As Jake sucks on his cigarette, Inez watches the pulse of ashy red light brighten a small corner of his face.
countdown
THE time comes when your business is all but done. That’s when the real countdown begins.
After doing a final shop at Sutro Super, Inez picks up Jake’s laundry at the cleaners—a box of shirts and three pairs of pressed Bermudas on hangers. The shorts make her laugh. It is getting very late in the year, but Jake is determined to keep wearing them.
“Bet you don’t get a lot of shorts this time of the year,” she says to the Chinese laundryman.
“No time of year,” he says.
“My husband’s.”
“Yes.” The man nods and makes an amused sound in his throat.
He knows Jake, Inez realizes, and is putting the pair of them together in his mind. Or does he even bother with such nonsense? Every time she’s come into this cleaners—and she’s been coming for years— she’s seen this man, maybe sixty now, buttoned up in his beige cardigan, no matter how warm the day or how much steam is rising from the back room. Today is the first time she’s spoken any extra words to him. As he bends over the cash register, she notices that he wears a gold wedding band, that his fingers look arthritic, that he’s getting thin on top. She knew him when he had a lot more hair on his head.
“Thank you,” Inez says as he hands her change.
“Say hello to Jake,” the laundryman says, surprising her. But why should she be surprised? Jake speaks with everyone and he has an effect on people. He can even get taciturn men to speak.
At home, Inez fills the fridge with groceries and waits for Isaac to go do his business. She’s learned how to time him. His habits are as predictable as a rat’s. Around four in the afternoon, he makes a trip to the bathroom that lasts a good half hour. Glory to a man and the passing of his bowels. With Isaac indisposed, Inez goes down to the music room in the basement for a little practicing. It’s hard for her father-in-law to get downstairs, virtually impossible, but Inez is still phobic about the old man walking in on her while she practices.
Today, she only wants to noodle around with a little Bach. She’s not been able to get the Chaconne out of her head since thinking of Isaac playing it in the dark. It’s something she’s played most of her life. She knows nothing that possesses a more severe and blistering beauty. Even for nonbelievers, the Chaconne has a holy architecture. Inez takes the violin out and, as she tunes it, wonders if she has ever been a believer, wonders if she is, in fact, a believer now. It might seem a foolish question for a woman in her situation to ask, and yet she answers affirmatively to both the past and the present. Belief can be as simple as realizing that your children will thrive beyond your life. Can’t a person who does not see herself as necessary believe in the world?
Inez draws a cake of rosin across her bow and decides to play the entire Partita in D Minor. All she needs is to bow the initial open Ds of the Allemande and she is inside Bach’s simple cathedral.
She closes her eyes—she always closes her eyes when she plays Bach. It was good of Bach to keep the Allemande so free of double-stops—they will arrive with a vengeance in the Chaconne. To begin this way, a player gets to dive into the beauty of the single line, relatively unencumbered. Inez, a woman in full control of her instrument and, surprisingly, of her life, plays straight through the Allemande, the Courante, the plaintive Sarabande, and the Gigue.
She takes a minute and a couple of deep breaths before launching into the Chaconne itself. It used to help her when working on its technical aspects to think of the Chaconne as a mechanical man. You put your penny in and the sequence of meticulously calibrated gears shift one into another. But with the Bach, unlike, say, the Paganini, the mechanical man comes alive almost immediately. He is flesh and blood. His large heart beats against his ribs. The more difficult the bowing, the more arduous the double-stop fingerings, the more emotional it becomes. Not emotion like we experience in the movies, which is to say histrionics, but rather a controlled emotion, rising indomitably along the parallel arcs and ridges.
Even though Inez is fully clothed as she plays the Chaconne, she feels herself stripped down to her essential skin. She’d like to believe that it’s the Bach that’s banished her protective shell, that a massive dose of Johann Sebastian has balanced her evil hormones and eliminated the heavy armor that’s accompanied her for years. But she knows better. The peace she’s made with herself is responsible.
