TWO

Excepting the formalities — the transfer of title when his check cleared, surrendering the keys — that was about the last time Alcibiades Chitral had anything to say to Mrs. Ted Bliss. The whirlwind courtship was over. That was just business, Dorothy explained to more than one of her inquisitive, curious friends in the Towers when they saw the fresh flowers — still fresh after more than a week, as though whatever upscale, emergency florist Alcibiades had had perforce to go to to purchase flowers at that time of night and charge what had to have been those kind of prices, would have had to provide not only the convenience of his after-hours availability but, too, something special in the nature of the blooms themselves, a mystery ingredient that imbued them with some almost Edenic longevity and extended scent — some of which Mrs. Ted had transferred from the cut crystal vase into which she’d originally put them and now redistributed in three equal parts into two other vessels.

She was at pains to inform them that there had been but the single presentation from Mr. Chitral, that she herself had thought to place these remarkable flowers in additional vases so that she might enjoy them from various vantage points throughout the room. They cheered her up, she said.

“Sure they do,” Florence Klein said. “Believe me, Dorothy, I only wish I had an admirer.”

“He admired me for my parking space.”

“I’m only kidding,” Florence Klein said. “Don’t get so cock-cited.”

“I’ll say this much for Latins,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “they always try to sell you a bill of goods. During the war, when Ted had the meat market, it was the same thing. He could have opened a liquor store with all the cases of wine those thieves gave him. They climbed all over each other to get you to take their black-market, Argentine meat. I wanted to sell.”

Had Chitral heard of any of this he would have been offended. The bitch was good-looking enough for an old bitch, but who did these people think they were?

Seducing her into selling her husband’s automobile was a non-starter, the last thing on his mind. It was insulting. One gave out of respect for the proprieties, the civilized gesture. Was he some nasty tango of a man? Had he kissed her hand? Had he offered serenades?

But no whiff of imagined scandal reached his ears. No wink of conspiracy, no gentle nudge to his ribs in the elevator. Even on those rare occasions when they ran into each other at this or that Towers do, Mrs. Bliss barely acknowledged him. He thought he understood her reasons. He imagined she still felt shame for having sold her husband’s car. Chitral was a gentleman, no more given to grandstanding or bluffing than Hector Camerando or Jaime Guttierez. Taking his cue from Mrs. Ted Bliss, he affected a discretion as palpable (though of course not as nervous) as her own. He was not just a gentleman. He was a man of parts. In addition to his decorums, he had his sensibilities as well. In the matter of the automobile she may have been shamed as much by the windfall profit she had made from the sale as by the sale itself. All you had to do was look at her. She was like the woman of valor in Proverbs. Any idea of benefit from the death of a spouse would have gone against her nature. She had known he’d overpaid her. That’s why he’d told her about the parking space. It was a matter of record that the people in Building One could sell their garage privileges. He’d meant to make it seem like a package deal — which of course it was. The space would have been worthless to him without the car, the car of no value without the space.

So the last time they saw each other without the mutual buffers of an amiable, pretend nonchalance was two years later, when Mrs. Bliss testified against him, a witness for the prosecution, in court. She never entirely understood how they worked it. Nor, for that matter, really understood why the government subpoenaed her.

But don’t think the family didn’t fight to have the subpoena quashed. Frank, her son, and Maxine, her daughter, wanted her to have representation and even hired a lawyer for her, although when Mrs. Bliss learned what they were being charged she gathered her outrage, joined it to her courage, and fired her. Manny, from the building, had been a lawyer before retiring and moving to Florida, and Mrs. Bliss told him that the kids thought she needed representation. Just using the word sounded dangerous in her mouth, and important.

He told her up front that he had been strictly a real estate lawyer, that he really knew nothing about the sort of thing Dorothy was involved with. “Besides,” he said, “I’m retired. I practiced in Michigan. I don’t even know if Michigan and Florida have, whadayacall it, reciprocity.”

“What’s reciprocity?” Mrs. Bliss asked.

Manny came to see her an hour later and told her he had called a man he knew, a registrar of deeds in the Dade County Courthouse.

“You know what?” he said. “He told me I have it.” He seemed very excited. “I’m going to take your case,” he told her solemnly.

“Ma,” Maxine said when she learned Mrs. Bliss had fired the attorney she and her brother had obtained for her, “do you think that’s such a good idea? No offense, Mother, but do you really believe Manny is up to this? These are people from the Justice Department, federal people. Can Manny go one on one with these people?”

“Manny’s no fool.”

“If it’s the money—”

“Of course it’s the money,” Mrs. Bliss said. “You know what she charges? Two hundred fifty dollars an hour!”

“Ma, Ma,” Maxine said, “this guy is a big-time Venezuelan cocaine kingpin.”

“He’s a farmer.

“Mother, he’s a drug lord! They want to put you on the stand so you can identify him as the man who bought Daddy’s car from you. You’re a very important government witness. I’m not even talking about the emotional strain, what going through all that stress could do to a person half your age and with a much better blood pressure. I don’t mean to scare you, Ma, but Frank and I are concerned“—she lowered her voice; Dorothy had to press her left ear tight against the receiver to hear her—“what these people could do to you.”

“Sweetheart, sweetheart,” Mrs. Bliss said, “your daddy, olov hasholem, is dead two years. Two years I’ve been without him. A lifetime. Who’s left to share Marvin’s death with me? Who’s around to miss him? What trouble can your kingpin make for me?”

Manny couldn’t get her out of it. He gave it his best effort, pulled out all the stops, tried tricks he’d learned in thirty-five years of real estate law in the great state of Michigan when clients required additional time before they could move into their new homes or out of their old ones. He brought a note to the government from Mrs. Bliss’s doctors. He had her put a dying battery into her hearing aid when she went to be deposed, but these federal boys knew their onions. They wrote their questions out on yellow, lined, 9 X 14-inch legal pads and handed them to her.

