Mrs. Ted Bliss

by Stanley Elkin

  “Because the secret of life is not to change, Dot. Never. Never ever never. To thine own self be true, do you know what I mean? I’m speaking as a therapist now, so the rest of this is on the meter.”

  Some therapist, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Oh, yes, she thought, I can just see that. I can’t wait to tell the children. I got a therapist tells me I should go live on square one. She had to laugh. Despite he was a momzer and gonif there was something almost charming about him. There always had been. That was probably why Ted had been taken in by him so often. Vaguely he reminded her of some of the Latins.

  “So, Dorothy,” he said, “I haven’t had a chance to look at your chart yet, so can you just fill me in on this a little? How may I help you, dear?”

  Well, that was a stumper, thought Dorothy Bliss. How could he help her, this guy who all along had helped only himself? What was she supposed to tell him, make restitution? See to it restitution’s in my hands by five o’clock, first day of business next week, or else? She had to laugh. She’d been crazy to come. What’d she been thinking of? Well, the murder, but why did she suppose anyone could think she’d have been the least bit implicated in something like that? She was no sophisticated lady, but even Mrs. Bliss understood she didn’t fit the profile. She was the longest shot in the world, and gave herself high marks in the innocence department. Murderers, she knew, would have to come to their calling moved by passions she could never even begin to understand. Just look how easily a putz like Junior found higher ground if not in her estimation—he was a liar, he’d lied to her not three minutes before about something so low on his priorities as a seventy-five-cent sympathy card; she did not esteem him—then in her too flimsily swayed judgmentals. Why, she’d found him charming!

  The question sprawled open before them: How might he help her? Well, he couldn’t, but she was too much the deferential manpleaser, even at her age, to say as much.

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I’m just getting old, I guess. There’s nothing anyone can do about that.”

  “Let’s see your hands, Dot!” Junior Yellin said.

  “My hands.”

  “Yes, please. If you don’t mind.”

  “You read palms?”

  “No, no, of course not. I have to look at your nails. It’s something we do.”

  “Toibb never looked at my nails.”

  “Toibb trained me,” he said. “I studied with Toibb who studied with Greener Hertsheim. This is like a what, a dynasty. I want to help you, Dot. We go back. Whatever I may have been in the old days, I’m a solid RT man. I’m highly regarded in the field. Didn’t I already reveal to you the secret of life?”

  At that minute he looked stunningly defensive. He held out his hands, waiting to receive hers.

  My hands are one of my best features, Dorothy thought. If he’s looking do I bite my nails, I don’t. It’s a disgusting habit, I never acquired a taste for it. She placed her hands in the old philanderer’s. He’s a doctor, she thought, it don’t mean nothing. Still, when he took them, Dorothy was conscious of every liver spot, each pellet like a small devastating explosion of melanin that traced the ancient fossil record of her skin, age locked into the soft geology of her flesh like rings on trees. She sat exposed and could not have felt more vulnerable if she’d shown him her sagging breasts. Hey, she thought to comfort herself, what’s he, a spring chicken? But sat, tentative and alert, ready to pull them away in an instant, like a child whose hands hover above her opponent’s in a game of Slap. And self-conscious, too, in some loopy fool’s sense, as though each dark freckle felt a faint, dizzyish sting of warmth and pleasure.

  He’s going to bring them to his lips and kiss them, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, and was ashamed for the both of them.

  He’s going to, he is, she thought, and was transported back almost half a century to when he stood behind her as she stood behind the display cases in her husband’s meat market, his hands down low, hidden under his butcher’s apron, folded they must have been, as though he were warming them, but goosing her really, ramming them up under her behind, pushing and trying to separate the cheeks of her tochis, using only his knuckles in a kind of weird foreplay or, as she would see years later in educational nature programs on public TV, like males of one or another species in a kind of sexual butting. She had not realized till now how much her memory of this moment had persisted.

  “Hold still, please,” said Junior Yellin, and continued to draw her hands closer to his face.

  He’s crazy, she thought, and was about to jerk them away just as they came within range of his limited focus and Junior began to examine them. Oh, she thought, it’s only his eyes: astigmatism, not love. And that half century she thought she’d lost came back to her again. In spades, compound interest. It was exactly like waking from a perfect, to-scale, very realistic dream in which she was a child again, only to find that she wasn’t a child, merely herself, with her aches and pains and duties, an old, old lady as distant and distinct from that careless, romping, laughing child as the conscious state is from the sleeping one.

