The MacGuffin (32 page)

And stepped into the elevator and pushed “I1,” vaguely proud of what he anticipated would be Margaret’s view: of the park, of the city, Druff’s streets. And for the second time in as many days struck his temple with his open palm. He wouldn’t get to see it. Any more than last night. It was dark out. Here, in the elevator, atemporal as Las Vegas, the lateness of the hour so abruptly revealed to him—Druff’s vaudeville truths, his dunderhead dumb show—was oddly disconcerting. He was frightened of this particular dark, of Margaret’s eclipsed views. What, he wondered, am I doing here? What in hell’s going on, just? It isn’t enough, he added obscurely, I have no friends in the lobby? It was Saturday night. Now you’d be able to find suits all over the place. But he’d been wearing his all day. It was no longer fresh. There was fear in its cloth. It could use a press. He cursed his bollixed timing. In various pockets, Rose Helen’s expensive batteries, not in use, drained ever so slowly. Near the eleventh floor he seriously considered going back down again, skipping Margaret, dropping all charges, returning home. And held his course only because of the vagrant, concupiscent itch in his used, fearful pants.

Or something like that.

And then Margaret, like a landmark, was standing outside her open door in the carpeted hallway when the elevator doors opened, and Druff was lured out. Something hospitable about her presence, gracious, old-fashioned, by-the-book. She could have been his hostess, welcoming him to a dinner party.

“I
thought
you’d show up.”

“Is this a bad time?”

“I expected you earlier.”

“A contributing factor is potholes,” Druff said. “Potholes slow a guy down.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“I came,” he said, “about the one-night stand.”

“You came about furniture?”

“What? Oh, right. Very funny.”

“You never heard that one before?”

“No.”

“It’s buyer humor.”

They were inside her small apartment. Druff didn’t recognize it. “You’ve done something to the furniture,” he said.

“They came today to dress the windows,” Margaret Glorio said.

Druff nodded. “So I see.”

“You like it, though?”

“It’s different.”

Margaret Glorio belly-laughed.

“What?”

“You topped me,” she said.

“What?”

“Guy walks into a flat he’s been in it can’t have been fourteen or fifteen hours earlier. Overnight all the furniture’s been replaced. He’s asked what he thinks. Guy says ‘It’s different.’ You topped me.”

“Well,” Druff said, “that was unintentional.”

“Sure sure,” Margaret Glorio said.

He couldn’t get over what had been done to the place. Overnight. As she’d said herself. It could have been a sting operation, or early evening, a week later, a parlor suite in a luxury hotel in a large city, in the second act of a play. He was looking for the bed. Surely Margaret’s pricey brocade sofa did not open out.

Miss Glorio, darting her eyes everywhere Druff’s settled, matched him glance for glance. Except for the fact that her face registered a certain amusement, it could almost have been a tic, as if she were one of those people whose lips move with your own, silently repeating everything you say.

“Come here,” she said, “I’ll show you something.”

She took Druff’s hand and led him up to a mahogany highboy, opening one drawer, then another, in the tall chest.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” she said.

“The drawers are empty?”

“Come over here,” she said.

Behind a high, silken, vaguely Japanese folding screen was a small Pullman kitchen. She pulled open the cupboards and cabinets.

“Poor Mother Hubbard?”

“There you go,” Margaret Glorio said.

Druff nodded and Miss Glorio—she was still holding his hand—led him out from behind the screen and back into the living room.

“So tell me,” she said when he was seated on the rich brocade couch she had invited him to share, “you see what things mean to me, how unattached I am. We could go into the bathroom and I could show you my medicine chest. A bottle of generic aspirin, toothpaste, a few hotel soaps and shampoos. There aren’t any monograms on my hand towels. I haven’t any appliances, not even a microwave. I eat out of cartons from Chinese restaurants, white paper bags. From cardboard boxes the pizza guy brings. Off Styrofoam china from the fast food, trays wrapped in cellophane around airline meals I never touched. So tell me, what was all that about Oriental rugs?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Oh please,” Margaret Glorio said.

