Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

“Listen, sweetheart, maybe you should go with someone else. I may be in over my head here. It’s one thing to help out a woman, could be my older sister, to see does she absolutely have to testify, or can I get her out of it (I couldn’t, she was a material witness), then hold her hand when she goes into court, lend her moral support; another entirely when she asks me to make some cockamamy investigation of this fancy-pants South American mystery man— she says — who may or may not be involved in this whacko-nutso dope scheme operating right here from the penthouse of Building Number One.”

“A dope scheme? Another dope scheme?”

“ She says,” said Manny from the building.

And then went on to run down for Maxine, and again for Frank not half an hour later when Maxine called her brother in Pittsburgh and asked him to phone the old real estate lawyer to hear straight from the horse’s mouth what was what.

“Walk me through this, will you, Manny, please? I didn’t entirely understand all Maxine was telling me.”

“Yeah,” Manny said, “I guess I wasn’t absolutely clear. Even in law school I had trouble writing up a brief. I don’t see how they do it, the trial lawyers, make their summations and offer their final arguments. I guess that’s why I never got into litigation.”

He told Mrs. Bliss’s son about the Auveristases open house. He tried to be thorough, for, to be honest, he was just the smallest bit intimidated by this young man, an author and professor who on his occasional trips to Florida to spend some time with his mother sometimes struck him as cool, distant, even impatient with the people in the Towers who were only trying to be helpful, after all. He found the kid a little too haughty for his own good if you asked him, a little too quiet. One time Manny had attempted to reassure him. “Don’t be so standoffish,” he’d said, “they’re just showing off some of their famous Southern hospitality.”

So he tried to be thorough, walking the little asshole through the evening in the penthouse, past the buffet table, the open bar where you could ask the two mixologists for any drink you could think of, no matter what, and they would make it for you, describing the abundant assortment of hors d’oeuvres that the caterers or servants or whoever they were passed around all night even after the buffet supper was laid out, until you wouldn’t think anyone could take another bite into their mouth, no matter how delicious.

Which was why, he told Frank, he suspected there might actually be something to the old woman’s story after all.

“I mean,” Manny said, “we don’t hear a peep from these so-called South Americans in a month of Sundays, and then, tra-la-la, fa-la-lah, they’re all over the old lady with their soft drinks and mystery meats. Do you know how many varieties of coffee there had to be there?”

Manny had been walking him through it by induction, but Frank seemed confused.

“Listen to me, Manny…” Frank said.

“It ain’t proof, it isn’t the smoking gun,” Manny admitted, “but think about it, that’s all I’m asking. The ostentation. That affair. That affair had to cost them twice what we spend on our galas and Saturday night card parties all year. Who throws around that kind of money on an open house? Drug dealers! And what did he say to Mother in his very own words? ‘I’m an importer!’ ”

“Manny…”

“Even she picked up on it.”

“My mother’s under a lot of pressure.”

Then, quite suddenly, Manny lowered his voice. The bizarre impression Frank, a thousand miles off, got from his tone was that of a man to whom it had just occurred that his phone was bugged and, to defeat the device, had resorted to whispering. Frank giggled.

Manny from the building was more hurt than shocked. Shocked, why should he be shocked? He considered the source. The little prick was a prick.

“Hey,” Manny, still sotto voce, said, “put anybody you want on the case. It ain’t exactly as if I was on retainer. Get your high-priced, toney, Palm Beach lawyer back, the one you wanted to get Mother’s subpoena quashed. Get her. If you can talk her into even coming to Miami Beach!”

Maybe it was because he’d been through it four times by now. Once when Dorothy had told him about it the night of the famous open house, twice when he tried to organize his thoughts about the information he’d been given, a third time when he’d explained to Maxine what her mother had told him, and now repeating the facts of the matter to Frank. But he’d raised his voice again. He’d journeyed in the four accounts from disbelief to skepticism through a rattier rattled, scattered objectivity till he’d finally broken through on the other side to a sort of neutral passion as he’d laid their cards — his and Mrs. Bliss’s — on the table during his last go-round for the benefit of the creep.

