Authors: Stanley Elkin
“Now I want you to understand something, Mrs. B. Excuse me, but I was never particularly horny. I was never particularly orientated to a behind or a leg or a bust line. Excuse me, but I was never
particularly
orientated even to the big C or any other of the female parts and features—the eyes, the hands, the teeth, a smile, the skin. For me it wasn’t even the whole person I was interested in.
“What I’m talking about, and I think
you’ll
understand this, is general passion, consuming lust.”
“I don’t understand it,” Mrs. Bliss said.
“I mean, of
course
Rita de Janeiro is her stage name. Oh, I don’t mean it had to be Rita de Janeiro. That’s just a flag of convenience, that’s just what her and her manager agreed on. It could have been anything. It could have been Mrs. Ted Bliss.”
Mrs. Ted Bliss winced.
“She’d just had her first period when she started. So of course she had a stage name. The truant officer would have reported her otherwise. And they wouldn’t just have shut that place down,”—he pointed toward a small brick building on the other side of Collins Avenue, undistinguished except for the fact that it looked more like a Chicago saloon (down to a high rectangular window built into the side of one wall like a wildly offset postage stamp) than Miami’s usual stucco, faintly iridescent pastel, mother-of-pearl, plaster-of-paris structures—“they’d of burned it.
“Hey,” Camerando said, “I’m not kinky. I don’t have nothing for little girls. Only this little girl. Only Rita.”
“She’s what, twelve?”
“Twelve when she broke into the business,” Camerando said. “She’ll be a senior next year. She’s sixteen. Next week she takes the test for her driver’s license. I’m going to surprise her with a car if she passes. Hell,” he said, “even if she don’t pass. I got this cute convertible in mind. Her little ass was just made for it.”
He didn’t bother to keep his voice down now. He’d set decorum aside, safety, almost as if he’d become Emil Jannings himself, Mrs. Bliss a version of Marlene Dietrich. God knew why, but he’d identified a power in her, too, offering his confession like a sacrifice. She knew she could take advantage of him. She still held his marker. She could take him for all he was worth.
“Can you get me in to see Alcibiades Chitral?” This was the marker she had wanted to call in.
“Hey,” Camerando said.
Because now she was on his turf again. And she understood that whatever powers he’d granted her, whatever the specific amounts he permitted her to draw upon from her letter of credit, they were not infinite. They were only social, friendly. They were merely honorary amounts and powers.
“But you
said,
” Mrs. Bliss said, her tone quavering, a whiny, petulant register that, even had she heard it clearly, she might not have recognized.
“
What
did I say?”
“About the water and wine,” Mrs. Bliss said. “All you could do,” she said, her voice trailing off.
“Agh,” Camerando said, “I’m all talk.”
He wasn’t of course. It was just more of the same. Another way to put you on, trip you up—
YOU, DOROTHY BLISS, HAVE ALREADY WON
…And there were all her prizes, written down, in black and white, the number to call. No fine print. No hidden clauses. Just go try claiming them. See what they do to you. Tie you up in the courts years. Make you sorry you were ever born.
But he wasn’t. If he was all talk, life was all talk; God, death, blood, love were all talk. The world was all talk.
She,
she was helpless.
She
was. Look at him, smell him beside her there on the bench, all his showy shtarker maleness. His expensive, dry-clean-only necktie and matching pocket handkerchief, the shine on his expensive shoes. See how at ease he is, how he sits on the bus bench as if he owns it, though Mrs. Bliss knows it must be years since the last time he waited for a bus. So don’t tell
her
he’s all talk, or that he couldn’t get her into the prison to see Alcibiades Chitral if he wanted, or maybe only if she hadn’t made it all sound so urgent and by letting him see how much she wanted it, that that gave him just that much more advantage over her. Though God only knows why he’d want it or how he would ever use it. Except, Mrs. Bliss thought, that’s why people accumulated power and advantage, like misers socking it away bit by bit for a rainy day.
“All right,” she said, “if you can’t, you can’t. Here’s my bus.”
