Nothing had been decided. Even during the little visit to Miami Maxine and her brother had undertaken after Manny’s all but incoherent telephone calls and the alarms they set off regarding her state of mind. To Frank’s assertion that the lawyer was probably not only a troublemaker but a shyster into the bargain, his sister said that even if he were she doubted he’d made up Tommy Auveristas’s end of the conversation.
“Meaning?”
“Frank, she’s a housewife. All she knows is ‘Tips from Heloise’ and how you get nasty stains out of the toilet bowl. She’s my mom and I love her, but she doesn’t have the imagination to make up that crap.”
“So what are you saying, Maxine, that this Manny guy is actually onto something, and that Mother’s in trouble with south Florida’s criminal element?”
“No. Poor Manny hasn’t a clue, but I think Mother’s in trouble all right.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The guest of honor at Mr. Big’s house party? The guest of honor? A helpless old lady in a pink polyester pants suit among all those diamonds, furs, and high-fashion shoes? And that he practically never left her side the whole evening? Or that he hung on her every word? The never-ending saga of Mama’s epic recipes? And what about the part where he tore into the help because he spilled food on the rug when he came up beside her sealed-over ear and startled her? Come on Frank, he fed her? Or told her he was a Sox fan? This is good evidence? This is the bill of particulars she presented to Manny?”
“Well,” Frank said, “he told her he was an importer. You know what that could mean down here.”
“Sure. That he buys and sells bananas. Frank, listen to me, the strongest card in her suit, the strongest, is the car, the LeSabre in the parking lot, and there could be a hundred forty explanations for that. And all that talk about his tone, Tommy whatsisname’s sinister menace.”
“He scared the shit out of her, Maxine.”
“She’s deaf, Frank. The woman is deaf.”
“What are you doing, Max? What are you trying to say?”
“She never goes downtown. At night…at night she hardly ever leaves the building unless she has an escort even if it’s only to cross over to the next condominium.”
“Hey, she’s nervous. Her husband is dead. She’s frail and vulnerable.”
“She’s a suspicious old lady.”
“She doesn’t have a right to be?”
“Frank, she bought Daddy a gun!”
“Oh, please,” said her brother.
“She carried it in her purse when they collected the rents. ‘Just in case,’ she told me one time, ‘just in case.’ ”
“Just in case what?”
“Just in case anything. I don’t know. If they called a rent strike, if they demanded new wallpaper.”
“You think she still has the gun?”
“Who knows?”
“You want us to confront her?” Frank asked. “Jesus, Maxine, why start up? We’re both of us out of here tomorrow. If she feels more comfortable with a gun around the place I don’t think that’s so terrible. She’d never use it.”
“As a matter of fact,” said his sister, “I don’t believe she even has that gun anymore. I mentioned it to point out her state of mind before Daddy even died.”
“So what are you getting at? You want to go one-on-one with Tommy A., take the bullshit by the horns?”
“I think she ought to talk to somebody,” Maxine said.
“Talk to somebody.”
“See someone.”
“You mean like a shrink? Can you really picture our mother going through analysis?”
“No,” Maxine said, “of course not. Just to have somebody to talk to. You see how she relies on Manny.”
“Mr. District Attorney.”
“Manny’s not so bad, Frank. He’s been very helpful.”
“Manny’s a jailhouse lawyer. The woods down here are full of them. Self-important experts and know-it-alls. Manny’s base, Maxine. That junk he fed us about Enoch Eddes? How he jabbed him with a left, and another left, then finished him off with a right hook?”
“Don’t be cruel, Frank. He told that story on himself.”
“Well, then he ain’t very reliable, is he?”
“They both see things in the dark, I think,” Maxine said.
They had less than twenty-one hours between them. Maxine’s flight was scheduled to leave Fort Lauderdale at nine the next morning, Frank’s an hour and a half later. While Mrs. Bliss was still in the kitchen, preparing at two o’clock in the afternoon the dinner she would not put on the table until at least six, her children concluded that Dorothy had not yet come to terms with her grief, that it was devouring her, and that in a kind of way she was reemigrating, first leaving the old country to flesh out the substance of a new life in America, and now quitting America to abandon what was left her of life in a sort of old country of the soul and spirit where she could be one with that bleak race of widowed grief cronies, woeful, keening sisters in perpetual mourning for the deep bygones of their better days.
The trouble was they had no real clout in Florida, no one to whom they could turn in a pinch. Their dad’s doctor hadn’t given him such a terrific run for his money. Diagnosed, dead, and buried in just over a year from a relatively slow-growing tumor. He was the last one they’d turn to. The little details of life were a sort of word-of-mouth thing, a piecemeal networking, but one needed one’s own turf before that kicked in, and the truth was that neither Maxine nor her brother had any. Their only contact was Mrs. Ted Bliss herself, so where did that leave them? High and dry. Nowhere. Between the devil and the deep blue sea.
Meanwhile, during Mrs. Ted Bliss’s sudden appearances in the living room, bearing gifts from her labors in the kitchen — bolts of kishka; sips of soup; little offerings of chopped liver in the making; k’naidlech; defrosted, freezer-burned challah; bites of jarred gefilte fish; ragged flags of boiled chicken skin; strings of overdone brisket — Frank and Maxine, shushing each other, making all the smiling, sudden, guilty moves of people doing ixnay and cheese it to one another, all the high signs and rushed semaphore of lookouts feigning innocence, their meter running out on them, less than nineteen hours to go now, eighteen, eleven or twelve if you counted the seven or eight they’d be asleep, nine or ten if you figured in the couple of hours it would take them to shower and dress, call a taxi to take them to the airport, eight or nine if they were caught up in rush-hour traffic. And no closer to solving their problem than when Maxine first suggested they had one.
“You know what I think?” Frank said.
“What?”
“I think we’re going to have to turn this one over to Manny.”
“Manny’s ‘base,’ Frank. You said so yourself. Nothing but a jailhouse lawyer. Self-important, a know-it-all.”
“He’s the only game in town, Maxine,” Frank said, sighing, resigned.
So that night while Dorothy was going back and forth from the dining room to the kitchen, they put it to Manny and Rosie that they thought Mrs. Bliss ought to be seeing someone with whom she might talk out her problems. Was that possible? Did either of them know of such a person? Someone reliable? He or she didn’t have to be a psychiatrist necessarily, they could be a psychologist, or even a counselor, but someone reliable. Was that possible?
“What, are you kidding me?” Manny wanted to know. “Half the people down here are nutty as fruitcakes. Rosie, am I right or am I right?”
“More like three-fifths,” said his wife.
