Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

There were more meetings. Nothing, of course, was done to the girls Rose Helen had brought her charges against. She was political, perhaps she didn’t intend anything to come of them more than the apologies — which she got — and pleas to stay with the sorority, which she got.

In the end, however, she determined to resign from the sorority.

She told him she didn’t even want to live in a dorm, the fine new women’s residence hall the university had put up, that she’d prefer a room in a boardinghouse.

“A boardinghouse,” Druff said. “What’s so great about a boardinghouse? You live in a boardinghouse, you have a landlady. I’ve told you what mine is like, Rose Helen. They’re all like that.”

“It just seems,” she said, “I don’t know, romantic. You know what I really think? I think they won’t be around much longer. Those big old wood houses. They’re a piece of Americana. All those old landladies and landlords will die out one day. Their kids won’t take them over. One by one they’ll burn down, or the university will start buying them up and turn them into queer little departments — meteorology, Asian studies. Or they’ll just raze them altogether and put up big new buildings. You’re lucky. You already live in one. You know what it’s like. I want to live somewhere they put your whole supper down on the table in big serving dishes and you have to ask someone to pass the mashed potatoes, pass the string beans, the water pitcher, the rolls and bread. It’s like missing out on vaudeville. Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor. All those people I know only from listening to on the radio who lived in boardinghouses and used to be on the ‘circuit.’ No,” she said, “when I resign from Chi Phi Kappa I’m definitely going into one.”

Because she was definitely more interesting than Druff. Falling for her now at second-per-second rates. As stones fall.

But who tried still to talk her out of the boardinghouse. Uncertain whether he’d be welcome once she moved. Knowing there’d be no more study rooms, no passion pit worthy of the name (not, as it were, after you’d seen Paree), forced again to think of those long lines at the movies, big public rooms in the Student Union, even of the classrooms and lecture halls where they’d spent the early weeks of their courtship.

They didn’t quarrel exactly — she was too high-strung, he was a little afraid of her — but he took the position that it was mostly their own fault.

“I was woolgathering,” he told her, “lollygagging. You know what the first thing was I thought to tell her when she caught us stretched out there on that carpet and I saw her standing over us? The very first thing? ‘Both my feet are on the floor, Mrs. Post.’ That’s how out of it I was. ‘Both my feet are on the floor.’ No wonder she wanted to throw me out.” (And would have added, if she’d been less high-strung, that it was probably Rose Helen’s squirming when he nibbled her ear that called Mrs. Post’s attention to them in the first place.)

“She had no right,” Rose Helen said. “She was out of line.”

She refused to hear anything more about it, declared the subject closed and even stopped talking about her plans to resign from her sorority. (She told him she was still looking, however, though she thought it unlikely she’d find anything suitable until after midterms and the students who were failing saw the handwriting on the wall and pulled out.) Meanwhile she denied him access to the sorority house, insisting it would be too humiliating for them (who, for his part, was hard to humiliate, who was perfectly content to accept serenades at face value, content to have watches set by him, to be the first out the door, content to eat shit, Mrs. Post’s, Rose Helen’s) to be seen there together.

He asked the waiter from his boardinghouse to keep his eyes open, to tell him if anything was going on.

“You want me to spy on her?”

“No, of course not. Look,” he said, and took the waiter into his confidence, told him the story till now. “I’m not asking you to spy, I’m not asking you to do anything you’re not already doing. Just keep an eye out. If they’re still talking about what happened, if there’s any more discussion about her giving up the sorority — if she’s seeing someone else. Edward, I think I’m getting the runaround.” (Because he was in love now, because she was more interesting than he was, because he thought they thought his lapse, his failure to leave on time, was a violation, like the nibbled ear Rose Helen forbade him, of the conditions of his probation. Because he was in love now —the girls were touching, she’d said; she didn’t blame Mrs. Post; he recalled her talent for mimicry— and couldn’t trust her.) And revealed all the intimate details and actual physical logistics of the complicated, astonishing foreplay they practiced in the study. He made mention of her hip.

Druff didn’t regard any of this as a reward or payment for information, or even as bragging, but as simple, heartfelt confidence, one heartfelt guy in a boardinghouse to another. All that detail, are you kidding, if anything, it was as if he were the waiter’s spy and not the other way around.

“Well?” Druff said when Edward returned one evening.

“She didn’t take the soup, she refused dessert. I think she’s on a diet.”

“So,” Druff said the next night, “what do you think?”

“I was the one who said about the boardinghouses. This was before you were in the picture.”

Rose Helen called on him at the house. She was standing outside. It was Edward who came to his room to tell him she was there. (If we ever get married I’m going to have to ask him to be my best man, Druff thought, then felt misgivings go through him like a bullet. For all he’d made him his confidant, Druff didn’t like the waiter very much, regretted his soiled, spilled beans.)

His landlady climbed the stairs and was waiting for him on the landing. She turned and went down beside him. With Edward, there were three of them on the steps now. Druff had a ludicrous sense of convoy, of imposed escort, a vague impression he was being handed over into another jurisdiction.

“That’s your girlfriend out there, the one you used to go see, the one who calls at all hours?”

“She called at all hours only once,” Druff said. “She’s a nice person, Mrs. Reese.”

“I have keys to all the rooms,” his landlady said darkly. “I know who is and who isn’t a nice person.”

Then they were standing at the screen door. It was already spring. The weather had been mild for two weeks now. The rooming houses up and down Druff’s street all had gardens — glowing, spontaneous flowers, grass the bleached, light green of Coca-Cola glass, parrot feathers. But here there were no crocuses, no daffodils, no hyacinths, no tulips, no forsythia. There were no trees or ornaments at all. Mrs. Reese’s scant, grudging yard was all surface, a kind of scrubbed earth. It seemed tracked, neutral as a path. It wasn’t even scuffed. There were no chairs, no porch swing on the crabbed front porch, no place to sit, not even steps, a proper stoop.

Rose Helen was waiting for him on the ramp which, in lieu of steps, led up to the porch. Druff had heard explanations about the ramp. Mrs. Reese had had it built after the war for paraplegics and quadriplegics, all the veterans in wheelchairs she hoped to attract to her rooming house. Word in the house was that she was the first, at least the first landlady, to understand the implications of the G.I. Bill. The war hadn’t ended yet, only in Germany, when she’d made her plans, when she realized that if returning veterans were to be paid a handsome allowance to go to school, then it was only reasonable to suppose that disabled veterans would be paid an even more handsome allowance — the greater the handicap the greater the allowance. It wasn’t the extra rent she’d be able to charge for their rooms that had held the appeal for her, it was the handicap itself, the tamed, chair-bound presence of the soldiers, the wild oats they’d probably be too depressed to sow even if they still could. They said she closed the house after the ’45 graduation to have the ramp put in. They said she’d already hired an architect to design modifications to the house itself, interior ramps, special bathrooms, special tubs, workmen to install them. It was the atom bomb. She hadn’t counted on the atom bomb, they said. The war was over before anyone expected. There just wouldn’t be enough casualties to justify the costs. This was what Druff heard. He didn’t believe a word of it, but it was what he was thinking of when he saw Rose Helen on the ramp, leaning invisible inches into the incline, her height and weight evenly distributed.