Mrs. Ted Bliss (14 page)

“No,” Hector Camerando said.

“You remind me,” said Mrs. Bliss. “He’s not as sharp a dresser.”

Camerando, squinting his eyes as though he were examining some rogues’ gallery of Manny-like suspects, shook his head.

The trouble, she thought, was that no one, not her Marvin, not anyone, could hold a candle to Ted. All there was, if you were lucky—oh, you had to be lucky—was someone who didn’t sit in judgment waiting for you to make a mistake. The trouble with kindness, Mrs. Bliss thought, was that there was a limit to it, that it was timed to burn out, that if you slipped up one time too many, or didn’t put a brave enough face on things, or weren’t happy often enough, people lost patience. She felt almost lighthearted.

She wasn’t good at expressing things in English. She’d forgotten her Russian, didn’t, except for a few expressions and maybe a handful of words, even speak Yiddish. Odd as it seemed to her, English was her first language and, though she couldn’t hear it, she knew that her accent was thick, that the sound of her words must be like the sounds characters made in jokes, routines, that she must, even as a young woman in her prime, have come across to others as more vulnerable than she really was, more tremendously naive, less interesting, a type, some stage mockery. (Had she been a murderess her lawyer might have used her voice as a defense; its quaintness like a sort of freckles and dimples and braids.) She wished Ted were alive so she could explain her mood.

It was funny; she thought well enough. She knew this. Not much escaped her. The sights were all up and down Collins Avenue, and everywhere else, too. Holmer Toibb was a sight, the big ugly car she rode in, the man who drove it. Mrs. Bliss wished she had words for the words in her head, or that people could read her mind as she had her impressions. But no one could do that, not even Ted. All Ted could do was not judge her. And now, may he rest, he couldn’t do even that. Yet she knew he wasn’t resting, he wasn’t anything. The thing about losing your life was that you lost everyone else’s, too. You lost Marvin’s, you lost Frank’s, you lost Maxine’s. You lost your wife’s, Dorothy’s. By dying, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, you lost everything. It must be a little like going through bankruptcy. Mrs. Bliss felt as if he’d set her aside. He’d set her aside? Then may she rest, too.

As, in a way, she did. She was. In the presence of a stranger, she was completely calm. If she’d allowed herself to she could have shut out the sights altogether, closed her eyes, and slept. It was only out of politeness that she didn’t, and it was as if they’d exchanged places, as if he were her guest instead of the other way around. She could have offered him coffee, the paper, the use of her phone. She could have broken out the cards and dealt him gin rummy. It was nuts, but that’s how she felt. The least she owed him was conversation.

“Louise Munez tells me you’re thinking of selling,” Dorothy said.

“Selling?”

“Your condominium. When I remember, I say ‘condominium.’ It’s one of the biggest investments we make. Why use slang?”

Mrs. Bliss had no such principles. She was paying him in conversation.

“Louise Munez?”

“Louise Munez. The security guard with the magazines. Very friendly woman with a gun and a nightstick. Talks to everyone. I don’t know where she learns all the gossip she knows but she’s very reliable. Oh, you know her. Elaine Munez’s daughter? No? I thought you did. I don’t think they get along very well. I think she asked to be assigned to One because her mother lives there. She probably does it just to aggravate her. Kids! I know the woman won’t let her live with her. It must be a secret, she never said what. She’s quiet enough about her own business. I don’t know what’s going on. People don’t foul their own nests. Sure, when it comes to
their
nests mum’s the word.”

She paused and looked sidelong at Camerando. Maybe he had something to contribute to the conversation. No?

“Anyway,” Dorothy continued, “it was Louise Munez who said you’re thinking of selling. The same one who told me your friend Jaime Guttierez bought a big place in West Palm Beach. You’ve been there? I hear it’s nice. Is it nice?”

“Es muy bueno,” Hector Camerando said.

(But restricted? thought Mrs. Bliss. They’ll take a Spaniard or a Mexican over a Jew?)

“Oh,” she said, “you speak Spinach.”

“Spinach?”

“It’s a joke. In the buildings.”

“Si.”

