? Are you going back in?”
Sylvia sits down by the pool. “No, I’m only going to dangle.”
Inez wonders what Sylvia knows, whether she’s bluffing. It’s certainly a specialty of hers. Inez walks over and sits beside Sylvia. She dips her feet slowly into the hot pool.
Sylvia scoots a distance away and smiles. “You are so beautiful, Inez.”
“Thank you.”
“So the decision is irreversible.” Sylvia says it as a statement that hangs for a moment in the steamy air.
Inez is tempted to contradict it, out of reflex. She’s tempted to mimic Sylvia’s initial response. No decision is irreversible. “Yes,” she says, “it’s irreversible.”
“Have you decided,” Sylvia asks in a flat tone, “whether you’ll paint your face like my mother did or destroy the body in the process?”
“How long have you known?” Inez asks.
Sylvia doesn’t answer. She thinks of what Bibi said: There really isn’t much you can do about it, if a person wants to harm herself. She slowly slips into the mineral pool and goes under, holding her breath for so long that she imagines that Inez is about to come in after her. When she finally shoots to the surface, Inez hollers at her: “What are you doing?”
Sylvia takes quick, shallow breaths, her hair matted to her face like seaweed, the skin under her eyes stinging. She looks up at Inez. “I’ve always known. I’ve watched you for a long time. I thought, for a while, that I could save you. I couldn’t save my mother, but maybe I could save you. But Bibi knew better. She helped me understand.”
THAT night they watch The Red Skelton Show on the motel TV. Neither of them laughs at any of the jokes or skits, but they watch the show with a curious fidelity. After Sylvia turns the television off, they lie awake for a long time in their twin beds like a pair of mute sisters. Then Inez repeats Red Skelton’s sign-off line, the line of a red-faced clown, cloying in its sincerity: May God Bless.
THE next morning in the Studebaker, Sylvia turns her body toward the side window, which, despite the chill, she has rolled all the way down. She rolls up her sleeves, loosens her string tie, opens the top three buttons of her blouse.
“You seem determined to freeze me out,” Inez says.
Sylvia doesn’t bother to answer.
“More power to you.” Inez turns up the collar of her wool coat and keeps her eye on the centerline.
Once they hit 101, Inez pushes the Studebaker to seventy, relishing the open lane ahead of her. All that’s left to do is to put her a fairs in order. A strange irony in that. Is it courtesy or vanity, she wonders, that fuels the desire to have her affairs sorted neatly at the end of her life?
Back in the city, Inez loses heart, as the time to drop
Sylvia off nears. Is she not as cold-blooded as she believes? Will she ever see Sylvia again? She drives in circles for a while through the streets of the Marina.
“Where are you going?” Sylvia asks, peeved.
“To your place to drop you off.”
“Don’t you know your way?”
“I thought I did.”
“You’re driving like a fool.”
“I probably am a fool.”
“Why don’t you just take Lombard from here?”
“All right.”
Pretty soon she’s advancing with other traffic through the timed lights on Lombard, past the rows of tourist motels. They all seem to have vacancies today. Each of the motels has a big sign that promises one thing or another. COLOR TV. FREE BREAKFAST. HEATED POOL. Most of the motels have a tiny swimming pool out front that nobody ever swims in. A middle-aged woman could rent a room at the Beauty Bay Inn, go for a chill afternoon swim, dry off with a whole day’s worth of scratchy white motel towels, lie naked in her bed, ingest a bottle of barbiturates, and watch a nice hour of color TV.
Inez glances over at Sylvia, as if the faux reporter were privy to her mental motel scenario, but Sylvia still won’t meet her eyes.
As Inez pulls up in front of Sylvia’s apartment, a northbound cable car is trundling by, a syncopated hallelujah of bells rung by the thick mustached gripman, as tourists on the running board holler, everybody so glad to be alive.
Sylvia gathers her few things from the backseat. Inez turns to watch her and notices the bottle of Prosecco beside the picnic basket— they didn’t even remember to bring it with them into the motel. Sylvia, dark glasses in place, hat in hand, and jacket over her arm, is ready to duck out of the car. “Good-bye,” Inez whispers, as Sylvia slips out of the front seat. No apologies to make at this point. No prolonged good-byes.
Sylvia, on the sidewalk now, turns back. She dips her head through the opened window and flips her sunglasses up onto her head. Inez wants to take Sylvia’s small, intense face into her hands, just for a moment, and kiss her good-bye. She keeps her hands gripped on the steering wheel instead and listens to the engine idle.
“I’d like to try and stop you,” Sylvia says, her eyes rimmed in red, “but I’m not sure there’s any way . . . any way to do it. Is this really something you can talk a person out of? Certain people, perhaps. You? I don’t know. You have a look in your eyes, Inez.”
“What kind of look?”
“I don’t know. Like somebody who’s found God. . . .”
“Well, that’s a surprise to me. I’m not particularly big on God.”
“Smug is what I really mean. Somebody who no longer needs anything or anybody.”
“If it’s any comfort to you, I don’t feel very smug.”
“My mother was taken to the hospital five times. It didn’t stop her. She always came back with that look in her eyes.”
Inez draws in her cheeks, closes her eyes.
“Tell me what I’m supposed to do, Inez. Should I call Jake? Telephone your kids and tell them that their mother is very sick? Call the police? Get them after you with a paddy wagon, as if you were violent, or crazy, or drunk? Or should I just tell you in the simplest possible way that you’re breaking my heart?”
“I’m so sorry, Sylvia.” Inez turns the car engine off, opens her door, and steps out. Now they are both standing in the cool sunshine, the car very much between them.
