Mrs. Ted Bliss

by Stanley Elkin

  “He admired me for my parking space.”

  “I’m only kidding,” Florence Klein said. “Don’t get so cock-cited.”

  “I’ll say this much for Latins,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “they always try to sell you a bill of goods. During the war, when Ted had the meat market, it was the same thing. He could have opened a liquor store with all the cases of wine those thieves gave him. They climbed all over each other to get you to take their black-market, Argentine meat. I wanted to sell.”

  Had Chitral heard of any of this he would have been offended. The bitch was good-looking enough for an old bitch, but who did these people think they were?

  Seducing her into selling her husband’s automobile was a non-starter, the last thing on his mind. It was insulting. One gave out of respect for the proprieties, the civilized gesture. Was he some nasty tango of a man? Had he kissed her hand? Had he offered serenades?

  But no whiff of imagined scandal reached his ears. No wink of conspiracy, no gentle nudge to his ribs in the elevator. Even on those rare occasions when they ran into each other at this or that Towers do, Mrs. Bliss barely acknowledged him. He thought he understood her reasons. He imagined she still felt shame for having sold her husband’s car. Chitral was a gentleman, no more given to grandstanding or bluffing than Hector Camerando or Jaime Guttierez. Taking his cue from Mrs. Ted Bliss, he affected a discretion as palpable (though of course not as nervous) as her own. He was not just a gentleman. He was a man of parts. In addition to his decorums, he had his sensibilities as well. In the matter of the automobile she may have been shamed as much by the windfall profit she had made from the sale as by the sale itself. All you had to do was look at her. She was like the woman of valor in Proverbs. Any idea of benefit from the death of a spouse would have gone against her nature. She had known he’d overpaid her. That’s why he’d told her about the parking space. It was a matter of record that the people in Building One could sell their garage privileges. He’d meant to make it seem like a package deal—which of course it was. The space would have been worthless to him without the car, the car of no value without the space.

  So the last time they saw each other without the mutual buffers of an amiable, pretend nonchalance was two years later, when Mrs. Bliss testified against him, a witness for the prosecution, in court. She never entirely understood how they worked it. Nor, for that matter, really understood why the government subpoenaed her.

  But don’t think the family didn’t fight to have the subpoena quashed. Frank, her son, and Maxine, her daughter, wanted her to have representation and even hired a lawyer for her, although when Mrs. Bliss learned what they were being charged she gathered her outrage, joined it to her courage, and fired her. Manny, from the building, had been a lawyer before retiring and moving to Florida, and Mrs. Bliss told him that the kids thought she needed representation. Just using the word sounded dangerous in her mouth, and important.

  He told her up front that he had been strictly a real estate lawyer, that he really knew nothing about the sort of thing Dorothy was involved with. “Besides,” he said, “I’m retired. I practiced in Michigan. I don’t even know if Michigan and Florida have, whadayacall it, reciprocity.”

  “What’s reciprocity?” Mrs. Bliss asked.

  Manny came to see her an hour later and told her he had called a man he knew, a registrar of deeds in the Dade County Courthouse.

  “You know what?” he said. “He told me I have it.” He seemed very excited. “I’m going to take your case,” he told her solemnly.

  “Ma,” Maxine said when she learned Mrs. Bliss had fired the attorney she and her brother had obtained for her, “do you think that’s such a good idea? No offense, Mother, but do you really believe Manny is up to this? These are people from the Justice Department, federal people. Can Manny go one on one with these people?”

  “Manny’s no fool.”

  “If it’s the money—”

  “Of course it’s the money,” Mrs. Bliss said. “You know what she charges? Two hundred fifty dollars an hour!”

  “Ma, Ma,” Maxine said, “this guy is a big-time Venezuelan cocaine kingpin.”

  “He’s a farmer.”

  “Mother, he’s a drug lord! They want to put you on the stand so you can identify him as the man who bought Daddy’s car from you. You’re a very important government witness. I’m not even talking about the emotional strain, what going through all that stress could do to a person half your age and with a much better blood pressure. I don’t mean to scare you, Ma, but Frank and I are concerned“—she lowered her voice; Dorothy had to press her left ear tight against the receiver to hear her—“what these people could do to you.”

  “Sweetheart, sweetheart,” Mrs. Bliss said, “your daddy, olov hasholem, is dead two years. Two years I’ve been without him. A lifetime. Who’s left to share Marvin’s death with me? Who’s around to miss him? What trouble can your kingpin make for me?”