The very next day, when she went down to pick up her mail, Louise Munez greeted Mrs. Bliss, though no one else was in the lobby, with a series of elaborate, conspiratorial winks and hand gestures. The woman, who struck Dorothy as having grown even more increasingly bizarre over the past few months, had mimed a sort of no-hurry, it-can-wait, take-your-time, I’m-not-going-anywhere message. To her surprise Mrs. Bliss was able to pick up every nuance of this strange foreigner’s perfectly syntaxed body language—that after she’d retrieved her mail, and if the coast was clear, she should stop by the security desk before going back upstairs.
“What?” Mrs. Bliss asked. “Did you want to see me?”
The Munez woman reproached Mrs. Ted Bliss with a scowl, as if to warn her that the walls had ears. She shook her head sadly.
“What?” Mrs. Bliss said.
“You should have let him,” Louise said.
“What? Who? What should I have let him?”
“Your boy Frank,” Louise said, “the last time he was down here. You should have let him put up a signal light in your apartment that tell when someone at your door, or even if your intercom is buzzing. Those things are perfected now you know. They’re state-of-the-art. If you’re waiting will there be improvements down the line or will they come down in price, I can say to you that in my opinion there won’t, and they’ll never be no cheaper than they are right now either. It’s your business, Mrs. Bliss, but who’s Security here, me or you?”
She’s loony, Dorothy thought, but where does she get her information? Did I say to her about Frank and the gadgets? Does she read my mail? Should I tell her poor mother? Nah, nah, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, the both of them are unfortunates. Why should I mix in? Does it cost me anything she reads my mail? Do I have secrets? The mad woman, Louise, maybe she guards Building One to protect her mother. What damage is done?
“You wanted to see me?” Mrs. Bliss said.
Louise selected two keys from an immense ring, opened a drawer in her desk with one, a long black metal box like a safety deposit box with the other. With silent, formal fanfare she took an envelope out of the box and handed it to Dorothy.
“A messenger brought it for you in a limo.”
“In a limo he brought it?”
YOU, DOROTHY BLISS,
she was thinking,
HAVE ALREADY WON
…
“He wanted to take it up but I thought, No, let him give it to me. She won’t hear the door, she hasn’t got signal lights. I say, ‘When she come for the mail I hand it to her.’ He didn’t want to give it to me. I don’t know, maybe he don’t want to go away without his tips, I don’t know. But he comes in a limo. This is suspicious. ‘What’s the matter,’ I tell him, ‘you can’t read? It don’t say on the sign tradesmen got to leave stuff at the security desk?’ ”
It was from Alcibiades Chitral.
“My dear Mrs. Bliss,” wrote Chitral in the letter Louise had handed her, “technically, of course, your lawyer was right when he advised you that it would be extraordinarily difficult for you to arrange to visit me in prison. In their paranoia, governments often write laws to protect themselves from all sorts of contingencies, real and imagined. In this instance they were seeking, on the basis that a prisoner might be engaged in filing an appeal, to limit congress between a felon and any material witness whose testimony was substantively instrumental in the felon’s conviction.
“So Manny was right, though he overstated the case. He’s a good lawyer and you’re lucky to have him, but when he told you that a visit between us was out of the question he should really have said that, from the system’s point of view, it was inadvisable.
“The law is a genius, really. I refer, as you know, to all its elegant ad hoc acrobatic flexibility.
“Well. In the event, I should like to see you, too, Dorothy—may I call you that?—and have made arrangements, unless you advise otherwise, for a driver to pick you up at the Towers @ 9:30
A.M.
Tuesday next.
“I hope you enjoy the roses, Señora.”
When she went back to the lobby she was so furious it was astonishing to her. It was so long since she’d been angry that she was not entirely certain she had it right. Was it always such a drain on the body? Did it usually dry up your mouth so bad that it was difficult to pronounce your words? Had it always made her nauseous? Indeed, she felt so ill that she was quite amazed, she was able to speak at all. For her years Mrs. Bliss was a relatively healthy, vigorous woman, but she would have sworn she felt blood pressure rising in her veins and heart and blood. She felt it seep into organs she could not even name.
She demanded. “
What did you do with my roses?
”
“What roses is that?”
“That he brought with the note in the limo!”
“The messenger?”
“Yes, the messenger. Who else would I be talking about?”
“Please, Mrs. Bliss, there were no roses. He didn’t bring no roses.”
