“Detectives come in? What do they want? What do they do there?”
“Oh, they just nose around. And we cooperate. Well, as much as we can. You understand. But not to worry. The therapeusisist/ client relationship is sacred.
“I really think you should make an appointment for a checkup,” the woman said ominously.
Mrs. Bliss’s first thought when she hung up was to get in touch with Manny. He was the one who’d given her Toibb’s name in the first place. The difficulty was she was reluctant to call him. They still saw each other of course. In a community as tight-knit as the Towers they could hardly have avoided running into each other, but the fact was Manny had taken up with other widows by now. With widowers, too. With anyone, really, to whom he could play Dutch uncle, all that wide-eyed, teeming lot of poor, tempest-tossed masses and tired, yearning, wretched refuse.
Really, Dorothy thought, in a kind of way it was as if she’d passed through a sort of second immigrant phase and, sloughing Manny from the building, taken out final papers. In unconsciously turning to Toibb, for example, deciding to go first class with her troubles, take them professional.
Of course she missed Manny. And when she saw him these days, and the helpless, troubled people who looked to him for support, it was quite as if she had dropped into an old neighborhood where she’d once lived. She often longed to tell him how she was doing, and to thank him. He had helped her, he really had, and she could never repay him, but now, in her new, unfocused, listless dispensation, Mrs. Ted Bliss had gone offshore so to speak, moved beyond the three-mile limit of Manny’s weak jurisdictionals. Which isn’t to say she didn’t occasionally feel flashes of a vestigial jealously, short twinges of a peculiar envy, not, she hoped, knew, because others now basked in the attention of the real estate lawyer who, with the death of his wife, had been thrust into an abrupt, sudden eligibility.
Rosie had passed away two years before from a massive coronary explosion.
Mrs. Bliss had gone to the funeral services and, afterward, to offer her condolences to the new widower. Manny’s condominium wasn’t large enough to accommodate so massive a shivah and they’d had to move it downstairs into the game room. Dorothy, no one, had ever seen anything like it. Not to take anything away from Rosie (though she was a decent, patient woman, everyone knew who the real star of the family was), but the tribute was to Manny. But, Rosie, Manny, those seven days of shivah would come to represent the benchmark of mourning in the Towers, possibly in all Miami Beach. Mrs. Bliss had approached the grieving widower, still a wide, relatively youthful and handsome man — he couldn’t have been more than a few years younger than Dorothy — oddly even more virile and distinguished-looking beneath his three- or four-day stubble like a loose gray veil of grief. “Oh, Manny,” Dorothy had said, “I’m so sorry. Listen,” she’d said, “if there’s anything I can do, anything.”
“I know, Dorothy. Thank you,” he said. And added, “You know what this means? It’s taught me a lesson. You’re up, you’re down. Life’s like a wheel of fortune. See, see how the tables have turned?”
Though they hadn’t, not really. Manny was still like some Johnny-on-the-spot with the men and women. If anything, he volunteered even more of his time now Rosie was dead than when she was alive. He’d even been singled out by a rabbi as one of the “just men,” one of those holy three dozen on earth who helped keep the good order of life. He was still, that is, on call, but these days Mrs. Ted Bliss had passed out of the range of his influence and was not at all envious of those people who were the beneficiaries of Manny’s new second wind, the brighter, even warmer glow of his radiating goodwill, so much as, well, a little sorry for them. They had more sharply defined needs than she, a different order of need — acute, short range, easily dealt with, like heat exhaustion, say. All they needed was to be pulled into the shade, given water, have cool, wet cloths applied to their temples and brows.
Mrs. Ted Bliss, on the other hand, had passed over into a new state of being, existed on a plane different from grief, out of reach of cumulate time’s ministering comforts and platitudes. Why, she, she had lost not only husband and family and self and appetite (that savored, one-shot pork chop for which she would never again feel a yen) but all urge and interest. The baleboosteh part of herself complete, her house at last in order, and order at last seen for what it finally was: the rule of regularity, habit ground down to the trim, plain, ugly shipshape of the deadened dinky, like all that long, perpetually cared for rectangularity in the Chicago boneyard. Urge and yen and craving subsided, absent from her life. Life absent from her life. So that all she could muster for this season’s batch and crop of bereft, forlorn survivors was a pinch of indignation, as if they were suckers of heartbreak, rubes and rookies who hadn’t seen nothing yet.
Oy, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Oy and oy. Oy, oy, a thousand times oy!
How come then, she thought, that such acceptance and coming to terms was so disquieting, so unsettling when everything the complete baleboosteh could hope for was to have all her decks cleared, squared away, every last hospital corner pulled taut and smooth, as if what life had been all about was preparation for some final white-glove inspection? What, she didn’t think in terms of a life in the barracks? But, surely, that’s what so much of hers had been all about. And now it was as if she’d been presented with a statement, some red-tape thing, complicated, governmental, bureaucratic, vaguely whiplashed through interagency (Part A’s uncertain relationship with Part B), like Ted’s Medicare bills almost a year after he died — THIS IS NOT A BILL, THIS IS NOT A BILL, THIS IS NOT A BILL — until one day one arrived inexplicably stamped Paid in Full.
So that if they had pressed her she could almost have told them, “Girls, they tell you time heals all things? Time heals nothing. What, you think you’re unhappy now? You think because your husband is gone this is the worst, the storm that breaks the camel’s back, water in the basement and climbing the stairs, that it’s up over the lip of the threshold and coming in under the door in the hall, that it’s destroyed the linoleum and already lapping the wall-to-wall, licking high up the legs of the dining room chairs, the mahogany sideboard and credenza, that it’s covered the tiles, and slipping down the side of the tub like dirty bathwater, is above the box spring and even with the mattress, is inside the chest of drawers with your things like stockings and underwear left to soak overnight in the bathroom basin.
“Or that the final slap in the face is when the insurance claim comes back marked ‘Sorry, not covered, act of God’?
“You think?
“You think so?
“Or from all that pile-on and pile-on of tsuris, the kids’ bad grades and the death of friends, your own decline, the failure of beauty, of memory, incontinence, shortness of breath, the inability not just to climb steps but to cross the room without pain?
“And that that’s the worst that can happen, one by one, or served up like so many courses at a dinner? Or that that is?
“You think, you think so? Well, all I can say is wait till next year! Because didn’t I already tell you you ain’t seen nothing yet? No, no, no, girls, there’s no such thing as a rock bottom to bottom!”
Though to tell the truth, she wouldn’t have told them a word. They couldn’t have dragged it out of her.
Meanwhile, there was still something on Mrs. Ted Bliss’s plate. Something left over that, though she knew, or thought she knew, to leave well enough alone, she continued to worry like a loose tooth.