Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

Thinking, as he washed up and examined himself in the mirror: This rabbi has some terrific deal going. Not only a swell study in which to do the holy contemplatives of his trade, but a private, humdinger john any fellow could really be proud of. The latest fixtures and even a nifty, beautiful Oriental rug.

Now why, wondered the City Commissioner of Streets, would that be?

This particular question catching him off guard. Quite rocking him. So much so, in fact, that although he’d heard no one reenter the rabbi’s study he was a bit chary about going back in there quite yet, lest they return before he was ready for them. He pulled the lid down over the toilet seat and sat. Dizzily, he contemplated the figure in the carpet. Contemplated having (and in something under thirty-some-odd hours) rediscovered his old, idling intelligence. (Idling no longer. His bright ideas sudden and received, as ready-to-wear and off-the-rack as Commandments. “Call Margaret,” he’s commanding himself.) In the rabbi’s toilet of the rabbi’s study contemplated, fearfully, his brand-spanking- new braveries. Not least, he contemplated Coincidence.

Those guys, he thought, Ham ‘n’ Eggs, Jerry Rector, the Dan guy, couldn’t have known I was coming. I couldn’t have known I was coming! I overslept. So much had happened. I woke up confused. I didn’t even know what day it was. I dressed for the office. Downstairs we had words. I stormed out of the house. I don’t go for walks, I don’t have routes. No one, no one ever, really set their watch by me. What’s the deal? I happened by. I just happened by. No one could know. How could anyone know? So life goes on, so character does, so we brush, floss and tune in to catch the news on the hour. So time marches on, tra la. So what’s the deal? So I didn’t know I even had a MacGuffin until yesterday. So I didn’t have spies or a girlfriend, either. There’s always the random. There’s always absentee ballots, late returns, and another county heard from. Things happen at sea while stars fall on Alabama. Who’s to say that isn’t a cooperation, a conspiracy of engaged, invisible gears? There’s chance, back channels and fucking farce. There’s this and there’s that — stuff going on all over the place, at all hours of the day and night, rough-hew them as we may. Why shouldn’t those boys have been waiting for me? She’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes, n’ est-ce pas? So don’t tell me hold your horses, old fella. Yes, yes, I know. I appreciate the powers of paranoia. They are surely considerable. But before you go rushing off to find a shrink, consider, I’m a politician. Trained in the random, in the chance remark and glancing blows of everybody’s mouth news, in on all the late returns and other counties heard from, in absentee ballots and the planetary swing vote, in the graciousness of concession speeches lived through twice, once on the phone from my hotel, then in the ballroom. Trained, when it comes down, in the thick skin of the professional politician, his water-off-a-duck’s-back bathing habits and almost Christian bygones-be- bygones vision. So, sure, I’d have spies. Of course I’ll have enemies. An odds-on favorite, for God’s sake, a hell of a bunch more likely to have a MacGuffin of my own than that there’d ever be, now I see its tight weave and, to judge by the Chinese water torture it’d probably have to put up with in here, the colorfast qualities of its terrific, mysterious dyes, its rich fringe and intricate design and peculiar shape, what is almost surely a Muslim prayer rug right in the rabbi’s crapper!

So coincidence? Coincidence? You tell me, what’s more outrageous, that someone like myself should go along, la de da, minding what he’s still got left for business in what he’s still got left for life, doing, dum dum de dum dum, his job, suddenly stumbling over conditions’ cooked books, or that, as anyone with an ounce of sense will tell you, it’s in the nature of books to be cooked, the nature, Christ, maybe even the duty, like evolution or natural selection, for people to wear themselves down and wear themselves down to a point where they have an actual edge, some in-tooth-and-claw arrangement which not only enables them to pull the shit they pull but actually drives them to do it! What’s more outrageous, eh? That I should step in a mess in the street or that so many messes should be left in the street that I can’t help but step in one?

“Oh, Su’ad, oh oh! Su’ad, Su’ad oh,” conjured and softly moaned the City Commissioner of Streets, as unready and ill-prepared to step out of the holy sanctuary crapper as when he’d first stepped into it.

But determinations had been made.

He let himself out of the toilet. (Thinking precisely that way now — as one who “let himself out” of things, leaving bathrooms as you’d slip ropes, negotiating ordinary rooms as if they were obstacle courses, some land-mined aspect to the scenery, some scenery aspect to the scenery!), thinking of his life as having a “look” to it now, all the authentic fine detailing of a movie set, his clothes, Dan’s, Rector’s, Ham ‘n’ Eggs’, even the colored shammes’s, as real and up-to-date as on the first day of principal photography. It was, all of it, faithful to Druffs times and circumstances, everything le dernier cri, organized, arranged as an illusion of environment in a zoo, Druff preserved in the perfect poisoned amber of his ambience.

All right then, he had thought, upon unlocking the door to the W.C. and peering cautiously out. Action?

He moved to the desk and tapped Margaret Glorio’s number, which he had called only once before but hadn’t forgotten, into the phone. She picked up on the first ring.

“Margaret, darling, it’s Bob Druff. I have to talk fast because under certain circumstances a fellow in my position not only has to be on his toes at all times but has to have eyes practically in the back of his head. Without going into detail, suffice it to say this may be one of them.”

“What do you want?”

“Just to tell you I haven’t forgotten last night.”

“For a man your age you’ve a remarkable memory.”

“Ha ha, Margaret darling.”

“Where are you calling from? Are you calling from home?”

What was left of the decent man in him told him there was no harm in the question, but the fellow straining tiptoe with his eyes practically in the back of his head warned otherwise. “Yes,” he said, “that’s right.”

“I’m glad your wife gave you my message.”

“My wife?” Druff said, alarmed. “No no, my wife and son were out when I got back from my errands. We didn’t have an opportunity to speak. Er, what, um,” asked the City Commissioner of Streets, “was your message, Margaret dear?”

“Why didn’t you tell me you have crabs?”

“That was your message? You said I had crabs?”

“You don’t think she has a right to know?”

“Ha ha, Margaret Glorio, you had me going there for a minute. That’s probably one of the reasons I like you so much, you playful devil scamp, you. You didn’t even call my house, I betcha. Well well.”

“Look,” Margaret Glorio said, “I’m expecting a call. You said you’d make this fast.”

“You’re expecting a call? There’s someone else?” said Druff with great feeling. The City Commissioner of Streets was astonished. If he sounded even half as melodramatic to her as he did to himself he must indeed have seemed the fool. It was because she’d picked up on the first ring. Well, he’d been there, hadn’t he? Had seen all there was to see of her studio apartment, its cunning furniture and unusual lamps, all that experimental decor, her buyer’s bold environment, the strange matte finish of the furniture, of the walls and carpets, the drapes and slipcovers, the designer telephone on the designer table of exotic wood. He’d been there, knew she’d have to have been sitting with the phone practically in her lap to have answered so quickly. Was that kind of anticipation ever not love-related on a day not part of the workweek? “Not, I mean, that you haven’t every right, of course. Of course you have. Certainly. Hey, I don’t own you. What makes me think I own you? I don’t own anybody. I’m not some jerk who has it in his head that just because he sends a girl a bucket of flowers on the night of the big dance or shares a crown rack with her, that that gives him some right — Maybe the guy whose call you’re waiting for thinks that way, maybe he feels he owns a piece of you, but not me. I’m just a lowly public servant. Where would I ever get off?