The Accidental Tourist (4 page)

At suppertime, he should have tried someplace formal. He had to list at least one formal restaurant in every city for entertaining clients. But tonight he wasn’t up to it. Instead, he went to a café he liked called My American Cousin. The diners there had American accents, and so did some of the staff, and the hostess handed out tickets at the door with numbers on them. If your number was called on the loudspeaker you could win a free TV, or at least a framed color print of the restaurant.

Macon ordered a comforting supper of plain boiled vegetables and two lamb chops in white paper bobby socks, along with a glass of milk. The man at the next table was also on his own. He was eating a nice pork pie, and when the waitress offered him dessert he said, “Oh, now, let me see, maybe I will try some at that,” in the slow, pleased, coax-me drawl of someone whose womenfolks have all his life encouraged him to put a little meat on his bones. Macon himself had the gingerbread. It came with cream, just the way it used to at his grandmother’s house.

By eight o’clock, according to his wristwatch, he was in bed. It was much too early, of course, but he could stretch the day only so far; the English thought it was midnight. Tomorrow he would start his whirlwind dashes through other cities. He’d pick out a few token hotels, sample a few token breakfasts. Coffee with caffeine and coffee without caffeine. Bacon underdone and overdone. Orange juice fresh and canned and frozen. More showerheads, more mattresses. Hair dryers supplied on request? 110-volt switches for electric shavers? When he fell asleep, he thought anonymous rooms were revolving past on a merry-go-round. He thought webbed canvas suitcase stands, ceiling sprinklers, and laminated lists of fire regulations approached and slid away and approached again, over and over all the rest of his days. He thought Ethan was riding a plaster camel and calling, “Catch me!” and falling, but Macon couldn’t get there in time and when he reached his arms out, Ethan was gone.

It was one of Macon’s bad habits to start itching to go home too early. No matter how short a stay he’d planned, partway through he would decide that he ought to leave, that he’d allowed himself far too much time, that everything truly necessary had already been accomplished—or almost everything, almost accomplished. Then the rest of his visit was spent in phone calls to travel agents and fruitless trips to airline offices and standby waits that came to nothing, so that he was forced to return to the hotel he’d just checked out of. He always promised himself this wouldn’t happen again, but somehow it always did. In England, it happened on his fourth afternoon. What more was there to do? he started wondering. Hadn’t he got the gist of the place?

Well, be honest: It was Saturday. He chanced to notice, entering the date in his expense book, that at home it was Saturday morning. Sarah would be stopping by the house for the rug.

She would open the front door and smell home. She would pass through the rooms where she’d been so happy all these years. (Hadn’t she been happy?) She would find the cat stretched out on the couch, long and lazy and languid, and she’d settle on the cushion next to her and think,
How could I have left?

Unfortunately, it was summer, and the airlines were overbooked. He spent two days tracking down faint possibilities that evaporated the instant he drew close. “Anything! Get me anything! I don’t have to go to New York; I’ll go to Dulles. I’ll go to Montreal! Chicago! Shoot, I’ll go to Paris or Berlin and see if they have flights. Are there ships? How long do ships take, nowadays? What if this were an emergency? I mean my mother on her deathbed or something? Are you saying there’s just no way out of this place?”

The people he dealt with were unfailingly courteous and full of chirpy good humor—really, if not for the strain of travel he believed he might actually have liked the English—but they couldn’t solve his problem. In the end he had to stay on. He spent the rest of the week huddled in his room watching TV, chewing a knuckle, subsisting on nonperishable groceries and lukewarm soft drinks because he couldn’t face another restaurant.

So he was first in line, naturally, at the check-in counter on the day of his departure. He had his pick of seats: window, nonsmoking. Next to him was a very young couple completely absorbed in each other, so he didn’t need
Miss MacIntosh
but sat staring out at the clouds all the long, dull afternoon.

