The MacGuffin (40 page)

“A preteen.
Maybe
a preteen.”

“Mikey, you were working out at the gym. You could have bench- pressed the dining room.”

“I was nervous.”

“I know you were nervous. You were scared I was going to die. You were terrified you wouldn’t be ready.”

“I had some stuff to work out.”

“Well, do you remember the time we got this annual report from a company I had some stock in and we went over it together?”

“Vaguely. I think I remember.”

“It was this
Fortune
500 company, some utility, I think. I forget which one. They listed their assets down one column, their liabilities down another.”

“I
think
I remember.”

“The profits they made each quarter from the natural gas they sold to their residential customers? What they took in from their industrial customers? How the two were charged at different rates because their industrial clientele consumed the stuff in much greater quantities?”

“Yes?”

“The profits from fields they owned but had leased to other gas companies?”

“Oh yes,” Mikey said.

“Then there were the debits. Well,” Druff said, “you can imagine. Their terrific operating expenses.”

“Sure.”

“A big fire. Equipment that had to be replaced. Disappointing yields from new wells.”

“I remember.”

“Then there were the acts of God.”

“I don’t recall the acts of God, Dad.”

“The acts of God, the acts of God. You remember.”

“No I don’t. I don’t think so.”

“The exceptionally mild winter they had that year. The unusually cool summer.”

“Oh,” Mikey said. “Sure.”

“Sure,” Druff said, “what finally accounted for their slight net loss.”

“I remember.”

“This was when you were still working stuff out.”

“Yes.”

“So I sat down with you and drafted my
own
annual report. I listed
my
assets and liabilities. I put down our savings and investments. My insurance. What my pension could be expected to bring in. The couple hundred bucks Social Security gives to help bury you. I listed the probable resale value of our house. I even put down the approximate worth of our possessions. The furniture, our car, the TVs and appliances, the appraised valuation on your mother’s jewelry, everything I could think of. What I took in over and above my salary that didn’t get saved or invested but was lying around the house in cash. (This part wasn’t in the annual report. This part was off the record. I just mentioned it to you on the qt.) Then I put down my debits.”

“What were those, Dad?”

“The twelve hundred or so dollars we owed on our charge cards. Whatever it was I’d pledged that year but hadn’t yet paid to a couple of charities. Some bills, our monthly expenses. I don’t know, maybe four thousand, forty-five hundred bucks tops.”

“That wasn’t too bad.”

“Well,” Druff said, “the mild winter and cool summer worked in our favor.”

“That’s right.”

“But of course those weren’t my only debits.”

“No? What were the rest, Dad?”

“My heart attack, my bad circulation. Whatever it was going to cost you guys to bury me.”

“Oh Dad,” his son said.

“No no,” Druff said. “You don’t remember. I showed you. We went over it very carefully. It was actually a net gain overall. You just don’t remember. A slight net gain, but a net gain’s a net gain. I was helping you to work out your stuff. I showed you that even though I was only one small, sick human being, in certain respects I was better off than a great big
Fortune
500 company, and that if you and your mom were careful you could be in the black for another fifteen years.”

Though Druff waited him out, Mikey didn’t say anything for a long while. Then Druff broke their silence. “It’s all right,” he told his son. “You can ask me.”

“That’s okay.”

“No,” Druff said, “go ahead. Ask me.”

“That’s okay.”

“I’ll tell you anyway,” said the City Commissioner of Streets. “If I dropped dead tonight, you’d still be in the black. But, really, it depends.”

“What does it depend on, Dad?”

“Whether or not you actually ran over that girl.”

“Su’ad was my
girlfriend,
Dad. Why would I run over my girlfriend?”

“Su’ad,” Druff said.

“I’m no dummy, Dad. Who else could you be talking about? How many accident-prone Shiite Muslims do I know?”

“Did Dick do it, did Doug?”

“Maybe. I’m not sure, Dad.”

“You were a witness?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. I was a
sort
of a witness.”

“What sort?”

“Gee, is this fair? I mean, I loved her, Daddy. What do you want from me? I planned to go back to Lebanon with her even if it meant they would probably have taken me hostage one of these days. So how do you think it made me feel when they ran her down?”

“Not over?”

“What?”

“Down, not over?”

