The MacGuffin

by Stanley Elkin

  She brought him off, he brought her off. But always in the dark—because there was a daytime curfew too; Rose Helen wouldn’t let him touch her while it was still daylight, and sometimes he had to sit like an Orthodox waiting for the last light to quit the two big windows with their southern exposure—and always between the mutual, prophylactic cloth of each other’s clothing—beneath coats, towels, laundry, things grabbed out of the closet, on the always-made double bed.

  They grew closer. Not just he and Rose Helen but he and Rose Helen and Edward as well. Who broke stolen bread with them, increasingly shared in their diminished, doggy-bag suppers, and whom, and not as founder of the feast (which even Rose Helen, who’d been on the sorority’s housekeeping committee the year she pledged and so had actually had a part in hiring him, had interviewed him, had been there when he’d sworn his male employee’s Chi Phi Kappa solemn oath that not only was he not to fraternize with the girls he would be serving twice a day six times a week but was not to speak of to other men or discuss with them what they discussed, how they comported themselves in their housecoats and lounging pajamas, what they looked like without makeup, or with their hair up in curlers, the slumber-party coze they affected when no men were around, never acknowledged him to be, preferring to think of herself as its founder, who still held that grudge against her sisters for singling her out—or no, not her so much as just that part of her which constituted the “sanitary deformity”—not to haze, and whose dues and room-and-board at the time of her resignation had been paid up in advance for the rest of the school year anyway), they regarded as their invited guest, despite the fact that he was the one who always served them whatever happened to be reheating itself inside whichever pot or pan he had placed there for them on the hot plate.

  And not just eating warmed-over supper, but some shared sense, certainly for Rose Helen and Druff, and quite possibly for the waiter, too, of a picnic occasion, of roughing it, or, if they were sitting by the window near the plants, a vague notion of actually being outside, dividing foraged food.

  “So,” Rose Helen would occasionally remark after Edward had cleared away their dishes, “how’s your life?” This was the signal for him to start his strange commentary, as if it were not enough that he had just brought them their supper and prepared and even served it, but must now sing for it, too.

  “I don’t know how any of them expects to make it in the real world,” he might begin. (And now it was exactly as if they were outdoors, in dark woods, beneath the stars, or like tramps in hobo camps alongside railroad tracks, Edward’s voice lulling, almost musical, his gossip like some postprandial accompaniment to their digestion.) “Do you know what Anita Carlin had the nerve to ask me to do for her tonight? Her soup was too hot. Instead of waiting for it to cool, she told me to take it back to the kitchen and bring it to her again when it was safe enough for her to eat without scalding herself. Just who does she think she is, Goldilocks? When I asked how I was supposed to know when it was the right temperature, you know what she said? ‘Edward, do I have to do all your thinking for you? Just pour off some in a cup and sip it.’ Now how will someone with an attitude like that ever raise children? Or Jean Allmann? Last night she complained the milk was sour. It came from the same pitcher everyone else’s came from at her table. No one else thought it was sour, but she made me go back and open up a bottle just for her. ‘Where’s the ketchup, where’s the salt?’ ” he grumbled. “ ‘Is there cream on the table?’ When it’s right there in front of them. ‘Edward, my napkin’s disappeared. Would you be a darling and get me another one?’ ‘Edward, there are too many bones in my fish. See can you find a piece that doesn’t have so many bones in it.’ I mean it, the average Chi Phi expects there’s always going to be someone around to wait on her hand and foot, cut her meat up for her, blow on her soup, recommend her dessert. ‘Which is better tonight, Edward, the German Black Forest or the chocolate mousse?’ Then light her cigarettes as if we were waiters in some fancy four-star restaurant instead of just students trying to get an education like everybody else. How will they? I mean, really, how will they? Make it I mean, in life, in the world?”

  And, in the wake of his voice, as if they had all the time in the world, as though all the night sky were above them, over their clubhouse in the treetops, they contemplated his question as if it were the profoundest ever posed.