  Not only wasn’t he going to kiss her, but the incident in the butcher shop had never, at least for Yellin, even occurred. It was astonishing to her that she should feel actually rebuffed, two-timed, done dirty, played for a fool.

  Meanwhile, Junior separated each finger, raised it by a knuckle, brought it close, made soundless this-little-piggy’s.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m looking for Beau’s lines.”

  The term sounded vaguely nautical. “What’s Beau’s lines?” asked Mrs. Bliss.

  “They’re transverse grooves in the nail plate, and they’re caused by various systemic and local traumatic factors.”

  “I’ve got Beau’s lines?”

  “I won’t be able to tell until you take off your nail polish. Here,” he said, “I keep a bottle of remover right in my desk. Use this.”

  “What does it mean if I have them?”

  “Well,” Milt said (for it was as Milt he spoke, he had gone back into the Milt mode), “it’s just this sort of ballpark test we do to give us some idea of a patient’s general health.”

  “Patient? I’m a patient? Toibb, may he rest, never called me a patient. I was more like a client than anything else. He wouldn’t even let me call him Doctor, and all the times I saw him he never searched me for Beau’s lines either.”

  “He never examined you for Beau’s lines?”

  “Never.”

  “Recreational therapeusis has come a long way since Toibb’s day, you know.”

  “He studied with Greener Hertsheim,” Mrs. Bliss said. “You studied with Holmer Toibb. It’s like a dynasty you said.”

  “Greener Hertsheim was a giant,” Milt said, “a very great technician, but the world don’t stand still, Dot.”

  “You’re telling me,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, who in the fifteen or twenty minutes she’d been in the crackpot’s office had been whip-lashed through time, fifty years gone here, another twenty or so taken away there (those years as a child in the dream), plus all the compounded-in-spades interest that had been dumped on her by Yellin’s forgetfulness.

  Or what if it hadn’t happened? What if it were Mrs. Ted Bliss who out of pure raging distaste for the man—the way, again and again, he’d taken in Mr. Ted Bliss—had manufactured the incident behind the meat case? What would that mean? (Could this be what Frank and Maxine—oh, she listened; she hadn’t always followed, but she listened; listened? she’d basked!—home on vacation from their colleges had meant with their discussions about high things like psychology, fancy-shmancy tricks the mind couldn’t help playing on itself. Sure, all right, she understood, but the minds her kids talked about were usually inside the heads of some pretty strange customers. Did that stuff work for the mind of a baleboosteh?) Either way, if it happened and she was sore because Junior had forgotten all about it, or if it hadn’t happened and it was only her head looking for revenge, what did that say about her? Either way, she didn
’t see herself getting out of this one alive. (Though of course she hoped that the filthy things she remembered had actually happened. Sure, let it be on his head, not hers!)

  “Okay,” Junior said (as far as Dorothy was concerned the bum was Junior and would stay Junior), “we’ll forget about the Beau’s lines for now. If you could give me a rough idea what’s been bothering you.”

  Oh, boy, Mrs. Ted Bliss thought.

  Because she couldn’t. Even if she understood her restless heavy-heartedness she couldn’t have begun to explain it, wouldn’t have wanted to discuss with someone like Junior Yellin the deep, deep misery of the last few years. She couldn’t have told Manny about it, or anyone close to her in the Towers. She couldn’t have told the gang. She couldn’t tell Frank, or Maxine, or even her still-living sisters and brothers. If she still even had any. And for an actual moment really couldn’t remember if she had. She’d lost track of who died—so many had died; she’d stopped thinking of “lost” lives—and who still hung on. It was too awful, too awful to live so diminished, it was too awful, such unhappiness too shameful to share. Maybe, she thought, maybe if Marvin still lived, maybe she could have explained it to him. Maybe, sitting by his side as he lay on his deathbed in the hospital, maybe she could have tried to decipher it for him. He’d been unhappier than all of them, after all. Maybe only poor suffering Marvin could have taken it in.

