The MacGuffin

by Stanley Elkin

  Was it even important?

  Seeing everything changed had thrown him off, the new decor.

  “They’re nice,” Druff said. He meant the rugs, and tapped the one nearest him with the toe of a shoe. He indicated the one over by the wing chair with his jaw.

  “Are you all right? What’s wrong? Don’t you feel well?”

  “Well, I’m hungry,” he said, “is there somewhere I could lie down?” (This was so. He required food. His breakfast had been botched. And he never got that lunch he’d been promised—his filet mignon, his garden fresh vegetables, his wine, his strawberries out of season. His hamburger, his order of fries, his coffee and pie à la mode had proved inedible. Margaret was no help. She had no utensils. Even if there’d been the makings for tea there’d be nothing to drink it from; even the brandy snifters seemed to be gone. He could hardly be expected to lick tea out of her cupped palms. Tea wouldn’t have satisfied him anyway. What he really needed was a good solid meal. Though he had no appetite for it.)

  “Why don’t you put your feet up?” Margaret said.

  “But it’s silk,” Druff said.

  “You won’t hurt it.”

  “It’s silk,” he said.

  “Wait. I’ll help with your shoes,” she said.

  She was rubbing the commissioner’s temples, massaging his neck, touching his hair. She was drawing her nails down his cheek. Her hand was in his lap. He had an erection.

  “We should both lie down,” she said.

  “Where?” he said. “How? Does this sofa make up? You think we ought to do it on the sofa? I don’t know, I don’t have a rubber,” he said. “I could stain the brocade. You think that stuff comes out of silk? Maybe you have rubbers. Could you lend me one? I’ll pay you back.”

  “I don’t have soup bowls, why would I have rubbers?”

  “Maybe the man I saw in the lobby left one with you.”

  “Dan?”

  “You know Dan?”

  “You’re such a worrywart.”

  “Dan doesn’t worry me.”

  “Nothing should worry you.”

  “I’m no kid,” he said.

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “A man old enough to be my age takes things into account.”

  If they were horses they’d be walking. It seemed to Druff the gait of their conversation had slowed.

  “I’ll make up the futon,” she said, easing his head from her lap. She brought a thin mattress and two pillows out of a closet and spread a clean sheet across the futon.

  “I’m not sure,” Druff said. “I don’t think I could get down on that.”

  “I’ll lower you.”

  “Once I’m down I might not be able to get up again.”

  “I’ll raise you.”

  He felt foolish undressing in front of her, just as foolish removing his suit coat, shirt and tie as he did taking off his pants. He was no beauty, Druff. He looked even worse in his scarred body and toneless, troubled flesh than he did in clothes. He tried to place himself onto the low, distant futon, only two inches or so from the bare floor. He bowed from the waist, recovered. Feinting, he made as if to lean into a kneeling position, then straightened up again. Seeking various body leverages, this lone, unopposed wrestler.

  “I’ve got you,” Margaret Glorio, sitting up, pronounced from the futon. One arm was wrapped about his leg, the other held him around the hip. She was in her underwear, her flesh tones bright as perfectly adjusted color on television. “Go on, don’t be afraid to put your weight on me. Lean on my shoulder. I won’t let you fall.”

  Using her back and shoulders for handholds, he carefully rappeled down the side of her body. “Whew!” he said, beside her at last. But his hard-on was almost gone. And he couldn’t properly maneuver on the futon, on its sheet like a picnic cloth set down on hard, stony ground. He thrashed away, but the floor, which he could feel through the scant, paltry mat, hurt his knees and dug into his elbows. He at last abandoned her and fell uselessly away. How, he wondered, did Japan manage to repopulate itself? “Well,” Druff said, out of breath, “that was pretty humiliating for me. How was it for you?”

  “What are all these scars?” she asked, running a finger down the incisions from his bypass surgery and other invasive procedures. Where they’d cracked open his chest. Where they’d taken a vein from his left leg and placed bits of it about his heart where the woodbine twines. Where they’d punctured his side and run a tube through it to his lung to blow it up again after it had collapsed.

  “Maybe,” Druff said unhappily, “I should have stained the brocade. I could have tried to induce a nosebleed.”

