Mrs. Ted Bliss

ONE

Sometimes, two, three times a year, there would be card parties, or at least invitations to them. Notices by the security desk in the lobby, or left by the door at each condominium, or posted in the game or laundry rooms, or maybe nothing more than a poster up on the easel near the lifeguard’s station on each of the half-dozen rooftop swimming pools in the condominium complex, announced that scheduled at such-and-so a time on so-and-such a Saturday night there was to be a gala, come one come all, sponsored by the residents of this or that building—“Good Neighbor Policy Night,” “International Evening,” “Hands Across the Panama Canal.” Usually there would be a buffet supper, followed by coffee, followed by entertainment, followed by cards.

It wasn’t that Bingo didn’t have its partisans. Wasn’t Bingo, like music, an international language? But that’s just the point, isn’t it, Dr. Wolitzer, chairman of the Towers’ Entertainment Committee, argued: The idea of these evenings was to get to know one another, and there was no nutritional value in the conversation of Bingo. G forty-seven, O eleven, I twenty-four. What kind of exchange was that? It was empty of content.

“Cards is better?” Irv Brodky from Building Number Four might counter. “ ‘I see your quarter and raise you a dime?’ This is hardly the meaning of life either.”

“It could be a bluff,” the doctor responded. “A bold bluff answered by a bluff more timid. There’s character here. There’s room to maneuver.”

Wolitzer had been a professional man, had two or three years to go before he’d have to step down as chairman of one of the complex’s most influential committees. Brodky was nobody’s fool; it would come as no surprise to him that if it came to a vote cards would win out over Bingo. Wolitzer was the glibber of the two and, though it hadn’t passed Brodky’s notice that the old doc might not himself be bluffing, Irv B. wasn’t going to the wall on this one and didn’t press the issue. Indeed, he backed down with considerable grace, taking it upon himself to suggest that the Entertainment Committee adopt a cards resolution by acclamation. Also, unless you were actually in it for the tsatske prizes — travel alarms, artificial plants, shadow boxes — practically everyone appreciated a good game of cards.

They did not, could not, know that the bloc of Colombian and Chilean and Venezuelan condominium owners along with the tiny contingent of Cubans couldn’t have cared less for these evenings. They had enough friends already, muchas gracias very much, good northern neighbors to last a lifetime and, if truth be told, commanded a sufficiency of English to lord it over this group of retired and fixed-income refugees drifted south from places frequently even farther from Miami Beach — Cleveland, Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Detroit — than the homelands of the South American newcomers.

Actually, these ex-Chicagoans and Clevelanders, former New Yorkers, Detroiters, and erstwhile St. Louisans, were, for all the variety of their geographic, financial, political, and even educational backgrounds, pretty much cut from the same cloth. They were Americans. Really, in existential ways they might not even understand, except for the fine, almost nit-picking distinctions between the Democrat, Socialist, and Republican parties, they had no political backgrounds. They were Americans. If not always at ease, then almost always easy to get along with. They were reasonably affable, eager as Building Four’s Irving Brodky to meet you halfway. They knew in their gut that life was short, and put up with it graciously.

They were Americans, cocks-of-the-walk, stereotypical down to the ground, and would have expressed astonishment to know that the very people to whom, no questions asked, they would have extended their hands in friendship during all those galas on all those international evenings, generally dismissed them as just so many babes in the wood. And who, though the South Americans lived among them and to whom they sometimes, if, say, a death in the family forced the surviving party, by dint of the sheer weight of loneliness, to list a condo in the Miami Herald as For Sale by Owner (this would have been during the flush times, from the late sixties through the mid-to late seventies, when the building boom was still on, when it was still a seller’s market), would have paid fabulous fees, handsome key money, vigorish, baksheesh that the Southern Hemispherians accepted as the cost of doing business and the surviving parties looked on as the very act of business itself, something maybe even a little sacred and holy not about profit per se but almost about the idea of appreciation, contemptuous of them not so much because they were giving far above par but because these naive, bereft Americans never suspected that their good neighbors to the south already knew it, expected it, may actually have been surprised or even a little disappointed that they hadn’t been asked to buy them out at still dearer, more exorbitant prices. Despising them, too, perhaps, for the failure of their imaginations, blind not only to the source of the money with which they were so free but also to the reasons they were so free with it. (Granted, they were Americans, but weren’t they Jews, too?) It never seemed to occur to the Americans that some complicated piece of history was happening here, that certain seeds were being planted, certain stakes claimed — that certain bets were being hedged. (Didn’t they ever get past the Wednesday Food Section in the newspapers, didn’t they read beyond the Winn-Dixie coupons? The pot was being stirred in El Salvador. Nicaragua was starting to simmer. Not fifteen miles from where they stood the Contras were already setting up. In Peru, the Shining Path was in place. Everywhere, the hemisphere seethed along all its awful fault lines, along politics’ ancient tectonic plates, meaningless to them as the Spanish language.) As if safe harbor were an alien concept to them, diaspora, exodus, the notion of plans.

They’d been around the block, Jews had, and, to hear the world tell it, had a reputation for being complicated and devious as Jesuits. Why, then, did they overlook in others what they so blithely practiced among themselves — the luxury of a private agenda? Were they so very arrogant that, while completely caught up in their own shrewd plots, they declined to believe in the schemes of others? Unless of course their bark was so much worse than their bite. Unless of course they were all hype and fury and didn’t deserve their notoriety as a people who bore a grudge. Even so, the Venezuelans and Chileans, Cubans and Colombians did not much trust (to say nothing of enjoy) such innocent, credulous souls. Why, there were a dozen unexplored reasons the South Americans might be interested in buying up modest, middle-class properties like those to be acquired in the Towers. As long ago as 1959, when Fidel Castro first made his revolution a couple of hundred or so miles from Miami, it should have been clear to anyone that the next wave of immigration would be from the south. These Chileans and Colombians, Cubans and Venezuelans were merely advance men, outposts, an expeditionary force. A party (in a tradition that went back five hundred years) of explorers. Testers of the waters who would one day accomplish with drugs what their proud Spanish forebears had accomplished with plunder.

