Wasn’t it strange, Mrs. Bliss thought, her old age? She wasn’t thinking of her beauty. That had been gone years. It wasn’t frailty or the breakup of memory. She didn’t forget the names of her children or confuse a grandchild with an old pal in Russia, a fellow in the building with her dead husband. Her disabilities had nothing to do with the flow of blood in her head. How could she explain to anyone that her great regrets and disappointments had to do with the mistakes she had made? The sale of the Buick LeSabre, the failure to carry through on her determination to visit Alcibiades Chitral in his prison. How could she explain her fascination with Tommy Auveristas or all that unfinished business with Hector Camerando and the marker she failed to call in and which Camerando himself (on the increasingly rare occasions she saw him hanging about the Towers) had long since failed to mention to her?
He was going to charge her anyway.
Whatever he did, or whatever he failed to do for her, whatever advice he did or did not give her, she would be billed. Forget old times — he had, the son of a bitch — forget the money the momzer had already stolen or charmed out of her husband, his deliberately cooked books and wiseguy’s crooked real estate deals, let alone what he’d once tried to do to her in her husband’s place of business — oh, he’d done it, he’d done it all right; she hadn’t made that up, she wasn’t that far gone — a bill would be presented, payment on service, and, old times or no old times, it would be a stiff one and, forget they went back, all the stuff that had happened, that he knew her when or she knew him, and without a dime’s worth of discount, and that’s just when she saw his sign — WE DO NOT VALIDATE PARKING TICKETS! — and decided, All right, that’s it, this rotten Moishe Kapoyr is going to give me my money’s worth!
“Milt,” she said, “forgive me but I can’t help remarking, the last time I was here Holmer Toibb told me his patients had to be in perfect health before he’d consent to see them. He said I first had to see a doctor and get an evaluation. You don’t go by this rule?”
“Dorothy, Dorothy,” Junior said, an edge of disappointment with her in his voice, “didn’t I ask to see your Beau’s lines? Didn’t I offer you nail polish remover from my desk drawer?”
She held out her left hand.
“What?” Junior said.
“Go ahead,” said Mrs. Bliss.
As he removed the polish from Mrs. Bliss’s ring finger, Dorothy leaned back, shut her eyes, pretending to luxuriate in his ministrations.
“Looks good,” Junior said. “No transverse striations. You’re fit as a fiddle.”
“You can tell this by examining one finger? You don’t have to look at the others?”
“I extrapolate.”
“Oh,” Dorothy said, “you extrapolate.” She held out her right hand. “I’d like a second opinion.”
He brushed Cutex across her thumbnail.
This time Mrs. Bliss watched him critically, appraising his technique and hoping he got the impression that she saw something menial in what he was doing, a man his age — almost in his seventies my eye, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, he should live so long he sees seventy again — who instead of buffing old ladies’ fingernails ought to be retired with the other alter kockers.
Though if she embarrassed him he never let on. If anything, he seemed quite happy to tell her she’d passed her Beau’s lines test with flying colors, that she didn’t sport a single Beau’s line. As of today, he said, she was spotless, pure as the driven snow, clean as a whistle Beau’s line-wise. Despite the fact that she didn’t trust him as far as she could throw him, she was pleased to hear it.
“He asked what were my interests, Holmer Toibb,” she said. “He had me make a list. I forgot to bring it, so I recited it for him,” she said, and thought, it’s strange, you know? She thought, I didn’t forget to bring it. I brought it. I was sore at him. Sometimes, for a minute, I’m not always sure who’s dead, who’s alive, and here’s a lie I told years ago I repeat word for word practically.
“What are they?” Junior asked.
“My interests?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t remember,” she admitted dully. “Whatever they were they’re gone. I don’t have them anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” Junior said, and Mrs. Bliss suddenly felt a little better about Milt, or Milton, or Junior, or whoever he was. It wasn’t his sympathy. He was a crook and crooks didn’t feel sympathy. If they could they wouldn’t be crooks anymore. So if it wasn’t sympathy, what was it? What it was, she thought, was probably only regret. She’d failed to take him seriously. He’d warned her never to change. This was his considered therapeusisist’s opinion. It was on the meter. If she’d lost her interests she’d changed. His regret was she’d failed to live according to his secret of life.
“I’d have a chart, wouldn’t I?” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “I know he took notes. The interests I told would be in my records.” Actually, she’d forgotten why she’d made the appointment, her original reason for coming, but she was very excited.
And why not? Here she was, doing heart-to-heart with someone who’d known her when. When she lived in Chicago. When she was a beauty. When she still had a husband. When she was the mother of three living children. When. If she’d never trusted him, if he’d taken everyone in a dozen times over if he’d taken them in once, well, even that had to count for something. When. This strange man who said he believed in changelessness but who had himself changed, making himself over and over through his shifting avatars, his continuous changings and callings — butcher, realtor, black marketeer, farmer, recreational therapeusisist. (My God! she thought. Like Ted! Who’d been almost all of those things himself. Not a recreational therapeusisist of course, and not a realtor though he had once been a landlord. My God! she thought, my God!) A man with a single unchanging strand run through his being like character — the furious ad hoc course he pursued, opportunistic as a refugee fleeing for his life. She felt an odd tenderness for him then, for just a moment, come and gone like gooseflesh.
She remembered why she’d come and, though she knew the answer, asked him a question as devastating as it was pro forma, asking it disinterestedly as a good detective.
“Milt,” Mrs. Ted Bliss asked him, for it was as Mrs. Ted Bliss she spoke, not as Dorothy, not even as Mrs. Bliss, “did you kill Holmer Toibb?”
“What? Did I — What did you say, what did you say to me? What are you, crazy?”
“No, no,” Mrs. Ted Bliss said, “you don’t understand. I didn’t say ‘murdered.’ You wouldn’t murder anybody. I mean, what is it they say on TV? ‘Death by misadventure’? ‘Manslaughter’? Something in the second or third degree. Self-defense even.”
“Boy oh boy,” Yellin said, “do we have a lot to work through!”
“It’s all right,” she said. “I was only asking. I’m sure you had nothing to do with it, that you bought into the practice fair and square.”
He had set her mind at ease. He really had. Though she couldn’t have explained it, she had asked him the question out of duty to and respect for Ted, to clear not her husband’s name so much as his character, who only seconds before she had seen trailing amiably along in this fellow’s careless footsteps. She was completely satisfied by Junior’s answer, reassured as much by what by second nature he immediately realized he stood to gain by her mad question as by his outrage. Indeed, Mrs. Bliss was no longer sure there had even been a murder, that that Iris hadn’t made the whole thing up on the spur of the moment, told her the bobbe mysehs just to get Dorothy to come in.