  “But the one who gets me, who really gets me, is that Lorraine. Who does she think she is? The other day at lunch she didn’t like her sandwich. She took a bite of it and spit it out on the plate. Then she hands it to me and says, ‘Taste this.’ Well, I don’t want to taste her sandwich, but Lorraine has other ideas and says, ‘Go on, Eddy, taste it. This ham is spoiled. They serve us spoiled ham and expect us to eat it. What, and get food poisoned? Taste it, Eddy. Am I crazy or what?’ Oh,” he said, “and Rachel?”

  “The one who may flunk out,” Druff said.

  “Well, that’s the thing,” the waiter said, “you know how worried she’s been about her classes?” His remark was to Rose Helen, who Druff realized the waiter never directly addressed by name.

  “She never studies,” Rose Helen said dreamily. “How can she pass? She never studies.”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” Edward said, “that’s what everyone thought. But you know, the last couple of weeks, she’s been eating like a horse. She asks for second helpings on everything. Seconds on soup, on the main course, seconds on salad.”

  “Rachel doesn’t even like salad,” Rose Helen said.

  “Seconds on salad.”

  “She doesn’t like salad.”

  “Well, that’s the thing. She never particularly liked soup. She never particularly liked anything. Now she wolfs everything down, she can’t get enough. She eats, pardon my French, like she’s got two behinds. There’s this running joke in the kitchen. The dishwasher can always tell which dishes were Rachel’s. Because they look like they’ve already been washed.”

  “Is she fat?”

  “She’s getting there.”

  “Poor Rachel.”

  “She has this really scruffy bathrobe. There are cigarette burns all over it.”

  “Rachel doesn’t smoke. She comes down in her bathrobe? Mrs. Post doesn’t say anything to her?”

  “Her fingernails are a mess, she bites them to the quick.”

  “Rachel doesn’t bite her nails. Poor kid, she’s so worried about her grades.”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  “She isn’t,” Rose Helen said.

  “She is,” the waiter said, “she’s pregnant all right. She’s had the tests.”

  All Druff could think was Where? How? She was an underclassman herself. On weekend nights she hadn’t any more access to those study rooms than they had, he, Rose Helen. She was pregnant? She’d done it? She wasn’t a virgin? And if she wasn’t a virgin, he wondered, then who was the guy? Not the mouse, the little Gamma Beta Sigma shrimp she dated, it couldn’t be him. And if it was him, then how many times did the runt get to poke her before he knocked her up? And who, finally, were Miss and Mr. Foreplay on this campus anyway, and what was the point of having a girlfriend with her own private room in her own unauthorized, non-university housing with a landlady who apparently not only lived and let live but was this high-rolling high liver herself, if all he ever got to show for it was, pardon my French, the goddamn blue balls he went around with all bent over so he was never any higher than the little runt Gamma Beta Sigma son of a bitch himself?

  “Oh,” the waiter said, “by the way, I won’t be seeing you guys Saturday. It’s Alumni Weekend and they’re putting on a special banquet. Mrs. Post wants the waiters to come in two hours early to serve drinks and pass around hors d’oeuvres. Then we have to be there for the banquet part, and by the time we clean up it’ll probably be midnight or later before we get out of there. So you’ll have to fend for yourselves about dinner.”

  But he’d stopped listening, and Rose Helen was probably fixing to call curfew on h
im anyway.

  Which, because of what the waiter had told them, had suddenly become a question between them. Because, though it was true, it no longer mattered to him that she was the more interesting. He had begun to discount her seniority, the damaged-goods factors, her recovered cripple’s way of walking, her defiance and resentment and pride, even the outlaw housing where, in the dark, in their nest there on the double bed, beneath all the queer hodgepodge of their coats and towels and laundry, all the odd, invisible motley of what, for warmth and style and texture, might just as well have been a housepainter’s drop cloth, she was even more inventive than he was. He had even begun to discount the fact that he loved her. Because he was jealous now. (This was the old days. This was the old days and somehow he already knew it was the old days, had this prescient sense of a soured nostalgia, realized they lived in a magic conspiracy of flimflam fears, knew the times were shoving them through the cracks, shucking them, jiving them, feeding them the prose of innocence, the hype of upbringing. For who gave blowjobs then, who took it up the ass? Poor Druff, Druff thought. Because evidently somebody did, and why did he have the feeling that it might have been him? Because maybe they weren’t the Dutch and Duchess of foreplay at all, maybe they were only the floor show. He would, recalling his old, presumed invisibility and warm, comfortable e-pluribus-unum ways, the fancied atmosphere of mutual absorption and the cumulative, conjoined hip-to-haunch of those Friday and Saturday nights in the Chi Phi Kappa passion pit, wince.) Because he was not only jealous now, he was furious.