They were only preparing the way.

(And another thing. It did not apparently register with the old-timers that there was, on average, probably a ten- or fifteen-year difference in their ages, advantage South America. Could they fail to project that it wasn’t the survivors who sold their condos to the Latin Americans who would ultimately survive? Something was happening in Miami and Miami Beach, up and down the south coast of Florida, that went unmarked on the Jews’ social calendars. It was history.)

But it wasn’t just the queer, naive provincialism of the natives that kept most of the Latin Americans away from those Good Neighbor Policy, International Evening, and Hands Across the Panama Canal galas. Much of the nasty secret lay in the naïveté itself. They were — the Latinos — not only a proud people but a stylish, almost gaudy one. The high heels of the women, the wide, double-breasted, custom suits of the men, lent them a sexy, perky, tango air; sent unmixed signals of something like risk and danger that sailed right over the Jews’ heads.

So not very many South Americans ever actually saw the “Hispanic” motifs set up in the game rooms by the Committee on Decorations on these poorly attended, floating occasions that traveled from Building One to Building Six, completing on a maybe semiannual or triquarterly basis a circuit of the six buildings every two or three years, depending. The transmuted, phantasmagorical visions, themes, and dreamscapes of a South America that never was mounted on the tarted-up walls of the game rooms in brightly colored crepe- and construction-paper cutouts of bullfights, sombreros, mariachi street bands, and, here and there, rough approximations of piñatas suspended from the ceiling like a kind of straw fruit. All this brought back and made known to the vast majority that had declined to see these wonders for themselves.

“I tell you,” Hector Camerando told Jaime Guttierez, “these people get their idea of what anything south of Texas looks like out of bad movies. It’s all cantinas and old Mexico to them, sleeping peasants sprawled out under the shade of their hats.”

“Ay, ¡caramba!” Jaime said flatly.

“There’s no stopping them,” Hector reported to Guttierez the following year. “You should have seen it, Jaime. The door prize was a lamp that grew out of the back of a burro. Come with me next time.”

“I don’ need no stinkin’ door prize.”

But one time, when the gala was hosted by Building Two, Camerando’s building, several of the resident Latinos in the Towers complex — Carlos and Rita Olvero, Enrique Frache, Oliver Gutterman, Ricardo Llossas, Elaine Munez, along with Carmen and Tommy Auveristas, Vittorio Cervantes, and Jaime Guttierez himself — their curiosity having been piqued by Hector Camerando’s almost Marco Polo-like accounts of these evenings, joined Hector to see for themselves what these galas were all about.

When Guttierez arrived in the game room a handful of his compatriots were already there. He picked up his paper plate, napkin, plastic utensils, and buffet supper and struck out to find where Hector Camerando was sitting. Hector, a veteran of these affairs, spotted him and rose in place at his table to signal his location, but just as Jaime saw him he was stopped by a woman who put her hand on his arm, jiggling the plates he carried and almost causing him to spill them to the floor. She invited him to join her party.

“I see my friend,” Jaime Guttierez said.

“So,” she said, “if you see your friend he’s your friend and you already know him so you don’t have to sit with him. Here. Sit by us.”

She was actually taking the plates and setup out of his hands and arranging them on the table.

“You look familiar to me. Are you from Building One? They’ll come and pour, you don’t have to get coffee. Dorothy, you know this man, don’t you? I think he’s from Building One.”

“Three,” Guttierez said.

“A very nice building. Three is a very nice building.”

“Aren’t they all the same?”

“Yes, but Three is as nice as any of them. You get a nice view from Three.”

“I’m just looking around,” Guttierez said. “The decorations. Who makes them?”

“Oh, thank you,” said the woman, “thank you very much. I’ll tell my friends on the Decorations Committee. They’ll be so pleased. This is just another example of your maintenance dollars at work.”

The woman’s name was Rose Blitzer. She was originally from Baltimore and had moved south in 1974 with her husband, Max. Rose and Max had a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath, full kitchen, living/dining-room area with a screened-in California room. Max had been the manager of Baltimore’s largest hardware store and had a guaranteed three-quarters point participation in net profits before his stroke in 1971 from which, thank God, he was now fully recovered except for a wide grin that was permanently fixed into his face like a brand.

“People don’t take me seriously,” Max said. “Even when I shout and call them names.”

Giving brief, lightning summaries of their situations and accomplishments, she introduced Guttierez to the others at the table. It was astonishing to Jaime how much information the woman managed to convey about the people and even the various political factions in the Towers. Within minutes, for example, he learned about the rift between Building One (not, despite its name, the first to go up but only the first where ground had been broken) and Building Five (which enjoyed certain easements in One’s parking garage). He was given to understand, though he didn’t, that Building Number Two was “a sleeping giant.” She sketched an overview of the general health of some of the people at their own and nearby tables.

Jaime clucked his tongue sympathetically. “No, you don’t understand,” Mrs. Blitzer said. “Those people are survivors. What do they say these days? ‘They paid their dues.’ They came through their procedures and chemotherapies; they spit in their doctors’ eyes who gave them only months to live. They laughed up their sleeves.”

And she even filled him in on who had the big money. “The little guy over there? He could buy and sell all of us, can’t he, Max?”

“I don’t dare go to funerals, they think I’m laughing,” Max said.