Dorothy put on her glasses.

“Wait, hold your horses a minute. Those ain’t her reading glasses.”

“Does he have to be here?” asked one of the lawyers.

“Behave yourself, Pop,” said another.

In the end, when she was finally called and sworn, she was very calm. She had no great wish to harm this man, she bore him no grudge. Indeed, she was even tempted to perjure herself on his behalf, but thought better of it when she realized the signals this might send to her neighbors in the Towers. So she drew a deep breath and implicated him. She was very careful, however, to point out what a gentleman he’d been, how he’d brought her roses that were still fresh as a daisy after more than a week, and recalled for the jury the lovely drive he had taken her on through Coconut Grove and Miami.

Chitral was sentenced to one hundred years. Dorothy felt terrible about that, just terrible. And although she was told they would have had more than enough to convict him even without her testimony, she was never quite reconciled to the fact that she had damaged him. She asked her lawyer (on the day of her appearance Manny had accompanied her to court for moral support) to get word to Alcibiades’s lawyer that there were no hard feelings, and that if he ever wanted her to visit him she would make every effort to get one of her friends in the building to drive her. He said, “Out of the question.”

She read about the case in the paper, she watched televised excerpts of it on the eleven o’clock news (though she herself never appeared on the screen she heard some of her actual testimony as the camera showed Chitral’s face in all its friendly indifference; he looked, thought Mrs. Bliss, rather as he had looked when they had run into each other in the elevators or passed one another in the Towers’ public rooms), but try as she might, she never commanded the nuts and bolts of just how Ted’s Buick LeSabre and parking space fit into the kingpin’s schemes. It all seemed as complex to her as the idea of “laundering money,” a concept alien to even Dorothy’s baleboosteh soul. Building on this vaguely housekeeping analogy, however, she gradually came to think of the car serving Chitral and his accomplices as a sort of dope hamper. It was the closest she came. Manny said she wasn’t far off.

Then, under the DEA’s new federal forfeiture laws, the government confiscated the car. Two agents came and affixed a bright yellow, heavy iron boot to its rear wheel. Mrs. Bliss came down to the garage when a neighbor alerted her to what was happening and wanted to know what was going on.

One of the government agents said there was no room for a pile a shit back on the lot, and they were putting her husband’s car under house arrest.

“How would it look?” said the other agent. “People would laugh. A seventy-eight Buick LeSabre next to all those Jags, Benzes, Rolls-Royces, Corvettes, and Bentleys? Folks would think we weren’t doing our job.”

“Please,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “you can’t leave it here. You’re dishonoring my husband’s memory.”

“Lady,” the agent said, “you should’ve thought of that before you started doing business with those mugs.”

She called Manny and told him what was happening. Manny from the building was there within minutes of her placing the call.

“Aha,” Manny told her, rubbing his hands, “this, this is more like it. This appertains to real estate law. Now they’re on my turf!” The agents were fixing a long yellow ribbon from four stanchions, in effect roping off Ted Bliss’s old parking space. The lawyer went up to the government. “Just what do you gentlemen think you’re doing? It looks like a crime scene down here.”

“It is a crime scene down here,” an agent said.

“That parking space is private property. It belongs to my client, Mrs. Ted Bliss. It was included in the deed of sale when the condominium was originally purchased.”

“Oh yeah?” said the agent who had finished attaching the last ribbon to the last metal stanchion and was just now adjusting the posts, pulling them taut so the ribbons formed a rectangle about the parking space. “How’s it look?” he asked his partner.

The other agent touched his forefinger to his right thumb and held it up eye level with his face. “You’re an artist,” he said.

“Oh yeah?” the agent, turning to Manny, said again. “We’re not just confiscating the car, we’re confiscating the parking space, too. She wants it back, she can come to the auction and make a bid just like any other American in good standing. She can make us an offer on the piece a shit, too.”

“Sure,” said the agent who’d said it was a crime scene down there, speaking to Manny but looking directly at Mrs. Ted Bliss, “she can start with a bid five, six thousand bucks over the blue book value of the parking space.”

The two DEA agents got into a sparkling, silver, late-model Maserati and drove the hell off, leaving Manny and Dorothy looking helplessly down at the rubber tire tracks the car had burned into the cement floor of the garage.

It was as if she were a greenhorn. She felt besmirched, humiliated, ridden out of town on a rail. In the old days her mother had bribed an immigration official fifteen dollars and he had changed the age on Dorothy’s papers. Her alien status had never been a problem for her. There had never been a time when she felt awkward, or that she had had to hold her tongue. The years in the dress shop when she’d been more like a lady’s maid than a salesgirl, and had attempted (and sometimes actually seemed) to hide in changing rooms narrower and less than half the length and width of her husband’s cordoned-off parking space in the garage hadn’t been nearly so degrading. Even in the presence of the terrifying Mrs. Dubow, who somehow managed not only to speak to Dorothy with her mouth full of pins but even to shout at her and come after her (at least five times in the almost ten years she had worked for the deranged woman), brandishing scissors and cracking her tailor’s yellow measuring tape at Dorothy’s cowering figure as if it were a whip, she hadn’t felt the woman’s dislike so much as her pure animal rage. The next week there was likely to be an additional six or seven dollars in her pay envelope.

It may have been nothing more than the glib way in which the two DEA men had addressed her (or addressing Manny but really speaking through him to Dorothy), but she had never felt so uncitizened, so abandoned, so bereft of appeal. Her protests would have meant nothing to them.

