Mrs. Ted Bliss

by Stanley Elkin

  Gradually the visits became less and less frequent and then, about two months after Ted’s death, Dorothy received a notice that her personal property taxes were about to come due. When she saw how high they were (her husband had always taken care of such things), she was stunned. They wanted almost two hundred dollars just for the automobile. She couldn’t understand. They didn’t owe on the car. Ted had paid cash for it. She looked and looked but there was no telephone number on the bill that she could call. She took a bus down to City Hall. They sent her from this office to that office. What with the long lines, it took at least two hours before she found a person she could talk to who didn’t chase her to another department. She told her story for maybe the tenth time. She had received this bill. Here, Miss, you can look. They owned the car outright. If he had it Ted always paid cash, even for big-ticket items—their bedroom suite, the sofa, their dining room table and chairs. Even for their condominium. Though he had a couple—they had sent them to him in the mail—he never used his credit cards. Only for gas, he liked paying for gasoline with his Shell credit card. He wrote down how many gallons he put into the tank, he could keep track of his mileage. Dorothy heard how she spoke to this perfect stranger and realized that it was maybe the first time since he’d died that she’d really talked about Ted, that it wasn’t just people telling her how sorry they were and if there was anything they could do and Dorothy sighing back at them, thank you, but there really wasn’t. She thought she might start in again with the tears. But she didn’t.

  She organized her thoughts. She didn’t know how to write checks. Even if she did she wouldn’t know how to keep her accounts. She’d gone to business almost ten years but not since she was a girl, and anyway, back then they gave you wages in a pay envelope that she turned over to her mother. Her husband did everything; she never had to lift a finger. She knew for a fact it was in Ted’s name, did she really owe two hundred dollars on the car?

  She couldn’t help it, she was a baleboosteh. She wasn’t so much house proud as efficient. It gave her great satisfaction to know where everything was. There was so much in even the simplest household. It was really astonishing how much there was. Every day the newspaper came, announcements of upcoming events in the building, in the Towers complex. Every day the mail came. (It still came for Ted, and though it broke her heart to read letters from people who hadn’t yet gotten the news, and though she never answered them because to write that he had died to someone who hadn’t heard about it would be like making him just a little more dead than he already was, she never threw any of her husband’s mail away.) She knew which letters of her own to keep (just as she knew what coupons to cut out or which articles to clip from the paper to send her children and grandchildren) and which to throw away.

  So as soon as she needed to find the card Alcibiades Chitral had left with her—it was a business card and, because a man had given it to her, she had been certain it was important—she knew where she had put it.

  It was in with a stack of current and already expired warranties, instruction manuals, and lists of potentially useful phone numbers and addresses. She called him that evening.

  “Are you having your dinner,” she said, “did I take you away from your programs?”

  There was a pause at the other end of the connection, and it crossed her mind that though she’d given her name and broadly broached the reason for her call—Ted had died two months ago, it had been maybe seven weeks since Chitral had come to her door—he might not remember her, or she might have hurt his feelings—she’d almost closed the door in his face—and though she’d tried to smile he must have seen how upset she was. Hadn’t she been an immigrant herself one time? She’d felt slights, plenty of them, other people’s warinesses. “It can wait, it can wait,” she said. “Or maybe you changed your mind.”

  “No, no,” Alcibiades said suddenly. “Look,” he said, “I have an appointment. I have to go to this meeting. I should be back in two, two and a half hours. If you’re up I could drop by then.”

  Dorothy felt herself flush. In two and a half hours it would be about ten o’clock. All of a sudden, just like that, implications of Ted’s death that hadn’t even occurred to her, occurred to her. Who goes to sleep at ten o’clock? Old lonely people. Soured ones. If her husband were alive they’d still be watching television. Or playing cards with neighbors. Or listen, even if he’d just died—well, he had just died, and she was still sitting shivah—the gang would still be there, no one would even be putting on coffee yet. What could happen? She needed to get rid of Ted’s car before she paid the personal property, didn’t she? What could happen? Even only just thinking in these directions was a sin. Blushing over a telephone to a total stranger was an insult to Ted’s memory.

  “I still don’t sleep so good,” she told him vaguely. “Two hours don’t bother me.”

  She drew a third bath. She dried and powdered herself. She put on the black dress she had worn for the funeral.

  This wasn’t funny business. She was too old for funny business. Her funny business days were gone forever. If she was nervous, if she blushed over telephones, if she bathed and powdered and put on fresh makeup, if it suddenly occurred that there were ramifications, if she straightened the chairs and made the lights and plumped the cushions, if she defrosted cake and set out fruit, if she was embarrassed or felt the least bit uncomfortable about her husband, dead two months though it seemed either forever or the day before yesterday (and she couldn’t remember how his voice sounded), it didn’t have the first thing to do with funny business.