A woman in an apron came by. She held out two pots of coffee — decaf and regular.

“You forgot sugar,” one of the women at the table said.

“Ida, she’s got her hands full. Don’t bother her, take Sweet ’n Low. Look, there’s Equal.”

“I can’t digest sugar substitutes without a nondairy creamer.”

“Really?” another woman said. “I never heard such a thing. Have you, Burt?”

“Nothing surprises me anymore. It’s all equally fantastic.”

“How about you, Mr. Guttierez? She wants to know if you want some coffee.”

“I better get back to my friend,” Jaime said. “He expected me to sit with him.”

“Oh, he’s very good looking,” Rose Blitzer said.

“He has a nice smile,” said Max.

“She thinks you’re good looking,” Guttierez told Hector Camerando.

“Olé.”

They were gentlemen. They were from South America. They lived according to a strict code of honor. It would never have occurred to the one to question the word of the other.

So despite the commanding two- or three-gala advantage Hector Camerando held over Jaime Guttierez, the gentleman from Building Three, armed with the bits of information Rose Blitzer had provided him, ate the gentleman of the host building alive that evening in a fast game of human poker.

Hector drew first. He picked Max Blitzer.

“Stroke,” Jaime said.

“Stroke? Really? He seems so animated.”

“The Gioconda smile is a residual.”

Jaime picked the woman pouring coffee.

“I check,” Guttierez said, and picked Ida.

“Something with her stomach,” Jaime said. “She can’t digest Equal unless she has Coffee-Mate.”

Guttierez picked Burt.

Jaime checked and picked the guy who was supposed to have the big money.

“Check,” Hector said.

Though he had to check when Camerando picked Dorothy, Jaime took the next few hands easily (a brain tumor, liver transplant, two radicals, and a lumpectomy) and was up five hundred dollars when Hector, laughing, said that Guttierez was murdering him and threw in the towel. Jaime declined to take his friend’s money but Hector insisted. Then he offered to return it but Camerando congratulated him on his game and said he hoped he was at least as much a man of honor as Guttierez. There was nothing to do but pocket the five hundred dollars as graciously as he could. “You really had me on that, Dorothy. I thought the tide was about to turn,” Jaime Guttierez said.

Though he wouldn’t remember it, Jaime Guttierez’s initial reaction was to be stumped when Hector Camerando had bid Dorothy and taken the hand in their friendly little game, had been about to say that the woman was either incredibly shy or very, very deaf. Shyness wasn’t even listed on the scale of infirmities, abnormalities, and outright deformities that counted for points in scoring human poker, and he had no genuinely corroborative evidence that the woman was deaf. The fact that she hadn’t spoken a word all evening, or, for that matter, even seemed to have heard one, was beside the point. Guttierez really was an honorable man. Honorable men did not bluff. Though he might well have taken the hand, Camerando was also an honorable man. He would never have called him on it. Knowing this, it wasn’t in Jaime’s character to bluff. Had he been a tad more observant, however, he might have seen the woman’s deformity, declared it openly to his friend, and humiliated him even more soundly than he already had.

Shorn now not only of decibels — unenhanced, Dorothy could no longer make out the ordinary noises of daily life, such as traffic, machinery, the singing of birds — but, in a way, even of the memory of them. She couldn’t recall, for example, the sound of her accent, her rough speech, or, even in her head, how to decline the melody of the most familiar tune.

It made her fearful, almost craven, in the streets, and she never entered them without making certain that her hearing aid was securely in place. (Which, hating its electronic hiss and frightful cackle as though storms were exploding inside her skull, she rarely wore in public and, sloughing it like too-constrictive clothing, never at home, even on the telephone or in front of the television, preferring instead to ask friends and visitors to speak louder or actually shout at her or endlessly repeat themselves as if she were carefully going over a tricky contract with them, something legalistic in her understanding.) And taking into account the time of day, whether it was rush hour, or the Christmas holidays, Spring Break and the kids down visiting on vacation, sometimes wore her spare, too, arranging the awkward, ugly hearing aid on the perfectly smooth flap of skin that covered her right outer ear like a long-healed amputation, the flap shiny and sealing over all the ear’s buried working parts — the tympanic membrane, auditory meatus and nerve, eustachian tube, cochlea, semicircular canals, stapes, anvil, malleus, and all the little wee chips of skull bones like a sort of gravel — so that even before her increasing, cumulative nerve deafness she heard everything at a slight remove, the profound bass of all distant, muffled sound. This was the deformity Guttierez had missed, for she made no attempt to hide it, never swept it behind her hair. Quite the opposite in fact. Displaying the ear like a piece of jewelry, or a beauty mark. Which, for a considerable time — almost until she was seven or eight — she truly believed it was, or believed it was since she first observed her older sister Miriam, may she rest, scooping wax from her right ear with a wooden match. This was back in Russia, and Dorothy was much too sensitive ever to draw the girl’s attention to the pitiable extra hole in her head, and much too modest ever to invite envy in either Miriam or her other sisters by boasting of the beauty of her own perfectly uninterrupted, perfectly smooth and complete right ear. (Indeed, when Miriam died, Dorothy, even though she knew better by then, even though she realized that most people’s ears did not enjoy the advantage of an extra flap of skin to prevent cold and germs and moisture from gaining access to the secret, most privy and concealed parts of her head, couldn’t help but at least a little believe that something of her dead sister’s illness might have been brought about by the vulnerability two open ears must have subjected her to.)

