The Trouble with Bliss

by Douglas Light

One of the two light bulbs in his building’s foyer is burnt out, giving the small space a jaundiced yellow hue. Night’s arrived in earnest. Bent down, Morris struggles to coax his mailbox open with his slightly bent key. There’s a tap at the door, and looking up, he sees her through the cloudy Plexiglas window: Andrea Goldman Angel. Her hair is shiny and stiff. In her mid-twenties, she lives in Apartment 5 with her husband, George. Morris knows her the way he knows the counter help at the café down the street; brief and fleeting. He has difficulty placing her when he sees her on the street, outside the safe environment of the apartment building’s hallway.

  She taps on the window again with a manicured nail, wanting in. Morris lets her in.

  “Right, thanks. This bag, you know, the things. I can’t find my keys,” she says, holding up her juice-box sized purse. “Thank you, right?” She’s attractive in a vague, tabloid way, all gloss and gossip. Morris guesses she spends an eternity each morning to achieve her stylish just-thrown-together look. “This day,” she says, moving past Morris, “is a terrible day. The mail’s come?” Her head rocks while her hair stays formed, unmoving.

  “I think so,” he tells her, jiggling his bent mailbox key in the lock, hoping to pop the mailbox. “Can’t seem to get my box open.” Morris rarely converses with the neighbors. A greeting, good morning, or “Hey, how are you” at most. Rarely more. A crowded city is often isolating.

  “What happened there?” Andrea asks, now having no problem finding her keys in her purse. She opens her mailbox, pulls a stack of mail from her box, multicolored bill envelopes, two glossy catalogues for overpriced clothing, Condé Naste’s Traveller, and Snap, a fashion magazine that focuses on how to please your boyfriend in one article and how to exact revenge on him in the next. “Your mailbox, right? It’s broken?”

  “My key.” Morris had used it to try to retrieve a quarter stuck in the slot of a soda machine. The key bent. He didn’t get the quarter. “There was a fight,” he says, jokingly.

  “A fight?” she asks. “Did you take your shirt off?”

  “Why would I take off my shirt?”

  She moves forward, places her hand to his arm like she’s comforting a disaster victim. Kosher restaurant menus litter the floor. A tattered Ellsworth Kelly poster is taped to the wall, placed there for no reason. “Right,” she says, “to fight.” Her eyes are a spill of green and brown, like crayon shards melted on glass. There’s a ghostly stain on the left breast of her blouse and her lower lip is substantially thicker than her upper. The intimacy throws Morris off; it arouses him. A flush of warmth runs to his groin. “I was actually just jok—”

  “You weren’t hurt, right?” she says, her hand tightening on his arm.

  “My key was hurt,” Morris says, holding it up. “It got bent.”

  “Oh,” she says. To Morris’s disappointment, she lets go. “Right.” She turns her attention to her mail. “It’s been such a bad day,” she tells him. She quickly flips through the mail, pausing momentarily to read a postcard advertising a 60 percent off sale at APC. “What a bad day. Had to come home early.”

  “Early? How late do you work?” Morris asks. It is after nine. He sees her Traveller magazine, the cover shot of Prague. “Is that a good magazine?” he asks.

  “The make-up tips and sex advice are wrong, right?” she says, opening up Snap, the fashion magazine. “But hairstyles, how-to-lose weight, and tidbit articles are usually pretty good. Like this, right,” she says, pausing on a page. “ ‘Bananas are a great way to battle PMS and chronic split ends,’ ” she reads. “I didn’t know that. Did you know that, right?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Morris says, adding, “I was actually talking about the travel magazine.”

  “Oh. Right.” She hands him the magazine. “Well, here, have it. I never read it, right? Don’t even know why we get it,” she says; then, “You travel much?”

  Morris takes the magazine, thanks her. “I travel a lot,” Morris says, studying the cover. “Or, I mean, I plan to travel a lot. I haven’t been anywhere yet. But soon,” he says.

  “Right,” she says, then holds out an envelope from the Bowery Mission and Homeless Shelter. “Look at this.” It pictures a hunched, bearded man with a spoon raised to his month. The text reads: “We all want to eat this Easter.”