So that’s how they left it. With Mr. Buttinsky, the eminent shyster, Manny from the building. Charging him not only with the duty of securing a reliable therapist for Mrs. Ted Bliss but with the responsibility of actually getting Dorothy to agree to see one. The children would help out of course, though all four — the Tresslers (Manny and Rosie), Frank and Maxine — agreed it would be unwise to spring their campaign on Mrs. Bliss the very night before her kids were scheduled to go back North. They had time yet. Their window of opportunity wouldn’t slam shut for a while. Tonight should be given over to the feast Mrs. Bliss had been preparing since just after her morning shower. Mrs. Bliss passed out hors d’oeuvres — herring with sour cream on Ritz crackers, chopped chicken liver on little rounds of rye, pupiks of fowl, egg-and-olive salad — and, though Dorothy didn’t drink, cocktails — Scotch and Diet Coke, bourbon and ginger ale.
Then they sat down to a heavy meal.
And then, dealer’s choice, they played cards — gin, poker, Michigan rummy. Dorothy, no matter the game, offering up the same comment over and over: “You call this a hand? This isn’t a hand, it’s a foot!”
It wasn’t until after midnight that the game broke up and Dorothy’s guests left.
“Ma,” said Maxine, forgetting she’d be gone the next day, “what are you doing? Leave it, we’ll do it in the morning.”
“Darling,” her mother said, “go to bed, you look exhausted. It’ll take me two minutes.”
“You’ve been working all day.”
“So what else have I got to do?”
Maxine and Frank fell in after their mother, clearing the dining room table of cups and saucers, emptying Manny’s ashtrays, picking up the jelly glasses, the liquor in most of them untasted, adulterate in the melted ice and soda pop. Frank sat down with the poker chips, sorting them according to their values and depositing the bright, primary colors into their caddy like coins into slots. Afterward, he scooped up the cards and tamped them into smooth decks.
Mrs. Ted Bliss scraped food from plates, then rinsed the dishes and cutlery and scrubbed down her pots and pans before placing everything in the dishwasher.
Maxine and Frank sat at their mother’s kitchen table, watching her through half-shut eyes.
“You know,” she was saying, “neither of them are big eaters, but I think Manny loved the soup. It wasn’t too salty, was it?”
“Of course not, Ma, it was delicious.”
“It wasn’t too salty?”
“It was perfect,” Frank said.
“Because nowadays, with their hearts, people are very finicky about the salt they take into their systems. You ask me, soup without salt tastes like pishechts.”
“Pishechts is salty,” Frank said.
“All in all,” Mrs. Bliss said, “I think it went very well. I think everyone had a good time. I know speaking for myself, having you here, I don’t think I’ve been so happy since your father was alive.”
She looked as if she were about to cry.
They needn’t have worried. Not two days later, Manny reported she hadn’t needed much convincing after all. It was no big deal. He’d not only arranged an appointment for her, she’d already had her first meeting with the therapist, someone, he said, with whom she was evidently very pleased.
“You know what she told me?” Manny said. “She said, ‘Manny, I think I made a very good impression.’ ”
“Oh,” said Maxine, “her therapist’s a man.”
Mrs. Ted Bliss was not without sympathy for the women’s movement. Indeed, if you’d asked, she’d probably have said she was many times more comfortable in the presence of women than in the presence of men. She had an instinctive sympathy with women and, though she’d never have admitted it, she secretly preferred her sisters to her brothers, her aunts to her uncles, her daughter to her son. (Marvin, her dead son, she loved in the abstract above all of them, though that was probably because of the wide swath of grief and loss his death had caused, all the trouble and rough, unfinished business his passing had left in its wake — his fatherless child; Ellen, her hysteric, fierce, New-Age daughter-in-law in whom Marvin’s death had loosed queer forces and a hatred of doctors so profound that when her children were young and ill, she so deprived them of medical attention that they might as well have been sick in an age not only before science but prior to the application of any remedial intervention — forest herbs and leaves and roots and barks and grasses, sacrifices, prayers and spells, and left them to cope with their diseases and fevers and pains by throwing themselves onto the mercy of their own helpless bodies.) Ted was merely an exception. And if she had loved her husband almost beyond reason it had more to do with reciprocity than with romance. Quite simply, he had saved her, had given the unschooled young woman with her immigrant’s fudged age a reason to leave Mrs. Dubow. It was as if his proposal and Dorothy’s acceptance had suddenly lifted the shy young salesgirl’s mysterious indenture and released her from the terror of her ten-year bondage. Terror not only of her employer but, even after a decade, of the customers’ shining, perfumed, and profound nudity, rich, lush, and overwhelming in the small, oppressive dressing closets, fearful of all their lavish, fecund, human ripeness, steamy and vegetal as a tropical rain forest. Dorothy was still more lady’s maid and dresser than clerk, and had become a kind of confidante to women who wouldn’t even talk to her, beyond their few curt instructions—“Button this, hold that”—let alone solicit opinions from her or offer up secrets; privy to their measurements, to the ways they examined their reflections, studying blemishes or lifting their necks and turning their heads back over their shoulders to catch glimpses of their behinds in the wide glass triptych of mirrors. These confidences struck like deals between the ladies and the bewildered, untutored maid, done and done, and signed and sealed by the unschooled young girl barely literate in English but who could by now read numbers well enough on the nickels, dimes, quarters, and fifty-cent pieces slipped to her by women, the secret of whose fragile disappointments in their female bodies she not only well enough understood but by accepting their coins was positively sworn to protect. Terrified, or, at the least, made terribly aware and uncomfortable by the awful burden of what she perceived to be a sort of collective letdown and discouragement in their even, enhanced appearance in their new gowns and dresses.
Which may actually have been at the core and source of her sympathies with her gender. It was men these women dressed for. (“I hope this blue isn’t too blue, I’ll die if it clashes with my husband’s brown suit.”) Dorothy had not, beyond the universe of her own family, known all that many men, but even in her family had noticed the tendency of the women to leave the choicest cuts, ripest fruits, even the favorite, most popular flavors of candy sourballs — the reds and purples, the greens and the oranges — for the men. The most comfortable chairs around the dining room table. The coldest water, the hottest soup, the last piece of cake. Her smallest little girl cousins cheerfully shared with their smallest little boy cousins, voluntarily gave up their turns in line. They worked combs through the boys’ hair gently; they scratched their backs.
She was not resentful. Her sympathies were with her sex because that was the way she felt, too.