  “It’s odd. I didn’t even notice these last night,” Margaret Glorio said.

  “Well, you wouldn’t, would you?” Druff said. “I didn’t have them last night.”

  “Oh you,” Margaret said.

  “Could you reach me my suit coat?”

  “Are you cold? I’ll get us a blanket.”

  “Well, yes, as a matter of fact. But I need something out of one of the pockets in my suit coat.”

  Effortlessly, she raised herself to a standing position. She was a big woman, tall as the diminished Druff, and not, he imagined, all that much lighter. He could only guess at the source of her agreeable strength. Maybe it came from the luxuriant hair that grew at her luxuriant pudendum. From his spectacular worm’s-eye view as she moved away from him, he stared up at her stirring, eloquent ass, at her sparkling snatch, glittering like facets off some hairy diamond as it vanished and appeared in league with her long strides. Anything doing? he wondered. Nah, not much. Nothing at all, in fact. Still, he thought, he was privileged to see this. If they didn’t kill him, he’d have to try to remember what it looked like.

  “You poor guy,” she said, “was this what you wanted?” She held out one of the blister packs.

  “That’s not mine,” Druff said with some indignation.

  “It’s not?”

  “No,” he said, “of course not.”

  “I thought it might be the battery for your pacemaker or something.”

  “I don’t have a pacemaker.”

  “Well, that’s good,” she said. “I thought maybe you did. What with those scars and all. You poor guy.”

  “No,” he said. “Those are my wife’s. She’s deaf.”

  “You poor guy.”

  “Could you hand me my jacket?”

  She handed over the suit coat, then started to pull her underwear back on, panty hose, a brassiere, white and plain as a kid’s training bra. Druff was surprised. He would have imagined teddies on this woman, garter belts holding silken hosiery. “What have you got there? Oh,” she said, “your coca leaves.”

  “A little fortification,” he said. “I could use the euphoria right now. Also, it gives me energy and cuts my appetite. Inca Indians use this stuff in the highest Andes. A few of these leaves in their jaws, the little fellas can keep going for days. They’re so wired, some of them walk up to work from their homes down at sea level.”

  “You’re not going to share?”

  “Here,” he said, extending the pouch. “Chow down.”

  “No thanks,” she said. “The way it works is I blackmail you, not the other way around.”

  In minutes his hunger had gone, his weakness. He’d forgotten his humiliation. Waves of well-being moved over him. He wondered if it was too late to try something even though she was dressed now. Nah, he realized, still nothing doing. Years of Inderal chemicals and ages of controlled agricultural substances fighting his libido to a standstill. Last night had been a gift. (Margaret Glorio would have to try to remember that.) “Women are damned good sports,” the City Commissioner of Streets said from his new, dreamy energy.

  “Oh? How’s that, sweetie?”

  “Well, you know…”

  “No,” she said. “I really don’t.”

  “Well, my performance, for example.”

  “You call that a performance?”

/>   “Right,” Druff said, and clammed up and, spreading out his suit jacket, covered his genitals and surgical scars and, pulling the sleeve of his coat over it, tried to hide what he could of the long zippery scar where the surgeons had removed the vein from his leg.

  “Come on,” she said, “don’t be that way. Suppose your face froze like that?”

  “Another weather terrorist heard from,” Druff mumbled.

  “What?”

  “I was making the point,” he said, “that women were good sports about these things, but I guess no one is, really. Sex is the hardest thing to get right. Please,” Druff put in quickly, “say nothing unworthy.” (Because he realized there was a streak of vulgarity to her. An air, despite her buyer’s smarts and chic, à la mode wisdoms, of rough inelegance which cost her points. This, well, jungliness. Her blatant body was an example, her telegenic flesh tones, or just the forwardness of her pronounced strength. Summer vacations, for kicks, on a lark, she might have done stints with the Roller Derby. Oh, he was a fastidious asshole. Still, she told jokes like a man—“Guy walks into this flat …” Besides, she knew he was a married man, and had slept with him anyway.)

  “Who do you think you’re talking to, ‘say nothing unworthy’?”

