The Accidental Tourist (19 page)

twelve

I don’t understand you,” Rose told Macon. “First you say yes, you’ll be here all afternoon, and then you say you won’t. How can I plan when you’re so disorganized?”

She was folding linen napkins and stacking them on the table, preparing her annual tea for the old people. Macon said, “Sorry, Rose, I didn’t think it would matter that much.”

“Last night you said you’d want supper and then you weren’t here to eat it. Three separate mornings these past two weeks I go to call you for breakfast and I find you haven’t slept in your bed. Don’t you think I worry? Anything might have happened.”

“Well, I said I was sorry.”

Rose smoothed the stack of napkins.

“Time creeps up on me,” he told her. “You know how it is. I mean I don’t intend to go out at all, to begin with, but then I think, ‘Oh, maybe for a little while,’ and next thing I know it’s so late, much too late to be driving, and I think to myself, ‘Well . . .’ ”

Rose turned away quickly and went over to the buffet. She started counting spoons. “I’m not asking about your private life,” she said.

“I thought in a sense you were.”

“I just need to know how much food to cook, that’s all.”

“I wouldn’t blame you for being curious,” he said.

“I just need to know how many breakfasts to fix.”

“You think I don’t notice you three? Whenever she’s here giving Edward his lesson, everyone starts coming out of the woodwork. Edging through the living room—‘Just looking for the pliers! Don’t mind me!’ Sweeping the entire front porch the minute we take Edward out for a walk.”

“Could I help it if the porch was dirty?”

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Tomorrow night I’ll definitely be here for supper. That’s a promise. You can count on it.”

“I’m not asking you to stay if you don’t want to,” she told him.

“Of course I want to! It’s just this evening I’ll be out,” he said, “but not late, I’m sure of that. Why, I bet I’ll be home before ten!”

Although even as he spoke, he heard how false and shallow he sounded, and he saw how Rose lowered her eyes.

He bought a large combination pizza and drove downtown with it. The smell made him so hungry that he kept snitching bits off the top at every stoplight—coins of pepperoni, crescents of mushroom. His fingers got all sticky and he couldn’t find his handkerchief. Pretty soon the steering wheel was sticky too. Humming to himself, he drove past tire stores, liquor stores, discount shoe stores, the Hot-Tonight Novelty Company. He took a shortcut through an alley and jounced between a double row of backyards—tiny rectangles crammed with swing sets and rusted auto parts and stunted, frozen bushes. He turned onto Singleton and drew up behind a pickup truck full of moldy rolls of carpet.

The next-door neighbor’s twin daughters were perched on their front stoop—flashy sixteen-year-olds in jeans as tight as sausage casings. It was too cold to sit outside, but that never stopped them. “Hey there, Macon,” they sing-songed.

“How are you, girls.”

“You going to see Muriel?”

“I thought I might.”

He climbed Muriel’s steps, holding the pizza level, and knocked on the door. Debbie and Dorrie continued to watch him. He flashed them a broad smile. They sometimes baby-sat with Alexander; he had to be nice to them. Half the neighborhood sat with Alexander, it seemed. He still felt confused by Muriel’s network of arrangements.

It was Alexander who opened the door. “Pizza man!” Macon told him.

“Mama’s on the phone,” Alexander said flatly. He turned away and wandered back to the couch, adjusting his glasses on his nose. Evidently he was watching TV.

“Extra-large combination, no anchovies,” Macon said.

“I’m allergic to pizza.”

“What part of it?”

“Huh?”

“What part are you allergic to? The pepperoni? Sausage? Mushrooms? We could take those off.”

“All of it,” Alexander said.

“You can’t be allergic to all of it.”

“Well, I am.”

Macon went on into the kitchen. Muriel stood with her back to him, talking on the phone with her mother. He could tell it was her mother because of Muriel’s high, sad, querulous tone. “Aren’t you going to ask how Alexander is? Don’t you want to know about his rash? I ask after
your
health, why don’t you ask about ours?”

He stepped up behind her soundlessly. “You didn’t even ask what happened with his eye doctor,” she said, “and here I was so worried about it. I swear sometimes you’d think he wasn’t your grandson! That time I sprained my ankle falling off my shoes and called to see if you’d look after him, what did you say? Said, ‘Now let me get this straight. You want me to come all the way down to your house.’ You’d think Alexander was nothing to do with you!”