Afternoon was never his favorite time; that was the worst of these homeward flights. It was afternoon for hours and hours, through drinks and lunch and drinks again—all of which he waved away. It was afternoon when they showed the movie; the passengers had to pull their shades down. An orange light filled the plane, burdensome and thick.

Once when he’d been away on an unusually difficult trip—to Japan, where you couldn’t even memorize the signs in order to find your way back to a place—Sarah had met his plane in New York. It was their fifteenth anniversary and she had wanted to surprise him. She called Becky at the travel agency to ask his flight number and then she left Ethan with her mother and flew to Kennedy, bringing with her a picnic hamper of wine and cheeses which they shared in the terminal while waiting for their plane home. Every detail of that meal remained in Macon’s memory: the cheeses set out on a marble slab, the wine in stemmed crystal glasses that had somehow survived the trip. He could still taste the satiny Brie. He could still see Sarah’s small, shapely hand resolutely slicing the bread.

But she didn’t meet him in New York today.

She didn’t even meet him in Baltimore.

He collected his car from the lot and drove into the city through a glowering twilight that seemed to promise something—a thunder-storm or heat lightning, something dramatic. Could she be waiting at home? In her striped caftan that he was so fond of? With a cool summer supper laid out on the patio table?

Careful not to take anything for granted, he stopped at a Seven-Eleven for milk. He drove to the vet’s to pick up Edward. He arrived at the Meow-Bow minutes before closing time; somehow, he’d managed to lose his way. There was no one at the counter. He had to ring the service bell. A girl with a ponytail poked her head through a door, letting in a jumble of animal sounds that rose at all different pitches like an orchestra tuning up. “Yes?” she said.

“I’m here for my dog.”

She came forward to open a folder that lay on the counter. “Your last name?”

“Leary.”

“Oh,” she said. “Just a minute.”

Macon wondered what Edward had done wrong this time.

The girl disappeared, and a moment later the other one came out, the frizzy one. This evening she wore a V-necked black dress splashed with big pink flowers, its shoulders padded and its skirt too skimpy; and preposterously high-heeled sandals. “Well, hi there!” she said brightly. “How was your trip?”

“Oh, it was . . . where’s Edward? Isn’t he all right?”

“Sure, he’s all right. He was so good and sweet and friendly!”

“Well, fine,” Macon said.

“We just got on like a house afire. Seems he took a shine to me, I couldn’t say why.”

“Wonderful,” Macon said. He cleared his throat. “So could I have him back, please?”

“Caroline will bring him.”

“Ah.”

There was a silence. The woman waited, facing him and wearing a perky smile, with her fingers laced together on the counter. She had painted her nails dark red, Macon saw, and put on a blackish lipstick that showed her mouth to be an unusually complicated shape—angular, like certain kinds of apples.

“Um,” Macon said finally. “Maybe I could pay.”

“Oh, yes.”

She stopped smiling and peered down at the open folder. “That’ll be forty-two dollars,” she said.

Macon gave her a credit card. She had trouble working the embossing machine; everything had to be done with the flats of her hands, to spare her nails. She filled in the blanks in a jerky scrawl and then turned the bill in his direction. “Signature and phone,” she said. She leaned over the counter to watch what he wrote. “Is that your home phone, or your business?”

“It’s both. Why? What difference does it make?” he asked.

“I was just wondering,” she told him. She tore off his copy, in that splay-fingered style of hers, and put the rest of the bill in a drawer. “I don’t know if I mentioned before that it so happens I train dogs.”

“Is that right,” Macon said.

He looked toward the door where the first girl had disappeared. It always made him nervous when they took too long bringing Edward. What were they doing back there—getting rid of some evidence?

“My speciality is dogs that bite,” the woman said.

“Specialty.”

“Pardon?”

“Webster prefers ‘specialty.’ ”

She gave him a blank look.

“That must be a dangerous job,” Macon said politely.

“Oh, not for me! I’m not scared of a thing in this world.”

There was a scuffling sound at the door behind her. Edward burst through, followed by the girl with the ponytail. Edward was giving sharp yelps and flinging himself about so joyfully that when Macon bent to pat him, he couldn’t really connect.

