Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

So who knows, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Maybe Ted wouldn’t mind even if she took Junior up on his offer. Maybe Mrs. Ted Bliss was part of a sting operation, too. Maybe Ted was dead today because he was ahead of his time (just as Dorothy had been behind hers) all the years he had been alive. Maybe he was the first one ever to have lost the sense of scandal, the one man to have taken in that first whiff and understood that evil was only another unpleasant smell, like mold, say, in a summer house.

But that’s where they parted company. If it suited Ted’s plans for Dorothy to participate in her husband’s experiment, it did not in the least suit Dorothy’s. Not only was she too old, Junior Yellin was. She’d been by herself too long now. She was settled, she could take care of herself, and her misery, whatever else it may have been, was not loneliness. Manny from the building had been more support than Yellin.

Would Junior shlep for her, drive her around on her errands? Would he have taught her to make out a check, or advised her in legal matters? In the drive and shlep, practical information, and stand-by-your-side departments he wasn’t worth the paper he was written on, and although — it was probably a sin just to think about this part — were both of them thirty or forty years younger they might have made something or other with the bedroom thing, Mrs. Bliss still wouldn’t have touched him with a ten-foot pole. For one thing the man was a born chaser. He would have broken her heart.

Mrs. Bliss gasped at the thought. Quite literally it took her breath away. The idea, just the idea, that Mrs. Ted Bliss could have been a candidate for a busted heart was enough to make her laugh. Or cry. For all her odd old vanity, the pride she’d taken in her beauty, in all the fastidious, just-so arrangements of her old life (the two and three daily baths, her painstaking toilet, her wardrobe, even the old baleboosteh care she lavished on the plastic seat covers over her furniture, the sky blue water in her commode, the shined surfaces of her breakfront and wood tabletops), she’d never been much interested in sexual relations. (Ted had rarely seen her nude and, with the exception of his illness, Mrs. Bliss, when she had helped him in the bathroom or washed him in their bed, had just as rarely — had in fact gone out of her way to avoid looking — seen her husband’s naked body.)

So it was pretty ridiculous to think of herself with a romantically broken heart. Marvin’s death had broken her heart, the deaths and divorces of certain close relatives, the failure of the Michigan farm, and other times her husband had sustained business reversals or been forced to sell at a loss. Her grandson Barry broke her heart. Losing Ted, it goes without saying. But a sufferer because of romance? Never. Never!

But that was one thing. Friendship was another. Surprisingly, astonishingly, really, she and Milton Yellin had become good friends. Pals, if you want to know; buddies, partners in crime. It was almost as if, like kids, they were cut from the same cloth. That’s the way they were with each other. They played together. This quite new to Dorothy’s not exactly vast experience (something she actually had to learn and the only thing in the world Junior Yellin could teach her), new to the experience because, for all that she was eighty-two, she’d never had a friend. And why would she have had? She’d never had a childhood either. What she remembered of being a kid was what she remembered of being an adult: her family. Brothers and sisters and cousins of various degree, but no friends. No, what Junior called, “asshole buddies.”

“There’s,” he’d say if people were watching as he stopped to pick her up outside Building Number One on days he was off, “my asshole buddy, Mrs. Ted Bliss. How you doin’, Dodo?”

“How many times do I have to tell you,” Dorothy, blushing, would scold him, “you’re embarrassing me. You’re embarrassing them. ”

“Yeah, well, the day I can’t get a rise out of people is the day I might as well drop dead and die.”

In his old age he drove big four-wheel-drive vehicles, Jeep Cherokees, Land Rovers, other such machines that he would borrow for the day from various people he knew with whom he was cooking up schemes. “Arrgh,” he’d say with a certain self-loathing, “I’m too old for this stuff, I ain’t got the balls anymore. I give them away. They can have them with my compliments. All my best-laid plans of mice and men. They can have them for free. Surefire shit. They take a flier on the least of my ideas, they’d double, triple their investment! ‘Gee, Milt,’ they say, ‘if it’s half as good as it sounds why don’t you get in on the ground floor? Why don’t you put up some dough?’ ‘Me?’ I say, ‘I’m content to trade you my ideas for a box at the Dolphins game, or take your car out for a spin with my asshole buddy, Dorothy.’ I get a rise out of them, it gives them a laugh. So they humor me. Twirps in their fifties and sixties, what do they know from getting old, cutting their losses, tossing their towels in?”

“Oh, you haven’t tossed in your towel,” Mrs. Bliss reassured.

“Damn straight I ain’t,” he told her, cheering, “there’s still a few miles left in this model. So what do you want to do today, kiddo? Go fishing out on a charter? Catch the helicopter and do the beaches or downtown Miami? They got a new one in Fort Lauderdale. Takes us up the coast to Palm. I slip the guy ten bucks, he buzzes the Kennedy compound or flies low over the country club and spooks the polo ponies.”

“Oh, Junior,” Mrs. Bliss said laughing, “where do you get your ideas?”

“Oh, my ideas,” Junior Yellin said, “my ideas are a dime a dozen. What I’m looking for are a few good years.”

He really is a death-oriented man, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. It was odd, death was something you worried about in middle age, or while your family was together. It was something she gave little thought to these days. Manny had drawn up her will shortly after Ted had died and, to tell you the truth, her death was the last thing on her mind — except those few times when she wished for it. So she was bothered to hear Junior talk this way.

She had an idea. She told Junior she had to go to the bathroom and asked if he would stop at the next gas station. When they stopped Mrs. Bliss went up to an attendant, turned, and walked back to the car. “You need a key,” she explained, but when she went into the office she took a small notebook from her purse, found a number she’d written down, then searched the purse for a quarter and called Hector Camerando from the pay phone.

She returned to the big off-road vehicle.

“I have an idea,” she said.

“Yeah? What?”

“Why don’t we go to the jai alai?”

“Oh,” Yellin frowned, “the jai alai’s a crapshoot. It’s fixed as wrestling. You don’t know that? Everyone knows that.”

“So what if it is?” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “What if it is if a person happens to know a person in a position to know which players are going to do what to which other players?”

Something in Mrs. Ted Bliss’s grin caused Junior to examine her closely, almost to appraise her.

“Dorothy?” he said.

“Junior?”

“I know you what, five decades?”

“Something or other.”

“Sweetheart,” he said, “apples don’t fall far from their trees. Ted, may he rest, was a sweet, stand-up guy. You heard of painless dentists? Well, your husband was a kind of bloodless butcher. He took practically all the cholesterol off a steak he trimmed the fat so close. That’s how honest he worked the scales. I’ll tell you the truth, I was a pig in comparison. I’d weigh in my thumbs, my wrists. Sometimes I’d sit with my tochis up on the scale to help make us break even. If I made him a patsy, if I wronged him, it was just to get even — almost like honor.