“So that’s when it happens. People live longer and longer, you know. The mean average dead man today is twenty or thirty years older than when Hector was a pup. So there’s this like sunshine boom now like once upon a time there was a gold rush. And then they put in the toll roads and interstates, and discovered stucco and air-conditioning, and invented beaches and tall buildings to put them up on. Tall, taller, tallest. And every year a new amenity. Once it was enough to have these huge game rooms where they’d bring in a songstress with an accordian and an old tummler from the Catskills on a Saturday night. Or have some circuit-riding rabbi who came around on Shabbes with a Torah, a bema, and a portable ark. Or they put TV monitors in the lobby you think you’re in a newsroom. Restaurants they had, Chinese take-out, cineplex, Banana Republic.
“That’s what they already got. You know what’s on the drawing boards? Condos like resort hotels—horseback, snorkeling, golf. One place a little north of here has its own trails. Next year they’re opening a building with its own community yacht!
“Paradise is a growth industry, the good life is. That leaves only the poor who’ll have to make do with global warming. The rest are flocking to Florida in droves, Southeastward ho!
“The only drawback, Nathan, is that the neighborhood’s changing. Dorothy will tell you. It’s going down steep as a thrill ride. Every year it becomes harder and harder to put a minyan together. I’m an old-timer, I don’t look so much to the future. What does it mean to me? I got enough to last me. And a little for a modest burial and maybe a few bucks left over for my own legatees and if the future is the wave of the future, so be it, I say. Others may have the energy for it. I don’t.
“You know what the Towers have become, Nathan? An ittybitty American metaphor. What, I’m making you blush? Relax, it’s no big deal. All I mean is it’s waves of immigration. All I mean is it’s peoples after peoples making a clearing in the world and then, soon as they see smoke from the other guy’s fire, they do a deal, they make an arrangement. The Jews are a very ancient race. If they didn’t always make the clearing they at least staked a claim and moved in. Sure, and then came the Spaniards. Just like the old days. Conquistadors with their macho dope rings and plunder. Aunt Dorothy could tell you stories would curl the hairs in your ears. You lived side-by-side, didn’t you, Aunt Dorothy? Who moved out on who is a nice question, but the bottom line is those waves of immigrants. Investment ops. Jews and South Americans falling all over each other. Until with a whoosh and a bim bam boom all of a sudden it’s the march of time and the South Americans are selling out or renting to some of the lesser Latinos. And even Jews beginning to sublet to WASPs down from up in the north country or a few worn-out old farmers in out of Iowa and the rest of the Midwest. Even, if you want to know, to a couple of handfuls of deserving poor who might actually qualify for food stamps if only those proud, worn-out old farmers and subsistence-level golden agers climbed down from their high horse long enough to register with the authorities.
“So that’s the story, Counselor. That’s why I won’t waste your time by pretending to consider your $170,000 or $161,500 or even your $148,792.50 price for Uncle’s condominium. Now, if you’d come to me in the flush old days when the Towers were regarded as one of your hot, cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, pushed envelope, growth-industry properties, it might have been a different story altogether. I mean I still wouldn’t have given you your $148,792.50 asking price of course, but I don’t think I would have felt myself so personally insulted.
“Here’s what I will do. If you get it repainted and bring the cosmetics up to code we’ll split the difference—loan me the calculator, Dorothy—and I’ll make you an offer of…$74,396.25.”
“That’s very funny,” Nathan Apple said.
He’s stalling for time, Dorothy thought. He sees his work’s cut out for him and he’s stalling for time. He’s figuring what can he do with a guy like this. Personally, she almost had goose bumps. She hadn’t felt so important since the evening, years ago, when she’d gone to Tommy Auveristas’s open house and he’d sat next to her on one of the living room’s three sofas. She couldn’t imagine what the nephew would say, but he’d have to go some just to earn a draw. It was wicked, really, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Men. Really, she thought, the lengths to which they went to flash their plumage in front of other males. It was flattering to the ladies, but sometimes she wondered if it was intended for their benefit, if they’d ever bother to get themselves up in their colors if there were only females around to catch their act. Otherwise, well, otherwise they might just pick out the one who’d caught their eye, knock her to the ground, and take her. Perhaps the reason for courtship at all was the same reason soldiers lined up in ranks for parades. Maybe all that display was the only way they knew to civilize themselves.
Well, look at Dorothy Bliss, will you, thought Dorothy Bliss. Was this Alcibiades Chitral’s pigeon, damned for her stupor and incuriosity?
