The MacGuffin (33 page)

“Who do you think you’re talking to, ‘say nothing unworthy’?”

“The performance remark? Then when I said that about the ‘hardest thing to get right’? You’re not that innocent. I could see double entendre in your eyes practically. I set myself up.”

“Oh sure,” she said,
“up.
”

“I shouldn’t be here,” he said. But he meant something else. (He’d changed the subject, he meant.) He talked about love now. About what was permissible. Love’s dead-center telemetry, blind Cupid’s locked-in coordinates. Propinquity was nothing, vaunted chemistry, all inexact dead reckoning’s girl-next-dooriness. Likewise Fate, the Kismets. Statistically, Druff figured, the odds of Fate coming through in matters of the heart were up there with hitting the Lotto. So if chemistry counted for nothing, propinquity, fate, what did? However did people end up in bed together?

“It’s demographics,” the City Commissioner of Streets said.

“The girl next door is demographics?”

Druff spoke up from the Japanese pallet and made a speech, wooing her, wooing himself, chasing her vote, his own, laying a little of the old Lincoln-Douglas on them both. “No,” he said, “she doesn’t exist. She’s like Betty Crocker. Not even. She’s a hairstyle, a skirt length, a size six or so shoe. When I say demographics I speak as a politician. Colored or white, combined household income, highest degree earned. Did your mother come from Ireland? Margin for error two points plus or minus. We’re fixed, I mean. Set in cement, chiseled in stone. Everyone who isn’t denied us is denied us. I mean it. It’s the demographics that require a fellow to forsake and forswear. We live by a finding, nature’s negative fiat. My Christ, think of the ways screwing is out of bounds—all God’s and custom’s disparate dasn’ts. The incests of family, the inside-out incests of class. All the sexual holdouts. When A declines B because B don’t measure up. Hey, just fear of trespass or a failure of nerve. An act of adultery’s a miracle when you stop to think. I don’t care how in synch with the times a man thinks he is, you can’t just knock ’em down and pull ’em into an alley. God fixed his canon ’gainst that sort of thing. Let alone the decorums—this one protecting her cellulite, that one a failure of sheer damned inches. Or holdouts of the head or heart when character’s a consideration—all love’s and sexuality’s crossed fingers. I talk through my hat if I tell you it’s natural. It ain’t natural. It’s the most unnatural thing in the world. The shortfall in opportunity, in the alignment of inclinations: ‘SWM, athletic, non-smoker, social drinker, interested in movies, music, dancing, dining, books and laughter, sitting around the house on rainy Sunday afternoons reading the
Times,
seeks relationship with attractive SWF with similar tastes.’ Oh? Yeah? You think? ‘SWM looking to get it on with MBF alligator wrestler. Must be able to make her own shoes and handbags’ is more like it. C may screw D but he’s dreaming of Jeannie with the light brown hair.

“I tell you, Miss Glorio, there are drifts and tendencies and pronenesses. There’s kinks and fixations, bent and bias. There’s yens and itches. And if the lion ever lies down with the lamb, or the goat with the otter, it’s dollars to doughnuts they’re dreaming of Jeannie with the light brown hair, too.

“Because love has to be exonerated, the extenuating circumstances taken into account, the forgives and forgets.”

“I love it when you talk gabardine. It fetches me, it really does. It’s a shame you can’t fuck,” Meg Glorio told him.

“There you go again,” said the commissioner. But she was right. It was. He tilted his head back and looked to where she sat, dressed, looking down on him from her superior position on the brocade sofa. She was smiling. Then, quite suddenly, she reached down and plucked the suit coat from his body. She started to laugh.

“Jesus,” Druff cried, and tried to cover himself with his hands. Then, just as suddenly as she’d pulled his jacket from him, almost inspired, and thinking, no,
not
almost, inspired out-and-out; by his on-again-off- again MacGuffìn sung to, City Commissioner of Streets Druff rolled to his side where he lay on the futon and grabbing the edge of one of Margaret Glorio’s small Oriental scatter rugs drew it across his body.

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?

“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?”