The Accidental Tourist

two

After his wife left him, Macon had thought the house would seem larger. Instead, he felt more crowded. The windows shrank. The ceilings lowered. There was something insistent about the furniture, as if it were pressing in on him.

Of course Sarah’s personal belongings were gone, the little things like clothes and jewelry. But it emerged that some of the big things were more personal than he’d imagined. There was the drop-leaf desk in the living room, its pigeonholes stuffed with her clutter of torn envelopes and unanswered letters. There was the radio in the kitchen, set to play 98 Rock. (She liked to keep in touch with her students, she used to say in the old days, as she hummed and jittered her way around the breakfast table.) There was the chaise out back where she had sunbathed, planted in the only spot that got any sun at all. He looked at the flowered cushions and marveled at how an empty space could be so full of a person — her faint scent of coconut oil that always made him wish for a piña colada; her wide, gleaming face inscrutable behind dark glasses; her compact body in the skirted swimsuit she had tearfully insisted on buying after her fortieth birthday. Threads of her exuberant hair showed up at the bottom of the sink. Her shelf in the medicine cabinet, stripped, was splashed with drops of liquid rouge in a particularly plummy shade that brought her instantly to Macon’s mind. He had always disapproved of her messiness but now those spills seemed touching, like colorful toys left on the floor after a child has gone to bed.

The house itself was medium-sized, unexceptional to look at, standing on a street of such houses in an older part of Baltimore. Heavy oak trees hung over it, shading it from the hot summer sun but also blocking breezes. The rooms inside were square and dim. All that remained in Sarah’s closet was a brown silk sash hanging on a hook; in her bureau drawers, lint balls and empty perfume bottles. Their son’s old room was neatly made up, as sleek as a room in a Holiday Inn. Some places, the walls gave off a kind of echo. Still, Macon noticed he had a tendency to hold his arms close to his body, to walk past furniture sideways as if he imagined the house could barely accommodate him. He felt too tall. His long, clumsy feet seemed unusually distant. He ducked his head in doorways.

Now was his chance to reorganize, he told himself. He was struck by an incongruous little jolt of interest. The fact was that running a house required some sort of system, and Sarah had never understood that. She was the sort of woman who stored her flatware intermingled. She thought nothing of running a dishwasher with only a handful of forks stacked inside. Macon found that distressing. He was opposed to dishwashers in general; he believed they wasted energy. Energy saving was a hobby of his, you might say.

He started keeping the kitchen sink filled at all times, adding some chlorine bleach for disinfectant. As he finished using each dish, he dropped it in. On alternate days he pulled the plug and sprayed everything with very hot water. Then he stacked the rinsed dishes in the empty dishwasher — which had become, under his new system, a gigantic storage area.

When he hunkered over the sink to let the spray attachment run, he often had the feeling that Sarah was watching. He sensed that if he slid his eyes just slightly to the left, he would find her with her arms folded across her chest, her head tipped and her full, curved lips meditatively pursed. At first glance she was simply studying his procedure; at second glance (he knew) she was laughing at him. There was a secret little gleam in her eyes that he was all too familiar with. “I see,” she would say, nodding at some lengthy explanation of his; then he’d look up and catch the gleam and the telltale tuck at one corner of her mouth.

In this vision of her — if you could call it a vision, considering that he never did glance over at her — she was wearing a bright blue dress from the early days of their marriage. He had no idea when she had given that dress up, but certainly it was years and years ago. He almost felt that Sarah was a ghost — that she was dead. In a way (he thought, turning off the faucet), she was dead, that young, vivid Sarah from their first enthusiastic apartment on Cold Spring Lane. When he tried to recall those days, any image of Sarah was altered by the fact that she had left him. When he pictured their introduction — back when they were barely out of childhood — it seemed nothing more than the beginning of their parting. When she had looked up at him that first night and rattled the ice cubes in her paper cup, they were already moving toward their last edgy, miserable year together, toward those months when anything either of them said was wrong, toward that sense of narrowly missed connections. They were like people who run to meet, holding out their arms, but their aim is wrong; they pass each other and keep running. It had all amounted to nothing, in the end. He gazed down at the sink, and the warmth from the dishes drifted gently up into his face.

