Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

“Absolutely,” Junior Yellin said. “I agree with you, but how do you think—”

“Bodies bloat. They decay. Death puffs them up and lets out their air like leaky balloons. Elements — seawater, the air — chip away at their skin like tapeworms. They melt. Fat lets go. Bones do. And gasses.” The sun! she thought. “Then what’s left to hold them?” Mrs. Bliss pointed to the sordid cache at their feet. “This iron? They slip these useless nooses like Houdinis.”

“Yeah,” Junior said, “I guess so. We write that up on the little cards. We do the whole megillah. Dramatic, hard-hitting. They come away with something to think about. Yeah,” he said, “yeah.

“I think this introduces a whole new dimension,” Yellin said. “ ‘Smuggler’s Museum’ won’t work anymore. Or ‘Dope Runner’s Museum’ either. We’ve got to change it to something more universal. ‘South Florida Museum of Havoc and History’? It needs work. Nothing’s written in stone. But in the ballpark. Think about it. You have a gift for this particular aspect.”

Mrs. Bliss shook her head.

“What?”

“I haven’t got the bells and whistles for this work,” she said.

“Oh, come on,” Junior said, “sure you do. You do. You’re the brains of the outfit.”

Mrs. Bliss found it difficult to look at him. The same poisons that radiated from the sun seemed to pour from his eyes.

“I get it,” Junior said, “you think maybe this is some soft soap I’m handing you. You’re knocking it back to what I said about partners. You probably put that down in case I need someone to help take the load off if I screw up. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing.”

“Will you tell me something?” Mrs. Bliss said.

“Will I tell you something? Will I tell you something? Of course, sweetie. What have I got to hide? We’re old friends. We know each other our whole lives practically. Ask me something, I’ll tell you something.”

She pointed up the beach to where he’d left the dune buggy.

“Where,” she said, “do you get those things? Who gives them to you? All those Frank Buck motorcars you ride around in?”

He seemed flustered, humiliated. Then he was angry.

“All those…What, you think it’s all up with me?” he shot back. “That it’s all over but the shouting? You think that ATV shit is too sporty for a guy like me? Listen, you. I’m a character, I’m colorful. All my life I’m a heartbreaker. My wife, the ladies, my daddy, the kids. My partners. Ask Ted, olov hasholem, you don’t believe me. They held their breath to see where I’d jump next, to see where I’d land. I’m in the air now! ”

“Where, Junior?”

“ You see? ” he exulted.

“No. Where? I mean who gives them to you? What strange lies do you have to tell them?”

Junior Yellin glared at Mrs. Ted Bliss. He held her eyes. Unmoved, she stared back at him. It was an old game she remembered from childhood. She used to play it with her brothers, her sisters. Even in America they played it. Even with her younger cousins Dorothy was always the first to look away, her concentration broken by some comic shame. This time, though, it was Yellin who looked away. He stifled a giggle. “Jesus, Dorothy,” he said.

“No, Milton, I mean it. How do you get those machines? What do you have to pay for them to give them to you?”

“Theah delez plays,” Yellin mumbled.

“What?” she said. “What?”

“They’re dealer’s plates.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yeah, well,” he said, “that’s because you think there ought to be some sort of statute of limitations on trying to stay alive,” he said malevolently.

“No,” said Mrs. Bliss, “no.”

“Bullshit,” Yellin growled. “I tell them I’m opening a business to take seniors on tours off the beaten track, rides in the sand, into the woods. Land cruises. That I put them in all-terrain vehicles on forks in the road. It’s a terrific idea. They all think so. And it is. Just what we came across today, for example. We’d do a land-office business. We’d clean up. I tell them I just have to take it out for a spin. Safety factors. Official vehicular approval ratings.”

“They fall for this?”

“I’m a heartbreaker, they eat it up. Half of them want to come in on the deal with me.”

He was a heartbreaker, he really was, and he made her as breathless as he must have made Ted and all the other dupes and suckers who’d ever had dealings (the dealers) with him. It occurred to her as he ran through his wild defenses that she was not properly dressed for him, that she should have worn the garments of Saharan nomads; that she had made a mistake not to sport gleaming robes, complicated headgear; or to have rubbed heavy sunblock into every pore like a minstrel. That he gave off a sort of cancer, had power to kindle headaches, to dehydrate the heart.

She needed to get back to her apartment.

“So soon?” he said mildly. She was astonished. He’d forgiven and forgotten.

“No, really. I have to.”

“Dorothy. Sweetheart. No one’s here. I’ll turn around, I’ll shut my eyes. Take off your bloomers and walk in the sea to your waist. Raise your dress, tinkle in the ocean.”

It wasn’t his business. She was furious, but despite herself she told him she didn’t have to go. She didn’t. It was the old business of her bladder shutting down on her when she wasn’t near a familiar toilet. Ted had teased her about it in the old days. Even Alcibiades Chitral had questioned her when she’d visited him in the penitentiary. People thought she was too modest, a prude, ashamed, for all her vanity, the pride she’d once taken in her looks, in her body. It was probably true. Though it rolled off other people like water off a duck’s back, she may have been one of the last alive who hadn’t come to accept scandal. Who, though she watched with the same avidity as anyone else the morning TV shows, the mass public confessionals on which everyone — incesters, whores, cross-dressers, the sex changed, the housewives who stripped, fat admirers, klansmen, wife swappers, self-proclaimed thieves, rapists, child abusers, the murderers, the specialist serial killers — admitted to anything, still wanted to cover her eyes, her ears, who couldn’t have fantasized a fantasy if her life depended on it (even that Ted was still alive, even that Marvin was), and who wouldn’t for the world have gone on any of these shows to admit that she had ever had anything so intimate as a body, or that even if she had, it could have found itself on national TV owning up to anything as personal (and it was this, not their standards and practices, that scandalized her) as a function or a need.

It was remarkable to Mrs. Ted Bliss that the whole world did not seize up when it was out of range of a toilet.

And she didn’t care to hear any mishegoss about repression, thank you very much. No. If she wanted no part of Junior Yellin right then it was because he embarrassed her. His remark about peeing in the ocean was the least of it. It wasn’t any one thing. His plans for a museum, what he’d said to the dealers, all the silly, heartbreaking highwire of which he was not only capable but proud, even the fatuity about the superiority of his metal detector, the baloney about the “spot” he was looking for, his crap about the demographics — all his crap. It was amazing, a revelation. She had perhaps at last met a man (taking nothing away from the natural gifts and bona fides of his manhood) whom she couldn’t entirely trust.

But she was his last connection to earth, the life he’d known before he’d become such a caricature of himself. How could she tell him goodbye and good luck, how could she write him off?