Dorothy had never experienced anti-Semitism. During all the years Ted had owned his meat market, or even after he’d sold it, bought a fifty-unit apartment building in a declining neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side and become not only its landlord but, with Dorothy’s assistance, went around collecting the rent money on the first Monday of every month, she hadn’t sensed even its trace. Neither from Polack nor shvartzer. Goyim liked her. Everyone liked her, and although there were people she disliked — some of Ted’s customers when they had the butcher shop, several of her husband’s four-flusher tenants in the North Side apartment building — she herself had always felt personally admired.

Now she wasn’t so sure. The agents had spoken in front of her as if she were the subject of gossip. From some superior plane of snobbery like a sort of wiseguy American Yiddish, they added insult to injury.

And now the continued presence of her late husband’s car seemed like nothing so much as an assault, a kind of smear campaign. She found herself averting her eyes from the blighted automobile whenever she went down to the garage with neighbors who’d offered to drive her to her hair appointment, or take her shopping, or invited her out to restaurants.

Actually her odd fame — she’d become a human interest story; a reporter from the Herald had written her up in a column; the host of a radio talk show wanted her as a guest — had leant her a swift cachet in the building, and people with whom she had barely exchanged a few sentences invited her to their condos for dinner. In the days and weeks following the trial Mrs. Bliss found herself accepting more of these invitations than she declined if for no other reason than that she genuinely enjoyed visiting other people’s condos in the Towers. With the exception of the penthouses, there were essentially only three basic floor plans. She got a kick out of seeing what people had done with their places and regretted only that Ted wasn’t there to see them with her.

It was peculiar, really, Mrs. Bliss thought, that she should be interested in such matters. She was, of course, house proud. Yet the fixtures and furniture in her apartment were not only pretty much what she had brought down to Florida with her from Chicago but many of her things were pieces they’d had from the time they were first married. Massive bedroom and dining room suites that looked as if they had been carved from the same dark block of mahogany. They had bought, it would seem, for the ages. Even their living room furniture, their sofa and side tables and chairs, seemed somehow to have come from a time that predated fashion, was prior to style. In Florida, their dining room table, too big for the squeezed, sleek, modern measurements of a condominium’s efficient, reduced rooms, had had to be cut down so that what in Chicago had accommodated eight people (a dozen when there was poker and the family — the gang — was over) now barely had room for five and overwhelmed the space in which it was put. Like every other piece of their giant furniture — the great boxy chairs in the living room like the enormous chairs of Beijing bureaucrats, their thick drapes and valances — it appeared to absorb light and locate the apartment in a more northerly climate in a season more like winter or autumn than summer or spring. An air of disjointedness and vague anachronism presided even over their appliances — their pressure cooker and metal juice squeezer, their electric percolator and carving knife.

And though Mrs. Bliss was neither jealous nor envious of other people’s possessions, or of the way they utilized space under their new dispensations, or translated their old New York, Cleveland, or Toronto surroundings through the enormous sea change of their Florida lives, nor understood how at the last moment — she didn’t kid herself, with the possible exception of the Central and South Americans (and a few of the Canadians), this was the last place most of them would ever live — they could trade in the solid, substantial furniture of their past for the lightweight bamboo, brushed aluminum, and canvas goods of what they couldn’t live long enough to become their future. And, indeed, there’d been considerable turnover in the Towers in the three or so years since Ted Bliss had died. From Rose Blitzer’s table alone three people had passed away — Rose’s husband, Max; Ida, the woman who couldn’t digest sugar substitutes without a nondairy creamer; and the woman who’d poured their coffee.

Yet it was never from a sense of the morbid or any thought to mockery that Mrs. Bliss accepted invitations to other people’s apartments. She went out of deep curiosity and interest, as others might go, say, to anthropological museums.

And now, for the first time since she’d moved south, Mrs. Bliss was visiting one of the Towers’ penthouses. She had emerged from the penthouse’s private elevator. First she had had to descend to the lobby from her condo on Building One’s seventh floor, cross the lobby to the security desk and give her name to the guard, Louise Munez. Louise had once confided that while she didn’t herself live in the Towers, she was the daughter of Elaine Munez, one of the residents here. She dressed in the thick, dark serge of a night watchman, wore a revolver that she carried in an open, strapless holster, and held a long, heavy batonlike flashlight that doubled as a nightstick. A pair of doubled handcuffs that clanked when she moved was attached to a reinforced loop at the back of her trousers. Though she didn’t appear to be a big woman, in her windbreaker and uniform she seemed bulky. On her desk, spread out before her closed-circuit television monitors, was an assortment of tabloids — the National Enquirer, the National Examiner, the Star—along with current numbers of Scientific American, Playboy, Playgirl, Town and Country. An open cigar box with a few bills and about two dollars in change was just to the left of a red telephone. A walkie-talkie chattered in a pants pocket.

“Interest you in some reading matter tonight, Mrs. Ted Bliss?”

“Maybe some other time, Louise. I’m invited to attend Mr. and Mrs. Auveristas’s open house.”

“I have to check the guest list.”

“It’s an open house,” Mrs. Bliss said.

“I have to check the guest list.” She referred to a sheet of names. “Stand over there by the penthouse elevator. You don’t have a key, I’ll remote it from here.”

Dorothy stepped out of the elevator into a sort of marble foyer that led to two tall, carved wooden doors. She had to ring to be let in. A butler opened the doors, which were electric and withdrew into a cavity in the marble walls. Without even asking who she was he handed her a name tag with her name written out in a fine cursive script. “How did you know?” she asked the butler who smiled enigmatically but did not answer.

The place was like nothing she’d ever seen. She knew she hadn’t worn the right clothes, that she didn’t even own the right clothes. What did she know, it was an open house. If she’d known it was supposed to be dress-up she’d have put on the dress she’d worn in court the day she testified. She had a queer sense she should have brought opera glasses.