Well, you have to carry on. You have to carry on. He decided to switch his shower from morning to night. This showed adaptability, he felt — some freshness of spirit. While he showered he let the water collect in the tub, and he stalked around in noisy circles, sloshing the day’s dirty clothes underfoot. Later he wrung out the clothes and hung them on hangers to dry. Then he dressed in tomorrow’s underwear so he wouldn’t have to launder any pajamas. In fact, his only real laundry was a load of towels and sheets once a week — just two towels, but quite a lot of sheets. This was because he had developed a system that enabled him to sleep in clean sheets every night without the trouble of bed changing. He’d been proposing the system to Sarah for years, but she was so set in her ways. What he did was strip the mattress of all linens, replacing them with a giant sort of envelope made from one of the seven sheets he had folded and stitched together on the sewing machine. He thought of this invention as a Macon Leary Body Bag. A body bag required no tucking in, was unmussable, easily changeable, and the perfect weight for summer nights. In winter he would have to devise something warmer, but he couldn’t think of winter yet. He was barely making it from one day to the next as it was.

At moments — while he was skidding on the mangled clothes in the bathtub or struggling into his body bag on the naked, rust-stained mattress — he realized that he might be carrying things too far. He couldn’t explain why, either. He’d always had a fondness for method, but not what you would call a mania. Thinking then of Sarah’s lack of method, he wondered if that had got out of hand now too. Maybe all these years, they’d been keeping each other on a reasonable track. Separated, demagnetized somehow, they wandered wildly off course. He pictured Sarah’s new apartment, which he had never seen, as chaotic to the point of madness, with sneakers in the oven and the sofa heaped with china. The mere thought of it upset him. He looked gratefully at his own surroundings.

Most of his work was done at home; otherwise he might not have cared so about the mechanics of the household. He had a little study in the spare room off the kitchen. Seated in a stenographer’s chair, tapping away at a typewriter that had served him through four years of college, he wrote a series of guidebooks for people forced to travel on business. Ridiculous, when you thought about it: Macon hated travel. He careened through foreign territories on a desperate kind of blitz — squinching his eyes shut and holding his breath and hanging on for dear life, he sometimes imagined — and then settled back home with a sigh of relief to produce his chunky, passport-sized paperbacks. Accidental Tourist in France. Accidental Tourist in Germany. In Belgium. No author’s name, just a logo: a winged armchair on the cover.

He covered only the cities in these guides, for people taking business trips flew into cities and out again and didn’t see the countryside at all. They didn’t see the cities, for that matter. Their concern was how to pretend they had never left home. What hotels in Madrid boasted king-sized Beautyrest mattresses? What restaurants in Tokyo offered Sweet’n’Low? Did Amsterdam have a McDonald’s? Did Mexico City have a Taco Bell? Did any place in Rome serve Chef Boyardee ravioli? Other travelers hoped to discover distinctive local wines; Macon’s readers searched for pasteurized and homogenized milk.

As much as he hated the travel, he loved the writing — the virtuous delights of organizing a disorganized country, stripping away the inessential and the second-rate, classifying all that remained in neat, terse paragraphs. He cribbed from other guidebooks, seizing small kernels of value and discarding the rest. He spent pleasurable hours dithering over questions of punctuation. Righteously, mercilessly, he weeded out the passive voice. The effort of typing made the corners of his mouth turn down, so that no one could have guessed how much he was enjoying himself. I am happy to say, he pecked out, but his face remained glum and intense. I am happy to say that it’s possible now to buy Kentucky Fried Chicken in Stockholm.Pita bread, too , he added as an afterthought. He wasn’t sure how it had happened, but lately pita had grown to seem as American as hot dogs.

“Of course you’re managing,” his sister told him over the phone. “Did I say you weren’t? But at least you could have let us know. Three weeks, it’s been! Sarah’s been gone three weeks and I only hear about it today. And by chance, at that. If I hadn’t asked to speak to her, would you ever have told us she’d left you?”

