The MacGuffin (16 page)

“Rue Glorio?” Margaret said when everybody had returned to their places. “Margaret Street? The Boulevard de Margaret Glorio is a bit grand, but it has a ring. What do
you
say, Commissioner? They’re your streets.”

“This would be about the blackmail then? A little to-do about the little to-do when I scarfed down what you apparently thought were coca leaves?”

“If I blackmail you,” Margaret said, “it won’t be over the coca leaves so much as the soufflé bones.”

It turned out to be her place after all. They were in bed now, over their brandy snifters, over Meg Glorio’s astonishing—to Druff astonishing, who’d never seen anything like it—clinging, red—silk? satin?—nightgown. (Anyway glowing, flushing anyway, some bright raddle of soft, luxurious, idealized skin, of flesh perfected beyond the condition of flesh, of flesh transcended, raised to some new plane—to Druff new—of tidy, sweet, unappurtenanced harmony—realized, hypostatic lovematter.) Just looking at her now he almost fainted. And the thought that they’d just made love near killed him. She had finished him, he was a goner, some polished-off shell of his former self. She would blackmail him? She wanted streets named after her? He would give her esplanades, parades, entire arrondissements! He’d been a politician more than thirty years. He’d call in his markers, see to it they changed the name of the city.

“Margaret Town,” the commissioner said. “Gloriville. Meg Glorio City.”

And wasn’t entirely kidding. At least a part of him serious, at least in his inclinations, in his good will serious. If not in his baggy boxer shorts. Oh, but they were mismatched (he’d be the first to admit it), he in his big boxers, she in her red silk or satin, flesh-transcended, lovematter nightgown.

And even if the actual lovemaking, though fine, and even several steps up from his usual performances, hadn’t been anywhere near the standard of your normal, average blockbuster, history-making, place- namer fucks, face it, it was plenty good enough and, for Druff, better than good enough, something which at fifty-eight, or even at forty-eight, or at thirty-eight even, he would never have expected to have happen to him again. (Or he might even name a street after that nightgown, he thought.)

“You know what would be okay in my book?” the commissioner said. Ms. Glorio ran a finger around the bottom of her glass and raised its sweet, bronzy dregs to her mouth as one might lick frosting from a pan. “Sleeping over tonight.”

“Oh, but wouldn’t Mrs. Druff worry? And the fuss and bother you’d be putting her to with all those cold, tired policemen.” He had spoken of Rose Helen’s conscientiousness, how she often greeted visitors with mugs of coffee in her hands. “Anyway,” she said, “you’d never get away with it.”

“I would,” he said. “I’m covered.” He was thinking of those race routes he was supposed to be covering with whatsisname and whatsisname. “I’m telling you, Ms. Glorio, I could have danced all night.”

“Well, your driver then. Didn’t you say he always picks you up in the morning?”

“Nuts!” Druff said. “I forgot about my driver. But don’t you have an alarm clock? I could set your alarm clock. Even if I can’t sleep over, then just sleeping
with
you, even if it’s only for an hour, would be okay in my book, too.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s awfully late.”

“Oh, I know,” he said. “It is. And I’m pooped. I am. But all I need is an hour. One hour, then I’m up, dressed, and out of here. I’m City Commissioner of Streets, I know where I can call a cab. I wouldn’t even have to use your telephone. No telltale, embarrassing taxis need ever show up at your door. Dick wouldn’t know a thing.”

To give you an idea how far gone he was. Not even nagging at him. Not even nagging at him all evening, though it had occurred to him. What Dick had told him in the limo—that the driver recognized her, that she was known to her son, known to Mikey, to Su’ad.
None
of it nagging at him or ruffling his feathers. Though he was as conscious of it as of her ash-blond hair, conscious of it as of that elemental red nightgown, the soft silk or satin lovestuff that might have passed for her skin. That’s how far gone. To give you an idea.

Had there been a love potion in the soufflé? Not bones at all, not even coca leaves, just some out-and-out love philter? Enchantment-mongering juices in the fruits and sugars, magic heart sesames and all obsession’s amorous fee faw fum? The bell, book and candle therapies and dowser gravitationals, could be, the wand of that ashen hair and all the red sorcery of her nightgown.

“May I? May I then?”

“It’s your funeral,” Meg Glorio said and, lying down beside him, switched off the light.

