Though Druff waited him out, Mikey didn’t say anything for a long while. Then Druff broke their silence. “It’s all right,” he told his son. “You can ask me.”
“That’s okay.”
“No,” Druff said, “go ahead. Ask me.”
“That’s okay.”
“I’ll tell you anyway,” said the City Commissioner of Streets. “If I dropped dead tonight, you’d still be in the black. But, really, it depends.”
“What does it depend on, Dad?”
“Whether or not you actually ran over that girl.”
“Su’ad was my girlfriend, Dad. Why would I run over my girlfriend?”
“Su’ad,” Druff said.
“I’m no dummy, Dad. Who else could you be talking about? How many accident-prone Shiite Muslims do I know?”
“Did Dick do it, did Doug?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure, Dad.”
“You were a witness?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. I was a sort of a witness.”
“What sort?”
“Gee, is this fair? I mean, I loved her, Daddy. What do you want from me? I planned to go back to Lebanon with her even if it meant they would probably have taken me hostage one of these days. So how do you think it made me feel when they ran her down?”
“Not over?”
“What?”
“Down, not over?”
“It was pretty confusing. All right,” his son said, “I’ll tell you what I think happened.”
And then, quite suddenly, Druff began to feel bored. Physically. Bored physically. As if boredom were a symptom like a tickle in your throat, a fever, or a runny nose. Perhaps he’d been exposed to too much MacGuffin. Maybe it was in his bloodstream by now. Gunking up the works. Causing rashes, eruptions, potholing his flesh. Like some disease, say, serious enough in childhood but devastating if you came down with it as an adult. What was it the old schemer had advised? Something-or-other something, or something-something, something-or-other, and that if you had enough of the one you didn’t need very much of the other. The fact was, thought the City Commissioner of Streets, solutions were boring, never as interesting as the trouble they were brought in to put an end to. Motion and sound effects. Like chase scenes. Shoot-outs. Guys scrambling over architecture or sprawled out in fields. Wrestling in water. Or caught, humbled on monuments. Dangled on ropes like clappers on bells. This far from vats, the various acid baths and boiled oils. Above great heights, precariously dancing. Fighting against time — the two-minute warning of armed nuclear devices, a few last inches of sizzling fuse. Character forgotten, left behind, left out, and only the juices of simple, driving survival left over, remaining, separated out, like whey, reduced, clarified like butter.
But Druff was in it deep now. Mikey would have his say. Bored or not, Druff would have to hear him out. It was, he supposed, almost his official duty as City Commissioner of Streets.
So the kid spoke his piece. In his old dad’s living room had, as it were, his day in court. Druff imagined Mikey rather enjoyed it, glad to get it off his chest finally, and probably feeling grateful that it was his father to whom he was telling the story, as if the story he was telling, no matter the light in which it put him, discharged, at least a little, some filial obligation he may have felt toward the old man, made up for never having brought home good enough grades, say, or given him grandkids.
It was full of detail.
He admitted that on the night Su’ad was run down he had been with her. They had attended the lecture together, an overview of the Arab- Israeli question delivered by an Arab congressman from the state of Delaware with whose conciliatory views Su’ad was in strong disagreement. Afterward, during the Q and A, Su’ad had quarreled with him. How, she asked, could he betray his own people? How, she wondered, could he even bring himself to lick up under the Israelis by referring to them at least three times in his talk as “our Israeli cousins”? The gentleman from Delaware said he felt both sides must rededicate themselves to finding a reasonable solution — he had suggested one, but Mikey had forgotten the details — to what, given the region’s long, complicated history and the antagonists’ apparently intractable positions, were problems that were only apparently insoluble.
“Solutions to apparently insoluble problems?” Su’ad had said. “But, sir,” she’d said, “I believe in the fell-swoop theory of history.”
“The fell-swoop theory of history?”
“Yes,” Su’ad had said, “when problems are apparently insoluble, final solutions must apparently be found.”
There were Jews in the audience. They made angry hoots and catcalls. Two or three started to come forward.
And Mikey, for love, rising in her defense, speaking out, backing her up, for love having his say in public, even if it was only “Stand back. Don’t touch her!” In the dark, Druff imagined, his eyes shut, mediating between Su’ad and the two or three furious Jews with his big body.
It was only afterward, he told his father, as they walked together to the parking lot to pick up the car in which he intended to drive her back to her dorm, that he thought to remind her, well out of hearing of the last stragglers leaving the auditorium, that his own father was a politician, a man who’d devoted his life to serving the public, and that it was the duty of such people to find solutions to problems that seemed insoluble and that, really, she had gone just a little too far, really, didn’t she think?
“Your father,” Su’ad had said, “doesn’t serve the public, he serves the infrastructure. He sends men to fix the streets. In winter he dispatches trucks to salt them, just as if they were soups or meats or vegetables.”
“Me?” Druff said. “You stood up for me? I’m touched.”
“Thanks, Dad, but that wasn’t really exactly the way. She was in a bad mood. PMS. You don’t normally think of women in chadors as even having periods, but, I don’t know, something was eating at her. If I said ‘black’ she’d say ‘white,’ if I said ‘up’ she’d say ’down.’ If I said ‘rugs’ she said… Well, you know what I mean.”
“Rugs?”
“Sir?”
“You said ‘rugs.’ What did she say?”
“It’s an example,” his son said uncomfortably. “I don’t think I ever actually said ‘rugs.’ ”
“Did Su’ad smuggle rugs, Mikey?” Druff asked, closing in, getting on, he supposed, toward the bottom of things, though still not excited (despite the fact that several times now he’d interrupted his son’s relation of the account of the proceedings on the night of — never mind, he’d actually forgotten — to stop them — Mikey, Su’ad — somewhere between the auditorium — those last, probably Jewish, stragglers — and the parking lot where he would admit her into the car she couldn’t possibly be both riding in and run down by at the same time), really not even off boredom’s dime, puzzles, as he’d just so recently noted, being always more interesting than their solutions, though how he, the most nouveau of gumshoes, could possibly know this he did not possibly know.
“Su’ad? Su’ad was a rug merchant, Daddy.”
“Ahh,” Druff said, “a rug merchant. She had a license to sell rugs?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know if she had a license.”
“You never saw it.”