So it was a matter of some irritation to her during those times of the day and those seasons of the year when heavy traffic caused her to affix the bulky backup hearing aid in place, planting it and winding it about her ear like a stethoscope laid flat against a chest, but better safe than sorry. She did it, as she did almost everything else, uncomplainingly, her only objection reflexive — a knowledge of her smudged, ruined character; her heavy sense, that is, of her vanity, which Dorothy had at least privately permitted herself and privately enjoyed at twenty and thirty and forty and fifty and even, to some extent, into her sixties while Ted, olov hasholem, was still living, but which she fully understood to be not only extravagant and uncalled for but more than a little foolish, too, now that she was almost eighty.

Extravagant or not, foolish or not, she removed them, the good one and the bad one, too, once she was inside the movie theater, preferring the shadowy, muffled, blunted voices of the actors to the shrill, whistling treble of the hearing aids. Most of the dialogue was lost to her. What difference did it make? What could they be saying to each other that she hadn’t heard them say to each other a thousand times before? The handsome boy declared his love for the pretty girl. The pretty girl didn’t know whether to trust him or not. He’d fooled her before. She should trust him. She should settle down and have his kids. Life was too short. It went by like a dream. It’s what Ted always said. And now look at him. He was dead too many years.

And what troubled Mrs. Ted Bliss, what wounded and astonished when sleep eluded during all those endless nights when thoughts outpaced one another in her insomniac mind, was the fact that now, still alive, she was by so many years her dead husband’s senior.

He wouldn’t recognize her today. She had been beautiful even into her sixties. A dark, smooth-skinned woman with black hair and fine sweet features on a soft, wide armature of flesh, she had been a very parlor game of a creature, among her neighbors in Building Number One something of a conversation piece, someone, you’d have thought, who must have drunk from the fountain of youth. She had been introduced in the game room for years to guests and visitors from the other buildings that lined Biscayne Bay as an oddity, a sport of nature unscathed by time.

“Go on, guess how old she is,” more than one of her friends had challenged newcomers while Dorothy, her deep blush invisible to their pale examination, sat meekly by.

“Dorothy is fifty-nine,” people five and six years older than herself would hazard.

“Fifty-nine? You think?”

“I don’t know. Fifty-nine, sixty.”

Even the year Ted was dying.

“Sixty-seven!” they shouted, triumphant as people who knew the answer to vexing riddles.

Even after his cancer had been diagnosed Ted smiled benignly, Dorothy suffering these odd old thrust and parries in an almost luxurious calm, detached from the accomplishment of her graceful, almost invisible aging as if it had been the fruit of someone else’s labors. (And hadn’t it? Except for her long, daily soaks in her tub two and three times a day, she’d never lifted a finger.) Grinning, a cat with a canary in its belly, a reverie of something delicious on its chops.

“Is she? Is she, Ted? Can it be?”

Ted winked.

“Of course not,” Lehmann, whose own wife at sixty-seven was as homely as Dorothy was beautiful, said. “They’re in a witness protection program, the both of them.”

Several of the men at the table understood Lehmann’s bitterness — many shared it — and laughed. Even Dorothy smiled. “I came to play,” Lehmann said, “deal the cards already. Did I ask to see her driver’s license? I don’t know what they’re up to.”

“I’ll be sixty-two my next birthday,” Dorothy Bliss said, shaving years from her age. (It was the vanity again, a battle of the wicked prides. It was one thing, though finally a lesser thing, to look young for one’s age, quite another to be the age one looked young for.)

The truth was no one really knew, not Ted, not her sisters. Not her two younger brothers. Certainly not her surviving children. It was as if the time zones she crossed on her ship to America shed entire blocks of months rather than just hours as it forced its way west. Not even Dorothy was certain of her age. It was a new land, a younger country. The same immigration officials who anglicized the difficult Cyrillic names into their frequently arbitrary, occasionally whimsical record books could be bribed into fudging the age of a new arrival. That’s exactly what happened to Dorothy. In order for the daughter to get work under the new child labor laws, Dorothy’s mom had paid the man fifteen dollars to list her kid as two or three years older than her actual age. She always knew that her clock had been pushed forward, that Time owed her, as it were, and somewhere in her twenties, Dorothy called in a marker that, by the time it was cashed, had accumulated a certain interest. The mind does itself favors. She really didn’t know her true age, only that whatever it was was less than the sixteen that had appeared on her documents when she’d first come to this country.

Because she didn’t have a driver’s license to which Lehmann might have referred. Because she had never learned to drive. As though the same fifteen bucks her mother had offered and the official had taken so she might get her work permit had finessed not just the late childhood and early adolescence that were her due but the obligatory education, too. Most grown-up Americans’ streetish savvy. Paying by check, applying for charge cards, simply subscribing to the damn paper, for God’s sake. As though the eleven or twelve thousand dollars she brought in over the nine or ten years before she hooked up with Ted and that her mother’s initial fifteen-dollar cash investment had cost for that green card, had purchased not merely an exemption from ever having to play like a child when she was of an age to enjoy it but had been a down payment, too, on ultimate, long-term pampering privileges, making a housewife of her, a baleboosteh, lending some spoiled, complacent, and self-forgiving pinkish aura to her life and perceptions, a certain fastidious cast of mind toward herself and her duties. She shopped the specials, she snipped coupons out of the papers for detergents, for canned goods and coffee and liters of diet soft drinks, for paper products and bottles of salad dressing. She spent endless hours (three or four a day) in her kitchen, preparing food, doing the dishes till they sparkled, mopping the floor, scouring the sink, wiping down the stove; yet she had never been a very good cook, only a driven taskmistress, seldom varying her menus and never, not even when she entertained guests, a recipe, obsessive finally, so finicky about the world whenever she was alone in it that she was never (this preceded her deafness) entirely comfortable outside the door to her apartment (where she conceived of the slipcovers on her living room furniture, and perhaps even of the fitted terrycloth cover on the lid of the toilet seat in the bathrooms, as a necessary part of the furniture itself; for her the development of clear, heavy-duty plastic a technological breakthrough, a hinge event in science, up there with Kern cards, washable mah-jongg tiles, lifelong shmutsdread, a first impression she must have taken as a child in Russia, a sense of actual biological trayf, fear of the Gentile, some notion of caste deeper than a Hindu’s, a notion, finally, of order), something stubborn and stolid and profoundly resistant in her Slavic features, her adamant, dumb, and disapproving stance like that of a farm animal or a very picky eater.

