The MacGuffin

by Stanley Elkin

  Then he moves to the bed and gets in beside his wife, dead to the world. It’s—what?—almost five in the morning. It must be a scientific fact, not noted until just this moment, that Rose Helen, whose snores (If I had a dollar, etc.) he’d always been able to extinguish simply by reaching out and touching her shoulder and saying “No Snoring,” easy as that, as if the words carried exactly the same municipal weight as his City Commissioner of Streets directives on signs (“No Parking,” “No Standing,” “No Loading“), doesn’t snore at this time of day. Druff is certain he’s uncovered a law of nature. It must be something in the five a.m. nasal atmospherics, or that snorers leave off when the birdies start up their songs, some symbiotic sound/silence deal—din physics.

  Druff, moved to the bed, slipped in beside Rose Helen, dead to the world himself, sleeps, putting everything he’s got into it, with nothing left over, not even an ounce, with which to dream, let alone make speeches or sketch from the edges of his consciousness his fabled Lincoln-Douglases.

  It was almost noon when he woke. He showered and dressed quickly. There was a possibility, he thought, that he might have missed Rose Helen, something, given the nature of his behavior, that was not entirely unwelcome. But he was wrong. She was in the kitchen, rubbing red seasoning into the carcass of a raw turkey. Mikey, beside her, sat on a stool peeling potatoes, pretending they were onions. He drew his shirtsleeve across his eyes, wiping away imaginary tears, pretending to flick them onto the floor. He whined. He wailed. He went boo-hoo. Conjugating noises in a toy grief. Rose Helen was laughing. Druff walked into the room. “Mama, look,” said his son, breaking off, “it’s Lazy Mary.” Rose Helen laughed even harder.

  Druff suspected something was terribly wrong.

  “You’re all dolled up,” Rose Helen said.

  The times were out of joint was what. Druff suddenly understood it was Saturday. He’d mistaken the weekend for a workday and couldn’t have felt more like Rip Van Winkle if all the appliances in his kitchen had been invented since he’d gone to bed. If he’d placed his hands on a long gray beard or seen in the paper that the government had changed hands overnight. It was the weekend and he felt as deprived of time as a jailbird, cheated as any prodigal crying over the spilled milk of a misspent youth, or money down the toilet of a bad husbandry.

  “I overslept,” he said. (Thereby losing a piece, too, of Saturday.) “Jeez,” he said, examining his suit coat, plucking his tie, “I’m dressed for downtown.”

  “Did you think you had to go to work today?” his son asked.

  “Sure did.”

  “Bank dividend in your favor.”

  “Error,” Druff said. “If the allusion’s to Monopoly, ‘Bank error in your favor’ is the quote you’re looking for.”

  “I’ll fix breakfast,” Rose Helen said. “Pancakes? We have Canadian maple syrup. I’ll squeeze oranges.”

  “It’s ‘dividend,’ Daddy, I think.”

  “How could it be dividend? A dividend’s something already coming to you,” Druff said.

  Mikey looked down at the potato he was holding, considering. “I should be done with my chores by the time you finish your breakfast. We could play some Monopoly and settle it like men.”

  “Coffee and toast,” Druff said. “Don’t bother squeezing any oranges. Frozen’s all right. Where’s the All-Bran? God damn it, Mikey, I opened up a new box just yesterday. How many times do I have to tell you? All-Bran is not a snack food. It’s medicine.”

  “For God’s sake,” Rose Helen said, “are you going to start in with him over a box of cereal?”

  “He goes after it like it was potato chips!” Druff said irritably. “He puts it away like popcorn! Oh,” Druff said, “now I understand the pancakes and syrup bit. Now I see what the fresh orange juice was all about. You knew he’d eaten up my All-Bran.”

  “Your All-Bran. Really,” she said.

  “Well, I hope you enjoyed it,” he told his son. “I just hope you found it a tasty treat. Because my colon cancer is on your head, young Mikey. My colostomy bag’s just one more piece of matched luggage you’ll have to learn to live with.”

  “Fine breakfast table conversation,” Rose Helen said.

