The MacGuffin

by Stanley Elkin

  So, he thought, he’d managed to place Su’ad and his spy together, within—what?—ten or so feet of each other in the long limousine. What have we, what have we, he wondered and, when he couldn’t figure it, decided it would be a good time to break for lunch.

  Stopping off first at Brooks Brothers to pick up his suit. Reminded of the errand by his driver (though he already remembered and it wasn’t necessary) as they left the office. (Well, thought Druff, what a heap of trouble it must be to know your man. Though, he thought, if they really knew me—Rose Helen; my spy guy, Dick—they could save their breath. I’m a politico. A politico never forgets a face or a chore.) And reflected on the streak—streak, hell, swath—of laziness that must line his being, recalling the spasm of irritation he always felt under the burden of such chores, his fettered, bothered spirit and all the mucked floors and clutter of his littered personal household.

  His suit. His suit was an example.

  Druff was a difficult fit. He’d never worn clothes well and now he felt a sort of physical disgrace whenever he saw himself in photographs. Dressed, he put himself in mind of some clumsy, human chimera—a gray, unformed behind and a slack, powerless belly and something off plumb about the shoulders that sloughed his right suspender—he called it his brassiere strap—and sent it sliding off his shoulder and halfway down inside his suit sleeve when he moved. His posture was shot. (It looked, his posture, as if it had taken a direct hit.) Well, he supposed it wasn’t his size or weight—he was lighter, even slimmer, than he’d been in years—so much as his time of life, living along the cusp of the elderly, his body abandoning itself and his chest caving and his torso sinking, lamed, skewed, going down like a ship—like a ship, yes; that was exactly the staved-in sense of himself he had—the cut of his cloth leaking lifeblood.

  So how could trying on clothes be a chore he’d forget? Because they don’t know their man, Druff thought. They don’t know me, that’s why I have spies. Or maybe they know me but just can’t find me. Out here on the cusp. Between houses. My neighborhood’s changing, thought hopeless Druff.

  His salesman didn’t recognize him.

  “Druff?” Druff said, and spelled it for him.

  “Oh yes,” said the salesman, “you’re here for the overcoat.”

  “The sun is shining, I’m here for the suit.”

  “Of course,” said the salesman, “I’ll see if it’s ready.”

  “I called. They said it was ready,” Druff told him, already beginning to feel his strange pique and building rage, whatever the flaw was that high-horsed his character and made him unfit to hold office. Some failed democracy in him, he supposed, and understood before the man even found it and brought it out that the suit wouldn’t fit.

  “Better try it on,” the salesman said, “before my tailor goes to lunch.”

  Druff following him to the tiny, flimsily curtained dressing room with its hard little bench, shallow as a bookshelf, where the man handed over Druff’s purchase and left him, the venue suddenly, subtly shifted, vaguely medical now, as though Druff had been called in for devastating examinations, something unforeseen popped up in the blood, the stool. (And this, well, aura, too, like a stall in the gents’ in a restaurant. Something he couldn’t think of as private property, yet understood—from his jacket on the hook on the wall there; like some flag slammed into enemy terrain in a battle—to be his as surely as if blood had been spilled for it, the front lines of the personal here, hallowed ground for sure, if only because of the men who’d occupied it before him, but not so hallowed he didn’t resent them, their collective spoor and lingering flatulence.)

  It was like dressing in a closet or an upper berth, Druff’s limbs and mood pinched, crippled, hobbled as a potato-racer’s in the close quarters.

  He stared down the inside of the trousers he had just removed into a cloth scaffolding of seams and tucks, great squirreled-away swatches of excess material, some strip mine of fabric. And, as he traded pants, overheard the proprietary tone of the other customers, men—he’d seen them appraising themselves in front of the three-way mirrors as he followed the salesman to the fitting room—whose salesmen, holding jackets for them, helping them into sportswear, seemed more like trusted valets and aides than actual employees of the store.

  “What do you think, Barney? Cuffs on these?”

  “On crushed, distressed linen, always. That’s just my opinion, Doctor.”

  “Waist thirty-six,” a second tailor said.