So it was possible, perhaps, that those long soaks in her tub, the two baths she took every day, were not a preening or polishing of self so much as part of a continual scour, a bodily function like the need for food. Not beauty (who knew almost nothing about beauty) but just another step in a long campaign, some Hundred Years War she waged against the dirt on fruits and meats and vegetables, the germs on pennies, the invisible bacterium in the transparent air, building up a sterile field around herself like a wall of hygiene.

She tried to replicate in her personal appearance the same effects she strove for in her habits as a housekeeper. In her long pink widowhood she started to dress in bright polyester pants suits, bright because bright colors seemed to suggest to her the same buffed qualities of her kitchen’s sparkling dishes, mopped floors, scoured sinks and counters, her wiped-down stoves; and polyester because she could clean the suits in the washer and dryer every night before she went to bed. Dorothy had merely meant to simplify her life by filling it with activities that would keep her within the limited confines of her apartment, to live out what remained of her widowhood a respectable baleboosteh life. But her neighbors in the Towers saw only the brightly colored clothes she wore, and the carefully kempt hair she still bothered to dye, and thought of her as a very brave woman, a merry widow; attributing her steady, almost aggressive smile to her friendly outlook and not to the hardness of her hearing, her constant fear that people were saying pleasant things and making soft and friendly jokes she believed only her constant, agreeable, chipper grin and temperament could protect her from ever having to understand.

And now, since Ted’s death and the piecemeal disappearance of her beauty, she had ceased to be their little parlor game and game room conversation piece and had become instead a sort of mascot.

About a week or so after she had buried her husband in the Chicago cemetery where almost all the Blisses had been interred, Dorothy Bliss was approached by a man named Alcibiades Chitral. Señor Chitral was from Venezuela, a newcomer to the United States, a relative newcomer to the Towers complex. He had a proposition for Dorothy. He offered to buy her dead husband’s car. When Mrs. Bliss heard what he was saying she was outraged, furious, and, though she smiled, would, had she not been so preoccupied by grief, have slammed the door in his face. Vulture, she thought, inconsiderate, scavenging vulture! Bang on my nerves, why don’t you? Indeed, she was so chilled by the prospect of a bargain hunter in these terrible circumstances she almost threw up some of the food (she hadn’t had a good bowel movement in a week) with which her friends and relatives had tried to distract her from her loss the whole time she had sat shivah in Chicago. (Even here, in Florida, her neighbors brought platters of delicatessen, bakery, salads, liters of the same diet soft drinks she had purchased with discount coupons. To look at all that food you’d have thought death was a picnic. It was no picnic.) When he divined her state Alcibiades excused himself and offered his card.

“Call me in a few days,” he said. “Or no,” he said, “I see that you won’t. I’ll call you.”

She had not even wanted to take Ted back to Chicago. She was so stunned the day he died she didn’t even call her children to tell them their father was dead, and when she phoned them the next morning she passed on her news so dispassionately it was almost as if it had already been written off (well, he had been so ill all year) or had happened so long ago that she might have been speaking of something so very foreign to all their lives it seemed a mild aberration, a curiosity, like a brief spell of freakish weather.

Dirt was dirt, she told the kids, she could make arrangements to get him buried right here in Miami.

They had to talk her into sending the body home, and then they had to talk her into coming to Chicago.

Her son Frank said he would come for her.

Maxine offered the same deal. “Ma,” she said, “I’ll come down and help you pack. You shouldn’t be by yourself. When we’re through sitting shivah you’ll come to Cincinnati with me. Stay as long as you like. We’ll fly back together.”

She resisted, it was crazy, an extravagance. What was she, a decrepit old lady? She couldn’t pack a suitcase? Anyway, she said, she really didn’t like the idea of shlepping Ted back to Chicago. And she didn’t, it would be like having him die twice. In Chicago he would be so far away from her, she thought, he might as well be dead. When she realized what she’d been thinking she started to laugh. When she heard herself laughing she began to weep.

“Ma,” said her daughter, “I’ll be on the next plane. Really, Mama, I want to.”

In the end she said that if she couldn’t go by herself she wouldn’t attend her husband’s funeral. Though the idea of that old boneyard sent chills. Maybe Ted really should be buried in Florida. The cemeteries were like eighteen-hole golf courses here. She wept when she went to make a withdrawal from her passbook at the savings and loan to get cash to give to the undertakers, and to pay her plane fare at the United ticket counter in the Fort Lauderdale airport, and could not stop weeping while she sat in the lounge waiting for her flight to board, or even for the entire three-hour-and-five-minute nonstop ride to Chicago.

Weeping, inconsolable, not even looking up into the faces of the various strangers who tried to comfort her, the airline hostess who served her her dinner, the captain, who actually left his cabin to come to her seat and ask what was the matter, if there was anything he could do. Looking out the plane window, seeing the perfect green of those eighteen-hole cemeteries, and thinking, oh, oh Ted, oh Ted, oh oh oh. It occurred to her as they flew over Georgia that she had never been on a plane without her husband before. Weeping, inconsolable, it occurred to her that maybe they had put his body in the hold, that the undertakers had checked him through like her luggage.

