The MacGuffin (13 page)

Rose Helen was waiting for him on the ramp which, in lieu of steps, led up to the porch. Druff had heard explanations about the ramp. Mrs. Reese had had it built after the war for paraplegics and quadriplegics, all the veterans in wheelchairs she hoped to attract to her rooming house. Word in the house was that she was the first, at least the first landlady, to understand the implications of the G.I. Bill. The war hadn’t ended yet, only in Germany, when she’d made her plans, when she realized that if returning veterans were to be paid a handsome allowance to go to school, then it was only reasonable to suppose that disabled veterans would be paid an even more handsome allowance—the greater the handicap the greater the allowance. It wasn’t the extra rent she’d be able to charge for their rooms that had held the appeal for her, it was the handicap itself, the tamed, chair-bound presence of the soldiers, the wild oats they’d probably be too depressed to sow even if they still could. They said she closed the house after the ’45 graduation to have the ramp put in. They said she’d already hired an architect to design modifications to the house itself, interior ramps, special bathrooms, special tubs, workmen to install them. It was the atom bomb. She hadn’t counted on the atom bomb, they said. The war was over before anyone expected. There just wouldn’t be enough casualties to justify the costs. This was what Druff heard. He didn’t believe a word of it, but it was what he was thinking of when he saw Rose Helen on the ramp, leaning invisible inches into the incline, her height and weight evenly distributed.

Druff looked at each of his escorts and opened the door. It hadn’t even closed behind him before Rose Helen began to speak.

“What’s different about me? Can you say, can you tell? No, don’t look at my hair, it isn’t my hair. Why do boys always look at your hair when a girl asks that question?” She was addressing the two witnesses at his back behind the screen door. “Come on,” she said, “I’ll give you a hint. It’s something you wear but it isn’t clothes.” He examined her scrupulously. “Oh, Robert,” she said, “you’re so
dense!”

“It’s your pin. You’re not wearing your sorority pin,” the waiter said.

“Who’s that, Edward? Good for you, Edward. You’re absolutely right.” She suddenly sounded to him like the schoolteacher she would one day be. “Well, I’ve done it,” she said.

“They make you turn those things back in if you resign?”

“Please,” Druff said, “we’re having a private conversation.”

“Sorry,” the waiter said, injured, “sometimes it’s hard to know what’s private and what isn’t.” Druff remembered he’d once tried to describe to Edward the taste of her breasts, the smell of her damp pants on his fingers, the odd feel of a particular softness here, the compensatory muscularity somewhere else from the exercises she continued to perform for her hip, her spine, stretching and bending herself, he supposed, like one doing farm work, forking hay, maybe.

“So,” she said, “I’ve voluntarily deconsecrated myself. I’ve left the Chi Phi’s. I’m an Independent now, too.”

Now they were sunk, he thought. She didn’t sound sunk, but now they were sunk. He wouldn’t taste those breasts again until they were married. (At least it wasn’t the furniture, he told himself. I’m not
that
bad, at least. At least most of my disappointment has to do with the fear of not being alone with her.)

She started to come the rest of the way up the ramp but Druff went to meet her. He began to walk with her toward the Student Union. “Here,” she said, when they had gone about half a block, “you wear this.” She took her sorority pin from her purse and pinned it to his shirt.

“So,” Druff said, “they don’t make you give them back.”

“Nope, that one’s bought and paid for. It’s free and clear. I burned the mortgage on that pin when I quit the Chi Phi’s.”

“Usually,” Druff said, “when pins are exchanged it means you’re going steady.”

“It means you’re engaged to be married,” she said. “It means you have children together. It means forsaking all others. It means till death us do part.”

“I don’t have any pin,” he said.

“Hey,” she said, “you’re this quote Independent unquote. You’ve probably your own weird customs. You’ll teach them to me.”

He gave her the waiter, he gave her Edward (as he had given parts of Rose Helen to the waiter). They still didn’t know any other couples, they still didn’t double-date, but they had a sidekick now, a squire, a retainer, a factotum, this best-man-in-waiting, this in-the-wings witness, their sworn fifth wheel and interested second party, someone to backstage for them and legitimate their love, make it interesting enough, dramatic enough, their own personal second-banana man, Edward R. Markey, with his name like a clerk of the court or some high-up in the Motor Vehicles Bureau, the man who signs the driver’s licenses, or the State Treasurer, say. (Druff enjoyed believing that the waiter was a little in love with her himself, or even with Druff in some safe, charming, companionable way which didn’t threaten anyone, even the faithful retainer. He thought of him, early on, as he would have thought of a devoted theatrical manager, some mysteriously womanless, childless, unfamilied—unsibling’d and, for all he knew, motherless, fatherless, perhaps even cousinless—bachelorly man whose only interest was that they—the two principals—not ever suffer.)

