Beautiful Inez

by Bart Schneider

  “Hi there,” he says and looks up surprised.

  She watches him drop his briefcase. Now he walks over and kisses her. Strange. When was the last time he came into the house and kissed her? “What’s that thing called?”

  “What I was whistling?”

  “Yeah.”

  “ ‘ ’Round Midnight. ’ ”

  “It’s a pretty tune.”

  “Thelonious Monk.”

  “Monk,” she echoes. “Tired?”

  “I am.”

  “Hope you picked up something to eat along the way; the kids and I just had TV dinners. Your father waged a boycott. Too goyish for him.”

  “Are there any left?”

  “Yeah, I stocked the freezer with them. Give the kids a little break from my illustrious cooking. Turkey or fried chicken?”

  “Turkey.”

  “Get you a drink?”

  “Be nice.”

  “Whiskey sour?”

  “Sounds good.”

  Inez turns the oven back on, and without waiting for it to warm, puts in his tin tray of turkey. As she fixes Jake a drink, she tops off her own. The song Jake was whistling is still in her head.

  They sit across from each other in the living room. After the conversation at the beach the other night, she worries they may have nothing left to say to each other. He’s looking at her strangely. As if he wants something from her, as if he wants to make a confession. She’d rather not hear it. She hereby forgives him everything: his infidelities, his princely indifference, his years of taking her for granted. Still, he smiles at her. He lights a cigarette and smiles at her some more. Must she suffer a fool, before she gets on with it?

  “You seem very happy tonight, Jake.”

  “I love you.”

  It’s the last thing in the world she’d have expected the man to say.

  “Jake, would you teach me the song you were whistling?”

  “ ‘ ’Round Midnight’?”

  “Yes.”

  Jake blows out a steady stream of smoke. “Do you want me to whistle it?”

  “Sure.”

  Jake whistles the first five notes of the minor dirge. The man may not play an instrument, but he is a hell of a whistler. Perhaps she has an inflated sense of his talent, since, as a whistler, she’s barely able to produce a sound. Jake can make bright, clear notes that flow easily, one to another. Plus, he’s got a decent ear. He whistles the plaintive song beautifully.

  “Let me get my violin.”

  Strange. Jake just stands still and smiles at her.

  Once she has her violin out, she bows easily through “ ’Round Midnight.”

  “No, no,” he says, “it’s too stiff. You’ve got to goose it a little bit here and there. Nothing’s staccato, it’s not meant to be staccato.” He winks at her. “This is jazz, baby.”

  “How’s that?” Inez says, playing it legato.

  “Now, get rid of the vibrato. Can it. You sound like some creature out of the thirties.”

  That makes her laugh. “You’re just as dictatorial as your father.”

  “That’s right. You want to play jazz, you listen to me, girl.”

  Inez plays through the theme several times until Jake finally nods his approval. He walks over to her and puts his arm around her waist. Please don’t let the man get amorous. The last thing she needs now is a scene. Miraculously, Jake answers her wishes and backs away.

  “My jazz baby,” he says and sits down.

  In another world she would have played jazz and lived with a person like Sylvia. Inez sniffs at the air and can smell Jake’s precooked turkey dinner beginning to warm.

  She puts down her violin. “Let me get your dinner and freshen your drink. Then I’m going out for a little drive.”

  Jake stands up out of his chair. “You can’t go out now. The fog . . .”

  Inez peeks out the dining room window. “It looks like it’s beginning to lift.”

  “I’m not going to let you go out there,” says Jake, giving his wife a hard stare.

  “Jake, come on. Don’t be silly.”

  “You can’t go out there.”

  “I’m not going far, Jake. And the fog’s lifting.”

  Jake looks out the street window. “You can hardly see out there.”

  “I just want a little air. I’ve been all cooped up. First with your father . . .”

  “If you really want to go out, Inez, I’ll go with you.”

  “No, no, you sit down and eat your dinner. I’ll be back before you finish.” She walks into the dining room with a place mat and a table setting. “I’ll drive slow. Promise.” A moment later she returns with the frozen turkey dinner and a glass of ice tea. The last supper she’ll serve her husband. The tin dish looks odd floating on a china plate. It’s more natural on a TV tray.