Indeed, if she resented anyone, it was her employer, Mrs. Dubow, she resented. A resentment that was something beyond and even greater than her fear of the terrifying woman who not only chased her through the confines of a dressmaker’s shop no larger than an ordinary shoe store, clacking her scissors and flicking a yellow measuring tape at her, but shouting at her, too, her mouth full of pins, and calling her names so vile she could only guess at their meaning and be more embarrassed than hurt. Because now she remembered just what it was Mrs. Dubow was supposed to have done to become the first wife in the history of Illinois ever required to pay alimony to the husband. She’d thrown acid in his face! Thrown acid at him, defiling him forever where the tenderest meat went, the sweetest fruits and most delicious candies.
Mrs. Ted Bliss shuddered.
Because there was a trade-off. A covenant almost. Women honored the men who put food on the table, who provided the table on which the food was put, and the men saved them. That was the trade-off. Men saved them. They took them out of awful places like Mrs. Dubow’s and put food on the table and kept all the books. Women owed it to them to be good-looking, they owed it to them that the shade of their dresses did not clash with the shade of their suits, to hold their shapes and do their level best to keep up their reflections in mirrors. It wasn’t vanity, it was duty. And it was what explained her calm when neighbors had marveled at her beauty, her almost invisible aging, the two or three baths she took each day. You needn’t have looked farther when people had complimented her than at the benign smile on Ted’s face (even in that last, malignant year) to see that she had kept up her end of the contract, had proved herself worthy of being saved.
So of course Mrs. Ted Bliss, having been saved once before by a man, and who saw no reason to fiddle with what worked, chose to see a man to save her this time, too, when her children thought she was going crazy.
Her therapist, Holmer Toibb, was not Jewish, and did not live in the Towers. He’d been recommended by Manny’s physician, who thought the lawyer had used the story of a depressed “friend” as a cover for his own bluff despondency. Manny, at sixty-eight, was at a difficult age. A few years into his retirement and the bloom off his freedom, the doctor thought Manny a perfect candidate for the sort of recreational therapeusis in which Toibb specialized, offering options to patients to open up ways that, in the early stages of their declining years, might lead them toward fresh interests in life. Himself in his sixties, Toibb had studied with Greener Hertsheim, practically the founder of recreational therapeusis, after twenty-or-so years still a relatively new branch of psychology whose practitioners eschewed the use of drugs and had no use for tie-ins with psychiatrists. Like a page out of the fifties when doctors of osteopathy faced off with chiropractors and spokesmen for the AMA on all-night radio talk shows, RT, in southern Florida at least, had become a sort of eighties substitute for all the old medical conspiracy theories. Mrs. Bliss, apolitical and passive almost to a fault, couldn’t get enough of controversial call-in shows. She had no position on the Warren Commission findings, didn’t know if she was for or against detente, supply-side economics, any of the hot-button issues of the times, including even the battle between traditional psychiatry and the recreational therapists, yet she ate up polemics, dissent, her radio turned up practically to full volume — she was deaf, yet even at full throttle their voices on the radio came to her as moderate, disciplined, but she was aware of their anger and edge and imagined them shouting — somehow comforted by all that fury, the baleboosteh busyness and passion in their speech. It was how, distracted from thoughts of Ted in the mutual family earth back in, and just under, Chicago, she managed to drift off to sleep.
So she was totally prepared when Toibb undertook to explain the principles of recreational therapeusis to her, and what he proposed (should he accept her as his patient) to do. Indeed, she rather enjoyed having it all explained to her, rather as if, thought Mrs. Bliss, Toibb was a salesman going over the good points in his wares. Faintly, although she was familiar with most of it from the call-in shows, she had the impression, always enjoyable to her, that he was fleshing out the full picture, a fact that (should he accept her as a patient or not) she liked to believe gave her the upper hand.
“I don’t want to leave you with a false impression,” Holmer Toibb said.
“No,” Dorothy said.
“You’d have to undergo an evaluation.”
“Of course.”
“A medical evaluation.”
“You’re the doctor,” Dorothy said.
“I’m not a doctor,” Holmer Toibb said. “I’m not even a Ph.D. You have to see a physician, someone to do a work-up on you before I’d consent to treat you.”
“Specimens? Needles?”
“Well,” Toibb said, “whatever it takes to give you a clean bill of health.”
Mrs. Bliss looked concerned.
“What?” Toibb said.
“Nothing,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “it’s just. You know something, Doctor?”
“I’m not a doctor.”
“What do I call you you’re not a doctor?”
“Holmer. My first name is Holmer.”
“I can’t call you your first name. I won’t call you anything.”
“Suits me,” said Holmer Toibb. “So what were you going to tell me?”
“Oh,” said Dorothy, “Ted, my husband, may he rest, took care of all of the paperwork. Medicare, supplemental, Blue Cross, Blue Shield — all the forms. The year he lost his life even. You know something, I haven’t seen a doctor since. Isn’t that crazy? It ain’t just the forms. I can’t look at them.”
“Here,” Toibb said, “use these. Please don’t cry, Mrs. Bliss.”
She was crying because, in a way, it was the last straw. What was she, stupid? Frank and Maxine had shpilkes to get home, out of Florida, away from her. To ease their consciences they dumped her with Manny from the building. Speaking personally, she liked him. Manny was a nice man. Generous, a lovely neighbor. She needed him and he always tried to be there for her as they said nowadays, but you know what? He was a clown, Manny. He was putting on a show. Perhaps for Mrs. Bliss, or other people in the building, maybe even for God. But a show was a show and anyway every time Manny did something nice for her, every single time, Dorothy felt like someone too poor to buy her own being offered a Thanksgiving turkey. So of course, overwhelmed as she was by the prospect of paperwork, official forms for the government, and the supplemental insurance gonifs, of course she was crying.
“Mrs. Bliss,” Holmer Toibb said.
“I’m not Mrs. Bliss.”
“You’re not?”
“You’re not a doctor, my husband is dead, I’m not a Mrs.”
“Please,” he said, “please Mrs. Bliss, all right, I’ll see you. If you want me to see you I’ll see you.”
That was their first appointment.
“Just out of curiosity, Doctor,” she said, and this time he didn’t correct her, “just out of curiosity, I don’t look healthy?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I look frail? My color is bad?”
“That’s not what I said, Mrs. Bliss.” And this time she didn’t correct him either. “I’ve no expertise in these matters. It’s something else entirely. I don’t treat people if there’s a chemical imbalance. If they’re bipolar personalities, or suffer various mental disorders. I thought you understood that.”
“I was a little worried.”
“Well,” Toibb said, “worried. If you were only worried. Worried’s a good sign.”
