Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

So he swung for the fences. He had to.

“Enoch,” he said, “ please. ”

“Who is this?” the DEA guy said.

“Hey,” Manny said very softly, “hey, Enoch, relax. I’m a repo man, too. Tommy Auveristas has turned you over to me.”

“Who?” Eddes asked, genuinely puzzled, totally, it seemed to Manny, without guile or affectation, nothing left of his own assumed character and more innocent than Manny could ever have imagined, as innocent, perhaps, as he’d been when he’d eaten his breakfast in his suburb that morning, when he’d hugged his kids and pecked his wife on the cheek, his own shoes pinching first and crying uncle in his surprised stupidity. “Who did you say?”

“I think,” said Manny from the building, “I may have reached a wrong number,” and hung up.

Later, Manny told Mrs. Ted Bliss’s children, they’d all have a good laugh over it. And by the way, he told them, smiling, they were off the hook and didn’t owe him dinner after all.

“Dinner?” Frank said.

“Well, I didn’t do anything to earn it, did I? What did I do, place a couple of phone calls to the Drug Enforcement Agency? Please. It’s nothing. You see, Frank, you see, Maxine, did I lie? Did I? I am a friend of the family. Just another good neighbor even if I’m not from South America and all I ever was was a Detroit real estate lawyer. It was my pleasure. It really was. I don’t say I wasn’t nervous. I was plenty nervous. You don’t live in the greater Miami area, you don’t know. I don’t care how many times you’ve seen reports on TV, all those Haitian and Cuban boatload exposés, the drug wars and race riots, the spring break orgies and savings and loan firesalers, all the Portuguese man-of-war alerts — unless you live down here and take the paper you have no idea what goes on. There are migrant workers not an hour away who live in conditions South African blacks would not envy. I’m telling you the truth, Maxine and Frank. You think it’s all golf and fishing and fun in the sun? You have a picture in your head of beautiful weather, round-the-clock security guards, and moderate-priced, outside cabins on three-day getaway cruises to the islands. What the hell do you know?”

Maxine rather enjoyed listening to him. He was a silly, heavily cologned, pretentious fool, but at least he was on the scene down there, a self-proclaimed stand-up sort in her mother’s corner. If he knew too much about her business, well, who else did the woman have? She wouldn’t hear of selling the condo and coming to live with them in Cincinnati. God knows how many times Maxine had invited her to. It was exasperating. If she didn’t want to be a burden, she would have understood. If she treasured her independence. If she’d made friends with whom she was particularly comfortable. But keeping the place up so that when she died Frank and Maxine and their dead brother Marvin’s fatherless children should have an inheritance? A roof over their heads? This was a reason? Not that Maxine wasn’t secretly glad — and not so secretly, she’d discussed it with George — that Dorothy refused to take her up on it, but let’s face it, her mother was getting to an age when sooner or later — probably later, her health, knock wood, was pretty good but there were no guarantees — something would have to give. A way would have to be found to deal with her physical needs. Manny from the building was a nice enough guy, but let’s face it, fair-weather friend was written all over him. And why shouldn’t it be? He had a wife, Rosie, who was decent enough, and God knows she’d always seemed willing to put herself out, but quite frankly had to be at least a little conflicted where Maxine’s mother was concerned. And who could blame her, all the time he’d spent with her in the year since Alcibiades Chitral’s trial?

What, Frank Bliss wondered, was with this guy? He wasn’t nervous? He was still nervous, or why would he be talking so much? And what was all that Florida Confidential crap about, the Miami killing fields? What was he up to? Was he selling protection, was this some kind of special condo old-guy scam? Did every retired old-widow hand down here have some corner he worked, spraying some dark territoriality, pacing off places where he might grind his particular ax?

What the hell do I know? Well, heck, Manny, he’d felt like telling him, sure, I know all about it. That and stuff you never even mentioned, the it’s-never-too-late and lonely hearts bobbe myseh and December/December alliances. The two-can-live-cheaper-than-one arrangements. That’s what I know, old boy, so just watch where you grind your particular ax.

He reined himself in. It wasn’t that he knew his mother simply wasn’t the type. She wasn’t of course, and he thought he understood what a Chinese water torture loneliness must have put her through in the years since his father had died, but all of a sudden and out of the blue, God help him, he thought he saw his mother through Manny’s eyes, through the eyes, he meant, God help him, of another man. She had to have been six or seven years older than Manny. And despite the pride Ted had taken in his wife’s appearance, her reputation for beauty even deep into her sixties, the woman had aged. Manny, on the other hand, still seemed to be in pretty good shape. All you had to do was look at him, his tan the shade of perfectly made toast. If he weren’t married he could have had the pick of the litter. What could a guy like Manny possibly see in his mother? A man would have to be pretty desperate to want to sleep with a woman like her.

Then, another bolt from the blue, he felt blind-sided by shame. What was it in the air down here that poisoned your spirit? Why, he wondered, did he despise Manny more now that he understood there could have been nothing between them, than when he worried about the guy’s officious, overbearing manner?

It’s all this fucking humidity and sea air, he thought, some steady oxidizing of the soul.

Maxine was feeling shame, too. She realized not only how glad she was her mother didn’t want to move to Cincinnati but how happy it made her that Dorothy wouldn’t sell the condo, how nice it would be to have it after, God forbid, her mother had died. She thought of all the times Dorothy had shown her records of the certificates of deposit she was accumulating, how she rolled them over whenever they came due, reinvesting, building on the booming interest rates they were earning just now, showing where she kept her bankbooks with their stamped, inky entries like marks in a passport, proud of her compounding interest, of living within her means on social security, on Ted’s pension from the butcher’s union, the monthly benefit of a modest insurance policy he’d taken out, the miracle of money, mysteriously richer now than when Ted was alive, showing off even the rubberbanded discount coupons she cut, the fat wads of paper like a gambler’s stake, Maxine all the while superstitiously protesting, “Spend it, Ma, spend it; it’s yours. Don’t stand in the heat waiting for a bus when you have to go out someplace. Call cabs, take taxis. You don’t even have to wait outside. Whoever’s on duty at the security desk will buzz you when it comes.”

I’m such a shit, Maxine thought, pretending to change the subject, deliberately averting my eyes whenever she tries to show me this stuff, but glad of Mother’s miserliness, even, God help me, dependent on it.

“You know,” Manny was saying, “when your dad, olov hasholem, passed away I don’t think your mother had made out more than three dozen checks in her whole life. Is this true, Dorothy?”

“I never needed,” Mrs. Bliss said defensively. “Whatever I needed — for the house, for the kids — he gave me. If I needed…needed? If I wanted, he gave me. My every whim — mah-jongg, the beauty parlor, kaluki, the show.”