Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

“You poor guy,” she said, “was this what you wanted?” She held out one of the blister packs.

“That’s not mine,” Druff said with some indignation.

“It’s not?”

“No,” he said, “of course not.”

“I thought it might be the battery for your pacemaker or something.”

“I don’t have a pacemaker.”

“Well, that’s good,” she said. “I thought maybe you did. What with those scars and all. You poor guy.”

“No,” he said. “Those are my wife’s. She’s deaf.”

“You poor guy.”

“Could you hand me my jacket?”

She handed over the suit coat, then started to pull her underwear back on, panty hose, a brassiere, white and plain as a kid’s training bra. Druff was surprised. He would have imagined teddies on this woman, garter belts holding silken hosiery. “What have you got there? Oh,” she said, “your coca leaves.”

“A little fortification,” he said. “I could use the euphoria right now. Also, it gives me energy and cuts my appetite. Inca Indians use this stuff in the highest Andes. A few of these leaves in their jaws, the little fellas can keep going for days. They’re so wired, some of them walk up to work from their homes down at sea level.”

“You’re not going to share?”

“Here,” he said, extending the pouch. “Chow down.”

“No thanks,” she said. “The way it works is I blackmail you, not the other way around.”

In minutes his hunger had gone, his weakness. He’d forgotten his humiliation. Waves of well-being moved over him. He wondered if it was too late to try something even though she was dressed now. Nah, he realized, still nothing doing. Years of Inderal chemicals and ages of controlled agricultural substances fighting his libido to a standstill. Last night had been a gift. (Margaret Glorio would have to try to remember that. ) “Women are damned good sports,” the City Commissioner of Streets said from his new, dreamy energy.

“Oh? How’s that, sweetie?”

“Well, you know…”

“No,” she said. “I really don’t.”

“Well, my performance, for example.”

“You call that a performance?”

“Right,” Druff said, and clammed up and, spreading out his suit jacket, covered his genitals and surgical scars and, pulling the sleeve of his coat over it, tried to hide what he could of the long zippery scar where the surgeons had removed the vein from his leg.

“Come on,” she said, “don’t be that way. Suppose your face froze like that?”

“Another weather terrorist heard from,” Druff mumbled.

“What?”

“I was making the point,” he said, “that women were good sports about these things, but I guess no one is, really. Sex is the hardest thing to get right. Please,” Druff put in quickly, “say nothing unworthy.” (Because he realized there was a streak of vulgarity to her. An air, despite her buyer’s smarts and chic, à la mode wisdoms, of rough inelegance which cost her points. This, well, jungliness. Her blatant body was an example, her telegenic flesh tones, or just the forwardness of her pronounced strength. Summer vacations, for kicks, on a lark, she might have done stints with the Roller Derby. Oh, he was a fastidious asshole. Still, she told jokes like a man—“Guy walks into this flat …” Besides, she knew he was a married man, and had slept with him anyway.)

“Who do you think you’re talking to, ‘say nothing unworthy’?”

“The performance remark? Then when I said that about the ‘hardest thing to get right’? You’re not that innocent. I could see double entendre in your eyes practically. I set myself up.”

“Oh sure,” she said, “up. ”

“I shouldn’t be here,” he said. But he meant something else. (He’d changed the subject, he meant.) He talked about love now. About what was permissible. Love’s dead-center telemetry, blind Cupid’s locked-in coordinates. Propinquity was nothing, vaunted chemistry, all inexact dead reckoning’s girl-next-dooriness. Likewise Fate, the Kismets. Statistically, Druff figured, the odds of Fate coming through in matters of the heart were up there with hitting the Lotto. So if chemistry counted for nothing, propinquity, fate, what did? However did people end up in bed together?

“It’s demographics,” the City Commissioner of Streets said.

“The girl next door is demographics?”

Druff spoke up from the Japanese pallet and made a speech, wooing her, wooing himself, chasing her vote, his own, laying a little of the old Lincoln-Douglas on them both. “No,” he said, “she doesn’t exist. She’s like Betty Crocker. Not even. She’s a hairstyle, a skirt length, a size six or so shoe. When I say demographics I speak as a politician. Colored or white, combined household income, highest degree earned. Did your mother come from Ireland? Margin for error two points plus or minus. We’re fixed, I mean. Set in cement, chiseled in stone. Everyone who isn’t denied us is denied us. I mean it. It’s the demographics that require a fellow to forsake and forswear. We live by a finding, nature’s negative fiat. My Christ, think of the ways screwing is out of bounds — all God’s and custom’s disparate dasn’ts. The incests of family, the inside-out incests of class. All the sexual holdouts. When A declines B because B don’t measure up. Hey, just fear of trespass or a failure of nerve. An act of adultery’s a miracle when you stop to think. I don’t care how in synch with the times a man thinks he is, you can’t just knock ’em down and pull ’em into an alley. God fixed his canon ’gainst that sort of thing. Let alone the decorums — this one protecting her cellulite, that one a failure of sheer damned inches. Or holdouts of the head or heart when character’s a consideration — all love’s and sexuality’s crossed fingers. I talk through my hat if I tell you it’s natural. It ain’t natural. It’s the most unnatural thing in the world. The shortfall in opportunity, in the alignment of inclinations: ‘SWM, athletic, non-smoker, social drinker, interested in movies, music, dancing, dining, books and laughter, sitting around the house on rainy Sunday afternoons reading the Times, seeks relationship with attractive SWF with similar tastes.’ Oh? Yeah? You think? ‘SWM looking to get it on with MBF alligator wrestler. Must be able to make her own shoes and handbags’ is more like it. C may screw D but he’s dreaming of Jeannie with the light brown hair.

“I tell you, Miss Glorio, there are drifts and tendencies and pronenesses. There’s kinks and fixations, bent and bias. There’s yens and itches. And if the lion ever lies down with the lamb, or the goat with the otter, it’s dollars to doughnuts they’re dreaming of Jeannie with the light brown hair, too.

“Because love has to be exonerated, the extenuating circumstances taken into account, the forgives and forgets.”

“I love it when you talk gabardine. It fetches me, it really does. It’s a shame you can’t fuck,” Meg Glorio told him.

“There you go again,” said the commissioner. But she was right. It was. He tilted his head back and looked to where she sat, dressed, looking down on him from her superior position on the brocade sofa. She was smiling. Then, quite suddenly, she reached down and plucked the suit coat from his body. She started to laugh.

“Jesus,” Druff cried, and tried to cover himself with his hands. Then, just as suddenly as she’d pulled his jacket from him, almost inspired, and thinking, no, not almost, inspired out-and-out; by his on-again-off- again MacGuffìn sung to, City Commissioner of Streets Druff rolled to his side where he lay on the futon and grabbing the edge of one of Margaret Glorio’s small Oriental scatter rugs drew it across his body.