Mrs. Ted Bliss

by Stanley Elkin

  What had taken her so long? Why hadn’t she caught on during that first, infuriating phone call? How could she not have seen through all the shabbiness right down through its full-of-malarkey, melancholy roots to the fundamental, underlying bedrock shabbiness that supported it? She should have known the minute she saw the manual typewriter, or the hunt-and-peck way the presumptive secretary had used it, or when she learned that the girl kept the magazines (if, in fact, there had ever been more than the one the girl was reading) behind the desk with her. Gypsies, they were gypsies and con men the lot of them, Iris, not-Iris, Junior Yellin. Even dead Toibb was a gypsy. Well, they all were, up to and including old Greener Hertsheim himself probably.

  It was plain as the nose. She was a visionary now. Recreational therapeusis was a sham, fodder for old call-in shows. She was a visionary now and she knew. She knew everything. (She even knew the character actor—speaking, for example, of good sports and holy clowns, she had become everyone’s ecumenical, cutesy-wootsy, Yiddishe mama and bobbe.) Sure, she thought, some visionary.

  So why was she enjoying this so much? Why had she agreed to make another appointment with Junior Yellin in a week, sooner if there was a last-minute cancellation and he could squeeze her in earlier?

  Why? Because she’d get a kick out of it, that’s why. The wild-goose chase she’d take him on. It was worth it. It was. Every penny she wouldn’t pay him when he submitted his bill. He could stand on his head, or send her letters from lawyers. Just let him try. Lawyers? Two could play at that game. She could always dust off good old pro bono Manny from the building. (Of whom it was said, though Dorothy—being herself of a generation of a different age, a generation when gender did not pit itself against gender, when men, throwing up their hands, might very well have exclaimed “Women!” but meant nothing more by it than that they were a difficult sex to read, while it would have never occurred to the ladies to make any such pronouncement—“Men!” in her day meaning something exactly the opposite, that they were all entirely too easy, the poor, simple, bumbling, babied dears, to understand, there being nothing more harmful in them than their set ways and peculiar male crotchets—couldn’t quite bring herself to believe it, that he was seeing someone now, had become, less than a full year after Rosie’s epic, historical shivah, an available man.)

  He told her to dress casually and to wear comfortable shoes, and that meanwhile he would hunt up her chart in the files and see what that was all about.

  It was worth it and, believe it or not, she went away happy.

  A coincidence occurred.

  Just as she had last time left her therapeusisist’s office on Lincoln Road and, waiting for her bus, spotted Hector Camerando, so did she this time, too. This time, however, she didn’t wave. The opposite in fact. Seeking to call no attention to herself, she forced her expression to remain fixed in place, her attitude one of suspended engagement, the neutral look of someone, well, waiting for a bus.

  It was, she reflected, an odd position to be in, as though, by seeking to evade confrontation, it was Camerando who held her marker rather than she his.

  It was apparent to her, however—her inspired visionaries were still upon her, her prescience and magic clarities—that Camerando himself was attempting to steer clear. He crossed the street, she saw, at very near the same pace and angle he’d crossed the street last time, and wore (allowing for subtle evolutions of fashion) the same sort of clothes as last time, too. Then she realized (no, knew, because if those high clarities she’d experienced at Junior Yellin’s slanted her self-awareness backward in time, she’d been bombarded, too, with perfect memory maps in sharp, precise relief) that it was the same time of day, as well.

  But if this were a contest in mutual, studied avoidance, well, it was no contest. Camerando, a kind of gangster and man of the world, was so much better at it than she was that despite herself it became too embarrassing for Mrs. Bliss to keep up. She was, as it were, the first to blink.

  She greeted him almost as he passed her.

  So it shouldn’t be a total loss she kidded herself that she did it because all these coincidences and circumstantials—the same reason for her being on the corner of Collins and Lincoln Road this time as last, his crossing at the same corner just as she was waiting for the bus, his wearing this year’s version of the same snappy clothes he’d worn that year, the fact that it had been of him she’d been thinking the other time they’d met like this and, what she didn’t acknowledge till now but knew she’d known from the moment she’d spotted him—that he was coining from the same place as he had come from then—of their twice meeting this way struck her as so unusual that they would be interesting to him, too.

  “Gee,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “how come we always run into each other like this? You got a special friend down here, Señor Hector?”

  She thought he was going to strike her. That’s how angry he seemed. Indeed, so violent was the shift in his expression, its explosion from some vaguely impatient neutrality of disengagement into feral, sudden alarm, that it was as if he had struck her. As she, Mrs. Bliss saw, had struck him. He even raised a finger to his lips as if to see if she’d drawn blood.

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “What?” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “it was like you were a million miles away. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “No, no,” Camerando said, “not at all. It’s good to see you again, Dorothy Bliss.”

  Mrs. Bliss—those crystal clarities, transparent, fluent as glass—saw what he was doing. He was collecting, composing himself. She saw what she had done. She had drawn blood.

