“Thank you for asking,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.
They turned the corner.
“Where is it?” she said. “I don’t see it.”
“We’re there,” he said, and opened the door on the passenger side of his Fleetwood Cadillac.
Mrs. Bliss was as stunned by its not being their old car as she had been by her conviction it would. She couldn’t catch her breath but she was still without pain.
“Let me turn this on,” Camerando said, and leaned across Mrs. Bliss and put the key in the ignition. Almost instantly Mrs. Bliss felt sheets of cold air. It was like standing at the frontier of a sudden cold front.
“Would you like to see a doctor? Let me take you to your doctor.”
“That’s all right,” she said.
“No, really. You mustn’t let things slide. It’s better if you catch them early. No,” said Camerando, “there’s nothing to cry about. What’s there to cry about? You mustn’t be frightened. It’s nothing. I’m certain it isn’t anything. You waited for the bus in all that heat. That’s enough to knock the stuffing out of anyone.”
“You shut up,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “You just shut up.”
“Hey,” Camerando said.
“Shut up,” she said. “Don’t talk.”
Camerando stared at her, looked for a moment as if he would say something else, and then shrugged and moved his oversized automobile into play in the traffic.
Mrs. Bliss giggled. Then, exactly as if giggling were the rudest of public displays, removed a handkerchief from her white plastic handbag and covered first one and then the other corner of her mouth with it, wiping her incipient laughter into her handkerchief like a sort of phlegm. She returned the handkerchief to her pocketbook, clicking it shut as though snapping her composure back into place.
“Do you happen to know,” Mrs. Bliss said, “a gentleman from Building One by the name of Manny?”
The bitch is heat struck, Hector Camerando thought. Her brains are sunburned.
“Manny?” he said. “Manny? Building One? No, I don’t think so.”
“A big man? Probably in his late sixties, though he looks younger?”
“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.