The MacGuffin (34 page)

“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.

“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.

That’s why the lady is a tramp, signaled the MacGuffin.

“Wait,” Margaret Glorio said, but he was already at the door. “Listen,” she called after him in the hallway, but he had already pressed the button for the elevator to come for him. “Where are you going?” she asked, but he had already stepped inside the little box and was sinking toward the street.

Where it came to him. Not bothering even to check out the building’s guardian in the lobby who was checking
him
out, rushing past him, inspired by his destination, the day’s one more additional errand which would keep him going, keep him from returning home just yet where he knew he would probably have to fight for his life, hold him on the route along the now quite pointless odyssey on which he was engaged (who could have stepped into a movie theater—the coward’s way out—or saloon, or even gone bowling for that matter, or dined in a restaurant, or checked into a hotel—all, all cowards’ ways out). Where, as if it were a scene from the life of a drowner, he was splashed by a memory, not even a memory, Marvin Macklin’s name like a clue in a scavenger hunt. The fellow who died, whose death “after a long illness” had been reported to him yesterday by Dick, his chauffeur and spy, during their hunt for potholes in the park. He turned around and went back into the lobby from which he’d just emerged, up to the desk behind which the doorman (for whom he’d have to supply a new job title since he was never anywhere near a door and who seemed to conduct all the building’s traffic from his post in the lobby, almost, it occurred, like someone in a war room) sat waiting for him, grinning.