  Furious (and not just on poor, pregnant Rachel’s behalf either), and not just at the mouse, the little runt shrimp Gamma Beta Sigma son of a bitch, but at all single men and women everywhere, particularly at every unmarried undergraduate or graduate student, coed or otherwise, who was getting it, regularly or otherwise, anywhere in the jiving, shucking, civilized world.

  And not only furious either. Regretful as well. For all his bent-over trials by erection, his excruciating stalled blood and stopped-up sperm.

  They quarreled. Or Druff did, Rose Helen just said no. He quarreled. Or cajoled and wheedled, rather; fawned and flattered, soft-soaped, pleaded and begged.

  He argued.

  “There are less attractive guys than me. The Gamma Beta.”

  “No. I’m sorry. No.”

  There were less attractive men, he argued, plenty of them, but it wasn’t the flukes he cared about. “Really,” he told her, “good for him, good for the Gamma Beta son of a bitch! Good for runts-of-the-litter everywhere!” Because who he really resented, if she wanted to know, were the non-runts, the idea of simply ordinary fellows taking their pleasure was the really galling thing. If she wanted to know.

  She didn’t want to know.

  And now they really quarreled, really went at it.

  We never do this, he told her, we never do that, naming acts for her, citing specifically denied sexual frictions, indicting the five-or-so months they had known each other now, almost, as lawyers do, fixing dollar amounts to his pain and suffering (so much for each blue ball, so much for going around all bent over), and assessing his mental anguish (so much for frustration, so much for the personal humiliation he felt when he’d learned that even a little runt Gamma Beta Sigma mouse had knocked someone up).

  “Don’t I let you touch me down there?” Rose Helen said. She might have been close to tears. It sounded that way, but he couldn’t tell. They were on Rose Helen’s made bed. It was too dark to see. “Don’t I?” she repeated. “Let you touch me down there?”

  “Sure, through layers of underwear.”

  “Haven’t you kissed my nipples?”

  “Oh come on, Rose Helen, you practically make me brush my teeth first,” he said irritably. “And when did you ever let me even touch them with your brassiere off?”

  “Don’t you get to hold my behind?”

  “With gloves on, mittens, through goddamn snowsuits.”

  “Don’t you go under my dress?”

  “I have to get past all the dry cleaning first, all the clothes and shower curtains on the damn bed. I have to prick my fingers on the pins in your Ship n’ Shore blouses. It’s a regular obstacle course!”

  “All right,” she said, “haven’t I kissed you down there?”

  “Through my trousers!” Druff yelled.

  “Don’t raise your voice to me!” she raised her voice to him. “And if this bed’s such an obstacle course, why don’t I just get out of it and remove one of the obstacles?”

  She got out of bed, smoothed her clothing down. She turned the light on.

  “Fine,” Druff shouted in the now bright room, “and why don’t I just remove the rest of them!” He ripped the bedspread off the bed, scattering it across the floor along with all his and Rose Helen’s intervening protections, the various towels, washcloths, throw rugs and clothing.

  “Pick all that up!” Rose Helen said.

  “I won’t do it,” Druff said.

  That was when Edward came up with their dinner.

  “Hey,” the waiter said, “what’s going on here? It looks like a cyclone hit the place. What happened?”

  “A cyclone hit the place,” Druff said. “All that crap ended up on the floor.”

  “Here,” Edward said, “let me help you get some of this stuff up,” and started to bend down.

  “Leave it alone,” Rose Helen shouted. “Don’t touch a thing!”

  Which was when Mrs. Green, startling them all, came into the room.

  “What’s this shouting?” she demanded. “Didn’t I tell you about the railroad workers,” she said, “the irregular hours they sleep? How are they supposed to get the rest they need if you people are so inconsiderate?”

