Beautiful Inez

by Bart Schneider

  Heading toward the wharf, a tourist queried the driver, Brakes ever go out on these things? The gripman, a corpulent Irishman who assumed a mythic heroism as he worked the grips, didn’t miss a beat, Happens all the time. The tourist looked a little pale. You’re not serious. The driver gave the tourist a sideways look, Serious as a heart attack, ma’am. Inez and Sylvia burst out laughing and, later, as they walked along the wharf with their crab cocktails, Sylvia pitched the question to Inez. How about you and me? Do you think it’s serious? Inez winked, Serious as a heart attack, ma’am.

  Now Inez stares at the sharp edge of blue on the horizon and thinks of Sylvia, how much she loved holding Sylvia’s small, winning face in her hands.

  Anna is shaking her head. “You sure you want to learn how to blow bubbles?”

  “Positive.”

  “Look, I’ll try, Mom, but I’m not responsible if you’re too spastic to figure it out.”

  “I might surprise you, you know. It all depends on how good a teacher you are.”

  Anna shakes her head, works her gum a minute, and then blows a majestic bubble.

  “Not bad. Now show me how to do that.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up.” Anna reaches into her purse and pulls out another hunk of gum. “You need reinforcements.”

  After Inez has softened up the gum, Anna goes into her patter. “You got to make it thick, right at the center where your tongue is. Think of digging a pocket with your tongue and make sure it’s good and sturdy right where your tongue is. Then blow, really gentle.”

  Inez does her best to follow her daughter’s instructions. The first few times she gets something going it snaps right away. But, finally, she gets the feel, and a small bubble opens in front of her face.

  “Hold it, Mom, hold it.”

  Pretty soon, Anna has one of her own. They stand at the corner of Forty-sixth and Geary, mother and daughter, swaying back and forth, proud of their pink bubbles.

  lantern

  THE next night Inez makes mashed potatoes and a nice gravy to go with the leftover roast. Although Inez referred to the dummy cookbook to make gravy, she resisted the hurry-up recipe and tried her hand at “Perfect Pan Gravy.” At this point, she figured she might as well go for broke. Serving it all with broccoli and a green salad, she feels as if she’s fulfilled her duty as a mother and wife, at least once.

  Joey is the best eater. Inez enjoys watching him feast on the meat and the mashed potatoes. Anybody with an appetite like that, it strikes her, will always want to stay alive.

  “If you have to eat leftovers, Mom,” Joey says, “this is the way to go.”

  Only her father-in-law seems to take issue with the meal. He is angry at her because she’s done her best to avoid him since he’s been in the house. Tonight Isaac slouches at the dinner table in a tweed sport coat, frayed at the elbows, and a stained yellow necktie that she thought she’d already thrown out. But, as it happens, all of his neckties are stained and live somewhere in the spectrum of yellow.

  “Why don’t you try some mashed potatoes, Pop?” Jake says.

  Isaac shakes his head. “We never had such food.”

  Jake smiles. “When, in the old country, Pop?”

  “I thought you moved here when you were two years old, Grandpa,” Anna says, innocently enough. “How can you remember whether you had mashed potatoes?”

  Jake begins to laugh. It starts as a giggle, but pretty soon he has let loose an infectious peal of laughter. Inez thinks of an adolescent boy— the Jake she first knew—getting a kick out of what a buffoon his father is. Pretty soon Joey joins in with his high-pitched cackle, and even Anna begins to purr with amusement.

  “I never said anything about the old country!” Isaac shouts.

  Jake and Joey smile at each other, a conspiracy of sorts, but Anna is clearly disturbed by her grandfather’s shouting. Inez tries to catch her eye, to let her know that she loves her, but Anna keeps her head down near her plate.

  “Mashed potatoes and gravy are goyish food,” Isaac says, quieter now.

  “What exactly does that mean?” Inez asks.

  “Jews don’t eat this kind of food, with the fat and all the starch.”

  “Jews don’t eat potatoes?” Inez asks.

