“I have an appointment? Dorothy Bliss?”
“Have a seat, Mrs. Bliss, a therapeusisist will be with you in a minute. While you’re waiting, if you can fill out these forms, dear. Do you have a pencil?”
“Medicare covers this?”
“It doesn’t cost anything to fill out the form.”
“There’re four pages here.”
“Fill out what you can.”
“This last page. It looks like a petition.”
“We’re a grass-roots movement, we’re lobbying Congress with the acupuncturers and hypnotists.”
Dorothy removed the petition from where it was stapled at the back of the other forms and handed them to the receptionist.
“You’re not standing with us, dear?”
“Ich hob dich in drerd,” Mrs. Bliss cursed her sweetly.
“Is this your first visit then, dear?”
“Two or three times a few years ago once.”
“It shouldn’t be long now.”
Dorothy sat back down on the leatherette sofa where she’d filled out the forms the woman had handed her. “There’s no magazines,” she said.
“I keep them back here, dear. Otherwise, people walk off with them.”
“They do?”
“You’d be surprised. Or cut out recipes, or rip whole articles from them even. Would you care to look at a magazine?” she asked suspiciously.
Mrs. Bliss wondered if this was the same one she’d spoken to on the phone. It didn’t sound like her, but she was getting so deaf it was all she could do to distinguish a man’s voice from a woman’s these days. For the most part she depended on the little whistle a woman’s higher pitch set off in her head. It was the queer combination of intimacy and attitude that reminded Dorothy of that other one. She asked her outright.
“That must have been Iris. Iris is with another client now. You’ll probably see Milt.”
“Milt.”
“Milt’s one of the best. He bought in as a partner.”
No one came in, no one came out. Magazineless, Mrs. Bliss sat in the empty waiting room. The one who wasn’t Iris had turned back to do whatever it was she’d been doing before Mrs. Bliss had first given her her name. “I have to do my billing now,” she said. The old woman, who could see her at her desk, was surprised to notice that she worked on an old manual typewriter, a portable, not even a heavy upright. She used carbon paper, and typed hunt-and-peck with only her pinky, forefinger, and thumb. Every time she made a mistake she pulled the sheets of typing paper out of the roller, crumpled them, and tossed them into a wastebasket. Then she made a big deal about setting the carbons and fresh paper into perfect alignment and inserting them in the platen.
In the twenty-five or so minutes that Mrs. Bliss waited the phone didn’t ring once, and the girl made out only one bill. Then she kicked back and picked up one of the magazines she kept with her in her tiny cubby of an office and idly turned its pages. Either the Greater Miami Recreational Therapeusis Research and Consultants was experiencing a slow period just now, or the fact of Toibb’s unsolved murder was scaring clients away. (As it had scared Mrs. Bliss into coming back again.) She wondered if recreational therapeusis still made the all-night call-in shows, or if it, too, had gone the way of all flesh as had the great days of the chiropractor/M.D. wars, the fluoridation/pure drinking-water ones. Though she still slept with her radio turned on all night, she was too deaf to take in very much of what was actually being said.
“I’ve been here almost forty minutes,” Mrs. Bliss said suddenly, going up to the little counter that separated the waiting room from the girl’s office. “Where’s Milt?”
“He went out for a sandwich,” the one who wasn’t Iris said.
“I had an appointment.”
“It’s not down here that you asked to see anyone in particular. We penciled you in for who was available. Iris is busy, Milt’s out to Wolfie’s for a sandwich. It shouldn’t be — See, what did I tell you? That was Milt’s buzzer. He signaled he’s back in his office.”
Dorothy put down to her deafness that she had heard no buzzer. Often, in the Towers, people would literally lean against the buzzer at the entrance to her condo for minutes at a time before she passed by the hall door close enough to hear it. Frank, who’d shown a late-blooming, surprising mechanical aptitude, had recently installed into his mother’s telephones lights that flashed whenever the phone rang. He had an illustrated catalog from the Center for Independent Living with maybe three or four hundred separate listings of aids for people who had a use for their special gadgets because of a handicap. He would clip them out of the catalog and send them from Pittsburgh to his mother in Miami Beach with a short note: “For your consideration, Ma: These are for the bath. The bar screws into the tile, you can let yourself down in the tub and hold it to pull yourself up. The friction strips bond to the bottom of the tub with a watertight sealant so you don’t slip. I can put them in the next time I come down. Let me know what you think. Love, Frank.” “I don’t remember if you still have that whistling teakettle. This works for coffee or tea. It whistles when the water comes to a boil if you’re making tea or by fixing it at the coffee setting when you make coffee. Give me the word and I’ll have it sent out. Love, Frank.” He called her at least twice a week, but except for these clippings and his brief explanations rarely wrote. He didn’t bother with birthday, New Year’s, or even Mother’s Day cards, so Dorothy was touched by these proofs that he thought of her and filed them away in her bedroom closet on the same shelf she kept her photograph albums. The reason she usually turned down these gadgets was that she had no wish to parade her infirmities before every Tom, Dick, or Harry who might stop by for a cup of coffee or ask to use her toilet. The lights on the phone were something else again. People knew she was deaf, and anyway how often did the phone ring on the rare occasions when someone was in her apartment?
Still, when the not-Iris one indicated that Milt was back in his office, she wondered how many times she had missed visitors by not having some special sort of light that flashed throughout the condo when people were at the door? Nah, she thought, it wasn’t worth the convenience if you had to live out your life in a rigged environment.
“I didn’t see anyone come in, even.”
“Oh, he didn’t come in here,” the girl said. “Milt’s office is next door. This is Iris’s suite. The consultants use it as a waiting room for all the clients. As you go out, it’s the first door on your left.”
Milt’s name wasn’t on the door, or a legend to indicate that it was part of the Greater Miami Recreational Therapeusis Research and Consultants organization. Indeed, it didn’t even have a number, and for what was supposed to be an office in an office building was about as anonymous as a spare bedroom in an apartment building.
Dorothy’s first thought was that Toibb could have been murdered here, or behind any one of the blank-looking doors up and down the long corridor.
