Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

“I say,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “I’m a married woman. I say Ted, olov hasholem, would turn over in his grave.”

Now she was eighty-two, the mysterious, discrepant matter of her age seemed to have resolved itself. Without proof, without seeming even to have been aware of how or why, she at last knew how old she was. Not in round, approximate figures but exact sums. It was as if all the peculiar spring-forward, fall-back, daylight savings and central standards and fluky international time lines and zones of her personal history had been fixed, repaired, tuned to some Greenwich Mean of the ticking world. She had a birthday now, and though she had not yet officially observed it (and had no plans to), it was as if all the square feet and exact specs of the properties and registered deeds of her existence had at last been revealed to her.

This was, of course, essentially useless, but like other essentially useless things, an old person who earns a bachelor’s degree in her last years, say, she received a genuine sense of accomplishment and pleasure from it. She finally knew, or if she didn’t actually know then at least had finally fixed upon the age she should be.

She did nothing about it. She didn’t rectify her social security records or notify Medicare. Nevertheless, she could now fit numbers to her life and this was somehow as liberating as the emerging knowledge of who she was and of what she had been.

She was eighty-two. She was a very old woman. Junior Yellin, whose very name suggested that she was his senior, was a very old man. Mrs. Bliss knew that if she had taken Yellin up on his offer to move into Manny Tressler’s apartment, Ted would not have turned over in his grave. He wouldn’t have so much as stirred. Ted had been fond of Manny and, despite all the awful stuff Junior had pulled on him, had always been rather more well-disposed toward him than otherwise. Ted had been dead almost fifteen years. The world had changed, attitudes had. Scandal had been all but wiped out in her lifetime, even, had he lived a little longer, in Ted’s. Since the sixties there had been a general, accelerating erosion of the shameful. It wasn’t that goodness was on the rise but that a general sense of evil — Think, Mrs. Ted Bliss thought, of the terror Mrs. Dubow, the first wife in Illinois forced to pay the husband alimony, evoked; that was a shocker that brought the house down — was being absorbed into the atmosphere. She saw it on the morning programs, she heard it on the call-ins, she read about it not only in the tabloids at the checkout in the supermarket but in the legitimate papers, too.

Who knew what went on behind closed doors, of course, but in her and Ted’s day married people had been generally loyal to each other. Except for Junior Yellin and his bimbos, Mrs. Bliss didn’t think she could name a man who ran around on his wife. Today it was a different story. In just her own family, hadn’t both Jerry, Irving’s boy, and Louis, Golda’s, died of AIDS? (And Louis had been married!) And hadn’t she recently heard that Betsy, a distant cousin she’d known only to say hello to who’d tested HIV positive, had come down with full-blown AIDS? (And why had her grandson Barry never married? What was what in that department?) And what was going on with the shaineh maidel, Judith, Maxine and George’s exquisite daughter, a girl in her mid-thirties if she was a day, who had probably been with at least a dozen men (and lived with three of them), so beautiful she could have afforded to remain a virgin forever but who instead — her grandmother should bite her tongue — chose to think with her panties the way some men had their brains in their pants? Or, while we’re on the subject of disgrace, was Frank and May’s Donny, the brainy one, a target of a grand jury investigation or not? He hadn’t flown in from Europe that time when Mrs. Bliss had gone to Providence for the seder. The fact was that Dorothy hadn’t heard from him in years, neither through a letter or a phone call (who used to call her with regularity), and whenever she had a chance to ask Frank about him, her son was uneasy, or put her off with a vague answer, or changed the subject. (Were they tapping her phones? Was that why Donny didn’t get in touch anymore? It wasn’t so far-fetched. She had a sort of record with federal people. Her Camerando connection. As far as she knew the government still held Ted’s Buick LeSabre under impoundment.)

For that matter how hotsy-totsy could Frank’s and Maxine’s marriages be? You couldn’t tell her there wasn’t any funny stuff going on back in Providence — probably the result of Frank’s picking up his Pittsburgh roots and setting them down in Rhode Island. She and Ted had done the same, and when they were even older than Frank and May, but let’s don’t kid ourselves, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, Frank and May were a horse of a different color.

Dorothy and Maxine were close as ever, so Mrs. Bliss didn’t have to speculate why her daughter was having such a tough time of it these days with George. The insurance business was practically in ruins, at least at George’s end of things. Whole life was out, a thing of the past, along with the agent who sold such policies, a relic. These days all the money was in term. It was entrepreneurial James who spotted the trend before his dad and left him to go with another company.

Life had lost the oom-pah-pah of fabulous things. Everyone lived shmutsig today, everyone had a rough time of it. The Mr. and Mrs. Ted Blisses were as dead as the dodo, olov hasholem. Which isn’t to say that some of their angels didn’t have dirty wings. Sam not only cheated at cards but on occasion might clumsily palm a loose quarter or fifty-cent piece if one were tossed to the ragged outer edge of the pot. And Philip wouldn’t give you a true wholesale price if your life depended on it, and Jake — who did he think he was fooling? — changed his name and signed up his sons for a Christian boarding school, while Joyce was a shnorrer first-class who gave cheapo wedding presents, bar mitzvah gifts that were practically an insult, and somehow never managed to have the right change in her purse when it came to sharing a cab or splitting a check.

But all that was piker sin, a kind of four-flusher pride, committed not so much in the name of fun as the spirit of edge.

Ted, taking the long view, had lived in a permanent state of forgiveness. He was too benign to have died of malignant tumors. (Mrs. Bliss recalled the last year of his life, how generous he was, how proud he’d been of her, how tirelessly he’d joined in on the grand joke of her beauty at those spirited underauctions where the bidders tried to guess her age.) So it was almost impossible to argue he would have been shocked by Junior Yellin’s suggestion that he move into Manny Tressler’s with her. (Whoa. Wait a minute. Was that the real point of the game? Was part of the pleasure Ted took in her sixty-some-odd-year-old beauty some old trap-more-flies-with-honey thing? Was it a routine he went through to make his wife more attractive to the bachelors he knew would survive him? Had it been more some midway trick in a carnival than an auction? Was Dorothy supposed to be the grand prize on the booth’s upper shelf?) Shocked? If she knew her Ted, he would have been thrilled! He could not bear to die and leave her a widow. He wanted to make sure she was settled, cared for, supported, unlonely. Thanks but no thanks, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Surely even Ted could not have wanted Junior Yellin for a legatee. Her condo plus $9,698.12? Not at those prices!

It was another thing altogether that they should turn out to be friends. Ted had made friends with him. Or if not friends exactly, then at least come to terms with the man. Sitting back amused, enjoying for all he was worth just watching the man operate, even if it was at his own expense. Not to pick up tips, tricks of the trade, not in any way trying to apprentice himself to the gonif, but like some scholar or philosopher, to see how far Yellin would go, to study the ways he had up his sleeve to get there. What did they call it, a sting operation? A sting operation, but with nobody jumping out of the wallpaper at the end of the show to point a gun or slap on the handcuffs.