The MacGuffin

by Stanley Elkin

  “I would,” he said. “I’m covered.” He was thinking of those race routes he was supposed to be covering with whatsisname and whatsisname. “I’m telling you, Ms. Glorio, I could have danced all night.”

  “Well, your driver then. Didn’t you say he always picks you up in the morning?”

  “Nuts!” Druff said. “I forgot about my driver. But don’t you have an alarm clock? I could set your alarm clock. Even if I can’t sleep over, then just sleeping with you, even if it’s only for an hour, would be okay in my book, too.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s awfully late.”

  “Oh, I know,” he said. “It is. And I’m pooped. I am. But all I need is an hour. One hour, then I’m up, dressed, and out of here. I’m City Commissioner of Streets, I know where I can call a cab. I wouldn’t even have to use your telephone. No telltale, embarrassing taxis need ever show up at your door. Dick wouldn’t know a thing.”

  To give you an idea how far gone he was. Not even nagging at him. Not even nagging at him all evening, though it had occurred to him. What Dick had told him in the limo—that the driver recognized her, that she was known to her son, known to Mikey, to Su’ad. None of it nagging at him or ruffling his feathers. Though he was as conscious of it as of her ash-blond hair, conscious of it as of that elemental red nightgown, the soft silk or satin lovestuff that might have passed for her skin. That’s how far gone. To give you an idea.

  Had there been a love potion in the soufflé? Not bones at all, not even coca leaves, just some out-and-out love philter? Enchantment-mongering juices in the fruits and sugars, magic heart sesames and all obsession’s amorous fee faw fum? The bell, book and candle therapies and dowser gravitationals, could be, the wand of that ashen hair and all the red sorcery of her nightgown.

  “May I? May I then?”

  “It’s your funeral,” Meg Glorio said and, lying down beside him, switched off the light.

  Almost at once she began lightly to snore. She lay on her side, facing him, her mouth putting out little sour puffs of brandied air, breath bubbles of systemic gall and, somehow this struck Druff as the most erotic—well, in a way erotic, in a manner of speaking erotic—thing that had happened to him yet, as though his fly-on-the-wall relation to her now, to her intimate cheeses and bitters, were some signal of absolute trust. (He thought of Rose Helen’s small, inaccessible shelf, of her real private parts.) Breathing in Margaret Glorio’s miasmas and off-limits climates not as a tourist, say, wandered and lost to the beaten paths, but as some hardened native of the place, acclimated, adapted, who lived light, who went without the frills and didn’t bother with repellents, sun blocks, the sissy amenities. This is what the Chamber of Commerce didn’t tell you about, thought the drifting-off, civic-minded public man. This is what didn’t get advertised or written up in brochures. This was what the sourdoughs knew, what the squatters wouldn’t share with you, what the founding fathers and first families kept to themselves.

  “Well,” said Druff, speaking from his sleep, “I, of course, won’t breathe a word. No, a lady’s breath is her own business. What goes on in the guts is a matter between her liver and onions. When in the course of privates events she chooses to leak on a lover, that lover, or so it seems to me, is sworn to secrete.”

  Druff giggled.

  “No,” he went on, “but seriously folks, this is the case with me here. I happen to need this MacGuffin thing because otherwise just about all I’m good for is to think about myself. Now, admittedly, this ain’t news. I’ve been thinking about myself just about all my life. Well somebody has to, n’est-ce pas? Do you leave such a thing to amateurs? Old pros like Dick, the paid professional? They’d hand you your head, fellows like that. The down side is your hat would be missing.

  “Because what it is essentially, I think, is that the world is getting away from me, I think. Like I was telling Dick in the car just this morning, it’s whizzing past us, the world. Just look at me you need an example. I’ve served as a Republican, an Independent, a Democrat, you name it. I’ve sat on all the committees. I’ve gone for an assemblyman, a streets commissioner, and one time for mayor. I’ve been this utility infielder of a pol, and what did it get me? Where’s my constituency? Will I ever be in a history lesson? It’s tough to be an old-timer, I’m here to tell you. You know why? Because you’ve got to take it sitting down! Well. I suppose you’ll say I’m just falling into the nostalgia trap, but there’s a lot to be said for the old days. (I was beautiful then.) (Oh, not me. I don’t mean me. But me too.)

