Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

“I don’t mean my doctor’s orders. Your generic doctor’s generic orders. Me, I’m fine. My clothes don’t hang right is all,” Druff reassured.

And Doug, considering, measuring Druff, sizing him up, apparently bought it. “Have a good walk then, Mr. Commissioner,” Doug said in his cop-cum-doorman’s negligibly effacing and commanding way, putting Mrs. Norman on hold, putting, Druff suspected, everything on hold; so long as the commissioner still sauntered to the door, not permitting, as if it were in his power, even a phone to ring. Druff had the sense that he was being safely conducted across a street while traffic waited.

Not even to the pharmacist in the drugstore a good three blocks from City Hall from whom Druff bought the condoms. Or at least any particular asshole. Who you would think ought to know better. I mean, Druff meant, a fifty-eight-year-old guy with an ill-hanging suit on him and probably plenty more just like it home in the closet, who wasn’t even trying to appear casual, but simply, quite casually appears and bellies up to the counter requiring a packet of condoms? That was the word Druff used, “packet.” Meaning to imply by his carefully chosen diminutive just that. No in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound largesse here, only the smallest quantity that could possibly be purchased, as if whatever fling the fifty-eight-year-old type was contemplating was just that, too. A fling and, judging by the size of his order, possibly his last? Not even, mind you, as any high school boy would, specifying a brand? What, this isn’t an asshole? Just selling the so apparently hopeful last-flinging old-timer the generic packet of condoms he asked for, and maybe (because Druff would in his place if Druff were the pharmacist and the pharmacist the customer in the ill-hanging clothes) hoping that the condom would hang better on him than the clothes did. But then again, Druff knew, the man was a professional, and a professional — his license was right up there on the counter like a framed picture of the wife and kids — keeps his feelings to himself. So he could be wrong, Druff thought. Maybe he did look like an asshole.

But (if you didn’t count the druggist) only to himself. And not because of the couple of condoms safe in his suit pocket next to the coca leaves (the condoms he knew he would not have a chance to use once even, and then throw away, throwing them away first, before they were used, or seen, like the flag he knew he not only didn’t have to show but wouldn’t even if he’d had to; hey, he was a guy who covered the bases, even if, not quite respectably he did have a spy, even if, he not only had a spy but maybe a MacGuffin, too, and certainly plenty of humbug in his heart) but because of the FTD flowers already on their way to Margaret Glorio’s home address.

So you can imagine how he felt. You can just imagine.

On the one hand anticipate, rampant with a kind of self-regard. In a way, he was already half in love with Miss Glorio, not for her perceived qualities (which he didn’t know about yet anyway) so much as for those which the contemplation of a relationship induced and released, or induced and released again, in Druff. Why, love, even half- love, was heady, hearty stuff, like the drugged aromatics of chemical flowers or the recovered toxins of adolescence. Thinking of it that way, years wilted from him, he filled his suits. He felt a sort of strutting potency and would have liked to get another gander at himself in Brooks Brothers glass. Love, contemplated Druff, was good for the gander, and the commissioner, like some world-class cuckold, had a temporary respite from the ordinary anxieties of ego, self-consciousness, was even enough liberated from himself to permit himself to regard — it was a festival of regard — some things which might please Margaret. Would she go to the fights or enjoy a day at the track? Was she a good sport, he meant, some down-and-dirty lady, the kind who would appreciate the unraveled arcana of a dope sheet? Because he could go that way, teach her the Racing Form, coach her in the codes of a low art, the stats, weights and measures of a compromised metrics, then tell her to forget all she’d learned, and to learn something new — that all bets were sucker bets, that the ponies in this town were fixed, that it was as well to know who was into whom — better! — than all the histories of all the horses in the field. And wasn’t this thrilling information too, to have this lowdown, this insider’s window on the world? He was sure it was the same in Sportswear, he’d tell her, and that he would be just as surprised to have his assumptions challenged, all the old warrants. Wasn’t it, wasn’t it thrilling? And then he would take her with him to the paddock for some private discussions because, he’d confide, you didn’t dope the horses so much as bet on those already doped. He longed to bring her along, a girlfriend like the son he’d always wanted.

Oh, thought Druff, let it begin, not just the touchy-feely but the philosophy parts too, all the shared sentimentals they sought to hook you with in the love classifieds. He’d been hooked years, reconstructing hypothetical dreamgirls from the tiny bytes of smuggled, implied tastes revealed there, played out like line to kidnappers. Oh, he thought, let it! Wanting to trade on special theories — that you’d make a killing, if you bet the professional wrestling, as fixed, everyone knew, as the stars. That all you had to do was to be willing to offer high odds and depend upon turnover, or find out when the champion agreed to stand down and the belt was about to change hands. You bet, he meant, the practicals in life, only first determining which these were. Only then did you stand to gain. (Was this too poetic? Not for his dreamgirl! She, no matter what she said about the love of a good fire after a walk in the woods on a drizzly, overcast day, would take such things in like aphrodisiac, or what did one talk about around those fires?)

Oh, thought Druff, surprised to be made to feel so male — those ponies and percentages, his cryptic dreamgirls in those classifieds — pleased by what he felt, some ballsy, weighted swagger of a vain regard, his discrete maleness urgent as mercury, forceful as magnetism, like some phantom erection paraded in a bath towel, seduced by his hankerings for all the tutorials of love, the thought of those shared pensées of a street commish.

On the other hand…

His hopes that afternoon were hedged all around by what he would tell Rose Helen.

It wasn’t that he was stuck for things to say. What, an old campaigner like him? Trippingly on the tongue. He’d qualms, but he didn’t doubt his ability to lie, even his ability to lie to Rose Helen. He just didn’t want to be caught out in a campaign promise. He rarely made them. (Because he knew he was a goner. For whatever reason, what he’d said to her, to Margaret Glorio, was true. He’d thrown his hat into the ring. He would pursue her, had already started.) It was what he would tell Rose Helen if his suit was successful.

They’d been married thirty-six years, after all. What was he, twenty- two when he married her? Just a kid. And Rose Helen, sixty now — sixty, Jesus! — had been twenty-four. Jesus! too, as far as that was concerned. Because hadn’t a deep part of her attraction been, as, God help him, it was something of an aversion now, those two extra years she had on him, as if she lived in a distant, telling time zone, coming to him, it could be, from alien geography, bringing alien geography, the covered flesh she’d not permitted him to see until their wedding night and teased him with — only it was nothing near so playful as teasing — denying him its light even then, granting him access to her only beneath the sheet and thin cover in the darkened room? The mysterious functions of her moving parts as much mysterious. Allowed to bring away with his eyes, like some impinged victor of guarded rewards, only what he could make out in that hobbled, weighted light. Only what he felt on his lips, the moistened tips of her powdered, perfumed nipples in licked conjunction with his moving, frantic tongue, a thick, yielded chemistry of a clayey, bridal milk. The source of her sweet and sour odors protected as the upper reaches of some under Nile. And what Druff was able to take away with him on his fingers, lifted like fingerprint from that dark and solemn scene.