Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

“Poor Mother Hubbard?”

“There you go,” Margaret Glorio said.

Druff nodded and Miss Glorio — she was still holding his hand — led him out from behind the screen and back into the living room.

“So tell me,” she said when he was seated on the rich brocade couch she had invited him to share, “you see what things mean to me, how unattached I am. We could go into the bathroom and I could show you my medicine chest. A bottle of generic aspirin, toothpaste, a few hotel soaps and shampoos. There aren’t any monograms on my hand towels. I haven’t any appliances, not even a microwave. I eat out of cartons from Chinese restaurants, white paper bags. From cardboard boxes the pizza guy brings. Off Styrofoam china from the fast food, trays wrapped in cellophane around airline meals I never touched. So tell me, what was all that about Oriental rugs?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Oh please,” Margaret Glorio said.

He didn’t understand. There were Oriental carpets in the rabbi’s study. In the rabbi’s study’s crapper even. They’d reminded him of Su’ad, suggested some Middle East connection which had seemed important at the time. He remembered, but didn’t understand. Seeing whether there was an Oriental rug at Margaret’s had seemed a good reason to come here today. Now he wasn’t so sure. MacGuffins were mind-boggling things. They were seductive, they threw you curves, they fucked you over. With the fleeting, now-you-see-’em-now-you-don’t appearances they put in on weekends? He could only conclude they weren’t dependable, MacGuffins. They were a trip, MacGuffins, but hardly money in the bank. Druff had lost sight of his reasons. Even though he saw that there were small Oriental rugs everywhere. The one behind the folding screen in the Pullman kitchen. The one over by the wing chair. Another practically under his feet. Three he could account for without even taking her up on her offer to show him the bathroom. But he couldn’t even find her bed, for heaven’s sake. How could he tell how many carpets there could still be?

Was it even important?

Seeing everything changed had thrown him off, the new decor.

“They’re nice,” Druff said. He meant the rugs, and tapped the one nearest him with the toe of a shoe. He indicated the one over by the wing chair with his jaw.

“Are you all right? What’s wrong? Don’t you feel well?”

“Well, I’m hungry,” he said, “is there somewhere I could lie down?” (This was so. He required food. His breakfast had been botched. And he never got that lunch he’d been promised — his filet mignon, his garden fresh vegetables, his wine, his strawberries out of season. His hamburger, his order of fries, his coffee and pie à la mode had proved inedible. Margaret was no help. She had no utensils. Even if there’d been the makings for tea there’d be nothing to drink it from; even the brandy snifters seemed to be gone. He could hardly be expected to lick tea out of her cupped palms. Tea wouldn’t have satisfied him anyway. What he really needed was a good solid meal. Though he had no appetite for it.)

“Why don’t you put your feet up?” Margaret said.

“But it’s silk,” Druff said.

“You won’t hurt it.”

“It’s silk,” he said.

“Wait. I’ll help with your shoes,” she said.

She was rubbing the commissioner’s temples, massaging his neck, touching his hair. She was drawing her nails down his cheek. Her hand was in his lap. He had an erection.

“We should both lie down,” she said.

“Where?” he said. “How? Does this sofa make up? You think we ought to do it on the sofa? I don’t know, I don’t have a rubber,” he said. “I could stain the brocade. You think that stuff comes out of silk? Maybe you have rubbers. Could you lend me one? I’ll pay you back.”

“I don’t have soup bowls, why would I have rubbers?”

“Maybe the man I saw in the lobby left one with you.”

“Dan?”

“You know Dan?”

“You’re such a worrywart.”

“Dan doesn’t worry me.”

“Nothing should worry you.”

“I’m no kid,” he said.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“A man old enough to be my age takes things into account.”

If they were horses they’d be walking. It seemed to Druff the gait of their conversation had slowed.

“I’ll make up the futon,” she said, easing his head from her lap. She brought a thin mattress and two pillows out of a closet and spread a clean sheet across the futon.

“I’m not sure,” Druff said. “I don’t think I could get down on that.”

“I’ll lower you.”

“Once I’m down I might not be able to get up again.”

“I’ll raise you.”

He felt foolish undressing in front of her, just as foolish removing his suit coat, shirt and tie as he did taking off his pants. He was no beauty, Druff. He looked even worse in his scarred body and toneless, troubled flesh than he did in clothes. He tried to place himself onto the low, distant futon, only two inches or so from the bare floor. He bowed from the waist, recovered. Feinting, he made as if to lean into a kneeling position, then straightened up again. Seeking various body leverages, this lone, unopposed wrestler.

“I’ve got you,” Margaret Glorio, sitting up, pronounced from the futon. One arm was wrapped about his leg, the other held him around the hip. She was in her underwear, her flesh tones bright as perfectly adjusted color on television. “Go on, don’t be afraid to put your weight on me. Lean on my shoulder. I won’t let you fall.”

Using her back and shoulders for handholds, he carefully rappeled down the side of her body. “Whew!” he said, beside her at last. But his hard-on was almost gone. And he couldn’t properly maneuver on the futon, on its sheet like a picnic cloth set down on hard, stony ground. He thrashed away, but the floor, which he could feel through the scant, paltry mat, hurt his knees and dug into his elbows. He at last abandoned her and fell uselessly away. How, he wondered, did Japan manage to repopulate itself? “Well,” Druff said, out of breath, “that was pretty humiliating for me. How was it for you?”

“What are all these scars?” she asked, running a finger down the incisions from his bypass surgery and other invasive procedures. Where they’d cracked open his chest. Where they’d taken a vein from his left leg and placed bits of it about his heart where the woodbine twines. Where they’d punctured his side and run a tube through it to his lung to blow it up again after it had collapsed.

“Maybe,” Druff said unhappily, “I should have stained the brocade. I could have tried to induce a nosebleed.”

“It’s odd. I didn’t even notice these last night,” Margaret Glorio said.

“Well, you wouldn’t, would you?” Druff said. “I didn’t have them last night.”

“Oh you,” Margaret said.

“Could you reach me my suit coat?”

“Are you cold? I’ll get us a blanket.”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact. But I need something out of one of the pockets in my suit coat.”

Effortlessly, she raised herself to a standing position. She was a big woman, tall as the diminished Druff, and not, he imagined, all that much lighter. He could only guess at the source of her agreeable strength. Maybe it came from the luxuriant hair that grew at her luxuriant pudendum. From his spectacular worm’s-eye view as she moved away from him, he stared up at her stirring, eloquent ass, at her sparkling snatch, glittering like facets off some hairy diamond as it vanished and appeared in league with her long strides. Anything doing? he wondered. Nah, not much. Nothing at all, in fact. Still, he thought, he was privileged to see this. If they didn’t kill him, he’d have to try to remember what it looked like.