Mrs. Ted Bliss (32 page)

For that matter how hotsy-totsy could Frank’s and Maxine’s marriages be? You couldn’t tell
her
there wasn’t any funny stuff going on back in Providence—probably the result of Frank’s picking up his Pittsburgh roots and setting them down in Rhode Island. She and Ted had done the same, and when they were even older than Frank and May, but let’s don’t kid ourselves, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, Frank and May were a horse of a different color.

Dorothy and Maxine were close as ever, so Mrs. Bliss didn’t have to speculate why her daughter was having such a tough time of it these days with George. The insurance business was practically in ruins, at least at George’s end of things. Whole life was out, a thing of the past, along with the agent who sold such policies, a relic. These days all the money was in term. It was entrepreneurial James who spotted the trend before his dad and left him to go with another company.

Life had lost the oom-pah-pah of fabulous things. Everyone lived shmutsig today, everyone had a rough time of it. The Mr. and Mrs. Ted Blisses were as dead as the dodo, olov hasholem. Which isn’t to say that some of their angels didn’t have dirty wings. Sam not only cheated at cards but on occasion might clumsily palm a loose quarter or fifty-cent piece if one were tossed to the ragged outer edge of the pot. And Philip wouldn’t give you a true wholesale price if your life depended on it, and Jake—who did he think
he
was fooling?—changed his name and signed up his sons for a Christian boarding school, while Joyce was a shnorrer first-class who gave cheapo wedding presents, bar mitzvah gifts that were practically an insult, and somehow never managed to have the right change in her purse when it came to sharing a cab or splitting a check.

But all that was piker sin, a kind of four-flusher pride, committed not so much in the name of fun as the spirit of edge.

Ted, taking the long view, had lived in a permanent state of forgiveness. He was too benign to have died of malignant tumors. (Mrs. Bliss recalled the last year of his life, how generous he was, how proud he’d been of her, how tirelessly he’d joined in on the grand joke of her beauty at those spirited underauctions where the bidders tried to guess her age.) So it was almost impossible to argue he would have been shocked by Junior Yellin’s suggestion that he move into Manny Tressler’s with her. (Whoa. Wait a minute. Was that the real point of the game? Was part of the pleasure Ted took in her sixty-some-odd-year-old beauty some old trap-more-flies-with-honey thing? Was it a routine he went through to make his wife more attractive to the bachelors he knew would survive him? Had it been more some midway trick in a carnival than an auction? Was Dorothy supposed to be the grand prize on the booth’s upper shelf?)
Shocked?
If she knew her Ted, he would have been thrilled! He could not bear to die and leave her a widow. He wanted to make sure she was settled, cared for, supported, unlonely. Thanks but no thanks, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Surely even Ted could not have wanted Junior Yellin for a legatee. Her condo plus $9,698.12? Not at
those
prices!

It was another thing altogether that they should turn out to be friends.
Ted
had made friends with him. Or if not friends exactly, then at least come to terms with the man. Sitting back amused, enjoying for all he was worth just watching the man operate, even if it was at his own expense. Not to pick up tips, tricks of the trade, not in any way trying to apprentice himself to the gonif, but like some scholar or philosopher, to see how far Yellin would go, to study the ways he had up his sleeve to get there. What did they call it, a sting operation? A sting operation, but with nobody jumping out of the wallpaper at the end of the show to point a gun or slap on the handcuffs.

So who knows, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Maybe Ted wouldn’t mind even if she took Junior up on his offer. Maybe Mrs. Ted Bliss was part of a sting operation, too. Maybe Ted was dead today because he was ahead of his time (just as Dorothy had been behind hers) all the years he had been alive. Maybe he was the first one ever to have lost the sense of scandal, the one man to have taken in that first whiff and understood that evil was only another unpleasant smell, like mold, say, in a summer house.

But that’s where they parted company. If it suited Ted’s plans for Dorothy to participate in her husband’s experiment, it did not in the least suit Dorothy’s. Not only was
she
too old, Junior Yellin was. She’d been by herself too long now. She was settled, she could take care of herself, and her misery, whatever else it may have been, was not loneliness. Manny from the building had been more support than Yellin.