  “Just who does he think he is?” Druff demanded. “Who gave him the right to scarf down all the roughage and high fiber in this house?”

  “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar, Dad,” Mikey, deadpan, said.

  “Toilet humor, very nice,” Druff said. “Thirty years old and he still makes ca-ca jokes. Mikey, do you understand that when Jesus Christ was crucified he was only three years older than you are right now?”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with it,” Mike said.

  “No,” said Druff, “I don’t suppose you do. All right, Rose Helen,” Druff said, “I see I’m going to have to go with the pancakes and maple syrup after all.”

  “Make your own goddamn breakfast,” Rose Helen said.

  “I will then,” he said. Then, more softly, “Of course, any idea I may have had of playing Monopoly with Michael here has entirely left me.”

  “You wouldn’t have anyway,” Mikey said.

  “No? How can you know that?”

  “Because you’re always trying to fool me,” he said.

  “Oh please,” Rose Helen said, “the both of you!”

  Well, it was the weekend, Druff thought. He was at an age when weekends spelled nothing but trouble. When they were no longer the big payoff they once had been. Baths, for example. Grooming. There was a time, he recalled, when the jokes on the radio had it that Saturday night was the night universally observed by Americans for taking their baths. Maybe it was farmers, factory workers, people in cold-water flats whose hot water was rationed, doled out on weekends. He wasn’t blue collar himself, none of his people had been. His father, a traveling salesman, made good money, had been a stickler for the personal hygienes—shined shoes, soap behind the ears, haircuts and fingernails. Even dancing lessons—fox-trots, the waltz—had been high on his father’s list as a kind of personal grooming, a preparation for feats of business linked in his dad’s mind with the mens sana in corpore sano of cleanliness and presentability. So he couldn’t imagine he’d ever been let off from taking baths on weekdays. Yet it was all a blur in his mind, and he had a sort of racial memory of long, ritual Saturday night baths when he lay soaking in his tub with, in effect, an entire country. Getting themselves up, sprucing.

  As he remembered the wonderful e pluribus unum arrangements of his Friday and Saturday nights with Rose Helen at the Chi Phi Kappa house. Not only out of the question, gone forever, unimaginable.

  Or MacGuffins either. He couldn’t imagine being visited by his MacGuffin on a weekend at home. MacGuffin’s night off.

  Where were the museums and zoos of yesteryear, or even the Monopoly encounters of Mikey’s blown hope? Druff, down Memory Lane, missed Saturday matinees.

  “Truce?” he suggested suddenly, tapping toast crumbs at the corners of his mouth with a napkin, swirling his coffee like a brandy. “What say?”

  Nothing, they said nothing. Michael peeled his potatoes, his wife rubbed her red seasonings. Druff sniffed at the neutral, still unroasted air. “Mnh,” he said, “mhnn. Something smells good. Company coming?” Without troubling to answer, Rose Helen abandoned the turkey, left the kitchen. Druff stared at the big dead bird. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of such a thing as salmonella then?” he said, raising his voice, calling after her. “I suppose you think salmonellas don’t show up in white people’s kitchens. I suppose you think they’re a respecter of persons. Well, that’s just what they want you to think. That’s playing right into their hands, Rose Helen. That’s burying the old head in the sand. There you go. That’s just the opening they’re looking for. You hear me? Hey, I asked did you hear me? Did you hear me, you ostrich?”

  “Come on, Dad,” Mikey, fingering Druff’s mood, his weekend irritability like some virus held in the bones, said. “Come on,” he said. “Please?
” Managing him, gingerly, like a handler of drunks.

  “Well,” Druff said grudgingly, “this will just have to be one of those unilateral truces then. It’s too nice a day to quarrel and let rip,” he said, quarreling and letting rip. “Because you know why Dad’s dressed up like this? Not because he thought it was still the workweek. Did you think he thought it was still the workweek? Well, you are easily fooled then. No. It’s because I thought maybe we’d all go somewhere nice together. Take you to McDonald’s, get you a Big Mac, see did their new Care Bears shipment come in yet.”

