Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

Punching up the two pillows, he propped his head against them, spread his fingers and placed his hands on top of the little rug’s soft, silken pile. He smoothed the carpet down over his chest and belly and tucked it in next to his torso and thighs.

“How do I look?” he said. “Luxurious? Like a guy in a deck chair? Like someone preparing to take breakfast in bed?”

“Cute,” she said evenly, “as a bug in a rug.”

Idly, he turned back a corner of the carpet.

“I forget,” Druff said, “is it good or bad if the pattern shows through the back of these things?”

“It’s good,” Margaret Glorio said.

Druff, flourishing the carpet as if it were a sheet flung over an unmade bed, or he some awkward bullfighter losing control of his cape in the wind, managed to flick the thing onto its verso. There, palely, the carpet’s mirror image showed itself, all its obsessed finials and geometrics, all its endlessly repetitive interlacing stems and leaves like some deranged floral script.

“You admire my rug?”

“Olé,” said the City Commissioner of Streets.

“What are you looking for?”

“I don’t know,” Druff said, “washing instructions, a tag, the little whoosie they stitch onto pillows and mattresses.”

“I don’t see anything like that.”

“No,” he said, “me neither.”

“Get dressed, Commissioner. Put the rug down. Get back in your clothes.”

It was the syntax of someone with the drop on you, Druff thought. She’d be pointing a gun at him. Well, well, he thought, he wasn’t really old, not even sixty actually, but he was a man with conditions — his heart, his lungs with their peculiar tendency to collapse and patched as worn tires, his impotence, his worn old brains, even the tic that shut his eyes against scorn and diminishment and that he’d picked up from Mikey — they were shut now — even his MacGuffin. So if he wasn’t, if one counted actual years, old, he felt like an octogenarian. He could have been someone in a home, though even with his complaints and conditions, in no way did he feel he’d led a full life. Not, in spite of his parapolitical street smarts and City Hall ways, politically, not sexually, not philosophically. In a peculiar way, he had his whole life ahead of him. And he was frightened. Well, she had the drop on him. Then there was the guy in the lobby who’d turned up his nose at Druff’s twenty bucks. In such clear cahoots with Maggie. All she had to do after she shot Druff was buzz the doorguy on the intercom. If they could bring an entire apartmentful of furniture into her place and set it all up in a few hours, they could probably dispose of just poor skimpy old Druff in minutes. There had to be special service elevators in the building. There could be God knew what all — incinerators, tortuous, murderous laundry chutes.

Think fast, Druff thought. He called on his MacGuffin. What to do, what to do? he prayed at it. I wouldn’t bother you, he prayed, only I just remembered that premonition I had at Doug’s — that this could be the day I come to a bad end? What with Margaret having the drop on me and all, I figure the odds on that happening are up from outside to about so-so. If this were baseball, say, my magic number would be somewhere in the teens.

Then, quick as snap, Ol’ MacGuffin came through, speaking to him from some court of last resorts, singing the desperate long-shot odds (of the plan’s success, the feasibility of its proposed escape measures), figuring them at one chance or something in a million.

She told you to get dressed, she demanded you put that rug down, the MacGuffin reprised.

Yes, yes, impatient Druff, needing to act quickly but thinking MacGuffin was merely vamping, thought miserably.

Put the rug down, the MacGuffin counseled.

Go along with her.

Put the rug down!

Sure, he thought, I can do that. Then what?

Don’t get into your clothes.

Seduce her? The woman’s got the drop on me. Don’t you think it’s a little late for that?

You’re naked as a jaybird. You think she’d shoot you in here? That she could afford to take that kind of chance? This place is tiny, it’s a tiny, cozy little place. You ain’t but a couple of feet from that brocade sofa. There’d be blood all over the furniture, the pillows and pallet, inside the drawers of the mahogany highboy, soaking into the wing chair’s fancy fabrics and the nifty new lamp shades. And you can’t tell me that Jap folding screen wouldn’t take a hit. And what about the rugs? All this shit’s on consignment. Think. It’s demos and loaners, this shit. She probably had to sign for every last stitch.

The MacGuffin was right. He’d defy her. Turning his neck, twisting it awkwardly up and away from the pillows, he was about to make the MacGuffin’s argument. It was the first time he dared look at her.

“Darn it, Commissioner, I thought I asked you to get dressed,” Miss Glorio said. “Why are you still lying there naked like that? What do you think this is?”

“Oh,” said the Commissioner of Streets. (Or oof. Or whoops. Something breathless, anyway, something startled and becalmed, something sucker-punched, something with the wind taken out of its sails.) “Oh,” he said again, this doomed, debilitated, worn-brained, impotent, heart- bypassed, vulnerable-lunged, tic-ridden, MacGuffin-haunted, paranoid old man, “you’re not even packing a weapon, are you?”

“Come on, Druff,” she said. “Put up or shut up.”

He understood. She meant his cock. Or all his insinuations about the rug stuff, about Dan. Ol’ MacGuffin just sat there laughing.

Druff felt like crying. “Why do you put up with me?” he said.

“For goodness sakes, Commissioner, I don’t put up with you. I just had to see what you’re holding, is all.”

“I held you.”

“Oh, Lord,” she said, “you put too much stock, you know that? You set too much store. Really, Bob, I say this for your own good. You do. You really do. You put too much stock in your love life. Everyone has a love life. Birds do it, bees do it. Even educated fleas. Sex isn’t the hardest thing to get right, it’s one of the simplest. You’re so repressed. You’re a repressed tight-ass. Or what was all that gabardine crap you tried to hand me all about? Sex is a lead-pipe cinch, easy as pie, like falling off a log. Hey, come on, Commissioner, it’s simple friction. Cavemen did it and discovered fire. Now, what you have, married to Amy Georgina all these years and years, that’s hard! Don’t pout. You’re not a pouter, are you? It’s not attractive in a man. Stiffen your lip. There,” she said, “isn’t that better? It certainly looks better. You’re our City Commissioner of Streets. You didn’t get where you are by pouting and wearing your heart on your sleeve. Are you all right? You’re all right, aren’t you?”

“I’m all right.”

“All right!” Margaret Glorio said.

“I guess I’ll get dressed now,” he said.

“Well, you certainly don’t need my permission,” she said. “I’m all for it.”

“It’s just I feel a little funny dressing with you sitting there.”

“Hey,” she said, “no problem. I’ll go stand behind the screen.”

Passing in front of him, she went around the foot of the futon and took up her position in back of the Japanese folding screen. Druff got into his boxer shorts, as long and high waisted on him as if he were actually a boxer. He pulled on his socks, his pants. Margaret spoke an accompaniment of explanation to him in the background. She didn’t come out even as he was buttoning his shirt, even as he was knotting his tie.

“That first night? Well, it was last night, actually, or even if you’re counting from yesterday afternoon, it all seems so long ago now. It must to you, too. After the long march you’ve been on? Anyway, when you were trying to talk me into going out with you? I said at the time (at least I’m consistent), ‘I like to know what I’m up against,’ I said. You mentioned Su’ad? I asked if that was a restaurant?