  Wasn’t it strange, Mrs. Bliss thought, her old age? She wasn’t thinking of her beauty. That had been gone years. It wasn’t frailty or the breakup of memory. She didn’t forget the names of her children or confuse a grandchild with an old pal in Russia, a fellow in the building with her dead husband. Her disabilities had nothing to do with the flow of blood in her head. How could she explain to anyone that her great regrets and disappointments had to do with the mistakes she had made? The sale of the Buick LeSabre, the failure to carry through on her determination to visit Alcibiades Chitral in his prison. How could she explain her fascination with Tommy Auveristas or all that unfinished business with Hector Camerando and the marker she failed to call in and which Camerando himself (on the increasingly rare occasions she saw him hanging about the Towers) had long since failed to mention to her?

  He was going to charge her anyway.

  Whatever he did, or whatever he failed to do for her, whatever advice he did or did not give her, she would be billed. Forget old times—he had, the son of a bitch—forget the money the momzer had already stolen or charmed out of her husband, his deliberately cooked books and wiseguy’s crooked real estate deals, let alone what he’d once tried to do to her in her husband’s place of business—oh, he’d done it, he’d done it all right; she hadn’t made that up, she wasn’t that far gone—a bill would be presented, payment on service, and, old times or no old times, it would be a stiff one and, forget they went back, all the stuff that had happened, that he knew her when or she knew him, and without a dime’s worth of discount, and that’s just when she saw his sign—WE DO NOT VALIDATE PARKING TICKETS!—and decided, All right, that’s it, this rotten Moishe Kapoyr is going to give me my money’s worth!

  “Milt,” she said, “forgive me but I can’t help remarking, the last time I was here Holmer Toibb told me his patients had to be in perfect health before he’d consent to see them. He said I first had to see a doctor and get an evaluation. You don’t go by this rule?”

  “Dorothy, Dorothy,” Junior said, an edge of disappointment with her in his voice, “didn’t I ask to see your Beau’s lines? Didn’t I offer you nail polish remover from my desk drawer?”

  She held out her left hand.

  “What?” Junior said.

  “Go ahead,” said Mrs. Bliss.

  As he removed the polish from Mrs. Bliss’s ring finger, Dorothy leaned back, shut her eyes, pretending to luxuriate in his ministrations.

  “Looks good,” Junior said. “No transverse striations. You’re fit as a fiddle.”

  “You can tell this by examining one finger? You don’t have to look at the others?”

  “I extrapolate.”

  “Oh,” Dorothy said, “you extrapolate.” She held out her right hand. “I’d like a second opinion.”

  He brushed Cutex across her thumbnail.

  This time Mrs. Bliss watched him critically, appraising his technique and hoping he got the impression that she saw something menial in what he was doing, a man his age—almost in his seventies my eye, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, he should live so long he sees seventy again—who instead of buffing old ladies’ fingernails ought to be retired with the other alter kockers.

  Though if she embarrassed him he never let on. If anything, he seemed quite happy to tell her she’d passed her Beau’s lines test with flying colors, that she didn’t sport a single Beau’s line. As of today, he said, she was spotless, pure as the driven snow, clean as a whistle Beau’s line-wise. Despite the fact that she didn’t trust him as far as she could throw him, she was pleased to hear it.

  “He asked what were my interests, Holmer Toibb,” she said. “He had me make a list. I forgot to bring it, so I recited it for him,” she said, and thought, it’s strange, you know? She thought, I didn’t forget to bring it. I brought it. I was sore at him. Sometimes, for a minute, I’m not always sure who’s dead, who’s alive, and here’s a lie I told years ago I repeat word for word practically.

  “What are they?” Junior asked.

  “My interests?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t remember,” she admitted dully. “Whatever they were they’re gone. I don’t have them anymore.”

  “I’m sorry,” Junior said, and Mrs. Bliss suddenly felt a little better about Milt, or Milton, or Junior, or whoever he was. It wasn’t his sympathy. He was a crook and crooks didn’t feel sympathy. If they could they wouldn’t be crooks anymore. So if it wasn’t sympathy, what was it? What it was, she thought, was probably only regret. She’d failed to take him seriously. He’d warned her never to change. This was his considered therapeusisist’s opinion. It was on the meter. If she’d lost her interests she’d changed. His regret was she’d failed to live according to his secret of life.

  “I’d have a chart, wouldn’t I?” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “I know he took notes. The interests I told would be in my records.” Actually, she’d forgotten why she’d made the appointment, her original reason for coming, but she was very excited.