Macon presented himself in front of her, holding out the pizza. “Ta-da!” he whispered. She looked up at him and gave that perky smile of hers—an ornate, Victorian V.

“Ma,” she said, “I’m going now! Macon’s here!”

It had been a long, long time since anyone made such an event of his arrival.

He went to Julian’s office on a Monday afternoon and handed over what he’d done on the U.S. guidebook. “That wraps up the Northeast,” he said. “I guess next I’ll start on the South.”

“Well, good,” Julian told him. He was bent over behind his desk, rummaging through a drawer. “Excellent. Like to show you something, Macon. Now, where in hell—ah.”

He straightened, with his face flushed. He gave Macon a tiny blue velvet box. “Your sister’s Christmas present,” he said.

Macon raised the lid. Inside, on a bed of white satin, was a diamond ring. He looked at Julian.

“What is it?” he asked.

“What
is
it?”

“I mean, is this a . . . what you would call, dinner ring? Or is it meant to be, rather . . .”

“It’s an engagement ring, Macon.”

“Engagement?”

“I want to marry her.”

“You want to marry Rose?”

“What’s so odd about that?”

“Well, I—” Macon said.

“If she’ll agree to it, that is.”

“What, you haven’t asked her yet?”

“I’ll ask her at Christmas, when I give her the ring. I want to do this properly. Old-fashioned. Do you think she’ll have me?”

“Well, I really couldn’t say,” Macon said. Unfortunately, he was sure she would, but he’d be damned if he’d tell Julian that.

“She’s got to,” Julian said. “I am thirty-six years old, Macon, but I tell you, I feel like a schoolboy about that woman. She’s everything those girls in my apartment building are not. She’s so . . . true. Want to know something? I’ve never even slept with her.”

“Well, I don’t care to hear about that,” Macon said hastily.

“I want us to have a real wedding night,” Julian told him. “I want to do everything right. I want to join a real family. God, Macon, isn’t it amazing how two separate lives can link up together? I mean two
differentnesses
? What do you think of the ring?”

Macon said, “It’s okay.” He looked down at it. Then he said, “It’s very nice, Julian,” and he closed the box gently and handed it back.

“Now, this is not your ordinary airplane,” Macon told Muriel. “I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea. This is what they call a commuter plane. It’s something a businessman would take, say, to hop to the nearest city for a day and make a few sales and hop back again.”

The plane he was referring to—a little fifteen-seater that resembled a mosquito or a gnat—stood just outside the door of the commuter’s waiting room. A girl in a parka was loading it with baggage. A boy was checking something on the wings. This appeared to be an airline run by teenagers. Even the pilot was a teenager, it seemed to Macon. He entered the waiting room, carrying a clipboard. He read off a list of names. “Marshall? Noble? Albright?” One by one the passengers stepped forward—just eight or ten of them. To each the pilot said, “Hey, how you doing.” He let his eyes rest longest on Muriel. Either he found her the most attractive or else he was struck by her outfit. She wore her highest heels, black stockings spattered with black net roses, and a flippy little fuchsia dress under a short fat coat that she referred to as her “fun fur.” Her hair was caught all to one side in a great bloom of frizz, and there was a silvery dust of some kind on her eyelids. Macon knew she’d overdone it, but at the same time he liked her considering this such an occasion.

The pilot propped open the door and they followed him outside, across a stretch of concrete, and up two rickety steps into the plane. Macon had to bend almost double as he walked down the aisle. They threaded between two rows of single seats, each seat as spindly as a folding chair. They found spaces across from each other and settled in. Other passengers struggled through, puffing and bumping into things. Last came the copilot, who had round, soft, baby cheeks and carried a can of Diet Pepsi. He slammed the door shut behind him and went up front to the controls. Not so much as a curtain hid the cockpit. Macon could lean out into the aisle and see the banks of knobs and gauges, the pilot positioning his headset, the copilot taking a final swig and setting his empty can on the floor.

“Now, on a bigger plane,” Macon called to Muriel as the engines roared up, “you’d hardly feel the takeoff. But here you’d better brace yourself.”

Muriel nodded, wide-eyed, gripping the seat ahead of her. “What’s that light that’s blinking in front of the pilot?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What’s that little needle that keeps sweeping round and round?”