“Well, when you said…”
“I have to be sure,” Toibb said. “Only if they’re at loose ends, sixes and sevens. Only if they have the blues or feel genuinely sorry for themselves. Otherwise…” He left the rest of his sentence unfinished.
Mrs. Bliss wasn’t sure either of them understood a single word of what the other was saying, but she felt oddly buoyed, even a little intoxicated by the sense she had that she was adrift in difficult waters. For all the times she had gone on picnics with Ted and the children to the Point on Lake Michigan, or out to the Dunes, for all the summers they’d been to resorts in Michigan City, Indiana, with their Olympic-size pools, or even, for that matter, to the one on the roof of the Towers building in which she lived, Mrs. Bliss had never learned to swim. She had taken lessons from lifeguards in the shallow ends of a dozen pools but without the aid of a life preserver she couldn’t manage even to float. Though water excited her, its mysterious, incongruous clarity and weight, its invisible powers of erosion and incubation — all its wondrous displacements. This was a little like that. The times, for example, Mrs. Bliss, giddy, alarmed, suspended in inner tubes suspended in life jackets, hovered in the deep end weightless in water, her head and body unknown yards and feet above drowning. This conversation was a little like that. She felt at once interested and threatened, its odd cryptic quality vaguely reminiscent of the times her Maxine or her Frank or her Marvin were home on vacation trying to explain to her the deep things they had learned in their colleges.
“…like the collapse of arteries under a heart attack,” Holmer Toibb said. “The heart muscle tries to compensate by prying open collateral vessels. That’s what we’ll work on. It’s what this therapy is all about — a collateralization of interests.”
“What heart attack?” asked Mrs. Bliss, alarmed.
“Oh, no,” Toibb said, “it’s an analogy.”
“You said heart attack.”
“It was only an example.”
There was little history of heart attacks in Mrs. Bliss’s family. What generally got them was cancer, some of the slower neuropathies. (Despite her sealed ear, Mrs. Bliss’s deafness was largely due to a progressive nerve disorder of the inner ear, a sort of auditory glaucoma.) Yet it was heart disease of which she was most frightened. It was her experience that things broke down. Lightbulbs burned out, the most expensive appliances went on the fritz. Washers and dryers, ranges, refrigerators, radios, cars. No matter how carefully one obeyed the directions in the service manuals, everything came fatally flawed. How many times had she sent back improperly prepared fish in restaurants, how many times were her own roasts underdone, the soup too salty? You watered the plants, careful to give them just the right amount, not too much and not too little, moving them from window to window for the best sun, yet leaves yellowed and fell off and the plant died. Because there was poison even in a rose. So how, wondered Mrs. Bliss, could a heart not fail? A muscle, wound and set to ticking even in the womb. How should it endure its first birthday, its tenth, and twentieth? And how, even after you subtracted those two or three years that the man in Immigration tacked on, could it not be winding down after seventy or so had passed? How could a little muscle of tissue and blood, less substantial than the heavy, solid, working metal parts in a courthouse clock, that you couldn’t see, and couldn’t feel until it was already coming apart in your chest, hold up to the wear and tear of just staying alive for more than seventy years of even a happy life? It was like the veiled mystery of the invisible depths between herself and her death in the water of a swimming pool.
He wanted to see her again later that same week, he told her, and sent her home with an assignment but, so far as Dorothy could tell, without starting her in on her therapy.
“Tell me,” Holmer Toibb said the next time she came, “what name is on your mailbox?” It was the first real question he’d ever asked her, and Mrs. Bliss, who thought it was for purposes of billing, which, since this was the third or fourth time they’d seen each other and he still hadn’t started to treat her, she rather resented. In fact, she was still stung by his heart attack remark.
“Mr. and Mrs. Ted Bliss,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.
“And Ted’s dead…how long?”
“My husband passed away three years ago,” she said primly.
“Three years? He kicked the bucket three years ago?”
“He’s gone, may he rest, three years next month.”
“And does he get much mail at this address since he cashed in his chips, may he rest?”
Mrs. Ted Bliss glared at him.
He didn’t even pretend to acknowledge her anger. “What,” Holmer Toibb said, “he ain’t dead? Come on, Dorothy, it’s been three years, it’s not natural. Well, it is, actually. Many women keep their husband’s name on the box after they’ve lost them. Even more than three years, the rest of their lives. It’s guilt and shame, not respect, and it doesn’t make them happy. You have to make an accommodation. You want to show me your list? Where’s your list? Show me your list. Did you bring it?”
The list Toibb referred to was her assignment — a list of her interests — and though she had brought it and actually been at some pains to compose it, she’d been hurt by this disrespectful man and was determined now not to let him see it. If she’d been bolder or less constrained in the presence of men, she might have ended their conference right then and, scorcher or no scorcher, gone back out in the sun to wait for her bus. But she was practical as well as vulnerable and saw no point in cutting off her nose to spite her face. Also — she knew the type — he’d probably charge for the appointment even if she broke it off before it had properly begun. Who am I fooling, Dorothy thought, how many times have I put Band-Aids on after cutting myself clipping coupons out of the papers? Climb down off your high horse before you break something.
Mrs. Bliss reddened. “I didn’t write one out,” she told him, avoiding his eyes.
“Well, what you remember then.”
Dorothy was glad he’d insisted. She hadn’t been to school since she was a young girl in Russia and, while she still remembered some of those early lessons and even today could picture the primers in which she’d first learned to read and been introduced to the mysteries of the simplest arithmetic and science and historical overviews, or seen on maps a rough version of the world’s geography, education had been the province of the males in her family, and she could still recall her guilty resentment of her younger brothers, Philip and Jake, and how they’d been permitted to take books overnight to study at home while she’d merely been allowed to collect the books of the other girls in the class and put them back on the shelves each afternoon and pass them out again the next morning. She’d never been given anything as important as an “assignment.” Even when Manny taught her to make out her own checks and fill out deposit slips, list the entries and withdrawals in her passbook, even when he’d taught her how to work her solar calculator and balance her checkbook, he’d been right there at her side to help her. He’d never given her one single assignment. It was a little like being a young girl back in Russia.
So it was quite possible, now she had regained her composure, that even if he hadn’t asked to see a list of her interests she might have volunteered anyway.
“Cards,” she began.
“For money?” Toibb said.
“Yes, sure for money.”
“Big money?”
“Friendly games. But rich enough for my blood.”
“How friendly?”
“Friendly. If someone loses five dollars that’s a big deal.”
“Go on,” Toibb said.
“Cooking.”
“Mexican? Continental? Japanese? What sort of cooking?”
“Supper. Coffee, dessert. Cooking.”