  She looked from one to the other, taking in the mess on the floor, taking in Rose Helen’s Butler’s Principles of Basic Education, Foerster’s American Poetry and Prose, and Druff’s Civics, taking in the big cellophane-wrapped dinner plate with Rose Helen’s supper on it that Edward still held.

  “You kids aren’t students, are you? That one, he isn’t a waiter sneaking food in from some sorority he just stole it from where he sets table and serves the sisters their lunches and dinners, is he? Because I run a respectable house here with railroad workers, beauticians, cashiers, Air Force wives and food handlers. This isn’t any authorized university housing I do here to baby-sit for a bunch of all-grown-up kids on the excuse that they’re here for an education, while the truth is that the male grown-up kid is mostly just interested in finding some agreeable female grown-up kid who’s willing to take his pecker and hold it inside her for a while.”

  “I don’t steal it,” Edward said.

  “What’s that?” Mrs. Green said.

  “The food,” he said. “I don’t steal it.”

  “Well all right,” Mrs. Green said, “so you don’t steal it. That’s still no call to go shouting at each other at all hours of the day and night and make the kind of mess I see here on the fl—”

  “They give it to me themselves. I’m no thief. I don’t steal it. They make up the plates themselves. For her, for Rose Helen. ‘Here,’ they tell me, ‘you’re friends with them, you know where she’s living, why don’t you go on and take these scraps to her? We won’t miss them, we’d only have to throw them out. Why should they go to waste? This way we’ll know that at least she’s eating well. She was one of us, after all. We took her in once and made her feel welcome. Just because she thinks she had a falling-out with us why should she go hungry? She’s had a hard enough life as it is.’ So I didn’t steal it. The Chi Phi Kappas give it to me for her themselves.”

  “The hypocrites,” she shouted, “the hypocrites!” She started to cry.

  Druff didn’t want to leave. Rose Helen said no, he had to. She said that once he picked everything up he’d tossed on the floor he could stay for a while but that she expected him to observe the usual curfew.

  That night she tried to kill herself. Mrs. Green and one of the railroad workers saved h
er life. They called the authorities and, afterwards, Mrs. Green had the decency to call Druff at Mrs. Reese’s to tell him what happened.

  She was still being held for observation when he proposed. Both of them understood that his proposal of marriage and her acceptance had nothing at all to do with forgiveness, or mercy, or their sorrows.

  So they still didn’t know any couples, and now they no longer had even Ed with them, good old Edward R. Markey with his name like a clerk of the court or some high-up in the Motor Vehicles Bureau, their friend downtown, could be, and who may have been the real politico here, who knew where the bodies were buried, their whys and whats, their names and addresses, and whose own bodies, his, Rose Helen’s, he would keep in his files long after they ceased to bother with his.

  So you can imagine how he felt.

  Even after all his careful arrangements for the evening, making the reservations at the restaurant, withdrawing two hundred dollars at the automatic teller, sending the flowers, purchasing the condoms he knew he wouldn’t be using, evading Mrs. Norman, sidestepping Doug, Druff had still to call Rose Helen to explain why he wouldn’t be coming home for dinner that night. It was the thing he most dreaded, and he put it off till last—unless, as he feared, calling Margaret Glorio and canceling out altogether (a distinct possibility) were to be his final “arrangement,” allowing the flowers to stand as a sort of olive branch—because he didn’t have the slightest idea what he would tell her. He’d had few occasions to lie to Rose Helen, so few, in fact, that he was sure she’d catch him out the minute he opened his mouth. The times he had lied to her had always been in the line of gallantry, and even then never volunteering, only if she asked, insisted. (Even after almost forty years he was afraid of her because she wouldn’t be patronized, his proud, up-front, warts-and-all wife.) And then the furthest he’d go might be to tell her that he liked a dress he didn’t particularly care for, or approved a hairdo to which he’d not yet become accustomed, Rose Helen not only reading his reservations, reading his mind, reading his instincts, but putting her finger precisely where he’d have put it himself if he’d known enough about fashion or coiffure to be at all articulate about them.