Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

“What is your pitch? I’m curious to know.”

“That you could do worse.”

“That I could do worse? That’s your pitch? That I could do worse?”

“Of course. Sure. You spelled most of this out yourself. I’m married. That protects you, you’re protected.”

“Oh, right,” Margaret Glorio said.

“Boy, you don’t know beans about blackmail, do you? Well,” he said, “call me old-fashioned, but I find that attractive in a woman.”

“Blackmail?”

“No, of course not. Your innocence of it. I guess what’s slowing you down is your suspicion I’m not really a public man. Well, you have my card, but that could be counterfeit. There are dozens of ways to check me out. Find out who authorizes snow removals in your neighborhood. You drive a car in this city, next time you come to a detour look at the chap’s name on the bottom of the legend apologizing for the delay and thanking you for your patience. I know. Are you on the tax rolls? The city sends out a calendar with the names of its officials and little photographic insets of what we look like.

“Listen, Margaret, I know you’re anxious to get back to work, I don’t want to hold you up. Check me out. If I’m who I say I am, you’ll know it’s all right for us to get it on. Once we start sneaking around together I’ll be buying you gifts, we’ll be checking into motels. I’ll be laying down a paper trail Hansel and Gretel could follow out of the woods in the dark better than crumbs. Oh, way better. (Birds peck up crumbs quick as snap.) Don’t you see? I love public life. You’d have me over a barrel. You’d have my old ass.”

“Why are you standing here saying these things to me?”

“I’ve reason to believe,” Druff said reasonably, “that my limousine is wired, that my car phone is tapped.”

“They keep a record of your calls to Time and Temperature?”

“They stoop at nothing.” She laughed, Druff taking her hilarity as the first good sign for his suit’s success since his confirmed presentiment about her age. Then and there he would have pressed her to make an assignation with him but she continued laughing. “What,” Druff said, “what?”

“Nothing,” she managed. “I was just wondering, what are they going to make of your telling some guy with a car phone in Massachusetts or Texas that he sounds like he’s just next door?”

“That was a heart’s confidence, Margaret,” he said, pretending offense. “I was letting you in on something,” he said stiffly, stooping at nothing in his own right and, then, drawing himself up, asked again if she would be his mistress.

“No.”

“To me you’re beautiful, Margaret, well above the usual normal, but face it, you’re a woman of a certain age. All right, it’s no secret. I’m not exactly your customary foot-sweeper, but you think I don’t have needs? If not, tell me, what do you think dirty old men are for?”

“Please,” she said, not smiling anymore, though forced to maintain a sort of ceremonial cheerfulness by the proximity of the various men and women, colleagues, supposed Druff, coming in and out of her building, an early cast-iron skyscraper in what was left of the city’s garment district, with huge windows and even more fretwork ornamenting it than the iron script that ran along the sides of City Hall like a kind of reductive Arabic.

“Tell me, yes or no, will you be my mistress?”

“No.”

“I mean to pursue you then, Miss Glorio. You haven’t heard the last of Bobbo Druff.”

“I’ll report you,” she warned as Druff turned and walked away from her. “I’ll turn you in.”

“Hah!” Druff barked without looking back. “You haven’t got the goods on me yet.”

This is what he thought about while he went up to the limo and climbed in: that he’d come on. That he’d come on strong. Like a fool, but strong. That however ineffective he may have been, he had come on. That was the thing. He discounted his foolishness, his ineffectuality, his age and marital status, his awry, skewed dress, as, earlier, he’d discounted his fragility. He had come on. His cards on the table. On the table? All over the place. It was the strength of his appeal that mattered, that gave at least a little of the lie to what he’d felt in the changing room at Brooks Brothers, before his devastated reflection in their three-way mirrors, within hearing of other people’s kibitzing, other men’s flatterers. And how about that quickstep when he hopped out of the car, when he scooted after Margaret in double time— double time —drawing off energy from those threatened old alacrity reserves? He meant it when he said what he’d said about the paper trail, about buying back a little relented life at the expense of scandal. Do all men feel as innocent as me, he wondered, when they’ve had it with their honor? Do they strain so against the laws of their MacGuffins? And I wonder, he wondered, if it’s love, time or only the threat of death that’s got me hopping?