“What else?”
“Breakfast. Lunch. Not now, not so much.”
“No, I mean do you have any other interests?”
“Oh, sure,” Mrs. Bliss said. “I’m very interested in television. We bought color TV back in the sixties and were one of the first to have cable. If you mean what kind of television I’d have to say the detectives.”
She had known while she wrote the list out that it made her life seem trivial. Even those interests she hadn’t yet mentioned — her membership in ORT and other organizations, things connected with events in the Towers, her visits to Chicago and Pittsburgh and Cincinnati — even that which was most important to her, her children and grandchildren, all her family. The trips, when Ted was alive, they’d taken to the islands and, one time, to Israel with a stop in London to visit Frank and his family Frank’s sabbatical year. (Her childhood, the years she’d spent in Russia, even farther than London, farther than Israel.) All these were real interests, yet she was ordinary, ordinary. Everyone had interests. Everyone had a family, highlights in their lives. She had considered, when she made her list, putting down Alcibiades Chitral’s name, the business with the car, the time she’d had to testify in court, but wasn’t sure those experiences qualified as interests. Unless Ted’s death also qualified, her twelve-hundred-mile crying jag on the plane to Chicago, Marvin’s three-year destruction. All the unhappy things in her life. Did they interest her?
“Other people’s condominiums,” she blurted. “Tommy Auveristas,” she said. “All the South Americans.”
“You know Tommy Overeasy?” Holmer Toibb said.
“Tommy Overeasy?”
“It’s what they call him. But wait a minute, you know this man?” Toibb said excitedly.
She’d struck pay dirt but was too caught up in her thoughts to notice. Not even thoughts. Sudden impressions. Saliencies. Bolts from the blue. And she rode over Toibb’s lively interest. Not her loose ends, her sixes and sevens, not her blues or sadness or even her grief. Maybe she wasn’t even a candidate for Holmer Toibb’s therapies.
I know, she thought, I want to go visit Alcibiades Chitral!
Speak of the devil, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss.
She had just left Holmer Toibb’s office on Lincoln Road and was sitting on a bench inside a small wooden shelter waiting for her bus. The devil who’d come into her line of sight just as she was thinking of him was Hector Camerando. Camerando from Building Two and his friend, Jaime Guttierez from Three, were two of the first South American boys she had met in the Towers. Mrs. Bliss, like many unschooled people, had an absolutely phenomenal memory when it came to attaching names to faces and, since in her relatively small world, her limited universe of experience, strangers were almost always an event, she was usually bang on target recalling the circumstances in which she’d met them. She’d met Hector through Jaime on one of the old international evenings that used to be held in the game rooms on Saturday nights. Rose Blitzer had thought him quite handsome, recalled Mrs. Bliss. Even Rose’s husband, Max, olov hasholem, had remarked on his smile. Dorothy sighed. It had been less than four years yet so many were gone. Just from Mrs. Bliss’s table alone — Max; Ida; the woman on coffee duty, Estelle. Ted. She didn’t care to think about all the others in the room that night who were gone now. (Not “cashed in his chips,” not “kicked the bucket.” “Who had lost his life.” That’s how Toibb should have put it. As if death came like the account of a disaster at sea in a newspaper. Or what happened to soldiers in wars. He should have honored it for the really big deal it was.) Let alone the people who’d been too sick to make it to the gala and had stayed in their apartments. Plus all those who’d been well enough but hadn’t come anyway. In a way even Guttierez hadn’t survived. Oh, he was still alive, touch wood, but Louise Munez had told Mrs. Bliss he’d taken a loss on his condo and moved to a newer, even bigger place in the West Palm Beach area that Louise told her was restricted.
And, if you could trust Louise (even without her mishegoss newspapers and magazines the security guard was a little strange), Hector Camerando was thinking to put his place on the market.
Mrs. Ted Bliss hated to hear about Towers condominiums being put up for sale. Everyone knew the Miami area was overbuilt, that it was a buyer’s market. But interest rates were sky high. It could cost you a fortune to take out a loan, and what you gave to the bank you didn’t give to the seller. That’s why the prices kept falling. Or that’s what Manny from the building told her anyway. Poor Rose Blitzer, thought Dorothy Bliss. As if it wasn’t enough that her husband had lost his life. Poor Rose Blitzer with her three bedrooms, two and a half baths, full kitchen, California room, and a living room/dining room area so large all she needed to have two extra, good-sized rooms was put in a wall. She must rattle around in a place like that. She’d never get back what they’d put into it before Max lost his life. (Crazy Louise was floating rumors.) But selling at a loss was better than renting or leaving it stand empty. Not that it made a difference to Mrs. Ted Bliss. She’d never sell her place. When she lost her life it would go to the kids and they’d do what they’d do. Till then, forget it. She and Ted had picked their spot and Mrs. Bliss was perfectly willing to lie in it.
But what, Mrs. Bliss wondered, was Hector Camerando doing on Lincoln Road? What could there be for him here?
Dorothy remembered Lincoln Road from when it was still Lincoln Road. From back in the old days, from back in the fifties, from when they first started coming down to Miami Beach. From when all the tourists from all the brand-new hotels up and down Collins Avenue would come there to shop — all the latest styles in men’s and women’s beach-wear, lounging pajamas, even fur coats if you could believe that. Anything you wanted, any expensive, extravagant thing you could think of — cocktail rings, studs for French cuffs, the fanciest watches and men’s white-on-white shirts, anything. Hair salons you could smell the toilet water and perfumes blowing out on the sidewalks like flowers exploding. You want it, they got it. Then, afterward, you could drop into Wolfie’s when Wolfie’s was Wolfie’s.
Now, even the bright, little, old-fashioned trolley bus you rode in free up and down Lincoln looked shabby and the advertising on the back of the bench on which Dorothy sat was in Spanish. Half the shops were boarded up or turned into medical buildings where chiropractors and recreational therapeusisists kept their offices; and in Wolfie’s almost the only people you ever saw were dried-up old Jewish ladies on sticks with loose dentures hanging down beneath their upper lips or riding up their jaws, and holding on for dear life to their fat doggie bags of rolls and collapsing pats of foiled, melting butter that came with their cups of coffee and single boiled egg, taking them back to the lone rooms in which they lived in old, whitewashed, three-story hotels far down Collins. Either them or the out-and-out homeless. It stank, if you could believe it, of pee.
What could a man like Hector Camerando want here?
He had seen Mrs. Ted Bliss, too, and was coming toward her.
Does he recognize me? They’d bumped into each other maybe a grand total of three or four times since they’d met. He lives in Building Two, I live in Building One. It’s two different worlds.
