Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

“Why did you cheer,” Yellin asked her, “for Berho and Hiribarren? Those characters were on the other side. Our guys were Darruspe and Urritzaga.”

She would have tried to tell him how she was drawn to what she could only have explained as their rugged vividness, but she would have sounded crazy even to herself.

So they played together. And it really was, Mrs. Ted Bliss supposed, quite like playing. She used as models her memories of Marvin’s and Frank’s and Maxine’s Saturday afternoon excursions with their Chicago buddies to the Rosenwald Museum of Science and Industry, or the Field Museum of Natural History, the Shedd Aquarium, the Adler Planetarium, double features at the South-town or Hyde Park, or important single features at big, first-run theaters like the State and Lake, the McVickers, the stage shows at the Chicago and Oriental; their forays into Jackson Park to the golf course and tennis courts, or out to see the Golden Lady, or the Japanese Gardens, to the archery range on the beach at Lake Michigan where they rented bows, arrows, leather bands for their arms, or their trips to the downtown stores on the I.C., or all the way to Wilmette to view the splendors of the Bahai Temple, shining, white as the Taj Mahal. And as asexual at her age with Junior Yellin as she assumed the children would have been when they had been tourists taking in the sights of their times.

So they played together, revisiting the jai alai, accompanying each other to the greyhounds, the track. Sightseers they were, the only difference between herself, Yellin, and her kids and their playmates was that Mrs. Bliss and Junior had more money to spend, but friendship at their level of disengagement as essentially touristic and hands-off as the kids had been when they aimlessly wandered from hole to hole on the Jackson Park golf course, or chased balls for the tennis players when they had been hit over the chain-link fences.

Playmates.

On rainy days playing the gin rummy variations (Hollywood, double points if the call card’s a spade, or being unable to knock until you had gin; the extra points, bonuses, and boxes in these refinements like a kind of runaway inflation) as her children might have stayed home and played Monopoly. Or shmoozing in restaurants over coffee after they’d eaten the Early Bird special. Playmates, but almost like courtship without any of courtship’s attendant anxieties. As comfortable with each other on these occasions as gossipy girls. (Junior Yellin unmasked, unmanned, sent home again to some almost virginal, pre-big shot condition, like a lion or tiger whose jaws and teeth are still undeveloped. Dorothy in her own way almost the same — their gossip making her nostalgic for something she’d never actually experienced, a life that, outside of family, had not yet happened.)

Queerly dependent on each other as a sort of stranger, castaways, say, or folks thrown together on a difficult trip. With nothing but time on their hands now, and nothing to do with that time — it’s still rotten out, say, the weather still threatening — but fall if not into the story of their lives then at least into some confessional sideshow aspect of the story of their lives, not the high points so much as the oddities, like freakish, unbeautiful geological formations in nature.

Mrs. Bliss, for example, offered a few of the reddest herrings from the last third of her life.

She told Yellin about the sale of Ted’s Buick LeSabre and of all the trouble that had gotten her into, and was quite astonished to learn that Junior had seen the car, had ridden in it, and, when his own was in the shop, had actually driven it once.

“What? No. Impossible.”

“What impossible? Why impossible? A seventy-eight, right?”

“Yes, but I could have told you that.”

“You never mentioned it. It was green, I think.”

“Not a dark green.”

“No, not a dark green. Ted wouldn’t drive around in a pool table. A light shade, I think. Like the background color on a dollar bill.”

“That’s right,” Mrs. Bliss said. “But this was 1978, we were already living in Florida.”

“Didn’t he go back to Myers for a second opinion?”

“You know I forgot?” Mrs. Ted Bliss said, astonished. “So much happened that year.” Confused now, surprised she could have forgotten something like that but amazed, too, that Ted — the whole trip had taken less than a week — would have gone out of his way to look this man up, this son of a bitch who’d taken such advantage of him over the years and then, to add insult to injury, asked to borrow his car, a man who’d driven God knows how many miles all the way to Chicago to get a second opinion on his cancer —it was…it was outrageous! Why, her husband mustn’t have been so much amused by the man as absolutely fond of him!

She could do nothing more now but surrender to her dead husband’s wishes.

So she offered him Alcibiades Chitral, too, and Tommy Auveristas, and finally gave up Hector Camerando himself, the bizarre terms of Camerando’s arrangement with her.

“Four hundred dollars? A setup like that and all you took him for was four hundred dollars? Whatever happened to the grand views of Biscayne Bay, the penthouse in West Palm? You let that crazy spic off the hook for a lousy four hundred dollars?”

“It was embarrassing to me.”

“Embarrassing,” Junior said. “You got some sense of the proprieties. Didn’t it occur to you you might be hurting his feelings by running away from his generosity? Jesus! Dorothy! ”

“It’s over anyway. His number’s been disconnected.”

“That don’t mean he’s dead. Where there’s life there’s hope, where there’s a will there’s a way. I bet that Alcibiades Chitral guy could put you in touch. One da dit dot dash on the jungle telegraph would do it.”

“An anti-Semite? I wouldn’t stoop.”

“Tommy Auveristas, then. I can’t get over it. You know Tommy Overeasy.”

“Well, know, ” said Mrs. Bliss dismissively.

“You were in the man’s home.”

“It was open house.”

“He put a napkin over your lap. You sat on a sofa with him and ate his food.”

“Oh, his food, ” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “Drek, chozzerai. I barely moved it around on the plate.”

“You were the belle of the ball. You went mano a mano with him, you went tête-â-tête.”

“You know,” she said, “I’ve been thinking about that. This was right after my testimony. I think he may have been sizing me up. I think he must have been trying to see how much I really knew about Alcibiades Chitral. About Alcibiades Chitral and himself.”

“How much did you?”

“Nothing,” Dorothy Bliss said, surprised. “Nothing at all. My God,” she said, “I don’t even know Hector Camerando’s phone number. I can’t remember the last time I saw Tommy Auveristas,” she whispered, suddenly frightened by how much she had lost. “Can you imagine that?”

Junior Yellin shrugged. “Spilled milk,” he said.

Suddenly she felt a duty to be interested. She leaned toward her companion cross from her on the faux leather banquette in the fish restaurant. “Holmer Toibb must have told you plenty.”

“Holmer Toibb?”

“The man who trained you, whose practice you bought into.”

Yellin didn’t even look shamefaced. Or stare sheepishly into the dregs of his coffee cup.

“Friends?” he said.

“Of course friends,” Dorothy said.

“Well, the fact of the matter is I didn’t know Toibb. I never even saw him.”

“You told me he trained you.”

“Trained me. I’m an old dog. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

“And Greener Hertsheim?”

“A legend.”