Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

Druff was touched. He was many things at once. He was moved and hungry and exhausted and cranky. He might be coming down with something. Not eating. All that running around. Lying buck naked — all right, half-a-buck naked — on what was practically Meg Glorio’s floor. He could feel a little tickle in his chest, the beginnings of what might be a sore throat. He’d feel better once he’d eaten. He hoped there’d be fixings. Turkey wasn’t turkey without fixings — stuffing, cranberry sauce, a little candied sweet potato. He was supposed to be this big-deal cynical politician, the big daddy of the city streets, and got all choked up at the thought of turkey dinner. Well, that was the clincher, maybe. It put him right smack in the middle of the tradition. A direct descendant. The pilgrims were politicians first or they were nothing. What was Thanksgiving, anyway, if not a sort of open-air version of the smoke- filled room, doing a deal with the Indians?

He followed his wife into their kitchen. He took off his suit coat. He loosened his tie. He rolled back his sleeves and opened his shirt at the collar. Pouring a little dishwashing detergent over them, he washed his hands under the faucet at the sink. Rose, dressed for bed, has been padding about, retrieving the turkey from the freezer, removing its remaining drumstick, carving a few stiff slices of meat from its breast, wrapping Druff’s dinner in aluminum foil on which she’s placed a spoonful of congealed gravy that she spreads like a sort of turkey butter over the meat with a knife. She places this package into their toaster oven to defrost.

“What did you set that at?”

“Three hundred fifty degrees. Why?”

“No. I mean the timer.”

“Ten minutes.”

Druff dried his hands on a dish towel. “You know,” he said, “this is kind of cozy.”

Rose Helen looked at him closely.

“No,” Druff said. “It is.”

“For you. For me it’s overtime.”

It was cozy. Druff, safe, snug in his kitchen, was thinking of blizzards, of cold, stormy evenings. He was thinking of MacGuffin locked out in the street like a wolf.

He couldn’t remember when he’d felt closer to his wife. How intimate they’ve been. Not the screwing, not even the two or three times she’d gone down on him. Certainly not the squeamishness he felt about her body, foreplay, occasions he’d had to stick his finger inside her to make her wet. But how intimate! When she’d brought him back from the hospital. If it hadn’t been for Rose Helen he might have died just from the humiliations of his body. She’d sat on the lip of the tub and stooped to retrieve the greasy suppositories he’d too timidly inserted into his behind to loosen the stalled, compacted bowels he’d been unable to move in the hospital. Feeling himself still too weak to walk into the bathroom when he first came home, he’d used a urinal at night. More than once, with his cock not properly inserted down its oddly angled plastic neck, he’d had sleepy, inattentive accidents. While he sat naked on a towel on a chair, Rose Helen had changed their sheets, gone for a washcloth and basin, warm, soapy water, washed down his thighs, his unstirred privates — all the more intimate, Druff felt, for his lack of response, his limp indifference to the contact, less aroused than if he’d been touching himself — and offered fresh pajamas. (Even his impotence, his open secret.) Intimate. As reconciled as the insensate organs of his own body — his tripes and kidneys, his liver and glands.

There, in the kitchen, chewing his turkey sandwich, eating the flesh off his drumstick, gnawing its bone, sucking its marrow, he wished he could tell Rose Helen what was happening. How Mikey figured in. But he didn’t see how he could do that without bringing Margaret Glorio into it. In a way, Druff thought, he and Rose Helen had been through far too much for that, had been far too intimate.

On the other hand, if anything happened… He was thinking of the mayor, of surprises waiting for them in the morning papers, of impaneled grand juries, of the fallback fall guy Druff suspected he was all too rapidly becoming. He was guilty of nothing, nothing. But these days it wasn’t enough to be innocent. They cared nothing for innocence. Besides, if you were innocent of one charge chances are you couldn’t be innocent of two. In politics as in life there was no statute of limitations. All they had to do to bring you into the conspiracy was to have you show up somewhere on some arbitrary table of organization, demonstrate how you made a blip on the screen even as a statistical or demographical cohort. Show the most tenuous linkage, the long, complicitous, breathtaking genealogy of sin. Guilt by association was still guilt. All one could do was demand how it could still be counted as a conspiracy if so many were in on it. Is it a cult? Was it a covenant? A convention, another political party altogether? Perhaps it was a movement. Maybe it was history.