  “Waist thirty-six for the judge,” the salesman repeated.

  “The collar rides up in back too much,” said the doctor.

  “I can steam that out.”

  “Think you should take the shoulder pads down?”

  “I’ll steam it out, I take the shoulder pads down I throw off the whole armature of the jacket.”

  “You’re the doctor.”

  “The doctor says I’m the doctor,” Barney said.

  “Where do you want the trousers to break? Here? About here?”

  “There, just above the top of my shoelaces.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “You’ll be wearing this at the club?”

  “Sure, yes.”

  “There’s dancing?”

  “Some dancing, some sitting some out.”

  “For some sitting some out just unbutton the jacket. For the dancing I can take a couple tucks in the left side panel.”

  “Tony, you flatter me,” said a man just coming out of a changing room.

  “No,” Tony said, “no.”

  “No? Who am I, the Jolly Green Giant? There’s enough room in the crotch.”

  Tony was furious. “That was special-ordered. Do me a favor, Mr. Gable. Talk to the store manager, lodge a complaint. Look, I’ll show you the measurements I took. There’s no relation. You see? You see these measurements? No, take it off, I don’t need to check it. I can see from here. Irreparable, irreparable. There’s no excuse. Our helpers in New York did this.”

  Druff’s suit, as his heart had known in advance, did not look good on him. It didn’t. (Druff humiliated by his hologram in the three-way mirror, the comings and goings of his balding, frailing self like a body knocked down on an auction block, going going gone. His image there telling as a CAT scan—of shabby old mortality and downscale being. Slackened fat looked awful on a frail man. Druff bitterly damning trousers that wouldn’t hold a crease, sagged buttonholes, his too-small handkerchiefs and scarves and failing zippers. Mourning the points of his collars, rounding, curling in on themselves, collapsed as old petals, fallen socks. Argh, Druff thought, I’d look shitty in furniture even.) What looked swell on the rack seemed—he recalled a Nehru jacket he’d owned, outmoded the first time he put it on—on him, in daytime’s available light, already played out. It was part of the humiliation of shopping and purchase. And didn’t even get the benefit of salesman- and-fitter talk, the shorten/lengthen arrangements, the tuck compensations and break-of-the-trouser breaks.

  Indeed, his salesman was checking his watch.

  “Tell me,” Druff asked gloomily, “you got potholes in your neighborhood?”

  “Potholes?”

  “Deep pits where the road don’t meet the road, breaks in the concrete where the city didn’t take it in a couple tucks or never bothered to smooth out the shoulders.”

  “No potholes, no.”

  “I’m City Commissioner of Streets,” Druff told him, “you call these guys ‘Doctor,’ you say ‘Judge.’ Anything wrong with the color of my money?”

  (No, Druff thought, too late, he’s going to call me Doctor, he’s going to call me Judge, screaming Dick, Dick, Dick! in his head the second the words were out of the commissioner’s mouth, because where was it written in the job description that his chauffeur-cum-spy-cum-security guard couldn’t scare the bejesus out of the wiseguys who didn’t treat Druff’s office with the proper respect? Or tailors who didn’t fit him properly or salesmen who didn’t steer him away from colors and styles unbe
coming to a man Druff’s complexion and build?)

  Though—admirably, Druff thought—the fellow restrained himself, or, rather, went in a different direction and was all over Druff with his salesman’s sirs and deferentials. It’s just that there was nothing—and Druff, sulkily, agreed—that either the salesman or the tailor could do. The suit fit Druff, Druff just didn’t fit the suit. He dressed, he saw, above his station. Good clothes were for the gorgeous, for the athletically trim and vigorous, for these prime got-up guys in their recognizable cloth and leveraged primes.

  It was a different story at Toober’s, a restaurant in his city’s near south end where many of the councilmen, department and agency heads, and very upper—almost civilian—cops and firemen took their afternoon meal along with other of the town’s higher civil service and search-committee’d political appointees. Here and there a few patronage types were along, secretaries brought by their bosses for their birthday, a retirement do, even, Druff thought, to show the flag, bring out the vote, demonstrate, he meant, a kind of available, last-ditch force like Lear’s whittled retainers. (“Missy,” he’d told his driver, dismissing him, “won’t be needing the car for an hour.”) In a way he might never have left the clothing store. He could have been taking his lunch—the place seemed that male—from his shallow, déclassé bench in the changing room.