“It was pretty confusing. All right,” his son said, “I’ll tell you what I
think
happened.”

And then, quite suddenly, Druff began to feel bored. Physically. Bored physically. As if boredom were a symptom like a tickle in your throat, a fever, or a runny nose. Perhaps he’d been exposed to too much MacGuffin. Maybe it was in his bloodstream by now. Gunking up the works. Causing rashes, eruptions, potholing his flesh. Like some disease, say, serious enough in childhood but devastating if you came down with it as an adult. What was it the old schemer had advised? Something-or-other something, or something-something, something-or-other, and that if you had enough of the one you didn’t need very much of the other. The fact was, thought the City Commissioner of Streets, solutions were boring, never as interesting as the trouble they were brought in to put an end to. Motion and sound effects. Like chase scenes. Shoot-outs. Guys scrambling over architecture or sprawled out in fields. Wrestling in water. Or caught, humbled on monuments. Dangled on ropes like clappers on bells.
This
far from vats, the various acid baths and boiled oils. Above great heights, precariously dancing. Fighting against time—the two-minute warning of armed nuclear devices, a few last inches of sizzling fuse. Character forgotten, left behind, left out, and only the juices of simple, driving survival left over, remaining, separated out, like whey, reduced, clarified like butter.

But Druff was in it deep now. Mikey would have his say. Bored or not, Druff would have to hear him out. It was, he supposed, almost his official duty as City Commissioner of Streets.

So the kid spoke his piece. In his old dad’s living room had, as it were, his day in court. Druff imagined Mikey rather enjoyed it, glad to get it off his chest finally, and probably feeling grateful that it was his father to whom he was telling the story, as if the story he was telling, no matter the light in which it put him, discharged, at least a little, some filial obligation he may have felt toward the old man, made up for never having brought home good enough grades, say, or given him grandkids.

It was full of detail.

He admitted that on the night Su’ad was run down he had been with her. They had attended the lecture together, an overview of the Arab- Israeli question delivered by an Arab congressman from the state of Delaware with whose conciliatory views Su’ad was in strong disagreement. Afterward, during the Q and A, Su’ad had quarreled with him. How, she asked, could he betray his own people? How, she wondered, could he even bring himself to lick up under the Israelis by referring to them at least three times in his talk as “our Israeli cousins”? The gentleman from Delaware said he felt both sides must rededicate themselves to finding a reasonable solution—he had suggested one, but Mikey had forgotten the details—to what, given the region’s long, complicated history and the antagonists’ apparently intractable positions, were problems that were only apparently insoluble.

“Solutions to apparently insoluble problems?” Su’ad had said. “But, sir,” she’d said, “I believe in the fell-swoop theory of history.”

“The fell-swoop theory of history?”

“Yes,” Su’ad had said, “when problems are apparently insoluble,
final
solutions must apparently be found.”

There were Jews in the audience. They made angry hoots and catcalls. Two or three started to come forward.

And Mikey, for love, rising in her defense, speaking out, backing her up, for love having his say in public, even if it was only “Stand back. Don’t touch her!” In the dark, Druff imagined, his eyes shut, mediating between Su’ad and the two or three furious Jews with his big body.

It was only afterward, he told his father, as they walked together to the parking lot to pick up the car in which he intended to drive her back to her dorm, that he thought to remind her, well out of hearing of the last stragglers leaving the auditorium, that his own father was a politician, a man who’d devoted his life to serving the public, and that it was the duty of such people to find solutions to problems that seemed insoluble and that, really, she had gone just a little too far, really, didn’t she think?

“Your father,” Su’ad had said, “doesn’t serve the public, he serves the infrastructure. He sends men to fix the streets. In winter he dispatches trucks to salt them, just as if they were soups or meats or vegetables.”

“Me?” Druff said. “You stood up for me? I’m touched.”

“Thanks, Dad, but that wasn’t really exactly the way. She was in a bad mood. PMS. You don’t normally think of women in
chadors
as even having periods, but, I don’t know, something was eating at her. If I said ‘black’ she’d say ‘white,’ if I said ‘up’ she’d say ’down.’ If I said ‘rugs’ she said… Well, you know what I mean.”

“Rugs?”

“Sir?”

“You said ‘rugs.’ What did she say?”

