The MacGuffin by Stanley Elkin Page B

cryptic dreamgirls in those classifieds—pleased by what he felt, some ballsy, weighted swagger of a vain regard, his discrete maleness urgent as mercury, forceful as magnetism, like some phantom erection paraded in a bath towel, seduced by his hankerings for all the tutorials of love, the thought of those shared pensées of a street commish.
    On the other hand…
    His hopes that afternoon were hedged all around by what he would tell Rose Helen.
    It wasn’t that he was stuck for things to say. What, an old campaigner like him? Trippingly on the tongue. He’d qualms, but he didn’t doubt his ability to lie, even his ability to lie to Rose Helen. He just didn’t want to be caught out in a campaign promise. He rarely made them. (Because he knew he was a goner. For whatever reason, what he’d said to her, to Margaret Glorio, was true. He’d thrown his hat into the ring. He would pursue her, had already started.) It was what he would tell Rose Helen if his suit was successful.
    They’d been married thirty-six years, after all. What was he, twenty- two when he married her? Just a kid. And Rose Helen, sixty now—sixty, Jesus!—had been twenty-four. Jesus! too, as far as that was concerned. Because hadn’t a deep part of her attraction been, as, God help him, it was something of an aversion now, those two extra years she had on him, as if she lived in a distant, telling time zone, coming to him, it could be, from alien geography, bringing alien geography, the covered flesh she’d not permitted him to see until their wedding night and teased him with—only it was nothing near so playful as teasing—denying him its light even then, granting him access to her only beneath the sheet and thin cover in the darkened room? The mysterious functions of her moving parts as much mysterious. Allowed to bring away with his eyes, like some impinged victor of guarded rewards, only what he could make out in that hobbled, weighted light. Only what he felt on his lips, the moistened tips of her powdered, perfumed nipples in licked conjunction with his moving, frantic tongue, a thick, yielded chemistry of a clayey, bridal milk. The source of her sweet and sour odors protected as the upper reaches of some under Nile. And what Druff was able to take away with him on his fingers, lifted like fingerprint from that dark and solemn scene.
    Things were different then. At least for Druff. Well, give him credit, for others too. This was the earliest fifties. A time of girdled sexuality. (Poodle skirts were a sort of Su’ad’s veil.) If you knocked someone up you married her as much to make an honest man of yourself as an honest woman of the girl. Guilt was champ. He hadn’t thought the belt would ever change hands.
    Now he knew, too late, it had all been just so much magic, the superstitious flimflam of conspired, agreeable fears. There’d been no especial power in her, he’d fallen through the net was all, squeezed through the cracks by his times, assigned, like others of his generation, high-flown attributes to what was mere rumor, the prose of innocence, guilt, the hype of “upbringing.” It was as if—truly—he’d lived by almanacs, “fun facts,” lore, raised in weathers controlled by swallows punctually returned to Capistrano or Puxatawney Phil frightened of his own shadow. He’d bought into such notions. It was like someone deciding to flesh out his portfolio because the NFL had won the Super Bowl that year, or someone pushed into buying or selling off because hems were high or low. (He didn’t remember the formula and reminded himself he would have to ask Margaret about that one when they were around the fire.) Well, why should he chastise himself, they all did. For who gave blowjobs then, who took it up the ass? Poor Druff, Druff thought, who was new to self-pity, a man who’d missed his season, who’d—you can imagine how he felt, you can just imagine—wasted ripeness and mourned girls—dreamgirls, indeed—he not only