The MacGuffin

by Stanley Elkin

  “I told you,” Charles said, “I slowed for the suit. I didn’t see you in it. I didn’t see anyone in it.”

  Right, Druff thought, that’s just what I was telling my tailor. “Anywhere around here will be fine,” he said.

  “You sure? Because this isn’t the sort of place you described. I mean it’s all elevator buildings. It don’t seemed zoned for neighborhood.”

  “Oh, I don’t live around here.”

  “No.”

  “Thought I’d drop in on my mistress.”

  Charles stopped his pickup at the curb and Druff carefully let himself out. Before shutting the door he turned back. “Charles, listen to me,” he said. “I’m not naming names because maybe I’ve got it all wrong and I’m in the clear. Habeas corpus, know what I mean? I’m fifty-eight years old. A lot of this could be glandular, a figment. Maybe all of it is. Nobody followed us. Now I know that’s not worth the paper. I mean, you don’t actually have to follow people. Not when you can phone ahead. Shit, Charley, I’m fifty-eight. My itinerary ain’t hard. Limo guy number one, limo guy number two. My kid, my wife, and a lady who makes it with ghosts.

  “It’s just I’ve got this feeling today could be the day I buy the farm. Fill out the forms, pay the points, do the closing. It’s only a feeling. I’m not really scared. It’s a little erotic, even. Catastrophe is required sometimes, the death-dangers. A touch of the apocalypse. You know, a lick and a promise.”

  He could tell Charles was anxious to get going, that he wasn’t in the mood. (No, thought Druff, he ain’t? And was suddenly reminded of last night, of the cars stopped at cross streets waiting for the green.) The commissioner hung on to the pickup’s open door for dear life. He was still talking, making his impressions, marking his trail, territorial as an animal.

  “It’s just I’m closing in on these guys,” he said.

  “Which guys?”

  “Well, as I say, I’m not at liber—”

  “No no,” Charles said, “don’t give me that. You’re at liberty. You’re at liberty all over the place. I’ve never seen anyone at so much. So which guys? Come in, sit down, feel free. You, easy rider, I know all about you—your age, your contingency plans for when the house gets too big—which goes first, your pool or your dining room. I know which toilet you piss in. So don’t tell me you’re not at liberty. Ain’t I been sitting here like limo guy number three, listening to all your harum- scarum? Which guys? Which goddamn guys?”

  “You’ve been very kind,” Druff said softly.

  “Too right.”

  The City Commissioner of Streets let go of the door but did not shut it just yet. “It’s true,” he said. “I’m not at liberty.”

  “Hey,” Charles said, “are you going to be all right?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say am I going to be all right,” said the City Commissioner of Streets, thinking it could be so, what’s there to stop it. There was something to his vague, titillative misgivings. There had to be. Knowing your chances and fate was at least as possible as knowing your body, your own most intimate, physical perceptions of the world. Once burned, twice sorry. If he lived another fifty-eight years he’d never mistake a heart attack for indigestion, could, with his telltale left arm tied behind his back, identify the singular pain that shot through it as clearly as some high, burning astronomical event over a quadrant of sky. He would forever recognize the particular stitch in his side, in his back, of a collapsed lung, the strange, sudden heaviness in the groin that prefigured a kidney stone. One minute nothing, asymptomatic, his personal weather like a day for flying kites, the next clouded over with squalls from nowhere.

  Charles was all right, Charles was probably as clean as a whistle, clean-as-a-whistle-wise, as it was possible to get in a compromised age. Yet it was almost all he was worth not to ask what he hauled in the truck bed, not, as official commissioner of the city’s streets, to demand to see invoices and manifests. Druff knew from their conversation the man was married. He knew he still had kids young enough to be driven in a car pool. He knew he worked as a projectionist, a kind of on-site inspector, in one of those automated multiplex cinemas with enough theaters radiating out from beneath its roof it could almost be a video rental service. (The sewers of Paris, he thought, each time he went to see a movie in one of those places.) Well, for a car pool they’d have to come up with something better than a pickup truck, so if he didn’t use it as the family car, and didn’t need it in his business, then surely the truck must have been used, at least partly, for hauling a certain amount of contraband. No? Not? These days?