She waved to him while he was still crossing the street.
“Oh,” she said, “how are you? How are you feeling? You’re looking very well. I’m waiting for my bus, that’s why I’m sitting here. I saw you when you were still across the street. We’re neighbors. I live in the Towers, too. Dorothy Bliss? Building One.”
“Of course. How are you, Mrs. Ted Bliss?” Hector Camerando said.
“I’m fine. Thank you for asking,” Dorothy said, at once flattered and a little surprised he should remember her name, a playboy and something of a man, if you could believe Louise, about town. And just at that moment Mrs. Bliss saw her bus approach. She frowned. She distinctly frowned and, exactly as if she had suddenly sneezed without having a Kleenex ready, she hastily clapped a hand over her face. “Oh,” she said, gathering herself and rising to go, “look. Here’s my bus.”
Hector Camerando lightly pressed his fingers on her arm. “No,” he said, “I have my car, I’ll drive you.”
And wasn’t being the least bit coy or too much protesting when she told him that wouldn’t be necessary, that she enjoyed riding the bus, that she liked looking out its big, tinted windows and studying all the sights on Collins Avenue, that she loved how, on a hot afternoon like this, the drivers, if only for their own comfort, kept their buses overly air-conditioned. She loved that feeling, she said.
“I’ll turn my thermostat down to sixty degrees,” he said. “And at this time of day the traffic’s so slow you’ll be able to study everything to your heart’s content. Besides,” he said, “why should you pay for a fare if you don’t have to? Come,” he said, taking her arm once more and leading her away gently, “I’m just around the corner.”
It was his point about the fare that turned her. Mrs. Bliss was not a venal woman. That she cut discount coupons out of the paper or, because of her premonition that she’d be charged for the visit anyway, hadn’t bolted from his office when Holmer Toibb referred so disrespectfully to the manner in which Ted had lost his life, was testimony not to parsimony as much as to her understanding that money, like oil or clean water or great stands of forest, was a resource, too, and must not be abused.
His hand on her arm, Mrs. Bliss felt almost girlish (she wasn’t a fool; it never crossed her mind she might be his sweetheart, he her swain), moved by the pleasure of being humanly touched, and virtuous, too, proud of his physical handsomeness and of the scrupulous innocence of her reasons for accepting his ride. Though he was doing her a favor and she knew it, and she might even be taking him out of his way, and she knew that, she was not made to feel (as she often did with Manny) that she was being patronized, or that there was anything showy about this guy’s good deeds. Rather, Mrs. Bliss felt for a moment he might be doing it out of something like camaraderie.
Only then did the network of coincidence strike her. Not half an hour earlier she’d mentioned Tommy Auveristas to Toibb, her interest in all the South Americans. She’d declared her interest, too, in other people’s condominiums. Perhaps that’s what put her in mind of what the security guard, Louise, had told her about Jaime Guttierez’s determination to sell and, then, auf tzuluchas, there he was, plain as the nose, a man she didn’t run into once or twice in two years.
And, gasping, stopped dead in her tracks, catching her breath.
“What?” said Hector Camerando. “What is it, what’s wrong? Is it the heat? Do you want to sit down? We’ll go into that Eckerd’s. I think there’s a soda fountain.”
“No,” said Dorothy Bliss. “I’m all right.”
She was. She was breathing regularly again. She felt no tightness in her throat or chest, no sharp shooting pains up her left arm or in her jaw. What stopped her, what she’d run into like a wall was the thrill of conviction, a presentiment, almost a vision. Her ride, the favor Hector Camerando had crossed the street to press on her, was to lead her to his car, which, plain as the nose, was sure to turn out to be Ted’s Buick LeSabre, washed, waxed, and green as the wrapper on a stick of Doublemint gum.
“You’re sure?”
“Thank you for asking,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.
They turned the corner.
“Where is it?” she said. “I don’t see it.”
“We’re there,” he said, and opened the door on the passenger side of his Fleetwood Cadillac.
Mrs. Bliss was as stunned by its not being their old car as she had been by her conviction it would. She couldn’t catch her breath but she was still without pain.
“Let me turn this on,” Camerando said, and leaned across Mrs. Bliss and put the key in the ignition. Almost instantly Mrs. Bliss felt sheets of cold air. It was like standing at the frontier of a sudden cold front.
“Would you like to see a doctor? Let me take you to your doctor.”
“That’s all right,” she said.
“No, really. You mustn’t let things slide. It’s better if you catch them early. No,” said Camerando, “there’s nothing to cry about. What’s there to cry about? You mustn’t be frightened. It’s nothing. I’m certain it isn’t anything. You waited for the bus in all that heat. That’s enough to knock the stuffing out of anyone.”
“You shut up,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “You just shut up.”
“Hey,” Camerando said.
“Shut up,” she said. “Don’t talk.”
Camerando stared at her, looked for a moment as if he would say something else, and then shrugged and moved his oversized automobile into play in the traffic.
Mrs. Bliss giggled. Then, exactly as if giggling were the rudest of public displays, removed a handkerchief from her white plastic handbag and covered first one and then the other corner of her mouth with it, wiping her incipient laughter into her handkerchief like a sort of phlegm. She returned the handkerchief to her pocketbook, clicking it shut as though snapping her composure back into place.
“Do you happen to know,” Mrs. Bliss said, “a gentleman from Building One by the name of Manny?”
The bitch is heat struck, Hector Camerando thought. Her brains are sunburned.
“Manny?” he said. “Manny? Building One? No, I don’t think so.”
“A big man? Probably in his late sixties, though he looks younger?”
“No,” Hector Camerando said.
“You remind me,” said Mrs. Bliss. “He’s not as sharp a dresser.”
Camerando, squinting his eyes as though he were examining some rogues’ gallery of Manny-like suspects, shook his head.
The trouble, she thought, was that no one, not her Marvin, not anyone, could hold a candle to Ted. All there was, if you were lucky — oh, you had to be lucky — was someone who didn’t sit in judgment waiting for you to make a mistake. The trouble with kindness, Mrs. Bliss thought, was that there was a limit to it, that it was timed to burn out, that if you slipped up one time too many, or didn’t put a brave enough face on things, or weren’t happy often enough, people lost patience. She felt almost lighthearted.
She wasn’t good at expressing things in English. She’d forgotten her Russian, didn’t, except for a few expressions and maybe a handful of words, even speak Yiddish. Odd as it seemed to her, English was her first language and, though she couldn’t hear it, she knew that her accent was thick, that the sound of her words must be like the sounds characters made in jokes, routines, that she must, even as a young woman in her prime, have come across to others as more vulnerable than she really was, more tremendously naive, less interesting, a type, some stage mockery. (Had she been a murderess her lawyer might have used her voice as a defense; its quaintness like a sort of freckles and dimples and braids.) She wished Ted were alive so she could explain her mood.