“Ah, it’s Mrs. Bliss! How are you, Mrs. Bliss?” called a youthful-looking but silver-haired man who couldn’t have been in more than his early forties or perhaps even his late thirties, immediately withdrawing from an intense conversation in which he seemed to be not merely engaged but completely engrossed. It occurred to Dorothy, who couldn’t remember having met him, that she’d never seen anyone so thoroughly immaculate. So clean, she meant (he might have been some baleboss of the personal), not so much well groomed (though he was well groomed) as buffed, preened, shiny as new shoes. He could have been newly made, something just off an assembly line, or still in its box. He seemed almost to shine, bright, fresh as wet paint. The others, following the direction of his glance, stared openly at her and, when he started to move toward her across the great open spaces of the immense room, simply trailed along after him. Instinctively, Dorothy drew back a few steps.

As if gauging her alarm the man quite suddenly halted and held up his hand, cautioning the others as if they were on safari and he some white hunter fearful of spooking his prey. “Madam Bliss!” he said, exactly as if it were she who had surprised him.

Dorothy nodded.

“Welcome to my home,” he declared, “welcome indeed.” And, reaching forward, took up her hand and bent to kiss it. This had never happened to her before, nor, outside the movies, had she ever seen it happen to anyone else. It even crossed her mind that she was being filmed. (People were beginning to buy those things…those camcorders. Even one of her grandsons had one. He took it with him everywhere.)

“Oh, don’t,” Dorothy said smiling nervously. “I must look terrible.”

Bemused, Tommy Auveristas — that’s who it was, she could read his name tag now — looked at her. It was one of those moments when neither person understands what the other person means. No matter what happened between them in the years that would follow, this was a point that would never be straightened out. Auveristas thought Mrs. Bliss was referring to the overpowering smell of cheap perfume coming off her hands and which he would taste for the rest of the evening and on through the better part of the next morning. Oh, he thought, these crazy old people. “No, no,” he said, “you are delicious,” and then, turning not to one of the two servers in the room but to a very beautifully dressed woman in a fine gown, told her to get Mrs. Bliss a drink. “What would you like?” he asked.

“Do you have diet cola?”

“I’m sure we must. If we don’t we shall absolutely have to send out for a case.”

“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I wouldn’t put you to the trouble. I’ll have 7-Up. Your home is very beautiful.”

“Would you like me to show you around? I will show you around.”

“I mustn’t take you from your guests. I just came, there’s time, I’m not in any hurry.”

Mrs. Bliss felt overwhelmed. She could have been the guest of honor or something, the way they treated her. It was, like that kiss on her hand, outside her experience. Or if not outside her experience exactly, then at least outside earned experience, the cost-effective honors of accomplishment. She’d been a bride. She was a mother, she and Ted had married a daughter, bar mitzvahed two sons, buried one of them. She was a widow, she had buried a husband, so it wasn’t as if she’d never been the center of attention. (She had been a witness for the government in a high-profile drug case.) But who’s kidding who? Let’s face it, except for the trial, all those other occasions had been affairs of one sort or the other, even the funerals, may Ted and Marvin rest, bought and paid for. So unless they were exaggerating their interest in her — Tommy Auveristas was polite, even, she thought, sincere — she couldn’t remember feeling so important. It was exciting. But she was overwhelmed. As she hadn’t known what to do with all the attention after Ted’s death, she didn’t know what to do with the solicitude of these strangers.

Many of them drifted away. New guests were arriving and Tommy Auveristas, excusing himself from Mrs. Bliss as if she were indeed the guest of honor, went off to greet them.

Ermalina Cervantes came back with her soft drink.

“Here you go,” she said. “It wasn’t cold enough, I put ice in it. Can you drink it with ice?”

“Oh, thank you. Cold is fine. This is good, I’m really enjoying it. But you know,” Mrs. Bliss said, “they fill up your glass with too much ice in a restaurant, they’re trying to water it down. I don’t let them get away with that. I send it back to the kitchen.”

“If there’s too much ice…”

“No, no, it’s perfect. Hits the spot. I was just saying.”

Ermalina Cervantes smiled at her. She had a beautiful smile, beautiful teeth. Beautiful skin. Mrs. Bliss set great store in pretty skin in a woman. She thought it revealed a lot about a person’s character. It wasn’t so important for a man to have a nice skin. Men had other ways of showing their hearts, but if a woman didn’t have sense enough to take care of her skin (it was the secret behind her own beauty; why people had bragged on her looks almost until she was seventy), then she didn’t really care about anything. The house could fall down around her ears and she’d never notice. She’d send her kids off to school all shlumperdik, shmuts on their faces, holes in their pants. But this was some Ermalina, this Ermalina. Teeth and skin! Butter wouldn’t melt.

Ermalina Cervantes, nervous under the scrutiny of Mrs. Bliss’s open stare, asked if anything were wrong.

“Wrong? What could be wrong, sweetheart? It’s a wonderful party. The pop is delicious. I never tasted better. You have a beautiful smile and wonderful teeth, and your skin is your crowning glory.”

“Oh,” Ermalina Cervantes said, “oh, thank you.”

“I hope you don’t mind my saying.”

“No, of course not. Thank you, Mrs. Bliss.”

“Please, dear. Dorothy.”

“Dorothy.”

“That’s better,” she said, “you make me very happy. I’ll tell you, I haven’t been this happy since my husband was alive. Older people like it when younger people use their first names. If you think it’s the opposite you’d be wrong. It shows respect for the person if the person calls the person by her first name than the other way around. Don’t ask me why, it’s a miracle. You’re blushing, am I talking too much? I’m talking too much. I can’t help it. Maybe because everyone’s so nice. You know, if I didn’t know pop don’t make you drunk I’d think I was drunk.”