  And old Druff still standing there staring at old Charley, sizing up his benefactor. For plunder, smuggle, loot, the sacked and secret booties.

  Feeling these vibes, getting this picture, imagining the puzzle coming to a head like a pimple. Thinking like a gifted clairvoyant now, some canny working for the cops, on the city’s actual payroll, possessed, running for daylight, inspired, bursting with intimation, sensing the aura of what was, damn near almost seeing the big picture, where everything went, how they put it all together, not the trail he’d been marking so much as that other one, all the trampled green places in the woods others had done for, something as material as hunch, dizzying as odor, Druff at once exhilarated and crazed, chipper as a hound, in it for the luscious bloods and dirts, high on this stench of the hunted, until Charley, in consultation with vibes of his own, intuiting what Druff was up to could be, leaned all the way over and across the cab of his pickup and slammed the door.

  Druff stared after the little truck, in the street now but still snagged on pieces of traffic, until the scent gradually cooled, faded, was gone.

  So anyway. Even if he didn’t buy the farm, even if it wasn’t even for sale, something was up. The commish on the cusp of things heavy- hearted. We’ll see what we’ll see. But no longer in touch with his wiped impressions, these scattered as the shards of a dream.

  Remembering only the grander outlines of his bozo itinerary. Margaret Glorio, check. Naming her name in his heart and, opening the plastic sack in which he still carried a half dozen batteries for Rose Helen’s hearing aids, he removed the three blister packs and distributed them discreetly about his person, placing one in the left inside pocket of his suit coat, another in the right, and shoving the last deep into the jacket’s breast pocket. Running on zinc now, thought the City Commissioner of Streets, his energy up, or on some fillip of shit more likely, what he felt trembling his gut now he’d left the pickup and was out on the wide sidewalks of Meg Glorioland, a jolt of the high school juices gathering, adrenalizing him and giving him, for all he knew, the zits altogether.

  Oh, he thinks, taking in the prospect, high rises with their addresses scribbled across their canvas canopies like meticulous signatures or the lettering on expensive invitations; discrete, iron-fenced trees sunk into the pavement like extravagantly potted plants; impressed as always by the tony, handsome upscale of the neighborhood, adjacent, it occurs, to the very park where he and Dick, searching out potholes, had encountered the mounted policeman—has he come full circle? he wonders—only the day before.

  Though from here he can’t even see Margaret Glorio’s building. He had deliberately passed it without saying anything—for Charley’s benefit—two blocks back. Nothing wrong, Druff thought, with a little camouflage. It was simple courtesy to lay down a trail. Nobody said it had to be a U.S. goddamn geological survey.

  Druff went into Margaret’s lobby, started toward the elevator.

  “Hey,” someone called. “Hey, hey.”

  It was the man from the night before, the fellow dozing at the television monitors, and who, awakened by Dick pounding on the horn, had then roused Druff.

  “What?” said Druff.

  “Where you going? You can’t go up unless you’re announced.”

  He didn’t want to be announced. He didn’t want to give her an opportunity to refuse to see him. (He remembered the call she said she was expecting, her initial rush to get him
off the phone.)

  The doorman insisted.

  Druff wondered if the man recognized him, but couldn’t tell. (Though he’d made the limo, he recalled, had known it was from the city.) To keep him off the scent a while longer, he offered Margaret’s apartment number, not her name. (More lore from the woods, the higher camouflage studies.)

  “What’s your name?”

  “Druff,” Druff whispered.

  “Wait, I’ll announce you.” He went to say something into an intercom and was back in less than a minute.

  “Margaret has a visitor,” he said.

  “I see.”

  “She says what do you want.”

  “What,” Druff said, “you think I’d tell you and blow my cover?”

  “You’ll just have to wait then,” he said. “You can sit over in that armchair you fell asleep in last night.”

  “I wasn’t here last night.”

  “Got ya,” the doorman said, and winked.

  “Well, I wasn’t,” Druff said.

  “Right.”

