Beautiful Inez

by Bart Schneider

  Sylvia arrives early and signs her name on the poets’ sheet. When her turn comes, she climbs to the stage with her handwritten poem and looks out at the crowd of noisy faces, covered in all assortment of fabrics. She stands a moment to behold herself and her place in the room. “I have a new poem,” she says, then reads the poem.

  THE CHIGNON

  Courage, I say to her,

  pronouncing it as the French would.

  You have no business, she says,

  telling me how to live my life.

  Au contraire, it is my business.

  We have these conversations,

  fluted glasses of Prosecco in our hands.

  I say, haven’t you heard of the pleasure principle?

  And she, don’t you have your nerve?

  Not at all, beauty. I want to see you

  as an old woman, your white hair

  coiled in a chignon.

  When she’s finished reading the poem, a man whose eyes are covered in a paisley cloth calls out to her: “What did you say the title of that poem is?”

  “It’s called ‘The Chignon.’ ”

  “Would you please read it again?”

  Sylvia looks out at the small crowd. A few people, along with the man in the paisley cloth blindfold, nod their heads, so she reads the poem again. Sylvia had never seen Inez wear her hair in a chignon, but she is sure that Inez would have looked beautiful with her hair that way.

  After Sylvia finishes reading a second time, the man in the paisley blindfold calls out again: “Read another poem.”

  “I don’t have any others,” she says.

  “Then write some,” he hollers back.

  “There’s an idea.”

  Once she climbs down and finds a stool near the back of the coffee-house, Sylvia slips off her red silk dickey and eases it over her head the opposite way, so that the ribbed neck part now covers her eyes. She wears it as a blindfold for the rest of the evening, feeling no compulsion to peek.

  hidden

  AT Inez’s funeral, there was no need to climb a tree in order to gain distance. Sylvia sat toward the back of the chapel but got a good look at the family when they streamed out after the service. Jake Roseman appeared reasonably destroyed, the children, distant, perhaps having anesthetized themselves in that way children have when situations become unbearably grave; the old man, with his twisted arm and body, appeared an emblem of ruin. Sylvia looked closely to see if Bibi was present, but apparently they had left her in “dear old Napa State.”

  AFTER Jake Roseman left the chapel, nobody among the more than hundred people remaining could have had any idea who Sylvia was or that she’d played a role of any significance in Inez’s life. How could a relationship that had affected them both so profoundly—and Sylvia had no doubt that this was true—be so immaculately erased? What remained of the two of them was as hidden as a tiny word torn from a page and folded into a pocket.

  When Sylvia started to leave, an old woman tapped her on the shoulder. It took a minute for Sylvia to remember her. It was the elderly usher from the symphony, her white hair, again, coming loose from her chignon. She was the woman who’d told Sylvia about Inez, who’d spelled out her own name.

  “You’re the reporter, aren’t you?”

  “Yes . . . yes, I am. And you’re . . . Elizabeth Mier. Spelled MIER.”

  A brightness came into the old woman’s face. It’s a good thing to be recognized once in a while.

  “Isn’t it terrible what happened to beautiful Inez?” Elizabeth Mier said, her expression retreating back into grief.

  “Yes, it is.” Sylvia looked into the old woman’s face, which was just about the saddest thing she’d seen in her life. There was nothing to do but grab her hand and hold on to it for a long time.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This was a very difficult novel to write; it went through more drafts than I’d like to admit. Many thanks to Anne Czarniecki, Brigitte Frase, Patrice Koelsch, George Rabasa, and Kasi Williamson, early readers who offered encouragement or solace, some of them sacrificing themselves to more than one draft.

  I am grateful to my agent, Marly Rusoff, for believing in the novel and for finding a fine publisher and editor in Shaye Areheart. It seemed clear that Beautiful Inez called for a female editor, and I feel doubly fortunate to have gotten two: Shaye and her brilliant colleague Deborah Artman. The way they worked in concert was sheer wizardry. Thanks also to my longtime friend Philip Patrick for his help and encouragement.

  My most satisfying research for this novel involved long phone conversations with my father, who was a violinist in the San Francisco Symphony for fifty years. I particularly enjoyed having him walk me through the trouble spots in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto as I sat with an open score. But more than that, it was the countless stories of musicians, the years of music in the house, the challenges my father set for himself. I remember, as an alienated adolescent, waking in my basement bedroom every day to the sound of my father practicing the very difficult Roger Sessions Violin Concerto. He carried on for more than a year, piecing together the impossible architecture of the thing. I am still not sure what inspired more awe in me: the daily doggedness with which my father pursued a concerto considered too difficult to play, or the splendor of hearing it for the first time with a full orchestra, when he gave the concerto its West Coast premiere with the San Francisco Symphony. Most of all, I thank him for sharing his sense that even in a frighteningly cynical world, one must push forward and find joy.

  Finally, I am very grateful to the friends who sustain me and to my family: my wife, poet Patricia Kirkpatrick, who inspires me with the high standard of her work and her vision of the world; and our children, Simone and Anton, who keep me both off balance and whole.