  Then he did something astonishing. He sat down beside her on the bus bench. Even when he’d spoken so rudely to her in his car, when he’d come to her door to give her the money he said she’d won on a bet he’d put down for her at the dog track, when she’d seen him in the corridor at the Towers that time and ducked into a neighbor’s apartment to avoid him, even then she had never felt so fiercely pressed and intimidated by a man. Compared to this, his looming, heavy presence, Junior Yellin was a piker, his goosing her behind a freezer case mere kid stuff.

  “Oh,” said flustered Mrs. Bliss, at a loss for words whose thoughts were so piercing, “you don’t have your car today? You’re riding the bus?”

  Camerando looked around to see if the coast were clear. Leaning in toward her, he lowered his voice. “I have my car,” he said so softly that Mrs. Bliss had to strain to hear him. “It’s in its customary parking space. Well, you’ve seen where I park. It’s very convenient. A cop watches it for me.”

  He’s paying me back, Mrs. Bliss thought, all her clear certainties on her like a head scarf. It’s my marker. He thinks he owes me. I don’t know why, it isn’t honor, it isn’t anything. Maybe it’s superstition. Sure, she thought, it’s the marker. He wants to be done with me. He’s going to pay me off big.

  “You got me dead to rights, Mrs.,” Hector Camerando said. “I see a woman down here. Her name is Rita de Janeiro. This is only her stage name.”

  “Please,” she said. “Mr. Camerando.” It was her stage name, Rita de Janeiro? She didn’t want him to tell her her two-feet-on-the-ground name, her floor or earth name. She didn’t want him to tell her anything. She didn’t care to hear his secrets. What, this was how he was going to pay her off? This was what the street value of her marker came to? She’d have been better off with the cash. And besides, now she knew what she’d stalled him for she finally decided what her payoff should have been.

  She heard him out, but barely listened to Hector Camerando where he sat beside her on the bench in the little wooden bus stop shelter whose vague simulacrum of a confessional she wouldn’t have noticed even though she understood that what she was hearing was a confession and that he offered it to her not so much in the spirit of closing the books as to someone in authority in whom he’d vested an almost magical power of forgiveness and amnesty. No one, not Frank
, not Marvin on his deathbed, not Ted on his, had ever spoken to her like this.

  “She’s a topless dancer. She makes me crazy, she drives me wild. Did you see The Blue Angel? Emil Jannings played a good part in that picture. He was an important professor but he fell in love with a nightclub singer, Marlene Dietrich. He’d do anything for Marlene Dietrich, anything. She took him for all he was worth, but all she ever did was make a fool out of him and give him the horns.

  “I’ll tell you something about myself. I’m not a professor. I don’t live with my head in the sky. Well, you know from personal experience what I can do. With the jai alai. With the pooches. Dollars-and-cents-wise, I turn water into wine. I got so much juice and clout I have to watch myself.

  “Now I want you to understand something, Mrs. B. Excuse me, but I was never particularly horny. I was never particularly orientated to a behind or a leg or a bust line. Excuse me, but I was never particularly orientated even to the big C or any other of the female parts and features—the eyes, the hands, the teeth, a smile, the skin. For me it wasn’t even the whole person I was interested in.

  “What I’m talking about, and I think you’ll understand this, is general passion, consuming lust.”

  “I don’t understand it,” Mrs. Bliss said.

  “I mean, of course Rita de Janeiro is her stage name. Oh, I don’t mean it had to be Rita de Janeiro. That’s just a flag of convenience, that’s just what her and her manager agreed on. It could have been anything. It could have been Mrs. Ted Bliss.”

  Mrs. Ted Bliss winced.

  “She’d just had her first period when she started. So of course she had a stage name. The truant officer would have reported her otherwise. And they wouldn’t just have shut that place down,”—he pointed toward a small brick building on the other side of Collins Avenue, undistinguished except for the fact that it looked more like a Chicago saloon (down to a high rectangular window built into the side of one wall like a wildly offset postage stamp) than Miami’s usual stucco, faintly iridescent pastel, mother-of-pearl, plaster-of-paris structures—“they’d of burned it.

  “Hey,” Camerando said, “I’m not kinky. I don’t have nothing for little girls. Only this little girl. Only Rita.”

  “She’s what, twelve?”

  “Twelve when she broke into the business,” Camerando said. “She’ll be a senior next year. She’s sixteen. Next week she takes the test for her driver’s license. I’m going to surprise her with a car if she passes. Hell,” he said, “even if she don’t pass. I got this cute convertible in mind. Her little ass was just made for it.”

  He didn’t bother to keep his voice down now. He’d set decorum aside, safety, almost as if he’d become Emil Jannings himself, Mrs. Bliss a version of Marlene Dietrich. God knew why, but he’d identified a power in her, too, offering his confession like a sacrifice. She knew she could take advantage of him. She still held his marker. She could take him for all he was worth.

  “Can you get me in to see Alcibiades Chitral?” This was the marker she had wanted to call in.

  “Hey,” Camerando said.