A pretty blond named Susan Gutterman came by and Ermalina introduced her to Mrs. Bliss.

“Susan Gutterman,” Mrs. Bliss said speculatively. “You’re Jewish?”

“No.”

“Gutterman is a Jewish name.”

“My husband is Jewish. He’s from Argentina.”

“You? What are you?”

“Oh,” Susan Gutterman said offhandedly, “not much of anything, I guess. I’m a WASP.”

“A wasp?”

“A White Anglo-Saxon Protestant,” Susan Gutterman explained.

“Oh, you’re of mixed blood.”

“May I bring you something to eat?” Susan Gutterman said.

“I haven’t finished my pop. We haven’t met but I know who you are,” said Mrs. Bliss, turning to a woman just then passing by. “You’re Carmen Auveristas, Tommy Auveristas’s wife.” Like all the other South Americans at the party she was a knockout, not anything like those stale cutouts and figures with their fancy guitars, big sombreros, spangled suits, and drooping mustaches thicker than paintbrushes that the Decorations Committee was always putting up for the galas on those Good Neighbor nights in the gussied-up game rooms. And not at all like the women who went about all overheated in their coarse, black, heavy mourning. Was it any wonder those galas were so poorly attended? They must have been insulted, Mrs. Ted Bliss thought. Portrayed like so many shvartzers. Sure, how would Jews like it?

“And I know who you are,” Carmen Auveristas said.

“Your husband’s very nice. Such a gentleman. He kissed my hand. Very continental. Very suave.”

“Have you met Elaine Munez?” Mrs. Auveristas asked.

“Your daughter, Louise, let me up. She tried to sell me a paper. Oh,” she told her fellow guest, the cop-and-paper-boy’s mother, “she must have called up my name on her walkie-talkie. That’s how the servant knew to give me my name tag. I was wondering about that.”

“May I bring you something to eat?” Elaine Munez said flatly.

“No, thank you,” she said. “I ate some supper before I came. I didn’t know what a spread you put on. Go, dear, it looks delicious. I wish I could eat hot spicy foods, but they give me gas. They burn my kishkas.”

The three women smiled dully and left her to stand by herself. Dorothy didn’t mind. Though she was having a ball, the strain of having to do all the talking was making her tired. She sat down in a big wing chair covered in a bright floral muslin. She was quite comfortable. Vaguely she was reminded of Sundays in Jackson Park when she and Ted and the three children had had picnics in the Japanese Gardens. In the beautiful room many of her pals from the Towers, there, like herself, in the penthouse for the first time, walked about, examining its expensive contents, trying out its furniture, accepting hors d’oeuvres from the caterers, and giggling, loosened up over highballs. Dorothy amused herself by trying to count the guests, keeping two sets of books, three — the Jews, those South Americans she recognized, and those she’d never seen before — but someone was always moving and, when she started over, she’d get all mixed up. It was a little like trying to count the number of musicians in Lawrence Welk’s band on television. The camera never stayed still long enough for her to get in all the trumpet players, trombonists, clarinet players, fiddlers, and whatnot. Sometimes a man with a saxophone would set it down and pick up something else. Then, when you threw in the singers…It could make you dizzy. Still, she was content enough.

Closing her eyes for a moment and concentrating as hard as she could — she was wearing her hearing aid; this was in the days when she owned only one — she attempted to distinguish between the English and Spanish conversations buzzing around her like flies.

Tommy Auveristas, kneeling beside her armchair, startled her.

Quite almost as much as she, bolting up, startled him, causing him to spill a little of the food from the plate he was extending toward her onto the cream Berber carpeting.

“Son of a bitch!”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! It’s my fault,” Mrs. Bliss volunteered. “If we rub it with seltzer it should come out! I’ll go and get some!”

“No, no, of course not. The maid will see to it. Stay where you are.”

Mrs. Bliss pushed herself up out of the armchair.

Stay where you are!” Auveristas commanded. “I said the girl would see to it. Where is the nincompoop?”

Seeing he’d frightened Mrs. Bliss half to death, he abruptly modulated. “I’ve offended you. Forgive me, señora. You’re absolutely right. I think you’d be more comfortable someplace else. Here, take my arm. We’ll get out of this woman’s way while she works.” He said something in Spanish to the maid who, on her hands and knees, was picking a reddish sauce out of a trough of sculpted carpet before wiping the stain away with a wet cloth. He led Dorothy to a sofa — one of three — in a distant corner of the room. Seating her there, he asked again that she forgive him for his outburst and promised he’d be right back.

He returned with food piled high on a plate. “Ah, Mrs. Bliss,” he said. “Not knowing your preference in my country’s dishes, I have taken the liberty of choosing for you.”

She accepted the plate from the man. She respected men. They did hard, important work. Not that laundry was a cinch, preparing and serving meals, cleaning the house, raising kids. She and Ted were partners, but she’d been the silent partner. She knew that. It didn’t bother her, it never had. If Ted had been mean to her, or bossed her around…but he wasn’t, he didn’t. As a matter of fact, honest, they’d never had a fight. Her sisters had had terrible fights with their husbands. Rose was divorced and to this day she never saw her without thinking of the awful things that had happened between her sister and Herman. Listen, scoundrel that he was, there were two sides to every story. And everything wasn’t all cream and peaches between Etta and Sam. Still, much as she loved Etta, the woman had a tongue on her. She wasn’t born yesterday. Husbands and wives fought. Cats and dogs. Not her and Ted. Not one time. Not once. Believe it or not. As far as Dorothy was concerned he was, well, he was her hero. Take it or leave it.