Would Junior shlep for her, drive her around on her errands? Would he have taught her to make out a check, or advised her in legal matters? In the drive and shlep, practical information, and stand-by-your-side departments he wasn’t worth the paper he was written on, and although—it was probably a sin just to think about this part—were both of them thirty or forty years younger they might have made something or other with the bedroom thing, Mrs. Bliss still wouldn’t have touched him with a ten-foot pole. For one thing the man was a born chaser. He would have broken her heart.

Mrs. Bliss gasped at the thought. Quite literally it took her breath away. The idea, just the
idea,
that Mrs. Ted Bliss could have been a candidate for a busted heart was enough to make her laugh. Or cry. For all her odd old vanity, the pride she’d taken in her beauty, in all the fastidious, just-so arrangements of her old life (the two and three daily baths, her painstaking toilet, her wardrobe, even the old baleboosteh care she lavished on the plastic seat covers over her furniture, the sky blue water in her commode, the shined surfaces of her breakfront and wood tabletops), she’d never been much interested in sexual relations. (Ted had rarely seen her nude and, with the exception of his illness, Mrs. Bliss, when she had helped him in the bathroom or washed him in their bed, had just as rarely—had in fact gone out of her way to avoid looking—seen her husband’s naked body.)

So it was pretty ridiculous to think of herself with a romantically broken heart. Marvin’s death had broken her heart, the deaths and divorces of certain close relatives, the failure of the Michigan farm, and other times her husband had sustained business reversals or been forced to sell at a loss. Her grandson Barry broke her heart. Losing Ted, it goes without saying. But a sufferer because of romance? Never. Never!

But that was one thing. Friendship was another. Surprisingly, astonishingly, really, she and Milton Yellin had become good friends. Pals, if you want to know; buddies, partners in crime. It was almost as if, like kids, they were cut from the same cloth. That’s the way they were with each other. They
played
together. This quite new to Dorothy’s not exactly vast experience (something she actually had to learn and the only thing in the world Junior Yellin could teach her), new to the experience because, for all that she was eighty-two, she’d never had a friend. And why would she have had? She’d never had a childhood either. What she remembered of being a kid was what she remembered of being an adult: her family. Brothers and sisters and cousins of various degree, but no friends. No, what Junior called, “asshole buddies.”

“There’s,” he’d say if people were watching as he stopped to pick her up outside Building Number One on days he was off, “my asshole buddy, Mrs. Ted Bliss. How you doin’, Dodo?”

“How many times do I have to tell you,” Dorothy, blushing, would scold him, “you’re embarrassing me. You’re embarrassing
them.
”

“Yeah, well, the day I can’t get a rise out of people is the day I might as well drop dead and die.”

In his old age he drove big four-wheel-drive vehicles, Jeep Cherokees, Land Rovers, other such machines that he would borrow for the day from various people he knew with whom he was cooking up schemes. “Arrgh,” he’d say with a certain self-loathing, “I’m too old for this stuff, I ain’t got the balls anymore. I give them away. They can have them with my compliments. All my best-laid plans of mice and men. They can have them for free. Surefire shit. They take a flier on the least of my ideas, they’d double,
triple
their investment! ‘Gee, Milt,’ they say, ‘if it’s half as good as it sounds why don’t
you
get in on the ground floor? Why don’t
you
put up some dough?’ ‘Me?’ I say, ‘I’m content to trade you my ideas for a box at the Dolphins game, or take your car out for a spin with my asshole buddy, Dorothy.’ I get a rise out of them, it gives them a laugh. So they humor me. Twirps in their fifties and sixties, what do they know from getting old, cutting their losses, tossing their towels in?”

“Oh, you haven’t tossed in your towel,” Mrs. Bliss reassured.

“Damn straight I ain’t,” he told her, cheering, “there’s still a few miles left in this model. So what do you want to do today, kiddo? Go fishing out on a charter? Catch the helicopter and do the beaches or downtown Miami? They got a new one in Fort Lauderdale. Takes us up the coast to Palm. I slip the guy ten bucks, he buzzes the Kennedy compound or flies low over the country club and spooks the polo ponies.”

“Oh, Junior,” Mrs. Bliss said laughing, “where do you get your ideas?”

“Oh, my ideas,” Junior Yellin said, “my ideas are a dime a dozen. What
I’m
looking for are a few good years.”

