Free Mrs. Ted Bliss by Stanley Elkin Page A

thought so witty and catchy that she found herself repeating it each time anyone offered her a glass of tea or a slice of coffee cake.
    Still, though she knew he must have had a reason for spending all that time with her (almost as if it were Auveristas who’d been doing the flirting), all that sitting beside her on the sofa, never once inviting anyone to join them but instead rather pointedly continuing their conversation every time someone sidled up to the couch, even if they were holding a plate of food, or a hot cup of coffee, she now understood that he wasn’t pulling on her celebrity—he was indifferent to the fact that her picture had been in the paper, or that people wanted to interview her, or that her testimony had been heard on TV.
    Mrs. Bliss was not a particularly suspicious woman. Well, that wasn’t entirely so. She was, she was a suspicious woman. She’d never trusted some of her husband’s customers when he’d owned the butcher shop, or his tenants in the apartment house he’d bought. On behalf of her family, of her near and dear, there was something in Dorothy that made her throw herself on all the landmines and grenades of all the welshers and four-flushers, lie down before all the ordnance of the deadbeats and shoplifters. “Dorothy,” Ted had once said to her, “how can you shoplift meat?” “Meat nothing,” Mrs. Bliss had replied, “the little cans of spices and tenderizers, the jars of A.1. Sauce on top of the display cases!”
    This was like that. Tommy Auveristas was like Mrs. Ted Bliss. He was watching her carefully.
    “Didn’t Señor Chitral mention to you? I’m an importer,” he’d said, and with that one remark brought back all the dread and alarm she’d felt from the time she learned she had to testify against the man who’d bought not only Ted’s car but the few square feet of cement on which it was parked, too. Feeling relief only during the brief interval between Chitral’s sentencing and the day the federal agents came to bind up Ted’s car in metal as obdurate as any Alcibiades Chitral would be breathing for the next hundred years. The dread and alarm merely softened, its edges blunted by the people who had invited her to tour their condominiums. And only completely lifted for the past hour or so when she had ceased to mourn her husband. (Not to miss him—she would always miss him—but, pink polyester or no pink polyester, lay aside the dark weeds and vestments of her spirit and cease to be conscious of him every minute of her waking life.)
    Now it was a different story. Now, with Auveristas’s icy menace and sudden, sinister calm like the eye of ferocious weather, it was a ton of bricks.
    Mrs. Ted Bliss had always enjoyed stories about detectives, about crime and punishment. On television, for example, the cops and the robbers were her favorite shows. She cheered the parts where the bad guys were caught. It was those shoplifters again, the case of the missing A.1. Sauce, the spice and tenderizer capers, that ignited her indignation and held her attention as if she were the victim of a holdup. (Not violence so much as the ordinary smash-and-grab of just robbers and burglars, looting as outrageous to her as murder. This infuriated her. Once, when thieves had broken into the butcher shop and pried their way into Ted’s meat locker, making off with a couple of sides of beef, she had described the theft to the policeman taking down the information as the work of cattle rustlers. It was Dorothy who had encouraged her husband to buy a revolver to keep in the store; it was Dorothy who went out and purchased it herself and presented it to him on Father’s Day when he had balked, saying owning a gun only invited trouble. And though Ted hadn’t known this, it was Dorothy who took it along with her when they went around together collecting the rent money from their tenants in the building in the declining neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side.) So Mrs. Bliss suddenly saw