“Now, stop that,” the girl told Edward. She was trying to buckle his collar. Meanwhile, the woman behind the counter was saying, “Biters, barkers, deaf dogs, timid dogs, dogs that haven’t been treated right, dogs that have learned bad habits, dogs that grew up in pet shops and don’t trust human beings . . . I can handle all of those.”

“Well, good,” Macon said.

“Not that he would bite
me
, of course,” the woman said. “He just fell in love with me, like I think I was telling you.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Macon said.

“But I could train him in no time not to bite other people. You think it over and call me. Muriel, remember? Muriel Pritchett. Let me give you my card.”

She handed him a salmon-pink business card that she seemed to have pulled out of nowhere. He had to fight his way around Edward to accept it. “I studied with a man who used to train attack dogs,” she said. “This is not some amateur you’re looking at.”

“Well, I’ll bear that in mind,” Macon said. “Thank you very much.”

“Or just call for no reason! Call and talk.”

“Talk?”

“Sure! Talk about Edward, his problems, talk about . . . anything! Pick up the phone and just talk. Don’t you ever get the urge to do that?”

“Not really,” Macon said.

Then Edward gave a particularly piercing yelp, and the two of them rushed home.

Well, of course she wasn’t there. He knew it the instant he stepped inside the house, when he smelled that stale hot air and heard the muffled denseness of a place with every window shut. Really he’d known it all along. He’d been fooling himself. He’d been making up fairy tales.

The cat streaked past him and escaped out the door, yowling accusingly. The dog hurtled into the dining room to roll about on the rug and get rid of the scent of the kennel. But there was no rug—only bare, linty floor, and Edward stopped short, looking foolish. Macon knew just how he felt.

He put away the milk and went upstairs to unpack. He took a shower, treading the day’s dirty clothes underfoot, and prepared for bed. When he turned off the light in the bathroom, the sight of his laundry dripping over the tub reminded him of travel. Where was the real difference?
Accidental Tourist at Home,
he thought, and he slid wearily into his body bag.

four

When the phone rang, Macon dreamed it was Ethan. He dreamed Ethan was calling from camp, wondering why they’d never come to get him. “But we thought you were dead,” Macon said, and Ethan said—in that clear voice of his that cracked on the high notes—“Why would you think
that
?” The phone rang again and Macon woke up. There was a thud of disappointment somewhere inside his rib cage. He understood why people said hearts “sank.”

In slow motion, he reached for the receiver. “Yes,” he said.

“Macon! Welcome back!”

It was Julian Edge, Macon’s boss, his usual loud and sprightly self even this early in the morning. “Oh,” Macon said.

“How was the trip?”

“It was okay.”

“You just get in last night?”

“Yes.”

“Find any super new places?”

“Well, ‘super’ would be putting it a bit strongly.”

“So now I guess you start writing it up.”

Macon said nothing.

“Just when do you figure to bring me a manuscript?” Julian asked.

“I don’t know,” Macon said.

“Soon, do you figure?”

“I don’t know.”

There was a pause.

“I guess I woke you,” Julian said.

“Yes.”

“Macon Leary in bed,” Julian said. He made it sound like the title of something. Julian was younger than Macon and brasher, breezier, not a serious man. He seemed to enjoy pretending that Macon was some kind of character. “So anyway, can I expect it by the end of the month?”

“No,” Macon said.

“Why not?”

“I’m not organized.”

“Not organized! What’s to organize? All you have to do is retype your old one, basically.”

“There’s a lot more to it than that,” Macon said.

“Look. Fellow. Here it is—” Julian’s voice grew fainter. He’d be drawing back to frown at his flashy gold calendar watch with the perforated leather racing band. “Here it is the third of August. I want this thing on the stands by October. That means I’d need your manuscript by August thirty-first.”

“I can’t do it,” Macon said.

