Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

“No no, I’m just calling to pass the time of day. As I might with any close personal friend I don’t particularly own. Hell no. You’re free, white and twenty-one, as we used to say in the old days. I just called because I promised I would after our one night of love, and to shoot the shit.”

“Well,” Margaret said, “it was good hearing from you.”

“Well,” said the City Commissioner of Streets, at a loss. “Look,” he said, “I know I caught you at a bad time. I just wanted to tell you what a swell time I had last night, and how much I admired your pad, how you fixed it up.”

“My ‘pad’?”

“Did I misspeak? You think I’m talking above my station, age-wise? No no, you misunderstand. I meant it as a compliment. You’ve your whole life ahead of you, young lady. You go call real estate whatever you please. But hey, I’m the old-timer in the outfit, what do I know? You don’t like ‘pad’? Showplace, then. How much I admired your showplace.”

“Thanks,” Margaret Glorio said, “I hope next time you see it you still like it.”

“Next time I see it,” Druff said. “Hubba hubba.”

“ ‘Hubba hubba,’ ” Miss Glorio said. “Where do you get this stuff?”

“Me? This stuff? I’m a gentleman of the old school. I speak a sort of gabardine, like a man in a hat.”

“I don’t exactly understand why,” she told him, “but it’s kind of cute. Charming.”

“Like your lovely pad.”

“What’s with you, Commissioner? Why do you keep bringing the conversation around to my apartment? What are you enamored of, me, or the fact I’m convenient to the good schools, churches, transportation, water and shopping? It’s my business to have nice things.”

“That’s right,” said the man with the MacGuffin. “I forgot. You’re this buyer, you have important contacts with wholesale. You get the urge, you call you want the furniture moved, and interior designers do you for nothing. You don’t lift a finger.”

“More or less.”

“Boy oh boy,” he said, “what perks! Oh, hey,” he said, “would that go even for Oriental rugs?”

“Oriental rugs?”

Because he was trying to remember if he’d seen one last night. A little like the rabbi’s, bigger than a throw rug, smaller than a flying carpet.

“What are you—”

“I’ll get back to you,” Druff said.

“Hey there!” said Jerry Rector.

“Will we see each other again?” Miss Glorio asked.

“I’ll get back to you. No, really. I will,” he said, and replaced the telephone.

“An offer is on the table here,” Dan said.

“Are you giving me to understand I can’t leave? That I haven’t your permission?”

“No, of course not,” Ham ‘n’ Eggs said.

“What, are you kidding us, you big lug?” said Jerry Rector.

“Jerry’s right,” Ham ‘n’ Eggs told him. “Aren’t I the party who warned against conducting business on the Sabbath?”

“Ham’s got something there, bub,” Jerry Rector said. “There are certain things that just aren’t done.”

“Which reminds me,” said Ham ‘n’ Eggs, switching sides, “there are psychiatrists in this town who’ll write you prescriptions for dinette sets, bedroom suites, expensive cars.”

“For custom-made suits,” said Jerry Rector. “Bespoke trousers of cavalry twill.”

“For ’round-the-world cruises,” Ham ‘n’ Eggs said. “You take it to your travel agent to be filled. She sells you a ticket, and you just take it off your taxes.”

“There are bugged confessionals,” Dan said, joining in. “Certain priests will sell you tapes.”

“And lawyers,” said Ham, “who go into the tank for the sake of the look on their clients’ faces when the jury counts them out.”

“Yeah,” Dan said, “they love that look.”

“Will you listen to us? We’re giving a City Commissioner of Streets civics lessons.”

“What you can get away with,” Ham said. “What the traffic will bear. Testing the limits. Pushing the envelope. When there are no more frontiers, you make them up. You strive, you stretch, you reach for the stars.”

“I heard him say ‘rugs,’ ” Dan said. “I distinctly did. Clear as a bell. He could have been in the next room.”

“He was in the next room, silly. That’s when we walked in on him.”

“But I can leave,” Druff said, just checking. “I’m free to go.”

“Dan,” Jerry Rector said, “there’s still an offer on the table.”

“Table it,” Dan said generously.

“Where’s his hat? Did he have a hat? Did you have a hat?”

“No.” (Feeling humiliated now, glad his girlfriend wasn’t there to see this, glad Rose Helen wasn’t, Mikey, Dick the Spy, Doug the Passive- Aggressive, his cronies and cohorts, the loyal opposition. More than a little downcast, in fact, to be himself on the scene. Well, he was outgunned. Three against one. Four, if you counted the black beadle with his keys to the closets where the brooms were buried, the mops and pails and wringers. Wondering where his powers had fled, the old MacGuffin confidence, backed, he would have thought, by just ages of tradition. Or perhaps his MacGuffin was merely magical, of the self-limiting kind, subject to conditions, stipulations, 5/50 arrangements like a warranty on a car. Subject, that is, to a commitment never to abuse the privilege of just having a MacGuffin, honoring his obligations to it, holding up his end. Maybe he wasn’t worthy of one. Maybe he wasn’t noble enough. Maybe Miss Glorio was a test he had failed. Having sweet truck with her not only a betrayal of his wife but, in a way, advantage taken of one already on her uppers physically, a little old lady practically, hoary-haired, a woman who almost couldn’t keep a battery in her hearing aids, of recent oddball speech patterns and edgy, jumpy attitudes and with a touch, too, of this just perceptible chronic limp. So a question of honor, finally, a matter of morals, of having — quite literally — been found wanting.

(But whatever. His courage was gone. He felt the absence of his breezy insouciance, the wisecracks and eloquent sort of gabardine he’d claimed to speak — and that they spoke better than he did. The universal language of toughs: “Where’s his hat? Did he have a hat? Did you have a hat?” Well, he wasn’t surprised. “No,” he had told them. They’d taken it from him. Ball in their court now, hat on their head.)

So what was he supposed to do with the leftovers? (That’s about what he asked himself now, that’s how he felt, as if he’d completely overestimated the appetites of guests at a party.) What was he to do with the leftovers, the leads and clues and flashy circumstantials, if he’d come to the part where his energy flagged?

Ol’ Bob Druff. Livin’ the Tammany life now. Routine, laid back, MacGuffinless. Yet what a way he’d come!

Here it ain’t been but a day, he thought, since he’d first surmised the MacGuffin and just look where it had taken him. His first tentative suspicion confirmed, connected to his second tentative suspicion, that one to a third and that to a fourth and so on. By God, he might have been hooking a rug! Because everything was linked, everything. If he had a sidekick (just about all that was missing here) he would tell him so. Begin with an initial observation. Make an observation, would tell him, any observation, any observation at all. Like one guy leading another through a card trick. Everything inevitable and conjoined in the vast, limitless network of things, merged in the world’s absolute ecology. There was, it seemed, no such thing as a loose end. Not in this life, there wasn’t. The universal synergy. In the end, thought our City Commissioner of Streets, all roads led.