  “The performance remark? Then when I said that about the ‘hardest thing to get right’? You’re not that innocent. I could see double entendre in your eyes practically. I set myself up.”

  “Oh sure,” she said, “up.”

  “I shouldn’t be here,” he said. But he meant something else. (He’d changed the subject, he meant.) He talked about love now. About what was permissible. Love’s dead-center telemetry, blind Cupid’s locked-in coordinates. Propinquity was nothing, vaunted chemistry, all inexact dead reckoning’s girl-next-dooriness. Likewise Fate, the Kismets. Statistically, Druff figured, the odds of Fate coming through in matters of the heart were up there with hitting the Lotto. So if chemistry counted for nothing, propinquity, fate, what did? However did people end up in bed together?

  “It’s demographics,” the City Commissioner of Streets said.

  “The girl next door is demographics?”

  Druff spoke up from the Japanese pallet and made a speech, wooing her, wooing himself, chasing her vote, his own, laying a little of the old Lincoln-Douglas on them both. “No,” he said, “she doesn’t exist. She’s like Betty Crocker. Not even. She’s a hairstyle, a skirt length, a size six or so shoe. When I say demographics I speak as a politician. Colored or white, combined household income, highest degree earned. Did your mother come from Ireland? Margin for error two points plus or minus. We’re fixed, I mean. Set in cement, chiseled in stone. Everyone who isn’t denied us is denied us. I mean it. It’s the demographics that require a fellow to forsake and forswear. We live by a finding, nature’s negative fiat. My Christ, think of the ways screwing is out of bounds—all God’s and custom’s disparate dasn’ts. The incests of family, the inside-out incests of class. All the sexual holdouts. When A declines B because B don’t measure up. Hey, just fear of trespass or a failure of nerve. An act of adultery’s a miracle when you stop to think. I don’t care how in synch with the times a man thinks he is, you can’t just knock ’em down and pull ’em into an alley. God fixed his canon ’gainst that sort of thing. Let alone the decorums—this one protecting her cellulite, that one a failure of sheer damned inches. Or holdouts of the head or heart when character’s a consideration—all love’s and sexuality’s crossed fingers. I talk through my hat if I tell you it’s natural. It ain’t natural. It’s the most unnatural thing in the world. The shortfall in opportunity, in the alignment of inclinations: ‘SWM, athletic, non-smoker, social drinker, interested in movies, music, dancing, dining, books and laughter, sitting around the house on rainy Sunday afternoons reading the Times, seeks relationship with attractive SWF with similar tastes.’ Oh? Yeah? You think? ‘SWM looking to get it on with MBF alligator wrestler. Must be able to make her own shoes and handbags’ is more like it. C may screw D but he’s dreaming of Jeannie with the light brown hair.

  “I tell you, Miss Glorio, there are drifts and tendencies and pronenesses. There’s kinks and fixations, bent and bias. There’s yens and itches. And if the lion ever lies down with the lamb, or the goat with the otter, it’s dollars to doughnuts they’re dreaming of Jeannie with the light brown hair, too.

  “Because love has to be exonerated, the extenuating circumstances taken into account, the forgives and forgets.”

  “I love it when you talk gabardine. It fetches me, it really does. It’s a shame you can’t fuck,” Meg Glorio told him.

  “There you go again,” said the commissioner. But she was right. It was. He tilted his head back and looked to where she sat, dressed, looking down on him from her superior position on the brocade sofa. She was smiling. Then, quite suddenly, she reached down and plucked the suit coat from his body. She started to laugh.

  “Jesus,” Druff cried, and tried to cover himself with his hands. Then, just as suddenly as she’d pulled his jacket from him, almost inspired, and thinking, no, not almost, inspired out-and-out; by his on-again-off- again MacGuffìn sung to, City Commissioner of Streets Druff rolled to his side where he lay on the futon and grabbing the edge of one of Margaret Glorio’s small Oriental scatter rugs drew it across his body.

  Punching up the two pillows, he propped his head against them, spread his fingers and placed his hands on top of the little rug’s soft, silken pile. He smoothed the carpet down over his chest and belly and tucked it in next to his torso and thighs.