  “I need to run upstairs for a jacket,” says Inez. On her way past Joey’s bedroom, she peeks in at her sleeping boy, his thumb nestled in his mouth. Let him give himself what pleasure he can.

  Downstairs, Jake has sat down to his humble dinner. He turns to face Inez as she starts toward the door. “Be careful.”

  Inez feels a momentary pang at the door. She puts on her jacket. She wants to say one more thing to Jake, anything, a small kindness to leave him with.

  “Jake,” she calls. “The Chinese man at the cleaners sent his best to you. ‘Say hello to Jake.’ It’s the first time he’s ever spoken to me.”

  “How often have you spoken to him?” Jake calls.

  “Well, maybe I’ll become a social being in my old age.”

  “Fat chance,” he says, his mouth full of Swanson’s turkey. “How about you become a cook instead?”

  “And what would you have me prepare?”

  “I don’t know. Chef’s choice. Be careful, darling; be careful out there.”

  force of habit

  ONCE she’s backed the Studebaker out of the garage, she notices the car is nearly out of gas. That’s no way to begin a journey. She drives to the Mobil station on Thirty-eighth and Geary, thinking she’ll fill it up with ethyl. But there’s no need to buy that much gas, no need to waste. She runs over the bell in the station, a minute before closing. She and Jake have brought the cars here for years. Inez can see a light in the office, a yellow pulse in the fog. She pictures the two middle-aged men standing in the cluttered office, grease on every surface. Jim, the older of the two men, surprises her at the driver’s-side window, an apparition standing in the swirl of fog. Bald, and missing teeth, he hunches down so that his face is framed in the window. At another time she might have been frightened. But tonight she’s calm. The engine is still humming. Inez rolls her window down.

  “Evening, Mrs. Roseman. Heck of a night to be out. Fill ’er up with regular?”

  “No, two dollars, of ethyl, Jim.”

  “Two dollars?”

  “That’s all I have with me, Jim.”

  “Put it on the charge?”

  “No, two dollars is fine.”

  He jerks his head back, as if to say, suit yourself. “Better turn off your engine.”

  Inez doesn’t want to turn it off, but she does.

  “Wouldn’t want to be driving very far tonight in this fog.”

  “Nope, not far.”

  As Jim cleans the windshield, taking great deliberate swipes with his squeegee, she wonders if this is the last conversation she’ll have.

  “No real point in cleaning this,” he says, shrugging. “Be all dewy in a minute.”

  “Thanks for doing it though.”

  “Force of habit.”

  The same phrase Sylvia used when she described her theft of a little wheel of goat cheese. She can’t imagine two people with less in common than Sylvia and Jim the garageman. There you go—life will surprise you right down to the end.

  Inez hands Jim two dollars, the whole transaction having the feel of a child’s game.

  Jim nods as he takes her money. “Nice picture of Mr. Roseman in the paper the ot
her day.”

  “Yes, it was,” she says, trying to remember Jake’s latest newspaper splash. She’s ready to drive away, but Jim has more to say.

  “He’s getting so famous, I wonder if he’ll be buying his gas here anymore. Might have to head down to Van Ness Avenue to fill up. Place they’ll make a little more fuss over him.”

  “I think he’ll keep coming here, Jim.”

  “Well, you say hello to him, ma’am.”

  She might as likely be heading out of Our Town in a shiny-fendered Model T as easing into the San Francisco fog in her five-year-old Studebaker Scotsman.

  Instinctively, Inez drives down the hills to the park, entering at Forty-third Avenue. She can see a few yards ahead of her, but no farther. Alone in the park, she drives east. She rolls down the window and smells eucalyptus. If the fog were a noxious gas, she’d be dead in a hurry. Even though her right foot is aching to floor the gas pedal, she drives slowly. Force of habit.

