The MacGuffin (11 page)

“Don’t I what?”

“That was it. That’s what they were saving. That’s what they were waiting for all along.”

“What are you talking about, Rose? What were they waiting for, what were they saving?”

“That was my hazing.”

“No,” he said, “you’ve got it wrong, Rose. They’re your sisters, they’re on our side. Really. All the happiness we could wish for ourselves, remember?” (Druff taking her in his arms—maybe he
was
political, maybe he
was
—and working his own agenda, wondering, marveling: Don’t they know? Don’t girls know it’s all a line? All of it? Don’t they see how it is with us? Don’t they know what we want to do to them, what we want them to do to us? Are they fools, or what?)

And astonished to be stroking her breasts beneath her sweater, to slip his hand up beneath her skirt, to negotiate the rind of stiff corset and feel the damp silk of her panties.

They were seated on the edge of the cot now. He tried to draw her down, to get her to lie beside him, but she resisted. She struggled to a sitting position and started to rise. “All right,” he said, “all right,” and she sat back down again. (Of
course
political. Political certainly. Bargaining actual territory, dividing physical spoils, making these Yalta arrangements, so that it was somehow agreed without one word passing between them that he could do this but not that, that but not this. Though he was not, for example, permitted to blow in her ear, he was allowed to feel her nipples. Though she would never hold his erection in her hand, she might touch it here and there through his trousers.)

Druff astonished, astounded, amazed now by her bizarre terms, terms, he realized, roughly equivalent to the restrictions imposed by the Hayes Office in regard to sexual conduct in films. (One foot had to be on the floor at all times. They could kiss with their mouths open, but only one of their tongues could be moving and, if it was his, he could touch her breasts but was not permitted to go under her dress.) It was to become the source of what weren’t so much arguments as vaguely legalistic, quickly abandoned disagreements, like appealed line-calls in tennis, say, or a batter’s brief, abrupt flash of temperament about an umpire’s questionable called strike. (“I don’t understand,” he might tell her, “I let you nibble
my
ear.” “You
like
it when I nibble your ear.” “Of course I do, the ear’s a very sensitive area. I’m surprised you don’t like it too.” She said she didn’t object to the feeling, it was the wetness she couldn’t stand.)

And touching her hip, of course, was out of the question.

As out of the question as the flesh and hair beneath that chartered, licensed, two- or three-inch strip of damp silk or cotton underwear, the tolerated,
nihil obstat
elastic piping that edged her drawers and which he worried with his finger like a lock of hair.

So maybe she was political too. A born legislator, some negotiator of the physical being. Because she was right, it
was
almost ten-thirty, almost time for him to leave, gratefully disappear with the other males—she was right about that too; his presence in that house of females had altered him; he was “male” now, his sexuality some new state of chemical excitation, simmering, charged, changed, like the cooked properties of solids melting to vapors—and she’d somehow managed to arrange all this in the last quarter hour of that first night.

(But why was he grateful? He was grateful for the same reasons he’d been relieved, the shit-scared avoider, to learn that the clear-skinned beauties of the Sadie Hawkins Day dance had been the wrong clear- skinned beauties. He was grateful because he’d been this, well, Mikey. It’s not true, Druff thought, that we ultimately turn into our own parents; we’re our own children long before they’re ever born. He was wrapped in a cocoon of stupidity, innocence, inexperience. Not virtue, but its simulacrum, what virtue did while it bided its time, until it sloughed fear and all fear’s hiding places in the cosmetic folds of guilt.
He was grateful because he was a virgin and he didn’t have to fuck her and get it all wrong was why!)

Now at least they had a place to go.

Though they still didn’t know that many couples, didn’t double-date, were there—at least, as her legacy, Druff was—on sufferance, like a guest of a member of a country club, say. Now they didn’t have to meet outside movie houses. These days he could pick her up at the sorority. (Gradually they stopped sitting in on each other’s classes, stopped going to coffeehouses; gradually they even stopped going to movies.) And if, collectively, they were novelties to the girls of Chi Phi Kappa, the girls of Chi Phi Kappa were even greater novelties to Druff. Rose Helen was a novelty to Druff. Indeed,
Druff
was a novelty to Druff. (It was strange—that simmering maleness, his ballsy, newfound exhibitionist’s swagger, his vain regard, his simmering chemical privilege and liberties—but these days he always went about feeling as if he had on brand-new clothes.)

