Free Mrs. Ted Bliss by Stanley Elkin Page B

this attentive, handsome hand-kisser in new circumstances, in a new light.
    Now he leaned dramatically toward her.
    “It must be very hard for you,” Tommy Auveristas said tonelessly.
    “What?” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.
    “For you to have to see it,” the importer said. “The LeSabre. Turning away when you have to walk past it in the garage. As if it were some dead carcass on the side of the road you have to see close up. A machine that gave your husband such pleasure to drive. That you yourself got such a kick out of when you rode down from…was it Chicago?”
    “Yes.”
    “North Side? South Side?”
    “South Side.”
    “Did he follow baseball, your husband?”
    “He rooted for the White Sox. He was a White Sox fan.”
    “Ah,” said Tommy Auveristas, “a White Sox fan. I’m a White Sox fan.”
    “Did you get the White Sox in South America?”
    “I picked them up on my satellite dish.”
    “Oh, yes.”
    “So much pleasure. Driving down the highway, listening to the Sox games on the radio in the Buick LeSabre. So much pleasure. Such happy memories. And now just a green eyesore for you. You turn your head away not to see it. It makes you sad to pass it in the underground garage. Locked up by the government. When they come down to visit kids stooping under the yellow ribbons that hang from the stanchions. Daring each other closer to it as though it was once the car of some mobster. Al Capone’s car. Meyer Lansky’s.”
    Dorothy held her breath.
    “Tell me, Mrs. Bliss, do you want it out of there? It has to be terrible for you. Others are ashamed, too. I hear talk. Many have said. I could make an arrangement.”
    Dorothy, breathless, looked around the room. If she hadn’t been afraid it would knock her blood pressure for a loop she’d have stood right up. If she’d been younger, or braver, or one of the knockout, gorgeously got-up women at the party, she’d have spit in his eye. But she was none of those things. What she was was a frightened old woman sitting beside—she didn’t know how, she didn’t know why or what—a robber.
    Frozen in place beside him, not answering him, not even hearing him anymore, she continued to look desperately around.
    And then she saw him, and tried to catch his eye. But he wasn’t looking in her direction. And then, when he suddenly did, she thrust a bright pink polyester arm up in the air stiffly and made helpless, wounded noises until, with others, he heard her voice and stared at her curiously until Mrs. Ted Bliss had the presence of mind to raise her polyester sleeve, waving him over, her lawyer, Manny from the building.

THREE
    M anny was on the phone to Maxine in Cincinnati. He was at pains to explain that he was on the horns of a dilemma. It had nothing to do with tightness. Maxine had to understand that. He wasn’t tight, he wasn’t not tight. He didn’t enjoy being under an obligation; he was just a guy who was innately uncomfortable when it came to accepting a gift or even being treated to a meal. On the other hand, he didn’t particularly like being taken advantage of either, or that anyone should see him as something of a showboat, so he was just as uncomfortable wrestling for a check. All he wanted, he told Maxine, was to be perceived as a sober, competent, perfectly fair-minded guy. (He’d have loved, for example, to have been appointed to the bench, but did she have any idea what the chances of that happening might be? A snowball’s in hell! No, Manny’d said, they didn’t pick judges from the ranks of mouthpieces who all they did all day was hang around City Hall looking up deeds, checking out titles, hunting up liens.) It was a nice question, a fine point. A professional judgment call, finally.
    “What’s this about, Manny?” Maxine asked over the Cincinnati long distance.
    “Be patient. I’m putting you in the picture.”
    “Has this something to do with my mother? Is my mother all right?”
    “Hey,” Manny said, “ I placed the call. I