Mrs. Ted Bliss (6 page)

And though Mrs. Bliss was neither jealous nor envious of other people’s possessions, or of the way they utilized space under their new dispensations, or translated their old New York, Cleveland, or Toronto surroundings through the enormous sea change of their Florida lives, nor understood how at the last moment—she didn’t kid herself, with the possible exception of the Central and South Americans (and a few of the Canadians), this was the last place most of them would ever live—they could trade in the solid, substantial furniture of their past for the lightweight bamboo, brushed aluminum, and canvas goods of what they couldn’t live long enough to become their future. And, indeed, there’d been considerable turnover in the Towers in the three or so years since Ted Bliss had died. From Rose Blitzer’s table alone three people had passed away—Rose’s husband, Max; Ida, the woman who couldn’t digest sugar substitutes without a nondairy creamer; and the woman who’d poured their coffee.

Yet it was never from a sense of the morbid or any thought to mockery that Mrs. Bliss accepted invitations to other people’s apartments. She went out of deep curiosity and interest, as others might go, say, to anthropological museums.

And now, for the first time since she’d moved south, Mrs. Bliss was visiting one of the Towers’ penthouses. She had emerged from the penthouse’s private elevator. First she had had to descend to the lobby from her condo on Building One’s seventh floor, cross the lobby to the security desk and give her name to the guard, Louise Munez. Louise had once confided that while she didn’t herself live in the Towers, she was the daughter of Elaine Munez, one of the residents here. She dressed in the thick, dark serge of a night watchman, wore a revolver that she carried in an open, strapless holster, and held a long, heavy batonlike flashlight that doubled as a nightstick. A pair of doubled handcuffs that clanked when she moved was attached to a reinforced loop at the back of her trousers. Though she didn’t appear to be a big woman, in her windbreaker and uniform she seemed bulky. On her desk, spread out before her closed-circuit television monitors, was an assortment of tabloids—the
National Enquirer,
the
National Examiner,
the
Star
—along with current numbers of
Scientific American, Playboy, Playgirl, Town and Country.
An open cigar box with a few bills and about two dollars in change was just to the left of a red telephone. A walkie-talkie chattered in a pants pocket.

“Interest you in some reading matter tonight, Mrs. Ted Bliss?”

“Maybe some other time, Louise. I’m invited to attend Mr. and Mrs. Auveristas’s open house.”

“I have to check the guest list.”

“It’s an open house,” Mrs. Bliss said.

“I have to check the guest list.” She referred to a sheet of names. “Stand over there by the penthouse elevator. You don’t have a key, I’ll remote it from here.”

Dorothy stepped out of the elevator into a sort of marble foyer that led to two tall, carved wooden doors. She had to ring to be let in. A butler opened the doors, which were electric and withdrew into a cavity in the marble walls. Without even asking who she was he handed her a name tag with her name written out in a fine cursive script. “How did you know?” she asked the butler who smiled enigmatically but did not answer.

The place was like nothing she’d ever seen. She knew she hadn’t worn the right clothes, that she didn’t even own the right clothes. What did
she
know, it was an open house. If she’d known it was supposed to be dress-up she’d have put on the dress she’d worn in court the day she testified. She had a queer sense she should have brought opera glasses.

“Ah, it’s Mrs. Bliss! How are you, Mrs. Bliss?” called a youthful-looking but silver-haired man who couldn’t have been in more than his early forties or perhaps even his late thirties, immediately withdrawing from an intense conversation in which he seemed to be not merely engaged but completely engrossed. It occurred to Dorothy, who couldn’t remember having met him, that she’d never seen anyone so thoroughly immaculate. So clean, she meant (he might have been some baleboss of the personal), not so much well groomed (though he was well groomed) as buffed, preened, shiny as new shoes. He could have been newly made, something just off an assembly line, or still in its box. He seemed almost to shine, bright, fresh as wet paint. The others, following the direction of his glance, stared openly at her and, when he started to move toward her across the great open spaces of the immense room, simply trailed along after him. Instinctively, Dorothy drew back a few steps.

As if gauging her alarm the man quite suddenly halted and held up his hand, cautioning the others as if they were on safari and he some white hunter fearful of spooking his prey. “Madam Bliss!” he said, exactly as if it were she who had surprised him.

