Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

Druff blurting, “Did I hurt you? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”

“No,” she said, “I’m not a good dance partner. I think I’d like to sit down now.”

“Oh sure,” he said, “but I’m the one who’s the lousy dancer. I’m sorry if I hurt you.”

“You didn’t hurt me,” Rose Helen said, “I’m not hurt. My dancing’s okay, I’m not a good partner.”

They were having coffee in the Union Building. Rose Helen guessed their friend had told Druff all about her. “All there is to tell,” she said. “I’m not a good partner,” she said, “because, well, I don’t like it when a boy touches me there.”

“I wasn’t trying anything. I mean all he said was it was some hip thing, that it isn’t even noticeable. It really isn’t.”

“I’m sitting down.”

“I didn’t see anything when you weren’t.”

“A full skirt covers a multitude of sins.”

He thought it a wonderful sentence. He believed she was clever. The synergistics again, the very thing which had driven her underground and caused her shyness, had given her wit. He actually laughed out loud.

“Look, I’m sorry if I loused up your Sadie Hawkins, okay?” Then she laughed.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“No, what?”

“Well, look at me. Sadie Hawkins! I mean did you pick the right girl for Sadie Hawkins, or what? I guess I’m just not the Sadie Hawkins Day type.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, I mean I’m too nervous to dance, aren’t I?” She looked at him. “I’m two years older than you, you know.” Sure, he thought, his deformity. Their friend was a good reporter. He’d spilled the beans about both their deformities. (Druff as self-conscious about his age as Rose Helen about that raised left hip.)

They discussed their majors. Rose Helen said she enjoyed being around kids and thought she would become a teacher, possibly declare a minor in English since, counting this semester, she would already have six hours of credit in that subject. Druff confessed he was still undecided, that he hadn’t realized until this year how important it was to have a plan since you’d probably be stuck for life with whatever you chose, adding that it wasn’t fair to expect someone only nineteen or twenty — not, he amended in deference to that two-year difference in their ages, that being nineteen or twenty was anything of a handicap (that was the word he used, ”handicap“) — to lock in on what he wanted to be doing fifteen or so years later. It was a serious business, and sad, really, when you thought about it, that you had to start your life off on the right foot or otherwise you could wake up when you were thirty-five and find out that you weren’t where you thought you belonged. Because how many times were you alive? Once, right? He thought, he said, that to waste your life was the worst thing you could do with it. It was like self-murder, suicide.

“This is very depressing,” Rose Helen said.

“Well, it is,” Druff said. “That’s why I don’t think that just because someone has six hours of credit in a subject that’s a good enough reason to say, ‘Yes, I have six hours of credit in this subject, I might as well make it my minor.’ You have to be interested in it for its own sake.” (You tell her, Mikey, thought Druff inside a judgmental parenthesis.)

“Yes, but did it ever occur to you that the reason a party already has six hours in a particular subject just might be that the person is already interested in it?”

Then she said she thought he was being pretty sarcastic for someone who didn’t seem to know what he was going to do with his life and talked about self-murder a few years down the line. And now Druff remembered exactly what an attractive, tragic, brooding figure she had made him feel at the time, recalling, who hadn’t forgotten so much after all, though they were seated inside the Union Building— “La Mer” on the jukebox was playing — how he had had this vagrant image of himself, how he must have looked in her eyes — this windblown, tempest- tossed guy, collar turned up against the elements, cigarette smoke rolling like fog up the side — it wasn’t that many years since the war had ended — of his doomed resistance-fighter’s sharp features.

“I’m interested,” he said, “—to the extent that I’m interested in anything — in politics.” To fulfill his social science requirement he was taking a course in civics. Monday there might be a snap quiz on the bicameral legislature.

“Really? In politics?”

“I’m like you,” the future City Commissioner of Streets confided offhandedly, “I want to help make sure that future generations of children will have, well, a future.”

They met for coffee, they went to the movies, they went to concerts. They’d become enthusiastic about certain of their professors and from time to time would sit in on each other’s classes. They were the only couple they knew who did this on a date. Though they really didn’t know all that many couples. Rose Helen was a sorority girl. (Yes, it surprised Druff too.) There was this rule that sorority girls couldn’t date Independents. Well, it was an unwritten rule actually, enforceable only while the girls were still pledging. Though even after they were initiated it was strongly discouraged. “They wouldn’t want to be hypocrites,” Rose Helen told him. “That’s what they say, that they wouldn’t want to be hypocrites, the hypocrites. That it would set a bad example for the pledges, that what would we think if we were still pledging and found out one of our sisters was dating someone who wasn’t a Greek?”

That’s why they didn’t know too many couples. That’s why they met for coffee in various cafés on campus, that’s why they met in front of certain movie theaters, and managed to be on line when the tickets to particular concerts — Odetta, Pete Seeger, Theodore Bikel — went on sale. That’s why they sat in on each other’s classes.

Because the pressure was on her not to date an Independent, because she couldn’t bring him to her sorority house (and because the landlady in Druff’s boardinghouse was as strict about men socializing with women in their rooms as the sisters were about fraternizing with Independents), couldn’t and wouldn’t, she said, even if she could. Because she didn’t want any brooding, tempest-tossed, “La Mer” -whistling, tragic and sarcastic friend of hers subjected to the silly remarks of a bunch of spoiled, malicious, superficial girls. Though Druff felt he could have held his own with the best of them and wouldn’t have minded. He told Rose Helen as much.

“No,” she said. “Why stoop to their level?”

“Well, why did you?” he asked in turn.

Which was just exactly the wrong question. They were in one of their coffee shops again, or, no, he remembered now, this time not in one of their coffee shops at all, not even on campus, not even in campus town anymore, but in the town proper, in a diner, the sort of place they might drop in on after one of those folk concerts they went to but which they ordinarily avoided, because they were both clearly students, and as much resented by the townies who went there as Druff was by the Greeks or Rose Helen by Druff’s landlady because she was a woman. Where no one they could possibly know would recognize them, except for the types they were. (And maybe he was interested in politics, maybe he was. Just maybe all this bi- and tri-cameral apartheid of ordinary life was beginning to have an influence on him.) But which was just exactly the wrong question. Because she was crying now, Druff’s little poster girl dissolved in tears, and not because she couldn’t answer his oblique reference to her own hypocrisy but because she could. Because she knew herself that well.