  THE STORY BEHIND THE BOOK

  In my recent novel Secret Love, San Francisco attorney and civil rights leader Jake Roseman mourns the death of his wife, Inez. Like Jake, I was haunted by the mystery behind Inez’s death and decided to write a stand-alone novel from her point of view, set in 1962, two years earlier than the time of Secret Love. Why would a woman whose life appeared so charmed choose suicide? Although a physical beauty, a violinist of prodigious talent, the mother of two lovely children, and the wife of a simpatico man, Inez is possessed by a quiet engine that is driving her toward annihilation.

  More than two years into the writing of Beautiful Inez, I realized that Inez Roseman suffered in part from what may have plagued my own mother: a postpartum depression that rather than being a temporary hormonal downswing, took up permanent residence within the skin. I recall hearing stories about my mother, that for months after my birth she couldn’t bear to sleep on the same floor as me, that the sound of a baby crying drove her up the wall. Postpartum depression hadn’t been identified as such in the 1950s, when I was born and when Inez gave birth to her children. A half century later, the condition’s potential danger and widespread incidence is just beginning to be recognized.

  Beautiful Inez is actually a novel about two women. Sylvia Bran (waitress, showroom pianist, part-time journalist, amateur linguist, petty thief, voyeur, and budding bohemian), may be a strange bedfellow for Inez Roseman, but she is able to open up Inez in a way that she hasn’t been opened in years. A waltz between love and betrayal, Beautiful Inez involves women ten years apart in chronological age, one having come of age in the forties, the other becoming a woman of the sixties.

  As a man writing alternately from the point of view of two women, I tried to enter the mind and spirit of each woman as deeply as I could. But for me, the key to understanding how experience and the cultural moment shaped these women depended on inhabiting their bodies with as much fidelity as my imagination allowed. —Bart Schneider

  AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

  Q: Your father, David Schneider, played violin with the San Francisco Symphony orchestra for fifty years. Can you tell us about how this personal connection helped you shape the novel and understand the character of Ine
z?

  A: My father has always been a marvelous storyteller, and he talked a lot about his days growing up in San Francisco. He got into the San Francisco Symphony at eighteen. He auditioned as a fluke the day before he was going to New York to study with a great violin teacher in hopes of being a soloist. I’ve always been fascinated with the notion of that crossroads in which he chose unwittingly a long happy career in the symphony. Didn’t he wonder about would have happened if he’d gone off to New York to study more? I used to ask. “Not really,” he said. “My temperament was right for the symphony.” Inez Roseman makes the same choice, but her temperament isn’t right. That was one of my initial understandings about her.

  Unlike Inez, my father claims to have spent a very limited time practicing—the music came so naturally to him that he didn’t feel compelled to overdo it. As a teenager he played quartets with Isaac Stern, who was the same age. He tells about going over to Isaac’s house shortly after getting into the symphony. Isaac’s mother said to her son, “Look at David. He’s already making money, and all you do is sit around all day and practice.” That was quite the joke, because everybody knew by the time he was a teen that Isaac was going to be a major international star. San Francisco in the twenties and thirties happened to be a breeding ground for young violinists, and my dad is listed in some academic’s book about the phenomenon as a minor child prodigy. I always thought that was cool—a little dude who’d hardly practiced being dubbed a minor cp.

  My father talked a lot about musicians who trained to be virtuosos, and how many of them, unlike Isaac, were emotional dwarfs. His notion was that most of these people were undeveloped in some way because they’d become muscle-bound from all their specialized training. He talked about musicians who’d trained to be soloists but ended up in symphony orchestras and felt that their talents and souls were being compromised by being nothing more than a section player. So I gave Inez the problems of a woman who stood on a spot practicing for six or seven hours a day, expecting to be a soloist but ending up a section player. That image of Inez as an exquisite racehorse having to work hauling farm loads was central to my early understanding of her.

  While writing this novel, I spent a lot of time talking with my father about technical problems in the music. I had him walk me through the Paganini caprice and the Mendelssohn concerto. Recently while I was visiting my father after he’d read the novel, he played the Kreisler piece for me that I have Inez play in Napa State Hospital during which all the inmates began crying. When my father was done playing, he said, “How come you’re not crying? You made all the people in the hospital cry. Is it really so sad a piece?” I said, “Hey, it’s called poetic license, Dad.”

  Q: Could you have set your novel in another era, in a different city, or is early 1960s San Francisco an essential setting for the story?

  A: I think of San Francisco as a character in this novel and earlier ones. The two things that ground me most in the writing are the physical landscape and the music. I am native to both, and when I find myself faltering I try to direct myself back to the pure, primal, sensual feeling of either the sound and mood of the music or the air and light of the city. I was eleven in 1962, when this novel is set, and I have an acute memory of that time. I had a lot of freedom as a kid and would often take the bus for a nickel from my house near the ocean to downtown. I was in love with all those stylish women parading around downtown doing their personal imitation of Jackie Kennedy, not that I knew at the time that that was what I was watching. I loved the theater of it, the energy of the downtown streets, the sense that everything had more consequence downtown than in my quiet neighborhood by the ocean. I think as a child I was very much a serious watcher like Sylvia. I sensed that all those people walking around had some kind of terrible secrets and I wanted to know what they were.