“She didn’t leave me,” Macon said. “I mean it’s not the way you make it sound. We discussed it like adults and decided to separate, that’s all. The last thing I need is my family gathered around me saying, ‘Oh, poor Macon, how could Sarah do this to you—’ ”

“Why would I say that?” Rose asked. “Everybody knows the Leary men are difficult to live with.”

“Oh,” Macon said.

“Where is she?”

“She’s got a place downtown,” he said. “And look,” he added, “you don’t have to bend over backwards, either, and go asking her to dinner or something. She does have a family of her own. You’re supposed to take my side in this.”

“I thought you didn’t want us to take sides.”

“No, no, I don’t. I mean you shouldn’t take her side, is what I’m trying to say.”

“When Charles’s wife got her divorce,” Rose said, “we went on having her to dinner every Christmas, just like always. Remember?”

“I remember,” Macon said wearily. Charles was their oldest brother.

“I suppose she’d still be coming, if she hadn’t got remarried to someone so far away.”

“What? If her husband had been a Baltimore man you’d have gone on inviting them both?”

“She and Porter’s wife and Sarah used to sit around the kitchen — this was before Porter’s wife got her divorce — and they’d go on and on about the Leary men. Oh, it was the Leary men this, the Leary men that: how they always had to have everything just so, always so well thought out beforehand, always clamping down on the world as if they really thought they could keep it in line. The Leary men! I can hear them still. I had to laugh: One Thanksgiving Porter and June were getting ready to leave, back when their children were small, and June was heading toward the door with the baby in her arms and Danny hanging onto her coat and this load of toys and supplies when Porter called out, ‘Halt!’ and started reading from one of those cash-register tapes that he always writes his lists on: blanket, bottles, diaper bag, formula out of the fridge… June just looked over at the other two and rolled her eyes.”

“Well, it wasn’t such a bad idea,” Macon said, “when you consider June.”

“No, and you notice it was alphabetical, too,” Rose said. “I do think alphabetizing helps to sort things out a little.”

Rose had a kitchen that was so completely alphabetized, you’d find the allspice next to the ant poison. She was a fine one to talk about the Leary men.

“At any rate,” she said. “Has Sarah been in touch since she left?”

“She’s come by once or twice. Once, actually,” Macon said. “For things she needed.”

“What kind of things?”

“Well, a double boiler. Things like that.”

“It’s an excuse, then,” Rose said promptly. “She could get a double boiler at any dimestore.”

“She said she liked ours.”

“She was checking to see how you’re doing. She still cares. Did you talk at all?”

“No,” Macon said, “I just handed her the double boiler. Also that gadget that unscrews bottle tops.”

“Oh, Macon. You might have asked her in.”

“I was scared she’d say no,” he said.

There was a silence. “Well. Anyhow,” Rose said finally.

“But I’m getting along!”

“Yes, of course you are,” she told him.

Then she said she had something in the oven and hung up.

Macon went over to his study window. It was a hot day in early July, the sky so blue it made his eyes ache. He rested his forehead against the glass and stared out at the yard, keeping his hands stuffed deep in the rear pockets of his khakis. Up in one of the oak trees, a bird sang what sounded like the first three notes of “My Little Gypsy Sweetheart.” “Slum… ber… on…” it sang. Macon wondered if even this moment would become, one day, something he looked back upon wistfully. He couldn’t imagine it; he couldn’t think of any period bleaker than this in all his life, but he’d noticed how time had a way of coloring things. That bird, for instance, had such a pure, sweet, piercing voice.

He turned away from the window, covered his typewriter, and left the room.

He didn’t eat real meals anymore. When he was hungry he drank a glass of milk, or he spooned a bit of ice cream directly from the carton. After the smallest snack he felt overfed and heavy, but he noticed when he dressed in the mornings that he seemed to be losing weight. His shirt collar stood out around his neck. The vertical groove between his nose and mouth had deepened so that he had trouble shaving it. His hair, which Sarah used to cut for him, jutted over his forehead like a shelf. And something had caused his lower lids to droop. He used to have narrow gray slits of eyes; now they were wide and startled. Could this be a sign of malnutrition?