There wasn’t a buzzer. She wondered if she should knock first or just open the door and go in. She wondered if she should go in at all. And was about to turn, was in fact already partway around and starting to move off when the door opened and she was confronted by a large, broad man standing in the doorway, his head with its dark, thick hair inclined downward as he rifled through some papers on a clipboard that appeared — she recognized her blunt handwriting — to be the forms Mrs. Bliss had filled out in GMRTRC’s waiting room.
How did they work that one, Dorothy wondered.
“Come in,” the man said and, assuming her compliance, was already headed toward a chair behind a desk Mrs. Bliss instantly recognized as the same one Holmer Toibb had sat behind years before.
How can I know this? she asked herself, and she answered, How did my fingers know his number when I was dialing Maxine that time?
“Dorothy, what’d you do with the petition?” Milt said, still gazing downward and looking very closely, like someone terribly nearsighted, for that last sheet she had pulled from the back of the forms.
“I decided not to sign it.”
“Why? It’s important.”
“I didn’t want to get involved,” she said, staring straight at him and pointedly addressing him as Junior.
Because as it happened, “Milt” was Junior Yellin, né Milton, Ted’s former partner, Herbie Yellin’s kid. “Milt” was Junior Yellin, the new nickname crowding out the older one. He was Junior Yellin, the butcher book futzer. That Junior Yellin. The Junior Yellin turned realtor and, later, farmer in his own right when he bought back her dead husband’s spread (if that’s what you called a black-market slaughtering house) for a fraction of what Ted had given him for it in the first place. Junior Yellin, the handsome gutter boulevardier and drunk, gambling man and philandering father of two who’d once felt up Mrs. Ted Bliss herself right there in her husband’s shop when she was helping out behind the counter, behind her behind behind Ted’s back before Ted’s customer.
She blushed to remember it, felt a sort of intense, localized internal heat slide through her face that only grew warmer as she realized that even with their shared history he didn’t know her from Adam.
She couldn’t have said which humiliated her more, that he hadn’t recognized her, that she should be consulting someone she knew to be a crook who over the years had cost her family thousands, or that she was in the presence of the only man beside her husband ever to have confronted her sexually in the whole history of her life as a woman.
Was this some new fraud (not that this time around he’d set up as a recreational therapeusisist; she knew of course that that was a fraud, but his failure to acknowledge his name by so much as a blink)? Was the new fraud the complete annihilation of his own old self? Was he wiping his slate? Would he no longer carry baggage for his former Chicago, Las Vegas, and Michigan farm-cum-abattoir lives? Without quite realizing why (and all this — her surprise at discovering him, her complicated humiliation and shame, her new wonder — taken in in an instant), Mrs. Bliss was overcome by a depression and sadness unlike anything she’d ever known — unlike mourning, unlike bad news, unlike trouble, unlike the recent, piecemeal unraveling of her old confidence and well-being, and the remains of the kickless, disinterested life she allowed herself to play out in her kickless, disinterested exile.
It was almost as if, she made a stab at explaining herself to herself, she were not so much furious at as jealous of this new man. He’d been Milton Yellin; he’d been Junior; was now Milt — all his a.k.a.’s subsumed in discrete avatars: butcher, flirt, bum, partner-in-bad-faith, black marketeer, and, now, recreational therapeusisist in a long white coat like an actual doctor’s. But no. Now she looked closer. It wasn’t a doctor’s white lab coat at all. It seemed rougher, heavier. Why the son of a bitch, it was one of his old butcher’s jackets!
Mrs. Ted Bliss glared at him, the flush of shame she’d felt earlier when she remembered his having groped her gone now and the warmth converted into a sort of angry energy as she collected the features of her face rather like a telescope collects light, and attempted to project them at him as she willed him to recognize her.
Whatever she was sending, Milt wasn’t receiving, and for a moment Dorothy wondered whether she had the right man and, for another moment, worried that, even if she did, whether she were so very changed, her good looks so lost to her that she might have appeared now like someone damaged in an accident or burned in a fire.
“It’s Dorothy,” she said.
“Yes, Dorothy, I know,” he said, “what can I do for you?”
“No,” she said, “Dorothy Bliss. Ted’s wife.”
The butcher/therapeusisist looked at her closely, almost examined her.
He don’t look so changed, but he’s old, she thought. His eyesight ain’t good and he’s too vain to wear glasses. Whatever shame she’d felt, whatever anger, she relented. Pity broke the fall of her resentments, she buried her hatchets.
“Teddy Bliss?” he asked, astonished, and, or at least Dorothy thought so, overcome by something closer to real fondness than genuine nostalgia. “My Teddy Bliss? Oh, God, Dorothy, sit, sit. It’s been a thousand years.”
“More than forty,” Mrs. Bliss said, and now it was Junior who was blushing, perhaps remembering the precise terms of their queer old relationship. She thought there was a sort of moisture behind his eyes. What, was he going to break down and blubber? It was several seconds before he spoke. “I was sorry to hear about his death,” Junior Yellin said (for it was as Junior, not Milt, that he spoke). “I was shocked, shocked. I was out of town and couldn’t get to a phone. Did you get my card?”
No, she didn’t get his card. She didn’t get it because he’d never sent one. She knew because she had painstakingly written out thank-you notes to everybody who had. She still had every letter and condolence card anyone had ever written to her when Ted died. They were filed away in shoe boxes in the same closet she kept her photograph albums, and Frank’s little notes, and all her other personal papers.
“It must have been awful for you. Well I know from my own dad, cancer’s no picnic.”
“Yes, I heard,” said Dorothy. “You have my condolences.”
“Yeah, he was a good man, the greatest dad a kid could have. Well, you know. You probably recall when I had some trouble with Ted’s books that time. My behind could really have been in a sling if Dad hadn’t been there for me. He was a great dad, a great dad. Between you, and me, and the lamppost, he was a greater dad than I was a kid. You’re not contradicting me, I see. The motion carries.