And now, back in the limousine (which was ridiculous — and why hadn’t he acknowledged that one when she was drawing up her bill of particulars against him and he was conceding to her accusations right and left; what would it have cost him? — and not only ridiculous but an environment whose charms he’d tired of long ago, charms that had, quite simply, worn off, worn out: the mystery of the controls, the appeal of the electric toggles for the windows and door locks, of the sunroof, the lights and air-conditioning and heat; the novelty jump seats he couldn’t remember anyone ever having sat in, the recessed armrests and all the straps and sequestered little lamps, all the hidden niches where the ashtrays went, the substantial, cumulative candlepower of the concealed cigar lighters, the tucked-away speakers for the radio, the secret drop-down desktop, and all the rest of the wet-bar, cable-TV-ready built-ins, the whole thing bristling with as much expendable latency as a hotel room or a compartment on a train), Druff contemplated old Dick suspiciously, trying, as neutrally as he could, to stare the man down in the same rearview mirror in which his driver had bullied him earlier, spying and smiling down on the cute couple they made, in his old-timey all-the-world-loves-a-lover mode.

“Women,” Dick offered as if the word were the concluding point in some telling, elegant argument.

Druff determined to stay the course, decided to stare him down by drawing him out.

“Women?” Druff repeated as if he were unfamiliar with the term, as though Dick had called out the name of some strange creature spotted in the road, the commissioner actually turning his head for a moment.

“Sure,” said his man to his man. “They’ll say anything. Even when there ain’t anything in it for them, even when they don’t stand to gain. ‘I’m forty-four,’ she says.”

“She is forty-four.”

“Yeah?” said the chauffeur. “Mikey said she’s fifty.”

“Mikey said?”

“Well, wasn’t she a friend of that Arab who died? I thought I recognized her. Ain’t that why we gave her the lift?”

Who’s drawing out whom here, wondered the City Commissioner of Streets, and found the switch on the control panel which sent the glass partition window up. “Here I go again,” his driver had just time enough to say before he was shut away, “off to Coventry.”

It was a cheerful enough remark but Druff could have slapped the side of his own head with the heel of his own hand, mentally cuffing himself in abrupt, classic realization, stagy awareness. (Actually seeing himself do it, the self-deprecating code gesture, the slammed clarity of his damning Dummkopf! theatrics, and even time to wonder why it was that for all their direct, stripped meaning, efficient, he supposed, as cursing, one rarely observed — and never executed — such things in real life. All one’s performances — he was a pol, close to government, privy to the high dramatics — blackmail, bribery, kickbacks and fraud, of course, but the hard-core rough stuff, too; the fires, he meant, the betrayals and anguish for which government, which made the laws and set the rules, had all the hottest tickets and best seats — all that devastating hard stuff, the gossip, rattling bones and smoking guns they did for each other, and which, he’d come to see, was a kind of professional courtesy, a sort of common currency, their mutual, collective corruption not only leveling the playing field but, by piquing each other’s interest, actually mining it — held in refined check not because one was naturally refined but because it just never really occurred to a fellow that these gestures were available to anyone but actors. So, at least till now, he’d never rubbed his chin to draw forth his thoughts, never torn at his hair or thrown up his hands in despair, couldn’t recall when he’d last touched thumb and forefinger to the inside corners of his eyes to ease fatigue. Nor had he ever sighed or touched the back of his hand to his forehead and brought on a swoon. He’d never swooned.) It was too powerful a vocabulary to have been deprived of. Now, possessed by his MacGuffins, and handed things to think about, he was aware of himself performing several of these gestures at once, caught out in some frenzy of squirming and thrashing, and actually administering those hard, initial, thumping salutes to the delayed consciousness that slept in both temples, pummeling them, right temple, left temple, as though he had water in his ears. (While meanwhile, back inside the transparent overlays of his parallel parentheses, he was suddenly appreciative of what he hadn’t appreciated before — that it was no mere showy false modesty which brought on these blows, that the Sherlocks who usually took them must usually have meant them, that it all had been plain as the nose, that if it’d been a snake on their face, it would have bit them!)