“It’s an example,” his son said uncomfortably. “I don’t think I ever actually said ‘rugs.’ ”

“Did Su’ad smuggle rugs, Mikey?” Druff asked, closing in, getting on, he supposed, toward the bottom of things, though still not excited (despite the fact that several times now he’d interrupted his son’s relation of the account of the proceedings on the night of—never mind, he’d actually forgotten—to stop them—Mikey, Su’ad—somewhere between the auditorium—those last, probably Jewish, stragglers—and the parking lot where he would admit her into the car she couldn’t possibly be both riding in and run down by at the same time), really not even off boredom’s dime, puzzles, as he’d just so recently noted, being always more interesting than their solutions, though how he, the most nouveau of gumshoes, could possibly know this he did not possibly know.

“Su’ad? Su’ad was a rug
merchant,
Daddy.”

“Ahh,” Druff said, “a rug
merchant.
She had a
license
to sell rugs?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know if she had a license.”

“You never saw it.”

“I never asked about any license.”

“But Mikey,” Druff said, “there are all sorts of city ordinances. Restaurants have to be licensed to dispense food and drink. People are licensed to drive taxis, to sell newspapers from kiosks. Elevators are licensed. Souvenir vendors pay license fees before they’re permitted to hawk their wares outside stadiums—jerseys with the team logo emblazoned on the front, pennants for the home team, pennants for the visitors. My God, son, the man who sells you your hot dog from his little cart has to have a license. His ketchup is licensed, his mustard and napkins and piccalilli. These were rugs from the Middle East, Iran, from all those problematic, difficult trouble spots the gentleman from Delaware was telling you about that night. Why would the licensing requirement on a high-ticket item like a Persian carpet from a region of hot, intractable positions and insoluble problems be waived when a man selling pencils out of his cap or an organ grinder with a monkey dressed up like a bellboy has to go through City Hall before he’s allowed to hit the streets? Can you think of a reason?”

“No.”

“I mean, think about it, if you were in Su’ad’s position I should think you’d go around
absolutely flaunting
your license, waving it in front of you like someone surrendering on a battlefield with a white handkerchief.”

“I guess.”

“Well, of course,” said Druff. “So if you never asked to see it, and she never offered to show it to you, don’t you suppose it’s stretching things to say she was a rug
merchant?”

“I guess.”

“Sure.”

“Su’ad smuggled rugs,” Mike said flatly, his face pale, his spirit without heft. His eyes were closed now. Squeezed tight. He seemed diminished in size to Druff, his very bulk deflated. Druff was as still as his son. He waited him out. When Mikey finally opened his eyes to look at his father, Druff simply stared at him. He offered no reassurances, and something new seemed gradually to creep across his son’s face like a shadow—bafflement, curiosity.

Because Druff was this hope pumper. It was his nature. He pumped hope for Mikey, for Rose Helen, even, as a politician, for his constituents, telling them their lives could be better, simpler, fixed like tickets, bargained for and traded up. It was not only his nature, it was his job. Maybe it had been his job even before it had become his nature. I have to be a hope pumper, Druff thought, it’s what I do. Nevertheless, the hope pumper wasn’t pumping no hope now. The well was dry. And he was waiting.

Then Mikey resumed explaining himself. Though he managed to follow him, Druff, distracted, was barely able to take it all in. He had to concentrate. Other things were on his mind, too.

“I don’t know what she wanted from me. When we got to the parking lot she was still bitching. It was that lecturer she was angry at, not me, the audience that hissed her and booed her when she made that remark. A few of them were trailing us, some of them were actually lined up along the path waiting for her as we went by. Their quarrel was with Su’ad, not with me. They made fun of the way she dressed. They passed remarks. I don’t think she even heard them, that she paid any attention. She was too busy complaining to me, arguing with me. As if
I’d
said those things. You’ve heard her. You know how she gets. She’s pretty hipped on this Palestine thing. They followed us to the parking lot. They milled around. I’m saying, ‘Look Su’ad, just get in the car. This isn’t any time to be standing out here.’ And she’s still lecturing me. About U.S. policy, the Israel lobby… Bitching at me as if I were responsible for what was happening over there. Finally I just had to shove her into the car. I mean, they were
steamed.”