Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

Poor shmuck didn’t know what to count as a billable hour. Finally decided as he went around eating his liver waiting on the cold day in hell for Frank or Maxine to get back to him — ha ha, hoo hoo, and next year in Jerusalem — that all he’d say, if they asked, which they wouldn’t, was that all he ever was was a small-timer, a lousy little Detroit real estate lawyer, and that until their mom he’d never put in a minute of pro bono in his life and that this was his chance, Frank, my pleasure, Maxine, though he might call them collect once in a while to keep them posted. No no, that wasn’t necessary, he already had a large-screen TV, he already had a fine stereo, he already had a Mont Blanc pen, but if they insisted, if it made them more comfortable, then sure, they could give him dinner once the dust settled and Mother was easy again in her heart.

As it happened, he didn’t have to wait long after all. Frank and Maxine were there not long after he’d placed his first phone call to the DEA people.

He looked them up in the Miami Southern Bell white pages. Quite frankly, he was surprised that they were actually listed. The CIA was listed, too. So was NASA and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. This brought home to Manny from the building that law degree or no law degree, senior citizen or no senior citizen, Golden Ager or no Golden Ager, just exactly what a naive babe-in-the-woods he actually was. He even had second thoughts about his mission. Here he was, proposing to go up pro bono against possible drug lords, dances with assholes, with nothing to be gained except the thrill of the chase. He was a married man, he had grandchildren, responsibilities. He and his wife were hosting the seder this year, ten people. Flying down — his treat — his graduate student daughter-in-law, his thirty-eight-year-old, out-of-work, house-husband son and their two vildeh chei-eh; his sister and brother-in-law — also in Florida, Jacksonville not Miami — and a couple of old people from South Beach one of the Jewish agencies would be sending over — a matched pair of personal Elijahs. (It was his wife’s idea; Manny hated the idea of having strangers in his home, no matter how old they were.) So it wasn’t as if he needed the additional aggravation.

Personally, if you want to know, like a lot of the people down here, the strangers from South Beach, and even Mrs. Ted Bliss herself, Manny was a little terrified of the very idea of Florida. Hey, who’s fooling who? Nobody got out of this place alive. It was like that place in Shakespeare from whose bourn no traveler returned.

Was that why he did it? Was that why? Him and all the other old farts, the buttinskies and busybodys, that crew of Boy Scouts, shleppers, and superannuated crossing guards — all that gung-ho varsity of amici curiae? For the last-minute letters their good deeds might earn them? Not the thrill of the chase at all, finally, so much as the just pure clean pro bono of it? Was that what all that tasteless, vaudeville clothing they wore was all about — their Bermuda gatkes and Hawaiian Punch shirts? Their benevolent dress code like the bright colors and cute cuddlies calming the walls on the terminal ward of a children’s hospital.

So he placed that first phone call to the agency. Getting, of course, exactly what he expected to get, talking, or listening rather, to a machine with its usual, almost infinite menu of options. “Thank you for calling the Drug Enforcement Agency. Our hours, Monday to Friday, are blah blah blah. For such-and-such information please press one; for such-and-so please press two; for so-and-such please press three; for…” He listened through about a dozen options until the machine, he thought a bit impatiently, told him that if he was calling from a rotary phone he should stay on the line and an operator would get to him as soon as it was his turn. (Manny was fascinated by the DEA’s choice of canned music.) It had already been established that he was naive, a babe-in-the-woods, but he was no dummy. He realized that no one calling the main number of the DEA on that or any other day would have any better idea than Manny had from the various choices, which went by too swiftly anyway, which button to press, that they would all be staying on the line. He hung up, called again, and, for no better reason than that it was the number of Mrs. Ted Bliss’s building, pressed one.

He explained to some employee in the Anonymous Tips Department that he was interested in finding out why a certain party’s car that had been last seen in the parking garage of this particular address he happened to know of had been suddenly been removed from the premises.

“Who is this?” asked the guy in Anonymous Tips.

“A friend of the family.”

“Unless you can be more specific…” the bureaucrat said.

He was Mrs. Bliss’s counsel now and acting under the Midwest real estate bar association’s scrupulous injunction to do no harm. He didn’t want to get his client in Dutch. And he was terrified, a self-confessed, small-time old-timer from the state of Michigan who’d earned his law degree from a night school that shared not only the same building but often the same classrooms with a local business college, so that it had been not just his but the experience of several of his classmates, too, that they frequently met the girls they would marry there, striking up their first halting conversations with them during that brief milling about in the halls between classes, the seven or eight minutes between the time Beginning Shorthand or Advanced Typing was letting out and Torts or Contracts was about to start up, an ideal symbiosis, the future secretaries meeting their future husbands, the future lawyers, the future lawyers courting their future wives and secretaries, but something the least bit provisional and backstairs about these arrangements, so that, well, so that there was a sort of irremediable rip in the fabric of their confidence and courage. Which explained his hesitancy and pure rube fear, and made Manny appreciate the nice irony of his having been connected to a division of the agency that dealt under a promise of the condition of anonymity. But didn’t mitigate a single inch of who he was. In fact, all the more fearful when he gazed down at his brown old arms coming out of the colorful, short-sleeved shirt he wore, the deep tan of a younger, healthier, sportier man, tan above his station, as if there were something not quite on the up-and-up about his appearance. How many Jews, Manny wondered idly, could there even be in the DEA?

And how could he be more specific when what he needed to hear was something he didn’t even want to know?

But he was on the clock, even if it were only a courtesy clock. He came suddenly out of his withering funk, inexplicably energized, inspired. “Put me through to the fella drives that late-model, silver Maserati as a loaner,” Manny demanded sharply.

“Yeah,” said a man, “this is Enoch Eddes.” The voice was hesitant, suspicious, perhaps even a little fearful. Manny guessed it was unaccustomed to taking phone calls from members of the public.

“Enoch Eddes, the repo man?”

“What the fuck!”

“Enoch, Enoch,” Manny said as though the man had just broken his heart.

“What the fuck,” Enoch said again, a little more relaxed this time, gentled into a sort of compliance, Manny supposed, by the faintly compromised argot of Manny’s thrown, ventriloquized character. Vaguely it felt good on him, like those first few moments when one tries on new, perfectly shined shoes in a shoe store, but Manny knew he couldn’t maintain it or hope to keep pace with this trained professional. In a few seconds it would begin to pinch and he would revert to his old Manny-from-the-building self.