Authors: Stanley Elkin
“Good night,” said Druff. And then, checking himself before passing through it, turning slowly around in the kitchen doorway, poised there for a curtain speech like the vaudeville bang of a rim shot, only tossed off, thrown away, scored against the pace of the scene, as if to say, God knows why I’m telling you this, or what made me think of it just now, but while it’s fresh in my head, and before I forget, let me try this on for size, see how it plays in Peoria, Druff said, “Oh, hey, I meant to tell you, I almost forgot. In the cab—it’s been a long night, Doug was tired so I sent him home and picked up a cab at their hotel—Scouffas and whoozis’s—well, I don’t know where it came from, but anyway there was more traffic for that time of night than you can shake a stick at, and normally I might not have noticed it but it hadn’t been there earlier—and a good thing—when we were pacing off the marathon and, incidentally, did you know you don’t actually have to strap the little sucker to your leg like some Boy Scout’s pedometer, or even hold it in your hand like you’d find your way through the woods with a compass, but almost just stick it there in the chauffeur’s pocket and forget about it while Doug or whoever just cruises along as if he didn’t have a care in the world, or the fate of an entire city’s hopes and dreams for a marathon of its own wasn’t riding on every little bump and grind in the road, every pothole and manhole cover, every cobblestone and speed bump, or forget about it, that is, as long as the guy doesn’t have to pull up short or come to any sudden stops—the damn thing’s so sensitive and is programmed to make every conceivable adjustment and compensation, except, as I say, for sudden stops, and that’s why I say it’s a good thing that that traffic wasn’t there earlier in the evening when McIlvoy and Doug and Irv Scouffas and I were doing the dry run of the dry run of the dry run of the contemplated battlefield or it might just have played Oh, Well, Back to the Drawing Board with all our plans—when I happened to notice these long delays on some of the traffic signals, particularly on the cautious left turn on greens, but on lots of others too, especially
where the pedestrian activates the signal in order to put the green light in her favor,
and I say
her
favor advisedly because I suddenly flashed on Su’ad, on how it might have happened to her, just that very way, stepping off the fatal curb at just the fatal moment when she became impatient and the hit-and-fatal-goddamn-run driver slammed all that fatal second-per-second tonnage and momentum into her frail, mortal Shiite bones. What do you think, Mikey? What do you think, kid? Is that a scenario you can live with?”
The father studied the son during all this long speech, carefully watching his boy’s face as, wide-eyed, it bumped along in the eddies of information then pulled up short, and opened out again into the avenues of its snarled syntax. Abruptly, when Druff came to Su’ad’s name, Mikey’s eyes squeezed shut, but it was difficult to imagine that he was not seeing her anyway, despite whatever layers of darkness he interposed between the light and his sealed, locked lids.
And didn’t wait for an answer, going instead, and at a pretty good clip, too, particularly for a guy of his advanced age at this advanced time of the night, up the stairs to the bedroom, tired, of course, but not a little compensated for his troubles by adventure’s and danger’s spiced, chemical buzz, interested, observing himself, thinking, Oh, right, so that’s how they do it. Sure, right, yes, of course. (Removing a shoe, pulling a sock.) Thinking, I see. Ahh. But of course. Even as you, even as me. (Taking his pants off, one leg at a time.) Thinking (loosening his tie, discarding his shirt, in the bathroom fumbling his shorts, peeing a ton), Well, I have to suppose that the body has its priorities too, and that’s why, caught up, we don’t require as many pit stops as otherwise. (Thinking “we” now.) Brushing his teeth and thinking, Now this surprises me, it really does. And
this!
(As he bothers to floss. To
floss!)
But
really
wowed, blown away wowed, by what he does next. He takes two ten-milligram Procardia out of their plastic prescription bottle, unscrews the lid from a jar of stool softeners and removes one odd, brown, football-shaped Peri-dos softgel. He takes a Valium, considers his unusual circumstances and decides to spring for a second. (Well, diazepam, actually, since it came in generic now.) (This is amazing, Druff thinks, all those others, CIA glamour boys, or just ordinary, caught-up bystander types, professors, say, businessmen, docs off on medical convenings in Paris, part business, part pleasure, would be dipping into the generics these days. Well, why not? We’d be crazy—he thinks “we,” already translated into that distinguished fraternity of fall guys, straw men and stalking horses pursued by blurry, unfocused, maniac furies and enemies—not to. Ain’t a chap with a MacGuffin already in enough trouble? Does he have to buy into inflation and the exorbitant prices the big drug companies get for their pills, too?) Well! This has certainly been a lesson for him!
