Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

“But you said, ” Mrs. Bliss said, her tone quavering, a whiny, petulant register that, even had she heard it clearly, she might not have recognized.

“ What did I say?”

“About the water and wine,” Mrs. Bliss said. “All you could do,” she said, her voice trailing off.

“Agh,” Camerando said, “I’m all talk.”

He wasn’t of course. It was just more of the same. Another way to put you on, trip you up — YOU, DOROTHY BLISS, HAVE ALREADY WON…And there were all her prizes, written down, in black and white, the number to call. No fine print. No hidden clauses. Just go try claiming them. See what they do to you. Tie you up in the courts years. Make you sorry you were ever born.

But he wasn’t. If he was all talk, life was all talk; God, death, blood, love were all talk. The world was all talk.

She, she was helpless. She was. Look at him, smell him beside her there on the bench, all his showy shtarker maleness. His expensive, dry-clean-only necktie and matching pocket handkerchief, the shine on his expensive shoes. See how at ease he is, how he sits on the bus bench as if he owns it, though Mrs. Bliss knows it must be years since the last time he waited for a bus. So don’t tell her he’s all talk, or that he couldn’t get her into the prison to see Alcibiades Chitral if he wanted, or maybe only if she hadn’t made it all sound so urgent and by letting him see how much she wanted it, that that gave him just that much more advantage over her. Though God only knows why he’d want it or how he would ever use it. Except, Mrs. Bliss thought, that’s why people accumulated power and advantage, like misers socking it away bit by bit for a rainy day.

“All right,” she said, “if you can’t, you can’t. Here’s my bus.”

The very next day, when she went down to pick up her mail, Louise Munez greeted Mrs. Bliss, though no one else was in the lobby, with a series of elaborate, conspiratorial winks and hand gestures. The woman, who struck Dorothy as having grown even more increasingly bizarre over the past few months, had mimed a sort of no-hurry, it-can-wait, take-your-time, I’m-not-going-anywhere message. To her surprise Mrs. Bliss was able to pick up every nuance of this strange foreigner’s perfectly syntaxed body language — that after she’d retrieved her mail, and if the coast was clear, she should stop by the security desk before going back upstairs.

“What?” Mrs. Bliss asked. “Did you want to see me?”

The Munez woman reproached Mrs. Ted Bliss with a scowl, as if to warn her that the walls had ears. She shook her head sadly.

“What?” Mrs. Bliss said.

“You should have let him,” Louise said.

“What? Who? What should I have let him?”

“Your boy Frank,” Louise said, “the last time he was down here. You should have let him put up a signal light in your apartment that tell when someone at your door, or even if your intercom is buzzing. Those things are perfected now you know. They’re state-of-the-art. If you’re waiting will there be improvements down the line or will they come down in price, I can say to you that in my opinion there won’t, and they’ll never be no cheaper than they are right now either. It’s your business, Mrs. Bliss, but who’s Security here, me or you?”

She’s loony, Dorothy thought, but where does she get her information? Did I say to her about Frank and the gadgets? Does she read my mail? Should I tell her poor mother? Nah, nah, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, the both of them are unfortunates. Why should I mix in? Does it cost me anything she reads my mail? Do I have secrets? The mad woman, Louise, maybe she guards Building One to protect her mother. What damage is done?

“You wanted to see me?” Mrs. Bliss said.

Louise selected two keys from an immense ring, opened a drawer in her desk with one, a long black metal box like a safety deposit box with the other. With silent, formal fanfare she took an envelope out of the box and handed it to Dorothy.

“A messenger brought it for you in a limo.”

“In a limo he brought it?”

YOU, DOROTHY BLISS, she was thinking, HAVE ALREADY WON…

“He wanted to take it up but I thought, No, let him give it to me. She won’t hear the door, she hasn’t got signal lights. I say, ‘When she come for the mail I hand it to her.’ He didn’t want to give it to me. I don’t know, maybe he don’t want to go away without his tips, I don’t know. But he comes in a limo. This is suspicious. ‘What’s the matter,’ I tell him, ‘you can’t read? It don’t say on the sign tradesmen got to leave stuff at the security desk?’ ”

It was from Alcibiades Chitral.

“My dear Mrs. Bliss,” wrote Chitral in the letter Louise had handed her, “technically, of course, your lawyer was right when he advised you that it would be extraordinarily difficult for you to arrange to visit me in prison. In their paranoia, governments often write laws to protect themselves from all sorts of contingencies, real and imagined. In this instance they were seeking, on the basis that a prisoner might be engaged in filing an appeal, to limit congress between a felon and any material witness whose testimony was substantively instrumental in the felon’s conviction.

“So Manny was right, though he overstated the case. He’s a good lawyer and you’re lucky to have him, but when he told you that a visit between us was out of the question he should really have said that, from the system’s point of view, it was inadvisable.

“The law is a genius, really. I refer, as you know, to all its elegant ad hoc acrobatic flexibility.

“Well. In the event, I should like to see you, too, Dorothy — may I call you that? — and have made arrangements, unless you advise otherwise, for a driver to pick you up at the Towers @ 9:30 A.M. Tuesday next.

“I hope you enjoy the roses, Señora.”

When she went back to the lobby she was so furious it was astonishing to her. It was so long since she’d been angry that she was not entirely certain she had it right. Was it always such a drain on the body? Did it usually dry up your mouth so bad that it was difficult to pronounce your words? Had it always made her nauseous? Indeed, she felt so ill that she was quite amazed, she was able to speak at all. For her years Mrs. Bliss was a relatively healthy, vigorous woman, but she would have sworn she felt blood pressure rising in her veins and heart and blood. She felt it seep into organs she could not even name.

She demanded. “ What did you do with my roses? ”

“What roses is that?”

“That he brought with the note in the limo!”

“The messenger?”

“Yes, the messenger. Who else would I be talking about?”

“Please, Mrs. Bliss, there were no roses. He didn’t bring no roses.”

She’d terrified her. The girl with the gun and the flashlight, the handcuffs and nightstick and two-way radio. She’d reduced her to tears.

“No roses,” Louise Munez said. “I swear you, no roses. You gonna tell my mother there was roses?”

All anger left her. She felt incredibly empty, almost hungry.

“No, no, of course not, Louise,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “I’m sorry. It was a mistake about the roses.”

It was a mistake, but not Louise’s. It was something she didn’t understand, but somehow she understood there hadn’t been roses. Oh, the world was so difficult. Alcibiades Chitral’s note had come the day after she’d broached the question of a visit to Hector Camerando. It had to have been Camerando who got word to Chitral that she’d asked for a meeting. And then all that stuff about the law and felons and material witnesses and appeals and difficulties, the difference between out-of-the-question and the inadvisable.