Mrs. Ted Bliss (2 page)

“People don’t take me seriously,” Max said. “Even when I shout and call them names.”

Giving brief, lightning summaries of their situations and accomplishments, she introduced Guttierez to the others at the table. It was astonishing to Jaime how much information the woman managed to convey about the people and even the various political factions in the Towers. Within minutes, for example, he learned about the rift between Building One (not, despite its name, the first to go up but only the first where ground had been broken) and Building Five (which enjoyed certain easements in One’s parking garage). He was given to understand, though he didn’t, that Building Number Two was “a sleeping giant.” She sketched an overview of the general health of some of the people at their own and nearby tables.

Jaime clucked his tongue sympathetically. “No, you don’t understand,” Mrs. Blitzer said. “Those people are survivors. What do they say these days? ‘They paid their dues.’ They came through their procedures and chemotherapies; they spit in their doctors’ eyes who gave them only months to live. They laughed up their sleeves.”

And she even filled him in on who had the big money. “The little guy over there? He could buy and sell all of us, can’t he, Max?”

“I don’t dare go to funerals, they think I’m laughing,” Max said.

A woman in an apron came by. She held out two pots of coffee—decaf and regular.

“You forgot sugar,” one of the women at the table said.

“Ida, she’s got her hands full. Don’t bother her, take Sweet ’n Low. Look, there’s Equal.”

“I can’t digest sugar substitutes without a nondairy creamer.”

“Really?” another woman said. “I never heard such a thing. Have you, Burt?”

“Nothing surprises me anymore. It’s all equally fantastic.”

“How about you, Mr. Guttierez? She wants to know if you want some coffee.”

“I better get back to my friend,” Jaime said. “He expected me to sit with him.”

“Oh, he’s
very
good looking,” Rose Blitzer said.

“He has a nice smile,” said Max.

“She thinks you’re good looking,” Guttierez told Hector Camerando.

“Olé.”

They were gentlemen. They were from South America. They lived according to a strict code of honor. It would never have occurred to the one to question the word of the other.

So despite the commanding two- or three-gala advantage Hector Camerando held over Jaime Guttierez, the gentleman from Building Three, armed with the bits of information Rose Blitzer had provided him, ate the gentleman of the host building alive that evening in a fast game of human poker.

Hector drew first. He picked Max Blitzer.

“Stroke,” Jaime said.

“Stroke? Really? He seems so animated.”

“The Gioconda smile is a residual.”

Jaime picked the woman pouring coffee.

“I check,” Guttierez said, and picked Ida.

“Something with her stomach,” Jaime said. “She can’t digest Equal unless she has Coffee-Mate.”

Guttierez picked Burt.

Jaime checked and picked the guy who was supposed to have the big money.

“Check,” Hector said.

Though he had to check when Camerando picked Dorothy, Jaime took the next few hands easily (a brain tumor, liver transplant, two radicals, and a lumpectomy) and was up five hundred dollars when Hector, laughing, said that Guttierez was murdering him and threw in the towel. Jaime declined to take his friend’s money but Hector insisted. Then he offered to return it but Camerando congratulated him on his game and said he hoped he was at least as much a man of honor as Guttierez. There was nothing to do but pocket the five hundred dollars as graciously as he could. “You really had me on that, Dorothy. I thought the tide was about to turn,” Jaime Guttierez said.

Though he wouldn’t remember it, Jaime Guttierez’s initial reaction was to be stumped when Hector Camerando had bid Dorothy and taken the hand in their friendly little game, had been about to say that the woman was either incredibly shy or very, very deaf. Shyness wasn’t even listed on the scale of infirmities, abnormalities, and outright deformities that counted for points in scoring human poker, and he had no genuinely corroborative evidence that the woman was deaf. The fact that she hadn’t spoken a word all evening, or, for that matter, even seemed to have heard one, was beside the point. Guttierez really was an honorable man. Honorable men did not bluff. Though he might well have taken the hand, Camerando was also an honorable man. He would never have called him on it. Knowing this, it wasn’t in Jaime’s character to bluff. Had he been a tad more observant, however, he might have seen the woman’s deformity, declared it openly to his friend, and humiliated him even more soundly than he already had.

Shorn now not only of decibels—unenhanced, Dorothy could no longer make out the ordinary noises of daily life, such as traffic, machinery, the singing of birds—but, in a way, even of the memory of them. She couldn’t recall, for example, the sound of her accent, her rough speech, or, even in her head, how to decline the melody of the most familiar tune.