“Hey, will you just listen to me? Going on about my troubles, my tragic flaws and little circumstances. Looks like I haven’t learned anything over the years, looks like I’m not only back at square one but that I never left it. I’ll let you in on a little secret, Dot — does anyone else still call you that? — the reason why is square one’s where I live. It’s practically my home town, square one. Square one zip, visitors plenty. I’m not ashamed to say this on myself even if I am a fellow almost in his seventies.
“Because the secret of life is not to change, Dot. Never. Never ever never. To thine own self be true, do you know what I mean? I’m speaking as a therapist now, so the rest of this is on the meter.”
Some therapist, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Oh, yes, she thought, I can just see that. I can’t wait to tell the children. I got a therapist tells me I should go live on square one. She had to laugh. Despite he was a momzer and gonif there was something almost charming about him. There always had been. That was probably why Ted had been taken in by him so often. Vaguely he reminded her of some of the Latins.
“So, Dorothy,” he said, “I haven’t had a chance to look at your chart yet, so can you just fill me in on this a little? How may I help you, dear?”
Well, that was a stumper, thought Dorothy Bliss. How could he help her, this guy who all along had helped only himself? What was she supposed to tell him, make restitution? See to it restitution’s in my hands by five o’clock, first day of business next week, or else? She had to laugh. She’d been crazy to come. What’d she been thinking of? Well, the murder, but why did she suppose anyone could think she’d have been the least bit implicated in something like that? She was no sophisticated lady, but even Mrs. Bliss understood she didn’t fit the profile. She was the longest shot in the world, and gave herself high marks in the innocence department. Murderers, she knew, would have to come to their calling moved by passions she could never even begin to understand. Just look how easily a putz like Junior found higher ground if not in her estimation — he was a liar, he’d lied to her not three minutes before about something so low on his priorities as a seventy-five-cent sympathy card; she did not esteem him — then in her too flimsily swayed judgmentals. Why, she’d found him charming!
The question sprawled open before them: How might he help her? Well, he couldn’t, but she was too much the deferential manpleaser, even at her age, to say as much.
“Oh,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I’m just getting old, I guess. There’s nothing anyone can do about that.”
“Let’s see your hands, Dot!” Junior Yellin said.
“My hands.”
“Yes, please. If you don’t mind.”
“You read palms?”
“No, no, of course not. I have to look at your nails. It’s something we do.”
“Toibb never looked at my nails.”
“Toibb trained me,” he said. “I studied with Toibb who studied with Greener Hertsheim. This is like a what, a dynasty. I want to help you, Dot. We go back. Whatever I may have been in the old days, I’m a solid RT man. I’m highly regarded in the field. Didn’t I already reveal to you the secret of life?”
At that minute he looked stunningly defensive. He held out his hands, waiting to receive hers.
My hands are one of my best features, Dorothy thought. If he’s looking do I bite my nails, I don’t. It’s a disgusting habit, I never acquired a taste for it. She placed her hands in the old philanderer’s. He’s a doctor, she thought, it don’t mean nothing. Still, when he took them, Dorothy was conscious of every liver spot, each pellet like a small devastating explosion of melanin that traced the ancient fossil record of her skin, age locked into the soft geology of her flesh like rings on trees. She sat exposed and could not have felt more vulnerable if she’d shown him her sagging breasts. Hey, she thought to comfort herself, what’s he, a spring chicken? But sat, tentative and alert, ready to pull them away in an instant, like a child whose hands hover above her opponent’s in a game of Slap. And self-conscious, too, in some loopy fool’s sense, as though each dark freckle felt a faint, dizzyish sting of warmth and pleasure.
He’s going to bring them to his lips and kiss them, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, and was ashamed for the both of them.
He’s going to, he is, she thought, and was transported back almost half a century to when he stood behind her as she stood behind the display cases in her husband’s meat market, his hands down low, hidden under his butcher’s apron, folded they must have been, as though he were warming them, but goosing her really, ramming them up under her behind, pushing and trying to separate the cheeks of her tochis, using only his knuckles in a kind of weird foreplay or, as she would see years later in educational nature programs on public TV, like males of one or another species in a kind of sexual butting. She had not realized till now how much her memory of this moment had persisted.
“Hold still, please,” said Junior Yellin, and continued to draw her hands closer to his face.
He’s crazy, she thought, and was about to jerk them away just as they came within range of his limited focus and Junior began to examine them. Oh, she thought, it’s only his eyes: astigmatism, not love. And that half century she thought she’d lost came back to her again. In spades, compound interest. It was exactly like waking from a perfect, to-scale, very realistic dream in which she was a child again, only to find that she wasn’t a child, merely herself, with her aches and pains and duties, an old, old lady as distant and distinct from that careless, romping, laughing child as the conscious state is from the sleeping one.
Not only wasn’t he going to kiss her, but the incident in the butcher shop had never, at least for Yellin, even occurred. It was astonishing to her that she should feel actually rebuffed, two-timed, done dirty, played for a fool.
Meanwhile, Junior separated each finger, raised it by a knuckle, brought it close, made soundless this-little-piggy’s.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m looking for Beau’s lines.”
The term sounded vaguely nautical. “What’s Beau’s lines?” asked Mrs. Bliss.
“They’re transverse grooves in the nail plate, and they’re caused by various systemic and local traumatic factors.”
“I’ve got Beau’s lines?”
“I won’t be able to tell until you take off your nail polish. Here,” he said, “I keep a bottle of remover right in my desk. Use this.”
“What does it mean if I have them?”
“Well,” Milt said (for it was as Milt he spoke, he had gone back into the Milt mode), “it’s just this sort of ballpark test we do to give us some idea of a patient’s general health.”
“Patient? I’m a patient? Toibb, may he rest, never called me a patient. I was more like a client than anything else. He wouldn’t even let me call him Doctor, and all the times I saw him he never searched me for Beau’s lines either.”
“He never examined you for Beau’s lines?”
“Never.”
“Recreational therapeusis has come a long way since Toibb’s day, you know.”
“He studied with Greener Hertsheim,” Mrs. Bliss said. “You studied with Holmer Toibb. It’s like a dynasty you said.”
“Greener Hertsheim was a giant,” Milt said, “a very great technician, but the world don’t stand still, Dot.”