  He was probably supposed to tip him but had no notion of what was appropriate in these circumstances. He had no clue what these circumstances even were exactly. “You know,” Druff said, “for a man my age, I have no idea what’s proper here. I mean, what are you? A working stiff, same as myself.” He glanced at the fellow’s elaborate uniform, at his epaulets and ornate, cursive braid. “Just another gold-collar worker doing his job the best he knows how. I wouldn’t want to embarrass you,” he said. “I mean, you’re the expert here. Tell me. What’s fair? I want to be fair.”

  “Forget it,” he said. “My treat.”

  “Well, I appreciate that. I do. But just for the record.”

  “Well,” said the doorman, “just for the record, it depends on who’s being protected, some married party, or bachelorette number one.”

  Druff casually placed a hand over his wedding band and leaned in toward the doorman. He was going to ask about Margaret Glorio’s visitor when someone, moving past his peripheral vision, waved to the doorman, who called, “See you, sir. Thank you very much, sir,” and waved back.

  “That was him, wasn’t it?”

  “Who?”

  “Miss Glorio’s visitor.”

  “Was it?”

  “Come on,” Druff said. “I didn’t get a good look.”

  The fellow shrugged and Druff produced a twenty, which he extended toward him. Well, produced. Which he fumbled out of his wallet. Which he was first at some difficulty to remove from the rear pocket of his pants, and was then at some more to unfold and open (the exact amount having been determined in advance, in an instant, less than an instant, and even then not really determined, finally, so much as known, almost—had he believed in such things—inspired), and then tried to hand over. (He was new at this: not bribery, not the fix; he was a political after all, he knew his baksheesh, the cost of doing business; but this kind of business? intrigue business? after years on Inderal?) And, well, for that matter, a twenty. A five, a ten, and five singles, actually, which, even at that, he had to practically fucking study, for Christ’s sake, looking into the wallet, examining it at close range, reading the goddamn bills like some auditor going over the goddamn books!

  “Sorry,” the Supreme Allied Commander—looking chap, declining Druff’s seven pieces of paper currency, told the City Commissioner of Streets, “that one’s under my protection.”

  “Everyone seems to be under your protection.”

  “I got de whole worl’ in my hands.”

  (And doing comedy, Druff thought, this happens. Comedy is what they do to you when there’s nothing you can do, when there’s nothing doing.)

  “May I go up now?”

  “Who’s stopping you?”

  “Aha!” Druff, a beat or so behind the rhythm of the conversation, said, meaning it had too been the guy, forgetting he already knew as much, and had since the doorman told him the man who’d just brushed past his peripheral vision was under his protection. He felt a sort of pity for Miss Glorio at this moment. Being ridiculous, he made her look bad. It was a good thing the doorman had her in his hands.

  “Announce me,” he said, chastened, and a little resentful, too. Even angry. Because the guy wouldn’t take Druff’s fistful of dollars, because no promises had been made, and the commissioner was high and dry in the lobby. It was as if he’d been denied membership in a not very exclusive club. “Tell her Druff’s on his way up. Give her a chance to put her face on, fix her hair. Maybe slip into something a little more uncomfortable.”

  And stepped into the elevator and pushed “I1,” vaguely proud of what he anticipated would be Margaret’s view: of the park, of the city, Druff’s streets. And for the second time in as many days struck his temple with his open palm. He wouldn’t get to see it. Any more than last night. It was dark out. Here, in the elevator, atemporal as Las Vegas, the lateness of the hour so abruptly revealed to him—Druff’s vaudeville truths, his dunderhead dumb show—was oddly disconcerting. He was frightened of this particular dark, of Margaret’s eclipsed views. What, he wondered, am I doing here? What in hell’s going on, just? It isn’t enough, he added obscurely, I have no friends in the lobby? It was Saturday night. Now you’d be able to find suits all over the place. But he’d been wearing his all day. It was no longer fresh. There was fear in its cloth. It could use a press. He cursed his bollixed timing. In various pockets, Rose Helen’s expensive batteries, not in use, drained ever so slowly. Near the eleventh floor he seriously considered going back down again, skipping Margaret, dropping all charges, returning home. And held his course only because of the vagrant, concupiscent itch in his used, fearful pants.