  “You know what I never see anymore? Just as an instance? Slo-mo movies of chicks hatching out of eggs. Plenty of queer larvae and nameless life forms emerging from the damnedest stuff, even human babies straight out of their mamas’ kootchies. But no chicks. Nothing even remotely edible slouching toward breakfast! Why is that, I wonder?”

  Margaret Glorio moaned.

  “I know,” Druff said, “I know. Ain’t that just what I’ve been saying?”

  She moaned again. She shuddered and issued a great exhalation of bad air, covering Druff, who was under the impression that it came from himself, a mournful accompaniment to his sad complaint. He waved his hands in front of his mouth to disperse the fumes. Jolting himself and opening his ears so he could actually hear what he was saying, making the words manifest, drawing them forth to a kind of consciousness, a sort of flagrance. (Rose Helen should have shaken him by now, tugged at his pajamas. The fact that she hadn’t, encouraged him to continue.)

  “I’m pleased you’re sitting still for all this. It’s good to get such stuff off the chest.

  “I don’t know,” Druff said, “it’s a different world. I see people walking around in malls, wearing the styles and noshing on foreign finger foods, and colored lights blinking beneath the flight paths of aircraft on the tops of tall buildings. Jesus, how organized it is! It’s all crowd control these days. Well, it has to be, I guess, or they’d mug you just for your junk bonds and clean out your Swiss accounts. But where are the bosses going to come from? There ain’t any places for your Pendergasts and Tweeds and Daleys to break in their acts today. If you can’t talk Greaser and don’t do hand jive you might as well pack it in.

  “So I need it. I need this MacGuffin thing!

  “I know I talk about myself, I know I do. Sure! This is my subject now. This is the case. But you know? I don’t particularly love myself. Really. I don’t. It’s just all that’s left over when you’ve burned up your power. I feel, I feel,” he confided, “like little bits of the British Empire!

  And, Rose Helen or no Rose Helen, was now another few hundred feet up the side of his consciousness, breathless, outraged in dreamland, stifled in the rarefied places between sleeping and waking, though he was almost sure, roused by the sound of his voice, stung by the spice of his tears, that he was almost certainly awake.

  He wanted her to hear this next part, insisted she must listen, was prepared, had she raised an objection, to shout it down.

  “Do others have themselves so thoroughly? No,” he said, “I wonder. I do wonder. Do they work themselves up like a foreign language, have they their parentheses and footnotes? Their grammar and…

  “Well,” Druff, cutting in on himself, observed craftily, “of course we must suppose old Su’ad may certainly have let down her guard. I’ve a few theories about that at least.” He waited for her response, got none—to be perfectly honest he hadn’t expected he would as a matter of fact if you wanted to know to tell you the truth; also, the air in the room had suddenly cleared, sweetened, as if a rain, say, had laid the summer dust (this would have been the held breath of her attention)—and went on. “Just feel free to shake me whenever you want,” he said. “Just break in anytime.”

  There was nothing. Excellent. It was a hell of a way to do business, he thought. It was a hell of a way! Forget your TV spots, your “messages,” dumb debates, campaign stops, being there at the gates to press the flesh when the shifts changed, and all the rest of it. Just giv
e him ten minutes alone in bed with the voters, and let him go! Well, he thought, now that I’ve got their attention, I’d better get on with it. He got on with it.

  “One,” he said. “Mikey ran her over.

  “That’s not as farfetched as it sounds. They could have had a lovers’ quarrel. Who knows? Here’s this young girl from a broken, war-torn homeland. She’s fond enough of my kid, but maybe she’s got a fella back in the old country, a sweetheart in the sand, some PLO type with a five-day growth of whiskers under the head drapes. Or maybe there isn’t any boyfriend. Maybe—‘Two different worlds we live in, Mikey. Your ways are not my ways. You say potato, I say potahto.’—she’s just homesick. Who knows? It could have been anything. Maybe her green card’s run out, or she can’t stand our Mikey. They quarrel, she calls him a name and he gets in the car and runs her over. Maybe they didn’t quarrel. Maybe they were having a race, Mikey in the car, Su’ad on foot. They’re neck and neck. He steps on the gas, she lengthens her stride to pass him and takes the lead. Mikey’s humiliated, a little slip of a girl hobbled by a chador passes a guy in a powerful, American-built car. Say what you will about him, Mikey’s a pretty patriotic kid. He guns it, really guns it. And he’s getting it up there now—ninety, ninety-five, a hundred ten, a hundred fifteen miles an hour. He’s catching up to her. He’s catching up to her and he’s getting excited. Hooray! Hip hip hurrah! Three cheers for the U.S. of A. But as I say, he’s excited, too excited. His hands are sweating. He makes a mistake, his hand slips on the wheel, he loses control. Bingo bango! He hits her, runs her over, and it’s good night nurse.

