Mrs. Ted Bliss by Stanley Elkin Read Free Book Online Page B

dark block of mahogany. They had bought, it would seem, for the ages. Even their living room furniture, their sofa and side tables and chairs, seemed somehow to have come from a time that predated fashion, was prior to style. In Florida, their dining room table, too big for the squeezed, sleek, modern measurements of a condominium’s efficient, reduced rooms, had had to be cut down so that what in Chicago had accommodated eight people (a dozen when there was poker and the family—the gang—was over) now barely had room for five and overwhelmed the space in which it was put. Like every other piece of their giant furniture—the great boxy chairs in the living room like the enormous chairs of Beijing bureaucrats, their thick drapes and valances—it appeared to absorb light and locate the apartment in a more northerly climate in a season more like winter or autumn than summer or spring. An air of disjointedness and vague anachronism presided even over their appliances—their pressure cooker and metal juice squeezer, their electric percolator and carving knife.
    And though Mrs. Bliss was neither jealous nor envious of other people’s possessions, or of the way they utilized space under their new dispensations, or translated their old New York, Cleveland, or Toronto surroundings through the enormous sea change of their Florida lives, nor understood how at the last moment—she didn’t kid herself, with the possible exception of the Central and South Americans (and a few of the Canadians), this was the last place most of them would ever live—they could trade in the solid, substantial furniture of their past for the lightweight bamboo, brushed aluminum, and canvas goods of what they couldn’t live long enough to become their future. And, indeed, there’d been considerable turnover in the Towers in the three or so years since Ted Bliss had died. From Rose Blitzer’s table alone three people had passed away—Rose’s husband, Max; Ida, the woman who couldn’t digest sugar substitutes without a nondairy creamer; and the woman who’d poured their coffee.
    Yet it was never from a sense of the morbid or any thought to mockery that Mrs. Bliss accepted invitations to other people’s apartments. She went out of deep curiosity and interest, as others might go, say, to anthropological museums.
    And now, for the first time since she’d moved south, Mrs. Bliss was visiting one of the Towers’ penthouses. She had emerged from the penthouse’s private elevator. First she had had to descend to the lobby from her condo on Building One’s seventh floor, cross the lobby to the security desk and give her name to the guard, Louise Munez. Louise had once confided that while she didn’t herself live in the Towers, she was the daughter of Elaine Munez, one of the residents here. She dressed in the thick, dark serge of a night watchman, wore a revolver that she carried in an open, strapless holster, and held a long, heavy batonlike flashlight that doubled as a nightstick. A pair of doubled handcuffs that clanked when she moved was attached to a reinforced loop at the back of her trousers. Though she didn’t appear to be a big woman, in her windbreaker and uniform she seemed bulky. On her desk, spread out before her closed-circuit television monitors, was an assortment of tabloids—the National Enquirer, the National Examiner, the Star —along with current numbers of Scientific American, Playboy, Playgirl, Town and Country. An open cigar box with a few bills and about two dollars in change was just to the left of a red telephone. A walkie-talkie chattered in a pants pocket.
    “Interest you in some reading matter tonight, Mrs. Ted Bliss?”
    “Maybe some other time, Louise. I’m invited to attend Mr. and Mrs. Auveristas’s open house.”
    “I have to check the guest list.”
    “It’s an open house,” Mrs. Bliss said.
    “I have to check the guest list.” She referred to a sheet of names. “Stand over there by the penthouse