  She had no education to speak of and her only experience with the world had to do with her family. She had been a salesgirl in a ladies dress shop for maybe ten years more than forty years ago. (For most of those ten not even a salesgirl, more like a lady’s maid. She fetched dresses to the changing rooms in the back of the shop, handed them in to the customers, or helped while they tried them on.) She had dealt only with women, seen them in their bodies’ infinite circumstances, shy, pressed in the crowded quarters of the curtained-off dressing room for intimate opinions. She took care of the family. Ted took care of her. So if she fidgeted now, if she fussed over the fruit and furniture, it was, all over again, the way she’d been when Mrs. Dubow of whom she was terrified (the first woman in Illinois to pay her husband alimony), had pulled her from her duties in the close quarters and sent her out front to deal with the public. Where she was no longer required to give up her reluctant opinions but had actually to force them on others. Whether she held them or not. Volunteering styles (who knew nothing of style), stumping for fashions (or of fashion either), who was not even a good cook, merely one who could be depended upon to get it on the table on time. A baleboosteh manqué who spent twice the time she should have needed to put her condominium in order. Who was uncomfortable dealing with those women in the dress shop some forty-odd years ago let alone a man she was staying up to receive in her home in order to sell him a car.

  Dorothy had given up on him and was already turning off lights when Security buzzed from downstairs.

  He was almost an hour late. He apologized for having inconvenienced her but he’d been inconvenienced himself. The start of his meeting had been delayed while they waited for stragglers in a hospitality suite at the Hotel Intercontinental. It was inexcusable for people to behave like that, inexcusable, and he hoped Madam would forgive him. And, startling her, he presented her with a bouquet of flowers, which he produced from behind his back. “Oh,” Dorothy said, jumping back, “oh.” Then, realizing how this could have given offense, she tried to regain some composure. “They’re wrapped,” she said.

  “Wrapped?” Alcibiades Chitral said.

  “In that paper. Like florists use. Like my children send me for Mother’s Day.”

  “Yes?”

  Then, embarrassed, Dorothy understood that they were not a centerpiece he’d removed from the table in the hotel. “Jewish people,” she explained gently, “Jewish people don’t send flower
s to a person if a person dies.”

  “Oh,” Alcibiades said, “they don’t?”

  “Sometimes they give a few dollars to a person’s charity in honor of the person,” she said.

  “I see,” Alcibiades said. “What charity in particular?”

  “The cancer fund,” Dorothy said meekly and wiped her eyes.

  “Well, that’s a good idea,” he said. “I’ll write a check. But these are for you,” he said. “To make up for my being so late.”

  She didn’t know what to say. Of course she had to accept them. If for nothing else then for going to the trouble. What florist was open this time of night? Maybe it was true what people said about the South Americans, not that they had money to burn but that they put it on their backs—the men’s gorgeous bespoke suits, the fantastic glitter of their wives’ gowns and dresses, the fabulous shoes with their sky-high heels they bought at a hundred dollars an inch, their jewelry and diamond watches that any person in their right mind would keep in a locked-up safe-deposit box and not wear on their wrist where a strap could break or a clasp come undone, or any bag boy in a supermarket or stranger on the street could knock you down and hit you over the head for.

  So it was not with an entirely undiluted gratitude that Dorothy accepted his flowers but with a certain scorn, too. Rousting emergency twenty-four-hour-a-day florists to open the store and paying a premium let alone just ordinary retail, never mind wholesale. Though it was sweet of him. Very thoughtful. Unless, of course, he was just buttering her up to get a price on the car.

  “I know I called you,” Dorothy said, “but to tell the truth I’m not sure I’m ready to sell.”

  “You’ve changed your mind, señora,” said Alcibiades Chitral and then, startling Mrs. Bliss, abruptly rose and moved toward the door.

  “Who said I changed my mind?” she said. “Did I say I changed my mind? I haven’t made it up, I meant.”

  Alcibiades smiled. He was a good-looking man, tall, stout, ruddy complected, with bushy black eyebrows and white wavy hair. He looked like Cesar Romero; Dorothy Bliss felt nothing about this observation. Her heart didn’t stumble, no nostalgic sigh escaped her. She did not feel foolish. If anything, saddened. In this place, in all the places in the world really, there was something faintly humorous about a recent widow. They consoled and consoled you, distracted you with their calls and their company from morning till night (until, in fact, at least in those first few days of your grief, all you needed for sleep to come over you was to put your head on a pillow), with their hampers of food to feed an army, and she wasn’t saying right away, or next month, she wasn’t even saying next year; she wasn’t saying any particular time, but sooner or later, married friends saw your single condition and pronounced you eligible. Have your hair done, get some new clothes, what are you waiting for, time marches on. Because sooner or later it struck people funny. Like you lived in a joke, something comic in the deprived, resigned life. No matter your age, no matter your children were grown, that they had children. Something funny about the life force. Because God put you here to be entertained, to make the most of whatever time, however little it was, you had left. And pushed men on you, old farts with one foot in the grave. To make accommodation, to come to terms and spin your heart on its heels like a girl’s. They’d change your life, have you cute, almost like you’d get a makeover in Burdines. They didn’t care if you didn’t get married. You didn’t have to marry, he could move in with you, you could move in with him. Marriage was too much trouble. Who needed the aggravation? There were wills to think about, prenuptial agreements. Like living in the old country, dowry, like America had never happened. Or starting all over again.