It made her fearful, almost craven, in the streets, and she never entered them without making certain that her hearing aid was securely in place. (Which, hating its electronic hiss and frightful cackle as though storms were exploding inside her skull, she rarely wore in public and, sloughing it like too-constrictive clothing, never at home, even on the telephone or in front of the television, preferring instead to ask friends and visitors to speak louder or actually shout at her or endlessly repeat themselves as if she were carefully going over a tricky contract with them, something legalistic in her understanding.) And taking into account the time of day, whether it was rush hour, or the Christmas holidays, Spring Break and the kids down visiting on vacation, sometimes wore her spare, too, arranging the awkward, ugly hearing aid on the perfectly smooth flap of skin that covered her right outer ear like a long-healed amputation, the flap shiny and sealing over all the ear’s buried working parts—the tympanic membrane, auditory meatus and nerve, eustachian tube, cochlea, semicircular canals, stapes, anvil, malleus, and all the little wee chips of skull bones like a sort of gravel—so that even before her increasing, cumulative nerve deafness she heard everything at a slight remove, the profound bass of all distant, muffled sound. This was the deformity Guttierez had missed, for she made no attempt to hide it, never swept it behind her hair. Quite the opposite in fact. Displaying the ear like a piece of jewelry, or a beauty mark. Which, for a considerable time—almost until she was seven or eight—she truly believed it was, or believed it was since she first observed her older sister Miriam, may she rest, scooping wax from her right ear with a wooden match. This was back in Russia, and Dorothy was much too sensitive ever to draw the girl’s attention to the pitiable extra hole in her head, and much too modest ever to invite envy in either Miriam or her other sisters by boasting of the beauty of her own perfectly uninterrupted, perfectly smooth and complete right ear. (Indeed, when Miriam died, Dorothy, even though she knew better by then, even though she realized that most people’s ears did not enjoy the advantage of an extra flap of skin to prevent cold and germs and moisture from gaining access to the secret, most privy and concealed parts of her head, couldn’t help but at least a little believe that something of her dead sister’s illness might have been brought about by the vulnerability
two
open ears must have subjected her to.)

So it was a matter of some irritation to her during those times of the day and those seasons of the year when heavy traffic caused her to affix the bulky backup hearing aid in place, planting it and winding it about her ear like a stethoscope laid flat against a chest, but better safe than sorry. She did it, as she did almost everything else, uncomplainingly, her only objection reflexive—a knowledge of her smudged, ruined character; her heavy sense, that is, of her vanity, which Dorothy had at least privately permitted herself and privately enjoyed at twenty and thirty and forty and fifty and even, to some extent, into her sixties while Ted, olov hasholem, was still living, but which she fully understood to be not only extravagant and uncalled for but more than a little foolish, too, now that she was almost eighty.

Extravagant or not, foolish or not, she removed them, the good one and the bad one, too, once she was inside the movie theater, preferring the shadowy, muffled, blunted voices of the actors to the shrill, whistling treble of the hearing aids. Most of the dialogue was lost to her. What difference did it make? What could they be saying to each other that she hadn’t heard them say to each other a thousand times before? The handsome boy declared his love for the pretty girl. The pretty girl didn’t know whether to trust him or not. He’d fooled her before. She should trust him. She should settle down and have his kids. Life was too short. It went by like a dream. It’s what Ted always said. And now look at him. He was dead too many years.

And what troubled Mrs. Ted Bliss, what wounded and astonished when sleep eluded during all those endless nights when thoughts outpaced one another in her insomniac mind, was the fact that now, still alive, she was by so many years her dead husband’s senior.

He wouldn’t recognize her today. She had been beautiful even into her sixties. A dark, smooth-skinned woman with black hair and fine sweet features on a soft, wide armature of flesh, she had been a very parlor game of a creature, among her neighbors in Building Number One something of a conversation piece, someone, you’d have thought, who must have drunk from the fountain of youth. She had been introduced in the game room for years to guests and visitors from the other buildings that lined Biscayne Bay as an oddity, a sport of nature unscathed by time.

“Go on, guess how old she is,” more than one of her friends had challenged newcomers while Dorothy, her deep blush invisible to their pale examination, sat meekly by.

“Dorothy is fifty-nine,” people five and six years older than herself would hazard.

