Mrs. Ted Bliss (21 page)

“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.