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.”