Could it be he was a better lawyer than he’d thought? Could it be that he’d been bamboozled by all the glamour-pusses of his profession, the big corporation hotshots with their three- and four-hundred-buck-an-hour fees, all those flamboyant, wild-west criminal lawyers with their string ties and ten-gallon hats, the famous ACLU and lost-cause hotdogs who’d have defended Hitler himself if the price was right or the press and TV cameras were watching? Hey, he’d passed the same bar exams they had, and courtroom or no courtroom, had satisfied just as many clients with the careful contracts he’d drawn up for them for their real estate deals, commercial as well as residential. So maybe all there was to being a good lawyer or working up an argument was just to go over it often enough until you began to believe it yourself.

“Well, thanks for filling me in, Manny,” Frank said. “I’ll talk it over with my sister, see what she has to say. We’ll get back to you.”

“Sure,” he said. “And when you do,” Manny suggested slyly, “ask how she explains the car?”

Because the fact was the ’78 Buick LeSabre was gone. One minute it had been there in the garage and the next it had vanished, a ton or so of locked-up, bolted-down metal carried off, disappeared, pffft, just like that!

He knew well enough what he must have sounded like to them.

A troublemaker. A busybody. Some self-important Mr. Buttinsky. And in fact, though he resented it, he could hardly blame them. Sometimes, down here, retired not just from the practice of law but from the forty-or-so-year pressure of building not just a professional life, or even a family one, but the constant, minute-to-minute routine of putting together a character, assembling out of little notes and pieces of the past — significant betrayals, deaths, yearnings, successes, meaningful disappointments, and sudden gushers of grace and bounty — some strange, fearful archaeology of the present, the Self to Now, as it were, like a synopsis, some queer, running quiddity of you-ness like a flavor bonded into the bones, skin, and flesh of an animal. Of course the curse of such guys was that they didn’t know how to retire. Or when to quit.

Hadn’t Manny run into these fellows himself? There seemed to be at least one on every floor of each building in the Towers. Tommy Auveristas himself, if he weren’t a dope-smuggling Peruvian killer, might have been such a one, an arranger of favors who insinuated himself into the life of a widowed neighbor; one of those aging Boy Scout types who offered to drive in all the carpools of the quotidian; shlepping their charges to doctors’ offices; dropping them off at supermarkets, beauty parlors, banks, and travel agents; hauling them to airports; picking up their prescriptions for them or organizing their personal affairs. Bloom in Building Three had actually filed an application with the Florida Secretary of State to become a notary public. He paid the fee for the official stamp and seal out of his own pocket and offered his services at no charge — he personally came to their condos — around the Towers complex. “Best investment I ever made,” Bloom, patting his windbreaker where the weight of the heavy kit tugged at its pocket, had once confessed to him. Manny, flushing, knew what he meant. (More than a little jealous of the secrets Bloom must know or, if not secrets exactly — these were people too old and brittle for scandal — then at least the sort of interesting detail that must surely be contained in documents so necessary to the deeds, affidavits, transfers, powers of attorney, and protests of negotiable paper, that they had to be sworn to and witnessed by an official designee of the State.) Subtly, over time, making themselves indispensable, breeding a kind of dependency, a sort of familiar, a sort of super who changed locks and replaced washers and often as not had their own keys to the lady’s apartment. A certain satisfaction in being these amici curiae to the declining or lonely, heroes of the immediate who filled their days with largely unresented, if sometimes intrusive, kindnesses. In it, Manny guessed, harmlessly, to retain at least a little of the juice spilled from the bottom of what had once been a full-enough life in the bygone days before exile, retired not just from the practice of law but of character, too, that forty-or-so-year stint of dependable quiddity, individual as the intimate smell of one’s trousers and shirts.