Breakfast: Breakfast was your most important meal. He hooked up the percolator and the electric skillet to the clock radio on his bedroom windowsill. Of course he was asking for food poisoning, letting two raw eggs wait all night at room temperature, but once he’d changed menus there was no problem. You had to be flexible about these matters. He was awakened now by the smell of fresh coffee and hot buttered popcorn, and he could partake of both without getting out of bed. Oh, he was managing fine, just fine. All things considered.

But his nights were terrible.

It wasn’t that he had trouble getting to sleep in the first place. That was easy. He’d watch TV till his eyes burned; then he’d climb the stairs. He would start the shower running and spread his clothes in the tub. At times he thought of skipping this part, except there was such a danger in falling behind with your system. So he carried out each step: hanging the laundry, setting up the breakfast things, flossing his teeth. He couldn’t go to bed without flossing his teeth. For some reason, Sarah had found this irritating. If Macon were condemned to death, she’d said once, and they told him he’d be executed by firing squad at dawn, he would no doubt still insist on flossing the night before. Macon, after thinking it over, had agreed. Yes, of course he would. Hadn’t he flossed while in the depths of pneumonia? In the hospital with gallstones? In a motel the night his son was killed? He checked his teeth in the mirror. They were never entirely white, in spite of all his care. And now it seemed his skin was taking on a yellowish cast as well.

He turned off the lights, moved the cat over, helped the dog up onto the bed. The dog was a Welsh corgi, very shortlegged, but he did love to sleep in a bed, and so every night he stood erect and propped his elbows on the mattress and gazed at Macon expectantly till Macon gave him a boost. Then they’d all three settle themselves. Macon slipped into his envelope, the cat fitted her shape to the warm spot under his arm, and the dog plopped down near his feet. Then Macon closed his eyes and drifted off.

But eventually he found himself conscious of his dreams — not borne along by them but tediously constructing them, quibbling over details. When it dawned on him that he was awake, he would open his eyes and squint at the clock radio. But it was only one a.m. At the latest, two. There were all those hours still to be survived.

His brain buzzed with little worries. Had he left the back door unlocked? Forgotten to put the milk away? Made out a check for his bank balance instead of his gas bill? He remembered all in a rush that he’d opened a can of V-8 juice and then put the can in the icebox. Oxidation of the metal seams! Resulting in lead poisoning!

The worries changed, grew deeper. He wondered what had gone wrong with his marriage. Sarah had been his first and only girlfriend; now he thought he should have practiced on someone else beforehand. During the twenty years of their marriage there’d been moments — there’d been months — when he didn’t feel they had really formed a unit the way couples were supposed to. No, they’d stayed two distinct people, and not always even friends. Sometimes they’d seemed more like rivals, elbowing each other, competing over who was the better style of person. Was it Sarah, haphazard, mercurial? Was it Macon, methodical and steady?

When Ethan was born, he only brought out more of their differences. Things they had learned to ignore in each other resurfaced. Sarah never got their son on any kind of schedule at all, was lax and unconcerned. And Macon (oh, he knew it, he admitted it) had been so intent on preparing him for every eventuality that he hadn’t had time to enjoy him. Ethan at two, at four floated up into his vision as clearly as a color film projected upon the bedroom ceiling. A chortling, sunny little boy, he’d been, with Macon a stooped shape above him wringing his hands. Macon had been fierce in teaching him, at age six, how to swing a bat; it would have wrenched his soul to have Ethan chosen last for any team. “Why?” Sarah had asked. “If he’s chosen last, he’s chosen last. Let it be, why don’t you.” Let it be! Life was so full of things you couldn’t do anything about; you had to avert what you could. She laughed when Macon spent one fall collecting Wacky Packs, which had these jokey stickers inside that Ethan liked to plaster his bedroom door with. He’d have more than anyone in the whole third grade, Macon vowed. Long after Ethan lost interest, Macon was still doggedly bringing them home. He knew it was absurd, but still, there was this one last sticker they had not yet managed to get hold of.