  At Tenth Avenue, she turns left. Once out of the park, she doubles back to Park Presidio and heads toward the bridge approach. Inexplicably, the fog has cleared enough at the tollbooth for her to read the big clock—11:27. A man in a stiff cap takes her quarter. This one a mute transaction. There is hardly any traffic on the bridge. Inez drives across, swerving a couple of times over the bumpy yellow reflectors that divide the lanes. She has no desire to pull over. The bridge has always struck her as a bit of a cliché. A more grandiose statement than she’d care to make. She favors an ambiguous approach. She’d heard of an entertainer in the fifties—he might have been a musician for all she knows—who told friends that he intended to either jump from the Golden Gate or move to Mexico, disappearing forever. When his body wasn’t found, his friends decided he’d made the Mexican choice. You had to salute the man and the cloud of ambiguity he left behind. Let every survivor come to their own conclusion, let each decide whether surviving is worth the price.

  The fog is not as dense when Inez comes through the Marin tunnel. She takes the first Sausalito exit and weaves along the hilly road toward the quaint hamlet of boats and tourist galleries and discovers more fog. She’d really only wanted to turn around. On a night like this, a woman could drive off the road into the white abyss without meaning to. She wants to mean to but doesn’t care for this setting. She takes the first intersection and manages to turn back toward the bridge. She’s not sure where she wants to go.

  Another quarter, another stoic toll taker. The big clock reads nine minutes before twelve, and the song comes into her head. Jake’s song. One regret—can she allow herself any?—that she didn’t have a chance to play this song for Sylvia. “’Round Midnight.” The idea of Jake teaching her jazz makes her laugh out loud. They should have tried that years ago. Somehow jazz is a better fit for her now than Mendelssohn. A better fit than Bach, although Inez could swear that all the music she has ever loved is playing now at once. One voice layered atop another. Inez is a musician in her glory, and this is the art of the fugue.

  Across the bridge and through town, she connects to the Bayshore, heading south, and finally pushes the gas pedal to the floor. There’s a pinch of tension in her Achilles tendon. It’s the feeling she’s been after. Invulnerability. Two dollars of gas is more than half a tank. She can keep driving through the fog, the blinding ambiguity of it. The miracle is that there’s nobody else out here. Finally, she’s by herself.

  living fish

  SYLVIA reads the news about Inez, like everybody else, in the newspaper. “Noted Symphony Violinist in Fatal Crash.” She pours herself a glass of plum wine, then stacks the recording of Satie’s Gnossiennes atop the Ravel string quartet on the hi-fi and sits by the window. She’s grateful for her familiar perch. From time to time Sylvia gets up to turn the records over—that’s when she tends to feel Inez’s presence in the room.

  A week after her mother died, Sylvia walked into the country, east of Sacramento, and spent half the day sitting in an almond tree. She didn’t think to bring any food but carried a canteen of water and a small Webster’s pocket dictionary in her pack. Words and water and the right tree to climb—what else did a woman in mourning need?

  Her mother had just been buried. Sylvia thought she’d be perched in the tree for an eternity, she had so much to figure out. How to measure the loss? Which to mourn most, the dozen years of dying, or the final death? Could she, Sylvia, have done anything differently? Would she be able to forgive her mother? How does one forgive the dead? Did she have a chance of living a life that wasn’t wrapped in the gauze of her mother’s dying?

  By midafternoon, Sylvia began to wonder how long a woman with a quart of water and a dictionary could survive in a tree. At what point would the birds begin roosting in her hair?

  Late in the day she opened the dictionary. It was like having a container of her mother’s ashes with her, even though her mother was buried in the ground. Perhaps, because it was a cheap dictionary, hardly a holy thing, she thought to tear out certain words and drop them, as ashes, through the leaves of the almond tree. She flipped through the dictionary and chose words at random. Actuary, bridle, contrarian, dictate,enticement, finite, gullible, horror. Of course, nothing is truly arbitrary. As her eyes traveled the page, they chose the words that wanted to come. She ripped whole pages from the dictionary and carefully tore her words from the pages. But once she had each word in hand, each a tiny living fish pulled from the water, they became precious. Each word had its pedigree, its part of speech, its key to pronunciation, its tide of meanings. She wished that she had brought some form of an adhesive so that she could attach words to the branches. Failing that, she stuffed each word into the pockets of her jeans.