He
didn’t
understand. There were Oriental carpets in the rabbi’s study. In the rabbi’s study’s crapper even. They’d reminded him of Su’ad, suggested some Middle East connection which had seemed important at the time. He remembered, but didn’t understand. Seeing whether there was an Oriental rug at Margaret’s had seemed a good reason to come here today. Now he wasn’t so sure. MacGuffins were mind-boggling things. They were seductive, they threw you curves, they fucked you over. With the fleeting, now-you-see-’em-now-you-don’t appearances they put in on weekends? He could only conclude they weren’t dependable, MacGuffins. They were a trip, MacGuffins, but hardly money in the bank. Druff had lost sight of his reasons. Even though he saw that there were small Oriental rugs everywhere. The one behind the folding screen in the Pullman kitchen. The one over by the wing chair. Another practically under his feet. Three he could account for without even taking her up on her offer to show him the bathroom. But he couldn’t even find her bed, for heaven’s sake. How could he tell how many carpets there could still be?

Was it even important?

Seeing everything changed had thrown him off, the new decor.

“They’re nice,” Druff said. He meant the rugs, and tapped the one nearest him with the toe of a shoe. He indicated the one over by the wing chair with his jaw.

“Are you all right? What’s wrong? Don’t you feel well?”

“Well, I’m hungry,” he said, “is there somewhere I could lie down?” (This was so. He required food. His breakfast had been botched. And he never got that lunch he’d been promised—his filet mignon, his garden fresh vegetables, his wine, his strawberries out of season. His hamburger, his order of fries, his coffee and pie à la mode had proved inedible. Margaret was no help. She had no utensils. Even if there’d been the makings for tea there’d be nothing to drink it from; even the brandy snifters seemed to be gone. He could hardly be expected to lick tea out of her cupped palms. Tea wouldn’t have satisfied him anyway. What he really needed was a good solid meal. Though he had no appetite for it.)

“Why don’t you put your feet up?” Margaret said.

“But it’s silk,” Druff said.

“You won’t hurt it.”

“It’s silk,” he said.

“Wait. I’ll help with your shoes,” she said.

She was rubbing the commissioner’s temples, massaging his neck, touching his hair. She was drawing her nails down his cheek. Her hand was in his lap. He had an erection.

“We should both lie down,” she said.

“Where?” he said. “How? Does this sofa make up? You think we ought to do it on the sofa? I don’t know, I don’t have a rubber,” he said. “I could stain the brocade. You think that stuff comes out of silk? Maybe you have rubbers. Could you lend me one? I’ll pay you back.”

“I don’t have soup bowls, why would I have rubbers?”

“Maybe the man I saw in the lobby left one with you.”

“Dan?”

“You know Dan?”

“You’re such a worrywart.”

“Dan doesn’t worry me.”

“Nothing should worry you.”

“I’m no kid,” he said.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“A man old enough to be my age takes things into account.”

If they were horses they’d be walking. It seemed to Druff the gait of their conversation had slowed.

“I’ll make up the futon,” she said, easing his head from her lap. She brought a thin mattress and two pillows out of a closet and spread a clean sheet across the futon.

“I’m not sure,” Druff said. “I don’t think I could get down on that.”

“I’ll lower you.”

“Once I’m down I might not be able to get up again.”

“I’ll raise you.”

He felt foolish undressing in front of her, just as foolish removing his suit coat, shirt and tie as he did taking off his pants. He was no beauty, Druff. He looked even worse in his scarred body and toneless, troubled flesh than he did in clothes. He tried to place himself onto the low, distant futon, only two inches or so from the bare floor. He bowed from the waist, recovered. Feinting, he made as if to lean into a kneeling position, then straightened up again. Seeking various body leverages, this lone, unopposed wrestler.

“I’ve got you,” Margaret Glorio, sitting up, pronounced from the futon. One arm was wrapped about his leg, the other held him around the hip. She was in her underwear, her flesh tones bright as perfectly adjusted color on television. “Go on, don’t be afraid to put your weight on me. Lean on my shoulder. I won’t let you fall.”

Using her back and shoulders for handholds, he carefully rappeled down the side of her body. “Whew!” he said, beside her at last. But his hard-on was almost gone. And he couldn’t properly maneuver on the futon, on its sheet like a picnic cloth set down on hard, stony ground. He thrashed away, but the floor, which he could feel through the scant, paltry mat, hurt his knees and dug into his elbows. He at last abandoned her and fell uselessly away. How, he wondered, did Japan manage to repopulate itself? “Well,” Druff said, out of breath, “that was pretty humiliating for me. How was it for you?”