Ethan went away to camp when he was twelve — a year ago, almost exactly. Most boys started earlier, but Macon had kept delaying it. Why have a child at all, he asked Sarah, if you were only going to ship him off to some godforsaken spot in Virginia? By the time he finally gave in, Ethan was in the top age group — a tall blond sprout of a boy with an open, friendly face and an endearing habit of bouncing on the balls of his feet when he was nervous.

Don’t think about it.

He was murdered in a Burger Bonanza his second night at camp. It was one of those deaths that make no sense — the kind where the holdup man has collected his money and is free to go but decides, instead, first to shoot each and every person through the back of the skull.

Ethan wasn’t even supposed to be there. He had snuck away from camp with a cabinmate, who waited outside as a lookout.

Blame the camp for not supervising. Blame Burger Bonanza for poor security. Blame the cabinmate for not going in too and altering, perhaps, what took place. (Lookout for what, for God’s sake?) Blame Sarah for allowing Ethan to leave home; blame Macon for agreeing; blame even (hell, yes) Ethan. Blame Ethan for wanting to attend that camp and for sneaking off from it, and for entering Burger Bonanza like some headstrong fool while a holdup was in progress. Blame him for so meekly moving to the kitchen with the others, for placing his hands flat against the wall as he was ordered and no doubt bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet…

Don’t think about it.

The director of the camp, not wanting to break the news on the phone, had driven to Baltimore to tell them in person. Then he’d driven them back to Virginia. Macon often recalled that director. Jim, his name was, Jim Robinson or maybe Robertson — a burly, white-whiskered man with a crew cut, wearing a suit coat, as if in respect, over a Redskins T-shirt. He’d seemed uncomfortable with silence and did his best to fill it with abrupt little fragments of chitchat. Macon hadn’t listened, or he’d thought he hadn’t; but now all the fragments came back to him. How Jim’s mother had been a Baltimorean herself, born the year Babe Ruth was playing for the Orioles. How Jim’s tomato plants had been acting queerly, producing only tiny green marbles that fell off the vines before they ripened. How Jim’s wife was terrified of driving in reverse and avoided any situation that required it. Macon gave a lot of thought to that now, lying in his bed at night. Could you really drive a car without reversing? What about at intersections, where a bus driver pokes his head out his window and asks you to roll on back a few yards so he can turn? Would she refuse? Macon imagined her, staunch and defiant, glaring straight in front of her and pretending not to notice. The driver escalating into curses, horns blowing, other drivers shouting, “Aw, lady!” It made a nice picture. He kept it firmly in mind.

Finally he would sit up and wriggle out of his sheet. The dog, sighing, roused himself and dropped off the bed to pad downstairs behind him. The floorboards were cool underfoot, the kitchen linoleum cooler still; there was a glow from the refrigerator as Macon poured himself a glass of milk. He went to the living room and turned on the TV. Generally some black-and-white movie was running — men in suits and felt hats, women with padded shoulders. He didn’t try to follow the plot. He took small, steady sips of milk, feeling the calcium traveling to his bones. Hadn’t he read that calcium cures insomnia? He absently stroked the cat, who had somehow crept into his lap. It was much too hot to have a cat in his lap, especially this one — a loose-strung, gray tweed female who seemed made of some unusually dense substance. And the dog, most often, would be lying on top of his feet. “It’s just you and me, old buddies,” Macon would tell them. The cat made a comma of sweat across his bare thighs.

At last he would slip out from under the animals and turn off the TV. He would put his glass in the chlorine solution in the kitchen sink. He would climb the stairs. He’d stand at the bedroom window looking over the neighborhood — black branches scrawled on a purple night sky, a glimmer of white clapboard here and there, occasionally a light. Macon always took comfort if he found a light. Someone else had trouble sleeping too, he assumed. He didn’t like to consider any other possibility — a party, for instance, or a heart-to-heart talk with old friends. He preferred to believe that someone else was on his own, sitting up wide awake fending off his thoughts. That made him feel much better. He returned to his bed. He lay down. He closed his eyes and without even trying, he dropped off the edge into sleep.