What she told Gutterman and Elaine Munez was true. She wasn’t hungry; she had prepared a bite of supper before she came to the party. She wasn’t hungry. What did an old woman need? Juice, a slice of toast with some jelly in the morning, a cup of coffee. Maybe some leftovers for lunch. And if she went out to Wolfie’s or the Rascal House with the gang for the Early Bird Special, perhaps some brisket, maybe some fish. Only this wasn’t any of those things. These things were things she’d never seen before in her life.

Bravely, she smiled at Tommy Auveristas and permitted him to lay a beautiful cloth napkin across her lap and hand her the plate of strange food. He gave her queer forks, an oddly shaped spoon. She didn’t have to look to know that it was sterling, top of the line.

Nodding at her, he encouraged her to dig in.

Mrs. Ted Bliss picked over this drek with her eyes. From her expression, from the way her glance darted from one mysterious item to the next, you’d have thought she was examining different chocolates in a pound box of expensive candy, divining their centers, like a dowser, deciding which to choose first. Meanwhile, Tommy Auveristas explained the food like a waiter in one of those two-star restaurants where you nod and grin but don’t know what the hell the man is talking about.

“Which did you say was the chicken, the green or the blue one?”

“Well, both.”

“I can’t decide,” Dorothy Bliss said.

Auveristas wasn’t born yesterday either. He knew the woman was stalling him, knew the fixed ways of the old, their petrified tastes. It was one of the big items that most annoyed the proud hidalgo about old fart señoras like this one. She was his guest, however, and whatever else he may have been he was a gracious and resourceful host.

“No, no, Dorothy,” he said, snatching her plate and signaling the maid up off her knees to take the food away, “you mustn’t!” he raised his hand against the side of his head in the international language of dummkopf.

The señora didn’t know what had hit her and looked at him with an expression at once bewildered, curious, and relieved.

“It isn’t kosher,” he explained, “can you ever forgive me?”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “Of course.”

“You are graciousness itself,” Tommy Auveristas said. “May I offer you something else instead? We have grapes. I bet you like grapes.”

“I do like grapes.”

He had a bowl of grapes brought to her, wide and deep as the inside of a silk hat.

He asked if it was difficult to keep kosher, and Dorothy, a little embarrassed, explained that she didn’t, not strictly, keep kosher. Now that the children were grown and her husband was dead she didn’t keep pork in the house — she’d never tasted it — though there was always bacon in her freezer for when the kids came to visit. She never made shellfish, which she loved, and had always eaten in restaurants when Ted was alive, and it didn’t bother her mixing milchik and flayshig. And although she always bought kosher meat for Passover, and kept separate dishes, and was careful to pack away all the bread in the house, even cakes and cookies, even bagels and onion rolls, she was no fanatic, she said, and stowed these away in plastic bags in the freezer until after the holidays. In her opinion, it was probably an even bigger sin in God’s eyes to waste food than to follow every last rule. Her sisters didn’t agree with her, she said, but all she knew was that she’d had a happier marriage with Ted, may he rest, than her sister Etta with Sam.

He was easy to talk to, Tommy Auveristas, but maybe she was taking too much of his time. He had other guests after all.

He shrugged off the idea.

“You’re sure my soda pop wasn’t spiked?”

“What?”

“Oh,” Mrs. Bliss said, “that was someone else, the girl with the skin. Ermalina? We had a discussion about my soft drink.”

“I see.”

“What was I going to tell you? Oh, yeah,” she said, “I remember. Chicken.

“One time, this was when Ted was still alive but we were already living in Miami Beach. And we went to a restaurant, in one of the hotels with the gang to have dinner and see the show. The girls treated the men. (Every week we’d set a percentage of our winnings aside from the card games. In a year we’d have enough to go somewhere nice.) And I remember we all ordered chicken. Everyone in our party. We could have had anything we wanted off the menu but everyone ordered chicken. Twenty people felt like chicken! It was funny. Even the waitress couldn’t stop laughing. She must have thought we were crazy.

“Now the thing about chicken is that there must be a million ways to prepare it. Boiled chicken, broiled chicken, baked chicken, fried chicken, roast chicken, stewed chicken. Just tonight I learned you could make green chicken, even blue chicken. And the other thing about chicken is that every different way you make it, that’s how different it’s going to taste. Chicken salad. Chicken fricassee.”

“Chicken pox,” Tommy Auveristas said.

Mrs. Bliss laughed. It was disgusting but it was one of the funniest things she’d ever heard.

“Yeah,” she said, “chicken pox!” She couldn’t stop laughing. She was practically choking. Tommy Auveristas offered to get her some water. She waved him off. “It’s all right, something just went down the wrong pipe. Anyway, anyway, everyone ordered their chicken different. I’ll never forget the look on that waitress’s face. She must have thought we were nuts.

“But you know,” Dorothy said, “when you really stop and think about it, it’s not that much different from eggs.” She stopped and thought about it. “There are all kinds of ways of making eggs, too.

“Well,” Mrs. Bliss said, “the long and the short is that chicken is a very popular dish. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like it. We were saying that, and then one of the girls — she’s in this room now — wondered how many chickens she must have made for her family in her life. She thought it had to be about a thousand chickens. But she was way off. Way off. I didn’t want to embarrass her so I kept my mouth shut, but later, after we got home, I took a pencil and worked it out. Figure you make chicken twice a week. Say I’ve been making it for 53 years. It’s probably more. I must have helped my mother make it when I was a girl, but say 53 years. If there are 52 weeks and 365 days in a year, that’s 104 chickens a year. You times 104 by 53 years, you get 5,512 chickens. I didn’t do that in my head. I worked it out on a gin rummy score sheet when we got home. I never forgot the number, though. When I told Ted, you know what he said? He said ‘I knew she was wrong. She had to be. I moved more chicken than anything else in the store.’ Ted was a butcher. He had a meat market on Fifty-third Street.”

“Which one is she?” Tommy whispered.

