Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

The jack of all trades was into his recreational therapeusistical mode now with more than a touch, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, of his handy-dandy bookkeeping and old black-marketeering skills than of his realtor ones.

“Because what you’ve got to remember,” Junior Yellin said, “is that this place, south Florida generally, is a one-industry town — the weather industry. Now you’ve got to refine that to read the winter weather industry. Not like Vermont, of course, or Vail, Colorado, but in some it’s-June-in-January sense. Why, it was practically invented by people with bad circulation. Well, it’s called the Sunshine State, ain’t it? They stick it on the goddamn license plates!

“All right, so what we essentially got here isn’t so much a place to be as a place to come to. You’re a kid, or in your thirties or forties or fifties, the blood is running, your daddy’s rich and your ma is good lookin’, and you’ve barely even heard of it. Maybe Disney-world, maybe Cape Canaveral. Maybe stone crabs, maybe Key lime pie. Because your nose is to the grindstone, your shoulder to the wheel. Because, jeez, you’re too busy even to notice the temperature, and if you did, so what? Because weather is a thing you strive for. You sock it away for a rainy day. I mean for when the blood turns to sludge, to thirty-weight oil. I mean for when the damp shtups mold and arthritis into your bones.

“So that’s when it happens. People live longer and longer, you know. The mean average dead man today is twenty or thirty years older than when Hector was a pup. So there’s this like sunshine boom now like once upon a time there was a gold rush. And then they put in the toll roads and interstates, and discovered stucco and air-conditioning, and invented beaches and tall buildings to put them up on. Tall, taller, tallest. And every year a new amenity. Once it was enough to have these huge game rooms where they’d bring in a songstress with an accordian and an old tummler from the Catskills on a Saturday night. Or have some circuit-riding rabbi who came around on Shabbes with a Torah, a bema, and a portable ark. Or they put TV monitors in the lobby you think you’re in a newsroom. Restaurants they had, Chinese take-out, cineplex, Banana Republic.

“That’s what they already got. You know what’s on the drawing boards? Condos like resort hotels — horseback, snorkeling, golf. One place a little north of here has its own trails. Next year they’re opening a building with its own community yacht!

“Paradise is a growth industry, the good life is. That leaves only the poor who’ll have to make do with global warming. The rest are flocking to Florida in droves, Southeastward ho!

“The only drawback, Nathan, is that the neighborhood’s changing. Dorothy will tell you. It’s going down steep as a thrill ride. Every year it becomes harder and harder to put a minyan together. I’m an old-timer, I don’t look so much to the future. What does it mean to me? I got enough to last me. And a little for a modest burial and maybe a few bucks left over for my own legatees and if the future is the wave of the future, so be it, I say. Others may have the energy for it. I don’t.

“You know what the Towers have become, Nathan? An ittybitty American metaphor. What, I’m making you blush? Relax, it’s no big deal. All I mean is it’s waves of immigration. All I mean is it’s peoples after peoples making a clearing in the world and then, soon as they see smoke from the other guy’s fire, they do a deal, they make an arrangement. The Jews are a very ancient race. If they didn’t always make the clearing they at least staked a claim and moved in. Sure, and then came the Spaniards. Just like the old days. Conquistadors with their macho dope rings and plunder. Aunt Dorothy could tell you stories would curl the hairs in your ears. You lived side-by-side, didn’t you, Aunt Dorothy? Who moved out on who is a nice question, but the bottom line is those waves of immigrants. Investment ops. Jews and South Americans falling all over each other. Until with a whoosh and a bim bam boom all of a sudden it’s the march of time and the South Americans are selling out or renting to some of the lesser Latinos. And even Jews beginning to sublet to WASPs down from up in the north country or a few worn-out old farmers in out of Iowa and the rest of the Midwest. Even, if you want to know, to a couple of handfuls of deserving poor who might actually qualify for food stamps if only those proud, worn-out old farmers and subsistence-level golden agers climbed down from their high horse long enough to register with the authorities.

“So that’s the story, Counselor. That’s why I won’t waste your time by pretending to consider your $170,000 or $161,500 or even your $148,792.50 price for Uncle’s condominium. Now, if you’d come to me in the flush old days when the Towers were regarded as one of your hot, cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, pushed envelope, growth-industry properties, it might have been a different story altogether. I mean I still wouldn’t have given you your $148,792.50 asking price of course, but I don’t think I would have felt myself so personally insulted.

“Here’s what I will do. If you get it repainted and bring the cosmetics up to code we’ll split the difference — loan me the calculator, Dorothy — and I’ll make you an offer of…$74,396.25.”

“That’s very funny,” Nathan Apple said.

He’s stalling for time, Dorothy thought. He sees his work’s cut out for him and he’s stalling for time. He’s figuring what can he do with a guy like this. Personally, she almost had goose bumps. She hadn’t felt so important since the evening, years ago, when she’d gone to Tommy Auveristas’s open house and he’d sat next to her on one of the living room’s three sofas. She couldn’t imagine what the nephew would say, but he’d have to go some just to earn a draw. It was wicked, really, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Men. Really, she thought, the lengths to which they went to flash their plumage in front of other males. It was flattering to the ladies, but sometimes she wondered if it was intended for their benefit, if they’d ever bother to get themselves up in their colors if there were only females around to catch their act. Otherwise, well, otherwise they might just pick out the one who’d caught their eye, knock her to the ground, and take her. Perhaps the reason for courtship at all was the same reason soldiers lined up in ranks for parades. Maybe all that display was the only way they knew to civilize themselves.

Well, look at Dorothy Bliss, will you, thought Dorothy Bliss. Was this Alcibiades Chitral’s pigeon, damned for her stupor and incuriosity?

Certainly she’d been entertained by Junior Yellin’s aggressive arguments. Certainly she’d anticipated that Nathan would counterattack. But she’d stopped just in time. (Because if there was no fool like an old fool, what sort of old fool would an eighty-year-old woman make?) Flattered, but short of taking it personally, a privileged witness to their swagger and strut. While quite abruptly reminded of Ted’s ways with his customers: charming them into one cut rather than another, selling them three pounds rather than two, and with no more plumage on him than the dried blood across his apron and, when Junior was not in the shop, the only witness to his sweet talk Dorothy herself for whom he passed in parade.

The nephew was staring straight into Junior Yellin’s eyes.

“Done,” he said sweetly. “If you can talk Aunt Dorothy into selling me hers for fifty-five thousand.”

“What about it, Dot?” Junior said. “You willing to trade up? There’s bedrooms and toilets galore. I could move in with you. We’ll split the nineteen-some-odd grand right down the middle. That would put us in Manny’s apartment — just a second — for $9,698.12. I won’t pressure you, I leave it entirely in your hands. I mean, I see the guy’s game. He buys the place, turns around and sells it on the open market. He could clean up, but what the hell, the laborer is worth his hire, and the two of us got a luxury apartment we could get lost in. Come on, kid, what do you say?”