Mrs. Ted Bliss (31 page)

“Absolutely,” Junior said. “Back in Grosse Pointe. Down here they go by the new math altogether.”

“The new math.”

“Yeah, well, first of all we start from an entirely different commission basis. The agent takes ten percent, not five. Already that brings us down to one hundred fifty-three thousand, and that’s without even factoring in the buyer’s initial additional expenses.”

“
What
initial additional expenses?” Apple said.

“The initial additional expenses of refurnishing this place.”

“That’s no problem,” Nathan said, “we’re selling it furnished.”

“You decided that? You and Aunt Rosie’s and Uncle Manny’s legatees?”

“I’m the executor.”

“I guess it just wasn’t meant to be,” Yellin said. “We’re at an impasse here, Dorothy.” Junior sighed sadly. Nathan Apple, deep in thought, stroked his chin.

“Let’s see,” he said, “maybe not.” And looked up brightly. “Tell you what,” he said. “You gave up your agent’s commission, I’ll give up my executor’s commission. But you know,” he said, “my hands are tied. We’re paid on a sliding scale. In most states, in an estate like Uncle Manny’s, the lawyer is entitled to a two and three-quarters percent fee. Anyone have a pocket calculator?”

“I do,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “your uncle gave me this in a time of trouble.” She handed it to him. “It works on solar,” she said.

The lawyer punched some numbers into the little machine, then showed them the numbers that ran along the top of the keypad like a faded headline. “I make that $4,207.50,” he said. “Subtract that from…We’ll use your $153,000 as a base price, Milt. There, it’s $148,792.50.”

“Tell him, Dorothy.”

“Tell him what?” said Mrs. Bliss.

“Tell him about the neighborhood.”

“I want to stay out of this,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

She did. She wanted to stay out of it altogether. She wished only to sit there, comfortably ringside, and watch these two champions go at each other. Rivals, she thought girlishly. Rivals for my hand. She almost laughed at the absurdity. She was eighty years old. If she had once been beautiful it would have taken the genius of some paleontological vision to restore her from her fossil clues and data. Bands of archaeologists would have had to reconstitute her from the geological record. It wasn’t vanity, she wasn’t vain. It had to do with that old gender mire. It was that they couldn’t help themselves. They couldn’t.

“Go on, Dot. Tell him.”

“You tell him, Milt.”

“Tell me what?”

“It’s sociology,” said the jack of all trades.

“Sociology.”

“And style. Sociology and style. Sociology and style and evolution, both progressive and retrograde.”

The jack of all trades was into his recreational therapeusistical mode now with more than a touch, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, of his handy-dandy bookkeeping and old black-marketeering skills than of his realtor ones.

“Because what you’ve got to remember,” Junior Yellin said, “is that this place, south Florida generally, is a one-industry town—the weather industry. Now you’ve got to refine that to read the
winter
weather industry. Not like Vermont, of course, or Vail, Colorado, but in some it’s-June-in-January sense. Why, it was practically invented by people with bad circulation. Well, it’s called the Sunshine State, ain’t it? They stick it on the goddamn license plates!

“All right, so what we essentially got here isn’t so much a place to be as a place to
come
to. You’re a kid, or in your thirties or forties or fifties, the blood is running, your daddy’s rich and your ma is good lookin’, and you’ve barely even
heard
of it. Maybe Disney-world, maybe Cape Canaveral. Maybe stone crabs, maybe Key lime pie. Because your nose is to the grindstone, your shoulder to the wheel. Because, jeez, you’re too busy even to notice the temperature, and if you did, so what? Because weather is a thing you strive for. You sock it away for a rainy day. I mean for when the blood turns to sludge, to thirty-weight oil. I mean for when the damp shtups mold and arthritis into your bones.

“So that’s when it happens. People live longer and longer, you know. The mean average dead man today is twenty or thirty years older than when Hector was a pup. So there’s this like sunshine boom now like once upon a time there was a gold rush. And then they put in the toll roads and interstates, and discovered stucco and air-conditioning, and invented beaches and tall buildings to put them up on. Tall, taller, tallest. And every year a new amenity. Once it was enough to have these huge game rooms where they’d bring in a songstress with an accordian and an old tummler from the Catskills on a Saturday night. Or have some circuit-riding rabbi who came around on Shabbes with a Torah, a bema, and a portable ark. Or they put TV monitors in the lobby you think you’re in a newsroom. Restaurants they had, Chinese take-out, cineplex, Banana Republic.

