Free Mrs. Ted Bliss by Stanley Elkin

rights.
    There was something still essentially pink in Mrs. Bliss’s soul, some almost vestigial principle in the seventyish old woman, not of childhood particularly, or even of girlhood, so much as of femininity itself, something so obscurely yet solidly distaff in her nature that she was quite suddenly overcome by the ancient etiquette she thought females owed males, something almost like courtship, or the need to nurture, shlepping, no matter how silly she knew it might sound—to Auveristas as well as to herself—the old proprieties of a forced, wide-eyed attention to a man’s interests and hobbies from right out of the old beauty-parlor magazines.
    Right there, in his penthouse, within earshot of anyone who cared to overhear, she said, “Your home is very beautiful. May I be so bold as to ask what you gave for it? What line of work are you in?”
    “Didn’t Señor Chitral mention to you?” Tommy Auveristas said evenly. “I’m an importer.”
    It wasn’t the implied meaning of his words, nor his distance, nor even the flattened cruelty of his delivery that caused the woman to flinch. Mrs. Bliss had never been struck. Despite her fear of Mrs. Dubow from her days in the dress shop, though she knew the old dressmaker was mad and perfectly capable of violence; the alimony she paid her husband had been awarded because of physical harm—she couldn’t remember what—she’d inflicted, and her memories of being chased about the shop had always been bordered in Dorothy’s mind by a kind of comedy. She’d experienced Mrs. Dubow’s rage then, and remembered it now, as having taken place in a sort of silent movie, something slapstick and frantically jumpy and Keystone Kops about all that futile energy. So all it could have been, all that had lunged out at her so unexpectedly to startle her was hearing Alcibiades Chitral’s name, and hearing it moreover not from the mouth of any of her retired, Jewish, star-struck friends but straight out of the suddenly cool, grim lips of her South American host. It was the way the two DEA agents had spoken to her in the garage, in that same controlled, despising banter of an enemy. She had sensed from the beginning of the evening that she was somehow the point of the open house, even its guest of honor (as far as she knew it was the first time any Towers Jew had set foot in a penthouse), and in light of all the attention she’d received from the moment she entered she’d felt as she sometimes did when she was feeding her family a meal she’d prepared. Tommy Auveristas had practically exclaimed her name the minute he saw her. He’d introduced her around, excused himself if he had to leave. He had kissed her hand and paid her compliments and brought her food. He was all ears as she prattled on about the degree of kosher she kept, listened as she counted her chickens.
    He did not strike her as a shy or reticent man. She was an old woman. He could have easily answered her question, a question she knew to be rude but whose rudeness he’d have written off not so much to her age and proprietary seniority as to the feeling of intimacy that had been struck up between them during all the back-and-forth of their easy exchange. He could have told her the truth. What would it hurt him? He had nothing to lose. If anything the opposite. The higher the price the more she’d have been impressed. Up and down the Towers she’d have gone, spreading the word about the big shot in Building One.
    Who did Mrs. Bliss think she was kidding? Offended? No offense intended. No, and none taken. Of that she was positive. It was her second question that had set him off, the one about what line of work he was in, if you please.
    She had, she saw, overestimated her celebrity. It may have given the gang a thrill and she certainly, as she’d once heard her son-in-law say about serving on the jury during the trial of an important rock star, that he’d “dined out on it for months,” a remark Mrs. Bliss