Even though he knew no more people now than he did before, even though, except for Rose Helen, he had no friends there, only, here and there, a few people he could nod to—the waiter from Druff’s boardinghouse, three or four of the pledges—Druff had become a sort of fixture around the place. The fact was they rarely left the sorority house. On weekdays he came there to study with Rose Helen and, if one was unoccupied, they would go into a tiny study room. (Since the night of the serenade when she had gone to the door and closed it herself and then negotiated with him the unspoken rules of their relationship, the study was never closed when they were in it.) At ten-thirty, however, he was the first male out of the house. Even on weekends, when the curfew was extended until midnight, he was always the first to leave.

It was as if he understood their sufferance (he did), their combined weight on the thin social ice that supported them. And if he was political, he thought, it was a strange way to practice his politics, lying low, muting, as it were, his own horn, making himself scarce on the very dot of the curfew hour like a frightened Cinderella. Not like him, not like his position, or his presence during what he had almost come to think of as their office hours, the sorority’s, his own—he was there more often than any of the fraternity men who dated these girls, longer than the waiters who set their tables, served their dinners, washed their dishes—a position and presence which had become obsessive.

He could not keep his hands off her, their almost surgical, circumscripted petting as complicated as the careful, delicately drawn lines of a contended geography, treatied borders; obsessed (not just Druff, Rose Helen too) with the endless diversity, variations, interpretations and all the fine distinctions available to them within compliance. So that he became,
they
became, respective Casanovas, very Venuses, geniuses of foreplay.

He was never there during scheduled house meetings, secret rites, restricted practices. He was fastidious, meticulous with their curfews, and lived, like many fabulous criminals, by the letter of the law, as if he sought to keep his nose clean by always paying his taxes, going about like one shoving change into parking meters, or each day dropping by the library to show the librarian the due date on a still-not-overdue book. He kept, that is, his accounts with all of them, Rose Helen, the girls of Chi Phi Kappa, the frat boys who visited them, the housemother, Mrs. Post.

Yet it was no game he was playing, neither with Rose Helen nor with her sisters. He was not seeking to test the limits of their patience. He
knew
the limits of their patience. He didn’t observe their curfews out of any of the old olly-olly-oxen-free impulses of his childhood, but because he was quite terrified of them really, afraid of having his privileges stripped from him.

Because those privileges were large, new, rare, immense. It wasn’t just what happened between the two of them in the study (and much, despite the unimpeded view they afforded anyone who happened to be passing that open door of their strange love gymnastics, the compulsory Olympic figures they cut,
did
happen), but the incredible feeling he had at those times. It was exactly what he’d said when he’d first gone in there with her, that they were at last
alone,
his sense of their privacy somehow fed by the curfew he was forced to observe, by his knowledge that the door was open, that their exciting, dangerous gyrations were, well, almost—living on the edge, pushing the envelope, you can just imagine how he felt—adulterous, anyway risky, anyway more intimate than even what her cards looked like on the table—Druff permitted all.

The feeling, if anything, amplified on weekends when they never even got close to one of those studies. (It was understood that on weekends these rooms were reserved for upperclassmen and their dates.) Then they went out into the big music- drawing- living room- cum-library, whatever the architectural equivalent was for that commodious, luxurious center—the house’s real passion pit, he supposed. And there, in that crowded space—there might be upwards of a hundred people in it, girls returned with their dates from campus beer gardens, from dances, from parties, flicks, pep rallies, concerts, basketball games, celebrations—a strange thing happened. He melded in with them, felt that he had somehow become invisible, though the others were plainly visible to
him,
what they did—he heard sweaters sliding up over cotton blouses, glimpsed underpants, cleavage, flesh, erections—he brandished his own, less self-conscious, finally, than he might have been in a communal shower, a public bath—all about him could hear girls groaning, boys coming. (“Our comings and groanings,” he joked to Rose Helen.) Not a voyeur. In the scene. Of it. Could feel, hear, see, taste the mass dishevelment, some sense of the undone and awry, of smeared lipstick and smudged face powder, of colognes gone off and all the fired chemistry of naked pheromones. A passion pit indeed, a steamy, cumulative sense of the stuff growing, of love cells dividing, multiplying, building in the room like weather, rain cloud, say, electric storm, thunderclap, passionate waves sweeping over them, a kind of heavy sexual traffic, his hip at their haunches on the long, crowded window seats, so that what he felt was not just his own passion but his passion added to the passion of everyone else, his passion compounding, earning interest on the passion of both sexes. (As his own, he felt, increased theirs, all their activity and somber, solemn concentration conjoined, benefited, a public privacy, like the serenade Rose Helen thought was hazing but Druff understood as encouragement, warrant.) A great joy in this, like the joy in a marvelous parade. (Maybe he
was
political.
Sure
he was political! Oh
boy,
was he political! Necking with Rose Helen at Rose Helen’s sorority no orgy but a democratic manifestation, great island chains, archipelagoes of feeling, some republic of sexuality. Druff thinking, no wonder I was so horny when Mikey was screwing Su’ad that time, it was the proximity again, only my fatherly good Americanism. Thinking, no wonder
he
was, because if we’re our own children before they’re ever born, maybe they’re as childish as their fathers before the fathers have had a chance to grow up. And feeling this anachronistic unity with his son.)