  It was a different story anyway. Here he looked fine, jim-dandy. It was recognizable cloth on the diners in the lunch house, too, only theirs didn’t lie on them as it did on the successful young men Druff had seen in the store, like well-kept hair on their well-kept heads. Here he, the pols and dependents dressed in a sort of dim apparatchik mode, one size fits all. No cuffs on their crushed linen, and even the color of their fabrics, no matter how expensive, a vaguely unfashionable shade of grime. Some principle operating here like the one that drove the city to stencil seals on its limos, that spoke of the company suit and, Druff supposed, was intended to ward off the voters by a kind of sartorial poor-mouthing. (Though he knew, of course, that the upper reaches of even democracy had its cutting edge. There were occasions when mayors dressed up like governors, governors like presidents, presidents like kings.)

  He’d been too long trying on his suit. They were very busy, they hadn’t been able, Toober said, to hold his table.

  “That’s all right, I’ll catch a sandwich at the bar,” Druff said, testing. Toober considered half a beat too long before he nodded, agreeing to the arrangement. “Et tu, Toober?” Druff said.

  “Commissioner?”

  “What, has Vegas sent in fresh odds on me? Is the new dope sheet out? D’ju see polls?”

  “Commissioner?”

  “Nah, it’ll be all right. I’ll catch a sandwich at the bar. I’ll inquire about the catch of the day. I’ll ask about soup.”

  “Anything, Commissioner,” said the owner. “You want birthday cake and a slice of pie and a malted, say so. It’s not on the menu, ask.” There was a rumor Druff wasn’t ready to believe that the restaurateur was interested in becoming sheriff, and would run for the office in the next election. Druff didn’t put much stock in the story, thought Toober a familiar enough type, one of those men—there were women too, of course, plenty of them, but these tended to attach themselves to individuals rather than political parties—who were political groupies, Jack Ruby types, drawn to, charged by, some homeopathic “juice.” There was a rough equivalency, he supposed, between the innkeeper and power trades. Both had their backslappers certainly, both worked their respective rooms and loved, if not ceremony, then outright pomp, intriguing circumstance. (Why, Druff wondered, did all restaurant owners make such a big deal about detail, fly into rages over ever-so- improperly set tables? He’d seen Toober fire a busboy just for having spilled a drop of coffee into a customer’s saucer.) Why were they always hounding the customer with their smarmy ingratiations and is-everything-satisfactories? Why, he meant, were they such bullies? (Druff, Druff felt, was no bully, and that was just what might have been wrong with him as a public man.) And why, he meant, did so many pols of his acquaintance share these same instincts, managing merely to smother them with their greased diplomacy? And why, he meant finally, oh why, was everything so political, as laced with motive as the goblets and china service of a poisoner? MacGuffins and plots everywhere. The world was all MacGuffin, one to a customer. (Saving one’s grace, perhaps. He didn’t think MacGuffins were in him. He had no plots, yet found himself to be not entirely displeased with this new—if it didn’t turn out to be paranoia—not unpromising dispensation in which he felt himself to be, as they said in the grand juries, the “target” of others’.)

  He found a place at the bar and plunged almost immediately into conversation with a woman he’d never seen before.

  “Are you,” she’d asked, “a politician too?”

  Druff, who hadn’t been able to judge people’s ages for years now (since, in fact, he’d begun to lose “force” and become a hero of anecdote, his personal golden age before people started to make allowances for him, and not just conducted but sometimes actually flourished his spirit through their wide-opened doors; that time, he meant, when they were still wary of him and he had their ages, indeed, all their numbers), had a particularly vivid notion of this one’s. He thought the woman to be a few months shy of her forty-fifth birthday and curiously amended to himself that he didn’t think she looked it. She was attractive—she looked, Druff thought, very smart—and was as openly blond as an au pair girl. Seated, the line of her back held almost militarily straight and her long, somewhat heavy legs reaching even farther down the bar stool than Druff’s, she seemed quite tall, and Druff felt a quick rush of intimidated lust.

