Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

So he’d failed her. Anyone with even half his cynicism could have gone further. So hitting — and recognizing — his stride somewhere between the zones of comfort and opportunity, he’d failed her. Rose Helen, that smart, sharp, unsuspecting Muse of his complacency. Waiting for her answer.

“Well,” Druff began, not at all willing for all of it to come out just yet but quite willing for some to, “I’m kind of an eyewitness.”

“Yes?”

“The mayor has a small Oriental rug on the floor of his limousine. He made a point of my seeing it. Well.”

“That’s why?”

“Hamilton Edgar’s rabbi has them in his study. Even in his crapper.”

“His crapper. I see.”

“There’s this buyer of men’s sportswear for some of the city’s leading department stores. The buyer has them.”

“Well then,” Rose Helen said.

“I know what I’m talking about,” Druff told her, imploring her, falling helplessly back on some trust-me idiomatics.

Rose Helen cleared away the remains of Druff’s supper. She rinsed his dish in the sink, the knife for the mayonnaise jar, his coffee cup, his spoon.

He knows he doesn’t have it in him. He hasn’t put it all together yet. He has no overview, as he has no guiding political principles. He’s really quite tired. In his condition, the way he’s feeling, he should probably just drop it. He probably would have if the mayor had not deliberately made everything seem so menacing. It wasn’t the first time today he’d had a sense of hazard and jeopardy. He remembered going down Doug’s stairs in a darkened atmosphere of danger like the threat of imminent rain. The handwriting was on the wall. The conditions were cooking. Took my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry. Singin’ this’ll be the day that I die, this’ll be the day that I die. Plus the dirty pictures he’d had in his head when he came home of what they might already have done to Rose Helen. So he wasn’t only thinking of himself. So he couldn’t just drop it. He owed her his best thinking on this one. All he could muster. For her own good.

“And when I asked Dick over the phone if he knew of any international rug rings working this town, the connection was broken.”

“You spoke like this to your driver?”

“Ha!” Druff exclaimed. “Not to my driver! To some bimbo whose voice I didn’t recognize except to know that it wasn’t Dick’s wife’s voice. When I asked her to ask him!”

“I’m confused,” Rose Helen said.

“It’s very confusing,” Druff admitted.

It was like her seeing his clumsily placed suppositories, his pissed sheets and open impotence, his incoherence another, further — maybe furthest — intimacy.

“Listen,” Rose Helen said, “does Mikey have anything to do with whatever it is you’re talking about?”

“Is he home, Mikey?”

“He’s out.”

“I don’t know,” Druff said, beats behind their conversation. “I can’t honestly say,” he told her, yawning. (Because the tryptophan from all that turkey was starting to work, the Thanksgiving enzyme loading him down, clear and present danger or no clear and present danger, heavying, hypnotizing him.) “The kid may be an accessory,” he said. “He might even be an accomplice. Look,” he said, “I’m falling asleep on my feet. I’ve got to lie down or die.”

“Go on up,” she said. “I still have a few things to do yet. I’ll be up as soon as I can.”

“No,” said Druff. “I have to see Mikey. I’ll just put my feet up on the couch in the living room.”

“Take your shoes off first, they’re filthy. My God, you really must have gone all over town to find those batteries.”

But Druff had already made it to the couch. He was already sleeping. Already deep into his rapid-mouth-motion version of REM sleep.

“I can place Su’ad with our Mikey. I can place Dick with our Mikey. I think I can place Mikey and Dick with the buyer,” he said aloud from the hustings of his dreamed oratory. “I think, from something Doug said, I can place Doug with all three of them. I can place Dan with the concierge, I can place him with the buyer,” he said, pleased how even in sleep he’d subsumed Margaret Glorio’s gender twice now under the neutral, asexual term. He smiled, proud of his presence of mind. “It’s all pretty much circumstantial, I guess, but the world’s pretty circumstantial, too.”

“Bob,” Rose Helen said.

“No,” he said, “I’m on a roll.”

“Bob,” she said, and shook him.

“No,” he said, “stop it! Do you know how frustrating it is when you do that, Rose Helen? Let me have my say, will you? It’s still America. We still have something called the First Amendment, if you want to know. Give a guy a break here a minute. If you’d be so kind. There, that’s better. Thank you. Now,” he said, “where was I? Dick with Mikey. Mikey with Dick with the buyer. The buyer with the concierge. The concierge with Dan. Dan with Ham ‘n’ Eggs and Jerry Rector. (I’m eyewitness to that part.) Ergo, by extension, all three of that lot with the buyer as well as with — as well as with — did I say Doug with Mrs. Macklin? Right then, Doug with Mrs. Macklin. Mrs. Mack with the mayor. And Doug with the mayor, too, of course. And obviously Doug with Dick. So Dick with the mayor. So Dick with Mrs. Macklin. Mrs. Mack with Mr. Mack. So why not Mr. Macklin with our Su’ad? Or our Mikey with Mr. Macklin? Or our Mr. Macklin with the little boy who lives down the lane? The cheese stands alone.

“Hey, is someone getting any of this down? Is anyone getting some of this down?

“No? Not? No? Maybe I’m talking in my sleep to the wrong party here. Maybe I ought to be sleeping with the buyer. With someone who takes me just a little more seriously, if you please.”

“Come on,” Rose Helen said, “wake up. Unless you’re already awake. You are awake, aren’t you? You do this on purpose. This is your way of making conversation. It’s your way of making conversation, isn’t it? Sure, you’re gone all day. Then, instead of explaining yourself, you do this song and dance. Well, I don’t have to listen to it. I won’t listen to it! I’m going upstairs. If you get tired of talking to yourself and want to come to bed and behave, you come up too. Don’t put the chain on the door; Michael isn’t home yet.”

“Rose Helen,” Druff said.

“What is it?”

“The chain isn’t on?”

“Mike hasn’t come back.”

“Please,” Druff pleaded, “put the chain on.”

“He isn’t home.”

“MacGuffin’s outside.”

“Does he have a key?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, there you are then.”

“Yes, but you don’t know my MacGuffin. He’s pretty slippery.”

“Good night,” Rose Helen told her sleeping husband.

“Sure,” he said, “run off just when I need you.”

“What do you need me for? I gave you your dinner.”

“I need you because.”

“I’m going up. Good night.”

“God damn it, Rose Helen, I’m not crazy. You think I talk to myself? I don’t talk to myself. I don’t talk to myself when I’m dreaming. I’m not sure I could do this if no one was there.”

“Good night,” she said, and Druff, in his sleep, could hear her going upstairs.

He was quiet. He felt as if the cat had his tongue. Well, he dreamed to himself, that’s that. That’s that, then. A politician to the last. He needed his audience, he supposed. With Rose Helen gone, there was no one to hear him. Now he’d never be able to work it out, all the linkages. All that complicated family tree of corruption and caper, the linchpin hidden in its leaves. Because I’m not crazy, he dreamed, thought, subconscioused — whatever. Because I’m not crazy. On the contrary, I’m a very decorumed, decorous guy. I have my flaws, I’d be the first to admit it. Oh, sure, he sleep-mulled, I’m no more perfect than the next fallen fellow. Well those surgeries. Well those collapsed lungs. Well that zippery leg where they took out my vein. Well that impotence. Well my itty-bitty paranoia, well my dreamspeak. But I have my principles. No talking aloud if no one’s in the forest to hear me. Mum’s the word, but you won’t catch me saying it!