She wondered if he knew what was going on. Her moods this afternoon were giving her fits. Now she was impatient to be home. She could almost have jumped out of her skin. What did they all want from her? Why had he crossed the street and made such a fuss if he was going to act this way? She wasn’t that vulnerable, she wasn’t. Or naive or uninteresting either. If she
did
need her Mannys and protectors. She was a woman who’d carried a gun. In Chicago, on the first of the month, covering her husband, a Jew Louise.

It was just that Miami alarmed her. The things you read, the things you
heard.
All the drugs and factions. There was offshore piracy. Yes, and this one had machine guns in the Everglades, and that one slaves in the orange groves, and another sold green cards, phony papers, and everyone practicing the martial arts against the time they could take back their countries.

The Cubans, the Colombians, the Central Americans. The blacks, and the Haitians beneath the blacks. The beach bums and homeless. Thugs, malcontents, and the insane invading from Mariel. And somewhere in there the Jews, throwbacks, who’d once come on vacations and now went there to die. It wasn’t a place, it was a pecking order.

Something sinister in even the traffic, some stalled, oppressive sense of refugee, of the bridge down and the last flight out of wherever (Dear
God,
couldn’t he go faster? Didn’t he know shortcuts?), and Mrs. Bliss, as much out of distraction and a need to make the time pass, tried to get Camerando to pitch in. She started to ask him questions. (Though, truthfully, were she back in Toibb’s office now, she would have opened her pocketbook, removed the homework she’d been at such pains to prepare, and torn it into a dozen pieces. This was no country for baleboostehs. Her husband was dead, her family scattered. She
had
no interests!)

“Do you know Susan and Oliver Gutterman?” she said.

Camerando shook his head.

“Enrique Frache? Ricardo Llossas?”

Mrs. Bliss noted the absence of recognition on his face and went on as though she were reading from a prepared list both of them knew was just a formality, so much red tape.

“Vittorio Cervantes? No? What about his wife, Ermalina?”

He shook his head again and again and Mrs. Bliss wondered how much longer he could answer her questions without actually speaking. She would make this the point of the game.

“Carlos and Rita Olvero? They live in your building.”

“I know Carlos,” Hector Camerando said. “We’re not close.”

So much for the point of the game, she thought. And then, remembering what they said on TV, she laughed and said, “Wait, I have a follow-up. Carmen and Tommy Auveristas?”

She hit the jackpot with that one, she broke the bank at Monte Carlo, and suddenly didn’t know whether to be pleased or terrified that they had made contact. It was tiresome to have to acknowledge that one no longer had any interests, yet there was something reassuring and comfortable about it, too. To live by second nature, the seat of your pants.

“Listen,” Camerando exploded, “put up or shut up! What do you know about it anyway? What do you know about
anythin’?
An old Jew lady cooking soup, making fish! You want some advice? These are your golden years. You should shuffleboard the livelong day. You should tan in the sun till the cows come home! Join the discussion groups. What’s wrong with you, lady? These are your golden years. You shouldn’t leave the game room!”

He’d scared her shitless. And the odd thing, the odd thing was he liked the old woman. When he came out of Rita de Janeiro’s and saw her waiting for her bus he’d been happy to see her, first on her account and then on his. It was already the middle of the afternoon and he hadn’t found an opportunity to make reparation, do his good deed. Well, he thought as he’d seen her waving at him, it’s Mrs. Ted in the nick of time.

Though that part was superstition, the little self-imposed ritual upping the degree of difficulty. Logically, of course, if the time of day made no difference to God it certainly shouldn’t make a difference to Camerando. And if it did (and it did), then maybe
none
of it made any difference to God. And maybe, too, he could have saved himself the trouble and stopped the whole thing altogether. On the other hand, he thought (though this had occurred more times than he could remember), perhaps God not only wasn’t in it but wasn’t even in
on
it! Boy, he thought, wouldn’t
that
be a kick in the nuts?

So he took God out of the equation (Hector Camerando, he scolded, Hector Camerando, you are one good-looking, well-dressed fuck; you can’t lose, can you, Fuck?) and decided for more times than he could remember that he’d been doing it for himself all along.

And that degree of difficulty was the whole point.

Hey, if it wasn’t, shit, if it wasn’t he could have tossed ten, twenty, thirty bucks to the first bum he saw on the street, said, “Starlight, Starbright,” and made a wish on the damn creep.