Dorothy nodded.

“Welcome to my home,” he declared, “welcome indeed.” And, reaching forward, took up her hand and bent to kiss it. This had never happened to her before, nor, outside the movies, had she ever seen it happen to anyone else. It even crossed her mind that she was being filmed. (People were beginning to buy those things…those camcorders. Even one of her grandsons had one. He took it with him everywhere.)

“Oh, don’t,” Dorothy said smiling nervously. “I must look terrible.”

Bemused, Tommy Auveristas—that’s who it was, she could read his name tag now—looked at her. It was one of those moments when neither person understands what the other person means. No matter what happened between them in the years that would follow, this was a point that would never be straightened out. Auveristas thought Mrs. Bliss was referring to the overpowering smell of cheap perfume coming off her hands and which he would taste for the rest of the evening and on through the better part of the next morning. Oh, he thought, these crazy old people. “No, no,” he said, “you are delicious,” and then, turning not to one of the two servers in the room but to a very beautifully dressed woman in a fine gown, told her to get Mrs. Bliss a drink. “What would you like?” he asked.

“Do you have diet cola?”

“I’m sure we must. If we don’t we shall absolutely have to send out for a case.”

“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I wouldn’t put you to the trouble. I’ll have 7-Up. Your home is very beautiful.”

“Would you like me to show you around? I will show you around.”

“I mustn’t take you from your guests. I just came, there’s time, I’m not in any hurry.”

Mrs. Bliss felt overwhelmed. She could have been the guest of honor or something, the way they treated her. It was, like that kiss on her hand, outside her experience. Or if not outside her experience exactly, then at least outside earned experience, the cost-effective honors of accomplishment. She’d been a bride. She was a mother, she and Ted had married a daughter, bar mitzvahed two sons, buried one of them. She was a widow, she had buried a husband, so it wasn’t as if she’d never been the center of attention. (She had been a witness for the government in a high-profile drug case.) But who’s kidding who? Let’s face it, except for the trial, all those other occasions had been affairs of one sort or the other, even the funerals, may Ted and Marvin rest, bought and paid for. So unless they were exaggerating their interest in her—Tommy Auveristas was polite, even, she thought, sincere—she couldn’t remember feeling so important. It was exciting. But she was overwhelmed. As she hadn’t known what to do with all the attention after Ted’s death, she didn’t know what to do with the solicitude of these strangers.

Many of them drifted away. New guests were arriving and Tommy Auveristas, excusing himself from Mrs. Bliss as if she were indeed the guest of honor, went off to greet them.

Ermalina Cervantes came back with her soft drink.

“Here you go,” she said. “It wasn’t cold enough, I put ice in it. Can you drink it with ice?”

“Oh, thank you. Cold is fine. This is good, I’m really enjoying it. But you know,” Mrs. Bliss said, “they fill up your glass with too much ice in a restaurant, they’re trying to water it down. I don’t let them get away with that. I send it back to the kitchen.”

“If there’s too much ice…”

“No, no, it’s perfect. Hits the spot. I was just saying.”

Ermalina Cervantes smiled at her. She had a beautiful smile, beautiful teeth. Beautiful skin. Mrs. Bliss set great store in pretty skin in a woman. She thought it revealed a lot about a person’s character. It wasn’t so important for a man to have a nice skin. Men had other ways of showing their hearts, but if a woman didn’t have sense enough to take care of her skin (it was the secret behind her own beauty; why people had bragged on her looks almost until she was seventy), then she didn’t really care about anything. The house could fall down around her ears and she’d never notice. She’d send her kids off to school all shlumperdik, shmuts on their faces, holes in their pants. But this was some Ermalina, this Ermalina. Teeth
and
skin! Butter wouldn’t melt.

Ermalina Cervantes, nervous under the scrutiny of Mrs. Bliss’s open stare, asked if anything were wrong.

“Wrong? What could be wrong, sweetheart? It’s a wonderful party. The pop is delicious. I never tasted better. You have a beautiful smile and wonderful teeth, and your skin is your crowning glory.”

“Oh,” Ermalina Cervantes said, “oh, thank you.”

“I hope you don’t mind my saying.”

“No, of course not. Thank you, Mrs. Bliss.”

“Please, dear. Dorothy.”

“Dorothy.”

