Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

And because they did, Druff, on the street again, who’d just been thinking, hadn’t he, of a sidekick, and what he might pass on to such a fellow if he had one, found himself — because hadn’t he been promised lunch (filet mignon, fresh vegetables, wine, strawberries out of season), which had never materialized, incidentally, and could it have been even three minutes ago he’d been thinking what could be done with the leftovers? — going into this little coffee shop where he sat in a booth wondering while he waited for his food to come — his rare hamburger, his order of fries, his coffee and pie à la mode — whether he should use the pay phone in the entryway to call Dick.

He signaled his waitress.

“Miss,” he said, “do me a favor, will you? There’s this guy I have to call, but, well, to be honest, I’m a little concerned that if I get up and phone him you’ll bring the food while I’m gone and my burger and fries will be cold and all dried out by the time I get back.”

“No problem,” she said. “I’ll watch you through the glass. I’ll wait until I see you’re off the phone before I bring your order.”

“Oh, hey, thanks, that’s very kind,” said Druff, perfectly sincere, on his own turf again, back, that is, with folks who’d never tag him, who couldn’t lay a glove on him, touched, actually moved, by the kindness of shockable, susceptible people. “I appreciate that. I really do.” (This part of the universal synergy too.) And with difficulty leveraged himself out of the booth (the quarters always too close in these places — even for a chap dropping into his clothing — their shallow seats and steep backs, the unyielding Formica tabletop in its wraparound metal trim) and made his way to the pay phone between the lunchroom’s heavy inner and outer glass doors.

“No, I’m sorry,” the woman said, “you must have the wrong number.”

He quoted the number he’d called.

“I’m sorry,” she told him. “There’s no one here by that name.”

Surprised, he checked it in the directory. Though he knew Dick’s number. He knew Dick’s number. Hadn’t he occasion to call it a hundred times a year? Sure enough. It was Dick’s number all right.

The waitress smiled at him. She waved. Druff, grinning, nodded acknowledgment.

“But this was an operator-assisted call,” he explained to the woman. “He dialed it himself. It has to be the right number.”

Druff could actually hear her turn away from the phone, hear her place her hand over the mouthpiece and, though he couldn’t make out what she was saying, he had a pretty good idea. Get in, he thought, the part about how the operator was a man. Though untrue — he hadn’t gone through any operator — it was, Druff felt, an absolutely telling detail.

She was back on the phone. “Dick says to ask who is this.” Without guilt at having been caught out, or shame, or the slightest indication that her pride had been in any way compromised. Fucking typical, Druff thought.

“This isn’t Polly,” Druff said. “You’re not Dick’s wife.”

“Nolo contendere,” she said.

Through the glass Druff’s waitress threw him a friendly high sign. The commissioner graciously, broadly, winked. “Tell him,” he said, “it’s his boss.”

He heard her transmit the message. “What,” she said, “what’s that, Dicky? Oh, okay.” She was speaking to him again. “Dick won’t come to the phone on the weekend. He told me to tell you that drivers get days off, too, and that you wouldn’t even be calling him on a Saturday if he was an Orthodox Jew.”

“What,” Druff said, raising his voice, “what’s that? What’s he say?” He looked up. At her station, the waitress, concerned, was staring at him. To reassure her, Druff barely shook his head, like a pitcher shaking off a sign. “Listen,” he said, looking to make friends with the woman in Dick’s apartment, “Miss—” And broke off, paused, waited for her to take the bait. She didn’t. “Won’t he come to the phone really? It’s rather important, a matter of quite some interest to him. It won’t take much time. I know it’s Saturday. Of course I do”—and this goes on too, he couldn’t help thinking, that spies get days off—“and I don’t expect him to come fetch me or drive me places. If I had anywhere to go, either I’d drive myself or I’d call a cab. Honest.”

“Oh sure,” she said, “assume I’m not married, just some limousine driver’s tootsie. ‘Miss’ and ‘Mademoiselle’ me. Just go ahead and make out your stereotypes. If it’s convenient for you to think so, you just make up in your head I’m not a respectable mother of twins. Well, my name is Charlotte, incidentally, if you’re so all-fired interested. No, I’m not Polly. I’m not Dick’s wife. Only I don’t know where a person like you would get off. A married man, so-called, traipsing around at all hours of the day and night.”

While she spoke, Druff gazed placidly through the coffee shop’s glass outer door to the quiet, empty, late-afternoon street. It’s like a decompression chamber in here, he thought. With a pay phone and a cigarette machine. When she’d finished, Druff said, “Just tell him it’s a snow day.”

“Wise guy,” Charlotte said.

“No, wait,” he said. (Because he was new at this and didn’t know when to play what he still wasn’t even sure was his trump card. Because City Commissioner of Streets or no City Commissioner of Streets, Druff didn’t even recognize the neighborhood he was in anymore. He was a politician. He knew about fixed elections, what could be done, if necessary, to a voting machine, how any even only decent mechanic could compromise it like a one-armed bandit or rigged roulette wheel. What had any of that to do with MacGuffins? With anything as important and down-to-earth as genuine evil? Because he was new at what he hadn’t even yet begun to understand, and he couldn’t wait. Not that he hadn’t as good a sense of timing as the next man, only that he was impatient, and maybe a little too anxious to have everything done with.) “No, wait,” he repeated. “Ask him if he ever heard of any international rug rings?”

Impatiently, she relayed his question. Then their connection was disengaged and he heard the burr of the dial tone. Saddened, his good name shot, he went back into the restaurant. At his table the hamburger and fries had already been laid down, his coffee. His sandwich, its meat and juices congealed and gray as brainfat, was cold, his saturated fries limp. The ice cream was melted on his pie like a thin white soup. When he was dead none of this would mean anything.

So he set off to buy Rose Helen’s batteries.

It was, as he’d noted, an unfamiliar neighborhood. He was Commissioner of Streets. Of course he recognized the place names. He remembered signing purchase orders for practically every avenue and street he passed, and remembered having authorized the dispatching of crews to probably each of the four corners of this place — to investigate ruptures in the paving, make determinations about the suitability of street signs citizens had requested, to paint white lines and double white lines in the road. Yet he couldn’t say with certainty he’d ever actually been here. He passed commercial districts filled with what were obviously chain stores whose peculiar names he’d never heard before.

And at last came to a place he knew. Indeed to the very pharmacy where only the day before the very pharmacist who served him now had sold him a condom. (From here, he recalled, he was only three blocks from City Hall. He had virtually drifted across the city, doing, it could have been, some rude, off-course, straying, swerving caricature of last night’s false marathon, making good the elaborate lie he had told to his wife, and repeated to his son, about his heroic walk with McIlvoy and Scouffas.) Maybe it was only the fact that he was on terra firma again, but he had, too, the same distinct impression of safe conduct he’d had yesterday in this place.