  “Of course, they eat potatoes, just not mashed potatoes with all this butter.”

  Inez looks Isaac directly in the eye and keeps staring at him, wishing she could work a curse into his addled brain, a kind of telepathic lobotomy, that would ensure that he’d be forever harmless to her children. Isaac, feeling the heat of her stare, the incision being made in his frontal lobe, is forced to turn away.

  “The thing is,” Inez says, “with a gentile cook you have to expect this kind of food sooner or later.”

  Inez has managed to shut the old man up, but rather than feeling any joy from the act, she’s steeped in a sudden melancholy. There’s no joy in watching Isaac Roseman dip his fork into the mashed potatoes. She remembers how much she learned from the man and how beautifully he once played. Does his betrayal take all of that away?

  When she was nine years old, already studying with Isaac, he left a pair of symphony tickets for Inez and her father at the Civic Auditorium box office. She can’t remember what was on the program that night. It was a warm evening, and her father sweated in his flannel suit. He had a tin of fancy candies that he kept offering and she kept pushing away. Suddenly, in the midst of a big orchestral work, there was a power outage in the auditorium and the lights went off. The music came to an abrupt stop. Unable to see their music, the musicians, unnerved by the ensuing hubbub, began to climb out of their seats and worry about the safety of their instruments. There was quite a panic in the audience, as if, rather than a power failure, an act of willful anarchy had taken place. Inez grabbed a handful of her father’s candies. Then she heard her teacher, Isaac Roseman, the concertmaster, speak into the dark auditorium.

  “So, we seem to have lost our electrical lights and there’s no telling when they will come back on. Some of you, you’ll probably be more comfortable going outside. Maybe nobody wants to sit in a dark auditorium. But for anybody who does, for anybody who’d like to hear a little more music, I’d be happy to play the Chaconne from Bach’s Partita in D Minor. I don’t need any electric lights to play that.”

  There were murmurs in the vast, dark hall. Some people decided to scurry from their seats for the exits. Mr. Roseman waited a moment for the commotion to subside. When he finally drew the bow across the D and the A strings, the open majesty of the sound caused a huge, collective gasp through the hall.

  Inez had just begun to study the Chaconne. “A little bit at a time,” Mr. Roseman said. “Technically, it’s difficult, but someday you’ll master it. Will you understand it? I can’t tell you that. Maybe in a lifetime. I’m hoping someday to understand it. I’ll tell you this, if somebody were to ask me what piece of music contains all of the universe, I wouldn’t think for a moment before I said the Chaconne.”

  Inez remembers sitting beside her father in the dark, listening to her teacher in awe. Midway through Mr. Roseman’s playing, an usher walked onstage with a lantern and set it on the floor of the stage a few feet from the violinist. The only glow in the hall illuminated Isaac Roseman. His left side was a bit outside the circle of light, but Inez could see his powerful bow arm and the determination carved into his face as he soared through his thirteen minutes of seized glory.

  Now, Inez watches her father-in-law, his bow arm twisted like a dead branch, lifting a forkful of mashed potatoes to his mouth.

  “So what do you think?” Inez asks.

  “What do I think?”

  “About the mashed potatoes.”

  “You want me to tell you I like this?—butter and mashed potato?— I’ll tell you I like it.”

  “No, tell me what you think, Isaac.”

  “I’ll tell you what I think. I could live without it.”

  “Not me,” Joey says, her little man, standing up for hi
s mother. “I want more. Pass me the mashed potatoes, Mom.”

  the splintered white

  AFTER they finish clearing the dishes, Inez lures Jake out for a walk. From the start, she finds it difficult to establish the right tone. How do you tell your husband that you care deeply for him, even though your departure is imminent?

  “How long a walk?” Jake asks, as soon as they step outside.

  “A walk of indeterminate length.”

  “Why the cryptic answer? Is there something you want to tell me?” Jake asks, suspicious. “Has something happened? Have you met with that Bucheron lady? Was she onto something?”