“You’re telling me,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, who in the fifteen or twenty minutes she’d been in the crackpot’s office had been whip-lashed through time, fifty years gone here, another twenty or so taken away there (those years as a child in the dream), plus all the compounded-in-spades interest that had been dumped on her by Yellin’s forgetfulness.
Or what if it hadn’t happened? What if it were Mrs. Ted Bliss who out of pure raging distaste for the man — the way, again and again, he’d taken in Mr. Ted Bliss — had manufactured the incident behind the meat case? What would that mean? (Could this be what Frank and Maxine — oh, she listened; she hadn’t always followed, but she listened; listened? she’d basked! — home on vacation from their colleges had meant with their discussions about high things like psychology, fancy-shmancy tricks the mind couldn’t help playing on itself. Sure, all right, she understood, but the minds her kids talked about were usually inside the heads of some pretty strange customers. Did that stuff work for the mind of a baleboosteh?) Either way, if it happened and she was sore because Junior had forgotten all about it, or if it hadn’t happened and it was only her head looking for revenge, what did that say about her? Either way, she didn’t see herself getting out of this one alive. (Though of course she hoped that the filthy things she remembered had actually happened. Sure, let it be on his head, not hers!)
“Okay,” Junior said (as far as Dorothy was concerned the bum was Junior and would stay Junior), “we’ll forget about the Beau’s lines for now. If you could give me a rough idea what’s been bothering you.”
Oh, boy, Mrs. Ted Bliss thought.
Because she couldn’t. Even if she understood her restless heavy-heartedness she couldn’t have begun to explain it, wouldn’t have wanted to discuss with someone like Junior Yellin the deep, deep misery of the last few years. She couldn’t have told Manny about it, or anyone close to her in the Towers. She couldn’t have told the gang. She couldn’t tell Frank, or Maxine, or even her still-living sisters and brothers. If she still even had any. And for an actual moment really couldn’t remember if she had. She’d lost track of who died — so many had died; she’d stopped thinking of “lost” lives — and who still hung on. It was too awful, too awful to live so diminished, it was too awful, such unhappiness too shameful to share. Maybe, she thought, maybe if Marvin still lived, maybe she could have explained it to him. Maybe, sitting by his side as he lay on his deathbed in the hospital, maybe she could have tried to decipher it for him. He’d been unhappier than all of them, after all. Maybe only poor suffering Marvin could have taken it in.
Wasn’t it strange, Mrs. Bliss thought, her old age? She wasn’t thinking of her beauty. That had been gone years. It wasn’t frailty or the breakup of memory. She didn’t forget the names of her children or confuse a grandchild with an old pal in Russia, a fellow in the building with her dead husband. Her disabilities had nothing to do with the flow of blood in her head. How could she explain to anyone that her great regrets and disappointments had to do with the mistakes she had made? The sale of the Buick LeSabre, the failure to carry through on her determination to visit Alcibiades Chitral in his prison. How could she explain her fascination with Tommy Auveristas or all that unfinished business with Hector Camerando and the marker she failed to call in and which Camerando himself (on the increasingly rare occasions she saw him hanging about the Towers) had long since failed to mention to her?
He was going to charge her anyway.
Whatever he did, or whatever he failed to do for her, whatever advice he did or did not give her, she would be billed. Forget old times — he had, the son of a bitch — forget the money the momzer had already stolen or charmed out of her husband, his deliberately cooked books and wiseguy’s crooked real estate deals, let alone what he’d once tried to do to her in her husband’s place of business — oh, he’d done it, he’d done it all right; she hadn’t made that up, she wasn’t that far gone — a bill would be presented, payment on service, and, old times or no old times, it would be a stiff one and, forget they went back, all the stuff that had happened, that he knew her when or she knew him, and without a dime’s worth of discount, and that’s just when she saw his sign — WE DO NOT VALIDATE PARKING TICKETS! — and decided, All right, that’s it, this rotten Moishe Kapoyr is going to give me my money’s worth!
“Milt,” she said, “forgive me but I can’t help remarking, the last time I was here Holmer Toibb told me his patients had to be in perfect health before he’d consent to see them. He said I first had to see a doctor and get an evaluation. You don’t go by this rule?”
“Dorothy, Dorothy,” Junior said, an edge of disappointment with her in his voice, “didn’t I ask to see your Beau’s lines? Didn’t I offer you nail polish remover from my desk drawer?”
She held out her left hand.
“What?” Junior said.
“Go ahead,” said Mrs. Bliss.
As he removed the polish from Mrs. Bliss’s ring finger, Dorothy leaned back, shut her eyes, pretending to luxuriate in his ministrations.
“Looks good,” Junior said. “No transverse striations. You’re fit as a fiddle.”
“You can tell this by examining one finger? You don’t have to look at the others?”
“I extrapolate.”
“Oh,” Dorothy said, “you extrapolate.” She held out her right hand. “I’d like a second opinion.”
He brushed Cutex across her thumbnail.
This time Mrs. Bliss watched him critically, appraising his technique and hoping he got the impression that she saw something menial in what he was doing, a man his age — almost in his seventies my eye, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, he should live so long he sees seventy again — who instead of buffing old ladies’ fingernails ought to be retired with the other alter kockers.
Though if she embarrassed him he never let on. If anything, he seemed quite happy to tell her she’d passed her Beau’s lines test with flying colors, that she didn’t sport a single Beau’s line. As of today, he said, she was spotless, pure as the driven snow, clean as a whistle Beau’s line-wise. Despite the fact that she didn’t trust him as far as she could throw him, she was pleased to hear it.
“He asked what were my interests, Holmer Toibb,” she said. “He had me make a list. I forgot to bring it, so I recited it for him,” she said, and thought, it’s strange, you know? She thought, I didn’t forget to bring it. I brought it. I was sore at him. Sometimes, for a minute, I’m not always sure who’s dead, who’s alive, and here’s a lie I told years ago I repeat word for word practically.
“What are they?” Junior asked.
