Mrs. Ted Bliss (13 page)

So it was quite possible, now she had regained her composure, that even if he hadn’t asked to see a list of her interests she might have volunteered anyway.

“Cards,” she began.

“For money?” Toibb said.

“Yes, sure for money.”

“Big money?”

“Friendly games. But rich enough for
my
blood.”

“How friendly?”

“Friendly. If someone loses five dollars that’s a big deal.”

“Go on,” Toibb said.

“Cooking.”

“Mexican? Continental? Japanese? What sort of cooking?”

“Supper. Coffee, dessert. Cooking.”

“What else?”

“Breakfast. Lunch. Not now, not so much.”

“No, I mean do you have any other interests?”

“Oh, sure,” Mrs. Bliss said. “I’m very interested in television. We bought color TV back in the sixties and were one of the first to have cable. If you mean what
kind
of television I’d have to say the detectives.”

She had known while she wrote the list out that it made her life seem trivial. Even those interests she hadn’t yet mentioned—her membership in ORT and other organizations, things connected with events in the Towers, her visits to Chicago and Pittsburgh and Cincinnati—even that which was most important to her, her children and grandchildren,
all
her family. The trips, when Ted was alive, they’d taken to the islands and, one time, to Israel with a stop in London to visit Frank and his family Frank’s sabbatical year. (Her childhood, the years she’d spent in Russia, even farther than London, farther than Israel.) All these were real interests, yet she was ordinary, ordinary. Everyone had interests. Everyone had a family, highlights in their lives. She had considered, when she made her list, putting down Alcibiades Chitral’s name, the business with the car, the time she’d had to testify in court, but wasn’t sure those experiences qualified as interests. Unless Ted’s death also qualified, her twelve-hundred-mile crying jag on the plane to Chicago, Marvin’s three-year destruction.
All
the unhappy things in her life. Did
they
interest her?

“Other people’s condominiums,” she blurted. “Tommy Auveristas,” she said. “
All
the South Americans.”

“You
know
Tommy Overeasy?” Holmer Toibb said.

“Tommy Overeasy?”

“It’s what they call him. But wait a minute, you
know
this man?” Toibb said excitedly.

She’d struck pay dirt but was too caught up in her thoughts to notice. Not
even
thoughts. Sudden impressions. Saliencies. Bolts from the blue. And she rode over Toibb’s lively interest. Not her loose ends, her sixes and sevens, not her blues or sadness or even her grief. Maybe she wasn’t even a candidate for Holmer Toibb’s therapies.

I know, she thought, I want to go visit Alcibiades Chitral!

Speak of the devil, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss.

She had just left Holmer Toibb’s office on Lincoln Road and was sitting on a bench inside a small wooden shelter waiting for her bus. The devil who’d come into her line of sight just as she was thinking of him was Hector Camerando. Camerando from Building Two and his friend, Jaime Guttierez from Three, were two of the first South American boys she had met in the Towers. Mrs. Bliss, like many unschooled people, had an absolutely phenomenal memory when it came to attaching names to faces and, since in her relatively small world, her limited universe of experience, strangers were almost always an event, she was usually bang on target recalling the circumstances in which she’d met them. She’d met Hector through Jaime on one of the old international evenings that used to be held in the game rooms on Saturday nights. Rose Blitzer had thought him quite handsome, recalled Mrs. Bliss. Even Rose’s husband, Max, olov hasholem, had remarked on his smile. Dorothy sighed. It had been less than four years yet so many were gone. Just from Mrs. Bliss’s table alone—Max; Ida; the woman on coffee duty, Estelle. Ted. She didn’t care to think about all the others in the room that night who were gone now. (Not “cashed in his chips,” not “kicked the bucket.” “Who had lost his life.” That’s how Toibb should have put it. As if death came like the account of a disaster at sea in a newspaper. Or what happened to soldiers in wars. He should have honored it for the really big deal it was.) Let alone the people who’d been too sick to make it to the gala and had stayed in their apartments. Plus all those who’d been well enough but hadn’t come anyway. In a way even Guttierez hadn’t survived. Oh, he was still alive, touch wood, but Louise Munez had told Mrs. Bliss he’d taken a loss on his condo and moved to a newer, even bigger place in the West Palm Beach area that Louise told her was restricted.