And the lesson is this:
Life goes on. Life goes on even in the chase scenes. Life goes on even as Grant and Stewart and Kelly and Bergman run for their lives. They would have Kleenex in their pocket, lipstick in their purse. In the climates calling for them they would have Chap Stick, sun block, insect repellent. They would have diarrhea equipment. They would need batteries for their transistor radios, stamps for their mail. Life goes on. They would need a place to cash their checks. They would have to get haircuts. Life goes on. They would require reservations, they would have to stop at the gate to obtain a boarding pass. Life goes on, life goes on. If they were religious they would be saying their prayers. They would continue to watch their salt intake and think twice before accepting an egg. They would laugh at good jokes, whistle, hum, wipe themselves, scratch where they itched, obey the laws of gravity and try not to use the strange, immediate pressures of their new situations as an excuse to start smoking again. They would, irrelevantly, dream. A glorious drudgery, life goes on. It goes on and goes on.
Then he moves to the bed and gets in beside his wife, dead to the world. It’s—what?—almost five in the morning. It must be a scientific fact, not noted until just this moment, that Rose Helen, whose snores (If I had a dollar, etc.) he’d always been able to extinguish simply by reaching out and touching her shoulder and saying “No Snoring,” easy as that, as if the words carried exactly the same municipal weight as his City Commissioner of Streets directives on signs (“No Parking,” “No Standing,” “No Loading“), doesn’t snore at this time of day. Druff is certain he’s uncovered a law of nature. It must be something in the five a.m. nasal atmospherics, or that snorers leave off when the birdies start up their songs, some symbiotic sound/silence deal—din physics.
Druff, moved to the bed, slipped in beside Rose Helen, dead to the world himself, sleeps, putting everything he’s got into it, with nothing left over, not even an ounce, with which to dream, let alone make speeches or sketch from the edges of his consciousness his fabled Lincoln-Douglases.
It was almost noon when he woke. He showered and dressed quickly. There was a possibility, he thought, that he might have missed Rose Helen, something, given the nature of his behavior, that was not entirely unwelcome. But he was wrong. She was in the kitchen, rubbing red seasoning into the carcass of a raw turkey. Mikey, beside her, sat on a stool peeling potatoes, pretending they were onions. He drew his shirtsleeve across his eyes, wiping away imaginary tears, pretending to flick them onto the floor. He whined. He wailed. He went boo-hoo. Conjugating noises in a toy grief. Rose Helen was laughing. Druff walked into the room. “Mama, look,” said his son, breaking off, “it’s Lazy Mary.” Rose Helen laughed even harder.
Druff suspected something was terribly wrong.
“You’re all dolled up,” Rose Helen said.
The times were out of joint was what. Druff suddenly understood it was Saturday. He’d mistaken the weekend for a workday and couldn’t have felt more like Rip Van Winkle if all the appliances in his kitchen had been invented since he’d gone to bed. If he’d placed his hands on a long gray beard or seen in the paper that the government had changed hands overnight. It was the weekend and he felt as deprived of time as a jailbird, cheated as any prodigal crying over the spilled milk of a misspent youth, or money down the toilet of a bad husbandry.
“I overslept,” he said. (Thereby losing a piece, too, of Saturday.) “Jeez,” he said, examining his suit coat, plucking his tie, “I’m dressed for downtown.”
“Did you think you had to go to work today?” his son asked.
“Sure did.”
“Bank dividend in your favor.”
“Error,” Druff said. “If the allusion’s to Monopoly, ‘Bank
error
in your favor’ is the quote you’re looking for.”
“I’ll fix breakfast,” Rose Helen said. “Pancakes? We have Canadian maple syrup. I’ll squeeze oranges.”
“It’s ‘dividend,’ Daddy, I think.”
“How could it be dividend? A dividend’s something already coming to you,” Druff said.
Mikey looked down at the potato he was holding, considering. “I should be done with my chores by the time you finish your breakfast. We could play some Monopoly and settle it like men.”
“Coffee and toast,” Druff said. “Don’t bother squeezing any oranges. Frozen’s all right. Where’s the All-Bran? God damn it, Mikey, I opened up a new box just yesterday. How many times do I have to tell you? All-Bran is not a snack food. It’s medicine.”