  Or something like that.

  And then Margaret, like a landmark, was standing outside her open door in the carpeted hallway when the elevator doors opened, and Druff was lured out. Something hospitable about her presence, gracious, old-fashioned, by-the-book. She could have been his hostess, welcoming him to a dinner party.

  “I thought you’d show up.”

  “Is this a bad time?”

  “I expected you earlier.”

  “A contributing factor is potholes,” Druff said. “Potholes slow a guy down.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I came,” he said, “about the one-night stand.”

  “You came about furniture?”

  “What? Oh, right. Very funny.”

  “You never heard that one before?”

  “No.”

  “It’s buyer humor.”

  They were inside her small apartment. Druff didn’t recognize it. “You’ve done something to the furniture,” he said.

  “They came today to dress the windows,” Margaret Glorio said.

  Druff nodded. “So I see.”

  “You like it, though?”

  “It’s different.”

  Margaret Glorio belly-laughed.

  “What?”

  “You topped me,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Guy walks into a flat he’s been in it can’t have been fourteen or fifteen hours earlier. Overnight all the furniture’s been replaced. He’s asked what he thinks. Guy says ‘It’s different.’ You topped me.”

  “Well,” Druff said, “that was unintentional.”

  “Sure sure,” Margaret Glorio said.

  He couldn’t get over what had been done to the place. Overnight. As she’d said herself. It could have been a sting operation, or early evening, a week later, a parlor suite in a luxury hotel in a large city, in the second act of a play. He was looking for the bed. Surely Margaret’s pricey brocade sofa did not open out.

  Miss Glorio, darting her eyes everywhere Druff’s settled, matched him glance for glance. Except for the fact that her face registered a certain amusement, it could almost have been a tic, as if she were one of those people whose lips move with your own, silently repeating everything you say.

  “Come here,” she said, “I’ll show you something
.”

  She took Druff’s hand and led him up to a mahogany highboy, opening one drawer, then another, in the tall chest.

  “What’s wrong with this picture?” she said.

  “The drawers are empty?”

  “Come over here,” she said.

  Behind a high, silken, vaguely Japanese folding screen was a small Pullman kitchen. She pulled open the cupboards and cabinets.

  “Poor Mother Hubbard?”

  “There you go,” Margaret Glorio said.

  Druff nodded and Miss Glorio—she was still holding his hand—led him out from behind the screen and back into the living room.

  “So tell me,” she said when he was seated on the rich brocade couch she had invited him to share, “you see what things mean to me, how unattached I am. We could go into the bathroom and I could show you my medicine chest. A bottle of generic aspirin, toothpaste, a few hotel soaps and shampoos. There aren’t any monograms on my hand towels. I haven’t any appliances, not even a microwave. I eat out of cartons from Chinese restaurants, white paper bags. From cardboard boxes the pizza guy brings. Off Styrofoam china from the fast food, trays wrapped in cellophane around airline meals I never touched. So tell me, what was all that about Oriental rugs?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Oh please,” Margaret Glorio said.

  He didn’t understand. There were Oriental carpets in the rabbi’s study. In the rabbi’s study’s crapper even. They’d reminded him of Su’ad, suggested some Middle East connection which had seemed important at the time. He remembered, but didn’t understand. Seeing whether there was an Oriental rug at Margaret’s had seemed a good reason to come here today. Now he wasn’t so sure. MacGuffins were mind-boggling things. They were seductive, they threw you curves, they fucked you over. With the fleeting, now-you-see-’em-now-you-don’t appearances they put in on weekends? He could only conclude they weren’t dependable, MacGuffins. They were a trip, MacGuffins, but hardly money in the bank. Druff had lost sight of his reasons. Even though he saw that there were small Oriental rugs everywhere. The one behind the folding screen in the Pullman kitchen. The one over by the wing chair. Another practically under his feet. Three he could account for without even taking her up on her offer to show him the bathroom. But he couldn’t even find her bed, for heaven’s sake. How could he tell how many carpets there could still be?