  He didn’t know why he did it. It had to be more than a moody weekend virus traveling his system, too much time on his hands, nothing happening until Monday morning when he would climb back into his limo again. (Absent emergency, of course, sudden ice storms, something fucked in the infrastructure, the pavements buckling, whole thoroughfares taken out.) His inexcusable behavior. It had to be more than cabin fever. Cabin fever? It wasn’t even lunch yet. Though whatever was bitching him, the weekend was part of it, of course. Also, Druff had a MacGuffin. Anything could happen. It had been only twenty-four or so hours, but you learn fast or die when you have a MacGuffin. Basic crash course for a City Commissioner of Streets. (How’s that for irony?) Already he was at least a little qualified in MacGuffin technique. No, anything could happen. He’d overslept. Margaret Glorio may have called. Perhaps she was taken with him. Maybe he was a dynamite fuck, him this political bigwig and all, this power-play type. She might have been a democracy groupie, some victor/spoils sport. He’d met her at Toober’s after all. Car trouble or no car trouble, the City Hall hangout had been her restaurant of choice. (Two meals he’d had with her now.) Who knew? The best defense… He slammed back into action.

  “Did anyone call?” he asked his son.

  “The phone rang a couple of times.”

  “Well?”

  “Mom got it.”

  “She say it was for me?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Listen,” he told the boy, “go find your mother.” Playfully he reached his hands out to Mikey’s neck, straightened a pretend knot on an imaginary necktie he made believe his thirty-year-old kid wore down the front of his T-shirt. “How’s them eyes?” he whispered. “All better?” It was an allusion to the tears he’d shed peeling potatoes. His eyes were shut now too, guarding against the vision of Druff’s slant purpose. He’d spent a lot of time, Druff thought, crouched behind his sight today. All through his father’s Monopoly, cancer bag, salmonella and McDonald’s riffs. “Say how late I got home, tell her I’m still a little cranky,” he instructed his son. “Ask in a nice way if there were any calls while Daddy was sleeping?”

  Druff poured a second cup of coffee for himself.

  Mikey lumbered off. Well, lumbered. Actually, he moved rather gracefully for so big a fellow. It was all that muscle gainsaid his grace, the vaguely armored, vaguely plated, faintly scaly quality of his flesh, skin’s moving parts, pads of muscle like a moving man’s quilted being, that lent him all the slow, frozen majesty and power of some giant, foursquare reptile. For all Druff’s contemptuous swagger, he feared the kid, scared in the rudiments and deep fundamentals, like someone apprehensive in darkness, or held frozen, checked by his atavistic willies. All that repression, all that hatred. It was maddening, Druff thought, no day at the beach, no month in the country. He hadn’t even the pie-plate look and sweet nature of the openly retarded, but all the feral anger and pronounced cheekbones of a psychopath, always wrong, always belligerently logical. Druff feared the poke Mikey would one day take at him, the swat that finished, the swipe that killed.

  Or suppose, he thought when Mikey went off—it was the weekend, all that time on his hands—company was coming? Druff’d just had his ashes hauled by a beautiful woman. How could he be expected to sit through a big meal?

  “Why,” Rose Helen said, “were you expecting a call?”

  “Oh,” Druff said, “you startled me.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, “you look startled.”

  “You surprised me,” he said, “your voice surprised me. I was a million miles away. A shock to the system. Ever take up your water glass when you reached for your tea? Has that happened to you?”

  “What?” she said. “Speak up, I can hardly hear you.”

  “Nothing,” Druff said, “I said you surprised me.”

  “Oh damn,” said Rose Helen. “I just put this battery in. That’s the second time this week. And now I’m all out. Wait, maybe it’s not seated properly.” She removed her hearing aid and laid out its parts on the table near the remains of Druff’s breakfast, his unfinished coffee, the crusts of his bread. A bit of earwax clung to a side of the stainless steel battery like jam on cutlery. “I swear,” she said, “these things are more trouble than they’re worth.”

  “Is that a zinc oxide?” Druff asked. “Dr. Zahler told you only zinc oxides.”