She’d terrified her. The girl with the gun and the flashlight, the handcuffs and nightstick and two-way radio. She’d reduced her to tears.
“No roses,” Louise Munez said. “I swear you, no roses. You gonna tell my mother there was roses?”
All anger left her. She felt incredibly empty, almost hungry.
“No, no, of course not, Louise,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “I’m sorry. It was a mistake about the roses.”
It was a mistake, but not Louise’s. It was something she didn’t understand, but somehow she understood there hadn’t been roses. Oh, the world was so difficult. Alcibiades Chitral’s note had come the day after she’d broached the question of a visit to Hector Camerando. It had to have been Camerando who got word to Chitral that she’d asked for a meeting. And then all that stuff about the law and felons and material witnesses and appeals and difficulties, the difference between out-of-the-question and the inadvisable.
What did she know of the world and its kingpins?
Who ruled here? Did the dog track and jai alai interests hold sway over the drug ones?
A word to Camerando, a note from Chitral. Yes, and the mystery of the missing roses. Louise was a little crazy and a blabbermouth but she was honest as the day is long, responsible, an ethics stickler, too conscientious to quit her post for so much as five minutes to stash stolen roses. No,
that
was out of the question. Speaking of which, she remembered having brought up the whole visit business with Manny after she heard about Alcibiades Chitral’s hundred-year sentence, and recalled that the lawyer’s response had been those words exactly! How could Chitral know? Was Manny from the building working both sides of the street? Impossible, she thought, what could the real estate lawyer get out of it? Or Chitral either? I mean, she thought, they gave the guy a hundred years. What was that supposed to be, a reduced sentence? Or maybe Manny was even a lousier lawyer than Maxine thought he was. Impossible again, thought Mrs. Bliss. The South American was a hotshot drug lord. Those fellows could afford nothing but the best. It was a mystery. It was
all
a mystery. Like all those cop and detective shows she liked to watch. It was as if—Tommy Overeasy flashed into her head—her 5,512 chickens had come home to roost. Though the mystery of the missing roses was maybe the biggest mystery of them all. Her part in the affair, too. Lashing out at the girl like that—with all she, Louise, had to worry about. It wasn’t like Dorothy. Even though Dorothy didn’t always know what Dorothy was like these days. The sudden, terrible reappearance of temper like a renewal of feelings she almost couldn’t remember ever really having. And suppose when he said that about the roses all he meant were those original roses, the ones he brought the night she sold him Ted’s car. She reread the letter. No, he said, “I hope you enjoy the roses.” That could only mean today’s roses, not roses he’d given her years ago. Unless he thought, and here Dorothy felt herself blush, remembering all the times in the game room when the men had spoken openly of her beauty, and been asked to guess her age as if she were some girl at the fair, she kept them pressed in a book somewhere. Oh, God, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, don’t let him think
that,
anything but not that.
Who ruled here? What did?
Why, the mysteries. It was like the puzzle of the jai alai and drug and dog track ascendancies. It was like those words her children had spoken before throwing out their hands in that game. What was that game? Lorn Som Po. Paper covers rock! Rock smashes scissors! Scissors cuts paper! It made her head spin. Such a mishmash of claims on her attention. The hidden secrets of the upper hand.
T
here was no guarantee he’d show up. Probably he wouldn’t. But why take chances? So when Dorothy went to bed that night she set the alarm to go off an hour earlier than it usually did. She set it to go off the same time it would if she had an appointment at the beauty parlor, or the doctor’s, or she wanted to beat the heat on a day she went shopping, or if she were going away on a trip. This way she had time for her bath and to lay out her clothes the way she wanted, and to eat her breakfast without having to rush.
She was down in plenty of time. She had time to spare, even. As a matter of fact, if it hadn’t been such a beautiful day she would have gone back inside and sat down on a bench in the lobby till he came. (If he was coming.) But it was, so she was content to stay put, to get away from the air-conditioning and stand out in the wondrous weather. (If it even
was
weather, and not some gorgeous potion of perfect idealized memory, the luscious aromatics of a childhood spell say, Mrs. Bliss’s, Dorothy’s, charmed skin fixed in the softened, smoothed-over stock-stillness of all temperate sufficiency. If it even
was
weather this temperate ate sufficiency as absent of climate as a room in a dream.)