Mrs. Ted Bliss (33 page)

Mrs. Ted Bliss laughed. “What,” she said, “you think I was born yesterday? Why would I tell him I have a partner in crime? As it is we’ll be pushing up the daisies soon enough. Let’s just let nature take its course. Oh,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I’m sorry. I know this man, he wouldn’t lift a finger.” She was trying to comfort him. The pallor had returned to his face. All he wanted, he’d said, was a few good years. His bloodlessness was a sort of reverse blush. She understood. He was embarrassed by death. “Really,” she said, “if I call, I don’t even have to mention where I am. Maybe you’ve changed your mind.”

“Well,” Junior said, “if you’re holding his marker.”

It was odd about the high rollers, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Their lives, built around some tender armature of chance, were always deeply grounded in hedged realities. Briefly, Mrs. Bliss pitied the man, came within a hair of writing him off. If she got through to Camerando she might not only tell him up front where she was but tell him Junior Yellin’s name, too.

As it happened, however, she still couldn’t reach him. A phone company recording came on to tell her the number she was calling had been disconnected.

She went back to Yellin to tell him the news.

“No luck,” she explained, “the number’s been disconnected. I don’t understand. When I called a half hour ago I got a busy signal.”

“Hey,” he said, “no problem. It’s not a big deal. They’re here today and gone tomorrow these guys. Come on,” a restored, relieved Junior Yellin told her, “who needs the son of a bitch? If we hurry, we still got time to lay a bet down on the match. Any of the names of these bums mean anything to you?”

After that they were closer than ever. Junior was actually relieved to be back on terra firma. Perhaps the idea of edge, of extravagant advantage, made him nervous. It wasn’t the first time she thought the old bully was a piker, daring enough in his own small ponds but quick to lose heart where he knew he was beyond his depths. It was an insult to Ted, finally, whose measure he’d taken and relegated, whom he’d comfortably fit into manageable scale. On her behalf she was furious, on her husband’s, amused, come to terms with Ted’s forgiveness and understanding and philosophic scrutiny. On her husband’s behalf they were closer than ever, Mrs. Ted Bliss taking up their friendship like someone pledged to carry on the unfinished work of someone who’d died. Even that first day at the jai alai she allowed herself to be drawn into his piker schemes.

Freed from the obligation of taking a risk, they agreed upon a system whereby they pooled their money and, by wagering on opposing teams, in effect, covered each other’s bets. Even Mrs. Bliss understood that this was more like accounting or balancing her checkbook than like gambling. Except for the fact that neither of them stood to win or lose much money, Mrs. Bliss was content to go along with Junior’s reasoning that, what the hell, at the end of the day they’d gotten several hours of quite good value for their entertainment dollars—the price of admission, the cost of their programs, the tabs for their hot dogs, their coffees and Cokes.

And, for Mrs. Ted Bliss, it
was
entertaining. She meant the jai alai, the power and flexibility and stamina of the athletes, their lightning hand-eye coordination, the way they scooped up the small, heavy, hard-rubber pelota into the unyielding woven reeds of the curving cesta attached like a long, predatory claw to their arms and drove the ball flying back against the main granite wall. For all their athleticism and diving, driving speed, within the relatively close quarters of the wire mesh ceiling and vaguely chicken wire fencing of the viewing wall, they seemed to Mrs. Ted Bliss, protected only by their odd, single-winged arm, like nothing so much as wounded, desperate, captive birds fighting for their lives inside a terrible caged battlefield.

She was close enough to smell their heat and sweat. It was awful. It was wonderful. She was at an age, she reflected, past (if she’d ever been capable of them) such odors. Even her fevers when they came would be back-burner, a dry, desiccate desert heat—the almost pastel fragrance of old bone, ancient skin. Her stools, too, had lost force and sting. Only the ammonias of her pee seemed cumulative, consolidate. But she couldn’t remember when she had last perspired. On the hottest, steamiest days of the Florida summers she had felt the heat really as a kind of comforter across the lap of the sore, listless, stymied blood of her advanced age, and she could only marvel at the smells spilling from the cage of athletes even in the middling distance of her and Junior’s seats.

“Why did you cheer,” Yellin asked her, “for Berho and Hiribarren? Those characters were on the other side. Our guys were Darruspe and Urritzaga.”