Four strings and a dozen voicings. How can one woman hold so much within her? How can she stop? The engine keeps pulsing, the fingers, curled into knots, tighten and loosen, the bow, a circular fury of pistons. When the engine hums with such harmonic majesty, an entire civilization grows, treelike, in her ear. Everything she’s imagined, in tune, all she’s desired, in time, each person she’s loved, baring themselves, gently insisting, right through the final held D, that she do what she must.
AT five, she gets a call from Jake that he won’t be home for dinner. A late meeting or a new girlfriend? She doesn’t bother to ask. Either way, she’s indifferent. She’d planned to make a nice meat loaf, but now with Jake gone and Joey having discovered the prodigious supply of TV dinners she’s stuffed into the freezer, she opts for the lazy mother’s choice. It seems such a strange final meal, at first, but both Joey and Anna are delighted that she’s willing to join them. Frozen dinners are usually reserved for the kids, for the nights when she and Jake are both out.
Only Isaac grumbles at the idea of a TV dinner. Alone with her in the kitchen, he gives her a sad-eyed look—like an old animal betrayed. “I don’t want a ready-made frozen dinner.”
“Why’s that, Isaac?”
“Who ever heard of a man eating ice for his dinner?”
“It’s warm when you eat it.”
“It’s one thing for the astronauts, but not for me.”
“If you don’t want one, I won’t put one in for you.”
“I don’t want one. I don’t want to go to space, I don’t want to eat their dinner. What’s it going to do for my digestion anyway?”
“That’s hard for me to say.”
He picks up a TV dinner package with his good hand and waves it in the air. “Frozen white turkey, frozen mashed potatoes, frozen peas, frozen goyish gravy. A meal like this could kill me.”
“Isaac, aren’t we being a little dramatic?”
“I might as well drink white paint,” he hollers, raising his twisted bow arm like a twirling arc in the air. “Make me some soup!” he commands.
“You don’t give me orders anymore. I am no longer your student.”
“Orders,” he laughs, feigning a jovial attitude. “Who’s giving orders?”
“Shhhh.” She puts her finger over her lips and tries to freeze him with her eyes. Inez holds him there a moment and then walks to the kitchen chair in which he’s sitting. Before she takes his tight, shriveled face in her hands, her father-in-law’s eyes cast around the room for something that might save him. Inez holds his face in a vise and forces him to look at her. The audacity of the act surprises even her.
“When I was a child, you did things to me that were wrong. You should have been punished. Do you understand?”
Isaac closes his eyes.
“Do you understand?”
Finally, he nods.
She lets go of Isaac’s face and watches him shrivel into his seat.
“Would you like me to fix you some soup?”
Isaac nods.
In a moment, she opens a can of tomato-rice soup for the old man. “How about some liverwurst crackers?” she asks, knowing how fond Isaac is of the smelly liver paste.
Again, he nods.
This will be the last time, she thinks as she stands spreading liverwurst on saltines.
Inez leaves the old man sitting alone with his meal in the kitchen.
She and the kids do something they haven’t done for ages: they set up TV trays in front of the television and watch a quiz show, drinking pop while eating
their astronaut dinners. The three of them are happy. Nothing can take that away.
matchmaker
THIS afternoon, out of the blue, he got a call from Christine. Given how painful their last visit was, he doubted if he’d see her again.
She offered no greeting, and, at first, he thought it might be a crank call. He’d been getting them lately, people unhappy with the labor work he’d been doing on behalf of Negroes. He liked listening for the fear in the anonymous voices, the idle threats, the words Nigger lover.
Her voice was softer than usual. “Can you talk, Jake?”
“Sure, I can talk,” he said, before he was sure who it was, and then he had it. “What’s up, Christine?” He half expected her to say something ugly, racist.
“Your secretary isn’t listening in?”