“What are all these scars?” she asked, running a finger down the incisions from his bypass surgery and other invasive procedures. Where they’d cracked open his chest. Where they’d taken a vein from his left leg and placed bits of it about his heart where the woodbine twines. Where they’d punctured his side and run a tube through it to his lung to blow it up again after it had collapsed.

“Maybe,” Druff said unhappily, “I should have stained the brocade. I could have tried to induce a nosebleed.”

“It’s odd. I didn’t even notice these last night,” Margaret Glorio said.

“Well, you wouldn’t, would you?” Druff said. “I didn’t have them last night.”

“Oh you,” Margaret said.

“Could you reach me my suit coat?”

“Are you cold? I’ll get us a blanket.”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact. But I need something out of one of the pockets in my suit coat.”

Effortlessly, she raised herself to a standing position. She was a big woman, tall as the diminished Druff, and not, he imagined, all that much lighter. He could only guess at the source of her agreeable strength. Maybe it came from the luxuriant hair that grew at her luxuriant pudendum. From his spectacular worm’s-eye view as she moved away from him, he stared up at her stirring, eloquent ass, at her sparkling snatch, glittering like facets off some hairy diamond as it vanished and appeared in league with her long strides. Anything doing? he wondered. Nah, not much. Nothing at all, in fact. Still, he thought, he was privileged to see this. If they didn’t kill him, he’d have to try to remember what it looked like.

“You poor guy,” she said, “was this what you wanted?” She held out one of the blister packs.

“That’s not mine,” Druff said with some indignation.

“It’s not?”

“No,” he said, “of course not.”

“I thought it might be the battery for your pacemaker or something.”

“I don’t have a pacemaker.”

“Well, that’s good,” she said. “I thought maybe you did. What with those scars and all. You poor guy.”

“No,” he said. “Those are my wife’s. She’s deaf.”

“You poor guy.”

“Could you hand me my jacket?”

She handed over the suit coat, then started to pull her underwear back on, panty hose, a brassiere, white and plain as a kid’s training bra. Druff was surprised. He would have imagined teddies on this woman, garter belts holding silken hosiery. “What have you got there? Oh,” she said, “your coca leaves.”

“A little fortification,” he said. “I could use the euphoria right now. Also, it gives me energy and cuts my appetite. Inca Indians use this stuff in the highest Andes. A few of these leaves in their jaws, the little fellas can keep going for days. They’re so wired, some of them walk up to work from their homes down at sea level.”

“You’re not going to share?”

“Here,” he said, extending the pouch. “Chow down.”

“No thanks,” she said. “The way it works is I blackmail
you,
not the other way around.”

In minutes his hunger had gone, his weakness. He’d forgotten his humiliation. Waves of well-being moved over him. He wondered if it was too late to try something even though she was dressed now. Nah, he realized, still nothing doing. Years of Inderal chemicals and ages of controlled agricultural substances fighting his libido to a standstill. Last night had been a gift. (Margaret Glorio would have to try to remember
that.
) “Women are damned good sports,” the City Commissioner of Streets said from his new, dreamy energy.

“Oh? How’s that, sweetie?”

“Well,
you
know…”

“No,” she said. “I really don’t.”

“Well, my performance, for example.”

“You call that a performance?”

“Right,” Druff said, and clammed up and, spreading out his suit jacket, covered his genitals and surgical scars and, pulling the sleeve of his coat over it, tried to hide what he could of the long zippery scar where the surgeons had removed the vein from his leg.

“Come on,” she said, “don’t be that way. Suppose your face froze like that?”

“Another weather terrorist heard from,” Druff mumbled.

“What?”

“I was making the point,” he said, “that women were good sports about these things, but I guess no one is, really. Sex is the
hardest
thing to get right. Please,” Druff put in quickly, “say nothing unworthy.” (Because he realized there was a streak of vulgarity to her. An air, despite her buyer’s smarts and chic, à la mode wisdoms, of rough inelegance which cost her points. This, well, jungliness. Her blatant body was an example, her telegenic flesh tones, or just the forwardness of her pronounced strength. Summer vacations, for kicks, on a lark, she might have done stints with the Roller Derby. Oh, he was a
fastidious
asshole. Still, she told jokes like a man—“Guy walks into this flat …” Besides, she knew he was a married man, and had slept with him anyway.)