Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

“Well, you know how I screwed him over — the books, the farm. From my point of view it was a…vindication. But what troubles me now is how you, who I had this idea lived in his moral shadow, all of a sudden pops out from the shadow to tell me she may know a person who knows a person who can chisel the jai alai.

“Do you know what you’re saying bites deeper than mafia? It huffs and puffs harder than the trade winds the drugs blow in on. It’s one of the grimmest shows the INS runs. We’re not just talking Basque separatists, we’re talking international terrorists.

“Dorothy, dear, tell me, how did you come to know such a person?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I’m—”

“No, don’t tell me,” Yellin broke in.

“I’m holding his marker.”

Junior Yellin scrutinized the old lady.

“Back at the gas station. You called him?”

“We could go to the greyhounds,” she said.

“The greyhounds, too?”

“I’m holding his marker.”

The jack of all scams weighed the odds.

“How much?” he asked finally. “What are we talking here?”

“The sky’s the limit,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

Yellin shut his eyes, his face lost in concentration. It was as though he were trying to guess in which hand an opponent was holding a coin. He opened his eyes. “The jai alai,” he said hoarsely.

They drove in silence to the white rectangular building, long and low as a huge discount store or a factory in an industrial park.

“So what did he say?” Junior asked when they were inside.

“Didn’t I tell you?”

“I was making a speech,” Junior said shyly. “I never gave you a chance.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Bliss said, “his line was busy.”

It was only minutes before the first match was scheduled to begin. They were standing near the five-dollar and ten-dollar windows. Yellin looked stricken. “The line was busy? It was busy, the line.”

“I tried two or three times.”

“Try it now,” Junior pleaded, “if he hasn’t got anything for us in the first match, then maybe a later one.” His eyes shone with an immense idea. Mrs. Bliss thought he looked fifteen years younger. She turned to go. “Oh, and Dorothy?”

“What?”

He signaled her closer, then, when she stopped, he stepped forward and closed the gap between the two of them even more. Mrs. Ted Bliss, who’d never see eighty again, watched him warily.

“Nothing,” he said. “Only when you talk to him, it might not be a good idea to tell him someone else is in on this, too.”

She was old; for a moment she’d had a crazy thought that Junior had been on the verge of trying something. She was relieved when he hadn’t. The shine in his eyes, the sudden, transient, ischemic pallor on his face like a sort of youth — she thought she’d felt the last weak rays of lust radiating out of him. She had, thankfully, misrepresented its source. It wasn’t the love of an old lady that had excited him but the action. The excited, polyglot voices of the crowds milling around the betting windows — his sense of connection and edge like deep drafts of ozone.

Mrs. Ted Bliss laughed. “What,” she said, “you think I was born yesterday? Why would I tell him I have a partner in crime? As it is we’ll be pushing up the daisies soon enough. Let’s just let nature take its course. Oh,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I’m sorry. I know this man, he wouldn’t lift a finger.” She was trying to comfort him. The pallor had returned to his face. All he wanted, he’d said, was a few good years. His bloodlessness was a sort of reverse blush. She understood. He was embarrassed by death. “Really,” she said, “if I call, I don’t even have to mention where I am. Maybe you’ve changed your mind.”

“Well,” Junior said, “if you’re holding his marker.”

It was odd about the high rollers, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Their lives, built around some tender armature of chance, were always deeply grounded in hedged realities. Briefly, Mrs. Bliss pitied the man, came within a hair of writing him off. If she got through to Camerando she might not only tell him up front where she was but tell him Junior Yellin’s name, too.

As it happened, however, she still couldn’t reach him. A phone company recording came on to tell her the number she was calling had been disconnected.

She went back to Yellin to tell him the news.

“No luck,” she explained, “the number’s been disconnected. I don’t understand. When I called a half hour ago I got a busy signal.”

“Hey,” he said, “no problem. It’s not a big deal. They’re here today and gone tomorrow these guys. Come on,” a restored, relieved Junior Yellin told her, “who needs the son of a bitch? If we hurry, we still got time to lay a bet down on the match. Any of the names of these bums mean anything to you?”

After that they were closer than ever. Junior was actually relieved to be back on terra firma. Perhaps the idea of edge, of extravagant advantage, made him nervous. It wasn’t the first time she thought the old bully was a piker, daring enough in his own small ponds but quick to lose heart where he knew he was beyond his depths. It was an insult to Ted, finally, whose measure he’d taken and relegated, whom he’d comfortably fit into manageable scale. On her behalf she was furious, on her husband’s, amused, come to terms with Ted’s forgiveness and understanding and philosophic scrutiny. On her husband’s behalf they were closer than ever, Mrs. Ted Bliss taking up their friendship like someone pledged to carry on the unfinished work of someone who’d died. Even that first day at the jai alai she allowed herself to be drawn into his piker schemes.

Freed from the obligation of taking a risk, they agreed upon a system whereby they pooled their money and, by wagering on opposing teams, in effect, covered each other’s bets. Even Mrs. Bliss understood that this was more like accounting or balancing her checkbook than like gambling. Except for the fact that neither of them stood to win or lose much money, Mrs. Bliss was content to go along with Junior’s reasoning that, what the hell, at the end of the day they’d gotten several hours of quite good value for their entertainment dollars — the price of admission, the cost of their programs, the tabs for their hot dogs, their coffees and Cokes.

And, for Mrs. Ted Bliss, it was entertaining. She meant the jai alai, the power and flexibility and stamina of the athletes, their lightning hand-eye coordination, the way they scooped up the small, heavy, hard-rubber pelota into the unyielding woven reeds of the curving cesta attached like a long, predatory claw to their arms and drove the ball flying back against the main granite wall. For all their athleticism and diving, driving speed, within the relatively close quarters of the wire mesh ceiling and vaguely chicken wire fencing of the viewing wall, they seemed to Mrs. Ted Bliss, protected only by their odd, single-winged arm, like nothing so much as wounded, desperate, captive birds fighting for their lives inside a terrible caged battlefield.

She was close enough to smell their heat and sweat. It was awful. It was wonderful. She was at an age, she reflected, past (if she’d ever been capable of them) such odors. Even her fevers when they came would be back-burner, a dry, desiccate desert heat — the almost pastel fragrance of old bone, ancient skin. Her stools, too, had lost force and sting. Only the ammonias of her pee seemed cumulative, consolidate. But she couldn’t remember when she had last perspired. On the hottest, steamiest days of the Florida summers she had felt the heat really as a kind of comforter across the lap of the sore, listless, stymied blood of her advanced age, and she could only marvel at the smells spilling from the cage of athletes even in the middling distance of her and Junior’s seats.