He could hear the MacGuffin howling at the door.

Not now, not now, Druff pleaded.

I’ll huff and I’ll puff, goes MacGuffin.

Not now. Not now.

“You know,” Druff said experimentally to his wife, “that girl, Mikey’s friend, Su’ad, I think she may have been a smuggler.”

“A smuggler? Su’ad? Do you think so? Oh, but that’s terrible. You think Michael’s on dope?”

“Mikey on dope? Mikey’s body is a holy temple. Oh, you mean am I saying was she Mikey’s connection? No, I don’t think so. Of course not. Su’ad’s body was a holy temple, too. The kid was a devout, respectable Muslim lady. Dyed-in-the-wool Shiite. She wouldn’t even take cocoa with us.”

“That’s right,” said Rose Helen, “I remember. She turned down a candy bar.”

“Sure, that’s the one.”

“Then I don’t see how you can call her a smuggler.”

“Rugs. She smuggled rugs. Oriental carpets.”

“Oriental rugs,” Rose Helen said. “Well, but how do you know?”

“Someone accused her.”

She said, “What an interesting piece of gossip.”

“Well, but that’s just it, Rose, this isn’t gossip.”

“Did Michael tell you this? He’s a dear man but he has an overactive imagination. I wouldn’t set much store by…”

“He never said a word.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You said it isn’t gossip. What do you mean?”

She was a smart cookie, Rose Helen. She made the fine distinctions. He’d probably failed her. Who could have been a contender. Who should have been a contender. Who’d settled for City Commissioner of Streets in a relatively out-of-the-way, not much more than middle-sized city with no major league baseball franchise. A kind of Indianapolis. A sort of Memphis, Tennessee. City Commissioner of Streets a thousand years in a sort of Memphis. Not fair to a First Lady manqué. Not fair to a girl with her eye on the statehouse or even just a mayor’s little mansion. She could have done better. She could have done better even with old Edward R. Markey, the waiter at Rose Helen’s sorority and Druff’s former roommate, the one with a name like the clerk of the court or the fellow who signs the driver’s licenses, and of whom, now a congressman from the state of Ohio, they’d been hearing such good things lately. She could have done better. He’d stood in her way with his bland ambition. He’d stood in both their ways — his fearful big- fish, little-pond heart (and which even at that had gone soft on him, had brought him to death’s door in the emergency room, had left him damned-near-for-dead on the operating table, as-good-as- in the recovery room, and practically so in intensive care, and not-much-better-than- in the at-last private room to which he’d been sent like some prisoner granted special, experimental privileges during the first stages of a long convalescence). And which, a non-starter, had somehow failed to kick in for him — even when he’d been successful — out on the hustings. Hizzoner was right. There was something rotten about his campaigns. “VOTE FOR BOB DRUFF! VOTE FOR BOB DRUFF ON APRIL EIGHTEENTH!” had been, from the first, almost all there was to it — the centerpiece of his positions, his platform. He’d had no record, and made none. He had no overarching vision. He had grounded himself in no particular principle. Give him that lever that could have moved the world and he would not have known where to set the fulcrum. He’d never been moved by party. One seemed as good to him as another. The broadest divisions — all the fors, all the againsts — were all the same to him. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. He was not unfeeling, this most civil of civil servants, but he felt, and thought he understood, that almost anything in more or less the right hands could be made to work. If he believed in anything it was a bureaucracy. His Fourteen Points had been a joke, merely his Inderal kicking in at the time of a confluence of his energy and an opponent’s boorish failure to recognize a joke.