The Accidental Tourist

eleven

Muriel Pritchett was how she was listed. Brave and cocky: no timorous initials for Muriel. Macon circled the number. He figured now was the time to call. It was nine in the evening. Alexander would have gone to bed. He lifted the receiver.

But what would he say?

Best to be straightforward, of course, much less hurtful; hadn’t Grandmother Leary always told them so? Muriel, last year my son died and I don’t seem to… Muriel, this has nothing to do with you personally but really I have no…

Muriel, I can’t. I just can’t.

It seemed his voice had rusted over. He held the receiver to his ear but great, sharp clots of rust were sticking in his throat.

He had never actually said out loud that Ethan was dead. He hadn’t needed to; it was in the papers (page three, page five), and then friends had told other friends, and Sarah got on the phone… So somehow, he had never spoken the words. How would he do it now? Or maybe he could make Muriel do it. Finish the sentence, please: I did have a son but he—. “He what?” she would ask. “He went to live with your wife? He ran away? He died?” Macon would nod. “But how did he die? Was it cancer? Was it a car wreck? Was it a nineteen-year-old with a pistol in a Burger Bonanza restaurant?”

He hung up.

He went to ask Rose for notepaper and she gave him some from her desk. He took it to the dining room table, sat down, and uncapped his fountain pen. Dear Muriel, he wrote. And stared at the page a while.

Funny sort of name.

Who would think of calling a little newborn baby Muriel?

He examined his pen. It was a Parker, a swirly tortoiseshell lacquer with a complicated gold nib that he liked the looks of. He examined Rose’s stationery. Cream colored. Deckle edged. Deckle! What an odd word.

Well.

Dear Muriel.

I am very sorry, he wrote, but I won’t be able to have dinner with you after all. Something has come up. He signed it, Regretfully, Macon.

Grandmother Leary would not have approved.

He sealed the envelope and tucked it in his shirt pocket. Then he went to the kitchen where Rose kept a giant city map thumb-tacked to the wall.

Driving through the labyrinth of littered, cracked, dark streets in the south of the city, Macon wondered how Muriel could feel safe living here. There were too many murky alleys and stairwells full of rubbish and doorways lined with tattered shreds of posters. The gridded shops with their ineptly lettered signs offered services that had a sleazy ring to them: CHECKS CASHED NO QUESTIONS, TINY BUBBA’S INCOME TAX, SAME DAY AUTO RECOLORING. Even this late on a cold November night, clusters of people lurked in the shadows — young men drinking out of brown paper bags, middle-aged women arguing under a movie marquee that read CLOSED.

He turned onto Singleton and found a block of row houses that gave a sense of having been skimped on. The roofs were flat, the windows flush and lacking depth. There was nothing to spare, no excess material for overhangs or decorative moldings, no generosity. Most were covered in formstone, but the bricks of Number 16 had been painted a rubbery maroon. An orange bugproof bulb glowed dimly above the front stoop.

He got out of the car and climbed the steps. He opened the screen door, which was made of pitted aluminum. It clattered in a cheap way and the hinges shrieked. He winced. He took the letter from his pocket and bent down.

“I’ve got a double-barreled shotgun,” Muriel said from inside the house, “and I’m aiming it exactly where your head is.”

He straightened sharply. His heart started pounding. (Her voice sounded level and accurate — like her shotgun, he imagined.) He said, “It’s Macon.”

“Macon?”

The latch clicked and the inner door opened several inches. He saw a sliver of Muriel in a dark-colored robe. She said, “Macon! What are you doing here?”

He gave her the letter.

She took it and opened it, using both hands. (There wasn’t a trace of a shotgun.) She read it and looked up at him.

He saw he had done it all wrong.

“Last year,” he said, “I lost… I experienced a… loss, yes, I lost my…”

She went on looking into his face.

“I lost my son,” Macon said. “He was just… he went to a hamburger joint and then… someone came, a holdup man, and shot him. I can’t go to dinner with people! I can’t talk to their little boys! You have to stop asking me. I don’t mean to hurt your feelings but I’m just not up to this, do you hear?”

She took one of his wrists very gently and she drew him into the house, still not fully opening the door, so that he had a sense of slipping through something, of narrowly evading something. She closed the door behind him. She put her arms around him and hugged him.

“Every day I tell myself it’s time to be getting over this,” he said into the space above her head. “I know that people expect it of me. They used to offer their sympathy but now they don’t; they don’t even mention his name. They think it’s time my life moved on. But if anything, I’m getting worse. The first year was like a bad dream — I was clear to his bedroom door in the morning before I remembered he wasn’t there to be wakened. But this second year is real. I’ve stopped going to his door. I’ve sometimes let a whole day pass by without thinking about him. That absence is more terrible than the first, in a way. And you’d suppose I would turn to Sarah but no, we only do each other harm. I believe that Sarah thinks I could have prevented what happened, somehow — she’s so used to my arranging her life. I wonder if all this has only brought out the truth about us — how far apart we are. I’m afraid we got married because we were far apart. And now I’m far from everyone; I don’t have any friends anymore and everyone looks trivial and foolish and not related to me.”

She drew him through a living room where shadows loomed above a single beaded lamp, and a magazine lay face down on a lumpy couch. She led him up a stairway and across a hall and into a bedroom with an iron bedstead and a varnished orange bureau.

“No,” he said, “wait. This is not what I want.”

“Just sleep,” she told him. “Lie down and sleep.”

That seemed reasonable.

She removed his duffel coat and hung it on a hook in a closet curtained with a length of flowered sheeting. She knelt and untied his shoes. He stepped out of them obediently. She rose to unbutton his shirt and he stood passive with his hands at his sides. She hung his trousers over a chair back. He dropped onto the bed in his underwear and she covered him with a thin, withered quilt that smelled of bacon grease.

Next he heard her moving through the rest of the house, snapping off lights, running water, murmuring something in another room. She returned to the bedroom and stood in front of the bureau. Earrings clinked into a dish. Her robe was old, shattered silk, the color of sherry. It tied at the waist with a twisted cord and the elbows were clumsily darned. She switched off the lamp. Then she came over to the bed and lifted the quilt and slid under it. He wasn’t surprised when she pressed against him. “I just want to sleep,” he told her. But there were those folds of silk. He felt how cool and fluid the silk was. He put a hand on her hip and felt the two layers of her, cool over warm. He said, “Will you take this off?”

She shook her head. “I’m bashful,” she whispered, but immediately afterward, as if to deny that, she put her mouth on his mouth and wound herself around him.

In the night he heard a child cough, and he swam up protestingly through layers of dreams to answer. But he was in a room with one tall blue window, and the child was not Ethan. He turned over and found Muriel. She sighed in her sleep and lifted his hand and placed it upon her stomach. The robe had fallen open; he felt smooth skin, and then a corrugated ridge of flesh jutting across her abdomen. The Caesarean, he thought. And it seemed to him, as he sank back into his dreams, that she had as good as spoken aloud. About your son, she seemed to be saying: Just put your hand here. I’m scarred, too. We’re all scarred. You are not the only one.