Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

What could a man like Hector Camerando want here?

He had seen Mrs. Ted Bliss, too, and was coming toward her.

Does he recognize me? They’d bumped into each other maybe a grand total of three or four times since they’d met. He lives in Building Two, I live in Building One. It’s two different worlds.

She waved to him while he was still crossing the street.

“Oh,” she said, “how are you? How are you feeling? You’re looking very well. I’m waiting for my bus, that’s why I’m sitting here. I saw you when you were still across the street. We’re neighbors. I live in the Towers, too. Dorothy Bliss? Building One.”

“Of course. How are you, Mrs. Ted Bliss?” Hector Camerando said.

“I’m fine. Thank you for asking,” Dorothy said, at once flattered and a little surprised he should remember her name, a playboy and something of a man, if you could believe Louise, about town. And just at that moment Mrs. Bliss saw her bus approach. She frowned. She distinctly frowned and, exactly as if she had suddenly sneezed without having a Kleenex ready, she hastily clapped a hand over her face. “Oh,” she said, gathering herself and rising to go, “look. Here’s my bus.”

Hector Camerando lightly pressed his fingers on her arm. “No,” he said, “I have my car, I’ll drive you.”

And wasn’t being the least bit coy or too much protesting when she told him that wouldn’t be necessary, that she enjoyed riding the bus, that she liked looking out its big, tinted windows and studying all the sights on Collins Avenue, that she loved how, on a hot afternoon like this, the drivers, if only for their own comfort, kept their buses overly air-conditioned. She loved that feeling, she said.

“I’ll turn my thermostat down to sixty degrees,” he said. “And at this time of day the traffic’s so slow you’ll be able to study everything to your heart’s content. Besides,” he said, “why should you pay for a fare if you don’t have to? Come,” he said, taking her arm once more and leading her away gently, “I’m just around the corner.”

It was his point about the fare that turned her. Mrs. Bliss was not a venal woman. That she cut discount coupons out of the paper or, because of her premonition that she’d be charged for the visit anyway, hadn’t bolted from his office when Holmer Toibb referred so disrespectfully to the manner in which Ted had lost his life, was testimony not to parsimony as much as to her understanding that money, like oil or clean water or great stands of forest, was a resource, too, and must not be abused.

His hand on her arm, Mrs. Bliss felt almost girlish (she wasn’t a fool; it never crossed her mind she might be his sweetheart, he her swain), moved by the pleasure of being humanly touched, and virtuous, too, proud of his physical handsomeness and of the scrupulous innocence of her reasons for accepting his ride. Though he was doing her a favor and she knew it, and she might even be taking him out of his way, and she knew that, she was not made to feel (as she often did with Manny) that she was being patronized, or that there was anything showy about this guy’s good deeds. Rather, Mrs. Bliss felt for a moment he might be doing it out of something like camaraderie.

Only then did the network of coincidence strike her. Not half an hour earlier she’d mentioned Tommy Auveristas to Toibb, her interest in all the South Americans. She’d declared her interest, too, in other people’s condominiums. Perhaps that’s what put her in mind of what the security guard, Louise, had told her about Jaime Guttierez’s determination to sell and, then, auf tzuluchas, there he was, plain as the nose, a man she didn’t run into once or twice in two years.

And, gasping, stopped dead in her tracks, catching her breath.

“What?” said Hector Camerando. “What is it, what’s wrong? Is it the heat? Do you want to sit down? We’ll go into that Eckerd’s. I think there’s a soda fountain.”

“No,” said Dorothy Bliss. “I’m all right.”

She was. She was breathing regularly again. She felt no tightness in her throat or chest, no sharp shooting pains up her left arm or in her jaw. What stopped her, what she’d run into like a wall was the thrill of conviction, a presentiment, almost a vision. Her ride, the favor Hector Camerando had crossed the street to press on her, was to lead her to his car, which, plain as the nose, was sure to turn out to be Ted’s Buick LeSabre, washed, waxed, and green as the wrapper on a stick of Doublemint gum.

“You’re sure?”

“Thank you for asking,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

They turned the corner.

“Where is it?” she said. “I don’t see it.”

“We’re there,” he said, and opened the door on the passenger side of his Fleetwood Cadillac.

Mrs. Bliss was as stunned by its not being their old car as she had been by her conviction it would. She couldn’t catch her breath but she was still without pain.

“Let me turn this on,” Camerando said, and leaned across Mrs. Bliss and put the key in the ignition. Almost instantly Mrs. Bliss felt sheets of cold air. It was like standing at the frontier of a sudden cold front.

“Would you like to see a doctor? Let me take you to your doctor.”

“That’s all right,” she said.

“No, really. You mustn’t let things slide. It’s better if you catch them early. No,” said Camerando, “there’s nothing to cry about. What’s there to cry about? You mustn’t be frightened. It’s nothing. I’m certain it isn’t anything. You waited for the bus in all that heat. That’s enough to knock the stuffing out of anyone.”

“You shut up,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “You just shut up.”

“Hey,” Camerando said.

“Shut up,” she said. “Don’t talk.”

Camerando stared at her, looked for a moment as if he would say something else, and then shrugged and moved his oversized automobile into play in the traffic.

Mrs. Bliss giggled. Then, exactly as if giggling were the rudest of public displays, removed a handkerchief from her white plastic handbag and covered first one and then the other corner of her mouth with it, wiping her incipient laughter into her handkerchief like a sort of phlegm. She returned the handkerchief to her pocketbook, clicking it shut as though snapping her composure back into place.

“Do you happen to know,” Mrs. Bliss said, “a gentleman from Building One by the name of Manny?”

The bitch is heat struck, Hector Camerando thought. Her brains are sunburned.

“Manny?” he said. “Manny? Building One? No, I don’t think so.”

“A big man? Probably in his late sixties, though he looks younger?”

“No,” Hector Camerando said.

“You remind me,” said Mrs. Bliss. “He’s not as sharp a dresser.”

Camerando, squinting his eyes as though he were examining some rogues’ gallery of Manny-like suspects, shook his head.

The trouble, she thought, was that no one, not her Marvin, not anyone, could hold a candle to Ted. All there was, if you were lucky — oh, you had to be lucky — was someone who didn’t sit in judgment waiting for you to make a mistake. The trouble with kindness, Mrs. Bliss thought, was that there was a limit to it, that it was timed to burn out, that if you slipped up one time too many, or didn’t put a brave enough face on things, or weren’t happy often enough, people lost patience. She felt almost lighthearted.

She wasn’t good at expressing things in English. She’d forgotten her Russian, didn’t, except for a few expressions and maybe a handful of words, even speak Yiddish. Odd as it seemed to her, English was her first language and, though she couldn’t hear it, she knew that her accent was thick, that the sound of her words must be like the sounds characters made in jokes, routines, that she must, even as a young woman in her prime, have come across to others as more vulnerable than she really was, more tremendously naive, less interesting, a type, some stage mockery. (Had she been a murderess her lawyer might have used her voice as a defense; its quaintness like a sort of freckles and dimples and braids.) She wished Ted were alive so she could explain her mood.