“Grania, are you there?” he said into the phone, holding it silently for a few beats. “No, we’d have heard her chewing her Aspergum by now. I think the poor woman’s in perpetual pain. Nothing specific, you realize, but the human condition in general.”
Christine offered a warm chuckle. “Aspergum helps with that?”
“Best thing on the market.”
“You’re funny, Jake. I’ve missed you. You know, I felt terrible after you left. I hate ending things on a bad note.” She paused then, perhaps expecting him to agree with her.
He said nothing. He enjoyed having her a bit off balance.
“Anyway, when the fog started rolling in this afternoon, I thought of you, Jake.”
“You equate me with the fog?”
“Well, I know you live out by the ocean. I pictured you going home after work and the fog getting thicker and thicker around your house.”
“It does that.”
“And I thought that perhaps I could get you to take me out for a drink, before you went home to the deep fog.”
“Out for a drink?” Jake said, amused. It struck him as a strange request. During the course of their affair, he’d often asked Christine to do something, anything, outside of the confines of her mansion, but she always demurred, reminding Jake that maintaining their happy arrangement required them to honor their vow of discretion.
“Derek’s out of town, in case you want to know, and I thought that if we went out to a place like The Cliff House, we’d probably have it to ourselves. Don’t you think we could safely get lost in the fog out there, at least for the duration of a cocktail? That’s assuming that you’re willing to meet me. There’s something I need to say to you.”
“I’ll pick you up,” Jake said, fancying the idea of this unexpected diversion. “I actually drove to work today. It’s a rarity.”
“I’d prefer to meet you there, but I’m curious—what do you drive?”
“My car? You’d find it fetching, Christine. A white Plymouth Valiant with push-button transmission.”
“Can I have a rain check on the ride? And tonight, say six o’clock,” said Christine and signed off.
IT’S so socked in by the time he hits the Avenues that the cars only inch along Geary Boulevard. His headlights seem to be illuminating nothing more than the transient vapor. But he can see the car in front of him. That’s all that matters. He thinks to turn the radio on but finds himself enjoying the white silence.
Despite his cautious driving, Jake still manages to arrive before the appointed time. He stands outside The Cliff House for a moment, listening to the foghorns. The damn things sound human. They manage to sound patient and insistent at the same time, a mother whose only purpose in life is to issue warnings. Like all warnings, there’s something about them that makes you want to disobey, that creates a sense of longing.
The smell of the sea wrack makes an even more intimate claim on Jake’s senses. The memory of taking the streetcar out here with Inez twenty-five years ago is clearer than his sense of their walk the other night. He used to love sitting across from Inez on the streetcar and admiring her beauty. He thought then that for the rest of his life he would never love anyone as he has Inez. And he was right. Of course, Inez is far different now from the woman he married. That woman expected him to guide her through every portal of her life. This woman doesn’t even regard him as a factor, but she has a curious resolve about her. The other night, when they strolled out to the ocean, he was reluctant to go with her. She can see right through him these days, and, in her company, he feels like a hale fellow lacking substance, a hollow man. Not only does she find him lacking, she’s made her peace with the fact.
As they walked along the beach, he wondered if he could do anything to regain her love. If not, he feared that he’d be irrelevant to her for the rest of their lives together.
CHRISTINE is quite striking standing in the entryway in dark wool trousers and a quilted turquoise jacket. It’s odd to see Christine outside of her house and realize that, though she’s small, she occupies a clear and forceful presence in the world.
Christine gives Jake an amused look. “A couple of adventurers, aren’t we?”
“Indeed.”
“I wondered if they’d close the place due to excessive fog.”
“Happens too often.”
“Not like this.”
“You’d be surprised.” Jake takes her arm and leads her into the large, open room. There is no hostess. The Cliff House has fallen on hard times. Seat yourself. Christine sneers at a loud group of tourists who sit at a table in the center of the room. “Let’s sit as far away from them as we can.”