And, if you could trust Louise (even without her mishegoss newspapers and magazines the security guard was a little strange), Hector Camerando was thinking to put
his
place on the market.

Mrs. Ted Bliss hated to hear about Towers condominiums being put up for sale. Everyone knew the Miami area was overbuilt, that it was a buyer’s market. But interest rates were sky high. It could cost you a fortune to take out a loan, and what you gave to the bank you didn’t give to the seller. That’s why the prices kept falling. Or that’s what Manny from the building told her anyway. Poor Rose Blitzer, thought Dorothy Bliss. As if it wasn’t enough that her husband had lost his life. Poor Rose Blitzer with her three bedrooms, two and a half baths, full kitchen, California room, and a living room/dining room area so large all she needed to have two extra, good-sized rooms was put in a wall. She must rattle around in a place like that. She’d never get back what they’d put into it before Max lost his life. (Crazy Louise was floating rumors.) But selling at a loss was better than renting or leaving it stand empty. Not that it made a difference to Mrs. Ted Bliss. She’d never sell
her
place. When she lost her life it would go to the kids and they’d do what they’d do. Till then, forget it. She and Ted had picked their spot and Mrs. Bliss was perfectly willing to lie in it.

But what, Mrs. Bliss wondered, was Hector Camerando doing on Lincoln Road? What could there be for him here?

Dorothy remembered Lincoln Road from when it was still
Lincoln Road.
From back in the old days, from back in the fifties, from when they first started coming down to Miami Beach. From when all the tourists from all the brand-new hotels up and down Collins Avenue would come there to shop—all the latest styles in men’s and women’s beach-wear, lounging pajamas, even fur coats if you could believe that. Anything you wanted, any expensive, extravagant thing you could think of—cocktail rings, studs for French cuffs, the fanciest watches and men’s white-on-white shirts, anything. Hair salons you could smell the toilet water and perfumes blowing out on the sidewalks like flowers exploding. You want it, they got it. Then, afterward, you could drop into Wolfie’s when Wolfie’s was Wolfie’s.

Now, even the bright, little, old-fashioned trolley bus you rode in free up and down Lincoln looked shabby and the advertising on the back of the bench on which Dorothy sat was in Spanish. Half the shops were boarded up or turned into medical buildings where chiropractors and recreational therapeusisists kept their offices; and in Wolfie’s almost the only people you ever saw were dried-up old Jewish ladies on sticks with loose dentures hanging down beneath their upper lips or riding up their jaws, and holding on for dear life to their fat doggie bags of rolls and collapsing pats of foiled, melting butter that came with their cups of coffee and single boiled egg, taking them back to the lone rooms in which they lived in old, whitewashed, three-story hotels far down Collins. Either them or the out-and-out homeless. It stank, if you could believe it, of pee.

What could a man like Hector Camerando want here?

He had seen Mrs. Ted Bliss, too, and was coming toward her.

Does he recognize me? They’d bumped into each other maybe a grand total of three or four times since they’d met. He lives in Building Two, I live in Building One. It’s two different worlds.

She waved to him while he was still crossing the street.

“Oh,” she said, “how are you? How are you feeling? You’re looking very well. I’m waiting for my bus, that’s why I’m sitting here. I saw you when you were still across the street. We’re neighbors. I live in the Towers, too. Dorothy Bliss? Building One.”

“Of course. How are you, Mrs. Ted Bliss?” Hector Camerando said.

“I’m fine. Thank you for asking,” Dorothy said, at once flattered and a little surprised he should remember her name, a playboy and something of a man, if you could believe Louise, about town. And just at that moment Mrs. Bliss saw her bus approach. She frowned. She distinctly frowned and, exactly as if she had suddenly sneezed without having a Kleenex ready, she hastily clapped a hand over her face. “Oh,” she said, gathering herself and rising to go, “look. Here’s my bus.”

Hector Camerando lightly pressed his fingers on her arm. “No,” he said, “I have my car, I’ll drive you.”

And wasn’t being the least bit coy or too much protesting when she told him that wouldn’t be necessary, that she enjoyed riding the bus, that she liked looking out its big, tinted windows and studying all the sights on Collins Avenue, that she loved how, on a hot afternoon like this, the drivers, if only for their own comfort, kept their buses overly air-conditioned. She loved that feeling, she said.

