The Elephant in the Room

The Elephant in the Room

“What do you mean by dragging that in?” she asked me as I pulled the white elephant into the room. I wasn’t really a “white elephant” so much as a statue of an elephant somebody thought should be white and so painted it so. It was made of papier-mâché and about five and a half feet high. Hence, it was, technically speaking, a really a baby white elephant in every sense of the word.

“I bought it.” I said simply.

She was not amused. “You bought it?” she asked as if the three words revealed a level of stupidity unattainable by any human in the history of the planet..

“Not exactly” I responded with more than a little fear in my voice. “You see, we were playing cards and, well, every time we played the guy who sat by the elephant won. Every time. For weeks and weeks it’s been going on.”
She said nothing, just shaking her head.

So I rushed on. “And, well, I figured that we could use some luck so I sort of convinced Bill he should sell it to me.”

Now her eyes got big. “Bill sold it to you?” She hated Bill with a passion. Not that there wasn’t a lot to hate. He was, and we all knew it, a man without morals of any kind. If he thought shooting his mother would earn him a buck he would have shot his mother. But if he was rotten to the core he was also a lot of fun to be around. So we – I mean the guys and me – watched him like a hawk and let him play poker with us. At first when we invited him we thought we’d catch him cheating a lot. But instead we noticed that he won and lost just about as often as each of us. It was our distrust of him that also made us notice that the guy who sat by the elephant always won.

So I pulled the white elephant into the middle of the room and sat down on the couch. It dominated the room. “So what are you going to do with it?” she asked?

I thought for moment before answering carefully. “Well…you see it’s …uh … magic?” I managed, stumbling along and slowly dropping my voice until the last word, the “magic” was issued in a whisper.

She looked at me, then at the elephant in the room, then at me again. “Magic, huh?” she said.

“Yeah.” Then, taking a big breath, I told her the story. How we played cards every Wednesday, -- which she already knew – and how the guy who sat closest to the elephant always won. We thought it was just a coincidence but it kept happening so we, well, at least I, figured it was magic. And once I figured that out I decided to buy it. And since it was in Bill’s house I made him an offer for it.

“How much?” she asked, obviously expecting the worse.

“A thousand,’ I told her, avoiding her gaze.

She gasped, then added, “A thousand! Are you nuts! We haven’t got a thousand! Not for anything, let alone something as stupid as this…this…thing!”

She was off and running. For the next hour the conversation – well, not conversation exactly, more like a harangue – continued. She said I was stupid and was, in her words, “incapable of an intelligent thought, devoid of insights, introspection, or any other form of self-reflection, and blind to the subtleties of common sense.” All of which may or may not be true -- if I could have figured out what she meant by all those big words. So I just sat there watching her slowly build up to a previously and probably never again attainable peak of pure rage. And as I watched I noticed her entire countenance turning first to a bright pink, followed by an ever deepening red, and finally, just before she toppled over, an utterly scary shade of deep purple.

I sat there looking at her laying there, her hands clasped at her throat for about ten minutes before I figured she might need help. But who call? It took me another ten minutes to figure it out by which time she was most certainly no longer angry about the elephant – or anything else for that matter. So I called Bill. When he answered I just thanked him again for the white elephant. It was, like I said, obviously quite magical. He just laughed.