Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

“So, Dorothy,” he said, “I haven’t had a chance to look at your chart yet, so can you just fill me in on this a little? How may I help you, dear?”

Well, that was a stumper, thought Dorothy Bliss. How could he help her, this guy who all along had helped only himself? What was she supposed to tell him, make restitution? See to it restitution’s in my hands by five o’clock, first day of business next week, or else? She had to laugh. She’d been crazy to come. What’d she been thinking of? Well, the murder, but why did she suppose anyone could think she’d have been the least bit implicated in something like that? She was no sophisticated lady, but even Mrs. Bliss understood she didn’t fit the profile. She was the longest shot in the world, and gave herself high marks in the innocence department. Murderers, she knew, would have to come to their calling moved by passions she could never even begin to understand. Just look how easily a putz like Junior found higher ground if not in her estimation — he was a liar, he’d lied to her not three minutes before about something so low on his priorities as a seventy-five-cent sympathy card; she did not esteem him — then in her too flimsily swayed judgmentals. Why, she’d found him charming!

The question sprawled open before them: How might he help her? Well, he couldn’t, but she was too much the deferential manpleaser, even at her age, to say as much.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I’m just getting old, I guess. There’s nothing anyone can do about that.”

“Let’s see your hands, Dot!” Junior Yellin said.

“My hands.”

“Yes, please. If you don’t mind.”

“You read palms?”

“No, no, of course not. I have to look at your nails. It’s something we do.”

“Toibb never looked at my nails.”

“Toibb trained me,” he said. “I studied with Toibb who studied with Greener Hertsheim. This is like a what, a dynasty. I want to help you, Dot. We go back. Whatever I may have been in the old days, I’m a solid RT man. I’m highly regarded in the field. Didn’t I already reveal to you the secret of life?”

At that minute he looked stunningly defensive. He held out his hands, waiting to receive hers.

My hands are one of my best features, Dorothy thought. If he’s looking do I bite my nails, I don’t. It’s a disgusting habit, I never acquired a taste for it. She placed her hands in the old philanderer’s. He’s a doctor, she thought, it don’t mean nothing. Still, when he took them, Dorothy was conscious of every liver spot, each pellet like a small devastating explosion of melanin that traced the ancient fossil record of her skin, age locked into the soft geology of her flesh like rings on trees. She sat exposed and could not have felt more vulnerable if she’d shown him her sagging breasts. Hey, she thought to comfort herself, what’s he, a spring chicken? But sat, tentative and alert, ready to pull them away in an instant, like a child whose hands hover above her opponent’s in a game of Slap. And self-conscious, too, in some loopy fool’s sense, as though each dark freckle felt a faint, dizzyish sting of warmth and pleasure.

He’s going to bring them to his lips and kiss them, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, and was ashamed for the both of them.

He’s going to, he is, she thought, and was transported back almost half a century to when he stood behind her as she stood behind the display cases in her husband’s meat market, his hands down low, hidden under his butcher’s apron, folded they must have been, as though he were warming them, but goosing her really, ramming them up under her behind, pushing and trying to separate the cheeks of her tochis, using only his knuckles in a kind of weird foreplay or, as she would see years later in educational nature programs on public TV, like males of one or another species in a kind of sexual butting. She had not realized till now how much her memory of this moment had persisted.

“Hold still, please,” said Junior Yellin, and continued to draw her hands closer to his face.

He’s crazy, she thought, and was about to jerk them away just as they came within range of his limited focus and Junior began to examine them. Oh, she thought, it’s only his eyes: astigmatism, not love. And that half century she thought she’d lost came back to her again. In spades, compound interest. It was exactly like waking from a perfect, to-scale, very realistic dream in which she was a child again, only to find that she wasn’t a child, merely herself, with her aches and pains and duties, an old, old lady as distant and distinct from that careless, romping, laughing child as the conscious state is from the sleeping one.

Not only wasn’t he going to kiss her, but the incident in the butcher shop had never, at least for Yellin, even occurred. It was astonishing to her that she should feel actually rebuffed, two-timed, done dirty, played for a fool.

Meanwhile, Junior separated each finger, raised it by a knuckle, brought it close, made soundless this-little-piggy’s.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m looking for Beau’s lines.”

The term sounded vaguely nautical. “What’s Beau’s lines?” asked Mrs. Bliss.

“They’re transverse grooves in the nail plate, and they’re caused by various systemic and local traumatic factors.”

“I’ve got Beau’s lines?”

“I won’t be able to tell until you take off your nail polish. Here,” he said, “I keep a bottle of remover right in my desk. Use this.”

“What does it mean if I have them?”

“Well,” Milt said (for it was as Milt he spoke, he had gone back into the Milt mode), “it’s just this sort of ballpark test we do to give us some idea of a patient’s general health.”

“Patient? I’m a patient? Toibb, may he rest, never called me a patient. I was more like a client than anything else. He wouldn’t even let me call him Doctor, and all the times I saw him he never searched me for Beau’s lines either.”

“He never examined you for Beau’s lines?”

“Never.”

“Recreational therapeusis has come a long way since Toibb’s day, you know.”

“He studied with Greener Hertsheim,” Mrs. Bliss said. “You studied with Holmer Toibb. It’s like a dynasty you said.”

“Greener Hertsheim was a giant,” Milt said, “a very great technician, but the world don’t stand still, Dot.”

“You’re telling me,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, who in the fifteen or twenty minutes she’d been in the crackpot’s office had been whip-lashed through time, fifty years gone here, another twenty or so taken away there (those years as a child in the dream), plus all the compounded-in-spades interest that had been dumped on her by Yellin’s forgetfulness.

Or what if it hadn’t happened? What if it were Mrs. Ted Bliss who out of pure raging distaste for the man — the way, again and again, he’d taken in Mr. Ted Bliss — had manufactured the incident behind the meat case? What would that mean? (Could this be what Frank and Maxine — oh, she listened; she hadn’t always followed, but she listened; listened? she’d basked! — home on vacation from their colleges had meant with their discussions about high things like psychology, fancy-shmancy tricks the mind couldn’t help playing on itself. Sure, all right, she understood, but the minds her kids talked about were usually inside the heads of some pretty strange customers. Did that stuff work for the mind of a baleboosteh?) Either way, if it happened and she was sore because Junior had forgotten all about it, or if it hadn’t happened and it was only her head looking for revenge, what did that say about her? Either way, she didn’t see herself getting out of this one alive. (Though of course she hoped that the filthy things she remembered had actually happened. Sure, let it be on his head, not hers!)