Mrs. Ted Bliss

by Stanley Elkin

  And the odd thing, the odd thing was he liked the woman. She reminded him of his mother. That’s why he felt free to poke about the holes in her character.

  While she, in her turn, had poked about his. All her damn questions.

  All right, Camerando thought, I’ll turn myself in.

  “Do you know, Mrs. Ted, what I do?”

  She didn’t. Again, she was without interest and could barely manage to muster the energy to look at him.

  “I’m with the jai alai interests,” he said.

  He didn’t look at her and couldn’t tell whether she was watching him or even, for that matter, if she’d heard him or, if she had, taken his meaning. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I’m a major jai alai kingpin. From little Rhode Island to South Florida important Basque athletes sit by their phones waiting for my calls. Ditto the greyhounds, so to speak. Ditto almost the little fucking mechanical rabbit.

  “What, you don’t believe me? Lady, I could give you tips, make you big winners. Spread your bets around, lay them off wisely, you don’t get impatient or too greedy, I could fix it up pretty good with your life. I could put you in a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath, full kitchen, living/dining room area with the convertible screened-in/glassed-in California rooms and a view of Biscayne Bay to knock your eyes out. And this is just starters, openers. I see you in penthouses. I see you in the great gorgeous restricted digs of West Palm. I can do this. Truly. No fooling. What do you say?”

  “Sure,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “why not?”

  FIVE

  She took him at his word. She bet sparingly, did not grow impatient or, at least in a conventional sense, greedy, and two years later was still in the same condo.

  She was very proud of this. It became a sort of referent of her character, a means by which she took her moral temperature. Mrs. Bliss knew her stuff. The lessons of those caper crooks in movies was not lost on her, those essentially victimless-crime villains enjoined to hold their horses, to wait out the statute of limitations before they cashed in on their shady bonanzas. Always, in these shows, one or another of the partners couldn’t hold out, snapped, failed the rest, and drew down destruction on their mutual enterprise. And, since she had no other partners, Mrs. Bliss felt all the better about her self-control.

  If she didn’t feel entirely honorable she had only her embarrassment to blame, her modesty; even, in a way, another aspect of what wasn’t even personality anymore so much as a matter of some long-standing tidiness of spirit. It would, after all, have required her actually to call Hector Camerando to ask him to give her the winner of a particular match, a specific race, and she could no more have abused this privilege than she could have asked her husband for extra money to run the household. Not that either of them would have refused. It was her need not to appear needy, a saving of face, that held her bets down. Indeed, if she hadn’t infrequently run into Hector Camerando—he hadn’t moved, he still lived in the Towers; Louise Munez’s information was either faulty or he’d changed his mind—she might never have placed a bet at all. Yet always on the rare occasions he saw her he chastised her for not asking for his tips. That he hadn’t forgotten his offer made him, well, heroic to Dorothy and, on these occasions, she almost always felt obliged to place a bet or, rather, allowed him to place one for her. The first time this happened she hadn’t even known she’d won until he came to her door to hand her her winnings. He gave her four hundred dollars.

  “So much? Why so much?”

  “It was a lock. A dead-solid certainty. The dog went off at twenty to one. I put down twenty dollars for you.”

  Surprisingly, her first reaction was one of anger, her second of shame, because although she said nothing to indicate her disappointment that if it was such a certainty he could easily have put down more than twenty dollars, she knew he’d seen the momentary blister of rage on her face. “Wait,” she said. Then, to cover her confusion, she excused herself and went off to get her purse. When she returned Camerando thought she had been looking for a place to put the money; instead she began to fumble with the bills in her wallet. She wasn’t wearing her glasses and had to hold them up close to her face. “Here,” Mrs. Bliss said, and handed Camerando a ten, a five, and five singles.

  “What’s this?” Hector said.

  “The twenty dollars you put down for me.”

  She knew they weren’t quits, but it was the best she could think to do at the time.

  Afterward, she tried to avoid him. She really did. And, once, just as she was leaving the apartment of a Towers friend she had been visiting and she spotted him step out of an elevator and walk down the corridor toward her, she quickly reversed fields and turned back to reenter the apartment she had left just seconds before. She had moved with such agility—this would have been when she was in her early seventies—that she quite startled her friend who was still in the process of shutting the door. “Oh,” Dorothy said, “did I leave my purse here? I think I left my purse here.”