“For God’s sake,” Rose Helen said, “are you going to start in with him over a box of cereal?”
“He goes after it like it was potato chips!” Druff said irritably. “He puts it away like popcorn! Oh,” Druff said, “now I understand the pancakes and syrup bit. Now I see what the fresh orange juice was all about. You knew he’d eaten up my All-Bran.”
“Your All-Bran.
Really,”
she said.
“Well, I hope you enjoyed it,” he told his son. “I just hope you found it a tasty treat. Because my colon cancer is on your head, young Mikey. My colostomy bag’s just one more piece of matched luggage you’ll have to learn to live with.”
“Fine breakfast table conversation,” Rose Helen said.
“Just who does he think he is?”
Druff demanded. “Who gave
him
the right to scarf down all the roughage and high fiber in this house?”
“Don’t get your bowels in an uproar, Dad,” Mikey, deadpan, said.
“Toilet humor, very nice,” Druff said. “Thirty years old and he still makes ca-ca jokes. Mikey, do you understand that when Jesus Christ was crucified he was only three years older than you are right now?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with it,” Mike said.
“No,” said Druff, “I don’t suppose you do. All right, Rose Helen,” Druff said, “I see I’m going to have to go with the pancakes and maple syrup after all.”
“Make your own goddamn breakfast,” Rose Helen said.
“I
will
then,” he said. Then, more softly, “Of course, any idea I may have had of playing Monopoly with Michael here has entirely left me.”
“You wouldn’t have anyway,” Mikey said.
“No? How can you know that?”
“Because you’re always trying to fool me,” he said.
“Oh please,” Rose Helen said, “the
both
of you!”
Well, it was the weekend, Druff thought. He was at an age when weekends spelled nothing but trouble. When they were no longer the big payoff they once had been. Baths, for example. Grooming. There was a time, he recalled, when the jokes on the radio had it that Saturday night was the night universally observed by Americans for taking their baths. Maybe it was farmers, factory workers, people in cold-water flats whose hot water was rationed, doled out on weekends. He wasn’t blue collar himself, none of his people had been. His father, a traveling salesman, made
good
money, had been a stickler for the personal hygienes—shined shoes, soap behind the ears, haircuts and fingernails. Even dancing lessons—fox-trots, the waltz—had been high on his father’s list as a kind of personal grooming, a preparation for feats of business linked in his dad’s mind with the
mens sana in corpore sano
of cleanliness and presentability. So he couldn’t imagine he’d ever been let off from taking baths on weekdays. Yet it was all a blur in his mind, and he had a sort of racial memory of long, ritual Saturday night baths when he lay soaking in his tub with, in effect, an entire country. Getting themselves up, sprucing.
As he remembered the wonderful
e pluribus unum
arrangements of his Friday and Saturday nights with Rose Helen at the Chi Phi Kappa house. Not only out of the question, gone forever, unimaginable.
Or MacGuffins either. He couldn’t imagine being visited by his MacGuffin on a weekend at home. MacGuffin’s night off.
Where were the museums and zoos of yesteryear, or even the Monopoly encounters of Mikey’s blown hope? Druff, down Memory Lane, missed Saturday matinees.
“Truce?” he suggested suddenly, tapping toast crumbs at the corners of his mouth with a napkin, swirling his coffee like a brandy. “What say?”
Nothing, they said nothing. Michael peeled his potatoes, his wife rubbed her red seasonings. Druff sniffed at the neutral, still unroasted air. “Mnh,” he said, “mhnn. Something smells good. Company coming?” Without troubling to answer, Rose Helen abandoned the turkey, left the kitchen. Druff stared at the big dead bird. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of such a thing as salmonella then?” he said, raising his voice, calling after her. “I suppose you think salmonellas don’t show up in white people’s kitchens. I suppose you think they’re a respecter of persons. Well, that’s just what they want you to think. That’s playing right into their hands, Rose Helen. That’s burying the old head in the sand. There you go. That’s just the opening they’re looking for. You hear me? Hey, I asked did you
hear
me? Did you
hear
me, you ostrich?”
“Come on, Dad,” Mikey, fingering Druff’s mood, his weekend irritability like some virus held in the bones, said. “Come on,” he said. “Please?” Managing him, gingerly, like a handler of drunks.