“Is who?”

“The dope who thought she made only about a thousand chickens.”

“I don’t want to embarrass her.”

“No,” he said, “go on. I won’t tell a soul. You have my word of honor.”

“Maybe they ate out more than we did,” Mrs. Bliss said, “maybe she hasn’t been cooking as long.”

“Still…” Tommy Auveristas said. “You can tell me. Come on.”

“Well,” Mrs. Ted Bliss, who hadn’t laughed so hard in years, said slyly, “if you promise not to tell.” Auveristas crossed his heart. Mrs. Bliss took a moment to evaluate this pledge, shrugged, and indicated he lean toward her. “It’s that one,” she said softly, “Arlene Brodky.”

“Arlene Brodky?”

“Shh,” Mrs. Bliss warned, a finger to her lips.

The gesture made her feel positively girlish. It was as if forty-odd years had poured out of her life and she was back in Chicago again, in the dress shop, gossiping with the real salesgirls about the customers, their loony employer, passing confidences among themselves like notes between schoolmates. Frivolous, silly, almost young.

She had come to see the penthouse. She couldn’t have articulated it for you, but it was simply that interest in artifact, some instinctive baleboosteh tropism in Mrs. Ted Bliss that drew her to all the tamed arrangements of human domesticities. She had never expected to enjoy herself.

Maybe it was the end of her mourning. Ted had been dead more than three years. She’d still been in her forties when Marvin died, and she’d never stopped mourning him. Perhaps thirty years of grief was enough. Maybe thirty years stamped its quitclaim on even the obligated life, and permitted you to burn the mortgage papers. Was she being disloyal? He’d be forty-six, Marvin. Had she been a better mother than a wife? She hoped she had loved everyone the same, the living and the dead, her children, her husband, her parents whom God himself had compelled her to honor and, by extension, her sisters and brothers, her relations and friends, the thirty years dredging up from the bottom of her particular sea all the sunken, heavy deadweight of her overwhelmed, overburdened heart.

Still, it was one thing not to keep kosher (or not strictly kosher), and another entirely to have caught herself actually flirting. She could have bitten her tongue.

Dorothy was not, of course, a particularly modern woman. She had been alive at the time others of her sex had petitioned the franchise from dubious, reluctant males and, though she’d been too young to rally for this or any other cause, the truth was she’d have been content to leave it to others — to other women as well as to other men — to pick the federal government, or even vote on the local, parochial issues of daily life. She had never, for example, attended a P.T.A. meeting when her children were young or, for that matter, spoken up at any of the frequent Towers Condominium Owners Association meetings. On the other hand, neither did she possess any of the vast scorn reserves some women called upon to heap calumny on those of their sisters they perceived as, well, too openly pushy about their rights.

There was something still essentially pink in Mrs. Bliss’s soul, some almost vestigial principle in the seventyish old woman, not of childhood particularly, or even of girlhood, so much as of femininity itself, something so obscurely yet solidly distaff in her nature that she was quite suddenly overcome by the ancient etiquette she thought females owed males, something almost like courtship, or the need to nurture, shlepping, no matter how silly she knew it might sound — to Auveristas as well as to herself — the old proprieties of a forced, wide-eyed attention to a man’s interests and hobbies from right out of the old beauty-parlor magazines.

Right there, in his penthouse, within earshot of anyone who cared to overhear, she said, “Your home is very beautiful. May I be so bold as to ask what you gave for it? What line of work are you in?”

“Didn’t Señor Chitral mention to you?” Tommy Auveristas said evenly. “I’m an importer.”

It wasn’t the implied meaning of his words, nor his distance, nor even the flattened cruelty of his delivery that caused the woman to flinch. Mrs. Bliss had never been struck. Despite her fear of Mrs. Dubow from her days in the dress shop, though she knew the old dressmaker was mad and perfectly capable of violence; the alimony she paid her husband had been awarded because of physical harm — she couldn’t remember what — she’d inflicted, and her memories of being chased about the shop had always been bordered in Dorothy’s mind by a kind of comedy. She’d experienced Mrs. Dubow’s rage then, and remembered it now, as having taken place in a sort of silent movie, something slapstick and frantically jumpy and Keystone Kops about all that futile energy. So all it could have been, all that had lunged out at her so unexpectedly to startle her was hearing Alcibiades Chitral’s name, and hearing it moreover not from the mouth of any of her retired, Jewish, star-struck friends but straight out of the suddenly cool, grim lips of her South American host. It was the way the two DEA agents had spoken to her in the garage, in that same controlled, despising banter of an enemy. She had sensed from the beginning of the evening that she was somehow the point of the open house, even its guest of honor (as far as she knew it was the first time any Towers Jew had set foot in a penthouse), and in light of all the attention she’d received from the moment she entered she’d felt as she sometimes did when she was feeding her family a meal she’d prepared. Tommy Auveristas had practically exclaimed her name the minute he saw her. He’d introduced her around, excused himself if he had to leave. He had kissed her hand and paid her compliments and brought her food. He was all ears as she prattled on about the degree of kosher she kept, listened as she counted her chickens.

He did not strike her as a shy or reticent man. She was an old woman. He could have easily answered her question, a question she knew to be rude but whose rudeness he’d have written off not so much to her age and proprietary seniority as to the feeling of intimacy that had been struck up between them during all the back-and-forth of their easy exchange. He could have told her the truth. What would it hurt him? He had nothing to lose. If anything the opposite. The higher the price the more she’d have been impressed. Up and down the Towers she’d have gone, spreading the word about the big shot in Building One.

Who did Mrs. Bliss think she was kidding? Offended? No offense intended. No, and none taken. Of that she was positive. It was her second question that had set him off, the one about what line of work he was in, if you please.