  “My God, can you believe this?” Andrea says, agitated. “As if my taxes aren’t enough, right? I work and work, then come home and am guilted into helping people who don’t pay a cent? This guy looks like my husband George’s grandfather. How can I say no, right?” She forcefully shuts her mailbox. “We all can’t have the easy life, the government covering our food and rent,” she says, smiling a pinched, acidic smile. “We all can’t be as lucky as some people in the building.”

  “No, I guess not,” Morris says. He wonders if she’s referring to him, but then realizes she’s probably talking about the Dominicans in apartment 2. They’re a mid-aged couple who’ve lived in New York for nearly ten years and still can’t speak English beyond a few basic words. Morris has helped them with small tasks, like carrying heavy groceries, or changing a light bulb, setting up mousetraps. The woman’s two sisters, her mother, and her mother’s sister are permanently visiting. They’re a gentle people who communicate by screaming. The government covers half their rent, provides public assistance.

  Keep working hard. Millions on welfare are depending on you. Morris saw that on a bumper sticker the other day. He thinks of sharing this with Andrea but then decides not to. She wouldn’t find it funny.

  Turning to head up the stairs, she says, “Well, right. Take care, Troy.” Her lavender thong peeks out above her black skirt. It’s like a glowing ember in a pitch-dark cave.

  “Morris,” Morris corrects her, watching as she mounts the stairs. “My name is Morris.” He gives up on his mailbox, on getting the mail.

  “Morris, right,” she says. At the first landing, Andrea turns and says, “Let me ask you, right? What are you doing Sunday at five p.m.?”

  “Nothing I can think of,” he says, heading up the stairs toward her.

  “Great. Then let me ask you, right? Do you eat…” She pauses, searching for the word. “What’s that stuff called?”

  “What stuff?” He reaches the first landing and catches a whiff of her perfume, a spicy orange scent that charges through him.

  “The Mexican stuff, right?” Again, she touches him, touches his chest, near his collarbone.

  He nearly drops the magazine. “Tacos?” he asks, excited and confused. She’s married, he reminds himself, hoping the cold realism will settle him. It doesn’t.

  “No, the stuff you put on tacos,” she says. “It’s all chopped up, right? Tomatoes and onions. Comes in a bottle.”

  “Salsa,” Morris says.

  “Right. Yes, salsa. Do you eat salsa?” Her fingers linger.

  “Not often, but yes. I eat it.”

  “Right, great,” she says, then heads up the next flight of stairs. Morris follows. “You want to make a hundred and twenty-five dollars?” she asks.

  “What would I have to do?”

  “Nothing,” she says, stopping in front of her door. “Or next to nothing.” She pulls out her cell phone. “I need you for a focus group on a new salsa, right? All you do is look at some print ads, make some comments.” She dials a number. Overhead, the florescent halo bulb shines its cheap, thin blue-white light.

  “Ronda? Andrea. Right. Listen,” she says into her phone. “Sunday, the salsa focus group, right? One male. Morris.” Then to Morris, she asks, “What’s your last name?”

  “Bliss.”

  “Bliss,” she says into the phone. “Right, Bliss. Great.” Hanging up, she gives Morris the details, where the office is, what time he needs to be there.

  Keying her door, she asks, “You want to come in, right? Have a drink?”

  Before Morris can answer, the door swings opens from the inside. There stands George, Andrea’s husband. Tall, heavy-set, and in a pair of cut-off s
weat pants and a tattered banana-green T-shirt that reads Where’s the Beef?, George glares at Morris. “This another stray you’ve picked up?” he asks Andrea.

  “Oh, Georgie, come on, right?” Andrea says, speaking in a voice Morris hasn’t heard before. It’s forcefully bright, yet pleading and worried.

  “I’m Morris,” Morris says, holding out his hand. George doesn’t take it. “I live upstairs.”

  “Keep it that way,” George says, then says to Andrea, “You promised no more strays.”

  “It’s for work, Georgie,” she says. “He’s our neighbor, right?” She steps past Morris, into her apartment. “Salsa, Sunday?” Andrea says to Morris. “See you then, right.”

  “Or not at all,” George says to him, firmly shutting the door. The locks click, the noise echoing down the stairwell.

  Two flights up is Morris’s home. The city and the street are below. “Sunday,” Morris says to himself, two days’ time.

  Everything can change so quickly.

  Chapter 7