  “That’s one way of looking at it.

  “Two!” he announced.

  “Which brings us to the traffic signal on Kersh Boulevard. (How does Meg Glorio Way strike your fancy?) Oh, yes, the fatal stoplight itself. That pedestrian-activated ‘attractive nuisance’ about which we’ve heard so much, and that anyone, particularly anyone who’s just spotted a lone, obviously foreign, obviously Arab-looking young lady, could just step up to at will and activate with the same casual and discretionary ease with which one turns on a radio. Recall the conditions on the night of the so-called accident. Was it raining? Were the streets slick? Was there fog? What was the phase of the moon? (Someone’s going to have to look this shit up.) And if the person in question happens to be of a different religious or political persuasion from the Shiite Muslim in question, what’s to prevent him or her not from pressing the button on the fatal stoplight, but from not pressing it? What’s to prevent such a person from holding Su’ad back when the light was green in her favor, or from throwing her to the wolves when the light was against her? And suppose such a person had an accomplice? Now this is a big city, a major market. The accomplice could have been anyone, of course, but let’s say for the sake of argument it was Mikey. He hits her, runs her over, and it’s good night nurse all over again!

  “Farfetched? You think so? Let me remind you it was once farfetched to think we’d ever have the scientific wherewithal to put a man on the moon!

  “Normally, I might rest my case, but these are not normal times.

  “Three!

  “The traffic signal was itself at fault.

  “Lookee here. The timer inside the box was defective. One of Su’ad’s Sunni enemies tampers with the signal so it can’t change colors, the critical wiring on the doodad for Go becomes entangled with the critical wiring on the gizmo for Stop. Your green won’t turn green, your red won’t turn red. It just hangs there on amber. It’s rigged so that both the driver’s and the Shiite’s patience run out at exactly the same time. Mikey starts up, Su’ad starts out. Know what we’re talking about here? Talking about the fatal conditions for bingo bango, good night nurse.

  “Oh, I don’t have to spell it out for you. There are hundreds of possibilities, dozens, several.

  “Four!

  “She was a terrorist. Mikey finds out about it and doesn’t like the idea of becoming involved with someone who spills innocent blood. He runs her over. Open and shut. Prima facie b. b., g. n. n.

  “Bear with me. Five and I’m finished.

  “Because so far all I’ve presented, no matter how persuasive it’s seemed, has been circumstantial. But five. What about five?

  “Suppose as I’ve suggested that Su’ad and Mikey didn’t fight. Suppose they didn’t race, the one on foot, the other in the car. Let’s further suppose that no one noticed her at the light and pushed her out into the street and under the wheels of some oncoming car driven by an accomplice. Let’s even suppose that Mikey didn’t run her over. Are you with me so far? All right then. What if there wasn’t even anything wrong with the traffic signal and nobody’s patience ran out, what then? What if she didn’t die at the hands of either mischief or mischance? What if she wasn’t even a terrorist? Or what if she was but Mikey didn’t know it? What if she was a terrorist, but, in the course of reading the American press saw the error of her ways and became so upset with herself that she settled into a deep depression and determined to take her own life? What if she enlisted the aid of our simple, smitten, good-hearted Mikey to help her do herself in?

  “What, I ask you, if it was self-murder? What, that is, if it was a case of simple Su’adicide!

  “Think about it. Think about it!”

  “Wake up, Druff,” said Margaret Glorio, “it’s time to go to school.”