  “No, it’s nothing like that. I just want your company.” She places her open hand on Jake’s bare neck—Sylvia’s gesture—and leaves it there until he begins to fidget.

  Jake doesn’t know what to make of the sudden affection. “It’s cold out here,” he says, zipping himself into his parka.

  “Good for you to walk, especially after eating all that goy food.”

  “You really put the old man in his place.”

  “That wasn’t my intention.”

  “Still.”

  At the corner of Forty-first and Geary, Jake stops, shakes a cigarette from his pack, and lights a match, expertly cupping his hands around the flame so that it won’t die in the breeze. Inez watches him take a hungry gulp of his cigarette once it’s lit.

  “How far do you want to go?”

  “To the ocean.”

  “That far?”

  “It’s not so far.”

  Jake exhales a long stream of smoke. “But you realize that once you walk there, you have to walk back.”

  “Yes, your basic round-trip.”

  They walk a couple blocks in silence, past Forty-sixth Avenue, the spot where, just yesterday, she and Anna had blown bubbles and stared at the horizon. But tonight, given the low overcast, there is no horizon. Inez wonders if the word horizon can indicate the line of separation between any two things. Not just the sea and sky, but a woman from a man. Can the mind imagine a vertical horizon existing between a wife and her husband as they walk toward the ocean? Can people draw an impermeable horizon between their present and their past? What form of horizon separates the sane from the insane? And how does one picture the horizon line between the living and the dead?

  As they walk past the Seal Rock Inn, Inez watches a couple get out of their car with a pair of young children. Their license plate says Ohio. They’ve come from so far to see the ocean that they’re determined to stay as close to it as they can, even if their motel is a little on the damp and spartan side. As the parents gather their suitcases, Inez sees that they’re happy to be here, the woman draping an arm around her husband’s waist.

  “Care for a drink?” Jake asks, as they come to The Cliff House.

  “How about on our way back? I want to walk on the beach.”

  “You sure seem to know what you want.”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you think it will be a little cold down there?”

  “I think we can handle it.”

  The wind is quite a bit stiffer once they get down the hill to the beach. Jake leans over the beach wall. “We’re the only fools down here.”

  “Do you feel like a fool, Jake?”

  He turns his back to the ocean to light another cigarette.

  The tide is out, but Inez loves the way the splintered white of the waves leaps out of the darkness.

  “I’m going to go down there,” Inez says, as she kneels to take off her shoes.

  “You’re going to walk on the beach?”

  “Yeah, you coming?”

  “What’s the idea? You’ve become a natural woman all of a sudden?”

  “In fact, I have. Every now and then I try to remind myself,” she says, feeding him his old silly line, “that I too am a part of nature.”

  “Touché.”

  Inez walks down the concrete steps to the beach, and Jake, still with his shoes on, follows.

  “Aren’t you going to take off your shoes?”

  “I don’t want to get my feet all mucked up. What’s the idea anyway?”

  “A walk on the beach? It’s not exactly a revolutionary thing, Jake.”

  “In the middle of the night?”

  “It’s not even nine o’clock. Anyway, you’re supposed to be my nature guide. And I’ve heard you’re an unconventional man. I read it in the paper. ‘If Jake Roseman is anything, he’s unconventional.’ I saw that in Saul Rose’s column. ‘Jake Roseman, our bohemian attorney from the Caribbean, was sighted the other day in a fresh pair of Bermuda shorts.’ ”

  “Stop.”

  “I like to tease you.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because I’m surprised that a savvy old fellow like you can still be teased.”

  “Surprise, surprise.”

  Inez leads Jake across the soft sand, sliding her bare feet in and out of smooth pockets of sand. There is still a slight warmth in the sand even though the sun is down. Inez closes her eyes to listen to the gather and heave of the waves. Even with the tide out, the roaring breath of the waves surprises her.

  “You shouldn’t walk out here barefoot, Inez. There’s broken glass all over the place.”

  “It’s better than getting sand in your shoes.”

  “If we stayed up on the top, we wouldn’t have either problem.”

  “My, you’re resistant, Jake. Pretend you’re out on an adventure with a new girl.”