It was funny; she thought well enough. She knew this. Not much escaped her. The sights were all up and down Collins Avenue, and everywhere else, too. Holmer Toibb was a sight, the big ugly car she rode in, the man who drove it. Mrs. Bliss wished she had words for the words in her head, or that people could read her mind as she had her impressions. But no one could do that, not even Ted. All Ted could do was not judge her. And now, may he rest, he couldn’t do even that. Yet she knew he wasn’t resting, he wasn’t anything. The thing about losing your life was that you lost everyone else’s, too. You lost Marvin’s, you lost Frank’s, you lost Maxine’s. You lost your wife’s, Dorothy’s. By dying, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, you lost everything. It must be a little like going through bankruptcy. Mrs. Bliss felt as if he’d set her aside. He’d set her aside? Then may she rest, too.
As, in a way, she did. She was. In the presence of a stranger, she was completely calm. If she’d allowed herself to she could have shut out the sights altogether, closed her eyes, and slept. It was only out of politeness that she didn’t, and it was as if they’d exchanged places, as if he were her guest instead of the other way around. She could have offered him coffee, the paper, the use of her phone. She could have broken out the cards and dealt him gin rummy. It was nuts, but that’s how she felt. The least she owed him was conversation.
“Louise Munez tells me you’re thinking of selling,” Dorothy said.
“Selling?”
“Your condominium. When I remember, I say ‘condominium.’ It’s one of the biggest investments we make. Why use slang?”
Mrs. Bliss had no such principles. She was paying him in conversation.
“Louise Munez?”
“Louise Munez. The security guard with the magazines. Very friendly woman with a gun and a nightstick. Talks to everyone. I don’t know where she learns all the gossip she knows but she’s very reliable. Oh, you know her. Elaine Munez’s daughter? No? I thought you did. I don’t think they get along very well. I think she asked to be assigned to One because her mother lives there. She probably does it just to aggravate her. Kids! I know the woman won’t let her live with her. It must be a secret, she never said what. She’s quiet enough about her own business. I don’t know what’s going on. People don’t foul their own nests. Sure, when it comes to their nests mum’s the word.”
She paused and looked sidelong at Camerando. Maybe he had something to contribute to the conversation. No?
“Anyway,” Dorothy continued, “it was Louise Munez who said you’re thinking of selling. The same one who told me your friend Jaime Guttierez bought a big place in West Palm Beach. You’ve been there? I hear it’s nice. Is it nice?”
“Es muy bueno,” Hector Camerando said.
(But restricted? thought Mrs. Bliss. They’ll take a Spaniard or a Mexican over a Jew?)
“Oh,” she said, “you speak Spinach.”
“Spinach?”
“It’s a joke. In the buildings.”
“Si.”
She wondered if he knew what was going on. Her moods this afternoon were giving her fits. Now she was impatient to be home. She could almost have jumped out of her skin. What did they all want from her? Why had he crossed the street and made such a fuss if he was going to act this way? She wasn’t that vulnerable, she wasn’t. Or naive or uninteresting either. If she did need her Mannys and protectors. She was a woman who’d carried a gun. In Chicago, on the first of the month, covering her husband, a Jew Louise.
It was just that Miami alarmed her. The things you read, the things you heard. All the drugs and factions. There was offshore piracy. Yes, and this one had machine guns in the Everglades, and that one slaves in the orange groves, and another sold green cards, phony papers, and everyone practicing the martial arts against the time they could take back their countries.
The Cubans, the Colombians, the Central Americans. The blacks, and the Haitians beneath the blacks. The beach bums and homeless. Thugs, malcontents, and the insane invading from Mariel. And somewhere in there the Jews, throwbacks, who’d once come on vacations and now went there to die. It wasn’t a place, it was a pecking order.
Something sinister in even the traffic, some stalled, oppressive sense of refugee, of the bridge down and the last flight out of wherever (Dear God, couldn’t he go faster? Didn’t he know shortcuts?), and Mrs. Bliss, as much out of distraction and a need to make the time pass, tried to get Camerando to pitch in. She started to ask him questions. (Though, truthfully, were she back in Toibb’s office now, she would have opened her pocketbook, removed the homework she’d been at such pains to prepare, and torn it into a dozen pieces. This was no country for baleboostehs. Her husband was dead, her family scattered. She had no interests!)
“Do you know Susan and Oliver Gutterman?” she said.
Camerando shook his head.
“Enrique Frache? Ricardo Llossas?”
Mrs. Bliss noted the absence of recognition on his face and went on as though she were reading from a prepared list both of them knew was just a formality, so much red tape.
“Vittorio Cervantes? No? What about his wife, Ermalina?”
He shook his head again and again and Mrs. Bliss wondered how much longer he could answer her questions without actually speaking. She would make this the point of the game.
“Carlos and Rita Olvero? They live in your building.”
“I know Carlos,” Hector Camerando said. “We’re not close.”
So much for the point of the game, she thought. And then, remembering what they said on TV, she laughed and said, “Wait, I have a follow-up. Carmen and Tommy Auveristas?”
She hit the jackpot with that one, she broke the bank at Monte Carlo, and suddenly didn’t know whether to be pleased or terrified that they had made contact. It was tiresome to have to acknowledge that one no longer had any interests, yet there was something reassuring and comfortable about it, too. To live by second nature, the seat of your pants.
“Listen,” Camerando exploded, “put up or shut up! What do you know about it anyway? What do you know about anythin’? An old Jew lady cooking soup, making fish! You want some advice? These are your golden years. You should shuffleboard the livelong day. You should tan in the sun till the cows come home! Join the discussion groups. What’s wrong with you, lady? These are your golden years. You shouldn’t leave the game room!”
He’d scared her shitless. And the odd thing, the odd thing was he liked the old woman. When he came out of Rita de Janeiro’s and saw her waiting for her bus he’d been happy to see her, first on her account and then on his. It was already the middle of the afternoon and he hadn’t found an opportunity to make reparation, do his good deed. Well, he thought as he’d seen her waving at him, it’s Mrs. Ted in the nick of time.