And she really didn’t want to take Ted there. The place was too strange. It was where her mother was buried, her sister, Ted’s twin brothers, cousins from both sides of the family, her uncles and aunts, her oldest son. May all of them rest. A plot of ground about the size of a vacant lot where an apartment building had been torn down, a plot of land about the size of the construction site where Building Number Seven was going up.

It had been purchased in 1923 by a rich and distant uncle, a waggish man none of them had ever seen, who had bought up the property and set it aside for whomever of the Bliss family was then living or would come after, and had then made arrangements to have himself cremated and his ashes scattered from a biplane over Wyoming’s Grand Teton mountains in aviation’s earliest days when it wasn’t always a dead-solid certainty that airplanes could even achieve such heights. The waggish uncle’s curious legacy to the Blisses was possibly the single mystery the family had ever been faced with. Yet more than anything else it was this cemetery that not only held them together but distinguished them as a family, like having a common homeland, say, their own little Israel.

You lived, you died. Then you were buried there. Dorothy had not been the first of the Blisses to speak out about breaking the chain. Others had pronounced the idea of the place as too strange, or claimed it sent chills. And had found other means to dispose of themselves. One Bliss had actually chosen to follow in the flight path of the founder, as it were, and put it in his will that his cremains float down through the same patch of Wyoming altitude as had the waggish uncle’s so many years before. Dorothy — this would have been while Ted was being interred — had long since ceased her long, twelve- or thirteen-hundred-mile crying jag. Ceased the moment her flight touched down at O’Hare. The people who met her plane to take her to her sister Etta’s apartment on the North Side and those who came over to Etta’s later that night to embrace Dorothy — just touching her set them off, just offering their condolences did — and came up to her the next day at the chapel where she sat with her children in the first row, all observed her odd detachment. In Chicago, she knew that among themselves the family spoke of how well she was taking it, as well as could be expected. “Under the circumstances,” they added. She couldn’t help herself, she didn’t mean to take it well. She couldn’t help it that at the very moment her husband’s coffin was being lowered into the ground she had looked away for a moment and seen all the other graves where her people — the immediate, extended, nuclear, and almost genealogical family of Blisses — were buried and somehow understood that what had so repelled her about the idea of this place was the holy odor of its solidarity.

Back in Florida, where a sort of extended, informal shivah (perpetuated by her friends and neighbors in the Towers) continued to roll on, people came from far and wide throughout the complex to offer their condolences. Dorothy would have preferred that they all stop talking about it. Didn’t they understand how exhausting it was to be both a widow and a baleboosteh? To have to deal with all the soups and salads, fruit and delicatessen and more salads, cookies and cakes and all the other drek she had to find enough jars and baggies and tinfoil and just plain space in the freezer for…How, with her grief, which wouldn’t go away and which, like the tears, she could handle only in public among strangers she would never see again, people who’d never known Ted, or else only in the privacy of her bed where she couldn’t sleep for the sound of her own sobbing. In two years she would see her doctor, who would prescribe sleeping pills to knock her out and on which she would become dependent, a sixty-nine- or seventy-year-old junkie Jewish lady, making her old, piecemeal beginning to break down her gorgeous looks, a fabulous beauty into her sixties, gone frail and plain before her time, a candidate for death by heartbreak, quite literally draining her (she was constantly thirsty, and would rise two or three times a night to take a glass of water) and making the tasks in which, while her husband lived, she had once taken a certain pleasure (the dishes and floors, the sink, wiping down the stove) now seem almost Herculean, too much for her strength. (And now she had the living room to contend with, too, heavy furniture to move in order to vacuum the rug, using attachments she’d rarely bothered with before just to suck crumbs from the sofa and chairs, even an ottoman, from which she now removed the slipcovers every evening in time for her guests and replaced again in the mornings. Cleaning the bathrooms, too, now, wiping stains from beneath the rims of the toilets with a special brush, rubbing off stuck brown tracks of actual turd, flushing them until they disappeared into a whirlpool of blue water, fifty cents off with the coupon.) She didn’t know, maybe she was brave.

Gradually the visits became less and less frequent and then, about two months after Ted’s death, Dorothy received a notice that her personal property taxes were about to come due. When she saw how high they were (her husband had always taken care of such things), she was stunned. They wanted almost two hundred dollars just for the automobile. She couldn’t understand. They didn’t owe on the car. Ted had paid cash for it. She looked and looked but there was no telephone number on the bill that she could call. She took a bus down to City Hall. They sent her from this office to that office. What with the long lines, it took at least two hours before she found a person she could talk to who didn’t chase her to another department. She told her story for maybe the tenth time. She had received this bill. Here, Miss, you can look. They owned the car outright. If he had it Ted always paid cash, even for big-ticket items — their bedroom suite, the sofa, their dining room table and chairs. Even for their condominium. Though he had a couple — they had sent them to him in the mail — he never used his credit cards. Only for gas, he liked paying for gasoline with his Shell credit card. He wrote down how many gallons he put into the tank, he could keep track of his mileage. Dorothy heard how she spoke to this perfect stranger and realized that it was maybe the first time since he’d died that she’d really talked about Ted, that it wasn’t just people telling her how sorry they were and if there was anything they could do and Dorothy sighing back at them, thank you, but there really wasn’t. She thought she might start in again with the tears. But she didn’t.

She organized her thoughts. She didn’t know how to write checks. Even if she did she wouldn’t know how to keep her accounts. She’d gone to business almost ten years but not since she was a girl, and anyway, back then they gave you wages in a pay envelope that she turned over to her mother. Her husband did everything; she never had to lift a finger. She knew for a fact it was in Ted’s name, did she really owe two hundred dollars on the car?