“I’ll turn my thermostat down to sixty degrees,” he said. “And at this time of day the traffic’s so slow you’ll be able to study everything to your heart’s content. Besides,” he said, “why should you pay for a fare if you don’t have to? Come,” he said, taking her arm once more and leading her away gently, “I’m just around the corner.”

It was his point about the fare that turned her. Mrs. Bliss was not a venal woman. That she cut discount coupons out of the paper or, because of her premonition that she’d be charged for the visit anyway, hadn’t bolted from his office when Holmer Toibb referred so disrespectfully to the manner in which Ted had lost his life, was testimony not to parsimony as much as to her understanding that money, like oil or clean water or great stands of forest, was a resource, too, and must not be abused.

His hand on her arm, Mrs. Bliss felt almost girlish (she wasn’t a fool; it never crossed her mind she might be his sweetheart, he her swain), moved by the pleasure of being humanly touched, and virtuous, too, proud of his physical handsomeness and of the scrupulous innocence of her reasons for accepting his ride. Though he was doing her a favor and she knew it, and she might even be taking him out of his way, and she knew
that,
she was not made to feel (as she often did with Manny) that she was being patronized, or that there was anything showy about this guy’s good deeds. Rather, Mrs. Bliss felt for a moment he might be doing it out of something like camaraderie.

Only then did the network of coincidence strike her. Not half an hour earlier she’d mentioned Tommy Auveristas to Toibb, her interest in all the South Americans. She’d declared her interest, too, in other people’s condominiums. Perhaps that’s what put her in mind of what the security guard, Louise, had told her about Jaime Guttierez’s determination to sell and, then, auf tzuluchas, there he was, plain as the nose, a man she didn’t run into once or twice in two years.

And, gasping, stopped dead in her tracks, catching her breath.

“What?” said Hector Camerando. “What is it, what’s wrong? Is it the heat? Do you want to sit down? We’ll go into that Eckerd’s. I think there’s a soda fountain.”

“No,” said Dorothy Bliss. “I’m all right.”

She was. She was breathing regularly again. She felt no tightness in her throat or chest, no sharp shooting pains up her left arm or in her jaw. What stopped her, what she’d run into like a wall was the thrill of conviction, a presentiment, almost a vision. Her ride, the favor Hector Camerando had crossed the street to press on her, was to lead her to his car, which, plain as the nose, was sure to turn out to be Ted’s Buick LeSabre, washed, waxed, and green as the wrapper on a stick of Doublemint gum.

“You’re sure?”

“Thank you for asking,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

They turned the corner.

“Where is it?” she said. “I don’t see it.”

“We’re there,” he said, and opened the door on the passenger side of his Fleetwood Cadillac.

Mrs. Bliss was as stunned by its not being their old car as she had been by her conviction it would. She couldn’t catch her breath but she was still without pain.

“Let me turn this on,” Camerando said, and leaned across Mrs. Bliss and put the key in the ignition. Almost instantly Mrs. Bliss felt sheets of cold air. It was like standing at the frontier of a sudden cold front.

“Would you like to see a doctor? Let me take you to your doctor.”

“That’s all right,” she said.

“No, really. You mustn’t let things slide. It’s better if you catch them early. No,” said Camerando, “there’s nothing to cry about. What’s there to cry about? You mustn’t be frightened. It’s nothing. I’m certain it isn’t anything. You waited for the bus in all that heat. That’s enough to knock the stuffing out of anyone.”

“You shut up,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “You just shut up.”

“Hey,” Camerando said.

“Shut up,” she said. “Don’t talk.”

Camerando stared at her, looked for a moment as if he would say something else, and then shrugged and moved his oversized automobile into play in the traffic.

Mrs. Bliss giggled. Then, exactly as if giggling were the rudest of public displays, removed a handkerchief from her white plastic handbag and covered first one and then the other corner of her mouth with it, wiping her incipient laughter into her handkerchief like a sort of phlegm. She returned the handkerchief to her pocketbook, clicking it shut as though snapping her composure back into place.

“Do you happen to know,” Mrs. Bliss said, “a gentleman from Building One by the name of Manny?”

The bitch is heat struck, Hector Camerando thought. Her brains are sunburned.

“Manny?” he said. “Manny? Building One? No, I don’t think so.”

“A big man? Probably in his late sixties, though he looks younger?”