She’d taken a room off campus, in town, in enemy territory, behind the lines, near the railroad station, not far from that diner where they’d gone the time Rose Helen had sobbed to him, confessing her suspicion that she’d made Chi Phi Kappa because of what she called her “sanitary deformity,” something between a pledge and a housemother, who did for them, a kind of dobbin, a sort of Edward herself, the patron saint of their vocabulary lists, of their mending and hairdos, Cinderella without the fairy godmother, a fairy godmother herself, theirs, or at least their fairy good sport.

She’d taken a room off campus.

Strictly speaking, it was an illegal address; unauthorized, non-university housing, not the apartment that undergraduate girls weren’t permitted to lease, and not even the boardinghouse—no meals were served—about which she entertained so many fancy, romantic notions, but a furnished room in what wasn’t even a rooming house for an exclusively female clientele. The house where Rose Helen stayed had as many men living in it as women—railroad employees, conductors and engine drivers, switchmen and gandy dancers. The women in the house were mostly students at a local college for beauticians; some were wives from the nearby air base whose enlisted-men husbands, still receiving their training, were permitted to leave the base only on weekends. Two or three Druff recognized from the Student Union Building, cashiers, food handlers.

“What do you think?” Rose Helen asked him.

“How did you get this place? You’re not allowed to live here. They could withhold your credits.”

“I never gave the university a change of address.”

“Suppose they have to get in touch with you?”

“Why would they have to get in touch with me? I lived at Chi Phi Kappa almost two years, they never had to get in touch with me.”

“What about mail?”

“Edward’s there for lunch, he can bring it to me.”

“It’s beautiful,” Druff said. “It’s really nice.”

It really was. His standard was the rooms at Mrs. Reese’s, his own, Edward’s, the three or four others he’d visited since coming to the university. His standard was the small study rooms with their typing tables and desk lamps, their wooden chairs and narrow cots.

There was a double bed with a pale, flowered spread across it, a small sofa, a ladder-back rocker, a stripped dresser with a pitcher and washstand on it. There was a closet. There was a painting, a pleasant landscape, not a reproduction but an actual oil. There were lamps, plants, hooked rugs, lace curtains on Rose Helen’s two big southern-exposed windows.

He heard someone coming up the stairs.

“Am I supposed to be in here?”

“It’s Edward,” Edward called, “with the rest of your things.”

“That was a close one,” Druff said to Rose Helen.

“Why a close one?”

“Well,” he said again, “am I supposed to be in here?”

“The landlady never said anything about visitors,” Rose Helen told him. “All she ever said was that the railroad workers come in at all hours, that they sleep when they can. All she said was that I have to be considerate of my neighbors, to play my radio low even during the day.”

Her room was beautiful, it really was. Still, he felt he was a thousand miles from a grand piano, big stately furniture, Oriental rugs, civilization. He felt like an outlaw.

The stairs and hallways, the rooms and shared baths, even Rose Helen’s landlady’s—Mrs. Green’s—apartment (where the television was which they were invited to watch with her: it was an early color set, an experimental model Mrs. Green’s boyfriend, an electrical engineer, possibly a married man, had given to her; only a handful of color transmissions a year were sent out at that time, and Druff remembered seeing the first lecture ever televised in color, the first-ever color telecast of a polo match, the announcers reporting all this solemnly, the commissioner reminded—now, not then—of those other almanac occasions to which he’d given credence, the Groundhog Days and leap years, Sadie Hawkinses and the various solstices, of all bloodless, neutered history) always smelled of pork chops, frying meat. (Mrs. Green permitted tenants to store food in her kitchen. There was a hot plate in Rose Helen’s room but she used it only to boil the tan beef and pale, mustard- colored chicken bouillon cubes and black coffee she drank, and to heat up the food, the almost untouched leftovers Edward stole from the Chi Phi Kappa house and gave Druff to bring to her, or brought her himself, and on which she lived.)