  “Don’t, Inez.”

  “Well, pretend anything. How often do I ask for your company?”

  Jake nods his head, a beaten man, falling into step.

  In a moment they are walking along the packed wet sand. Her feet are cold, but she’s happy to be in contact with the ocean. Inez wonders if a woman could put rocks in the front pockets of her slacks and walk straight into the ocean. She’d heard about a famous writer doing that. A brilliant white-haired Englishwoman, whoever she was, with rocks in her pockets. Inez reaches into the pockets of her slacks. They are nearly empty. Nothing but a cake of rosin. What’s she doing with a cake of rosin? She must have picked it off the counter at Smetna’s—a half-dollar of German rosin, glued to a green felt backing. It doesn’t have enough weight to sink a kitten.

  Inez takes ahold of Jake’s hand and thinks of the woman in the parking lot at the Seal Rock Inn. The woman from Ohio. The way she roped her arm around her husband’s waist. Inez tries, for a moment, to think of Jake as her lover.

  “You know what the problem is, Jake?”

  “No, I don’t know what the problem is.”

  “The problem is . . . you’ve never pleased me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m not even talking about sex, though I could talk about that as well. The trouble with sex for somebody like me is that I didn’t know that I was supposed to expect anything. Most people have an expectation of how it’s supposed to be, but not me. Which begs the question: would I have been better off not to have found out? I suppose I am talking about sex.”

  “I’m having trouble understanding you.”

  “You wouldn’t have trouble if you listened. If you listened really hard, I bet you wouldn’t have trouble. At some point, I realized it’s supposed to be about pleasure. It came to me very late, I’m ashamed to say. Pleasure. It’s supposed to be the instinct that drives us. The pleasure principle. But I didn’t know to have it. So there, you see how flawed my thinking is? Did I imagine pleasure as an elective? It’s not for you, Jake. You’ve always had the instinct. So here’s the question: if pleasure isn’t what’s been driving me, what is? Was I born without it? Did I have it bred out of me? Sometimes I think it was all that practicing on my violin. I can’t remember, Jake, did you ever see the carpet in my bedroom, the hole I wore in it from standing on a single spot? Your father . . . your father used to say that training a young violinist was like binding the feet of a Chin
ese girl. If you were successful, you created a cripple. I heard him say that a hundred times, but I never knew what he meant. Should I blame it on your father? Blame it on the old man?”

  Jake shrugs. “Sure, blame it on the old man.”

  They both laugh a moment. Inez thinks about Sylvia. How she learned more from Sylvia about pleasure in a weekday afternoon than she did during all the years with Jake.

  Jake bends toward her now and kisses her forehead.

  Inez closes her eyes. Lets herself feel Jake’s lips. His sweetness. “You think I’m going mad, don’t you, with all this crazy talk. Don’t worry, I’m not going to sew my fingers together, or do myself any harm. It’s just that thinking has become one of my curses. You’re lucky to be free of it, Jake,” she says with a laugh.

  “Hey, I’ve been known to have had a thought or two.”

  “Of course you have.”

  They come to a good-sized log, and Inez asks Jake if he’d consent to sit a moment. He doesn’t answer. She sits down on the log and looks up at Jake, standing there. More than six feet tall and still pleasing to the eye, even as a dark silhouette standing at the ocean. No matter what has come between them, she knows that she still loves the man. He is simpler than she is. Part of him has never needed to grow up. That’s one of the privileges for a nice-looking man with a measure of intelligence and charm.

  “Won’t you sit?”

  “There’s tar on that log.”

  “And you don’t want to get your pants dirty.”

  “Not especially.”

  “I’ve thrown all caution to the wind. How’s that for a cliché?”

  “Are you okay, Inez?”

  “I’m fine. Just having one of my introspective moments. I get an idea sometimes, like this notion of pleasure, and it doesn’t let me alone. I only wish that you’d tried to please me more.”

  “How come you’ve never mentioned it?”

  “How come it never occurred to you?”