Though that part was superstition, the little self-imposed ritual upping the degree of difficulty. Logically, of course, if the time of day made no difference to God it certainly shouldn’t make a difference to Camerando. And if it did (and it did), then maybe none of it made any difference to God. And maybe, too, he could have saved himself the trouble and stopped the whole thing altogether. On the other hand, he thought (though this had occurred more times than he could remember), perhaps God not only wasn’t in it but wasn’t even in on it! Boy, he thought, wouldn’t that be a kick in the nuts?
So he took God out of the equation (Hector Camerando, he scolded, Hector Camerando, you are one good-looking, well-dressed fuck; you can’t lose, can you, Fuck?) and decided for more times than he could remember that he’d been doing it for himself all along.
And that degree of difficulty was the whole point.
Hey, if it wasn’t, shit, if it wasn’t he could have tossed ten, twenty, thirty bucks to the first bum he saw on the street, said, “Starlight, Starbright,” and made a wish on the damn creep.
But nah, nah. He played by the rules even if they were only his rules. It had to be all done by at least an hour before sunset, Fall back, Spring forward inclusive. And it was having to wait until the last minute that made it exciting. Well, it was in the blood, wasn’t it? Flowing free all up and down his proud red hidalgo.
Still, he hoped the royal reaming he’d just given Mrs. Ted’s old ass hadn’t spooked her to the point where it canceled his reparation. It probably had, though, and now he’d either have to look out for an accident he could stop for, or pull up to some kid selling newspapers at a stoplight, slip him a ten, and then not take the paper.
Sometimes, compulsive superstition could be a pain in the ass. He wondered whether Jaime Guttierez had similar tics. The guy was one of his best pals, but they had never talked about it. Sure, Camerando thought, he must have them. They were compadres — the both of them dashing macho gentlemen spirit sports with a word and code of honor big and wide as a barn door.
He hated his temper, his temperament. It had cost him a wife, a couple of relatives, and not a few friends. Though he personally doubted that was what had gotten him into the loopy tit-for-tat of his life. And, frankly, he didn’t think being Catholic had all that much to do with the endless appeasement that made up at least a part of his days. Even when he’d been a strict observer, confession and penance were things he could do with his soul tied behind his back. In spite of — maybe even because of — the fact that he never really understood those mysteries. To him, God had always seemed something of a pushover. Surely, he thought, reciting all the Our Fathers and Hail Marys in the world didn’t make a dime’s worth of difference to the human heart, and he’d long ago wearied of such pale, puny recompense. What’s more, making restitution to the injured party made as little sense. Why go to the bother of injuring a party if all you had to do to wipe the slate clean was give back his money or restore his health? It slipped all the punches and didn’t do a thing for your character. It was hypocritical, if you want to know.
Yet he’d stung and frightened her, rammed words down her ears that, at that close a range, she couldn’t help but hear even if she was deaf. (And to judge by the size of the hearing aid that hung out of the side of her head like a fucking Walkman, she was plenty deaf!) So what he decided to do, he decided, was make her the beneficiary of a second reparation. She’d been poking her nose, sniffing around his business, trying to get him to spill the goods on his life. All right then, he’d pass up the accidents and paperboys, go straight ahead and rat on himself.
“I know Frache,” he told the old woman, “I know Llossas. I know them all. I’m in with Aspiration de Lopardoso.”
“Aspiration de Lopardoso?”
“You don’t know him?”
She shook her head.
“You didn’t just ask me about de Lopardoso?”
“I never heard of him,” Mrs. Bliss said.
Ay ay ay, Camerando thought. Macho gentleman spirit sport or no macho gentleman spirit sport, he was frankly astonished that he should be sitting beside this particular woman in this particular place. True, she was only one more familiar absolute type of woman. Throw a mantilla around her shoulders or a dark shawl over her head and she could be a stand-in for any widow in the world, any lachrymose madre, ma, or mama who ever was. Any old, enfeebled pietà of a dame crying over the spilled milk of a lost child. Though it was beyond imagining (as it was with so many of that order) how she could have set aside the housework and tatting and nursing of babes ever to have lain still long enough to conceive one, impossible to drum up in her — not love, she was a pillar of love — but the juices of anything like enjoyment or passion. It was for her that the long distance was created, floral remembrances on birthdays and holidays, all the merely token requitals of pure blind will in the service of sacrifice. She was such a dope! So stupid! Running only on instinct without the intelligence or fury to refuse anything to anybody, so simply and purely biological as to once have tumbled out of her silly-ass womb. Up to her eyes in forgiveness and long-suffering and incapable of cutting, or even of recognizing, a loss. Who knew nothing of odds, and believed that, by God, so long as it were her blood, she didn’t care a damn what damage it did! Selfishness like hers — mother selfishness — made guys like him and Auveristas and Chitral and Guttierez pikers. So dumb! Now there was someone who knew how to work the reparations!
But what astonished him, what he couldn’t get past, were their disparate worldviews. By golly, thought Camerando, I am a dashing macho gentleman spirit sport. I am. Next to her I am! I do, too, have a code of honor. I do. Next to her I do!
He knew her type all right. She wasn’t human, she was a cliché quivering in the corner. Of course she was a pillar of love. She was a pillar of love capable of any greed, nastiness, bad manners, gossip, or folly. A patriot only to consanguinity, this cowering special pleader of blood who traded on her revenant, immemorial widowship and mommyhood.
Had she been putting on an act, then? What were all those tears? What had that gasping and shortness of breath been all about, the staggering stutter step when she walked toward his car, or struck her heatstroke poses?
And the odd thing, the odd thing was he liked the woman. She reminded him of his mother. That’s why he felt free to poke about the holes in her character.
While she, in her turn, had poked about his. All her damn questions.
All right, Camerando thought, I’ll turn myself in.
“Do you know, Mrs. Ted, what I do?”
She didn’t. Again, she was without interest and could barely manage to muster the energy to look at him.
“I’m with the jai alai interests,” he said.
He didn’t look at her and couldn’t tell whether she was watching him or even, for that matter, if she’d heard him or, if she had, taken his meaning. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I’m a major jai alai kingpin. From little Rhode Island to South Florida important Basque athletes sit by their phones waiting for my calls. Ditto the greyhounds, so to speak. Ditto almost the little fucking mechanical rabbit.
“What, you don’t believe me? Lady, I could give you tips, make you big winners. Spread your bets around, lay them off wisely, you don’t get impatient or too greedy, I could fix it up pretty good with your life. I could put you in a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath, full kitchen, living/dining room area with the convertible screened-in/glassed-in California rooms and a view of Biscayne Bay to knock your eyes out. And this is just starters, openers. I see you in penthouses. I see you in the great gorgeous restricted digs of West Palm. I can do this. Truly. No fooling. What do you say?”
“Sure,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “why not?”