Jake chooses a small table by the massive picture window. “Normally, you can see the seals from here.” Now all that’s visible are swirling layers of fog. Jake lights a cigarette. He feels curiously awkward with Christine. It strikes him that they have very little in common. The years of good sex and amusement have accrued no real history. The present tense that he gloried in has left little in its wake.
“So you’re wondering why I asked you to meet me,” Christine says, signaling to the waitress.
“I haven’t been holding my breath.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” says Christine, twisting her lips into an exaggerated smile.
Jake is grateful to see the waitress, a tall Irish girl, approach the table and orders a tequila on the rocks after Christine asks for a glass of Harvey’s Bristol Cream.
ONCE they have their drinks, Christine narrows her eyes at Jake. “I know what happened to you toward the end, even if you don’t.”
“You do, huh?” Jake looks away. He isn’t sure he wants to hear it. He takes a gulp of the tequila and decides to hold it in his mouth for as long as he can before swallowing. “You realize what you did, Jake; you fell in love with your wife again.”
Jake swallows his mouthful of tequila. “What makes you think . . . ?”
“I watched it happen. I’ve seen it happen before. A man returns to his wife and he’s no good to me anymore. I just wasn’t sure you realized what you’d done.”
It seems as plausible a theory as any, and yet Jake has an overwhelming desire to tell Christine to go fuck herself. He thinks of Inez. The other night, after their walk, he saw her in the bath. How beautiful she was. Christine is watching him, waiting for a response.
“You don’t have to worry about me, Jake.” Christine sips her sherry and smiles at him. “We had an absolutely perfect affair, Jake; the best of my life. I’m not wrong, am I, about Inez?”
“I don’t know.” Jake smiles at his former lover. Nothing like being patronized by a Pacific Heights matron. She’s probably a fucking Republican, Jake decides, despite making claims to the contrary.
“It happens sometimes to men your age—your heart, or shall we say your capacity for actual love, grows larger than your prick. Don’t worry, your glory days aren’t over.”
“I’m glad you understand me so well, Christine.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. A man can fall in love with his wife again. I think that’s what’s happened to you.”
Jake shrugs.
“You have to woo her all ove
r again.”
Jake slugs down the last of his tequila. “I don’t know that I have it in me.”
Christine fingers the beauty mark on her upper lip. “You have it in you. Just let it unfold naturally. It will be the most important seduction of your life.”
Jake shakes his head. “Listen to you, Christine, you sound like a goddamn matchmaker. You should set up a little shop in the Mission District with a big heart outside. And how about you, Christine?”
“Me? You needn’t worry about me. I met a young man. He’s really too young for me.” Christine runs a finger along a furrow in her forehead.
A young Republican, no doubt. “You’re shameless, Christine.”
“I am.”
Jake’s ready for this little escapade to be over. Christine’s become like an unpleasant client whose business he’s done with.
Jake laughs lustily. “Does the poor boy know what he’s in for?”
“I don’t think he has a clue.”
AFTER Christine declines a ride home, Jake waits with her for a cab. They stand together at the curb, each in their own pocket of fog. He can’t wait to get in his car and drive home. To see Inez. The damn thing is, Christine is right. But how does a middle-aged man woo his wife? As the cab appears from out of nowhere, he opens the door for Christine and kisses her good-bye. He stands at the curb, watching her cab disappear into oblivion.
chef’s choice
AROUND nine, sipping a gimlet, Inez hears Jake’s car pull up out front. Isaac has gone to bed and the kids are in their rooms. Inez pulls the curtains back to look out on the street. The fog has come in so thick that she can’t even see Jake’s car at the curb. Inez hears the slam of the car door and also hears the foghorns wailing in their insistent fifths. Then she hears the sweetest sound of all: Jake whistling. He’s whistling a beautiful tune, not his usual agitated jazz, but a minor ballad that she’s heard somewhere before.
Jake comes in the door whistling. The song has a hold on him, not unlike the way the Bach had taken her in the afternoon.
“What’s the name of that tune?”
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