“Well, that’s a good idea,” he said. “I’ll write a check. But these are for you,” he said. “To make up for my being so late.”
She didn’t know what to say. Of course she had to accept them. If for nothing else then for going to the trouble. What florist was open this time of night? Maybe it was true what people said about the South Americans, not that they had money to burn but that they put it on their backs — the men’s gorgeous bespoke suits, the fantastic glitter of their wives’ gowns and dresses, the fabulous shoes with their sky-high heels they bought at a hundred dollars an inch, their jewelry and diamond watches that any person in their right mind would keep in a locked-up safe-deposit box and not wear on their wrist where a strap could break or a clasp come undone, or any bag boy in a supermarket or stranger on the street could knock you down and hit you over the head for.
So it was not with an entirely undiluted gratitude that Dorothy accepted his flowers but with a certain scorn, too. Rousting emergency twenty-four-hour-a-day florists to open the store and paying a premium let alone just ordinary retail, never mind wholesale. Though it was sweet of him. Very thoughtful. Unless, of course, he was just buttering her up to get a price on the car.
“I know I called you,” Dorothy said, “but to tell the truth I’m not sure I’m ready to sell.”
“You’ve changed your mind, señora,” said Alcibiades Chitral and then, startling Mrs. Bliss, abruptly rose and moved toward the door.
“Who said I changed my mind?” she said. “Did I say I changed my mind? I haven’t made it up, I meant.”
Alcibiades smiled. He was a good-looking man, tall, stout, ruddy complected, with bushy black eyebrows and white wavy hair. He looked like Cesar Romero; Dorothy Bliss felt nothing about this observation. Her heart didn’t stumble, no nostalgic sigh escaped her. She did not feel foolish. If anything, saddened. In this place, in all the places in the world really, there was something faintly humorous about a recent widow. They consoled and consoled you, distracted you with their calls and their company from morning till night (until, in fact, at least in those first few days of your grief, all you needed for sleep to come over you was to put your head on a pillow), with their hampers of food to feed an army, and she wasn’t saying right away, or next month, she wasn’t even saying next year; she wasn’t saying any particular time, but sooner or later, married friends saw your single condition and pronounced you eligible. Have your hair done, get some new clothes, what are you waiting for, time marches on. Because sooner or later it struck people funny. Like you lived in a joke, something comic in the deprived, resigned life. No matter your age, no matter your children were grown, that they had children. Something funny about the life force. Because God put you here to be entertained, to make the most of whatever time, however little it was, you had left. And pushed men on you, old farts with one foot in the grave. To make accommodation, to come to terms and spin your heart on its heels like a girl’s. They’d change your life, have you cute, almost like you’d get a makeover in Burdines. They didn’t care if you didn’t get married. You didn’t have to marry, he could move in with you, you could move in with him. Marriage was too much trouble. Who needed the aggravation? There were wills to think about, prenuptial agreements. Like living in the old country, dowry, like America had never happened. Or starting all over again.
So if Dorothy was a little sad it wasn’t because she found this stranger attractive so much as that, as a widow, she felt like a figure of fun in his eyes. The gallantry, the expensive flowers, his predatory smile when she balked as he got up to leave.
“So what would you give?” she said, determined not to dicker.
He wanted to be fair, he said. He said he’d placed a few calls, taken the trouble to find out its blue book value. “That’s the price a dealer will pay for your used car.”
She knew what a blue book was. Ted, olov hasholem, had had one himself.
“Of course,” Alcibiades said, “I don’t know what extras came with your car, but air-conditioning, electric door locks and windows, if you have those it could be worth a little more. Even a radio, FM, AM. And if it’s clean.”
The baleboosteh in her looked offended. “Spic and span,” she said evenly.
Alcibiades, solemn, considered. “Tell you what,” he said seriously. “Let’s take it for a spin.”
She was as stunned as if the Venezuelan had asked her out on a date. Yet in the end she agreed to go with him. She would need a sweater, he said, a wrap. He would wait, he said, while she got it.
The car keys were in a drawer in the nightstand by their bed. Oddly enough, they were right on top of the blue book, and Mrs. Bliss, out of breath and feeling a pressure in her chest, opened it and looked up the value of the car. They’d had it over two years. Ted never kept a car more than three years. If he’d lived he’d be looking for a new one soon.
Downstairs, in the underground garage, she didn’t even have to tell him where it was parked. It was the first time she’d seen it in months and she began to cry. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“No, no, señora,” Alcibiades said, “please. I understand very well.”
“You’ll have to drive,” Mrs. Bliss said. “I never learned.”
She handed him the keys and he opened the door on the passenger side. He held it while she got in and closed the door after her. But Mrs. Bliss was on guard against his charm now. She knew the blue book value.
Then something happened that made her want to get this all over with. Before Chitral had even had time to come around to the driver’s side and unlock the door Dorothy was overcome with a feeling so powerful she gasped in astonishment and turned in her seat and looked in the back to see if her husband were sitting there. She was thrown into confusion. It was Ted’s scent, the haunted pheromones of cigarettes and sweat and loss, his over-two-year ownership collected, concentrated in the locked, unused automobile. It was the smell of his clothes and habits; it was the lingering odor of his radiation treatments, of road maps and Shell gasoline. It was the smell of presence and love.
They drove to Coconut Grove; they drove to Miami. She went past places and buildings she had never seen before. She didn’t see them now. It was a hot night and the air-conditioning was on. She asked Chitral to turn it off and, hoping to exorcize Ted’s incense, pressed the buttons to open all the windows.
She knew the blue book value. She would take whatever he offered. When he drove into the garage and went unerringly to Ted’s space he shut off the engine and turned to her.
“It drives like a top,” he said, and offered her five thousand dollars more than the car was worth.
“But that’s more—” Mrs. Ted Bliss said.
“Oh,” said Alcibiades Chitral, “I’m not so much interested in the car as in the parking space.”
TWO
Excepting the formalities — the transfer of title when his check cleared, surrendering the keys — that was about the last time Alcibiades Chitral had anything to say to Mrs. Ted Bliss. The whirlwind courtship was over. That was just business, Dorothy explained to more than one of her inquisitive, curious friends in the Towers when they saw the fresh flowers — still fresh after more than a week, as though whatever upscale, emergency florist Alcibiades had had perforce to go to to purchase flowers at that time of night and charge what had to have been those kind of prices, would have had to provide not only the convenience of his after-hours availability but, too, something special in the nature of the blooms themselves, a mystery ingredient that imbued them with some almost Edenic longevity and extended scent — some of which Mrs. Ted had transferred from the cut crystal vase into which she’d originally put them and now redistributed in three equal parts into two other vessels.