Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

It was like being married. It was and it wasn’t. They studied there. They necked there, did all their heavy petting there. Because despite the sofa (to say nothing of the double bed), they still played for the same relatively low table stakes that they had played for in the study rooms and in the big, crowded, luxurious central passion pit at the sorority house on those Friday and Saturday nights deconsecration ante. He even observed the same curfew. Maybe it was only Edward (or Rose Helen or even himself) who was landlady or housemother now. Maybe it wasn’t any of them, maybe they didn’t need a housemother, maybe they didn’t need a landlady. Maybe it was merely the Zeitgeist which protected (if that was the word) them, or maybe they were really these collective, dedicated virgins (though technically he wasn’t a virgin, he’d been to the whores; so had the waiter), or maybe it didn’t finally matter where they conducted their white, unconsummated courtship. And maybe, despite what they’d told each other, it was a game, or a sort of a game, but something loftier, higher, more important. Maybe though they weren’t there yet, they were still honestly striving to become the respective Casanova and Venus of foreplay, sexual-stimulation savants. Maybe foreplay was their event. Because these were the days of magnificent foreplay, the student prince, his education-major consort. He could remember times when he’d gone around packing blue balls like kidney stones. Other times Rose Helen, who often sensed his pain before it reached actual critical mass, would bring him off.

She brought him off, he brought her off. But always in the dark — because there was a daytime curfew too; Rose Helen wouldn’t let him touch her while it was still daylight, and sometimes he had to sit like an Orthodox waiting for the last light to quit the two big windows with their southern exposure — and always between the mutual, prophylactic cloth of each other’s clothing — beneath coats, towels, laundry, things grabbed out of the closet, on the always-made double bed.

They grew closer. Not just he and Rose Helen but he and Rose Helen and Edward as well. Who broke stolen bread with them, increasingly shared in their diminished, doggy-bag suppers, and whom, and not as founder of the feast (which even Rose Helen, who’d been on the sorority’s housekeeping committee the year she pledged and so had actually had a part in hiring him, had interviewed him, had been there when he’d sworn his male employee’s Chi Phi Kappa solemn oath that not only was he not to fraternize with the girls he would be serving twice a day six times a week but was not to speak of to other men or discuss with them what they discussed, how they comported themselves in their housecoats and lounging pajamas, what they looked like without makeup, or with their hair up in curlers, the slumber-party coze they affected when no men were around, never acknowledged him to be, preferring to think of herself as its founder, who still held that grudge against her sisters for singling her out — or no, not her so much as just that part of her which constituted the “sanitary deformity”—not to haze, and whose dues and room-and-board at the time of her resignation had been paid up in advance for the rest of the school year anyway), they regarded as their invited guest, despite the fact that he was the one who always served them whatever happened to be reheating itself inside whichever pot or pan he had placed there for them on the hot plate.

And not just eating warmed-over supper, but some shared sense, certainly for Rose Helen and Druff, and quite possibly for the waiter, too, of a picnic occasion, of roughing it, or, if they were sitting by the window near the plants, a vague notion of actually being outside, dividing foraged food.

“So,” Rose Helen would occasionally remark after Edward had cleared away their dishes, “how’s your life?” This was the signal for him to start his strange commentary, as if it were not enough that he had just brought them their supper and prepared and even served it, but must now sing for it, too.

“I don’t know how any of them expects to make it in the real world,” he might begin. (And now it was exactly as if they were outdoors, in dark woods, beneath the stars, or like tramps in hobo camps alongside railroad tracks, Edward’s voice lulling, almost musical, his gossip like some postprandial accompaniment to their digestion.) “Do you know what Anita Carlin had the nerve to ask me to do for her tonight? Her soup was too hot. Instead of waiting for it to cool, she told me to take it back to the kitchen and bring it to her again when it was safe enough for her to eat without scalding herself. Just who does she think she is, Goldilocks? When I asked how I was supposed to know when it was the right temperature, you know what she said? ‘Edward, do I have to do all your thinking for you? Just pour off some in a cup and sip it.’ Now how will someone with an attitude like that ever raise children? Or Jean Allmann? Last night she complained the milk was sour. It came from the same pitcher everyone else’s came from at her table. No one else thought it was sour, but she made me go back and open up a bottle just for her. ‘Where’s the ketchup, where’s the salt?’ ” he grumbled. “ ‘Is there cream on the table?’ When it’s right there in front of them. ‘Edward, my napkin’s disappeared. Would you be a darling and get me another one?’ ‘Edward, there are too many bones in my fish. See can you find a piece that doesn’t have so many bones in it.’ I mean it, the average Chi Phi expects there’s always going to be someone around to wait on her hand and foot, cut her meat up for her, blow on her soup, recommend her dessert. ‘Which is better tonight, Edward, the German Black Forest or the chocolate mousse?’ Then light her cigarettes as if we were waiters in some fancy four-star restaurant instead of just students trying to get an education like everybody else. How will they? I mean, really, how will they? Make it I mean, in life, in the world?”

And, in the wake of his voice, as if they had all the time in the world, as though all the night sky were above them, over their clubhouse in the treetops, they contemplated his question as if it were the profoundest ever posed.

“But the one who gets me, who really gets me, is that Lorraine. Who does she think she is? The other day at lunch she didn’t like her sandwich. She took a bite of it and spit it out on the plate. Then she hands it to me and says, ‘Taste this.’ Well, I don’t want to taste her sandwich, but Lorraine has other ideas and says, ‘Go on, Eddy, taste it. This ham is spoiled. They serve us spoiled ham and expect us to eat it. What, and get food poisoned? Taste it, Eddy. Am I crazy or what?’ Oh,” he said, “and Rachel?”

“The one who may flunk out,” Druff said.

“Well, that’s the thing,” the waiter said, “you know how worried she’s been about her classes?” His remark was to Rose Helen, who Druff realized the waiter never directly addressed by name.

“She never studies,” Rose Helen said dreamily. “How can she pass? She never studies.”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Edward said, “that’s what everyone thought. But you know, the last couple of weeks, she’s been eating like a horse. She asks for second helpings on everything. Seconds on soup, on the main course, seconds on salad.”

“Rachel doesn’t even like salad,” Rose Helen said.

“Seconds on salad.”

“She doesn’t like salad.”

“Well, that’s the thing. She never particularly liked soup. She never particularly liked anything. Now she wolfs everything down, she can’t get enough. She eats, pardon my French, like she’s got two behinds. There’s this running joke in the kitchen. The dishwasher can always tell which dishes were Rachel’s. Because they look like they’ve already been washed.”