Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

He stood up and kissed her.

“The door’s open.”

“I’ll close it.”

“It’s supposed to be open. You’re not allowed to close it.”

“The door across the hall is closed. That one over there is.”

“Girls are studying in those.”

“Sure,” he said.

“They are,” she said. Then she went over to the door and closed it herself. Druff stood waiting to embrace her. “They are,” she said, “but even if they’re not, even if they’re in there with boys, even if they’re slow dancing with their hands all over each other’s behinds, even if they’re French-kissing. Even if they’re quote doing it unquote, I wouldn’t let you touch me. I wouldn’t even let you hold my hand.”

“Why? My God, Rose Helen, why? They’re your sisters. They serenaded us. Isn’t that like piping us aboard? Didn’t they just practically marry us at sea?”

“Don’t you know what that was? Don’t you? They as good as made you their mascot. They brought the waiters up from downstairs as witnesses.”

“Come on,” Druff said, “I don’t care about them.”

“You don’t?”

“Listen, Miss Kitty, we’re like men without a country.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Well, we are,” he said, “just exactly like men without a country. Except for those coffeehouses, this is the first time we’ve been alone since we met.”

She was crying again, and Druff suddenly understood that that was why she’d closed the door, because she knew they were going to have this conversation. And why she’d extended their invitation in the first place, because it was exactly the conversation she’d wanted to have with him from the beginning. Understood she was permitting him something far more intimate than just the groping he had anticipated, showing him a glimpse of her turf, an unrestricted view of what her cards looked like on the table.

He tried to comfort her. “Oh, Rose Helen. Rose Helen, oh.”

“Don’t you?”

“Don’t I what?”

“That was it. That’s what they were saving. That’s what they were waiting for all along.”

“What are you talking about, Rose? What were they waiting for, what were they saving?”

“That was my hazing.”

“No,” he said, “you’ve got it wrong, Rose. They’re your sisters, they’re on our side. Really. All the happiness we could wish for ourselves, remember?” (Druff taking her in his arms — maybe he was political, maybe he was —and working his own agenda, wondering, marveling: Don’t they know? Don’t girls know it’s all a line? All of it? Don’t they see how it is with us? Don’t they know what we want to do to them, what we want them to do to us? Are they fools, or what?)

And astonished to be stroking her breasts beneath her sweater, to slip his hand up beneath her skirt, to negotiate the rind of stiff corset and feel the damp silk of her panties.

They were seated on the edge of the cot now. He tried to draw her down, to get her to lie beside him, but she resisted. She struggled to a sitting position and started to rise. “All right,” he said, “all right,” and she sat back down again. (Of course political. Political certainly. Bargaining actual territory, dividing physical spoils, making these Yalta arrangements, so that it was somehow agreed without one word passing between them that he could do this but not that, that but not this. Though he was not, for example, permitted to blow in her ear, he was allowed to feel her nipples. Though she would never hold his erection in her hand, she might touch it here and there through his trousers.)

Druff astonished, astounded, amazed now by her bizarre terms, terms, he realized, roughly equivalent to the restrictions imposed by the Hayes Office in regard to sexual conduct in films. (One foot had to be on the floor at all times. They could kiss with their mouths open, but only one of their tongues could be moving and, if it was his, he could touch her breasts but was not permitted to go under her dress.) It was to become the source of what weren’t so much arguments as vaguely legalistic, quickly abandoned disagreements, like appealed line-calls in tennis, say, or a batter’s brief, abrupt flash of temperament about an umpire’s questionable called strike. (“I don’t understand,” he might tell her, “I let you nibble my ear.” “You like it when I nibble your ear.” “Of course I do, the ear’s a very sensitive area. I’m surprised you don’t like it too.” She said she didn’t object to the feeling, it was the wetness she couldn’t stand.)

And touching her hip, of course, was out of the question.

As out of the question as the flesh and hair beneath that chartered, licensed, two- or three-inch strip of damp silk or cotton underwear, the tolerated, nihil obstat elastic piping that edged her drawers and which he worried with his finger like a lock of hair.

So maybe she was political too. A born legislator, some negotiator of the physical being. Because she was right, it was almost ten-thirty, almost time for him to leave, gratefully disappear with the other males — she was right about that too; his presence in that house of females had altered him; he was “male” now, his sexuality some new state of chemical excitation, simmering, charged, changed, like the cooked properties of solids melting to vapors — and she’d somehow managed to arrange all this in the last quarter hour of that first night.

(But why was he grateful? He was grateful for the same reasons he’d been relieved, the shit-scared avoider, to learn that the clear-skinned beauties of the Sadie Hawkins Day dance had been the wrong clear- skinned beauties. He was grateful because he’d been this, well, Mikey. It’s not true, Druff thought, that we ultimately turn into our own parents; we’re our own children long before they’re ever born. He was wrapped in a cocoon of stupidity, innocence, inexperience. Not virtue, but its simulacrum, what virtue did while it bided its time, until it sloughed fear and all fear’s hiding places in the cosmetic folds of guilt. He was grateful because he was a virgin and he didn’t have to fuck her and get it all wrong was why!)

Now at least they had a place to go.

Though they still didn’t know that many couples, didn’t double-date, were there — at least, as her legacy, Druff was — on sufferance, like a guest of a member of a country club, say. Now they didn’t have to meet outside movie houses. These days he could pick her up at the sorority. (Gradually they stopped sitting in on each other’s classes, stopped going to coffeehouses; gradually they even stopped going to movies.) And if, collectively, they were novelties to the girls of Chi Phi Kappa, the girls of Chi Phi Kappa were even greater novelties to Druff. Rose Helen was a novelty to Druff. Indeed, Druff was a novelty to Druff. (It was strange — that simmering maleness, his ballsy, newfound exhibitionist’s swagger, his vain regard, his simmering chemical privilege and liberties — but these days he always went about feeling as if he had on brand-new clothes.)

Even though he knew no more people now than he did before, even though, except for Rose Helen, he had no friends there, only, here and there, a few people he could nod to — the waiter from Druff’s boardinghouse, three or four of the pledges — Druff had become a sort of fixture around the place. The fact was they rarely left the sorority house. On weekdays he came there to study with Rose Helen and, if one was unoccupied, they would go into a tiny study room. (Since the night of the serenade when she had gone to the door and closed it herself and then negotiated with him the unspoken rules of their relationship, the study was never closed when they were in it.) At ten-thirty, however, he was the first male out of the house. Even on weekends, when the curfew was extended until midnight, he was always the first to leave.