  Manny couldn’t get her out of it. He gave it his best effort, pulled out all the stops, tried tricks he’d learned in thirty-five years of real estate law in the great state of Michigan when clients required additional time before they could move into their new homes or out of their old ones. He brought a note to the government from Mrs. Bliss’s doctors. He had her put a dying battery into her hearing aid when she went to be deposed, but these federal boys knew their onions. They wrote their questions out on yellow, lined, 9 X 14-inch legal pads and handed them to her.

  Dorothy put on her glasses.

  “Wait, hold your horses a minute. Those ain’t her reading glasses.”

  “Does he have to be here?” asked one of the lawyers.

  “Behave yourself, Pop,” said another.

  In the end, when she was finally called and sworn, she was very calm. She had no great wish to harm this man, she bore him no grudge. Indeed, she was even tempted to perjure herself on his behalf, but thought better of it when she realized the signals this might send to her neighbors in the Towers. So she drew a deep breath and implicated him. She was very careful, however, to point out what a gentleman he’d been, how he’d brought her roses that were still fresh as a daisy after more than a week, and recalled for the jury the lovely drive he had taken her on through Coconut Grove and Miami.

  Chitral was sentenced to one hundred years. Dorothy felt terrible about that, just terrible. And although she was told they would have had more than enough to convict him even without her testimony, she was never quite reconciled to the fact that she had damaged him. She asked her lawyer (on the day of her appearance Manny had accompanied her to court for moral support) to get word to Alcibiades’s lawyer that there were no hard feelings, and that if he ever wanted her to visit him she would make every effort to get one of her friends in the building to drive her. He said, “Out of the question.”

  She read about the case in the paper, she watched televised excerpts of it on the eleven o’clock news (though she herself never appeared on the screen she heard some of her actual testimony as the camera showed Chitral’s face in all its friendly indifference; he looked, thought Mrs. Bliss, rather as he had looked when they had run into each other in the elevators or passed one another in the Towers’ public rooms), but try as she might, she never commanded the nuts and bolts of just how Ted’s Buick LeSabre and parking space fit into the kingpin’s schemes. It all seemed as complex to her as the idea of “laundering money,” a concept alien to even Dorothy’s baleboosteh soul. Building on this vaguely housekeeping analogy, however, she gradually came to think of the car serving Chitral and his accomplices as a sort of dope hamper. It was the closest she came. Manny said she wasn’t far off.

  Then, under the DEA’s new federal forfeiture laws, the government confiscated the car. Two agents came and affixed a bright yellow, heavy iron boot to its rear wheel. Mrs. Bliss came down to the garage when a neighbor alerted her to what was happening and wanted to know what was going on.

  One of the government agents said there was no room for a
pile a shit back on the lot, and they were putting her husband’s car under house arrest.

  “How would it look?” said the other agent. “People would laugh. A seventy-eight Buick LeSabre next to all those Jags, Benzes, Rolls-Royces, Corvettes, and Bentleys? Folks would think we weren’t doing our job.”

  “Please,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “you can’t leave it here. You’re dishonoring my husband’s memory.”

  “Lady,” the agent said, “you should’ve thought of that before you started doing business with those mugs.”

  She called Manny and told him what was happening. Manny from the building was there within minutes of her placing the call.

  “Aha,” Manny told her, rubbing his hands, “this, this is more like it. This appertains to real estate law. Now they’re on my turf!” The agents were fixing a long yellow ribbon from four stanchions, in effect roping off Ted Bliss’s old parking space. The lawyer went up to the government. “Just what do you gentlemen think you’re doing? It looks like a crime scene down here.”

  “It is a crime scene down here,” an agent said.

  “That parking space is private property. It belongs to my client, Mrs. Ted Bliss. It was included in the deed of sale when the condominium was originally purchased.”

  “Oh yeah?” said the agent who had finished attaching the last ribbon to the last metal stanchion and was just now adjusting the posts, pulling them taut so the ribbons formed a rectangle about the parking space. “How’s it look?” he asked his partner.

  The other agent touched his forefinger to his right thumb and held it up eye level with his face. “You’re an artist,” he said.

  “Oh yeah?” the agent, turning to Manny, said again. “We’re not just confiscating the car, we’re confiscating the parking space, too. She wants it back, she can come to the auction and make a bid just like any other American in good standing. She can make us an offer on the piece a shit, too.”