  On her return walk to Sacramento, Sylvia kicked a stone along the side of the dusty highway and wondered if what she’d done in the tree was just a bunch of mood making. Could anybody out there tell her what a natural response to an unnatural death might be?

  At her window, Sylvia is pleased to see that people leap on and off the cable car’s running board with the same grace as ever.

  the torah

  THE day after the funeral, Mafalda takes the kids for the afternoon and Jake brings his father’s friend Silvio Manatelli back to the house to play chess with the old man. After he’s set them up at the dining room table, Jake goes down to the basement with a large red radio from the forties and plugs it in beside the twin bed.

  When Joey was a baby, they’d sectioned off this part of the basement and tried to make a little room of it. For months, Jake slept with the baby down there. Jake would wake sometimes with a crick in his neck— he slept at an odd angle because he was afraid of crushing Joey. It pleased Jake to think that he was being a good father and that an irrevocable bond had formed between him and Joey. Some nights when Joey woke up crying, Jake paced with him along the narrow track of basement carpet. Once, while trying to walk him back to sleep, he dozed off himself and dreamt that instead of a baby hoisted on his shoulder, he was carrying the Torah.

  Jake tunes the red radio to KKHI, the classical music station. He and Inez used to joke about the station’s imperious announcers, but no one is talking now. Instead, it’s what he feared and hoped for—a violin concerto. He thinks the Brahms but isn’t sure. He doesn’t really hear the music so much as know that it’s playing. This is his first waking hour alone. He lay on the small bed—just a bare mattress now—as he did with baby Joey. Watch him end up with a crick in his neck.

  The worst part was Inez’s face in the morning. Jake would creep into the bedroom hoping not to wake her as he laid the sleeping baby in his crib. Half the time, Inez was already awake in the bed, staring stone-eyed, like a person who’d committed a crime for which there was no forgiveness. Jake tried to comfort her when he could. This is something that’s easier for me, he’d say, than it is for you. That’s all. Usually she closed her eyes in response, sometimes she nodded. At least once, Inez offered a verbal response that Jake found chilling. You’re good, Jake, she’d said, her eyes
closing. But this isn’t about you, it’s about me. It’s about me and the baby.

  Jake had always wanted to tell Inez about the night Joey became the Torah in his arms. He wasn’t sure what it meant but he thought it was a good thing. That, no matter what, the boy had a soul and was connected to a long history, and that, by extension, their little family was linked to a past and a future. But every time Jake thought to tell her, he worried she’d misunderstand, think that he was boasting about the special bond between the baby and him. Nonetheless, he wishes he’d told her.

  There’s a racket overhead. His father sounds as if he’s both shouting and stomping around the dining room. Jake climbs the basement stairs, wishing he’d had a little more time to himself. The old man is standing beside the dining room buffet holding a china gravy boat in his good hand. He looks like he wants to throw the gravy boat at his friend, who’s sitting with a fat smile on his face, the chessboard in front of him.

  “You took your hand off the bishop, Manatelli,” his father shouts, cocking his frail left arm. “Once you take your hand off the bishop you can’t move another piece.”

  “It’s checkmate, my friend,” Mr. Manatelli says.

  Jake sees no reason to break up the argument. He looks toward the little shrine for Inez that’s on the buffet beside his father. Three photographs in standing frames. Inez with her violin. Inez with the kids in front of the blue hydrangeas in the backyard. Inez with Jake beside a hotel swimming pool in Los Angeles, the two of them clearly happy.

  His father turns to look at the photographs and begins to cry.

  “You’re a cheater, Manatelli,” the old man shouts, his voice cracking.

  Jake wonders two things: will his father throw the gravy boat? And how long until Jake lets himself cry?

  the chignon

  THE first Tuesday after Inez’s funeral, Sylvia dresses in trousers and her herringbone sport coat. She spends some time deciding between Hy’s string tie and the red silk dickey that she stole from Toole-James. Which accoutrement will be the more natural? She chooses the red dickey, because she’s yet to wear it in public. The Blindfold seems a perfect spot to break it in, and to read the twelve-line poem she wrote after Inez’s funeral. It may not be a particularly inspired poem, or even especially natural, but since Sylvia wrote it she’s wanted to read it to somebody.