She couldn’t help it, she was a baleboosteh. She wasn’t so much house proud as efficient. It gave her great satisfaction to know where everything was. There was so much in even the simplest household. It was really astonishing how much there was. Every day the newspaper came, announcements of upcoming events in the building, in the Towers complex. Every day the mail came. (It still came for Ted, and though it broke her heart to read letters from people who hadn’t yet gotten the news, and though she never answered them because to write that he had died to someone who hadn’t heard about it would be like making him just a little more dead than he already was, she never threw any of her husband’s mail away.) She knew which letters of her own to keep (just as she knew what coupons to cut out or which articles to clip from the paper to send her children and grandchildren) and which to throw away.

So as soon as she needed to find the card Alcibiades Chitral had left with her — it was a business card and, because a man had given it to her, she had been certain it was important — she knew where she had put it.

It was in with a stack of current and already expired warranties, instruction manuals, and lists of potentially useful phone numbers and addresses. She called him that evening.

“Are you having your dinner,” she said, “did I take you away from your programs?”

There was a pause at the other end of the connection, and it crossed her mind that though she’d given her name and broadly broached the reason for her call — Ted had died two months ago, it had been maybe seven weeks since Chitral had come to her door — he might not remember her, or she might have hurt his feelings — she’d almost closed the door in his face — and though she’d tried to smile he must have seen how upset she was. Hadn’t she been an immigrant herself one time? She’d felt slights, plenty of them, other people’s warinesses. “It can wait, it can wait,” she said. “Or maybe you changed your mind.”

“No, no,” Alcibiades said suddenly. “Look,” he said, “I have an appointment. I have to go to this meeting. I should be back in two, two and a half hours. If you’re up I could drop by then.”

Dorothy felt herself flush. In two and a half hours it would be about ten o’clock. All of a sudden, just like that, implications of Ted’s death that hadn’t even occurred to her, occurred to her. Who goes to sleep at ten o’clock? Old lonely people. Soured ones. If her husband were alive they’d still be watching television. Or playing cards with neighbors. Or listen, even if he’d just died — well, he had just died, and she was still sitting shivah — the gang would still be there, no one would even be putting on coffee yet. What could happen? She needed to get rid of Ted’s car before she paid the personal property, didn’t she? What could happen? Even only just thinking in these directions was a sin. Blushing over a telephone to a total stranger was an insult to Ted’s memory.

“I still don’t sleep so good,” she told him vaguely. “Two hours don’t bother me.”

She drew a third bath. She dried and powdered herself. She put on the black dress she had worn for the funeral.

This wasn’t funny business. She was too old for funny business. Her funny business days were gone forever. If she was nervous, if she blushed over telephones, if she bathed and powdered and put on fresh makeup, if it suddenly occurred that there were ramifications, if she straightened the chairs and made the lights and plumped the cushions, if she defrosted cake and set out fruit, if she was embarrassed or felt the least bit uncomfortable about her husband, dead two months though it seemed either forever or the day before yesterday (and she couldn’t remember how his voice sounded), it didn’t have the first thing to do with funny business.

She had no education to speak of and her only experience with the world had to do with her family. She had been a salesgirl in a ladies dress shop for maybe ten years more than forty years ago. (For most of those ten not even a salesgirl, more like a lady’s maid. She fetched dresses to the changing rooms in the back of the shop, handed them in to the customers, or helped while they tried them on.) She had dealt only with women, seen them in their bodies’ infinite circumstances, shy, pressed in the crowded quarters of the curtained-off dressing room for intimate opinions. She took care of the family. Ted took care of her. So if she fidgeted now, if she fussed over the fruit and furniture, it was, all over again, the way she’d been when Mrs. Dubow of whom she was terrified (the first woman in Illinois to pay her husband alimony), had pulled her from her duties in the close quarters and sent her out front to deal with the public. Where she was no longer required to give up her reluctant opinions but had actually to force them on others. Whether she held them or not. Volunteering styles (who knew nothing of style), stumping for fashions (or of fashion either), who was not even a good cook, merely one who could be depended upon to get it on the table on time. A baleboosteh manqué who spent twice the time she should have needed to put her condominium in order. Who was uncomfortable dealing with those women in the dress shop some forty-odd years ago let alone a man she was staying up to receive in her home in order to sell him a car.

Dorothy had given up on him and was already turning off lights when Security buzzed from downstairs.

He was almost an hour late. He apologized for having inconvenienced her but he’d been inconvenienced himself. The start of his meeting had been delayed while they waited for stragglers in a hospitality suite at the Hotel Intercontinental. It was inexcusable for people to behave like that, inexcusable, and he hoped Madam would forgive him. And, startling her, he presented her with a bouquet of flowers, which he produced from behind his back. “Oh,” Dorothy said, jumping back, “oh.” Then, realizing how this could have given offense, she tried to regain some composure. “They’re wrapped,” she said.

“Wrapped?” Alcibiades Chitral said.

“In that paper. Like florists use. Like my children send me for Mother’s Day.”

“Yes?”

Then, embarrassed, Dorothy understood that they were not a centerpiece he’d removed from the table in the hotel. “Jewish people,” she explained gently, “Jewish people don’t send flowers to a person if a person dies.”

“Oh,” Alcibiades said, “they don’t?”

“Sometimes they give a few dollars to a person’s charity in honor of the person,” she said.

“I see,” Alcibiades said. “What charity in particular?”

“The cancer fund,” Dorothy said meekly and wiped her eyes.

“Well, that’s a good idea,” he said. “I’ll write a check. But these are for you,” he said. “To make up for my being so late.”