“My interests?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t remember,” she admitted dully. “Whatever they were they’re gone. I don’t have them anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” Junior said, and Mrs. Bliss suddenly felt a little better about Milt, or Milton, or Junior, or whoever he was. It wasn’t his sympathy. He was a crook and crooks didn’t feel sympathy. If they could they wouldn’t be crooks anymore. So if it wasn’t sympathy, what was it? What it was, she thought, was probably only regret. She’d failed to take him seriously. He’d warned her never to change. This was his considered therapeusisist’s opinion. It was on the meter. If she’d lost her interests she’d changed. His regret was she’d failed to live according to his secret of life.
“I’d have a chart, wouldn’t I?” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “I know he took notes. The interests I told would be in my records.” Actually, she’d forgotten why she’d made the appointment, her original reason for coming, but she was very excited.
And why not? Here she was, doing heart-to-heart with someone who’d known her when. When she lived in Chicago. When she was a beauty. When she still had a husband. When she was the mother of three living children. When. If she’d never trusted him, if he’d taken everyone in a dozen times over if he’d taken them in once, well, even that had to count for something. When. This strange man who said he believed in changelessness but who had himself changed, making himself over and over through his shifting avatars, his continuous changings and callings — butcher, realtor, black marketeer, farmer, recreational therapeusisist. (My God! she thought. Like Ted! Who’d been almost all of those things himself. Not a recreational therapeusisist of course, and not a realtor though he had once been a landlord. My God! she thought, my God!) A man with a single unchanging strand run through his being like character — the furious ad hoc course he pursued, opportunistic as a refugee fleeing for his life. She felt an odd tenderness for him then, for just a moment, come and gone like gooseflesh.
She remembered why she’d come and, though she knew the answer, asked him a question as devastating as it was pro forma, asking it disinterestedly as a good detective.
“Milt,” Mrs. Ted Bliss asked him, for it was as Mrs. Ted Bliss she spoke, not as Dorothy, not even as Mrs. Bliss, “did you kill Holmer Toibb?”
“What? Did I — What did you say, what did you say to me? What are you, crazy?”
“No, no,” Mrs. Ted Bliss said, “you don’t understand. I didn’t say ‘murdered.’ You wouldn’t murder anybody. I mean, what is it they say on TV? ‘Death by misadventure’? ‘Manslaughter’? Something in the second or third degree. Self-defense even.”
“Boy oh boy,” Yellin said, “do we have a lot to work through!”
“It’s all right,” she said. “I was only asking. I’m sure you had nothing to do with it, that you bought into the practice fair and square.”
He had set her mind at ease. He really had. Though she couldn’t have explained it, she had asked him the question out of duty to and respect for Ted, to clear not her husband’s name so much as his character, who only seconds before she had seen trailing amiably along in this fellow’s careless footsteps. She was completely satisfied by Junior’s answer, reassured as much by what by second nature he immediately realized he stood to gain by her mad question as by his outrage. Indeed, Mrs. Bliss was no longer sure there had even been a murder, that that Iris hadn’t made the whole thing up on the spur of the moment, told her the bobbe mysehs just to get Dorothy to come in.
Sure, she thought, a trick of the trade. What fools old people were! The crazy things they fell for! Wisdom? You thought wisdom came with the territory? It was a myth of the young. Only terror came with the territory. The young were stupid and the old were terrified.
There ought to be a law, she thought, against all the song and dance they foist on you if you live past sixty. The victims they turn you into, the scams they run. It was on all the programs. Bunco squads working around the clock every day of the year didn’t make a dent in it. They were easy pickings, old folks. Mrs. Bliss was, easy pickings. Old as she was, she could have been born yesterday.
The Greater Miami Therapeusis. What an operation. It was so shabby, you’d never believe how shabby. She was like a visionary now, the almost deaf and varicose goddess, shabby herself, the former beauty who disgraced bathing suits and, over the years, had paid out a small fortune in hard cash plus tips for swimming lessons to various lifeguards and cabana boys but who had never learned to swim, or maybe never even had the knack for it, ludicrous, suspicious in pools, who always wore clogs to keep herself above the unseen dirts, the terrible sediment of pee and scum and hair and scabs settled at their bottom there, at once repelled and fascinated by the mystery of water, the disparity between its clarity and weight, her very lightness in it impeded by its unseen resistances as, in inner tube and water wings, she moved her arms to the Australian crawl, not even omitting to take a breath every other stroke as she slowly mimed her way across the shallow end of the pool; she, Mrs. Ted Bliss, laughingstock, and good sport, too, consciously playing this holy clown for all the visiting grandkids, gin rummy contestants, and kibitzers gathered there, as much perhaps for the exhilaration of it as the attention, it being a great comfort to her wrapped in a riddle of water to know that anyone might know she knew she was in over her head and depth even at this low end, and would jump in and save her if it ever became necessary; she, Mrs. Ted, suddenly sighted as an oracle or priestess, seeing and knowing and understanding all, everything, her heart breaking because she knew that Toibb had not been murdered, that he’d met his death as almost everyone met their deaths, by natural causes — heart attack, cancer, a bad fall resulting in a broken hip, a slipup on the operating table—natural causes; that it had been only a whim, a cheap ruse, desperate Iris’s desperate move on just another silly old lady to perk up a moribund business.
What had taken her so long? Why hadn’t she caught on during that first, infuriating phone call? How could she not have seen through all the shabbiness right down through its full-of-malarkey, melancholy roots to the fundamental, underlying bedrock shabbiness that supported it? She should have known the minute she saw the manual typewriter, or the hunt-and-peck way the presumptive secretary had used it, or when she learned that the girl kept the magazines (if, in fact, there had ever been more than the one the girl was reading) behind the desk with her. Gypsies, they were gypsies and con men the lot of them, Iris, not-Iris, Junior Yellin. Even dead Toibb was a gypsy. Well, they all were, up to and including old Greener Hertsheim himself probably.
It was plain as the nose. She was a visionary now. Recreational therapeusis was a sham, fodder for old call-in shows. She was a visionary now and she knew. She knew everything. (She even knew the character actor — speaking, for example, of good sports and holy clowns, she had become everyone’s ecumenical, cutesy-wootsy, Yiddishe mama and bobbe.) Sure, she thought, some visionary.
