“Which one is she?” Tommy whispered.
“Is who?”
“The dope who thought she made only about a thousand chickens.”
“I don’t want to embarrass her.”
“No,” he said, “go on. I won’t tell a soul. You have my word of honor.”
“Maybe they ate out more than we did,” Mrs. Bliss said, “maybe she hasn’t been cooking as long.”
“Still…” Tommy Auveristas said. “You can tell me. Come on.”
“Well,” Mrs. Ted Bliss, who hadn’t laughed so hard in years, said slyly, “if you promise not to tell.” Auveristas crossed his heart. Mrs. Bliss took a moment to evaluate this pledge, shrugged, and indicated he lean toward her. “It’s that one,” she said softly, “Arlene Brodky.”
“Arlene Brodky?”
“Shh,” Mrs. Bliss warned, a finger to her lips.
The gesture made her feel positively girlish. It was as if forty-odd years had poured out of her life and she was back in Chicago again, in the dress shop, gossiping with the real salesgirls about the customers, their loony employer, passing confidences among themselves like notes between schoolmates. Frivolous, silly, almost young.
She had come to see the penthouse. She couldn’t have articulated it for you, but it was simply that interest in artifact, some instinctive baleboosteh tropism in Mrs. Ted Bliss that drew her to all the tamed arrangements of human domesticities. She had never expected to enjoy herself.
Maybe it was the end of her mourning. Ted had been dead more than three years. She’d still been in her forties when Marvin died, and she’d never stopped mourning him. Perhaps thirty years of grief was enough. Maybe thirty years stamped its quitclaim on even the obligated life, and permitted you to burn the mortgage papers. Was she being disloyal? He’d be forty-six, Marvin. Had she been a better mother than a wife? She hoped she had loved everyone the same, the living and the dead, her children, her husband, her parents whom God himself had compelled her to honor and, by extension, her sisters and brothers, her relations and friends, the thirty years dredging up from the bottom of her particular sea all the sunken, heavy deadweight of her overwhelmed, overburdened heart.
Still, it was one thing not to keep kosher (or not strictly kosher), and another entirely to have caught herself actually flirting. She could have bitten her tongue.
Dorothy was not, of course, a particularly modern woman. She had been alive at the time others of her sex had petitioned the franchise from dubious, reluctant males and, though she’d been too young to rally for this or any other cause, the truth was she’d have been content to leave it to others — to other women as well as to other men — to pick the federal government, or even vote on the local, parochial issues of daily life. She had never, for example, attended a P.T.A. meeting when her children were young or, for that matter, spoken up at any of the frequent Towers Condominium Owners Association meetings. On the other hand, neither did she possess any of the vast scorn reserves some women called upon to heap calumny on those of their sisters they perceived as, well, too openly pushy about their rights.
There was something still essentially pink in Mrs. Bliss’s soul, some almost vestigial principle in the seventyish old woman, not of childhood particularly, or even of girlhood, so much as of femininity itself, something so obscurely yet solidly distaff in her nature that she was quite suddenly overcome by the ancient etiquette she thought females owed males, something almost like courtship, or the need to nurture, shlepping, no matter how silly she knew it might sound — to Auveristas as well as to herself — the old proprieties of a forced, wide-eyed attention to a man’s interests and hobbies from right out of the old beauty-parlor magazines.
Right there, in his penthouse, within earshot of anyone who cared to overhear, she said, “Your home is very beautiful. May I be so bold as to ask what you gave for it? What line of work are you in?”
“Didn’t Señor Chitral mention to you?” Tommy Auveristas said evenly. “I’m an importer.”
It wasn’t the implied meaning of his words, nor his distance, nor even the flattened cruelty of his delivery that caused the woman to flinch. Mrs. Bliss had never been struck. Despite her fear of Mrs. Dubow from her days in the dress shop, though she knew the old dressmaker was mad and perfectly capable of violence; the alimony she paid her husband had been awarded because of physical harm — she couldn’t remember what — she’d inflicted, and her memories of being chased about the shop had always been bordered in Dorothy’s mind by a kind of comedy. She’d experienced Mrs. Dubow’s rage then, and remembered it now, as having taken place in a sort of silent movie, something slapstick and frantically jumpy and Keystone Kops about all that futile energy. So all it could have been, all that had lunged out at her so unexpectedly to startle her was hearing Alcibiades Chitral’s name, and hearing it moreover not from the mouth of any of her retired, Jewish, star-struck friends but straight out of the suddenly cool, grim lips of her South American host. It was the way the two DEA agents had spoken to her in the garage, in that same controlled, despising banter of an enemy. She had sensed from the beginning of the evening that she was somehow the point of the open house, even its guest of honor (as far as she knew it was the first time any Towers Jew had set foot in a penthouse), and in light of all the attention she’d received from the moment she entered she’d felt as she sometimes did when she was feeding her family a meal she’d prepared. Tommy Auveristas had practically exclaimed her name the minute he saw her. He’d introduced her around, excused himself if he had to leave. He had kissed her hand and paid her compliments and brought her food. He was all ears as she prattled on about the degree of kosher she kept, listened as she counted her chickens.
He did not strike her as a shy or reticent man. She was an old woman. He could have easily answered her question, a question she knew to be rude but whose rudeness he’d have written off not so much to her age and proprietary seniority as to the feeling of intimacy that had been struck up between them during all the back-and-forth of their easy exchange. He could have told her the truth. What would it hurt him? He had nothing to lose. If anything the opposite. The higher the price the more she’d have been impressed. Up and down the Towers she’d have gone, spreading the word about the big shot in Building One.
Who did Mrs. Bliss think she was kidding? Offended? No offense intended. No, and none taken. Of that she was positive. It was her second question that had set him off, the one about what line of work he was in, if you please.
She had, she saw, overestimated her celebrity. It may have given the gang a thrill and she certainly, as she’d once heard her son-in-law say about serving on the jury during the trial of an important rock star, that he’d “dined out on it for months,” a remark Mrs. Bliss thought so witty and catchy that she found herself repeating it each time anyone offered her a glass of tea or a slice of coffee cake.
Still, though she knew he must have had a reason for spending all that time with her (almost as if it were Auveristas who’d been doing the flirting), all that sitting beside her on the sofa, never once inviting anyone to join them but instead rather pointedly continuing their conversation every time someone sidled up to the couch, even if they were holding a plate of food, or a hot cup of coffee, she now understood that he wasn’t pulling on her celebrity — he was indifferent to the fact that her picture had been in the paper, or that people wanted to interview her, or that her testimony had been heard on TV.