But nah, nah. He played by the rules even if they were only his rules. It had to be all done by at least an hour before sunset, Fall back, Spring forward inclusive. And it was having to wait until the last minute that made it exciting. Well, it was in the blood, wasn’t it? Flowing free all up and down his proud red hidalgo.

Still, he hoped the royal reaming he’d just given Mrs. Ted’s old ass hadn’t spooked her to the point where it canceled his reparation. It probably had, though, and now he’d either have to look out for an accident he could stop for, or pull up to some kid selling newspapers at a stoplight, slip him a ten, and then not take the paper.

Sometimes, compulsive superstition could be a pain in the ass. He wondered whether Jaime Guttierez had similar tics. The guy was one of his best pals, but they had never talked about it. Sure, Camerando thought, he must have them. They were compadres—the both of them dashing macho gentlemen spirit sports with a word and code of honor big and wide as a barn door.

He hated his temper, his temperament. It had cost him a wife, a couple of relatives, and not a few friends. Though he personally doubted that was what had gotten him into the loopy tit-for-tat of his life. And, frankly, he didn’t think being Catholic had all that much to do with the endless appeasement that made up at least a part of his days. Even when he’d been a strict observer, confession and penance were things he could do with his soul tied behind his back. In spite of—maybe even because of—the fact that he never really understood those mysteries. To him, God had always seemed something of a pushover. Surely, he thought, reciting all the Our Fathers and Hail Marys in the world didn’t make a dime’s worth of difference to the human heart, and he’d long ago wearied of such pale, puny recompense. What’s more, making restitution to the injured party made as little sense. Why go to the bother of injuring a party if all you had to do to wipe the slate clean was give back his money or restore his health? It slipped all the punches and didn’t do a thing for your character. It was hypocritical, if you want to know.

Yet he’d stung and frightened her, rammed words down her ears that, at that close a range, she couldn’t help but hear even if she was deaf. (And to judge by the size of the hearing aid that hung out of the side of her head like a fucking Walkman, she was plenty deaf!) So what he decided to do, he decided, was make her the beneficiary of a
second
reparation. She’d been poking her nose, sniffing around his business, trying to get him to spill the goods on his life. All right then, he’d pass up the accidents and paperboys, go straight ahead and rat on himself.

“I know Frache,” he told the old woman, “I know Llossas. I know them all. I’m in with Aspiration de Lopardoso.”

“Aspiration de Lopardoso?”

“You don’t know him?”

She shook her head.

“You didn’t just ask me about de Lopardoso?”

“I never heard of him,” Mrs. Bliss said.

Ay ay ay, Camerando thought. Macho gentleman spirit sport or no macho gentleman spirit sport, he was frankly astonished that he should be sitting beside this particular woman in this particular place. True, she was only one more familiar absolute type of woman. Throw a mantilla around her shoulders or a dark shawl over her head and she could be a stand-in for any widow in the world, any lachrymose madre, ma, or mama who ever was. Any old, enfeebled pietà of a dame crying over the spilled milk of a lost child. Though it was beyond imagining (as it was with so many of that order) how she could have set aside the housework and tatting and nursing of babes ever to have lain still long enough to conceive one, impossible to drum up in her—not love, she was a pillar of love—but the juices of anything like enjoyment or passion. It was for her that the long distance was created, floral remembrances on birthdays and holidays, all the merely token requitals of pure blind will in the service of sacrifice. She was
such
a dope!
So
stupid! Running only on instinct without the intelligence or fury to refuse anything to anybody, so simply and purely biological as to once have tumbled out of her silly-ass womb. Up to her eyes in forgiveness and long-suffering and incapable of cutting, or even of recognizing, a loss. Who knew nothing of odds, and believed that, by God, so long as it were her blood, she didn’t care a damn
what
damage it did! Selfishness like hers—mother selfishness—made guys like him and Auveristas and Chitral and Guttierez pikers. So
dumb!
Now there was someone who knew how to work the reparations!

But what astonished him, what he couldn’t get past, were their disparate worldviews. By golly, thought Camerando, I
am
a dashing macho gentleman spirit sport. I
am.
Next to her I am! I do, too, have a code of honor. I
do.
Next to her I do!