So you can just imagine how he felt, you can just imagine.

His precious invisibility different in kind from the invisibility he so carefully cultivated at the curfew hour, or the invisibility they sought out on those lines outside the picture show, or in the coffeehouses, or could have used in that diner in town, the invisibility not only exciting but comforting—a
shared
invisibility. And for the first time since he met her unconscious of resentment, all resentment—his, theirs—dissolved or maybe only absorbed in the mutual, protective clouds of sperm that were a sort of collective atmosphere in the fancy room.

He was in his element. He
loved
Friday and Saturday nights, he
loved e pluribus unum,
and would willingly have traded four weeknights alone with Rose Helen in a study room for just one additional half hour of extended curfew on the cushioned window seats, long leather sofas, upholstered wing chairs, or stretched out with her in the sexual traffic on the fine Oriental rug in the big ground-floor room.

Which is just where Mrs. Post, the housemother, found them on the one night out of the eighty or so since Druff had been coming to the Chi Phi Kappa house, on the single occasion when he was not the first one out the door. A fixture indeed. And not only a fixture, but someone whose habits were so well known by now it was said that you could set your watch by him. He had simply lost track of the time. Or no, that wasn’t quite true. As a matter of fact it was time he was thinking of at the time, how this was only a Friday, how they still had all Saturday together. (Because he loved her now, had discovered in just the last month, the past few weeks, that there was something there beyond the simple fact of her availability, the damaged-goods advantage he thought he had over her because of her two-year seniority and scarcely legible limp, which, if it was not completely put on, she had at least to take the trouble to memorize; a limp which wasn’t, he’d begun to realize, entirely natural, as a dance step is never entirely natural, but had always at least to be a little studied, like a runner’s stride or swimmer’s kick turn. Because he loved her, because no one could hold his tongue in someone else’s mouth for eighty out of the last hundred nights without developing a certain fondness for the head as a whole, the neck and everything it rested on. Teeth were just not that interesting—palates, gums, inlays, lips. Because he loved her, because he had come to appreciate her savage resentment, enjoy her outcast representations of herself, his own accreditation in the drama—he’d never played an outcaste before, had gotten by on his innate Mikeyness and good-boy behaviors; now they were in it together, Rose Helen, himself, could almost put Greek letters of their own beside their names—appreciate Rose Helen’s marvelous mimicry of the sisters and frat boys, even of the waiter from Druff’s boardinghouse. Because he loved her now, her fastidious dignity and rough, playful ways with her own rules. She had qualities. Also, she let him put his tongue in her head.) Thinking, this is only Friday, there’s still Saturday. Then thinking, Sundays we go our own ways, then it’s Monday and we’ll have all those ten-thirty nights in the study. Isn’t it peculiar, he thought, we do so much more to each other in the study than we ever try to do out here (where the rules were house rules, liberal enough, astonishing really, but ultimately table stakes), but to tell the truth (and he knew what was probably going on right now on the cots in those studies) he preferred it out here, though—they hadn’t talked about it, it was just, knowing her qualities, something he felt—he didn’t think Rose Helen did. Thinking all this (because you can’t do two things at once, you really can’t, not if you were to give each the attention it deserved), and meanwhile letting up on the very things he so loved about these Friday nights—the collective concentration, that mutual chemistry of fired nerves and cumulative, conjoined hip-to- haunch loving, at the same time that, though he didn’t realize this, he failed to hold up his end of the bargain—one hand on R.H.’s breast and the other starting to lift her dress while, absently, he nibbled her ear (not even aware of her squirming until later) in direct violation, though he was woolgathering, lollygagging, oblivious of all her Geneva conventions, not even excited, in his content mode, thinking, it’s only Friday, there’s still Saturday.