But what astonished him, what he couldn’t get past, were their disparate worldviews. By golly, thought Camerando, I am a dashing macho gentleman spirit sport. I am. Next to her I am! I do, too, have a code of honor. I do. Next to her I do!
He knew her type all right. She wasn’t human, she was a cliché quivering in the corner. Of course she was a pillar of love. She was a pillar of love capable of any greed, nastiness, bad manners, gossip, or folly. A patriot only to consanguinity, this cowering special pleader of blood who traded on her revenant, immemorial widowship and mommyhood.
Had she been putting on an act, then? What were all those tears? What had that gasping and shortness of breath been all about, the staggering stutter step when she walked toward his car, or struck her heatstroke poses?
And the odd thing, the odd thing was he liked the woman. She reminded him of his mother. That’s why he felt free to poke about the holes in her character.
While she, in her turn, had poked about his. All her damn questions.
All right, Camerando thought, I’ll turn myself in.
“Do you know, Mrs. Ted, what I do?”
She didn’t. Again, she was without interest and could barely manage to muster the energy to look at him.
“I’m with the jai alai interests,” he said.
He didn’t look at her and couldn’t tell whether she was watching him or even, for that matter, if she’d heard him or, if she had, taken his meaning. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I’m a major jai alai kingpin. From little Rhode Island to South Florida important Basque athletes sit by their phones waiting for my calls. Ditto the greyhounds, so to speak. Ditto almost the little fucking mechanical rabbit.
“What, you don’t believe me? Lady, I could give you tips, make you big winners. Spread your bets around, lay them off wisely, you don’t get impatient or too greedy, I could fix it up pretty good with your life. I could put you in a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath, full kitchen, living/dining room area with the convertible screened-in/glassed-in California rooms and a view of Biscayne Bay to knock your eyes out. And this is just starters, openers. I see you in penthouses. I see you in the great gorgeous restricted digs of West Palm. I can do this. Truly. No fooling. What do you say?”
“Sure,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “why not?”
FIVE
She took him at his word. She bet sparingly, did not grow impatient or, at least in a conventional sense, greedy, and two years later was still in the same condo.
She was very proud of this. It became a sort of referent of her character, a means by which she took her moral temperature. Mrs. Bliss knew her stuff. The lessons of those caper crooks in movies was not lost on her, those essentially victimless-crime villains enjoined to hold their horses, to wait out the statute of limitations before they cashed in on their shady bonanzas. Always, in these shows, one or another of the partners couldn’t hold out, snapped, failed the rest, and drew down destruction on their mutual enterprise. And, since she had no other partners, Mrs. Bliss felt all the better about her self-control.
If she didn’t feel entirely honorable she had only her embarrassment to blame, her modesty; even, in a way, another aspect of what wasn’t even personality anymore so much as a matter of some long-standing tidiness of spirit. It would, after all, have required her actually to call Hector Camerando to ask him to give her the winner of a particular match, a specific race, and she could no more have abused this privilege than she could have asked her husband for extra money to run the household. Not that either of them would have refused. It was her need not to appear needy, a saving of face, that held her bets down. Indeed, if she hadn’t infrequently run into Hector Camerando — he hadn’t moved, he still lived in the Towers; Louise Munez’s information was either faulty or he’d changed his mind — she might never have placed a bet at all. Yet always on the rare occasions he saw her he chastised her for not asking for his tips. That he hadn’t forgotten his offer made him, well, heroic to Dorothy and, on these occasions, she almost always felt obliged to place a bet or, rather, allowed him to place one for her. The first time this happened she hadn’t even known she’d won until he came to her door to hand her her winnings. He gave her four hundred dollars.
“So much? Why so much?”
“It was a lock. A dead-solid certainty. The dog went off at twenty to one. I put down twenty dollars for you.”
Surprisingly, her first reaction was one of anger, her second of shame, because although she said nothing to indicate her disappointment that if it was such a certainty he could easily have put down more than twenty dollars, she knew he’d seen the momentary blister of rage on her face. “Wait,” she said. Then, to cover her confusion, she excused herself and went off to get her purse. When she returned Camerando thought she had been looking for a place to put the money; instead she began to fumble with the bills in her wallet. She wasn’t wearing her glasses and had to hold them up close to her face. “Here,” Mrs. Bliss said, and handed Camerando a ten, a five, and five singles.
“What’s this?” Hector said.
“The twenty dollars you put down for me.”
She knew they weren’t quits, but it was the best she could think to do at the time.
Afterward, she tried to avoid him. She really did. And, once, just as she was leaving the apartment of a Towers friend she had been visiting and she spotted him step out of an elevator and walk down the corridor toward her, she quickly reversed fields and turned back to reenter the apartment she had left just seconds before. She had moved with such agility — this would have been when she was in her early seventies — that she quite startled her friend who was still in the process of shutting the door. “Oh,” Dorothy said, “did I leave my purse here? I think I left my purse here.”
“Dorothy,” said her friend, “what’s wrong, sweetheart? You’re carrying your purse. It’s right there on your arm.”
“Is it? Oh, my,” she explained, “it’s been like that all day. I’m running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”
“Maybe you should say something to Robins.”
“Robins?” said Mrs. Bliss. “No, it’s nothing. You don’t see a doctor because once in a while you’re absentminded.”
When she thought it was safe, she bade her friend goodbye a second time and stepped out again into the hallway. She could feel the woman watching her and turned back to look. Her friend smiled broadly and made an exaggerated gesture in the direction of the elevator as if to assure Dorothy she was headed in the right direction.
Is that how they thought of her? Like she was an idiot? She’d give them idiot. She bet she could spot most of them the names of ten people who lived in the Towers and come up with more of their buildings, floors, and apartment numbers than anyone. She could have been the damn postman here!
It occurred, of course, that she could have given that oysvorf, her friend so-called, something to think about. All she had to do was explain Camerando and why she was trying to avoid him.