Almost at once she began lightly to snore. She lay on her side, facing him, her mouth putting out little sour puffs of brandied air, breath bubbles of systemic gall and, somehow this struck Druff as the most erotic—well, in a way erotic, in a manner of speaking erotic—thing that had happened to him yet, as though his fly-on-the-wall relation to her now, to her intimate cheeses and bitters, were some signal of absolute trust. (He thought of Rose Helen’s small, inaccessible shelf, of her
real
private parts.) Breathing in Margaret Glorio’s miasmas and off-limits climates not as a tourist, say, wandered and lost to the beaten paths, but as some hardened native of the place, acclimated, adapted, who lived light, who went without the frills and didn’t bother with repellents, sun blocks, the sissy amenities. This is what the Chamber of Commerce didn’t tell you about, thought the drifting-off, civic-minded public man. This is what didn’t get advertised or written up in brochures. This was what the sourdoughs knew, what the squatters wouldn’t share with you, what the founding fathers and first families kept to themselves.

“Well,” said Druff, speaking from his sleep, “I, of course, won’t breathe a word. No, a lady’s breath is her own business. What goes on in the guts is a matter between her liver and onions. When in the course of privates events she chooses to leak on a lover, that lover, or so it seems to me, is sworn to secrete.”

Druff giggled.

“No,” he went on, “but seriously folks, this is the case with me here. I happen to need this MacGuffin thing because otherwise just about all I’m good for is to think about myself. Now, admittedly, this ain’t news. I’ve been thinking about myself just about all my life. Well
somebody
has to,
n’est-ce pas?
Do you leave such a thing to amateurs? Old pros like Dick, the paid professional? They’d hand you your head, fellows like that. The down side is your hat would be missing.

“Because what it is essentially, I think, is that the world is getting away from me, I think. Like I was telling Dick in the car just this morning, it’s whizzing past us, the world. Just look at me you need an example. I’ve served as a Republican, an Independent, a Democrat, you name it. I’ve sat on all the committees. I’ve gone for an assemblyman, a streets commissioner, and one time for mayor. I’ve been this utility infielder of a pol, and what did it get me? Where’s my constituency? Will I ever be in a history lesson? It’s tough to be an old-timer, I’m here to tell you. You know why? Because you’ve got to take it sitting down! Well. I suppose you’ll say I’m just falling into the nostalgia trap, but there’s a lot to be said for the old days. (I was beautiful then.) (Oh, not me. I don’t mean me. But me too.)

“You know what I never see anymore? Just as an instance? Slo-mo movies of chicks hatching out of eggs. Plenty of queer larvae and nameless life forms emerging from the damnedest stuff, even human babies straight out of their mamas’ kootchies. But no chicks. Nothing even remotely edible slouching toward breakfast! Why is that, I wonder?”

Margaret Glorio moaned.

“I know,” Druff said, “I know. Ain’t that just what I’ve been saying?”

She moaned again. She shuddered and issued a great exhalation of bad air, covering Druff, who was under the impression that it came from himself, a mournful accompaniment to his sad complaint. He waved his hands in front of his mouth to disperse the fumes. Jolting himself and opening his ears so he could actually hear what he was saying, making the words manifest, drawing them forth to a kind of consciousness, a sort of flagrance. (Rose Helen should have shaken him by now, tugged at his pajamas. The fact that she hadn’t, encouraged him to continue.)

“I’m pleased you’re sitting still for all this. It’s good to get such stuff off the chest.

“I don’t know,” Druff said, “it’s a different world. I see people walking around in malls, wearing the styles and noshing on foreign finger foods, and colored lights blinking beneath the flight paths of aircraft on the tops of tall buildings. Jesus, how organized it is! It’s all crowd control these days. Well, it has to be, I guess, or they’d mug you just for your junk bonds and clean out your Swiss accounts. But where are the bosses going to come from? There ain’t any places for your Pendergasts and Tweeds and Daleys to break in their acts today. If you can’t talk Greaser and don’t do hand jive you might as well pack it in.

“So I need it. I
need
this MacGuffin thing!

“I
know I talk about myself, I
know
I do. Sure! This is my subject now. This is the case. But you know? I don’t particularly love myself. Really. I don’t. It’s just all that’s left over when you’ve burned up your power. I feel, I feel,” he confided, “like little bits of the British Empire!