“I don’t know.”

He felt he’d disappointed her. “I’m used to jets, not these toys,” he told her. She nodded again, accepting that. It occurred to Macon that he was really a very worldly and well-traveled man.

The plane started taxiing. Every pebble on the runway jolted it; every jolt sent a series of creaks through the framework. They gathered speed. The crew, suddenly grave and professional, made complicated adjustments to their instruments. The wheels left the ground. “Oh!” Muriel said, and she turned to Macon with her face all lit up.

“We’re off,” he told her.

“I’m flying!”

They rose—with some effort, Macon felt—over the fields surrounding the airport, over a stand of trees and a grid of houses. Above-ground swimming pools dotted backyards here and there like pale blue thumbtacks. Muriel pressed so close to her window that she left a circle of mist on the glass. “Oh, look!” she said to Macon, and then she said something else that he couldn’t hear. The engines on this plane were loud and harsh, and the Pepsi can was rolling around with a clattering sound, and also the pilot was bellowing to the copilot, saying something about his refrigerator. “So I wake up in the middle of the night,” he was shouting, “damn thing’s thudding and thumping—”

Muriel said, “Wouldn’t Alexander enjoy this!”

Macon hadn’t seen Alexander enjoying anything yet, but he said dutifully, “We’ll have to bring him sometime.”

“We’ll have to take just lots of trips! France and Spain and Switzerland . . .”

“Well,” Macon said, “there’s the little matter of money.”

“Just America, then. California, Florida . . .”

California and Florida took money too, Macon should have said (and Florida wasn’t even given space in his guidebook), but for the moment, he was borne along by her vision of things. “Look!” she said, and she pointed to something. Macon leaned across the aisle to see what she meant. The airplane flew so low that it might have been following road signs; he had an intimate view of farmlands, woodlands, roofs of houses. It came to him very suddenly that every little roof concealed actual lives. Well, of course he’d known that, but all at once it took his breath away. He saw how real those lives were to the people who lived them—how intense and private and absorbing. He stared past Muriel with his mouth open. Whatever she had wanted him to look at must be long past by now, but still he went on gazing out her window.

Porter and the others were talking money. Or Porter was talking money and the others were half listening. Porter was planning ahead for income taxes. He was interested in something called a chicken straddle. “The way it works,” he said, “you invest in baby chicks right now, before the end of the year. Deduct the cost of feed and such. Then sell the grown hens in January and collect the profit.”

Rose wrinkled her forehead. She said, “But chickens are so prone to colds. Or would you call it distemper. And December and January aren’t usually all that warm here.”

“They wouldn’t be here in Baltimore, Rose. God knows where they’d be. I mean these are not chickens you actually see; they’re a way to manage our taxes.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Charles said. “I hate to get involved in things someone else would be handling. It’s someone else’s word those chickens even exist.”

“You people have no imagination,” Porter said.

The four of them stood around the card table in the sun porch, helping Rose with her Christmas present for Liberty. She had constructed an addition to Liberty’s dollhouse—a garage with a guest apartment above it. The garage was convincingly untidy. Miniature wood chips littered the floor around a stack of twig-sized fire logs, and a coil of green wire made a perfect garden hose. Now they were working on the upstairs. Rose was stuffing an armchair cushion no bigger than an aspirin. Charles was cutting a sheet of wallpaper from a sample book. Porter was drilling holes for the curtain rods. There was hardly elbow room; so Macon, who had just come in with Edward, stood back and merely watched.

“Besides,” Charles said, “chickens are really not, I don’t know, very classy animals. I would hate to go round saying I’m a chicken magnate.”

“You don’t even have to mention the fact,” Porter said.

“
Beef
magnate, now; that I wouldn’t mind. Beef has more of a ring to it.”

“They’re not offering a straddle for beef, Charles.”

Macon picked up some color photos that sat beside the wallpaper book. The top photo showed a window in a room he didn’t recognize—a white-framed window with louvered shutters closed across its lower half. The next was a group portrait. Four people— blurry, out of focus—stood in a line in front of the couch. The woman wore an apron, the men wore black suits. There was something artificial about their posture. They were lined up too precisely; none of them touched the others. “Who
are
these people?” Macon asked.