Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

“So I had to, didn’t I? Didn’t I just say so? Didn’t I just admit it to you — it couldn’t have been seven minutes ago — that I had to see what you were holding? How could I know you weren’t holding anything but your glands? Christ, Bob, a City Commissioner of Streets your age? Coming on like some high school boy. Give me a break. Think if this made the papers. Are you decent yet?”

“I’ve just put my jacket on,” he said, “I’m still tying my shoes.”

She waited another minute and came out.

“You knew Su’ad?” he asked reluctantly.

“She got me the rugs.”

“Dick said he saw you and Mikey together,” Druff said, offering his spy’s name and surrendering information as if he hadn’t just heard what she’d just told him. “He said Mikey told him you’re fifty.”

“Mikey’s your son?”

“You know he is.”

“He told you I’m fifty?”

“He’s a kid. Kids don’t know people’s ages.”

“Oh they don’t, don’t they?” Margaret Glorio said.

This was a blow, though he couldn’t have said why. Or, perhaps not so much a blow as the softening of a blow. Maybe it was a last gift to him, that if he thought she was fifty he wouldn’t make so much of losing her. She was being kind. But her kindness, if that’s what it was, had backfired. It only fed his useless, oddball lust for her. And fifty, Druff thought, there was something awfully sensual about a fifty-year-old woman. She’d be menopausal, her secondary sex characteristics less classically articulated perhaps; no longer working off her woman’s juices and estrones, all femininity’s biologic perfumes, but the moving parts themselves, the sourish organ meats and tainted dairy, her powerful spoiled essences and lurid cheeses. What, oh what, moaned Druff, is being sacrificed here?

Hey, scolded Druff’s MacGuffin, bringing him up shortly, stay on task, will you?

“You were saying Su’ad sold you these rugs?” Druff offered automatically, doing a Q and A rag in the detective mode.

“Don’t put words in my mouth. I never said sold. They’re here on consignment. Like everything else in my showplace. Who’s Dick?”

“Hah!” said Druff.

“Is Dick your chauffeur? Is he the one drives you around in that silly limousine?”

“Who’s asking the questions here?” the City Commissioner of Streets said.

“All right,” she said, “you’ve got me. What do you want to know? Just ask and I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

Whoa, thought the commissioner. Wait up a sec. Hold my horses. Don’t let’s jump the gun here. Do I really want to take her up on this? Let’s look before we leap. Do I really want everything unraveled just yet? He was on a cusp. The timing was wrong. Was he properly prepared? Did he need anything as final as truth? Did he appreciate the cost of precipitate knowledge? What about all those old fools in tragedy? Didn’t curiosity kill their cats for them? What, would he let a MacGuffin egg him on? Old Druff stood his ground.

“Gee,” he said, “are you really fifty?”

“More or less.”

But it was hard work. Maybe the hardest work in the whole business. It wasn’t clear to him how he could put it off much longer.

He closed his eyes. Bringing up the family tic like a belch.

“So you know Mikey,” he said offhandedly.

“I sure do.”

She sure did? She sure did?

Then it came to him how he could manage. Instead of looking for secret information, he would provide it. The MacGuffin told him so. All he need do to forestall the devastating would be to utter it himself.

“Well,” he said, “then you understand my position. I mean, I’m sorry to have to say so, but that boy’s my cross. Well, you’ve seen him, you have some idea. He’s my personal white man’s burden. I know this isn’t the way dads normally talk about their children, but damn it, Margaret, the kid’s a kid. Thirty if he’s a day and still a baby. Big as he is, scared of his shadow. Scared shitless of mine. That I might die on him before his time. Which has bloody fuck-all to do with love. Love? He hasn’t enough love in him to sustain a thank-you note. We still support him, did you know that? He still gets an allowance. We buy his clothes for him. His mother picks out his suits, she takes him for shoes. I pay his speeding tickets. All his moving violations. Sure, I could have them fixed, I suppose, but if it ever came out? I could have another wife, what he costs me. I give him dough for the movies, for tickets to games. He’s too old for me to carry on my Blue Cross any longer, so I pay premiums on health insurance that’s not even group. And his birthdays? Every year he makes out like it’s his sweet sixteenth. He expects a big check. He likes us to take him to dinner, Happy Birthday sung to him by waiters in restaurants. He blows candles out on his cake. He makes a wish. Every year we have to remind him it’s the other way around. We give him money for gas, lifetime memberships in gyms that could close in a year. He nickels and dimes us. My son, the kid. If I weren’t at least a little corrupt you think I could afford him? In a pig’s ass.

“I’m Commissioner of Streets, recall. I’ve offered to get him jobs. Nothing illegal, mind. Nothing sub rosa or under the table. This would be outside the spoils system entirely. He could day labor streets. He could drive the salt trucks, redirect traffic or handle the signs. ‘Detour,’ ‘Men Working,’ ‘Bridge Out Ahead.’ But he won’t deal with the public, he tells me, and I can’t bring him into the Hall. How would it look it got out he’s my son? You tell me you know him. Well, he’s stupid. You’ve seen the confusion on him, his brow when it furrows like terrace farming in China.

“We talk. I take him into my confidence. I father-to-son him. Every chance I get, if you want to know. ‘The riddle of the Sphinx ain’t no knock-knock joke, Mikey,’ I tell him. ‘Who goes bare-handed in the morning, holds Mace in the afternoon, and won’t leave his house after dark?’ I ask. ‘It’s Man, son,’ I answer. ‘There’s no reason to be so alarmed. You’re no needier than anyone else.’

“He is, of course. He’s in the top forty of the hundred neediest cases. With a bullet.

“Well, you know him. You tell me, do you think there’s any confidence there at all? Because I’ve never seen such a combination of raw, bleeding need and nutty fatuity. It’s outside my experience.

“And he has these ideas? Well, ideas.

“He takes this art course at the U? You knew about his art course? This studio thing? That he attends once, twice a week? He doesn’t even take it for credit. Well, he can’t. It’s offered at night but it’s not part of their Continuing Education program, just some hobby-lobby deal the university offers to take the business away from the Y. (I buy his supplies — his canvas and brushes, his stretchers and colors. His alizarin crimsons, his manganese blues. His cadmium yellows and terre- vertes and oxides of chromium. All his raw umbers and titanium whites.)

“So last semester he was working on this project? Very hush-hush? And one day he comes to me and says he wants money for pinking shears, he needs these pinking shears. I don’t ask. Usually I don’t ask. They say the heart has its reasons, and I pretty much go along. But why pinking shears? It’s not as if I had to know, it’s just that I had this hunch. The bill for his art supplies was costing me more money than all the books in all his regular courses combined. The cockeyed advanced meteorology degree he’s taking because one time he thought maybe he wanted to be a weatherman on TV. For the disasters? For the cataclysms and catastrophes that that could put him next to, would give him a leg up on the rest of us for the ten or fifteen minutes before they happened, the hurricanes and storm surges and killer twisters. Before they made landfall or touched down in the trailer park. For the inside info it provided him and which he could pass on to the public, the tips and helpful hints. What corner of the basement they should stand, how low they should lie they’re caught in a field.