Indeed, his salesman was checking his watch.
“Tell me,” Druff asked gloomily, “you got potholes in your neighborhood?”
“Potholes?”
“Deep pits where the road don’t meet the road, breaks in the concrete where the city didn’t take it in a couple tucks or never bothered to smooth out the shoulders.”
“No potholes, no.”
“I’m City Commissioner of Streets,” Druff told him, “you call these guys ‘Doctor,’ you say ‘Judge.’ Anything wrong with the color of my money?”
(No, Druff thought, too late, he’s going to call me Doctor, he’s going to call me Judge, screaming Dick, Dick, Dick! in his head the second the words were out of the commissioner’s mouth, because where was it written in the job description that his chauffeur-cum-spy-cum-security guard couldn’t scare the bejesus out of the wiseguys who didn’t treat Druff’s office with the proper respect? Or tailors who didn’t fit him properly or salesmen who didn’t steer him away from colors and styles unbecoming to a man Druff’s complexion and build?)
Though — admirably, Druff thought — the fellow restrained himself, or, rather, went in a different direction and was all over Druff with his salesman’s sirs and deferentials. It’s just that there was nothing — and Druff, sulkily, agreed — that either the salesman or the tailor could do. The suit fit Druff, Druff just didn’t fit the suit. He dressed, he saw, above his station. Good clothes were for the gorgeous, for the athletically trim and vigorous, for these prime got-up guys in their recognizable cloth and leveraged primes.
It was a different story at Toober’s, a restaurant in his city’s near south end where many of the councilmen, department and agency heads, and very upper — almost civilian — cops and firemen took their afternoon meal along with other of the town’s higher civil service and search-committee’d political appointees. Here and there a few patronage types were along, secretaries brought by their bosses for their birthday, a retirement do, even, Druff thought, to show the flag, bring out the vote, demonstrate, he meant, a kind of available, last-ditch force like Lear’s whittled retainers. (“Missy,” he’d told his driver, dismissing him, “won’t be needing the car for an hour.”) In a way he might never have left the clothing store. He could have been taking his lunch — the place seemed that male — from his shallow, déclassé bench in the changing room.
It was a different story anyway. Here he looked fine, jim-dandy. It was recognizable cloth on the diners in the lunch house, too, only theirs didn’t lie on them as it did on the successful young men Druff had seen in the store, like well-kept hair on their well-kept heads. Here he, the pols and dependents dressed in a sort of dim apparatchik mode, one size fits all. No cuffs on their crushed linen, and even the color of their fabrics, no matter how expensive, a vaguely unfashionable shade of grime. Some principle operating here like the one that drove the city to stencil seals on its limos, that spoke of the company suit and, Druff supposed, was intended to ward off the voters by a kind of sartorial poor-mouthing. (Though he knew, of course, that the upper reaches of even democracy had its cutting edge. There were occasions when mayors dressed up like governors, governors like presidents, presidents like kings.)
He’d been too long trying on his suit. They were very busy, they hadn’t been able, Toober said, to hold his table.
“That’s all right, I’ll catch a sandwich at the bar,” Druff said, testing. Toober considered half a beat too long before he nodded, agreeing to the arrangement. “Et tu, Toober?” Druff said.
“Commissioner?”
“What, has Vegas sent in fresh odds on me? Is the new dope sheet out? D’ju see polls?”
“Commissioner?”
“Nah, it’ll be all right. I’ll catch a sandwich at the bar. I’ll inquire about the catch of the day. I’ll ask about soup.”
“Anything, Commissioner,” said the owner. “You want birthday cake and a slice of pie and a malted, say so. It’s not on the menu, ask.” There was a rumor Druff wasn’t ready to believe that the restaurateur was interested in becoming sheriff, and would run for the office in the next election. Druff didn’t put much stock in the story, thought Toober a familiar enough type, one of those men — there were women too, of course, plenty of them, but these tended to attach themselves to individuals rather than political parties — who were political groupies, Jack Ruby types, drawn to, charged by, some homeopathic “juice.” There was a rough equivalency, he supposed, between the innkeeper and power trades. Both had their backslappers certainly, both worked their respective rooms and loved, if not ceremony, then outright pomp, intriguing circumstance. (Why, Druff wondered, did all restaurant owners make such a big deal about detail, fly into rages over ever-so- improperly set tables? He’d seen Toober fire a busboy just for having spilled a drop of coffee into a customer’s saucer.) Why were they always hounding the customer with their smarmy ingratiations and is-everything-satisfactories? Why, he meant, were they such bullies? (Druff, Druff felt, was no bully, and that was just what might have been wrong with him as a public man.) And why, he meant, did so many pols of his acquaintance share these same instincts, managing merely to smother them with their greased diplomacy? And why, he meant finally, oh why, was everything so political, as laced with motive as the goblets and china service of a poisoner? MacGuffins and plots everywhere. The world was all MacGuffin, one to a customer. (Saving one’s grace, perhaps. He didn’t think MacGuffins were in him. He had no plots, yet found himself to be not entirely displeased with this new — if it didn’t turn out to be paranoia — not unpromising dispensation in which he felt himself to be, as they said in the grand juries, the “target” of others’.)
He found a place at the bar and plunged almost immediately into conversation with a woman he’d never seen before.
“Are you,” she’d asked, “a politician too?”
Druff, who hadn’t been able to judge people’s ages for years now (since, in fact, he’d begun to lose “force” and become a hero of anecdote, his personal golden age before people started to make allowances for him, and not just conducted but sometimes actually flourished his spirit through their wide-opened doors; that time, he meant, when they were still wary of him and he had their ages, indeed, all their numbers), had a particularly vivid notion of this one’s. He thought the woman to be a few months shy of her forty-fifth birthday and curiously amended to himself that he didn’t think she looked it. She was attractive — she looked, Druff thought, very smart — and was as openly blond as an au pair girl. Seated, the line of her back held almost militarily straight and her long, somewhat heavy legs reaching even farther down the bar stool than Druff’s, she seemed quite tall, and Druff felt a quick rush of intimidated lust.