She didn’t know what to say. Of course she had to accept them. If for nothing else then for going to the trouble. What florist was open this time of night? Maybe it was true what people said about the South Americans, not that they had money to burn but that they put it on their backs — the men’s gorgeous bespoke suits, the fantastic glitter of their wives’ gowns and dresses, the fabulous shoes with their sky-high heels they bought at a hundred dollars an inch, their jewelry and diamond watches that any person in their right mind would keep in a locked-up safe-deposit box and not wear on their wrist where a strap could break or a clasp come undone, or any bag boy in a supermarket or stranger on the street could knock you down and hit you over the head for.

So it was not with an entirely undiluted gratitude that Dorothy accepted his flowers but with a certain scorn, too. Rousting emergency twenty-four-hour-a-day florists to open the store and paying a premium let alone just ordinary retail, never mind wholesale. Though it was sweet of him. Very thoughtful. Unless, of course, he was just buttering her up to get a price on the car.

“I know I called you,” Dorothy said, “but to tell the truth I’m not sure I’m ready to sell.”

“You’ve changed your mind, señora,” said Alcibiades Chitral and then, startling Mrs. Bliss, abruptly rose and moved toward the door.

“Who said I changed my mind?” she said. “Did I say I changed my mind? I haven’t made it up, I meant.”

Alcibiades smiled. He was a good-looking man, tall, stout, ruddy complected, with bushy black eyebrows and white wavy hair. He looked like Cesar Romero; Dorothy Bliss felt nothing about this observation. Her heart didn’t stumble, no nostalgic sigh escaped her. She did not feel foolish. If anything, saddened. In this place, in all the places in the world really, there was something faintly humorous about a recent widow. They consoled and consoled you, distracted you with their calls and their company from morning till night (until, in fact, at least in those first few days of your grief, all you needed for sleep to come over you was to put your head on a pillow), with their hampers of food to feed an army, and she wasn’t saying right away, or next month, she wasn’t even saying next year; she wasn’t saying any particular time, but sooner or later, married friends saw your single condition and pronounced you eligible. Have your hair done, get some new clothes, what are you waiting for, time marches on. Because sooner or later it struck people funny. Like you lived in a joke, something comic in the deprived, resigned life. No matter your age, no matter your children were grown, that they had children. Something funny about the life force. Because God put you here to be entertained, to make the most of whatever time, however little it was, you had left. And pushed men on you, old farts with one foot in the grave. To make accommodation, to come to terms and spin your heart on its heels like a girl’s. They’d change your life, have you cute, almost like you’d get a makeover in Burdines. They didn’t care if you didn’t get married. You didn’t have to marry, he could move in with you, you could move in with him. Marriage was too much trouble. Who needed the aggravation? There were wills to think about, prenuptial agreements. Like living in the old country, dowry, like America had never happened. Or starting all over again.

So if Dorothy was a little sad it wasn’t because she found this stranger attractive so much as that, as a widow, she felt like a figure of fun in his eyes. The gallantry, the expensive flowers, his predatory smile when she balked as he got up to leave.

“So what would you give?” she said, determined not to dicker.

He wanted to be fair, he said. He said he’d placed a few calls, taken the trouble to find out its blue book value. “That’s the price a dealer will pay for your used car.”

She knew what a blue book was. Ted, olov hasholem, had had one himself.

“Of course,” Alcibiades said, “I don’t know what extras came with your car, but air-conditioning, electric door locks and windows, if you have those it could be worth a little more. Even a radio, FM, AM. And if it’s clean.”

The baleboosteh in her looked offended. “Spic and span,” she said evenly.

Alcibiades, solemn, considered. “Tell you what,” he said seriously. “Let’s take it for a spin.”

She was as stunned as if the Venezuelan had asked her out on a date. Yet in the end she agreed to go with him. She would need a sweater, he said, a wrap. He would wait, he said, while she got it.

The car keys were in a drawer in the nightstand by their bed. Oddly enough, they were right on top of the blue book, and Mrs. Bliss, out of breath and feeling a pressure in her chest, opened it and looked up the value of the car. They’d had it over two years. Ted never kept a car more than three years. If he’d lived he’d be looking for a new one soon.

Downstairs, in the underground garage, she didn’t even have to tell him where it was parked. It was the first time she’d seen it in months and she began to cry. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“No, no, señora,” Alcibiades said, “please. I understand very well.”

“You’ll have to drive,” Mrs. Bliss said. “I never learned.”

She handed him the keys and he opened the door on the passenger side. He held it while she got in and closed the door after her. But Mrs. Bliss was on guard against his charm now. She knew the blue book value.

Then something happened that made her want to get this all over with. Before Chitral had even had time to come around to the driver’s side and unlock the door Dorothy was overcome with a feeling so powerful she gasped in astonishment and turned in her seat and looked in the back to see if her husband were sitting there. She was thrown into confusion. It was Ted’s scent, the haunted pheromones of cigarettes and sweat and loss, his over-two-year ownership collected, concentrated in the locked, unused automobile. It was the smell of his clothes and habits; it was the lingering odor of his radiation treatments, of road maps and Shell gasoline. It was the smell of presence and love.

They drove to Coconut Grove; they drove to Miami. She went past places and buildings she had never seen before. She didn’t see them now. It was a hot night and the air-conditioning was on. She asked Chitral to turn it off and, hoping to exorcize Ted’s incense, pressed the buttons to open all the windows.

She knew the blue book value. She would take whatever he offered. When he drove into the garage and went unerringly to Ted’s space he shut off the engine and turned to her.

“It drives like a top,” he said, and offered her five thousand dollars more than the car was worth.

“But that’s more—” Mrs. Ted Bliss said.

“Oh,” said Alcibiades Chitral, “I’m not so much interested in the car as in the parking space.”