  I’m very interested in the culture of the early sixties, that time just before society was going to profoundly change. What was it like for a woman who had difficulty with her marriage, who had a career, but had no support in the world for being outside of the norm, feeling so at odds with what could only seem like her failure as a wife and mother? I approached Inez with a keen sense of how much like an outsider she felt. This was far more important to me in understanding the deepest nature of the character than, say, her sexual relationship with another woman. That is something that happened to her, but the sense of failure and being an outsider was who she was. Inez would be a different woman in our time, with antidepressants and a culture of support for her quandary.

  Q: Some of your readers may not realize that you’ve written about Jake Roseman before, in a novel that serves as a kind of sequel to Beautiful Inez. Tell us about Secret Love—do you recommend that readers of Beautiful Inez read Secret Love as well, and does it matter which novel they read first?

  A: I think of these two novels as companion books, which can be read independently but which offer a richer experience if read in tandem. Two books that have been very important to me are Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, later made into a good film, Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Connell’s world is the stifling upper middle class of Kansas City in the thirties. Companion novels like Connell’s and mine allow readers a chance to know more about both the principal characters—having been inside their heads, and to a certain extent their bodies—than the married couples know about each other.

  With Secret Love, I wanted to explore the common male problem of grandiosity. In Jake Roseman I have a well-meaning, socially minded character who cannot live up to his own high-minded values. I love those types of contradictions in a character because it gives him complexity and makes him very human. I tried to make Jake particularly charming in Secret Love so that readers had some difficulty reconciling his charm with his appalling behavior. Secret Love strikes me as a book that women read very differently than men. Women are quick about knowing a jerk when they see one, yet nonetheless, many women are still susceptible to a questionable man’s charm. I was surprised when a male reviewer called Jake Roseman a mensch. I guess I have a different standard.

  Q: Describe your writing process a bit. Was writing Beautiful Inez different in any way than writing your other novels?

  A: I write early in the morning, about an hour and a half a day, before my family gets up. I spend about a year just generating raw material for a novel, allowing the characters to find out where they want to go and who they are. I mostly try to stay out of the way. I have learned to have great confidence in my imagination, which means I always expect I’ll have something to write if, as the poet William Stafford said, I’m willing to keep my standards low enough. I keep my standards very low in the first year or so because I know I’ll get a year or more of revising before the manuscript even goes to an editor. I see the imagination as a renewable resource; there is not a finite amount that I have to hurry and use up or lose. In fact, if I hurry and get anxious, I’ll lose it. I have learned to be patient and see my job as being very workmanlike and unglamorous, like my dad practicing his fiddle a little bit every day.

  Q: Book groups are sure to have passionate discussions about Beautiful Inez. What issues, characters, and events do you anticipate will shape these discussions? Is there something in the novel you hope readers will consider, something you don’t want them to miss?

  A: I’m sure readers will wonder about the appropriateness of a male writer writing so intimately about women. I’ve come to see that all the characters in my novels represent a part of my personality, just as some people say all the characters in a nocturnal dream represent some aspect of the dreamer. I like to think I have this many variations to my personality and am still relatively sane. I try to understand the personalities of characters, male or female, straight or gay, black or white, by doing my best to understand their situations and the components of what makes them who they are. It’s less a matter of writing a deliberate psychological sketch or a police report than allowing myself to be guided intuitively by the
character’s reality and bringing as much sympathy as I can to understanding them.

  In many ways this book is about motherlessness. I grew up with a mother who had a very difficult time being a mother, and I’ve come to understand the world as divided between people whoses mother loved them unconditionally and those, like Inez and Sylvia and Joey and Anna and me, whose mother for one reason or another was unable to love them. That shared ache aligns me with great sympathy for these characters, even for a mother like Inez who ultimately betrays her children. Sylvia, of course, is my true love in this novel. I like to think her spirit is most like mine, at least mine as a surviving child.

  I fear that some readers will find Inez too chilly a character, but I tried to make her as genuine as I could given her background and circumstances. I feel great sympathy for her and her plight, and I was glad to find a rich vein of soulfulness in her.

  I hope readers will not feel that the sex scenes are gratuitous. Rather than alluding to sex between the two women, I felt that I needed to earn the experience through the writing. Earn Inez’s arousal and pleasure and transformation in particular. A male reader said to me, How did you manage to get the lesbian sex so right? And I answered: How do you know I have? In the end, I let myself be guided by my understanding of sensual pleasure. As long as I didn’t stray too far into mechanical descriptions of sex, I felt I could remain accurate to what is, above all, human about sexual pleasure. Food and music were also very helpful in this novel in giving sex a pair of rightful sensual companions.

  Reader’s Group Guide