Because the way Junior figured, life was a little like one of those games — checkers, Monopoly — where everyone started with the same assets and lost when they went bankrupt.
My life, thought Yellin, my life is like that. More Monopoly than checkers, though. I was always the top hat or the roadster, the wheelbarrow or battleship or dog, never the iron or thimble or shoe. Sure, he thought, big man. Big man’s man. In your dreams! he thought bitterly.
Because he knew there’d always been more smoke than fire to him, to his history. He caused trouble and brought grief down around people’s heads — already he could spot a little flame of yellow piss burning through the water spots he’d made doing his repairs. Oh Christ, he moaned, and wondered if Dorothy’s wasn’t the real reason — that, as Dorothy said, he was in enough trouble already — more women hadn’t told on him. My God, how he hated owning an unearned reputation! Still, if it weren’t unearned he’d have no reputation at all.
Because, sight unseen, he knew there was little of substance to the contemptuous awe folks held him in. Those out there now, vulnerable to charm but nothing more to it than that, silly as girls at a sleepover, simply had no skill at recognizing a flirt when they saw one. He could hardly believe, for example, that he’d ever tried to feel up that old one, Mrs. Ted Bliss. And as for Ellen, the elderly one, why would he ever have put a move on a woman with a husband in the hospital? It would have been too brave, it wasn’t like him.
The whoosie was still damp but he couldn’t stay in there forever. He unlocked the bathroom door and went out.
“Sorry,” he blustered to the ladies already seated at the dining room table, “had to see a man about a dog. Ah,” he said, taking his seat and winking at both of them, “girl, boy, girl. Just the way I like it!”
“On Marvin’s life?” the outraged Mrs. Bliss was still saying, and Junior Yellin had the impression that time had stood still while he had been in the bathroom, that there was something faintly magical in his ability to charm people, but only faintly magical. Otherwise he would have made a greater dent in the world. He’d be high and dry and sitting pretty instead of just dragooned and press-ganged into a skimpy little company of old ladies. Otherwise, he might have followed his heart and had the nerve to propose to that gorgeous Rita de Janeiro kid and married her.
If he’d a better command of the life cycle of liquor he’d have known that he was coming down from the ledges of optimism and gaiety to the flatlands of despair and self-pity. In the event, the quarrel he’d generated between the two women registered like a chatter of drone.
“Ma, nothing happened.”
“On his life? His life?”
“If something happened, why would I say so? Just to aggravate him? He made a pass, all right? Big deal, he made a pass. He tickled my palm with his finger. Once he blew in my ear when I leaned toward him to listen to a secret he wanted to tell.”
“While Marvin lies dying in a hospital bed.”
I tickled her palm? That was my pass? I blew in her ear? That was? Oh, I am so pathetic. I am pathetic. Not a grand galoot of a guy at all. Just a sorry old asshole. I must cancel Miss de Janeiro’s flowers. I must remember to tie a string around my finger so as not to forget to cancel her flowers.
What he did or didn’t do. As if he weren’t even in the room at all. They’d invited him to supper, not the other way around. The boiled chicken could be boiling over. He hadn’t come there just to be humiliated. He had better set them straight.
“Excuse me,” Yellin said, “but if either of you is thinking of using the little girl’s room, may I suggest you use the other one? I’m afraid I missed and made number one all over the toilet-seat cover. I tried to blot it out with hand towels but I didn’t do such a good job. It’s still pretty damp. Did I really tickle your palm and blow in your ear? Sorry. Maybe I was trying to cheer you up. Dotty, dear, did I really feel you up?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” he said, “you were both beautiful women. I’m sorry, but I guess I’m not much of a boozer. I’m sorry. I think I’ve lost my appetite. Just as well, I have to run an errand. Have to see my florist on a matter of some urgency.
“Oh,” he said as he reached the door, “they say if you rub it with seltzer the stain disappears like magic.”
He disappeared like magic.
That night, after she picked up the empty glasses and cleared the table and washed the dishes — Ellen had offered to help but Mrs. Ted Bliss was still enough of a baleboosteh to do some things by herself and refused her — and Ellen had gone to bed, Mrs. Bliss noticed something out of place on top of the telephone table. It was the directory, which had not been replaced in the little shelf where it should have been. Loose on top of the telephone directory Ellen had failed to put back properly were her airline tickets, spread-eagled to her open-ended return coupon. Without meaning to pry, Mrs. Bliss noticed the price of her ticket. Thinking she’d made a mistake, she checked it again. What had so surprised her was that her daughter-in-law received the same senior citizen’s discount as she did herself!
She must have known, she’d sent birthday greetings to the woman for years. Even, though Marvin was dead, cards on their anniversaries. It was easy, if not to lose track exactly then to fix people in time and suspend them there, your near and dear. Growing old was no picnic and though you made allowances for it in yourself, it hardly seemed possible that others, your children and grandchildren, for example, were susceptible to the same erosions. Yet she must have known, she must have. Hadn’t Ellen herself brought up the subject, and more than once, of what she intended to do and where she intended to move when she retired? And each time, each time, Dorothy had felt uncomfortable hearing such talk, as if, oh yes, as if there were something maybe just a bit disreputable and vulgar about the idea of someone relatively secure and successful in her position throwing it over for the sake of some soft dream. Wasn’t this, in some wild way, connected to her feelings about Frank leaving Pittsburgh and moving to Rhode Island? All right, he said he had his reasons, and maybe, as he’d said, the feelings, his and the university’s, were mutual, but somewhere there’d been an infraction, disorder on both sides. It was the way she’d felt when Ted had told her he had bought the farm in Michigan. Who knows, it may have been the way she’d felt all those years back when her family uprooted itself and came all the way from Russia to America.
“You’ve lived in Chicago all your life,” she’d told her daughter-in-law when Ellen had first introduced the subject. “All your friends are there, your family. You’re no spring chicken anymore, Ellen. Where would you go, what would you do, chase Janet in India? Believe me, darling, if I had it all to do over again and poor Ted was still alive, you think I’d be here today?”
Enough things had changed, she wanted her daughter-in-law to stay put, although even as she made her point she recognized the fallacy in her argument. There was nothing to stop her from picking up and moving back to Chicago. All right, the price of condos in the Towers had plunged. She’d never get back what they gave for it, but so what? Even if she took a loss, even if she sold the place under fire-sale conditions, threw in the carpet, the drapes, her furniture and appliances, all the crap she’d accumulated, the manuals, the letters and cards, pictures and scrapbooks, all the carefully rubber-banded documentation and ledgers of her life, how bad could it be? Wouldn’t it, as a matter of fact, be just the thing for her old baleboosteh ways, to clear the decks, make everything neat, one last final spring cleaning of things, the deleavenization of her past? What would she lose? Nothing, zip, gornisht. She could rent a furnished room or even a small studio apartment and live off the proceeds of her red-tag sale. She was eighty-two years old, had her health, but how much longer could she expect to get away with it? Hale and hearty as she was, kayn aynhoreh, how much longer could Mrs. Bliss have left, four, five years? So her estate would drop to maybe seventy-three cents on the dollar when she passed. What difference would it make to her inheritors? They were provided for. Her good husbandry couldn’t really make a difference in their lives, so what was the big deal? What was to stop her from moving back to Chicago? Nothing. Nothing but her failing energies, nothing but her sense of how disruptive and untrue one must be to oneself even to want to make a new life.