  “Dorothy,” said her friend, “what’s wrong, sweetheart? You’re carrying your purse. It’s right there on your arm.”

  “Is it? Oh, my,” she explained, “it’s been like that all day. I’m running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”

  “Maybe you should say something to Robins.”

  “Robins?” said Mrs. Bliss. “No, it’s nothing. You don’t see a doctor because once in a while you’re absentminded.”

  When she thought it was safe, she bade her friend goodbye a second time and stepped out again into the hallway. She could feel the woman watching her and turned back to look. Her friend smiled broadly and made an exaggerated gesture in the direction of the elevator as if to assure Dorothy she was headed in the right direction.

  Is that how they thought of her? Like she was an idiot? She’d give them idiot. She bet she could spot most of them the names of ten people who lived in the Towers and come up with more of their buildings, floors, and apartment numbers than anyone. She could have been the damn postman here!

  It occurred, of course, that she could have given that oysvorf, her friend so-called, something to think about. All she had to do was explain Camerando and why she was trying to avoid him.

  Then they’d really have me going to the doctors, Dorothy thought, and giggled. Running away from some tall, dark, and handsome character who was trying to force money on her without, except for lifting her hands to receive it, her lifting her hands.

  “You’re too proud,” they’d say, “introduce me!”

  But she wasn’t. Too proud, that is. It had nothing to do with pride. Nor, like so many of these widowed, tummy-tucked, liposuctioned, double-dentured, face-lifted, hair-dyed, foolish old husband hunters, the Never-Too-Late brigade, was she looking for a man, or a boyfriend, or even a companion with whom she could go to a movie. In Mrs. Ted Bliss’s experience, it wasn’t true what they told you, the experts, the AARP people, all the high-powered gerontologists and aging-gracefully crowd—that desire burned a hole in your pocket even on your deathbed. Speaking personally, she hadn’t felt that way about a man since Ted, olov hasholem, had lost his life. Or even, if you want to know, since the time his cancer was first diagnosed. Well, she’d been afraid of hurting him and, more shamefully, of his hurting her, of her contracting, though she knew better, a piece of his illness.

  And, if you had to know all the truth, she’d never so much as touched herself, not once, not in her whole life. So, as far as Mrs. Bliss was concerned, it was bunk, and they were full of it if they said that the sex drive in a healthy person didn’t die. What, she wasn’t healthy? She was healthy. She was plenty healthy. It was those others, the oversexed ones, who couldn’t accept that there was a time and a place for everything and went on searching for the fountain of youth long after it ceased to be appropriate.

  Like her friend, who’d only have snickered and kidded her about having a fancy man if she so much as said a word about Camerando.

  But even that wasn’t the reason she not onl
y kept Hector Camerando’s name out of the picture but took actual pains to avoid him. She was saving him. He was money in the bank, something she’d set aside for a rainy day, and she was, she liked to think, playing him like some of the men in the Towers played the stock market.

  Now Dorothy was no fool. Just as she knew there was a time and a place for everything, she understood, without ever having come across the actual words, the notion that there is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood, et cetera. He might be riding high right now with his Basques and his greyhounds, but she had known plenty of his type back in Chicago, high rollers, heavy winners and losers in a thousand enterprises, men, competitors of Ted’s who followed the trends and locations like dowsers, and opened stores and businesses first in this place, then in that, who had buildings, sold them here, bought them there—wiseguys, into the rackets some of them, always with some new deal on the books, mavins one day, bankrupts the next, but make no mistake, people you had to take seriously, men who always seemed to have good reasons for what they did. Ted, who’d lost his life, had never been one of them, knock wood and thank God. He told Dorothy that what it finally came down to was a failure of nerve, and asked her forgiveness as if, in a way, he held her responsible, their three, then two, children, his family responsibilities. Only one time, during the war, when he splurged and bought the farm in Michigan where he raised and slaughtered his own cattle to sell on the black market, had he behaved otherwise. It wasn’t Dorothy, though he used her as an excuse to sell it at a loss only eleven months after he bought it. They’d made money hand over fist; he’d had no reason to sell. It was his failure of nerve and not her complaints about having to live on a place that morning to night stank of cow shit and urine and God knows what awful odors of sour milk and fermenting hay. In town, she had turned even the odd stares of the grauber yung and anti-Semites into reluctant grins with her cheery, preemptive greetings and comments and deliberately clownish ways.