“Fifty-nine? You think?”

“I don’t know. Fifty-nine, sixty.”

Even the year Ted was dying.

“
Sixty-seven!
” they shouted, triumphant as people who knew the answer to vexing riddles.

Even after his cancer had been diagnosed Ted smiled benignly, Dorothy suffering these odd old thrust and parries in an almost luxurious calm, detached from the accomplishment of her graceful, almost invisible aging as if it had been the fruit of someone else’s labors. (And hadn’t it? Except for her long, daily soaks in her tub two and three times a day, she’d never lifted a finger.) Grinning, a cat with a canary in its belly, a reverie of something delicious on its chops.

“Is she? Is she, Ted? Can it be?”

Ted winked.

“Of course not,” Lehmann, whose own wife at sixty-seven was as homely as Dorothy was beautiful, said. “They’re in a witness protection program, the both of them.”

Several of the men at the table understood Lehmann’s bitterness—many shared it—and laughed. Even Dorothy smiled. “I came to play,” Lehmann said, “deal the cards already. Did I ask to see her driver’s license? I don’t
know
what they’re up to.”

“I’ll be sixty-two my next birthday,” Dorothy Bliss said, shaving years from her age. (It was the vanity again, a battle of the wicked prides. It was one thing, though finally a lesser thing, to look young for one’s age, quite another to be the age one looked young for.)

The truth was no one really knew, not Ted, not her sisters. Not her two younger brothers. Certainly not her surviving children. It was as if the time zones she crossed on her ship to America shed entire blocks of months rather than just hours as it forced its way west. Not even Dorothy was certain of her age. It was a new land, a younger country. The same immigration officials who anglicized the difficult Cyrillic names into their frequently arbitrary, occasionally whimsical record books could be bribed into fudging the age of a new arrival. That’s exactly what happened to Dorothy. In order for the daughter to get work under the new child labor laws, Dorothy’s mom had paid the man fifteen dollars to list her kid as two or three years older than her actual age. She always knew that her clock had been pushed forward, that Time owed her, as it were, and somewhere in her twenties, Dorothy called in a marker that, by the time it was cashed, had accumulated a certain interest. The mind does itself favors. She really
didn’t
know her true age, only that whatever it was was less than the sixteen that had appeared on her documents when she’d first come to this country.

Because she didn’t have a driver’s license to which Lehmann might have referred. Because she had never learned to drive. As though the same fifteen bucks her mother had offered and the official had taken so she might get her work permit had finessed not just the late childhood and early adolescence that were her due but the obligatory education, too.
Most
grown-up Americans’ streetish savvy. Paying by check, applying for charge cards, simply subscribing to the damn paper, for God’s sake. As though the eleven or twelve thousand dollars she brought in over the nine or ten years before she hooked up with Ted and that her mother’s initial fifteen-dollar cash investment had cost for that green card, had purchased not merely an exemption from ever having to play like a child when she was of an age to enjoy it but had been a down payment, too, on ultimate, long-term pampering privileges, making a housewife of her, a baleboosteh, lending some spoiled, complacent, and self-forgiving pinkish aura to her life and perceptions, a certain fastidious cast of mind toward herself and her duties. She shopped the specials, she snipped coupons out of the papers for detergents, for canned goods and coffee and liters of diet soft drinks, for paper products and bottles of salad dressing. She spent endless hours (three or four a day) in her kitchen, preparing food, doing the dishes till they sparkled, mopping the floor, scouring the sink, wiping down the stove; yet she had never been a very good cook, only a driven taskmistress, seldom varying her menus and never, not even when she entertained guests, a recipe, obsessive finally, so finicky about the world whenever she was alone in it that she was never (this preceded her deafness) entirely comfortable outside the door to her apartment (where she conceived of the slipcovers on her living room furniture, and perhaps even of the fitted terrycloth cover on the lid of the toilet seat in the bathrooms, as a necessary part of the furniture itself; for her the development of clear, heavy-duty plastic a technological breakthrough, a hinge event in science, up there with Kern cards, washable mah-jongg tiles, lifelong shmutsdread, a first impression she must have taken as a child in Russia, a sense of actual biological trayf, fear of the Gentile, some notion of caste deeper than a Hindu’s, a notion, finally, of
order),
something stubborn and stolid and profoundly resistant in her Slavic features, her adamant, dumb, and disapproving stance like that of a farm animal or a very picky eater.