Blind Panic Read Free Page B

you would have known why. She was seventy-one and skeletally thin, with huge Chanel sunglasses and a nose like a buzzard on the lookout for a baby prairie dog to swoop down on.
    “You know what that means, don’t you, Mrs. Z?” I asked her.
    “It means that I’m insecure?”
    I shook my head.
    “It means that I’m frightened of people finding out that I was born in the South Bronx, and that my father sewed linings for a living?” She leaned closer when she said this, andspoke in a very hoarse whisper, even though the nearest sunbather was more than twenty feet away, and he was snoring.
    I shook my head again.
    “It means that I’m worried about losing my money and ending up with nothing?”
    “No, Mrs. Zlotorynski, your dream has nothing to do with your social status or your lack of self-esteem or, God forbid, your late husband’s investments in Pfizer pharmaceuticals. Men will always need Viagra! It simply means that you have an inner glow that you very rarely share. In your daily life, as you go about your business, you hardly ever display your natural warmheartedness.”
    “My natural warmheartedness?”
    “That’s right. You understand people, Mrs. Z. You feel what they feel. You have so much spiritual radiance. But most of the time you keep it tightly locked up in your inner jewelry box so that nobody can appreciate how caring you are.”
    Mrs. Zlotorynski swung her scrawny legs around and sat up straight. It was impossible to see her eyes behind those sunglasses, but I would have bet you ten portraits of Benjamin Franklin that they were piggy with self-approval. Well, piggier than they usually were. You know what too much blepharoplasty can do to a girl.
    She prodded my shoulder with one orange-polished fingernail—once, twice, three times. It was like being bitten by a particularly annoying mosquito.
    “You—are— so —right!” she agreed. “I do have spiritual radiance. I do have warmth . I am beautiful. Inside of myself, I shine . Yet—do you know?—you’re one of the very few people who has ever recognized it. Apart from Morry, of course— alev ha sholem —but then Morry was hardly ever home. What did he know?”
    I sat up, too, trying to shift myself out of fingernail range. “I’ve seen your driver. What’s his name? Emigdlio. The way he scowls at you behind your back…It’s a disgrace, don’t you think? Just because you asked him to drive your friendshome to Key West, at two thirty in the morning! It’s only three hundred twenty-eight miles, there and back! And Rosita! She’s supposed to be your maid. Yet when you told her to worm little Q-Tip for you, what did she do? She said that she wasn’t an animal doctor, and she stamped her foot and turned all sulky on you.
    “Don’t these people understand how much you feel for them? I guess they don’t. But that’s what makes them ‘little people.’ That’s what you call them, isn’t it? And don’t they deserve it!”
    “You are so right,” Mrs. Zlotorynski repeated. She opened her orange suede purse and took out her mirror so she could adjust her Marilyn Hikida straw hat with orange feather trim, and reapply her matching orange lip gloss. “They are little people, God help them. Well, God has to help them—doesn’t he?—because they don’t know how to help themselves!”
    I lifted my cocktail in salute. My friends, I was having the time of my life. My old poker-playing buddy Marco Hernandez had gone on a three-month tour of Europe with the Joe Morales Mariachi Orchestra, and he had asked me to take care of his house in Coral Gables. Well, wouldn’t you? The humidity had been 93 percent on the day I left New York. The streets had smelled like a salami slicer’s armpit, and when I climbed out of the cab at LaGuardia, the handle had broken off my suitcase. But here I was, sitting on the beach outside of the five-star Delano Hotel, with the sun broiling the soles of my yellow plastic Crocs, and the blue Atlantic