“My mother turned herself into somebody who didn’t need to feel anything, and I studied her for so long that it rubbed off on me,” says Sylvia. “If you want to learn how to become numb, live with somebody who’s always at the point of destroying herself. I could have gone on forever without feeling much. I could have been happy enough. I had no need to destroy myself. I learned how to enjoy the smaller pleasures. I didn’t need anything as grandiose as you or my mother. I was happy enough to be a watcher.”
Inez reaches her arm toward Sylvia, across the roof of the Studebaker.
“Don’t. You can’t have your cake and eat it. That was one of my mother’s favorite phrases.” Sylvia shivers visibly and folds her arms in front of her.
“You’re cold,” says Inez.
“I’m all right. My mother could talk a good game. She was steeped in arrogance. She didn’t suffer fools and, when it came down to it, we were all fools in her eyes. If not, we would have been sensitive enough to understand her perfectly. Sounds like you, Inez.”
“Don’t play psychology with me, Sylvia.”
“I’m not playing.” Sylvia drapes her jacket over her shoulder.
“It isn’t going to work on me.”
“I know that. I know all about you, Inez. You’re exactly like my mother. She loved the word emotion. From the French émouvoir, to move toward feeling.”
“I’m not your mother, Sylvia.”
“I used to wonder if she ever achieved anything beyond synthetic feeling. If you counted the frequency of usage, if a concordance of her most frequently used words existed, grieve, grief, grief-stricken might lead the way. The only genuine grief in our house is what she left behind with me. She used words that way. Language as decoy. Language as bluff. Language as a means of disassociation. She made a wall of language around herself. You’re the same.”
“Are you trying to torture me?”
“Listen to the pot calling the kettle. That was another of my mother’s favorites.”
Inez looks up the street toward a southbound cable car trundling their way. She glances back at Sylvia. “You talk a pretty good game yourself, with all your phony identities.”
“I’m an amateur compared with you, Inez, because I take it all to heart. Nothing means anything to you. What happened to your soul, Inez Roseman? All this nonsense about me being the charlatan. We both know who the real fake is here.”
“I think I’ve heard enough.”
“I’m sure you have.”
The cable car is bearing down on the double-parked Studebaker, the bells a bit terrifying in their urgency. Sylvia walks quickly toward the front door of her building. Inez is at the point of calling her back, but simply watches as Sylvia turns one more time to face her. The silver medallion of Sylvia’s string tie, a shimmering orb in the sunlight.
old home
INEZ parks at a meter on Chestnut Street, feeding it all the pennies from her coin purse. This is Jake’s childhood neighborhood, the place she came three times a week for violin lessons. Inez has no idea why she’s parked here, except that she’s so numb after dropping Sylvia off that she has to stop somewhere. She locks her violin in the trunk and walks into a fruit market, where she buys a single Santa Rosa plum, which she slips into her coat pocket.
Walking west on Chestnut, she finds a phone booth that she closes herself away in. She spills out seven dimes. Who does she think she’s going to call? Her father and mother are dead, her sister is unavailable, her children are in school, she never wants to speak again with her father-in-law, her friend Mafalda is angry at her for disappearing, for becoming so poor a friend, and Sylvia will hang up as soon as she hears Inez’s voice.
Still, she makes phone calls—to Jake at his office; to the symphony manager, Arn Burlingame; to Jan Smetna, her violin dealer—and ends up speaking with a secretary, an assistant, and Smetna’s Czech apprentice. When one wants to conduct business without emotion, there’s something to be said for the efficiency of good assistants. Inez is assured by her husband’s gum-snapping secretary that he has nothing in the works that should keep him from being home by seven; she sets up an appointment with Arn Burlingame to discuss a leave from the symphony; and she gets penciled into Smetna’s calendar to get her violin appraised.
Inez decides to walk through the old neighborhood. Soon enough she finds herself in front of Jake’s old house on Francisco Avenue and she leans for a few minutes against a shiny blue Ford Fairlane that is parked exactly where her father used to park his Hudson. In the summers, after she and Jake had started seeing each other, he’d som
etimes go out and sit with her father while she was inside having a lesson. She used to wonder why this bright modern boy, home for a couple of months from his classes at Berkeley, would care to spend time with her old-world father. Once, after a lesson, she found them sitting forward in the lumpy gray seats of the Hudson with pocketknives in their hands. Jake was whistling one of his Tin Pan Alley songs and carving a greenish block of alder. Her father, the funny old Swede, had his lips puckered as if he might whistle “Dear Old Stockholm” as a counterpoint while he worked away on a lop-eared bunny. A couple of weeks later, Jake gave her a gift—his only known carving, a misshaped miniature violin, a freak of love and nature, that she kept for years in an underwear drawer with sachets of lavender and potpourri.
Jake brought her father pictures from Metronome of his favorite jazz musicians, and her dad returned the next week with framed photos of Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, and Earl Fatha Hines. Her father seemed happiest when he was making gifts and wrapping them up in colored pages from the Saturday Evening Post. Once, at the kitchen table, she watched her father wrap a just-framed photograph of Duke Ellington in a Pierce Arrow ad. “One thing I’ll say for Jacob Roseman,” her father said. “He certainly holds a strong appreciation for colored musicians.”
Heavy drapes are pulled across the picture window of Jake’s old house, but Inez can still see the living room as it was on the day that Jake first spoke to her. The matching chairs and sofa, covered in a creamy brocade, the warm light from the pair of olive wood floor lamps, the plump copper vase stuffed with huge white hydrangeas, the blossoms the size of a stout woman’s face. Inez can also see Jake, twenty-five years ago, staring out the picture window at her as she climbed into the black Hudson.
Pretty soon a man walks out of the house, a handsome fellow in a tweed coat. Inez watches this polished character walk down the front steps of the Rosemans’ old house. It is as if she is remembering somebody from her youth, but this natty man has no more connection to her past than he does to her present.
Beautiful Inez Page 29