  “Well,” Druff answered her question, “I’m more an official than a politician.”

  “An official,” she said, and Druff smelled her light, liquored breath, pleasant drafts like lovely, discrete things boxed, bottled, packaged, wrapped. Sheets, say, banded in boxes, or the stripped scent of perfume on the ground floor of a department store, sealed candy at the confectioner’s, unopened cartons of cigarettes at the tobacconist’s. Pungencies, the sweet, substantive zephyrs of bakery.

  Uh oh and uh oh, thought Druff, and placed a few loose coca leaves onto his tongue from the stash in his pocket.

  “Well, tell me,” said the tall, blond stranger, “how official are you? Could you have me arrested?”

  “I could get you a ‘No Parking’ sign for the front of your house, or ‘Quiet Please, Hospital Zone.’ ‘Slow. Children Crossing.’ ” Then—perhaps it was the additional coca leaves kicking in—he said, “You’re here on the tour, right?”

  “The tour?”

  “You’re between planes. You saw notices for the city’s hot new ‘Change planes in our town and we’ll show you a time’ campaign. You had a four-hour layover and figured, ‘What the hell, I’ll go for it’ and hopped on the free luxury tour bus.”

  “This happens? I pay taxes for this boondoggle?”

  “Well,” Druff said, “it’s still in the planning stages. I’m trying the idea out on folks, getting their reactions, taking a straw vote. Vox pop. It’s not very scientific, I don’t suppose.”

  By the time Druff’s turkey club came, the coca leaves had taken the edge off his appetite and he thought they were on easy enough terms to offer the woman his sandwich. She refused, but accepted the pickle and agreed to eat some french fries, which Druff spread out on a napkin for her. He asked if he could pick up her bar tab but she declined. He told her his name and identified himself as City Commissioner of Streets, and she told Druff she was Margaret Glorio, a freelance buyer of men’s sportswear for some of the city’s chain department stores. She worked for herself. They exchanged cards, and he undertook to identify many of the people in the room for her. He’d actually turned around on his bar stool and was pointing.

  “Nobody, no one, nobody, no one,” Druff said as if he was counting.

  Several of Druff’s best friends in the world looked up a
nd waved.

  “Oh,” Druff said, “the little unassuming fella in the corner?”

  “That one?”

  “That one.”

  “Oh.”

  “Curator of the art museum.”

  “Really?”

  “They’re cold. What you have to understand is I’m happily married thirty-six years. Nothing that happens between us is going to change that. You ought to know that going in. Want some more fries?”

  “No thank you.”

  “As it happens, I’ve just come from doing some shopping myself. Brooks Brothers? Oh, I suppose you get weary of hearing that after you’ve just told folks you’re a buyer for the major chains, but do I look like someone who’d lie about his haberdashery? Besides, it’s not sportswear I’ve been looking at anyway, it’s a suit. Not even your field.”

  “Are you really the street commissioner?”

  “Sure as Langello there’s the county coroner,” Druff told her, indicating the man Toober had placed at Druff’s table.

  “He’s county coroner?”

  “Like to meet him? Want to shake his hand?”

  “I see no need,” Miss Glorio said, adding she’d never been much of a voter in the local elections and that if a suspicious transmission on her automobile hadn’t caused her to bring the car back to the dealer she’d never have discovered this restaurant or known it was a hangout for local politicians.

  “Local elections, local politicians,” Druff said, “you make us all sound like the Great Gildersleeve. See Superintendent of Schools Carlin? No, over there. Right, that one. You wouldn’t think it to look at him but he’s in charge of a budget of over a hundred million dollars a year.”

  She was trying to catch the bartender’s eye. Druff, a little belligerent, tendered one superbly inflected cough and the fellow came at once. He presented Druff the checks. She started to object but the City Commissioner of Streets overrode her and handed the man money for both their bills. He wouldn’t even let her get the tip, Druff said.