  What, they’d never seen Jews before? They thought they had horns, tails? They never dreamed Jews could be comely and clean? If, before going into the little village for supplies, she showered in the infrequently hot water of their primitive bathroom and got herself up in her nicest hats and dresses and furs and nylons and shoes, if she put on her makeup as carefully as she might if she’d been going to synagogue on the highest holiday, it wasn’t to flaunt her beauty or show off her big-city fashions but to defy the epithet of “dirty Jew.” She took the insult not only personally but literally, too, and, drawing on all her old, childish notions of shmutsdread and trayf, meant to get round it literally, by turning herself into a sort of sterile field. (And wasn’t that freezing Michigan village with its wood houses and all its big, powerful goyim and blond, rosy-cheeked shiksas enough like its old Russian counterparts that as soon as she saw it it was like forty years had dropped away from her just like that?) So it wasn’t just for herself that she went to these ridiculous lengths. (To avoid getting shit on them, she wore galoshes over her high heels and removed them, setting them down on the side of the road only after coming within sight of the tiny town.) On the contrary. As far as she was concerned she would have donned overalls and walked all the way into town without so much as bothering to scrape the muck from her boots. No, it was for Ted that she went to extremes, for Marvin and Frank and Maxine. To honor her mother and her father and the memory of all her Jewish relatives and all her Jewish playmates who had ever suffered some Cossack’s insult. To rub her cleanliness in the faces of the gentiles.

  Who of course she thought too benighted ever to take her point, but doing it anyway, as much a victim of her own rituals and superstitions as Hector Camerando with his degree-of-difficulty reparations.

  Because, for herself, he needn’t have bothered. She’d never have made it an issue between them or thrown it in his face. Sure. She hated the farm, was appalled from the first moment she’d seen it. Which was at night, so how much of its ramshackle and disrepair could she have actually seen? The darkness at the cozy edges of the candlelight was soft, a layered dark of flickering, unfocused textures. Even the chill beyond the thrown heat of their woodstove seemed a sort of complementary, necessary fiction, lending a kind of magic, olly-olly-oxen-free privilege to the room, a port-in-a-storm illusion of harbor. In the morning she could see just how close they’d actually come to shipwreck. What was wooden in the room was splintered, the fragile chairs they sat on just steps up from kindling. The homespun of the curtains that hung above their windows was so dusty it seemed clogged with a kind of powder. Only Marvin, ten or eleven at the time, was excited by their new arrangements. Four-year-old Maxine was frightened by the animal noises. The baby choked on the dust. Ted, as if he’d been born to it, was already out working the barns.

  He hadn’t told Dorothy a thing. For months he’d been placing and taking mysterious phone calls at all hours. The voices, if she managed to get to the phone before Ted, were mostly unrecognizable to her. Sometimes they were even female, and once or twice she thought they may have been customers from the store. Another time she thought she distinctly recognized Junior’s voice. She’d even asked, “Junior, is that you?” but he’d hung up without answering her. Junior was Milton, Herbie Yellin’s boy. Nobody knew why he was called Junior. Dorothy had other, less polite names for him. Early on, and for only a very brief time, he’d been the single partner Ted had ever had. Dorothy had never liked him. He was married to a very nice girl and had two beautiful children, but he was a drunk, a heavy gambler, a philanderer, and flirted with every pretty woman who came into the shop. Once, before the holidays, when they’d been very busy and Mrs. Bliss was helping out behind the counter, he even tried to rub up against Dorothy in a disgusting, filthy way.

  Now Dorothy wasn’t blind. All butchers were flirts. The female customers seemed to expect it and were flattered by it. (It was good for business, even.) Mrs. Bliss had a theory that she’d mentioned to Ted.

  “I think butchers flirt because they’re always working with meat.”

  Her husband blushed.

  “That’s why, isn’t it? Ted? No, I’m serious.”

  “Sure,” said Mr. Bliss. “You hit the nail on the head. Some go for the pot roasts, the rest for the chickens.”