In fact, it amazed him he’d found the strength to carry on this conversation.

“August thirty-first, Macon. That’s four full weeks away.”

“It’s not enough,” Macon said.

“Not enough,” Julian said. “Well. All right, then: mid-September. It’s going to knock a good many things out of whack, but I’ll give you till mid-September. How’s that?”

“I don’t know,” Macon said.

The dullness of his voice interested him. He felt strangely distant from himself. Julian might have sensed this, for after another pause he said, “Hey. Pal. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Macon told him.

“I know you’ve been through a lot, pal—”

“I’m fine! Just fine! What could be wrong? All I need is time to get organized. I’ll have the manuscript in by September fifteenth. Possibly earlier. Yes, very possibly earlier. Maybe the end of August. All right?”

Then he hung up.

But his study was so dim and close, and it gave off the salty, inky smell of mental fidgeting. He walked in and felt overwhelmed by his task, as if finally chaos had triumphed. He turned around and walked out again.

Maybe he couldn’t get his guidebook organized, but organizing the household was another matter entirely. There was something fulfilling about that, something consoling—or more than consoling; it gave him the sense of warding off a danger. Over the next week or so, he traveled through the rooms setting up new systems. He radically rearranged all the kitchen cupboards, tossing out the little bits of things in sticky, dusty bottles that Sarah hadn’t opened in years. He plugged the vacuum cleaner into a hundred-foot extension cord originally meant for lawn mowers. He went out to the yard and weeded, trimmed, pruned, clipped—stripping down, he pictured it. Up till now Sarah had done the gardening, and certain features of it came as a surprise to him. One variety of weed shot off seeds explosively the instant he touched it, a magnificent last-ditch stand, while others gave way so easily—too easily, breaking at the topmost joint so their roots remained in the ground. Such tenacity! Such genius for survival! Why couldn’t human beings do as well?

He stretched a clothesline across the basement so he wouldn’t have to use the dryer. Dryers were a terrible waste of energy. Then he disconnected the dryer’s wide flexible exhaust tube, and he taught the cat to go in and out through the empty windowpane where the tube had exited. This meant no more litterbox. Several times a day the cat leapt soundlessly to the laundry sink, stood up long and sinewy on her hind legs, and sprang through the window.

It was a pity Edward couldn’t do the same. Macon hated walking him; Edward had never been trained to heel and kept winding his leash around Macon’s legs. Oh, dogs were so much trouble. Dogs ate mammoth amounts of food, too; Edward’s kibble had to be lugged home from the supermarket, dragged out of the car trunk and up the steep front steps and through the house to the pantry. But for that, at least, Macon finally thought of a solution. At the foot of the old coal chute in the basement he set a plastic trash can, with a square cut out of the bottom. Then he poured the remainder of a sack of kibble into the trash can, which magically became a continuous feeder like the cat’s. Next time he bought dog food, he could just drive around to the side of the house and send it rattling down the coal chute.

The only hitch was, Edward turned out to be scared of the basement. Every morning he went to the pantry where his breakfast used to be served, and he sat on his fat little haunches and whimpered. Macon had to carry him bodily down the basement stairs, staggering slightly while Edward scrabbled in his arms. Since the whole idea had been to spare Macon’s trick back, he felt he’d defeated his purpose. Still, he kept trying.

Also with his back in mind, he tied the clothes basket to Ethan’s old skateboard and he dropped a drawstring bag down the laundry chute at the end of a rope. This meant he never had to carry the laundry either up or down the stairs, or even across the basement. Sometimes, though—laboriously scooting the wheeled basket from the clothesline to the laundry chute, stuffing clean sheets into the bag, running upstairs to haul them in by the long, stiff rope— Macon felt a twinge of embarrassment. Was it possible that this might be sort of silly?

Well, everything was silly, when you got right down to it.

