Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

“Well, he wouldn’t need pinking shears for that. I knew that much. That much I knew. And, anyway, he’d lost interest, his heart had gone out of the meteorology trade. When he learned that earthquakes and volcanoes weren’t weather, that any bozo stringer on the scene could handle them, make the body counts and pass them on, that they couldn’t be foretold — the volcanoes, what it would say on the Richter scale — not even in those ten or fifteen minutes he thought he would have on them, and so weren’t pure science and he was wasting his time.

“So I asked him. ‘Why pinking shears, Mikey? What have you got into now?’

“ ‘Oh, Papa,’ he says, ‘that was my surprise.’

“ ‘Which surprise was that, Mikey?’

“You know what he said? You know what he told me? ‘I’m no good. I’m silly this way because I’m no good. I’m not the man my father was. You’re too big for my britches. I can’t make my way.’ ”

Druff had trouble speaking.

“Would you like some water?” Margaret Glorio said.

The City Commissioner of Streets shrugged, then followed the woman into her small Pullman kitchen where she rinsed the stale, tinny dregs of tomato juice from a clear plastic airline cup and filled it with tap water.

“What were the pinking shears for? Did he ever say?”

“For cutting canvas. For serrating the edges around his paintings. That was his surprise, his idea. He knew he couldn’t paint, that he wasn’t any good. He needed a gimmick.”

“I don’t under—”

“He’d glue the backs of the paintings and stick them in the upper right-hand corner of white, rectangular canvas ‘envelopes’ that he’d covered with primer. They’d look just like stamps. He’d paint in the purchaser’s name and address in Mars black if he made a sale. If it was a gift he’d put in the name and address of whoever it was that was supposed to receive it.”

“That’s wild,” the buyer said.

He wasn’t her son. Druff ignored her. “I tried to explain,” he said. “I told him he couldn’t base his future on a gimmick. I warned about the prohibitive costs of his idea. Why, just the canvases alone. I showed him on an actual letter. ‘Look, Mike,’ I said, ‘just consider the ratios. See how much larger the white area of the envelope is than the stamp. What is that, nine to one? Ten? That’s on the horizontal, the proportions would be more favorable on the vertical but we’re still talking in the neighborhood of four or five inches to one. Now an ordinary first- class postage stamp weighs in at about something under an inch by a little better than three-quarters of an inch. You carry those dimensions over to anything that would be meaningful on a full-size piece of mail art and you’re talking of a piece in excess of, oh, nine or ten feet by five feet. That’s not counting the frame. Then, even if you find someone willing to pay for all that blank, unpainted area, it would still be too big to go over a sofa. And you’re still stuck with the problem of your painting.’

“ ‘I could make wavy lines,’ he says, ‘I could cancel the stamp. I could put in a postmark and a return address.’

“ ‘Too busy,’ I said.”

“How do you know the size of a postage stamp?” Ms. Glorio said.

“I’m a politician. I used to be a collector. FDR was a collector.”

“I interrupted you,” she said. “Go on.”

“Well, that’s about it,” Druff said. “I brought him around. I told him it was all very well to come up with original ideas, but that speaking in the main the world didn’t much prize what was original, that it already knew its needs and it was the business of successful men to discover what those were and then go about trying to prepare themselves to fulfill them. I reminded him that there were probably already more people studying to be meteorologists in his classes at the university than there were weathermen on all the local news shows on all the television stations in the city.”

“Did he answer you?”

“Well, I told you,” Druff said. “He’d pretty much lost interest in meteorology. What he said was pretty crazy. He talked about having to go where there wasn’t so much competition. Maybe learn to fish, build fires, become this hunter/gatherer. Live on the range off the land.

“ ‘Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny?’

“ ‘What? Oh. Yeah. I mean it, Daddy,’ he says. ‘I don’t think that would be half bad. The benefits of fresh, unpolluted air, of sweet, cold springwater. Hunkering down with nature, learning to watch and appreciate the seasons. Does that seem so terrible?’

“Well, he was making me mad. I’m talking survival, he’s talking the quality of life.

“ ‘Damn it, Mikey, what are you talking about? You don’t even know what buffalo look like.’

“ ‘I do,’ he tells me. ‘They look like old nickels.’ ”

“That’s where they met,” Meg Glorio said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Su’ad and your son. That’s where they met. In that night-school art class.”

“She was a Shiite Muslim,” Druff said. “Very devout, very pious. Into that stuff like a terrorist. Wasn’t drawing from life against her religion or something? Even a landscape, even raw fruits and vegetables, bread, a goose on a table with its neck wrung?”

“She painted geometry. Interlocking angles and rhomboids, configurations and patterns.”

“Oriental rugs,” the commissioner put in.

“Iranian carpets, yes. The Iran-Lebanon nexus. The Iranian-Lebanese-Syrian one.”

“Su’ad was a smuggler?”

“Su’ad was a genius,” she said. “She not only managed to bring carpets out of her country but got commissions for those designs she worked out in night school and managed to get them back in to her weavers.”

“I don’t believe this. If she was so good why did she have to take art classes at night?”

“She used the place as her studio. She used their light. She used the paints and swatches of those canvases you paid for.”

He’d seen it coming, of course. Sometime between the lunch he’d been promised but which had never been given him and the lunch he’d ordered but hadn’t touched, he’d anticipated that rugs would be in it, that Dan and Jerry and Hamilton Edgar would. He’d seen it coming. And had enough of that touch of the gumshoe in him to know, if not the specifics, at least the broad outlines of what was up. Or, specifically, that something was. His dilemma now was what to do if he solved it, put together the pieces of the puzzle. What puzzle? Which puzzle? The puzzle of how Mikey figured? How Ms. Glorio and Dick and Douglas did? The puzzle of where he himself was standing and what he happened to be doing on the evening of the afternoon of the morning in question? The deeper question of the question in question?

And nah, nah, he told himself. He knew which puzzle, all right. Simply, it was what he would do, could do, if he used the MacGuffin up before its time. (Because MacGuffins by nature, however it may have seemed at the beginning, or during one’s more anxious moments, were essentially in your corner, on your side, were these sort of guardian angels. No matter that they scared the shit out of you. They were tests from God. Little blessings blown on not-quite-good- or interesting- enough lives. Holy tremors, sacred seizures before the long, arduous order of death. That’s the way he saw it anyway. That was the view from Ms. Glorio’s apartment. No matter that it was full dark. It would not do to throw off the spirit of narrative in his life, his sense of closure, his timing, his all. There would Druff be, compromised, caught with his pants down in the middle of his muddle if he gave in to the sweet temptation of a closed case. It was a question of simple good husbandry and accountable, agreeable stewardship.) Draw it out, draw it out, he warned. Vamp until ready. But I’m so tired, he argued, I haven’t eaten, I’m lonely and old.