So why was she enjoying this so much? Why had she agreed to make another appointment with Junior Yellin in a week, sooner if there was a last-minute cancellation and he could squeeze her in earlier?
Why? Because she’d get a kick out of it, that’s why. The wild-goose chase she’d take him on. It was worth it. It was. Every penny she wouldn’t pay him when he submitted his bill. He could stand on his head, or send her letters from lawyers. Just let him try. Lawyers? Two could play at that game. She could always dust off good old pro bono Manny from the building. (Of whom it was said, though Dorothy — being herself of a generation of a different age, a generation when gender did not pit itself against gender, when men, throwing up their hands, might very well have exclaimed “Women!” but meant nothing more by it than that they were a difficult sex to read, while it would have never occurred to the ladies to make any such pronouncement—“Men!” in her day meaning something exactly the opposite, that they were all entirely too easy, the poor, simple, bumbling, babied dears, to understand, there being nothing more harmful in them than their set ways and peculiar male crotchets — couldn’t quite bring herself to believe it, that he was seeing someone now, had become, less than a full year after Rosie’s epic, historical shivah, an available man.)
He told her to dress casually and to wear comfortable shoes, and that meanwhile he would hunt up her chart in the files and see what that was all about.
It was worth it and, believe it or not, she went away happy.
A coincidence occurred.
Just as she had last time left her therapeusisist’s office on Lincoln Road and, waiting for her bus, spotted Hector Camerando, so did she this time, too. This time, however, she didn’t wave. The opposite in fact. Seeking to call no attention to herself, she forced her expression to remain fixed in place, her attitude one of suspended engagement, the neutral look of someone, well, waiting for a bus.
It was, she reflected, an odd position to be in, as though, by seeking to evade confrontation, it was Camerando who held her marker rather than she his.
It was apparent to her, however — her inspired visionaries were still upon her, her prescience and magic clarities — that Camerando himself was attempting to steer clear. He crossed the street, she saw, at very near the same pace and angle he’d crossed the street last time, and wore (allowing for subtle evolutions of fashion) the same sort of clothes as last time, too. Then she realized (no, knew, because if those high clarities she’d experienced at Junior Yellin’s slanted her self-awareness backward in time, she’d been bombarded, too, with perfect memory maps in sharp, precise relief) that it was the same time of day, as well.
But if this were a contest in mutual, studied avoidance, well, it was no contest. Camerando, a kind of gangster and man of the world, was so much better at it than she was that despite herself it became too embarrassing for Mrs. Bliss to keep up. She was, as it were, the first to blink.
She greeted him almost as he passed her.
So it shouldn’t be a total loss she kidded herself that she did it because all these coincidences and circumstantials — the same reason for her being on the corner of Collins and Lincoln Road this time as last, his crossing at the same corner just as she was waiting for the bus, his wearing this year’s version of the same snappy clothes he’d worn that year, the fact that it had been of him she’d been thinking the other time they’d met like this and, what she didn’t acknowledge till now but knew she’d known from the moment she’d spotted him — that he was coining from the same place as he had come from then — of their twice meeting this way struck her as so unusual that they would be interesting to him, too.
“Gee,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “how come we always run into each other like this? You got a special friend down here, Señor Hector?”
She thought he was going to strike her. That’s how angry he seemed. Indeed, so violent was the shift in his expression, its explosion from some vaguely impatient neutrality of disengagement into feral, sudden alarm, that it was as if he had struck her. As she, Mrs. Bliss saw, had struck him. He even raised a finger to his lips as if to see if she’d drawn blood.
“Oh,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“What?” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “it was like you were a million miles away. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“No, no,” Camerando said, “not at all. It’s good to see you again, Dorothy Bliss.”
Mrs. Bliss — those crystal clarities, transparent, fluent as glass — saw what he was doing. He was collecting, composing himself. She saw what she had done. She had drawn blood.
Then he did something astonishing. He sat down beside her on the bus bench. Even when he’d spoken so rudely to her in his car, when he’d come to her door to give her the money he said she’d won on a bet he’d put down for her at the dog track, when she’d seen him in the corridor at the Towers that time and ducked into a neighbor’s apartment to avoid him, even then she had never felt so fiercely pressed and intimidated by a man. Compared to this, his looming, heavy presence, Junior Yellin was a piker, his goosing her behind a freezer case mere kid stuff.
“Oh,” said flustered Mrs. Bliss, at a loss for words whose thoughts were so piercing, “you don’t have your car today? You’re riding the bus?”
Camerando looked around to see if the coast were clear. Leaning in toward her, he lowered his voice. “I have my car,” he said so softly that Mrs. Bliss had to strain to hear him. “It’s in its customary parking space. Well, you’ve seen where I park. It’s very convenient. A cop watches it for me.”
He’s paying me back, Mrs. Bliss thought, all her clear certainties on her like a head scarf. It’s my marker. He thinks he owes me. I don’t know why, it isn’t honor, it isn’t anything. Maybe it’s superstition. Sure, she thought, it’s the marker. He wants to be done with me. He’s going to pay me off big.
“You got me dead to rights, Mrs.,” Hector Camerando said. “I see a woman down here. Her name is Rita de Janeiro. This is only her stage name.”
“Please,” she said. “Mr. Camerando.” It was her stage name, Rita de Janeiro? She didn’t want him to tell her her two-feet-on-the-ground name, her floor or earth name. She didn’t want him to tell her anything. She didn’t care to hear his secrets. What, this was how he was going to pay her off? This was what the street value of her marker came to? She’d have been better off with the cash. And besides, now she knew what she’d stalled him for she finally decided what her payoff should have been.
She heard him out, but barely listened to Hector Camerando where he sat beside her on the bench in the little wooden bus stop shelter whose vague simulacrum of a confessional she wouldn’t have noticed even though she understood that what she was hearing was a confession and that he offered it to her not so much in the spirit of closing the books as to someone in authority in whom he’d vested an almost magical power of forgiveness and amnesty. No one, not Frank, not Marvin on his deathbed, not Ted on his, had ever spoken to her like this.