  “How do I look?” he said. “Luxurious? Like a guy in a deck chair? Like someone preparing to take breakfast in bed?”

  “Cute,” she said evenly, “as a bug in a rug.”

  Idly, he turned back a corner of the carpet.

  “I forget,” Druff said, “is it good or bad if the pattern shows through the back of these things?”

  “It’s good,” Margaret Glorio said.

  Druff, flourishing the carpet as if it were a sheet flung over an unmade bed, or he some awkward bullfighter losing control of his cape in the wind, managed to flick the thing onto its verso. There, palely, the carpet’s mirror image showed itself, all its obsessed finials and geometrics, all its endlessly repetitive interlacing stems and leaves like some deranged floral script.

  “You admire my rug?”

  “Olé,” said the City Commissioner of Streets.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I don’t know,” Druff said, “washing instructions, a tag, the little whoosie they stitch onto pillows and mattresses.”

  “I don’t see anything like that.”

  “No,” he said, “me neither.”

  “Get dressed, Commissioner. Put the rug down. Get back in your clothes.”

  It was the syntax of someone with the drop on you, Druff thought. She’d be pointing a gun at him. Well, well, he thought, he wasn’t really old, not even sixty actually, but he was a man with conditions—his heart, his lungs with their peculiar tendency to collapse and patched as worn tires, his impotence, his worn old brains, even the tic that shut his eyes against scorn and diminishment and that he’d picked up from Mikey—they were shut now—even his MacGuffin. So if he wasn’t, if one counted actual years, old, he felt like an octogenarian. He could have been someone in a home, though even with his complaints and conditions, in no way did he feel he’d led a full life. Not, in spite of his parapolitical street smarts and City Hall ways, politically, not sexually, not philosophically. In a peculiar way, he had his whole life ahead of him. And he was frightened. Well, she had the drop on him. Then there was the guy in the lobby who’d turned up his nose at Druff’s twenty bucks. In such clear cahoots with Maggie. All she had to do after she shot Druff was buzz the doorguy on the intercom. If they could bring an entire apartmentful of furniture into her place and set it all up in a few hours, they could probably dispose of just poor skimpy old Druff in minutes. There had to be special service elevators in the buildi
ng. There could be God knew what all—incinerators, tortuous, murderous laundry chutes.

  Think fast, Druff thought. He called on his MacGuffin. What to do, what to do? he prayed at it. I wouldn’t bother you, he prayed, only I just remembered that premonition I had at Doug’s—that this could be the day I come to a bad end? What with Margaret having the drop on me and all, I figure the odds on that happening are up from outside to about so-so. If this were baseball, say, my magic number would be somewhere in the teens.

  Then, quick as snap, Ol’ MacGuffin came through, speaking to him from some court of last resorts, singing the desperate long-shot odds (of the plan’s success, the feasibility of its proposed escape measures), figuring them at one chance or something in a million.

  She told you to get dressed, she demanded you put that rug down, the MacGuffin reprised.

  Yes, yes, impatient Druff, needing to act quickly but thinking MacGuffin was merely vamping, thought miserably.

  Put the rug down, the MacGuffin counseled.

  Go along with her.

  Put the rug down!

  Sure, he thought, I can do that. Then what?

  Don’t get into your clothes.

  Seduce her? The woman’s got the drop on me. Don’t you think it’s a little late for that?

  You’re naked as a jaybird. You think she’d shoot you in here? That she could afford to take that kind of chance? This place is tiny, it’s a tiny, cozy little place. You ain’t but a couple of feet from that brocade sofa. There’d be blood all over the furniture, the pillows and pallet, inside the drawers of the mahogany highboy, soaking into the wing chair’s fancy fabrics and the nifty new lamp shades. And you can’t tell me that Jap folding screen wouldn’t take a hit. And what about the rugs? All this shit’s on consignment. Think. It’s demos and loaners, this shit. She probably had to sign for every last stitch.

  The MacGuffin was right. He’d defy her. Turning his neck, twisting it awkwardly up and away from the pillows, he was about to make the MacGuffin’s argument. It was the first time he dared look at her.