Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

“Come on, Rose. You’re not going to burn up in a fire. It’s senseless to worry about a thing like that. What are the odds, Rose? More people win the lottery in this town than go up in flames.”

But she couldn’t hear him, probably couldn’t hear herself, her mistaken emphases bumping up the stress on certain words like a hiccup, knocking meaning for a loop, blowing it sky-high, sounding alarms, laying down her insistence and hysteria like a trail.

And then this occurred to the commissioner: This was the same little lady who stepped on his best lines in dreams. This was old Rose Helen. It couldn’t have been forty years ago she rested her palm on the tiny shelf above her damaged left hip, posturing buffalo gals, dance-hall ladies, leading him on with the thrust of a raised hip beneath those full skirts, drawing him, luring him, pulling him in with her seductive dip and forward glide, turning her “deformity” into a lewd suggestion. This was old Rose Helen here, the throwback cripple, pouring it on with the skewed iambics, cute as a lisp, of her oddball speech and nervous, loony monologue.

Only suppose she was faking it? Suppose this was only another lewdness meant to arouse in Druff whatever sucker passions he had left to his name? After all his decades in politics he ought to be able to recognize a dirty trick when it stared him in the face. Suppose the batteries still lived in her hearing aid? What a mistake to have thought MacGuffins took weekends off. That’s just how adulterers, their guards lowered and their minds groggy from the candles they burned at both ends, from their monkeyshines and escapades and scrapes, had their nuts handed to them.

Aha! thought the City Commissioner of Streets. (Thinking Aha! Thinking its concomitant, exclamatory dagger, too, as, yesterday, in the limo, he could have slapped the side of his head with the heel of his hand.) Had Margaret called? Probably Margaret had called. Rose Helen was getting him up with her hear-no-evils, waiting to listen in the minute he picked up a phone.

“Well, no,” he said evenly (and getting sore now, too, recalling the silver or mercury oxide thingummy in its tiny compartment in the hearing aid which, for whatever reasons, Rose Helen, some misleading alchemist of the downscale, was eager to pass off as zinc), setting his own traps and thinking two can play this game (having just thought Aha! and into clichés’ easy, comfortable rhythms now), turning his head away and speaking into his coffee cup, answering the last question which, on the evidence, he could be certain she’d heard. “It’s just that I thought the company you’re making that turkey there for might have canceled out at the last minute.”

Rose Helen didn’t answer.

“Because frankly, Rose Helen,” he said, “I was hoping they had. I’m too tired even to go through the motions. Last night really took it out of me.”

She didn’t say boo. He’d just have to up the ante was all. He turned to face her.

“They marathoned my tail off, those two. Scouffas and his broad.”

She smiled at him.

“Margaret Glorio,” he risked fearfully. Rose Helen nodded and went back to polishing her turkey.

What? he wondered. Does she or doesn’t she?

Poor Druff, poor Druff thought, who recognized a no-win situation when it stared him in the face. Because if she really couldn’t hear him it meant not only that she was deaf and that he was married to her, but that he was, well, maybe just a little paranoid into the bargain, and that his suspicions, so reasonable and even exciting during the workweek, seemed so much blown smoke in the glare of a civil-service sabbath. And as if that wasn’t enough, he’d been picking on a little sixty-year-old lady with white hair and a failing hearing aid and a limp. And as if that wasn’t, he’d been cheating on her, too!

A grown man. Well, he amended, once a grown man.

And then, contemplating an endless vista of the long weekend before him spelling nothing but trouble, he was overcome with a sort of bedrock blues. He didn’t know what to do with himself. Maybe he could run out for half a dozen nice fresh zinc oxides for Rose Helen’s hearing aid. Saying as much, watching her face, testing, uncertain how to read her bland regard, first thinking up and then pulling the old switcheroo, throwing mixed signals, underscoring innocent, cheerful things with sneers and scowls, bad, devastating ones with encouraging smiles, a jaunty facial merriment.

“I don’t,” she said, “know what you’re talking about?”

Well, thought Druff, if Rose Helen was in the enemy camp (if there was an enemy camp), she was a worthy adversary.

He fixed her wagon. Neutrally he asked a question at point-blank range.

“Do you expect there’ll be an earthquake sometime soon?”

Neutrally Rose Helen shrugged.

“Oh no you don’t,” Druff said, “no you don’t!” Making his mistake, as if to shake her reaching out.

She turned away from him, locking, so to speak, her mouth, throwing away, as it were, the key.

Druff, steamed, losing it.

“What is it?” he shouted. “Tell me. What’s going on? I demand to know. What are you people after? What’s the scam? Just what are you pulling here? Out with it, Betty Marjorie.”

Oh, he was fuming.

He didn’t even believe the weekend had anything to do with it anymore, and laid down a barrage of piggyback names. Mary Molly, he called her, Annie Mildred. Sonia Eileen. Scandalizing, he figured, an entire generation of Peter Pan-collared women.

“Because it ain’t as if there were two sides to this story. I’ll tell you something, Beth Jessie — our lives are short enough as it is. Here we are, down toward the precious few. Toward? Into! Does ‘bottom of the barrel’ mean anything to you? I don’t need the aggravation at this juncture.”

And hoped like hell there was something to it.

Because as he was just telling Heidi Minnehaha here, he didn’t need it. Here he’d made an eleventh-hour connection. If it didn’t pan out, if his fears weren’t real, why then, that was the aggravation. He’d become cranky, another fearful old fart afraid in the streets (and him their commissioner), shying at bogeymen who weren’t there, at robbers and highwaymen, cutpurses, pirates and rustlers after his cattle, poachers with a blood lust for his fish and his game. If the pillagers and ravagers weren’t at the gates, then his suspicions and fears were merely the sure signs of a withering self-regard, the miserly selfishness of the craven aged.

“You lied to me about the zinc oxides, didn’t you?” he demanded. “What else is untrue? What else are you keeping from me? Are we having company or not? Out with it. What else? Zahler is cheaper than Williams Pharmacy, isn’t he? Isn’t he, Rose Helen?!”

And that’s how he left it, slamming out of the house, trailing his furious spoor of sabbath anger, leaving her, if she even heard him, cowed, wide-eyed, dumbstruck, amazed, and about the same, he imagined, even if she didn’t. (Damn, she was clever!) Seeing out of the corner of his eye as he quit his hearth, too, the lurking, hulking, dangerous Mikey, that beamish boy, that piece of work, his son, of whom more later, he thought, and already rehearsing in his head their inevitable confrontation: “There comes a time,” he’d say, “when you get frail and your kids get strong. You’re afraid they’ll hurt you, beat you up, shake you down. It was ever thus. Well, we’re old now, Mother and I, living in fear for our lives, blaming the niggers, blaming the Japs, niggers and Japs just water off a duck’s back when we were healthy and young and you kids were feeble. So get out,” he would say. “I want you out of my tent.” Was this legal? he wondered. Could he call the cops? Would it stand up in court? Be perfectly frank, he didn’t know. Out of his jurisdiction. He’d ask Dick, he’d take it up with Doug. Solons and Solomons of law, Doug and Dick, angels of arbitration.