“She’s a topless dancer. She makes me crazy, she drives me wild. Did you see The Blue Angel? Emil Jannings played a good part in that picture. He was an important professor but he fell in love with a nightclub singer, Marlene Dietrich. He’d do anything for Marlene Dietrich, anything. She took him for all he was worth, but all she ever did was make a fool out of him and give him the horns.
“I’ll tell you something about myself. I’m not a professor. I don’t live with my head in the sky. Well, you know from personal experience what I can do. With the jai alai. With the pooches. Dollars-and-cents-wise, I turn water into wine. I got so much juice and clout I have to watch myself.
“Now I want you to understand something, Mrs. B. Excuse me, but I was never particularly horny. I was never particularly orientated to a behind or a leg or a bust line. Excuse me, but I was never particularly orientated even to the big C or any other of the female parts and features — the eyes, the hands, the teeth, a smile, the skin. For me it wasn’t even the whole person I was interested in.
“What I’m talking about, and I think you’ll understand this, is general passion, consuming lust.”
“I don’t understand it,” Mrs. Bliss said.
“I mean, of course Rita de Janeiro is her stage name. Oh, I don’t mean it had to be Rita de Janeiro. That’s just a flag of convenience, that’s just what her and her manager agreed on. It could have been anything. It could have been Mrs. Ted Bliss.”
Mrs. Ted Bliss winced.
“She’d just had her first period when she started. So of course she had a stage name. The truant officer would have reported her otherwise. And they wouldn’t just have shut that place down,”—he pointed toward a small brick building on the other side of Collins Avenue, undistinguished except for the fact that it looked more like a Chicago saloon (down to a high rectangular window built into the side of one wall like a wildly offset postage stamp) than Miami’s usual stucco, faintly iridescent pastel, mother-of-pearl, plaster-of-paris structures—“they’d of burned it.
“Hey,” Camerando said, “I’m not kinky. I don’t have nothing for little girls. Only this little girl. Only Rita.”
“She’s what, twelve?”
“Twelve when she broke into the business,” Camerando said. “She’ll be a senior next year. She’s sixteen. Next week she takes the test for her driver’s license. I’m going to surprise her with a car if she passes. Hell,” he said, “even if she don’t pass. I got this cute convertible in mind. Her little ass was just made for it.”
He didn’t bother to keep his voice down now. He’d set decorum aside, safety, almost as if he’d become Emil Jannings himself, Mrs. Bliss a version of Marlene Dietrich. God knew why, but he’d identified a power in her, too, offering his confession like a sacrifice. She knew she could take advantage of him. She still held his marker. She could take him for all he was worth.
“Can you get me in to see Alcibiades Chitral?” This was the marker she had wanted to call in.
“Hey,” Camerando said.
Because now she was on his turf again. And she understood that whatever powers he’d granted her, whatever the specific amounts he permitted her to draw upon from her letter of credit, they were not infinite. They were only social, friendly. They were merely honorary amounts and powers.
“But you said,” Mrs. Bliss said, her tone quavering, a whiny, petulant register that, even had she heard it clearly, she might not have recognized.
“What did I say?”
“About the water and wine,” Mrs. Bliss said. “All you could do,” she said, her voice trailing off.
“Agh,” Camerando said, “I’m all talk.”
He wasn’t of course. It was just more of the same. Another way to put you on, trip you up — YOU, DOROTHY BLISS, HAVE ALREADY WON…And there were all her prizes, written down, in black and white, the number to call. No fine print. No hidden clauses. Just go try claiming them. See what they do to you. Tie you up in the courts years. Make you sorry you were ever born.
But he wasn’t. If he was all talk, life was all talk; God, death, blood, love were all talk. The world was all talk.
She, she was helpless. She was. Look at him, smell him beside her there on the bench, all his showy shtarker maleness. His expensive, dry-clean-only necktie and matching pocket handkerchief, the shine on his expensive shoes. See how at ease he is, how he sits on the bus bench as if he owns it, though Mrs. Bliss knows it must be years since the last time he waited for a bus. So don’t tell her he’s all talk, or that he couldn’t get her into the prison to see Alcibiades Chitral if he wanted, or maybe only if she hadn’t made it all sound so urgent and by letting him see how much she wanted it, that that gave him just that much more advantage over her. Though God only knows why he’d want it or how he would ever use it. Except, Mrs. Bliss thought, that’s why people accumulated power and advantage, like misers socking it away bit by bit for a rainy day.
“All right,” she said, “if you can’t, you can’t. Here’s my bus.”
The very next day, when she went down to pick up her mail, Louise Munez greeted Mrs. Bliss, though no one else was in the lobby, with a series of elaborate, conspiratorial winks and hand gestures. The woman, who struck Dorothy as having grown even more increasingly bizarre over the past few months, had mimed a sort of no-hurry, it-can-wait, take-your-time, I’m-not-going-anywhere message. To her surprise Mrs. Bliss was able to pick up every nuance of this strange foreigner’s perfectly syntaxed body language — that after she’d retrieved her mail, and if the coast was clear, she should stop by the security desk before going back upstairs.
“What?” Mrs. Bliss asked. “Did you want to see me?”
The Munez woman reproached Mrs. Ted Bliss with a scowl, as if to warn her that the walls had ears. She shook her head sadly.
“What?” Mrs. Bliss said.
“You should have let him,” Louise said.
“What? Who? What should I have let him?”
“Your boy Frank,” Louise said, “the last time he was down here. You should have let him put up a signal light in your apartment that tell when someone at your door, or even if your intercom is buzzing. Those things are perfected now you know. They’re state-of-the-art. If you’re waiting will there be improvements down the line or will they come down in price, I can say to you that in my opinion there won’t, and they’ll never be no cheaper than they are right now either. It’s your business, Mrs. Bliss, but who’s Security here, me or you?”