“That’s what they already got. You know what’s on the drawing boards? Condos like resort hotels—horseback, snorkeling, golf. One place a little north of here has its own trails. Next year they’re opening a building with its own community yacht!

“Paradise is a growth industry, the good life is. That leaves only the poor who’ll have to make do with global warming. The rest are flocking to Florida in droves, Southeastward ho!

“The only drawback, Nathan, is that the neighborhood’s changing. Dorothy will tell you. It’s going down steep as a thrill ride. Every year it becomes harder and harder to put a minyan together. I’m an old-timer, I don’t look so much to the future. What does it mean to me? I got enough to last me. And a little for a modest burial and maybe a few bucks left over for my own legatees and if the future is the wave of the future, so be it, I say. Others may have the energy for it. I don’t.

“You know what the Towers have become, Nathan? An ittybitty American metaphor. What, I’m making you blush? Relax, it’s no big deal. All I mean is it’s waves of immigration. All I mean is it’s peoples after peoples making a clearing in the world and then, soon as they see smoke from the other guy’s fire, they do a deal, they make an arrangement. The Jews are a very ancient race. If they didn’t always make the clearing they at least staked a claim and moved in. Sure, and then came the Spaniards. Just like the old days. Conquistadors with their macho dope rings and plunder. Aunt Dorothy could tell you stories would curl the hairs in your ears. You lived side-by-side, didn’t you, Aunt Dorothy? Who moved out on who is a nice question, but the bottom line is those waves of immigrants. Investment ops. Jews and South Americans falling all over each other. Until with a whoosh and a bim bam boom all of a sudden it’s the march of time and the South Americans are selling out or renting to some of the lesser Latinos. And even Jews beginning to sublet to WASPs down from up in the north country or a few worn-out old farmers in out of Iowa and the rest of the Midwest. Even, if you want to know, to a couple of handfuls of deserving poor who might actually qualify for food stamps if only those proud, worn-out old farmers and subsistence-level golden agers climbed down from their high horse long enough to register with the authorities.

“So that’s the story, Counselor. That’s why I won’t waste your time by pretending to consider your $170,000 or $161,500 or even your $148,792.50 price for Uncle’s condominium. Now, if you’d come to me in the flush old days when the Towers were regarded as one of your hot, cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, pushed envelope, growth-industry properties, it might have been a different story altogether. I mean I still wouldn’t have given you your $148,792.50 asking price of course, but I don’t think I would have felt myself so personally insulted.

“Here’s what I
will
do. If you get it repainted and bring the cosmetics up to code we’ll split the difference—loan me the calculator, Dorothy—and I’ll make you an offer of…$74,396.25.”

“That’s very funny,” Nathan Apple said.

He’s stalling for time, Dorothy thought. He sees his work’s cut out for him and he’s stalling for time. He’s figuring what can he do with a guy like this. Personally, she almost had goose bumps. She hadn’t felt so important since the evening, years ago, when she’d gone to Tommy Auveristas’s open house and he’d sat next to her on one of the living room’s three sofas. She couldn’t imagine what the nephew would say, but he’d have to go some just to earn a draw. It was wicked, really, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss.
Men.
Really, she thought, the lengths to which they went to flash their plumage in front of other males. It was flattering to the ladies, but sometimes she wondered if it was intended for their benefit, if they’d ever bother to get themselves up in their colors if there were only females around to catch their act. Otherwise, well, otherwise they might just pick out the one who’d caught their eye, knock her to the ground, and take her. Perhaps the reason for courtship at all was the same reason soldiers lined up in ranks for parades. Maybe all that display was the only way they knew to civilize themselves.

Well, look at Dorothy Bliss, will you, thought Dorothy Bliss. Was this Alcibiades Chitral’s pigeon, damned for her stupor and incuriosity?

Certainly she’d been entertained by Junior Yellin’s aggressive arguments. Certainly she’d anticipated that Nathan would counterattack. But she’d stopped just in time. (Because if there was no fool like an old fool, what sort of old fool would an eighty-year-old woman make?) Flattered, but short of taking it personally, a privileged witness to their swagger and strut. While quite abruptly reminded of Ted’s ways with his customers: charming them into one cut rather than another, selling them three pounds rather than two, and with no more plumage on him than the dried blood across his apron and, when Junior was not in the shop, the only witness to his sweet talk Dorothy herself for whom he passed in parade.