The neighborhood must have learned by now that Sarah had left him. People started telephoning on ordinary weeknights and inviting him to take “potluck” with them. Macon thought at first they meant one of those arrangements where everybody brings a different pot of something and if you’re lucky you end up with a balanced meal. He arrived at Bob and Sue Carney’s with a bowl of macaroni and cheese. Since Sue was serving spaghetti, he didn’t feel he’d been all that lucky. She set his macaroni at one end of the table and no one ate it but Delilah, the three-year-old. She had several helpings, though.

Macon hadn’t expected to find the children at the table. He saw he was somebody different now, some kind of bachelor uncle who was assumed to need a glimpse of family life from time to time. But the fact was, he had never much liked other people’s children. And gatherings of any sort depressed him. Physical contact with people not related to him—an arm around his shoulder, a hand on his sleeve—made him draw inward like a snail. “You know, Macon,” Sue Carney said, leaning across the table to pat his wrist, “whenever you get the urge, you’re welcome to drop in on us. Don’t wait for an invitation.”

“That’s nice of you, Sue,” he said. He wondered why it was that outsiders’ skin felt so unreal—almost waxy, as if there were an invisible extra layer between him and them. As soon as possible, he moved his wrist.

“If you could live any way you wanted,” Sarah had once told him, “I suppose you’d end up on a desert island with no other human beings.”

“Why! That’s not true at all,” he’d said. “I’d have you, and Ethan, and my sister and brothers . . .”

“But no people. I mean, people there just by chance, people you didn’t know.”

“Well, no, I guess not,” he’d said. “Would you?”

But of course she would—back then. Back before Ethan died. She’d always been a social person. When there was nothing else to do she’d stroll happily through a shopping mall—Macon’s notion of hell, with all those strangers’ shoulders brushing his. Sarah thought crowds were exciting. She liked to meet new people. She was fond of parties, even cocktail parties. You’d have to be crazy to like cocktail parties, Macon thought—those scenes of confusion she used to drag him to, where he was made to feel guilty if he managed by some fluke to get involved in a conversation of any depth. “Circulate. Circulate,” Sarah would hiss, passing behind him with her drink.

That had changed during this past year. Sarah didn’t like crowds anymore. She never went near a mall, hadn’t made him go to any parties. They attended only quiet little dinners and she herself had not given a dinner since Ethan died. He’d asked her once, “Shouldn’t we have the Smiths and Millards over? They’ve had us so often.”

Sarah said, “Yes. You’re right. Pretty soon.” And then did nothing about it.

He and she had met at a party. They’d been seventeen years old. It was one of those mixer things, combining their two schools. Even at that age Macon had disliked parties, but he was secretly longing to fall in love and so he had braved this mixer but then stood off in a corner looking unconcerned, he hoped, and sipping his ginger ale. It was 1958. The rest of the world was in button-down shirts, but Macon wore a black turtleneck sweater, black slacks, and sandals. (He was passing through his poet stage.) And Sarah, a bubbly girl with a tumble of copper-brown curls and a round face, large blue eyes, a plump lower lip—she wore something pink, he remembered, that made her skin look radiant. She was ringed by admiring boys. She was short and tidily made, and there was something plucky about the way her little tan calves were so firmly braced, as if she were determined that this looming flock of basketball stars and football stars would not bowl her over. Macon gave up on her at once. No, not even that—he didn’t even consider her, not for a single second, but gazed beyond her to other, more attainable girls. So it had to be Sarah who made the first move. She came over to him and asked what he was acting so stuck-up about. “Stuck-up!” he said. “I’m not stuck-up.”

“You sure do look it.”

“No, I’m just . . . bored,” he told her.

“Well, so do you want to dance, or not?”

They danced. He was so unprepared that it passed in a blur. He enjoyed it only later, back home, where he could think it over in a calmer state of mind. And thinking it over, he saw that if he hadn’t looked stuck-up she never would have noticed him. He was the only boy who had not openly pursued her. He would be wise not to pursue her in the future; not to seem too eager, not to show his feelings. With Sarah you had to keep your dignity, he sensed.