She’s loony, Dorothy thought, but where does she get her information? Did I say to her about Frank and the gadgets? Does she read my mail? Should I tell her poor mother? Nah, nah, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, the both of them are unfortunates. Why should I mix in? Does it cost me anything she reads my mail? Do I have secrets? The mad woman, Louise, maybe she guards Building One to protect her mother. What damage is done?
“You wanted to see me?” Mrs. Bliss said.
Louise selected two keys from an immense ring, opened a drawer in her desk with one, a long black metal box like a safety deposit box with the other. With silent, formal fanfare she took an envelope out of the box and handed it to Dorothy.
“A messenger brought it for you in a limo.”
“In a limo he brought it?”
YOU, DOROTHY BLISS, she was thinking, HAVE ALREADY WON…
“He wanted to take it up but I thought, No, let him give it to me. She won’t hear the door, she hasn’t got signal lights. I say, ‘When she come for the mail I hand it to her.’ He didn’t want to give it to me. I don’t know, maybe he don’t want to go away without his tips, I don’t know. But he comes in a limo. This is suspicious. ‘What’s the matter,’ I tell him, ‘you can’t read? It don’t say on the sign tradesmen got to leave stuff at the security desk?’ ”
It was from Alcibiades Chitral.
“My dear Mrs. Bliss,” wrote Chitral in the letter Louise had handed her, “technically, of course, your lawyer was right when he advised you that it would be extraordinarily difficult for you to arrange to visit me in prison. In their paranoia, governments often write laws to protect themselves from all sorts of contingencies, real and imagined. In this instance they were seeking, on the basis that a prisoner might be engaged in filing an appeal, to limit congress between a felon and any material witness whose testimony was substantively instrumental in the felon’s conviction.
“So Manny was right, though he overstated the case. He’s a good lawyer and you’re lucky to have him, but when he told you that a visit between us was out of the question he should really have said that, from the system’s point of view, it was inadvisable.
“The law is a genius, really. I refer, as you know, to all its elegant ad hoc acrobatic flexibility.
“Well. In the event, I should like to see you, too, Dorothy — may I call you that? — and have made arrangements, unless you advise otherwise, for a driver to pick you up at the Towers @ 9:30 A.M. Tuesday next.
“I hope you enjoy the roses, Señora.”
When she went back to the lobby she was so furious it was astonishing to her. It was so long since she’d been angry that she was not entirely certain she had it right. Was it always such a drain on the body? Did it usually dry up your mouth so bad that it was difficult to pronounce your words? Had it always made her nauseous? Indeed, she felt so ill that she was quite amazed, she was able to speak at all. For her years Mrs. Bliss was a relatively healthy, vigorous woman, but she would have sworn she felt blood pressure rising in her veins and heart and blood. She felt it seep into organs she could not even name.
She demanded. “What did you do with my roses?”
“What roses is that?”
“That he brought with the note in the limo!”
“The messenger?”
“Yes, the messenger. Who else would I be talking about?”
“Please, Mrs. Bliss, there were no roses. He didn’t bring no roses.”
She’d terrified her. The girl with the gun and the flashlight, the handcuffs and nightstick and two-way radio. She’d reduced her to tears.
“No roses,” Louise Munez said. “I swear you, no roses. You gonna tell my mother there was roses?”
All anger left her. She felt incredibly empty, almost hungry.
“No, no, of course not, Louise,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “I’m sorry. It was a mistake about the roses.”
It was a mistake, but not Louise’s. It was something she didn’t understand, but somehow she understood there hadn’t been roses. Oh, the world was so difficult. Alcibiades Chitral’s note had come the day after she’d broached the question of a visit to Hector Camerando. It had to have been Camerando who got word to Chitral that she’d asked for a meeting. And then all that stuff about the law and felons and material witnesses and appeals and difficulties, the difference between out-of-the-question and the inadvisable.
What did she know of the world and its kingpins?
Who ruled here? Did the dog track and jai alai interests hold sway over the drug ones?
A word to Camerando, a note from Chitral. Yes, and the mystery of the missing roses. Louise was a little crazy and a blabbermouth but she was honest as the day is long, responsible, an ethics stickler, too conscientious to quit her post for so much as five minutes to stash stolen roses. No, that was out of the question. Speaking of which, she remembered having brought up the whole visit business with Manny after she heard about Alcibiades Chitral’s hundred-year sentence, and recalled that the lawyer’s response had been those words exactly! How could Chitral know? Was Manny from the building working both sides of the street? Impossible, she thought, what could the real estate lawyer get out of it? Or Chitral either? I mean, she thought, they gave the guy a hundred years. What was that supposed to be, a reduced sentence? Or maybe Manny was even a lousier lawyer than Maxine thought he was. Impossible again, thought Mrs. Bliss. The South American was a hotshot drug lord. Those fellows could afford nothing but the best. It was a mystery. It was all a mystery. Like all those cop and detective shows she liked to watch. It was as if — Tommy Overeasy flashed into her head — her 5,512 chickens had come home to roost. Though the mystery of the missing roses was maybe the biggest mystery of them all. Her part in the affair, too. Lashing out at the girl like that — with all she, Louise, had to worry about. It wasn’t like Dorothy. Even though Dorothy didn’t always know what Dorothy was like these days. The sudden, terrible reappearance of temper like a renewal of feelings she almost couldn’t remember ever really having. And suppose when he said that about the roses all he meant were those original roses, the ones he brought the night she sold him Ted’s car. She reread the letter. No, he said, “I hope you enjoy the roses.” That could only mean today’s roses, not roses he’d given her years ago. Unless he thought, and here Dorothy felt herself blush, remembering all the times in the game room when the men had spoken openly of her beauty, and been asked to guess her age as if she were some girl at the fair, she kept them pressed in a book somewhere. Oh, God, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, don’t let him think that, anything but not that.
Who ruled here? What did?
Why, the mysteries. It was like the puzzle of the jai alai and drug and dog track ascendancies. It was like those words her children had spoken before throwing out their hands in that game. What was that game? Lorn Som Po. Paper covers rock! Rock smashes scissors! Scissors cuts paper! It made her head spin. Such a mishmash of claims on her attention. The hidden secrets of the upper hand.