Certainly she’d been entertained by Junior Yellin’s aggressive arguments. Certainly she’d anticipated that Nathan would counterattack. But she’d stopped just in time. (Because if there was no fool like an old fool, what sort of old fool would an eighty-year-old woman make?) Flattered, but short of taking it personally, a privileged witness to their swagger and strut. While quite abruptly reminded of Ted’s ways with his customers: charming them into one cut rather than another, selling them three pounds rather than two, and with no more plumage on him than the dried blood across his apron and, when Junior was not in the shop, the only witness to his sweet talk Dorothy herself for whom he passed in parade.
The nephew was staring straight into Junior Yellin’s eyes.
“Done,” he said sweetly. “If you can talk Aunt Dorothy into selling me hers for fifty-five thousand.”
“What about it, Dot?” Junior said. “You willing to trade up? There’s bedrooms and toilets galore. I could move in with you. We’ll split the nineteen-some-odd grand right down the middle. That would put us in Manny’s apartment—just a second—for $9,698.12. I won’t pressure you, I leave it entirely in your hands. I mean, I see the guy’s game. He buys the place, turns around and sells it on the open market. He could clean up, but what the hell, the laborer is worth his hire, and the two of us got a luxury apartment we could get lost in. Come on, kid, what do you say?”
“I say,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “I’m a married woman. I say Ted, olov hasholem, would turn over in his grave.”
Now she was eighty-two, the mysterious, discrepant matter of her age seemed to have resolved itself. Without proof, without seeming even to have been aware of how or why, she at last knew how old she was. Not in round, approximate figures but exact sums. It was as if all the peculiar spring-forward, fall-back, daylight savings and central standards and fluky international time lines and zones of her personal history had been fixed, repaired, tuned to some Greenwich Mean of the ticking world. She had a birthday now, and though she had not yet officially observed it (and had no plans to), it was as if all the square feet and exact specs of the properties and registered deeds of her existence had at last been revealed to her.
This was, of course, essentially useless, but like other essentially useless things, an old person who earns a bachelor’s degree in her last years, say, she received a genuine sense of accomplishment and pleasure from it. She finally knew, or if she didn’t actually know then at least had finally fixed upon the age she should be.
She did nothing about it. She didn’t rectify her social security records or notify Medicare. Nevertheless, she could now fit numbers to her life and this was somehow as liberating as the emerging knowledge of who she was and of what she had been.
She was eighty-two. She was a very old woman. Junior Yellin, whose very name suggested that she was his senior, was a very old man. Mrs. Bliss knew that if she had taken Yellin up on his offer to move into Manny Tressler’s apartment, Ted would not have turned over in his grave. He wouldn’t have so much as stirred. Ted had been fond of Manny and
, despite all the awful stuff Junior had pulled on him, had always been rather more well-disposed toward him than otherwise. Ted had been dead almost fifteen years. The world had changed, attitudes had. Scandal had been all but wiped out in her lifetime, even, had he lived a little longer, in Ted’s. Since the sixties there had been a general, accelerating erosion of the shameful. It wasn’t that goodness was on the rise but that a general sense of evil—Think, Mrs. Ted Bliss thought, of the terror Mrs. Dubow, the first wife in Illinois forced to pay the husband alimony, evoked; that was a shocker that brought the house down—was being absorbed into the atmosphere. She saw it on the morning programs, she heard it on the call-ins, she read about it not only in the tabloids at the checkout in the supermarket but in the legitimate papers, too.
Who knew what went on behind closed doors, of course, but in her and Ted’s day married people had been generally loyal to each other. Except for Junior Yellin and his bimbos, Mrs. Bliss didn’t think she could name a man who ran around on his wife. Today it was a different story. In just her own family, hadn’t both Jerry, Irving’s boy, and Louis, Golda’s, died of AIDS? (And Louis had been married!) And hadn’t she recently heard that Betsy, a distant cousin she’d known only to say hello to who’d tested HIV positive, had come down with full-blown AIDS? (And why had her grandson Barry never married? What was what in that department?) And what was going on with the shaineh maidel, Judith, Maxine and George’s exquisite daughter, a girl in her mid-thirties if she was a day, who had probably been with at least a dozen men (and lived with three of them), so beautiful she could have afforded to remain a virgin forever but who instead—her grandmother should bite her tongue—chose to think with her panties the way some men had their brains in their pants? Or, while we’re on the subject of disgrace, was Frank and May’s Donny, the brainy one, a target of a grand jury investigation or not? He hadn’t flown in from Europe that time when Mrs. Bliss had gone to Providence for the seder. The fact was that Dorothy hadn’t heard from him in years, neither through a letter or a phone call (who used to call her with regularity), and whenever she had a chance to ask Frank about him, her son was uneasy, or put her off with a vague answer, or changed the subject. (Were they tapping her phones? Was that why Donny didn’t get in touch anymore? It wasn’t so far-fetched. She had a sort of record with federal people. Her Camerando connection. As far as she knew the government still held Ted’s Buick LeSabre under impoundment.)
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 ex
ception 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?”
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