He really is a death-oriented man, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. It was odd, death was something you worried about in middle age, or while your family was together. It was something she gave little thought to these days. Manny had drawn up her will shortly after Ted had died and, to tell you the truth, her death was the last thing on her mind—except those few times when she wished for it. So she was bothered to hear Junior talk this way.

She had an idea. She told Junior she had to go to the bathroom and asked if he would stop at the next gas station. When they stopped Mrs. Bliss went up to an attendant, turned, and walked back to the car. “You need a key,” she explained, but when she went into the office she took a small notebook from her purse, found a number she’d written down, then searched the purse for a quarter and called Hector Camerando from the pay phone.

She returned to the big off-road vehicle.

“I have an idea,” she said.

“Yeah? What?”

“Why don’t we go to the jai alai?”

“Oh,” Yellin frowned, “the jai alai’s a crapshoot. It’s fixed as wrestling. You don’t know that? Everyone knows that.”

“So what if it is?” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “What if it is if a person happens to know a person in a position to know which players are going to do what to which other players?”

Something in Mrs. Ted Bliss’s grin caused Junior to examine her closely, almost to appraise her.

“Dorothy?” he said.

“Junior?”

“I know you what, five decades?”

“Something or other.”

“Sweetheart,” he said, “apples don’t fall far from their trees. Ted, may he rest, was a sweet, stand-up guy. You heard of painless dentists? Well, your husband was a kind of bloodless butcher. He took practically all the cholesterol off a steak he trimmed the fat so close. That’s how honest he worked the scales. I’ll tell you the truth, I was a pig in comparison. I’d weigh in my thumbs, my wrists. Sometimes I’d sit with my tochis up on the scale to help make us break even. If I made him a patsy, if I wronged him, it was just to get even—almost like honor.

“Well, you know how I screwed him over—the books, the farm. From my point of view it was a…vindication. But what troubles me now is how you, who I had this idea lived in his moral shadow, all of a sudden pops out from the shadow to tell me she may know a person who knows a person who can chisel the jai alai.

“Do you know what you’re saying bites deeper than mafia? It huffs and puffs harder than the trade winds the drugs blow in on. It’s one of the grimmest shows the INS runs. We’re not just talking Basque separatists, we’re talking international terrorists.

“Dorothy, dear, tell me, how did you come to know such a person?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I’m—”

“No, don’t tell me,” Yellin broke in.

“I’m holding his marker.”

Junior Yellin scrutinized the old lady.

“Back at the gas station. You called him?”

“We could go to the greyhounds,” she said.

“The greyhounds, too?”

“I’m holding his marker.”

The jack of all scams weighed the odds.

“How much?” he asked finally. “What are we talking here?”

“The sky’s the limit,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

Yellin shut his eyes, his face lost in concentration. It was as though he were trying to guess in which hand an opponent was holding a coin. He opened his eyes. “The jai alai,” he said hoarsely.

They drove in silence to the white rectangular building, long and low as a huge discount store or a factory in an industrial park.

“So what did he say?” Junior asked when they were inside.

“Didn’t I tell you?”

“I was making a speech,” Junior said shyly. “I never gave you a chance.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Bliss said, “his line was busy.”

It was only minutes before the first match was scheduled to begin. They were standing near the five-dollar and ten-dollar windows. Yellin looked stricken. “The line was busy? It was busy, the line.”

“I tried two or three times.”

“Try it now,” Junior pleaded, “if he hasn’t got anything for us in the first match, then maybe a later one.” His eyes shone with an immense idea. Mrs. Bliss thought he looked fifteen years younger. She turned to go. “Oh, and Dorothy?”

“What?”

He signaled her closer, then, when she stopped, he stepped forward and closed the gap between the two of them even more. Mrs. Ted Bliss, who’d never see eighty again, watched him warily.

“Nothing,” he said. “Only when you talk to him, it might not be a good idea to tell him someone else is in on this, too.”

She was old; for a moment she’d had a crazy thought that Junior had been on the verge of trying something. She was relieved when he hadn’t. The shine in his eyes, the sudden, transient, ischemic pallor on his face like a sort of youth—she thought she’d felt the last weak rays of lust radiating out of him. She had, thankfully, misrepresented its source. It wasn’t the love of an old lady that had excited him but the action. The excited, polyglot voices of the crowds milling around the betting windows—his sense of connection and edge like deep drafts of ozone.