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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
    E xcepting 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