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.