And, Rose Helen or no Rose Helen, was now another few hundred feet up the side of his consciousness, breathless, outraged in dreamland, stifled in the rarefied places between sleeping and waking, though he was almost sure, roused by the sound of his voice, stung by the spice of his tears, that he was almost certainly awake.

He wanted her to hear this next part, insisted she must listen, was prepared, had she raised an objection, to shout it down.

“Do others have themselves so thoroughly? No,” he said, “I wonder. I
do
wonder. Do they work themselves up like a foreign language, have they their parentheses and footnotes? Their grammar and…

“Well,” Druff, cutting in on himself, observed craftily, “of course we must suppose old Su’ad may certainly have let down her guard. I’ve a few theories about that at least.” He waited for her response, got none—to be perfectly honest he hadn’t expected he would as a matter of fact if you wanted to know to tell you the truth; also, the air in the room had suddenly cleared, sweetened, as if a rain, say, had laid the summer dust (this would have been the held breath of her attention)—and went on. “Just feel free to shake me whenever you want,” he said. “Just break in anytime.”

There was nothing. Excellent. It was a hell of a way to do business, he thought. It was a
hell
of a way! Forget your TV spots, your “messages,” dumb debates, campaign stops, being there at the gates to press the flesh when the shifts changed, and all the rest of it. Just give him ten minutes alone in bed with the voters, and let him go! Well, he thought, now that I’ve got their attention, I’d better get on with it. He got on with it.

“One,” he said. “Mikey ran her over.

“That’s not as farfetched as it sounds. They could have had a lovers’ quarrel. Who knows? Here’s this young girl from a broken, war-torn homeland. She’s fond enough of my kid, but maybe she’s got a fella back in the old country, a sweetheart in the sand, some PLO type with a five-day growth of whiskers under the head drapes. Or maybe there
isn’t
any boyfriend. Maybe—‘Two different worlds we live in, Mikey. Your ways are not my ways. You say potato, I say potahto.’—she’s just homesick. Who knows? It could have been anything. Maybe her green card’s run out, or she can’t stand our Mikey. They quarrel, she calls him a name and he gets in the car and runs her over. Maybe they
didn’t
quarrel. Maybe they were having a race, Mikey in the car, Su’ad on foot. They’re neck and neck. He steps on the gas, she lengthens her stride to pass him and takes the lead. Mikey’s humiliated, a little slip of a girl hobbled by a
chador
passes a guy in a powerful, American-built car. Say what you will about him, Mikey’s a pretty patriotic kid. He guns it,
really
guns it. And he’s getting it up there now—ninety, ninety-five, a hundred ten, a hundred fifteen miles an hour. He’s catching up to her. He’s catching up to her and he’s getting excited. Hooray! Hip hip hurrah! Three cheers for the U.S. of A. But as I say, he’s excited,
too
excited. His hands are sweating. He makes a mistake, his hand slips on the wheel, he loses control. Bingo bango! He hits her, runs her over, and it’s good night nurse.

“That’s one way of looking at it.

“Two!” he announced.

“Which brings us to the traffic signal on Kersh Boulevard. (How does Meg Glorio Way strike your fancy?) Oh, yes, the fatal stoplight itself. That pedestrian-activated ‘attractive nuisance’ about which we’ve heard so much, and that anyone, particularly anyone who’s just spotted a lone, obviously foreign, obviously Arab-looking young lady, could just step up to at will and activate with the same casual and discretionary ease with which one turns on a radio. Recall the conditions on the night of the so-called accident. Was it raining? Were the streets slick? Was there fog? What was the phase of the moon? (Someone’s going to have to look this shit up.) And if the person in question happens to be of a different religious or political persuasion from the Shiite Muslim in question, what’s to prevent him or her not from pressing the button on the fatal stoplight, but from
not
pressing it? What’s to prevent such a person from holding Su’ad back when the light was green in her favor, or from throwing her to the wolves when the light was against her? And suppose such a person had an accomplice? Now this is a big city, a major market. The accomplice could have been anyone, of course, but let’s say for the sake of argument it was Mikey. He hits her, runs her over, and it’s good night nurse all over again!

“Farfetched? You think so? Let me remind you it was once farfetched to think we’d ever have the scientific wherewithal to put a man on the moon!

“Normally, I might rest my case, but these are not normal times.

“Three!