  Rose Helen, vulnerable, missing one of her senses, began to cry.

  “Oh Christ, oh Jesus,” he comforted. “Baby,” he cooed. “Rose,” he said. “Never mind. Don’t. Aw,” said the Commissioner of Streets, “I know, I know. So what,” he said, rubbing her back, raising her chin to hold between his forefinger and thumb, “fuck it. Let ’em hear cake.”

  He took the battery out of her hands and fit it into a little compartment in the hearing aid. (Druff was no expert, of course, but it looked no different to him from the less efficient, less expensive mercury or silver oxide batteries.) “There,” he said, “see is that any better.”

  The First Lady of City Streets took the device and, turning away, reinserted it. She inclined her head, she shook it, as if testing to see if water was lodged in her ear. “Oh my,” she said, turning back to her commissioner. “Oh my, yes. Yes indeed. What a difference. Day and night. What a relief. I thought for a minute… Well,” she said, “what were we… Oh yes, how startled you looked. Then my silly battery went dead on me. It’s so strange,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used… One minute I hear everything they throw at me, the next I’m deaf as a post. Well, I can’t say he didn’t warn me. He said when he first fitted me for the stupid thing not to let the batteries go down, to take them out when they’re not in use. It’s a nuisance and really, well, frankly, to tell you the truth, there are times I don’t dare take them out. That’s why it’s important I should try to see about getting tested for a second hearing aid, one of those new space-age models that practically turn you into a spy satellite. Wouldn’t that be something? How’d you like your wife to have such powers? I could overhear everything that goes on, all the plotting. Can you think of a better advantage a politician could have? I thought,” she said, “the impression I was left with, was it wouldn’t happen with a zinc oxide, that it drained down more slowly, like the reserve in a gas tank after you’re already on ‘E.’ That’s what it’s supposed to have over the mercury or silver oxide. It’s six of one, half a dozen of the other, if you ask me. And twice as expensive. Even if I get them from Zahler. I bought half a dozen from Zahler. It couldn’t have been a month ago. He’s no cheaper than Williams Pharmacy and they’re an arm and a leg. But take them out when they’re not in use? When aren’t they in use? That’s a laugh. When aren’t they in use? When I go to sleep? Could I have taken them out last night? With you gone and Mike out all hours? Suppose there’d been a fire? Suppose there’d been a fire and the smoke alarm went off? How would I have heard it? I wouldn’t have heard it. I’d have burned up in my bed. The deaf perish in fires. On a per capita basis more hearing-impaired burn up in fires than people still in control of their sound. Did you know that?”

  “Come on, Rose. You’re not going to burn up in a fire. It’s senseless to worry about a thing like that. What are the odds, Rose? More people win the lottery in this town than go up in flames.”

  But she couldn’t hear him, probably couldn’t hear herself, her mistaken emphases bumping up the stress on certain words like a hiccup, knocking meaning for a
loop, blowing it sky-high, sounding alarms, laying down her insistence and hysteria like a trail.

  And then this occurred to the commissioner: This was the same little lady who stepped on his best lines in dreams. This was old Rose Helen. It couldn’t have been forty years ago she rested her palm on the tiny shelf above her damaged left hip, posturing buffalo gals, dance-hall ladies, leading him on with the thrust of a raised hip beneath those full skirts, drawing him, luring him, pulling him in with her seductive dip and forward glide, turning her “deformity” into a lewd suggestion. This was old Rose Helen here, the throwback cripple, pouring it on with the skewed iambics, cute as a lisp, of her oddball speech and nervous, loony monologue.

  Only suppose she was faking it? Suppose this was only another lewdness meant to arouse in Druff whatever sucker passions he had left to his name? After all his decades in politics he ought to be able to recognize a dirty trick when it stared him in the face. Suppose the batteries still lived in her hearing aid? What a mistake to have thought MacGuffins took weekends off. That’s just how adulterers, their guards lowered and their minds groggy from the candles they burned at both ends, from their monkeyshines and escapades and scrapes, had their nuts handed to them.