  And why not? Here she was, doing heart-to-heart with someone who’d known her when. When she lived in Chicago. When she was a beauty. When she still had a husband. When she was the mother of three living children. When. If she’d never trusted him, if he’d taken everyone in a dozen times over if he’d taken them in once, well, even that had to count for something. When. This strange man who said he believed in changelessness but who had himself changed, making himself over and over through his shifting avatars, his continuous changings and callings—butcher, realtor, black marketeer, farmer, recreational therapeusisist. (My God! she thought. Like Ted! Who’d been almost all of those things himself. Not a recreational therapeusisist of course, and not a realtor though he had once been a landlord. My God! she thought, my God!) A man with a single unchanging strand run through his being like character—the furious ad hoc course he pursued, opportunistic as a refugee fleeing for his life. She felt an odd tenderness for him then, for just a moment, come and gone like gooseflesh.

  She remembered why she’d come and, though she knew the answer, asked him a question as devastating as it was pro forma, asking it disinterestedly as a good detective.

  “Milt,” Mrs. Ted Bliss asked him, for it was as Mrs. Ted Bliss she spoke, not as Dorothy, not even as Mrs. Bliss, “did you kill Holmer Toibb?”

  “What? Did I—What did you say, what did you say to me? What are you, crazy?”

  “No, no,” Mrs. Ted Bliss said, “you don’t understand. I didn’t say ‘murdered.’ You wouldn’t murder anybody. I mean, what is it they say on TV? ‘Death by misadventure’? ‘Manslaughter’? Something in the second or
third degree. Self-defense even.”

  “Boy oh boy,” Yellin said, “do we have a lot to work through!”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I was only asking. I’m sure you had nothing to do with it, that you bought into the practice fair and square.”

  He had set her mind at ease. He really had. Though she couldn’t have explained it, she had asked him the question out of duty to and respect for Ted, to clear not her husband’s name so much as his character, who only seconds before she had seen trailing amiably along in this fellow’s careless footsteps. She was completely satisfied by Junior’s answer, reassured as much by what by second nature he immediately realized he stood to gain by her mad question as by his outrage. Indeed, Mrs. Bliss was no longer sure there had even been a murder, that that Iris hadn’t made the whole thing up on the spur of the moment, told her the bobbe mysehs just to get Dorothy to come in.

  Sure, she thought, a trick of the trade. What fools old people were! The crazy things they fell for! Wisdom? You thought wisdom came with the territory? It was a myth of the young. Only terror came with the territory. The young were stupid and the old were terrified.

  There ought to be a law, she thought, against all the song and dance they foist on you if you live past sixty. The victims they turn you into, the scams they run. It was on all the programs. Bunco squads working around the clock every day of the year didn’t make a dent in it. They were easy pickings, old folks. Mrs. Bliss was, easy pickings. Old as she was, she could have been born yesterday.

  The Greater Miami Therapeusis. What an operation. It was so shabby, you’d never believe how shabby. She was like a visionary now, the almost deaf and varicose goddess, shabby herself, the former beauty who disgraced bathing suits and, over the years, had paid out a small fortune in hard cash plus tips for swimming lessons to various lifeguards and cabana boys but who had never learned to swim, or maybe never even had the knack for it, ludicrous, suspicious in pools, who always wore clogs to keep herself above the unseen dirts, the terrible sediment of pee and scum and hair and scabs settled at their bottom there, at once repelled and fascinated by the mystery of water, the disparity between its clarity and weight, her very lightness in it impeded by its unseen resistances as, in inner tube and water wings, she moved her arms to the Australian crawl, not even omitting to take a breath every other stroke as she slowly mimed her way across the shallow end of the pool; she, Mrs. Ted Bliss, laughingstock, and good sport, too, consciously playing this holy clown for all the visiting grandkids, gin rummy contestants, and kibitzers gathered there, as much perhaps for the exhilaration of it as the attention, it being a great comfort to her wrapped in a riddle of water to know that anyone might know she knew she was in over her head and depth even at this low end, and would jump in and save her if it ever became necessary; she, Mrs. Ted, suddenly sighted as an oracle or priestess, seeing and knowing and understanding all, everything, her heart breaking because she knew that Toibb had not been murdered, that he’d met his death as almost everyone met their deaths, by natural causes—heart attack, cancer, a bad fall resulting in a broken hip, a slipup on the operating table—natural causes; that it had been only a whim, a cheap ruse, desperate Iris’s desperate move on just another silly old lady to perk up a moribund business.