  Only he was awake, of course. Had been, sort of, since somewhere between his second and third arguments. Even if he didn’t immediately understand who was shaking him, even if, in his confused, hypnagogic wakefulness, he didn’t always understand where he was, or knew only that it was somewhere dreadfully, disgracefully off-limits, he was awake. Awake enough, at any rate, to recognize his clothes at the foot of the unusual sofa bed, the stylish sheets, awake enough as he stepped into his pants and put on his socks and shoes and buttoned his shirt and tied up his tie and arranged his jacket around him to comprehend where he was, even as he recognized Margaret and recalled their evening together and blew her a kiss, mouthing “Good night, Margaret dearest. I love you, darling. You’ve captured my heart, my heart, and I’ll call you in the morning,” and took in the long, splendid red nightgown that only two or three hours earlier he’d helped to take off her and held as she stepped back and let him behold her glorious ash-blond bush and firm, trained, unforgettable all. Awake enough, even in the dark, to have registered finally what, excited as he’d been by all the stir and jiggle of his glands and all the bumps and grinds of his unprepared imagination, he had not even seen in the light, some tentative, on-trial, thirty- day, money-back guarantee texture to the decor, or, no, nothing on-trial or thirty-day or even guaranteed to it at all, so much as—see how awake, see how fine his fine distinctions—experimental, some run-up-the-flagpole quality, a feel in the furnishings almost of demographics, of customer-satisfaction surveys, almost, that is, as if the buyer, like some hero of science, had first to work out on herself the exact dosages and precise indications of these surroundings, some environment of the new and venturesome, of the questionable and dangerous, he was able to guess at, anxious and hurried as he was, and in the dark, remember, and only from the dark’s graduated, particular finishes and thicknesses, the bold colors of the walls and carpeting, drapes and slipcovers, working up even the studio apartment’s queer lamps and appliances from what appeared to him—or, rather, didn’t even actually appear to him—not even as black shapes finally so much as almost sonar interferences and encumbrances. That’s how awake, that’s how alert! Even as he stepped, intuiting where it would have to be from the room’s dark, almost invisible silhouettes and pitchy mass, directly up to the designer telephone and dialed, by terrible, instinctive, ruinous rote, Dick, his driver, the spy.

  “Hello?” came the worried, sleep-ridden voice, so thickly accented with semiconsciousness that Druff almost couldn’t quite recognize it at first and paused, waiting for it to go on. “Hello? Hello? Who’s this, who’s there?” Gradually the cop’s voice
came into rich, angry focus. “Is that you again? Give me a break. How many the fuck times I have to tell you don’t call me. You know what time it is? Hello? Come on, what is it? What shit did you get into now? All right, all right, I ain’t mad. If you’re calling this time of night you probably got a reason. What is it this time, you dent a fender, scratch the paint, run a stop? Man, they’re gonna lift your license one of these days. They’re gonna strip you of your privileges.”

  Druff, furious, said calmly, “It’s your employer, Bobbo Druff. It’s your City Commissioner of Streets.” He gave Margaret Glorio’s address, even the number of her apartment. (See how awake? See how alert?) “But I’ll wait in the lobby,” he said. “Stop by the canopy at the front of the building. Don’t leave the car. I’ll see the limousine and come out.”

  Ms. Glorio had turned on a freestanding leather lamp beside the sofa bed.

  “Gee,” she said, “and here I thought I was under no obligation. No salesman would call, or telltale, embarrassing taxis show up at the door. Here I thought my reputation was all safe and sound and that Mary Sally—what’s your wife’s name again?”

  “Rose Helen.”

  “And that Alice Nancy wouldn’t have a clue about what’s going on in our sordid little lives. Oh well,” she said, “I guess Mother was right. It’ll have to be heaven that protects the working girl, after all. Because God knows the gentlemen callers don’t seem to have a handle on it.”

  “I got a little confused,” Druff said. “I called him by mistake.”

  “Hey,” Margaret Glorio said, “we make mistakes. Who’s perfect? Any volunteers? It’s just that at this point in my life, maybe just a couple notches up from the last thing I need, right around, oh, bad news from the Pap smear, say, or a failing score on my mammogram, would be an embittered wife hanging around trying to scratch my eyes out, throwing acid onto the drapes and furniture, making scenes.”