  She would have mentioned the incident with Junior, too, but she was afraid of what might happen. Ted was a gentle man, but it wasn’t unknown for partners to use their carving knives in a fit of temper. It wasn’t Junior’s life she feared for but her husband’s. Since he’d touched her she imagined Junior capable of any outrage. If it happened again, though…

  And that’s why she was so bothered by those telephone calls at all hours. Dorothy was frightened Ted might be taking up with Junior again. The gonif had stolen from them once (tricks with the books), and though Herbie Yellin, Junior’s father, had made good their losses (or Dorothy might have taken up a carving knife herself and cut him where it would do the most good), she knew he could rob them again. It was in his nature to be a thief, and not just a thief but someone who deliberately went out of his way to betray the people who were closest to him. Look how he treated his wife, or, fallen down drunk, how he must have appeared to his beautiful children. Look what he’d done to Ted, and how he ran to his daddy whenever he got too far behind in his gambling debts. Was it any wonder Mrs. Bliss didn’t want him back in their lives?

  But whenever she tried to bring up the subject of the calls with Ted her husband just shrugged and denied that there was anything going on and changed the subject. Sometimes he smiled and winked, conveying that if he really was up to something it wasn’t anything she needed to worry about.

  Then he sprang the farm on her!

  Then he told her—it was in the old, ruined farmhouse that first night after the children had fallen asleep—that the thing of it was that it was a black-market operation. He knew he could trust her, he said. It was no big deal, he said. It was 1942, probably already the middle of the war, and time to strike while the iron was s
till hot. It was the first time they’d really ever had any opportunity to cash in big. Fortunes were to be made in meat. And did Dorothy remember what it was like during the Depression, how no one had the money for the better cuts of meat and the only way they’d managed to get by was by eating up half their inventory? And every independent butcher he knew was into it directly or indirectly. Some were taking under the table for monkey business with the ration books. And some were charging whatever the traffic would bear no matter how hard the OPA tried to hold prices down. And some sons of bitches had given up the butcher profession completely and had become full-time ration-stamp counterfeiters. Now that was really a dirty thing to do, and hurt the war effort, and Ted wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. What he was trying to accomplish with his little operation was just to go to the source, become the source and set up his own little business. Why let big shots like Swift and Armour and Mr. Hormel Ham soak up all the profits and leave nothing over for the little guy? It was supply and demand, he said. Didn’t Dorothy know anything about supply and demand? It was how business did business, he said, and if Dorothy didn’t understand that even the war effort worked by that principle, then all he could say was that he was offering her a very valuable lesson. “Well,” Ted said, “what do you think?”

  “Does Junior Yellin have anything to do with this?”

  “Junior’s out of it. He found the place. Then all he did was put me in touch with the guy who owned it.”

  “And took a cut, I suppose.”

  “He took his commission. He’s entitled to his little commission. Even Junior Yellin has a right to live, Dorothy.”

  This last was not something Dorothy entirely agreed with—the philandering, the gambling, the drunkenness, the lovely wife and beautiful kids, the funny business with Ted’s books, the funny business when he tried to try something with her—and although she knew her husband hated anyone speaking ill of his old partner (despite the fact that the no-good had cheated him), she understood that if she found out that Junior still maintained the slightest connection with this new operation, she would say something, she would have to, even if it meant spilling the beans about what had happened to her in back of the case in which the meat was displayed. (Though she understood her husband’s loyalty to Junior. She really did. It was the loyalty of family and, in a way, she shared it. The old loyalty of battle stations and circling wagons—all the closed ranks of blood. The world was humiliating enough. You couldn’t afford to live in a double-dealing world where you thought you were subject to being humiliated by partners, too. Of course old man Yellin had bailed out his boy by making restitution. Of course Ted had not broken up their partnership; of course it had been Herbie Yellin who had insisted that his son, so ruthlessly charged, so mercilessly done in by a partner who actually took the word of the accountant, an outsider, against the needs of a son who if he futzed the books did so out of necessity—those mounting gambling debts and the high price of his high nature with the floozies and bimbos he kept on the side. You came, you sprang to the defense of family. Dorothy understood this and even admired old Yellin for paying them back, then telling them off, and then insisting that it was Junior who had dissolved the partnership. Your dear ones were dear, no matter. Whatever was yours was.