Lord knows, though, keeping his dignity wasn’t easy. Macon lived with his grandparents, and they believed that no one under eighteen ought to have a driver’s license. (Never mind if the state of Maryland felt otherwise.) So Grandfather Leary drove Macon and Sarah on their dates. His car was a long black Buick with a velvety gray backseat on which Macon sat all by himself, for his grandfather considered it unseemly for the two of them to sit there together. “I am not your hired chauffeur,” he said, “and besides, the backseat has connotations.” (Much of Macon’s youth was ruled by connotations.) So Macon sat alone in back and Sarah sat up front with Grandfather Leary. Her cloud of hair, seen against the glare of oncoming headlights, reminded Macon of a burning bush. He would lean forward, clear his throat, and ask, “Um, did you finish your term paper?”

Sarah would say, “Pardon?”

“Term paper,” Grandfather Leary would tell her. “Boy wants to know if you finished it.”

“Oh. Yes, I finished it.”

“She finished it,” Grandfather Leary relayed to Macon.

“I do have ears, Grandfather.”

“You want to get out and walk? Because I don’t have to stand for any mouthing off. I could be home with my loved ones, not motoring around in the dark.”

“Sorry, Grandfather.”

Macon’s only hope was silence. He sat back, still and aloof, knowing that when Sarah looked she’d see nothing but a gleam of blond hair and a blank face—the rest darkness, his black turtleneck blending into the shadows. It worked. “What do you
think
about all the time?” she asked in his ear as they two-stepped around her school gym. He only quirked a corner of his mouth, as if amused, and didn’t answer.

Things weren’t much different when he got his license. Things weren’t much different when he went away to college, though he did give up his black turtlenecks and turn into a Princeton man, crisply, casually attired in white shirts and khakis. Separated from Sarah, he felt a constant hollowness, but in his letters he talked only about his studies. Sarah, home at Goucher, wrote back,
Don’t
you miss me a little? I can’t go anywhere we’ve been for fear I’ll see
you looking so mysterious across the room.
She signed her letters
I love you
and he signed his
Fondly
. At night he dreamed she lay next to him, her curls making a whispery sound against his pillow, although all they’d done in real life was a lengthy amount of kissing. He wasn’t sure, to tell the truth, that he could manage much more without . . . how did they put it in those days? Losing his cool. Sometimes, he was almost angry with Sarah. He felt he’d been backed into a false position. He was forced to present this impassive front if he wanted her to love him. Oh, so much was expected of men!

She wrote she wasn’t dating other people. Neither was Macon, but of course he didn’t say so. He came home in the summer and worked at his grandfather’s factory; Sarah worked on a tan at the neighborhood pool. Halfway through that summer, she said she wondered why he’d never asked to sleep with her. Macon thought about that and then said, levelly, that in fact he’d like to ask her now. They went to her parents’ house; her parents were vacationing in Rehoboth. They climbed the stairs to her little bedroom, all white ruffles and hot sunlight baking the smell of fresh paint. “Did you bring a whatchamacallit?” Sarah asked, and Macon, unwilling to admit that he hardly knew what one looked like, barked, “
No,
I didn’t bring a whatchamacallit, who do you think I am?”—a senseless question, if you stopped to examine it, but Sarah took it to mean that he was shocked by her, that he thought her too forward, and she said, “Well, excuse me for living!” and ran down the stairs and out of the house. It took him half an hour to find her, and longer than that to make her stop crying. Really, he said, he’d only been thinking of her welfare: In his experience, whatchamacallits weren’t all that safe. He tried to sound knowledgeable and immune to passions of the moment. He suggested she visit a doctor he knew—it happened to be the doctor who treated his grandmother’s Female Complaint. Sarah dried her tears and borrowed Macon’s pen to write the doctor’s name on the back of a chewing gum wrapper. But wouldn’t the doctor refuse her? she asked. Wouldn’t he say she ought to be at least engaged? Well, all right, Macon said, they would get engaged. Sarah said that would be lovely.