The man was talking with Mrs. Norman but snapped to a smart attention when Druff appeared.
“Oh, hi, Commissioner,” Doug said agreeably enough, but in odd opposition to the starched formality of his stance, “it’s nice to see you.”
“It’s nice to see you, Doug.”
“Thank you, Mr. Commissioner. How are you, sir?”
“Fine, thanks. Yourself?”
“Oh, it’s not my nature to complain, Commissioner Druff, but I’m all right.”
“That’s good, Doug. That’s good.”
“Are you going out, sir? I’ll bring the car straight around.”
“No, no,” Druff said, “it’s too nice a day. Don’t stir yourself, Doug. I’ll walk.”
“It’s absolutely no trouble.” He carefully studied his commissioner. “Of course, it is a fine day, and a brisk walk sets a man up. I understand that. I’d only want to make sure you’re not doing this to save me effort.”
“Doctor’s orders, Doug.”
“Oh?” said Doug, who, despite the clipped-sounding youthfulness of his name, Druff knew to be his own age, a fellow (clearly a cop, though he had vaguely about him the ingratiating air of a somewhat sinister doorman, an unindicted despoiler of male children, say, and an aura of one already vested but still building his pension, a man always on overtime, whose activities belied the sense one somehow had of him that there was money there somewhere) who seemed to know things about him he’d been at pains to learn. Druff liked him. Probably the man was only a passive-aggressive, a nurser of secret grudges, but Druff had the idea that the city was missing a bet here, that he’d have been a better operative for it than Dick (though he believed all Doug’s oleaginous loomings and hoverings would, in the end, come to nothing, that there’d be no September surprises from that quarter, the guy a classic case of mistaken identity, more a type, finally, than a man).
“I don’t mean my doctor’s orders. Your generic doctor’s generic orders. Me, I’m fine. My clothes don’t hang right is all,” Druff reassured.
And Doug, considering, measuring Druff, sizing him up, apparently bought it. “Have a good walk then, Mr. Commissioner,” Doug said in his cop-cum-doorman’s negligibly effacing and commanding way, putting Mrs. Norman on hold, putting, Druff suspected, everything on hold; so long as the commissioner still sauntered to the door, not permitting, as if it were in his power, even a phone to ring. Druff had the sense that he was being safely conducted across a street while traffic waited.
Not even to the pharmacist in the drugstore a good three blocks from City Hall from whom Druff bought the condoms. Or at least any particular asshole. Who you would think ought to know better. I mean, Druff meant, a fifty-eight-year-old guy with an ill-hanging suit on him and probably plenty more just like it home in the closet, who wasn’t even trying to appear casual, but simply, quite casually appears and bellies up to the counter requiring a packet of condoms? That was the word Druff used, “packet.” Meaning to imply by his carefully chosen diminutive just that. No in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound largesse here, only the smallest quantity that could possibly be purchased, as if whatever fling the fifty-eight-year-old type was contemplating was just that, too. A fling and, judging by the size of his order, possibly his last? Not even, mind you, as any high school boy would, specifying a brand? What, this isn’t an asshole? Just selling the so apparently hopeful last-flinging old-timer the generic packet of condoms he asked for, and maybe (because Druff would in his place if Druff were the pharmacist and the pharmacist the customer in the ill-hanging clothes) hoping that the condom would hang better on him than the clothes did. But then again, Druff knew, the man was a professional, and a professional — his license was right up there on the counter like a framed picture of the wife and kids — keeps his feelings to himself. So he could be wrong, Druff thought. Maybe he did look like an asshole.
But (if you didn’t count the druggist) only to himself. And not because of the couple of condoms safe in his suit pocket next to the coca leaves (the condoms he knew he would not have a chance to use once even, and then throw away, throwing them away first, before they were used, or seen, like the flag he knew he not only didn’t have to show but wouldn’t even if he’d had to; hey, he was a guy who covered the bases, even if, not quite respectably he did have a spy, even if, he not only had a spy but maybe a MacGuffin, too, and certainly plenty of humbug in his heart) but because of the FTD flowers already on their way to Margaret Glorio’s home address.
So you can imagine how he felt. You can just imagine.
On the one hand anticipate, rampant with a kind of self-regard. In a way, he was already half in love with Miss Glorio, not for her perceived qualities (which he didn’t know about yet anyway) so much as for those which the contemplation of a relationship induced and released, or induced and released again, in Druff. Why, love, even half- love, was heady, hearty stuff, like the drugged aromatics of chemical flowers or the recovered toxins of adolescence. Thinking of it that way, years wilted from him, he filled his suits. He felt a sort of strutting potency and would have liked to get another gander at himself in Brooks Brothers glass. Love, contemplated Druff, was good for the gander, and the commissioner, like some world-class cuckold, had a temporary respite from the ordinary anxieties of ego, self-consciousness, was even enough liberated from himself to permit himself to regard — it was a festival of regard — some things which might please Margaret. Would she go to the fights or enjoy a day at the track? Was she a good sport, he meant, some down-and-dirty lady, the kind who would appreciate the unraveled arcana of a dope sheet? Because he could go that way, teach her the Racing Form, coach her in the codes of a low art, the stats, weights and measures of a compromised metrics, then tell her to forget all she’d learned, and to learn something new — that all bets were sucker bets, that the ponies in this town were fixed, that it was as well to know who was into whom — better! — than all the histories of all the horses in the field. And wasn’t this thrilling information too, to have this lowdown, this insider’s window on the world? He was sure it was the same in Sportswear, he’d tell her, and that he would be just as surprised to have his assumptions challenged, all the old warrants. Wasn’t it, wasn’t it thrilling? And then he would take her with him to the paddock for some private discussions because, he’d confide, you didn’t dope the horses so much as bet on those already doped. He longed to bring her along, a girlfriend like the son he’d always wanted.