“That’s better,” she said, “you make me very happy. I’ll tell you, I haven’t been this happy since my husband was alive. Older people like it when younger people use their first names. If you think it’s the opposite you’d be wrong. It shows respect for the person if the person calls the person by her first name than the other way around. Don’t ask me why, it’s a miracle. You’re blushing, am I talking too much? I’m talking too much. I can’t help it. Maybe because everyone’s so nice. You know, if I didn’t know pop don’t make you drunk I’d think I was drunk.”

A pretty blond named Susan Gutterman came by and Ermalina introduced her to Mrs. Bliss.

“Susan Gutterman,” Mrs. Bliss said speculatively. “You’re Jewish?”

“No.”

“Gutterman is a Jewish name.”

“My husband is Jewish. He’s from Argentina.”

“You? What are you?”

“Oh,” Susan Gutterman said offhandedly, “not much of anything, I guess. I’m a WASP.”

“A wasp?”

“A White Anglo-Saxon Protestant,” Susan Gutterman explained.

“Oh, you’re of mixed blood.”

“May I bring you something to eat?” Susan Gutterman said.

“I haven’t finished my pop. We haven’t met but I know who you are,” said Mrs. Bliss, turning to a woman just then passing by. “You’re Carmen Auveristas, Tommy Auveristas’s wife.” Like all the other South Americans at the party she was a knockout, not anything like those stale cutouts and figures with their fancy guitars, big sombreros, spangled suits, and drooping mustaches thicker than paintbrushes that the Decorations Committee was always putting up for the galas on those Good Neighbor nights in the gussied-up game rooms. And not at
all
like the women who went about all overheated in their coarse, black, heavy mourning. Was it any wonder those galas were so poorly attended? They must have been insulted, Mrs. Ted Bliss thought. Portrayed like so many shvartzers. Sure, how would Jews like it?

“And I know who you are,” Carmen Auveristas said.

“Your husband’s very nice. Such a gentleman. He kissed my hand. Very continental. Very suave.”

“Have you met Elaine Munez?” Mrs. Auveristas asked.

“Your daughter, Louise, let me up. She tried to sell me a paper. Oh,” she told her fellow guest, the cop-and-paper-boy’s mother, “she must have called up my name on her walkie-talkie. That’s how the servant knew to give me my name tag. I was wondering about that.”

“May I bring you something to eat?” Elaine Munez said flatly.

“No, thank you,” she said. “I ate some supper before I came. I didn’t know what a spread you put on. Go, dear, it looks delicious. I wish I could eat hot spicy foods, but they give me gas. They burn my kishkas.”

The three women smiled dully and left her to stand by herself. Dorothy didn’t mind. Though she was having a ball, the strain of having to do all the talking was making her tired. She sat down in a big wing chair covered in a bright floral muslin. She was quite comfortable. Vaguely she was reminded of Sundays in Jackson Park when she and Ted and the three children had had picnics in the Japanese Gardens. In the beautiful room many of her pals from the Towers, there, like herself, in the penthouse for the first time, walked about, examining its expensive contents, trying out its furniture, accepting hors d’oeuvres from the caterers, and giggling, loosened up over highballs. Dorothy amused herself by trying to count the guests, keeping two sets of books, three—the Jews, those South Americans she recognized, and those she’d never seen before—but someone was always moving and, when she started over, she’d get all mixed up. It was a little like trying to count the number of musicians in Lawrence Welk’s band on television. The camera never stayed still long enough for her to get in all the trumpet players, trombonists, clarinet players, fiddlers, and whatnot. Sometimes a man with a saxophone would set it down and pick up something else. Then, when you threw in the singers…It could make you dizzy. Still, she was content enough.

Closing her eyes for a moment and concentrating as hard as she could—she was wearing her hearing aid; this was in the days when she owned only one—she attempted to distinguish between the English and Spanish conversations buzzing around her like flies.

Tommy Auveristas, kneeling beside her armchair, startled her.

Quite almost as much as she, bolting up, startled him, causing him to spill a little of the food from the plate he was extending toward her onto the cream Berber carpeting.

“Son of a bitch!”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! It’s my fault,” Mrs. Bliss volunteered. “If we rub it with seltzer it should come out! I’ll go and get some!”

“No, no, of course not. The maid will see to it. Stay where you are.”