Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

If she didn’t feel entirely honorable she had only her embarrassment to blame, her modesty; even, in a way, another aspect of what wasn’t even personality anymore so much as a matter of some long-standing tidiness of spirit. It would, after all, have required her actually to call Hector Camerando to ask him to give her the winner of a particular match, a specific race, and she could no more have abused this privilege than she could have asked her husband for extra money to run the household. Not that either of them would have refused. It was her need not to appear needy, a saving of face, that held her bets down. Indeed, if she hadn’t infrequently run into Hector Camerando — he hadn’t moved, he still lived in the Towers; Louise Munez’s information was either faulty or he’d changed his mind — she might never have placed a bet at all. Yet always on the rare occasions he saw her he chastised her for not asking for his tips. That he hadn’t forgotten his offer made him, well, heroic to Dorothy and, on these occasions, she almost always felt obliged to place a bet or, rather, allowed him to place one for her. The first time this happened she hadn’t even known she’d won until he came to her door to hand her her winnings. He gave her four hundred dollars.

“So much? Why so much?”

“It was a lock. A dead-solid certainty. The dog went off at twenty to one. I put down twenty dollars for you.”

Surprisingly, her first reaction was one of anger, her second of shame, because although she said nothing to indicate her disappointment that if it was such a certainty he could easily have put down more than twenty dollars, she knew he’d seen the momentary blister of rage on her face. “Wait,” she said. Then, to cover her confusion, she excused herself and went off to get her purse. When she returned Camerando thought she had been looking for a place to put the money; instead she began to fumble with the bills in her wallet. She wasn’t wearing her glasses and had to hold them up close to her face. “Here,” Mrs. Bliss said, and handed Camerando a ten, a five, and five singles.

“What’s this?” Hector said.

“The twenty dollars you put down for me.”

She knew they weren’t quits, but it was the best she could think to do at the time.

Afterward, she tried to avoid him. She really did. And, once, just as she was leaving the apartment of a Towers friend she had been visiting and she spotted him step out of an elevator and walk down the corridor toward her, she quickly reversed fields and turned back to reenter the apartment she had left just seconds before. She had moved with such agility — this would have been when she was in her early seventies — that she quite startled her friend who was still in the process of shutting the door. “Oh,” Dorothy said, “did I leave my purse here? I think I left my purse here.”

“Dorothy,” said her friend, “what’s wrong, sweetheart? You’re carrying your purse. It’s right there on your arm.”

“Is it? Oh, my,” she explained, “it’s been like that all day. I’m running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”

“Maybe you should say something to Robins.”

“Robins?” said Mrs. Bliss. “No, it’s nothing. You don’t see a doctor because once in a while you’re absentminded.”

When she thought it was safe, she bade her friend goodbye a second time and stepped out again into the hallway. She could feel the woman watching her and turned back to look. Her friend smiled broadly and made an exaggerated gesture in the direction of the elevator as if to assure Dorothy she was headed in the right direction.

Is that how they thought of her? Like she was an idiot? She’d give them idiot. She bet she could spot most of them the names of ten people who lived in the Towers and come up with more of their buildings, floors, and apartment numbers than anyone. She could have been the damn postman here!

It occurred, of course, that she could have given that oysvorf, her friend so-called, something to think about. All she had to do was explain Camerando and why she was trying to avoid him.

Then they’d really have me going to the doctors, Dorothy thought, and giggled. Running away from some tall, dark, and handsome character who was trying to force money on her without, except for lifting her hands to receive it, her lifting her hands.

“You’re too proud,” they’d say, “introduce me! ”

But she wasn’t. Too proud, that is. It had nothing to do with pride. Nor, like so many of these widowed, tummy-tucked, liposuctioned, double-dentured, face-lifted, hair-dyed, foolish old husband hunters, the Never-Too-Late brigade, was she looking for a man, or a boyfriend, or even a companion with whom she could go to a movie. In Mrs. Ted Bliss’s experience, it wasn’t true what they told you, the experts, the AARP people, all the high-powered gerontologists and aging-gracefully crowd — that desire burned a hole in your pocket even on your deathbed. Speaking personally, she hadn’t felt that way about a man since Ted, olov hasholem, had lost his life. Or even, if you want to know, since the time his cancer was first diagnosed. Well, she’d been afraid of hurting him and, more shamefully, of his hurting her, of her contracting, though she knew better, a piece of his illness.

And, if you had to know all the truth, she’d never so much as touched herself, not once, not in her whole life. So, as far as Mrs. Bliss was concerned, it was bunk, and they were full of it if they said that the sex drive in a healthy person didn’t die. What, she wasn’t healthy? She was healthy. She was plenty healthy. It was those others, the oversexed ones, who couldn’t accept that there was a time and a place for everything and went on searching for the fountain of youth long after it ceased to be appropriate.

Like her friend, who’d only have snickered and kidded her about having a fancy man if she so much as said a word about Camerando.

But even that wasn’t the reason she not only kept Hector Camerando’s name out of the picture but took actual pains to avoid him. She was saving him. He was money in the bank, something she’d set aside for a rainy day, and she was, she liked to think, playing him like some of the men in the Towers played the stock market.

Now Dorothy was no fool. Just as she knew there was a time and a place for everything, she understood, without ever having come across the actual words, the notion that there is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood, et cetera. He might be riding high right now with his Basques and his greyhounds, but she had known plenty of his type back in Chicago, high rollers, heavy winners and losers in a thousand enterprises, men, competitors of Ted’s who followed the trends and locations like dowsers, and opened stores and businesses first in this place, then in that, who had buildings, sold them here, bought them there — wiseguys, into the rackets some of them, always with some new deal on the books, mavins one day, bankrupts the next, but make no mistake, people you had to take seriously, men who always seemed to have good reasons for what they did. Ted, who’d lost his life, had never been one of them, knock wood and thank God. He told Dorothy that what it finally came down to was a failure of nerve, and asked her forgiveness as if, in a way, he held her responsible, their three, then two, children, his family responsibilities. Only one time, during the war, when he splurged and bought the farm in Michigan where he raised and slaughtered his own cattle to sell on the black market, had he behaved otherwise. It wasn’t Dorothy, though he used her as an excuse to sell it at a loss only eleven months after he bought it. They’d made money hand over fist; he’d had no reason to sell. It was his failure of nerve and not her complaints about having to live on a place that morning to night stank of cow shit and urine and God knows what awful odors of sour milk and fermenting hay. In town, she had turned even the odd stares of the grauber yung and anti-Semites into reluctant grins with her cheery, preemptive greetings and comments and deliberately clownish ways.