  “Sure,” said the agent who’d said it was a crime scene down there, speaking to Manny but looking directly at Mrs. Ted Bliss, “she can start with a bid five, six thousand bucks over the blue book value of the parking space.”

  The two DEA agents got into a sparkling, silver, late-model Maserati and drove the hell off, leaving Manny and Dorothy looking helplessly down at the rubber tire tracks the car had burned into the cement floor of the garage.

  It was as if she were a greenhorn. She felt besmirched, humiliated, ridden out of town on a rail. In the old days her mother had bribed an immigration official fifteen dollars and he had changed the age on Dorothy’s papers. Her alien status had never been a problem for her. There had never been a time when she felt awkward, or that she had had to hold her tongue. The years in the dress shop when she’d been more like a lady’s maid than a salesgirl, and had attempted (and sometimes actually seemed) to hide in changing rooms narrower and less than half the length and width of her husband’s cordoned-off parking space in the garage hadn’t been nearly so degrading. Even in the presence of the terrifying Mrs. Dubow, who somehow managed not only to speak to Dorothy with her mouth full of pins but even to shout at her and come after her (at least five times in the almost ten years she had worked for the deranged woman), brandishing scissors and cracking her tailor’s yellow measuring tape at Dorothy’s cowering figure as if it were a whip, she hadn’t felt the woman’s dislike so much as her pure animal rage. The next week there was likely to be an additional six or seven dollars in her pay envelope.

  It may have been nothing more than the glib way in which the two DEA men had addressed her (or addressing Manny but really speaking through him to Dorothy), but she had never felt so uncitizened, so abandoned, so bereft of appeal. Her protests would have meant nothing to them.

  Dorothy had never experienced anti-Semitism. During all the years Ted had owned his meat market, or even after he’d sold it, bought a fifty-unit apartment building in a declining neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side and become not only its landlord but, with Dorothy’s assistance, went around collecting the rent money on the first Monday of every month, she hadn’t sensed even its trace. Neither from Polack nor shvartzer. Goyim liked her. Everyone liked her, and although there were people she disliked—some of Ted’s customers when they had the butcher shop, several of her husband’s four-flusher tenants in the North Side apartment building—she herself had always felt personally admired.

  Now she wasn’t so sure. The agents had spoken in front of her as if she were the subject of gossip. From some superior plane of snobbery like a sort of wiseguy American Yiddish, they added insult to injury.

  And now the continued presence of her late husband’s car seemed like nothing so much as an assault, a kind of smear campaign. She found herself averting her eyes from the blighted automobile whenever she went down to the garage with neighbors who’d offered to drive her to her hair appointment, or take her shopping, or invited her out to restaurants.

  Actually her odd fame—she’d become a human interest story; a reporter from the Herald had written her up in a column; the host of a radio talk show wanted her as a guest—had leant her a swift cachet in the building, and people with whom she had barely exchanged a few sentences invited her to their condos for dinner. In the days and weeks following the trial Mrs. Bliss found herself accepting more of these invitations than she declined if for no other reason than that she genuinely enjoyed visiting other people’s condos in the Towers. With the exception of the penthouses, there were essentially only three basic floor plans. She got a kick out of seeing what people had done with their places and regretted only that Ted wasn’t there to see them with her.

  It was peculiar, really, Mrs. Bliss thought, that she should be interested in such matters. She was, of course, house proud. Yet the fixtures and furniture in her apartment were not only pretty much what she had brought down to Florida with her from Chicago but many of her things were pieces they’d had from the time they were first married. Massive bedroom and dining room suites that looked as if they had been carved from the same dark block of mahogany. They had bought, it would seem, for the ages. Even their living room furniture, their sofa and side tables and chairs, seemed somehow to have come from a time that predated fashion, was prior to style. In Florida, their dining room table, too big for the squeezed, sleek, modern measurements of a condominium’s efficient, reduced rooms, had had to be cut down so that what in Chicago had accommodated eight people (a dozen when there was poker and the family—the gang—was over) now barely had room for five and overwhelmed the space in which it was put. Like every other piece of their giant furniture—the great boxy chairs in the living room like the enormous chairs of Beijing bureaucrats, their thick drapes and valances—it appeared to absorb light and locate the apartment in a more northerly climate in a season more like winter or autumn than summer or spring. An air of disjointedness and vague anachronism presided even over their appliances—their pressure cooker and metal juice squeezer, their electric percolator and carving knife.

  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. Bli
ss 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.