“It ain’t all bad,” Mrs. Bliss said. “I got outside interests.”
“That’s good, Ma. That’s swell.”
Mrs. Bliss grinned.
“What?”
She smiled broadly, almost laughed.
“Ma?” Ellen said. “Ma?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Ellen!”
“Tell me,” Ellen said, “I won’t breathe a word.”
Mrs. Bliss shook her head.
“Come on, Ma, tell me.”
“All right,” she said, “but if this ever gets out…”
“I swear. What?”
“I’m pregnant.”
“You’re never!”
“Yeah, I’m pregnant, but I’m thinking of getting an abortion. You think maybe Wilcox…”
“Why would you say something like that to me?”
“Come on, it’s a joke.”
“I could have had a heart attack!”
“I’m sorry, but when I said I had outside interests something tickled my funny bone.”
“I could have had a heart attack.”
“A few weeks ago I went on a treasure hunt.”
“Sure, a treasure hunt. All right, Ma.”
“No, I did. I have one of those metal detectors.”
“Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum,” Ellen said.
“No really,” Mrs. Bliss said.
“Sure, Ma.”
“Do you remember Junior Yellin?”
“Junior Yellin, Junior Yellin. Dad’s Junior Yellin?”
“Junior’s his nickname, his real name is Milt.”
“A gonif?”
“Well,” said Mrs. Bliss.
“No, I remember. Very presentable. A good-looking guy but a gonif. You saw Junior Yellin? He’s still alive?”
“He’s in his seventies,” Mrs. Bliss said.
“Gee,” Ellen said, “it’s been years since I even heard his name mentioned. He had an eye for the ladies. He was Dad’s partner in the butcher shop.”
“Yeah, well, now he’s a treasure hunter. He wants to open up a museum. I was supposed to be his partner.”
“You’re kidding! Junior Yellin. He’s still alive?”
“I’m still alive.”
“No, well, I mean, but Junior Yellin. He burned the candle at both ends.” Ellen lowered her voice. Dorothy, who had trouble hearing her, was surprised that a woman like Ellen, who wore earth shoes and took enema instructions from some quack in Texas, who wolfed down the kale and the pumpkin and powdered her salads with raw oatmeal, and could throw a hundred dollars’ worth of meat out of her freezer just like that, a woman who sold so many shoes she earned awards that took her all over the world, who went through life at the top of her voice, would ever bother to lower her voice, and was overtaken with a sudden, strange but not entirely off-the-wall idea: that in his salad days Yellin had probably made an entirely serious pass at her young daughter-in-law, as he had once made one at her.
“Would you like to see him?” Mrs. Bliss asked.
“See him? See Junior Yellin?”
“I’ll invite him for supper. We’ll talk about old times.”
“He wouldn’t remember me.”
“You’ll remind him.”
Ellen nodded vaguely in the direction of the kitchen table, toward the uneaten scraps of Mrs. Ted Bliss’s rice pie, the deepish dregs of her unfinished tea.
“I’ll boil a chicken,” Mrs. Bliss said. “I’ll make some soup. You make the salad, put in some of your organic vegetables.”
“I wouldn’t mind seeing him again,” Ellen said.
He didn’t. He didn’t remember her. No more than he had recognized Dorothy the day she had come to his office on Lincoln Road. Even when Mrs. Bliss identified her as Marvin’s wife.
Well, a lot of water had passed under the bridge he excused. The old gray mare ain’t what he used to be.
“Isn’t the mare generally a she?” Ellen called down from her high horse. “I’d have thought a butcher would know the difference.”
“Hey,” Junior said, “touché there. But you know,” he said, “I’m not a butcher anymore. I haven’t been behind a meat counter in years.”
“No,” Ellen said as Mrs. Bliss poured the wine Junior brought, “Ma says you’ve decided to become a museum director.”
“It’s still America, sweetheart,” Yellin said and, sensing it might be a long evening, filled his glass to the brim.
He was not a mean drunk. Indeed, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, he was no longer even much of a wiseass, and reflected that if you both only managed to live long enough your worst enemy could become one of your best friends. The thought made for a kind of nostalgia that inhabited the room like atmosphere, enveloping Mrs. Ted Bliss and, so it seemed to her, Yellin, and perhaps even Ellen herself, though Ellen, Dorothy imagined, had to be coaxed along, rather like someone of two minds in an audience, say, who has been asked to come up on the stage to assist the performer in his act. They finished Junior’s wine and Dorothy, on a roll of good feeling, offered to open a bottle of what had to be at least forty-year-old Scotch whiskey — twelve years in the bottle, twenty-eight or so in a drawer of the big walnut breakfront in the dining room, a gift from one of Ted’s customers when they left Chicago to take up a new life in Florida.
The women weren’t drinkers and Junior usually drank only to pass out, and so had no clear idea of what it was like to be drunk. They supposed it meant something like “tipsy,” by which they meant lighthearted, frivolous, cute, a condition summed up by the notion of women in films of the thirties and forties, say, forced by far-fetched circumstance into wearing men’s pajamas, several sizes too large for them. This was their collective mood now — an exaggerated comity between them too big for its necessity. They laughed easily, Junior himself joining in as they evoked his old piratical avatars and manifestations like a sort of wild glory.
“Do you know,” Mrs. Ted Bliss giddily confessed, “there was a time I thought you’d set your cap for me?”
“Me? Really?”
“Oh, I suppose you don’t remember the time you snuck up behind me and tried to feel me up while I was waiting on a customer.”
He didn’t of course, but smiled sly as an old roué, a heroic rogue in a different movie, and politely wondered aloud how far he’d managed to get.
“I thought of telling Ted on you. On you to Ted.”
“I bet you never did,” Junior Yellin said.
“You were already in enough trouble.”
“I thought,” Ellen said, “of telling Marvin.”
“Marvin?” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.
She’d struck a nerve, and a little of Yellin’s guilty handsomeness drained from his face.
“Only he was already in Billings,” Ellen said, the second person there whose mood had cracked.
“Hey,” Junior Yellin said, the last, his mood breaking up, run aground on a sandbar of suddenly uncovered memory, “dinner about ready? I guess I’ll go powder my nose.”
“I think,” Mrs. Bliss whispered when he left the room, “he remembers you.”
“Oh, Ma,” Ellen said, suddenly weeping. “Nothing happened. I swear to you. I swear on Marvin’s life!”
“On Marvin’s life? On his life?”
What Mrs. Ted Bliss didn’t know was that in the toilet, Junior Yellin raised the toilet seat and peed wide of his mark, drilling some of his urine around the elasticized hem of her terry-cloth toilet-seat cover. Feeling immensely disconsolate about this awkward turn of events, he wet one of Dorothy’s hand towels under a faucet in the bathroom sink and tried to wipe away (rubbing it furiously, as one might attempt to clear a stain from a freshly starched shirt back from the laundry on which one has just dripped gravy) the evidence of his marked territory.
“By damn,” he muttered, “I am one goofy galoot of a guy.”
The sound of the phrase cheered him a bit, but he was thankful he was a little high. Under the influence, he thought. Get a grip, he thought, you’re seventy-eight. Sooner or later one or the other of them would have to come in to do her business. We all got business. What will it look like if she realizes her dress is DWI due to my carelessness? How many points would that cost him?