  Because now she was on his turf again. And she understood that whatever powers he’d granted her, whatever the specific amounts he permitted her to draw upon from her letter of credit, they were not infinite. They were only social, friendly. They were merely honorary amounts and powers.

  “But you said,” Mrs. Bliss said, her tone quavering, a whiny, petulant register that, even had she heard it clearly, she might not have recognized.

  “What did I say?”

  “About the water and wine,” Mrs. Bliss said. “All you could do,” she said, her voice trailing off.

  “Agh,” Camerando said, “I’m all talk.”

  He wasn’t of course. It was just more of the same. Another way to put you on, trip you up—YOU, DOROTHY BLISS, HAVE ALREADY WON…And there were all her prizes, written down, in black and white, the number to call. No fine print. No hidden clauses. Just go try claiming them. See what they do to you. Tie you up in the courts years. Make you sorry you were ever born.

  But he wasn’t. If he was all talk, life was all talk; God, death, blood, love were all talk. The world was all talk.

  She, she was helpless. She was. Look at him, smell him beside her there on the bench, all his showy shtarker maleness. His expensive, dry-clean-only necktie and matching pocket handkerchief, the shine on his expensive shoes. See how at ease he is, how he sits on the bus bench as if he owns it, though Mrs. Bliss knows it must be years since the last time he waited for a bus. So don’t tell her he’s all talk, or that he couldn’t get her into the prison to see Alcibiades Chitral if he wanted, or maybe only if she hadn’t made it all sound so urgent and by letting him see how much she wanted it, that that gave him just that much more advantage over her. Though God only knows why he’d want it or how he would ever use it. Except, Mrs. Bliss thought, that’s why people accumulated power and advantage, like misers socking it away bit by bit for a rainy day.

  “All right,” she said, “if you can’t, you can’t. Here’s my bus.”

  The very next day, when she went down to pick up her mail, Louise Munez greeted Mrs. Bliss, though no one else was in the lobby, with a series of elaborate, conspiratorial winks and hand gestures. The woman, who struck Dorothy as having grown even more increasingly bizarre over the past few months, had mimed a sort of no-hurry, it-can-wait, take-your-time, I’m-not-going-anywhere message. To her surprise Mrs. Bliss was able to pick up every nuance of this strange foreigner’s perfectly syntaxed body language—that after she’d retrieved her mail, and if the coast was clear, she should stop by the security desk before going back upstairs.

  “What?” Mrs. Bliss asked. “Did you want to see me?”

  The Munez woman reproached Mrs. Ted Bliss with a scowl, as if to warn her that the walls had ears. She shook her head sadly.

  “What?” Mrs. Bliss said.

  “You should have let him,” Louise said.

  “What? Who? What should I have let him?”

  “Your boy Frank,” Louise said, “the last time he was down here. You should have let him put up a signal light in your apartment that tell when someone at your door, or even if your intercom is buzzing. Those things are perfected now you know. They’re state-of-the-art. If you’re waiting will there be improvements down the line or will they come down in price, I can say to you that in my opinion there won’t, and they’ll never be no cheaper than they are right now either. It’s your business, Mrs. Bliss, but who’s Security here, me or you?”

  She’s loony, Dorothy thought, but where does she get her information? Did I say to her about Frank and the gadgets? Does she read my mail? Should I tell her poor mother? Nah, nah, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, the both of them are unfortunates. Why should I mix in? Does it cost me anything she reads my mail? Do I have secrets? The mad woman, Louise, maybe she guards Building One to protect her mother. What damage is done?

  “You wanted to see me?” Mrs. Bliss said.

  Louise selected two keys from an immense ring, opened a drawer in her desk with one, a long black metal box like a safety deposit box with the other. With silent, formal fanfare she took an envelope out of the box and handed it to Dorothy.

  “A messenger brought it for you in a limo.”

  “In a limo he brought it?”

  YOU, DOROTHY BLISS, she was thinking, HAVE ALREADY WON…

  “He wanted to take it up but I thought, No, let him give it to me. She won’t hear the door, she hasn’t got signal lights. I say, ‘When she come for the mail I hand it to her.’ He didn’t want to give it to me. I don’t know, maybe he don’t want to go away without his tips, I don’t know. But he comes in a limo. This is suspicious. ‘What’s the matter,’ I tell him, ‘you can’t read? It don’t say on the sign tradesmen got to leave stuff at the security desk?’ ”

  It was from Alcibiades Chitral.

  “My dear Mrs. Bliss,” wrote Chitral in the letter Louise had handed her, “technically, of cours
e, your lawyer was right when he advised you that it would be extraordinarily difficult for you to arrange to visit me in prison. In their paranoia, governments often write laws to protect themselves from all sorts of contingencies, real and imagined. In this instance they were seeking, on the basis that a prisoner might be engaged in filing an appeal, to limit congress between a felon and any material witness whose testimony was substantively instrumental in the felon’s conviction.

  “So Manny was right, though he overstated the case. He’s a good lawyer and you’re lucky to have him, but when he told you that a visit between us was out of the question he should really have said that, from the system’s point of view, it was inadvisable.