She would have tried to tell him how she was drawn to what she could only have explained as their rugged vividness, but she would have sounded crazy even to herself.

So they played together. And it really was, Mrs. Ted Bliss supposed, quite like playing. She used as models her memories of Marvin’s and Frank’s and Maxine’s Saturday afternoon excursions with their Chicago buddies to the Rosenwald Museum of Science and Industry, or the Field Museum of Natural History, the Shedd Aquarium, the Adler Planetarium, double features at the South-town or Hyde Park, or important single features at big, first-run theaters like the State and Lake, the McVickers, the stage shows at the Chicago and Oriental; their forays into Jackson Park to the golf course and tennis courts, or out to see the Golden Lady, or the Japanese Gardens, to the archery range on the beach at Lake Michigan where they rented bows, arrows, leather bands for their arms, or their trips to the downtown stores on the I.C., or all the way to Wilmette to view the splendors of the Bahai Temple, shining, white as the Taj Mahal. And as asexual at her age with Junior Yellin as she assumed the children would have been when they had been tourists taking in the sights of
their
times.

So they played together, revisiting the jai alai, accompanying each other to the greyhounds, the track. Sightseers they were, the only difference between herself, Yellin, and her kids and their playmates was that Mrs. Bliss and Junior had more money to spend, but friendship at their level of disengagement as essentially touristic and hands-off as the kids had been when they aimlessly wandered from hole to hole on the Jackson Park golf course, or chased balls for the tennis players when they had been hit over the chain-link fences.

Playmates.

On rainy days playing the gin rummy variations (Hollywood, double points if the call card’s a spade, or being unable to knock until you had gin; the extra points, bonuses, and boxes in these refinements like a kind of runaway inflation) as her children might have stayed home and played Monopoly. Or shmoozing in restaurants over coffee after they’d eaten the Early Bird special. Playmates, but almost like courtship without any of courtship’s attendant anxieties. As comfortable with each other on these occasions as gossipy girls. (Junior Yellin unmasked, unmanned, sent home again to some almost virginal, pre-big shot condition, like a lion or tiger whose jaws and teeth are still undeveloped. Dorothy in her own way almost the same—their gossip making her nostalgic for something she’d never actually experienced, a life that, outside of family, had not yet happened.)

Queerly dependent on each other as a sort of stranger, castaways, say, or folks thrown together on a difficult trip. With nothing but time on their hands now, and nothing to do with that time—it’s still rotten out, say, the weather still threatening—but fall if not into the story of their lives then at least into some confessional sideshow aspect of the story of their lives, not the high points so much as the oddities, like freakish, unbeautiful geological formations in nature.

Mrs. Bliss, for example, offered a few of the reddest herrings from the last third of her life.

She told Yellin about the sale of Ted’s Buick LeSabre and of all the trouble that had gotten her into, and was quite astonished to learn that Junior had seen the car, had ridden in it, and, when his own was in the shop, had actually driven it once.

“What? No. Impossible.”

“What impossible? Why impossible? A seventy-eight, right?”

“Yes, but I could have told you that.”

“You never mentioned it. It was green, I think.”

“Not a dark green.”

“No, not a dark green. Ted wouldn’t drive around in a pool table. A light shade, I think. Like the background color on a dollar bill.”

“That’s right,” Mrs. Bliss said. “But this was 1978, we were already living in Florida.”

“Didn’t he go back to Myers for a second opinion?”

“You know I forgot?” Mrs. Ted Bliss said, astonished. “So much happened that year.” Confused now, surprised she could have forgotten something like that but amazed, too, that Ted—the whole trip had taken less than a week—would have gone out of his way to look this man up, this son of a bitch who’d taken such advantage of him over the years and then, to add insult to injury, asked to borrow his car, a man who’d driven God knows how many miles all the way to Chicago to get a second opinion on his
cancer
—it was…it was
outrageous!
Why, her husband mustn’t have been so much amused by the man as absolutely
fond
of him!

She could do nothing more now but surrender to her dead husband’s wishes.

So she offered him Alcibiades Chitral, too, and Tommy Auveristas, and finally gave up Hector Camerando himself, the bizarre terms of Camerando’s arrangement with her.