The nephew was staring straight into Junior Yellin’s eyes.

“Done,” he said sweetly. “If you can talk Aunt Dorothy into selling me hers for fifty-five thousand.”

“What about it, Dot?” Junior said. “You willing to trade up? There’s bedrooms and toilets galore. I could move in with you. We’ll split the nineteen-some-odd grand right down the middle. That would put us in Manny’s apartment—just a second—for $9,698.12. I won’t pressure you, I leave it entirely in your hands. I mean, I see the guy’s game. He buys the place, turns around and sells it on the open market. He could clean up, but what the hell, the laborer is worth his hire, and the two of us got a luxury apartment we could get lost in. Come on, kid, what do you say?”

“I say,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “I’m a married woman. I say Ted, olov hasholem, would turn over in his grave.”

Now she was eighty-two, the mysterious, discrepant matter of her age seemed to have resolved itself. Without proof, without seeming even to have been aware of how or why, she at last knew how old she was. Not in round, approximate figures but exact sums. It was as if all the peculiar spring-forward, fall-back, daylight savings and central standards and fluky international time lines and zones of her personal history had been fixed, repaired, tuned to some Greenwich Mean of the ticking world. She had a birthday now, and though she had not yet officially observed it (and had no plans to), it was as if all the square feet and exact specs of the properties and registered deeds of her existence had at last been revealed to her.

This was, of course, essentially useless, but like other essentially useless things, an old person who earns a bachelor’s degree in her last years, say, she received a genuine sense of accomplishment and pleasure from it. She finally knew, or if she didn’t actually know then at least had finally fixed upon the age she should be.

She did nothing about it. She didn’t rectify her social security records or notify Medicare. Nevertheless, she could now fit numbers to her life and this was somehow as liberating as the emerging knowledge of who she was and of what she had been.

She was eighty-two. She was a very old woman. Junior Yellin, whose very name suggested that she was his senior, was a very old man. Mrs. Bliss knew that if she had taken Yellin up on his offer to move into Manny Tressler’s apartment, Ted would not have turned over in his grave. He wouldn’t have so much as stirred. Ted had been fond of Manny and, despite all the awful stuff Junior had pulled on him, had always been rather more well-disposed toward him than otherwise. Ted had been dead almost fifteen years. The world had changed, attitudes had. Scandal had been all but wiped out in her lifetime, even, had he lived a little longer, in Ted’s. Since the sixties there had been a general, accelerating erosion of the shameful. It wasn’t that goodness was on the rise but that a general sense of evil—Think, Mrs. Ted Bliss thought, of the terror Mrs. Dubow, the first wife in Illinois forced to pay the husband alimony, evoked; that was a shocker that brought the house down—was being absorbed into the atmosphere. She saw it on the morning programs, she heard it on the call-ins, she read about it not only in the tabloids at the checkout in the supermarket but in the legitimate papers, too.

Who knew what went on behind closed doors, of course, but in her and Ted’s day married people had been generally loyal to each other. Except for Junior Yellin and his bimbos, Mrs. Bliss didn’t think she could name a man who ran around on his wife. Today it was a different story. In just her own family, hadn’t both Jerry, Irving’s boy, and Louis, Golda’s, died of AIDS? (And Louis had been married!) And hadn’t she recently heard that Betsy, a distant cousin she’d known only to say hello to who’d tested HIV positive, had come down with full-blown AIDS? (And why had her grandson Barry never married? What was what in that department?) And what was going on with the shaineh maidel, Judith, Maxine and George’s exquisite daughter, a girl in her mid-thirties if she was a day, who had probably been with at least a dozen men (and lived with three of them), so beautiful she could have afforded to remain a virgin forever but who instead—her grandmother should bite her tongue—chose to think with her panties the way some men had their brains in their pants? Or, while we’re on the subject of disgrace, was Frank and May’s Donny, the brainy one, a target of a grand jury investigation or not? He hadn’t flown in from Europe that time when Mrs. Bliss had gone to Providence for the seder. The fact was that Dorothy hadn’t heard from him in years, neither through a letter or a phone call (who used to call her with regularity), and whenever she had a chance to ask Frank about him, her son was uneasy, or put her off with a vague answer, or changed the subject. (Were they tapping her phones? Was that why Donny didn’t get in touch anymore? It wasn’t so far-fetched. She had a sort of record with federal people. Her Camerando connection. As far as she knew the government still held Ted’s Buick LeSabre under impoundment.)