Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

“A legend?” Mrs. Bliss said.

“Like Robin Hood. Like George Washington and the cherry tree.” Mrs. Bliss scowled. “Friends?” Yellin asked like a professional wrestler extending his hand for forgiveness.

“But Junior, you billed me!”

“You never paid.”

“You threatened to turn it over to a collection agency!”

“Did I follow through?”

“It would have cost you money to follow through.”

“What are you so cockcited? You knew I was a fake. What troubles you, I was an untrained fake?”

“Junior, you’re dealing with people’s lives.”

“Oh,” Yellin said, “people’s lives.”

She took his point and smiled.

“Sure,” Mrs. Bliss said, “friends.”

Closer than ever now.

Who did absolutely nothing for each other: Yellin pulling Mrs. Ted Bliss into what were for her uncharted but thoroughly buoyant waters; Mrs. Bliss reciprocating with an openness so total she might well have been dealing in the naked heart-to-heart of a child with an imaginary friend. And, as in such friendships, they often arranged strange adventures — journeys and tasks neither would have undertaken on their own. Of course, Mrs. Bliss reasoned, she at least had been preparing, training for, and, in a sense, behaving in such “public” ways since coming to the Towers almost thirty years earlier. For what had those demonstrations and makeovers been that she and the other tenants had gathered on the decks of the rooftop swimming pools to witness and participate in? What had the tango lessons been? The lectures and language classes? The Yiddish film festivals and landscape painting courses? Las Vegas and Monte Carlo nights? The good neighbor policy and international evenings? What had all those participatory crash courses in winning bridge, golf, tennis, and chess and even deep-sea fishing instructional programs amounted to, finally? Well, not to very much because for all the initial enthusiasm — Mrs. Bliss did not exempt herself — these courses of study may have elicited, few who signed up for them (and paid their good money) persevered long enough to earn their merit badges.

And it was just this, Mrs. Bliss saw (and explained to Junior Yellin), that as much as age was at least part, and maybe most, of the cause that had contributed to the breakdown and deterioration of what could only be called “the spirit of the Towers.”

“Well, sure,” Mrs. Ted Bliss said, “what then? You don’t see that even the dumbest of us didn’t understand we were barking up the wrong tree? A person don’t take up chess, deep-sea fishing, and the tango just because there’s a sign-up sheet in the game room. You got to have a better motivation than that. You got to have a calling. You ask me, the recreational therapeusisists have it bass ackwards. Fresh interests in life? Who has the time? All right, okay, we got the time. We do. What’s missing is the energy. Piecemeal, this has to have its effect. Piecemeal, this has got to lead to the conclusion that no matter how hard you work you’re never going to be any according to Hoyle or Bobby Fischer or Gussie Moran. Piecemeal, you lose the will to put in the time practicing or do your homework or just show up for the weekly meetings. There ain’t enough left in the class to make up a pair for what would have been the gala at what would have been the end of the term.

“So this is one of the ways the neighborhood changes and gets to put a damper on the spirit of the Towers.”

The old therapeusisist blushed.

“Guilty as charged,” he said.

“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “with you it’s only business. You’re no more to blame than the art teachers and French cooking specialists we used to bring in. It wasn’t their fault we dropped out like flies.”

“Because,” Junior Yellin said shyly, “it just so happens I’ve taken up an interest of my own. I read an article about it in the Sunday paper. It was very interesting. Right, you might say, down my alley.”

“What?” Dorothy asked.

“I read up on it first.”

“What?” she said. “What?”

“In fact, I thought it might be something we might do together. We’d get some fresh air out of it if nothing else and, if we ever got lucky, maybe something even more substantial.”

“What already? What?”

Then he told her about the metal detector. His trip to the library to see could he find them evaluated in back issues of Consumer Reports, Consumer Guide.

“You’d be surprised, they can be very complicated. Did you know that they work by means of radio waves? I mean, when you come to think the whole planet’s like some enormous orchestra that plays this ongoing set that never takes a break. It just keeps on blasting out the music of its treasures — all its locked-up silvers and golds and other precious metals. All its buried iron-padlocked chests and trunks, caskets and hidden, bundled safes. Earth’s hush-hush, top-secret knippls and pushkes.”

His voice was hoarse, his eyes wide and oddly lively, as if his pupils had been dilated. He was as excited as she’d ever seen him. No, he had never been so excited.

“You’ve seen them. Haven’t you seen them, Dorothy? Old guys in the park in the grass combing the lawn as if they were sweeping it with a broom or going over it with a vacuum cleaner?”

“Sure,” she said, “I always wondered what they found. Bottle tops, beer cans, old tins of Band-Aids?”

“Oh, no, Dorothy,” Junior Yellin said. “There’s caches of valuable stuff everywhere, the world littered with stash like carpet laid down by pirates. Rare coins and crashed ransoms, stolen goods like a scavenger hunt dreamed up by gangsters.”

“It was a hobby, a fad,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “You don’t see it no more so much.”

“What, are you kidding me? Maybe up north, maybe the fields are played out in Minnesota and Wisconsin, but down here, down here it’s still practically a natural resource. Only cordless phones outsell the metal detector in the greater Miami Radio Shacks.”

“This is true?”

“Cross my heart.”

“I don’t see it so much no more,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“You don’t see it so much no more because you don’t get out so much no more.”

“I get out.”

“Where? To a Jewish-style restaurant for the Early Bird special? To the movie in the strip mall for the rush-hour show? Where, where do you go, Dorothy? When was the last time you been to the beach?”

“I got a pool on the roof, what do I need the beach?”

“Entirely different story.”

“What, I should lay in my bathing suit on a blanket in the sand with a portable radio? A woman my age?”

“I’m not arguing, I’m just saying. Anyway, don’t change the subject, I want you to come in on this with me.”

“Come in on this what?”

“Metal detectors. What else have we been talking about?”

“Oh, Junior,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “I think you got a bug up your ass with these metal detectors. If you want one so bad why don’t you just go out and buy it?”

Here Junior Yellin looked down at his shoes. Suddenly, and to his great disadvantage, he seemed years younger, almost childish, the expression on his face at once sheepish and serene and, for Dorothy, triggering vague memories of if not of similar occasions then at least of times when she had seen this peculiar amalgam of defeated triumph and victorious shame, the scared pyrotechnics of someone narrowly escaping a threat to his life, say, like someone getting away with murder in a near fatal collision of his own making. It was, Mrs. Bliss realized, the look of one whose prayers have been undeservedly answered.

“Well,” he said, looking up, “you know me, Dot. I always feel I have to have a partner.”