She had, she saw, overestimated her celebrity. It may have given the gang a thrill and she certainly, as she’d once heard her son-in-law say about serving on the jury during the trial of an important rock star, that he’d “dined out on it for months,” a remark Mrs. Bliss thought so witty and catchy that she found herself repeating it each time anyone offered her a glass of tea or a slice of coffee cake.

Still, though she knew he must have had a reason for spending all that time with her (almost as if it were Auveristas who’d been doing the flirting), all that sitting beside her on the sofa, never once inviting anyone to join them but instead rather pointedly continuing their conversation every time someone sidled up to the couch, even if they were holding a plate of food, or a hot cup of coffee, she now understood that he wasn’t pulling on her celebrity — he was indifferent to the fact that her picture had been in the paper, or that people wanted to interview her, or that her testimony had been heard on TV.

Mrs. Bliss was not a particularly suspicious woman. Well, that wasn’t entirely so. She was, she was a suspicious woman. She’d never trusted some of her husband’s customers when he’d owned the butcher shop, or his tenants in the apartment house he’d bought. On behalf of her family, of her near and dear, there was something in Dorothy that made her throw herself on all the landmines and grenades of all the welshers and four-flushers, lie down before all the ordnance of the deadbeats and shoplifters. “Dorothy,” Ted had once said to her, “how can you shoplift meat?” “Meat nothing,” Mrs. Bliss had replied, “the little cans of spices and tenderizers, the jars of A.1. Sauce on top of the display cases!”

This was like that. Tommy Auveristas was like Mrs. Ted Bliss. He was watching her carefully.

“Didn’t Señor Chitral mention to you? I’m an importer,” he’d said, and with that one remark brought back all the dread and alarm she’d felt from the time she learned she had to testify against the man who’d bought not only Ted’s car but the few square feet of cement on which it was parked, too. Feeling relief only during the brief interval between Chitral’s sentencing and the day the federal agents came to bind up Ted’s car in metal as obdurate as any Alcibiades Chitral would be breathing for the next hundred years. The dread and alarm merely softened, its edges blunted by the people who had invited her to tour their condominiums. And only completely lifted for the past hour or so when she had ceased to mourn her husband. (Not to miss him — she would always miss him — but, pink polyester or no pink polyester, lay aside the dark weeds and vestments of her spirit and cease to be conscious of him every minute of her waking life.)

Now it was a different story. Now, with Auveristas’s icy menace and sudden, sinister calm like the eye of ferocious weather, it was a ton of bricks.

Mrs. Ted Bliss had always enjoyed stories about detectives, about crime and punishment. On television, for example, the cops and the robbers were her favorite shows. She cheered the parts where the bad guys were caught. It was those shoplifters again, the case of the missing A.1. Sauce, the spice and tenderizer capers, that ignited her indignation and held her attention as if she were the victim of a holdup. (Not violence so much as the ordinary smash-and-grab of just robbers and burglars, looting as outrageous to her as murder. This infuriated her. Once, when thieves had broken into the butcher shop and pried their way into Ted’s meat locker, making off with a couple of sides of beef, she had described the theft to the policeman taking down the information as the work of cattle rustlers. It was Dorothy who had encouraged her husband to buy a revolver to keep in the store; it was Dorothy who went out and purchased it herself and presented it to him on Father’s Day when he had balked, saying owning a gun only invited trouble. And though Ted hadn’t known this, it was Dorothy who took it along with her when they went around together collecting the rent money from their tenants in the building in the declining neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side.) So Mrs. Bliss suddenly saw this attentive, handsome hand-kisser in new circumstances, in a new light.

Now he leaned dramatically toward her.

“It must be very hard for you,” Tommy Auveristas said tonelessly.

“What?” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“For you to have to see it,” the importer said. “The LeSabre. Turning away when you have to walk past it in the garage. As if it were some dead carcass on the side of the road you have to see close up. A machine that gave your husband such pleasure to drive. That you yourself got such a kick out of when you rode down from…was it Chicago?”

“Yes.”

“North Side? South Side?”

“South Side.”

“Did he follow baseball, your husband?”

“He rooted for the White Sox. He was a White Sox fan.”

“Ah,” said Tommy Auveristas, “a White Sox fan. I’m a White Sox fan.”

“Did you get the White Sox in South America?”

“I picked them up on my satellite dish.”

“Oh, yes.”

“So much pleasure. Driving down the highway, listening to the Sox games on the radio in the Buick LeSabre. So much pleasure. Such happy memories. And now just a green eyesore for you. You turn your head away not to see it. It makes you sad to pass it in the underground garage. Locked up by the government. When they come down to visit kids stooping under the yellow ribbons that hang from the stanchions. Daring each other closer to it as though it was once the car of some mobster. Al Capone’s car. Meyer Lansky’s.”

Dorothy held her breath.

“Tell me, Mrs. Bliss, do you want it out of there? It has to be terrible for you. Others are ashamed, too. I hear talk. Many have said. I could make an arrangement.”

Dorothy, breathless, looked around the room. If she hadn’t been afraid it would knock her blood pressure for a loop she’d have stood right up. If she’d been younger, or braver, or one of the knockout, gorgeously got-up women at the party, she’d have spit in his eye. But she was none of those things. What she was was a frightened old woman sitting beside — she didn’t know how, she didn’t know why or what — a robber.

Frozen in place beside him, not answering him, not even hearing him anymore, she continued to look desperately around.

And then she saw him, and tried to catch his eye. But he wasn’t looking in her direction. And then, when he suddenly did, she thrust a bright pink polyester arm up in the air stiffly and made helpless, wounded noises until, with others, he heard her voice and stared at her curiously until Mrs. Ted Bliss had the presence of mind to raise her polyester sleeve, waving him over, her lawyer, Manny from the building.

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