  So if Dorothy was a little sad it wasn’t because she found this stranger attractive so much as that, as a widow, she felt like a figure of fun in his eyes. The gallantry, the expensive flowers, his predatory smile when she balked as he got up to leave.

  “So what would you give?” she said, determined not to dicker.

  He wanted to be fair, he said. He said he’d placed a few calls, taken the trouble to find out its blue book value. “That’s the price a dealer will pay for your used car.”

  She knew what a blue book was. Ted, olov hasholem, had had one himself.

  “Of course,” Alcibiades said, “I don’t know what extras came with your car, but air-conditioning, electric door locks and windows, if you have those it could be worth a little more. Even a radio, FM, AM. And if it’s clean.”

  The baleboosteh in her looked offended. “Spic and span,” she said evenly.

  Alcibiades, solemn, considered. “Tell you what,” he said seriously. “Let’s take it for a spin.”

  She was as stunned as if the Venezuelan had asked her out on a date. Yet in the end she agreed to go with him. She would need a sweater, he said, a wrap. He would wait, he said, while she got it.

  The car keys were in a drawer in the nightstand by their bed. Oddly enough, they were right on top of the blue book, and Mrs. Bliss, out of breath and feeling a pressure in her chest, opened it and looked up the value of the car. They’d had it over two years. Ted never kept a car more than three years. If he’d lived he’d be looking for a new one soon.

  Downstairs, in the underground garage, she didn’t even have to tell him where it was parked. It was the first time she’d seen it in months and she began to cry. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “No, no, señora,” Alcibiades said, “please. I understand very well.”

  “You’ll have to drive,” Mrs. Bliss said. “I never learned.”

  She handed him the keys and he opened the door on the passenger side. He held it while she got in and closed the door after her. But Mrs. Bliss was on guard against his charm now. She knew the blue book value.

  Then something happened that made her want to get this all over with. Before Chitral had even had time to come around to the driver’s side and unlock the door Dorothy was overcome with a feeling so powerful she gasped in astonishment and turned in her seat and looked in the back to see if her husband were sitting there. She was thrown into confusion. It was Ted’s scent, the haunted pheromones of cigarettes and sweat and loss, his over-two-year ownership collected, concentrated in the locked, unused automobile. It was the smell of his clothes and habits; it was the lingering odor of his radiation treatments, of road maps and Shell gasoline. It was the smell of presence and love.

  They drove to Coconut Grove; they drove to Miami. She went past places and buildings she had never seen before. She didn’t see them now. It was a hot night and the air-conditioning was on. She asked Chitral to turn it off and, hoping to exorcize Ted’s incense, pressed the buttons to open all the windows.

  She knew the blue book value. She would take whatever he offered. When he drove into the garage and went unerringly to Ted’s space he shut off the engine and turned to her.

  “It drives like a top,” he said, and offered her five thousand dollars more than the car was worth.

  “But that’s more—” Mrs. Ted Bliss said.

  “Oh,” said Alcibiades Chitral, “I’m not so much interested in the car as in the parking space.”

  TWO

  Excepting the formalities—the transfer of title when his check cleared, surrendering the keys—that was about the last time Alcibiades Chitral had anything to say to Mrs. Ted Bliss. The whirlwind courtship was over. That was just business, Dorothy explained to more than one of her inquisitive, curious friends in the Towers when they saw the fresh flowers—still fresh after more than a week, as though whatever upscale, emergency florist Alcibiades had had perforce to go to to purchase flowers at that time of night and charge what had to have been those kind of prices, would have had to provide not only the convenience of his after-hours availability but, too, something special in the nature of the blooms themselves, a mystery ingredient that imbued them with some almost Edenic longevity and extended scent—some of which Mrs. Ted had transferred from the cut crystal vase into which she’d originally put them and
now redistributed in three equal parts into two other vessels.

  She was at pains to inform them that there had been but the single presentation from Mr. Chitral, that she herself had thought to place these remarkable flowers in additional vases so that she might enjoy them from various vantage points throughout the room. They cheered her up, she said.

  “Sure they do,” Florence Klein said. “Believe me, Dorothy, I only wish I had an admirer.”