“Four hundred dollars? A setup like that and all you took him for was four hundred dollars? Whatever happened to the grand views of Biscayne Bay, the penthouse in West Palm? You let that crazy spic off the hook for a lousy four hundred dollars?”

“It was embarrassing to me.”

“Embarrassing,” Junior said. “You got some sense of the proprieties. Didn’t it occur to you you might be hurting his
feelings
by running away from his generosity?
Jesus! Dorothy!
”

“It’s over anyway. His number’s been disconnected.”

“That don’t mean he’s dead. Where there’s life there’s hope, where there’s a will there’s a way. I bet that Alcibiades Chitral guy could put you in touch. One da dit dot dash on the jungle telegraph would do it.”

“An anti-Semite? I wouldn’t stoop.”

“Tommy Auveristas, then. I can’t get over it. You know Tommy Overeasy.”

“Well,
know,
” said Mrs. Bliss dismissively.

“You were in the man’s home.”

“It was open house.”

“He put a napkin over your lap. You sat on a sofa with him and ate his food.”

“Oh, his
food,
” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “Drek, chozzerai. I barely moved it around on the plate.”

“You were the belle of the ball. You went mano a mano with him, you went tête-â-tête.”

“You know,” she said, “I’ve been thinking about that. This was right after my testimony. I think he may have been sizing me up. I think he must have been trying to see how much I really knew about Alcibiades Chitral. About Alcibiades Chitral and himself.”

“How much did you?”

“Nothing,” Dorothy Bliss said, surprised. “Nothing at all. My God,” she said, “I don’t even know Hector Camerando’s phone number. I can’t remember the last time I saw Tommy Auveristas,” she whispered, suddenly frightened by how much she had lost. “Can you imagine that?”

Junior Yellin shrugged. “Spilled milk,” he said.

Suddenly she felt a duty to be interested. She leaned toward her companion cross from her on the faux leather banquette in the fish restaurant. “Holmer Toibb must have told you plenty.”

“Holmer Toibb?”

“The man who trained you, whose practice you bought into.”

Yellin didn’t even look shamefaced. Or stare sheepishly into the dregs of his coffee cup.

“Friends?” he said.

“Of course friends,” Dorothy said.

“Well, the fact of the matter is I didn’t know Toibb. I never even saw him.”

“You told me he trained you.”

“Trained me. I’m an old dog. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

“And Greener Hertsheim?”

“A legend.”

“A legend?” Mrs. Bliss said.

“Like Robin Hood. Like George Washington and the cherry tree.” Mrs. Bliss scowled. “Friends?” Yellin asked like a professional wrestler extending his hand for forgiveness.

“But Junior, you
billed
me!”

“You never paid.”

“You threatened to turn it over to a collection agency!”

“Did I follow through?”

“It would have cost you
money
to follow through.”

“What are you so cockcited? You knew I was a fake. What troubles you, I was an untrained fake?”

“Junior, you’re dealing with people’s lives.”

“Oh,” Yellin said, “people’s lives.”

She took his point and smiled.

“Sure,” Mrs. Bliss said, “friends.”

TEN

C
loser than ever now.

Who did absolutely nothing for each other: Yellin pulling Mrs. Ted Bliss into what were for her uncharted but thoroughly buoyant waters; Mrs. Bliss reciprocating with an openness so total she might well have been dealing in the naked heart-to-heart of a child with an imaginary friend. And, as in such friendships, they often arranged strange adventures—journeys and tasks neither would have undertaken on their own. Of course, Mrs. Bliss reasoned, she at least had been preparing, training for, and, in a sense, behaving in such “public” ways since coming to the Towers almost thirty years earlier. For what had those demonstrations and makeovers been that she and the other tenants had gathered on the decks of the rooftop swimming pools to witness and participate in? What had the tango lessons been? The lectures and language classes? The Yiddish film festivals and landscape painting courses? Las Vegas and Monte Carlo nights? The good neighbor policy and international evenings? What had all those participatory crash courses in winning bridge, golf, tennis, and chess and even deep-sea fishing instructional programs amounted to, finally? Well, not to very much because for all the initial enthusiasm—Mrs. Bliss did not exempt herself—these courses of study may have elicited, few who signed up for them (and paid their good money) persevered long enough to earn their merit badges.