It was like being married. It was and it wasn’t. They studied there. They necked there, did all their heavy petting there. Because despite the sofa (to say nothing of the double bed), they still played for the same relatively low table stakes that they had played for in the study rooms and in the big, crowded, luxurious central passion pit at the sorority house on those Friday and Saturday nights deconsecration ante. He even observed the same curfew. Maybe it was only Edward (or Rose Helen or even himself) who was landlady or housemother now. Maybe it wasn’t any of them, maybe they didn’t need a housemother, maybe they didn’t need a landlady. Maybe it was merely the Zeitgeist which protected (if that was the word) them, or maybe they were really these collective, dedicated virgins (though technically he wasn’t a virgin, he’d been to the whores; so had the waiter), or maybe it didn’t finally matter where they conducted their white, unconsummated courtship. And maybe, despite what they’d told each other, it
was
a game, or a sort of a game, but something loftier, higher, more important. Maybe though they weren’t there yet, they were still honestly striving to become the respective Casanova and Venus of foreplay, sexual-stimulation savants. Maybe foreplay was their event. Because these were the days of magnificent foreplay, the student prince, his education-major consort. He could remember times when he’d gone around packing blue balls like kidney stones. Other times Rose Helen, who often sensed his pain before it reached actual critical mass, would bring him off.

She brought him off, he brought her off. But always in the dark—because there was a daytime curfew too; Rose Helen wouldn’t let him touch her while it was still daylight, and sometimes he had to sit like an Orthodox waiting for the last light to quit the two big windows with their southern exposure—and always between the mutual, prophylactic cloth of each other’s clothing—beneath coats, towels, laundry, things grabbed out of the closet, on the always-made double bed.

They grew closer. Not just he and Rose Helen but he and Rose Helen and Edward as well. Who broke stolen bread with them, increasingly shared in their diminished, doggy-bag suppers, and whom, and not as founder of the feast (which even Rose Helen, who’d been on the sorority’s housekeeping committee the year she pledged and so had actually had a part in hiring him, had interviewed him, had been there when he’d sworn his male employee’s Chi Phi Kappa solemn oath that not only was he not to fraternize with the girls he would be serving twice a day six times a week but was not to speak of to other men or discuss with them what they discussed, how they comported themselves in their housecoats and lounging pajamas, what they looked like without makeup, or with their hair up in curlers, the slumber-party coze they affected when no men were around, never acknowledged him to be, preferring to think of herself as its founder, who still held that grudge against her sisters for singling her out—or no, not her so much as just that part of her which constituted the “sanitary deformity”—not to haze, and whose dues and room-and-board at the time of her resignation had been paid up in advance for the rest of the school year anyway), they regarded as their invited guest, despite the fact that he was the one who always served them whatever happened to be reheating itself inside whichever pot or pan he had placed there for them on the hot plate.

And not just eating warmed-over supper, but some shared sense, certainly for Rose Helen and Druff, and quite possibly for the waiter, too, of a picnic occasion, of roughing it, or, if they were sitting by the window near the plants, a vague notion of actually being outside, dividing foraged food.

“So,” Rose Helen would occasionally remark after Edward had cleared away their dishes, “how’s
your
life?” This was the signal for him to start his strange commentary, as if it were not enough that he had just brought them their supper and prepared and even served it, but must now sing for it, too.

“I don’t know how any of them expects to make it in the real world,” he might begin. (And now it was
exactly
as if they were outdoors, in dark woods, beneath the stars, or like tramps in hobo camps alongside railroad tracks, Edward’s voice lulling, almost musical, his gossip like some postprandial accompaniment to their digestion.) “Do you know what Anita Carlin had the nerve to ask me to do for her tonight? Her soup was too hot. Instead of waiting for it to cool, she told me to take it back to the kitchen and bring it to her again when it was safe enough for her to eat without scalding herself. Just who does she think she is, Goldilocks? When I asked how I was supposed to know when it was the right temperature, you know what she said? ‘Edward, do I have to do all your thinking for you? Just pour off some in a cup and sip it.’ Now how will someone with an attitude like that ever raise children? Or Jean Allmann? Last night she complained the milk was sour. It came from the same pitcher everyone else’s came from at her table. No one else thought it was sour, but she made me go back and open up a bottle just for her. ‘Where’s the ketchup, where’s the salt?’ ” he grumbled. “ ‘Is there cream on the table?’ When it’s right there in front of them. ‘Edward, my napkin’s disappeared. Would you be a darling and get me another one?’ ‘Edward, there are too many bones in my fish. See can you find a piece that doesn’t have so many bones in it.’ I mean it, the average Chi Phi expects there’s always going to be someone around to wait on her hand and foot, cut her meat up for her, blow on her soup, recommend her dessert. ‘Which is better tonight, Edward, the German Black Forest or the chocolate mousse?’ Then light her cigarettes as if we were waiters in some fancy four-star restaurant instead of just students trying to get an education like everybody else. How
will
they? I mean, really, how
will
they? Make it I mean, in life, in the world?”