The Accidental Tourist

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.

Their engagement lasted three years, all through college. Grandfather Leary felt the wedding should be delayed even further, till Macon was firmly settled in his place of employment; but since his place of employment would be Leary Metals, which manufactured cork-lined caps for soft drink bottles, Macon couldn’t see himself concentrating on that even briefly. Besides, the rush to and from Sarah’s bedroom on her mother’s Red Cross days had begun to tell on them both.

So they married the spring they graduated from college, and Macon went to work at the factory while Sarah taught English at a private school. It was seven years before Ethan was born. By that time, Sarah was no longer calling Macon “mysterious.” When he was quiet now it seemed to annoy her. Macon sensed this, but there was nothing he could do about it. In some odd way, he was locked inside the standoffish self he’d assumed when he and she first met. He was frozen there. It was like that old warning of his grandmother’s: Don’t cross your eyes, they might get stuck that way. No matter how he tried to change his manner, Sarah continued to deal with him as if he were someone unnaturally cool-headed, someone more even in temperament than she but perhaps not quite as feeling.

He had once come upon a questionnaire that she’d filled out in a ladies’ magazine — one of those “How Happy Is Your Marriage?” things — and where it said, I believe I love my spouse more than he/she loves me, Sarah had checked True. The unsettling part was that after Macon gave his automatic little snort of denial, he had wondered if it might be true after all. Somehow, his role had sunk all the way through to the heart. Even internally, by now, he was a fairly chilly man, and if you didn’t count his son (who was easy, easy; a child is no test at all), there was not one person in his life whom he really agonized over.

When he thought about this now, it was a relief to remind himself that he did miss Sarah, after all. But then his relief seemed unfeeling too, and he groaned and shook his head and tugged his hair in great handfuls.

Some woman phoned and said, “Macon?” He could tell at once it wasn’t Sarah. Sarah’s voice was light and breathy; this one was rough, tough, wiry. “It’s Muriel,” she said.

“Muriel,” he said.

“Muriel Pritchett.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, but he still had no clue who she was.

“From the vet’s?” she asked. “Who got on so good with your dog?”

“Oh, the vet’s!”

He saw her, if dimly. He saw her saying her own name, the long u sound and the p drawing up her dark red mouth.

“I was just wondering how Edward was.”

Macon glanced over at Edward. The two of them were in the study, where Macon had managed to type half a page. Edward lay flat on his stomach with his legs straight out behind him — short, pudgy legs like the drumsticks of a dressed Long Island duckling. “He looks all right to me,” Macon said.

“I mean, is he biting?”

“Well, not lately, but he’s developed this new symptom. He gets angry if I leave the house. He starts barking and showing his teeth.”

“I still think he ought to be trained.”

“Oh, you know, he’s four and a half and I suppose—”

“That’s not too old! I could do it in no time. Tell you what, maybe I could just come around and discuss it. You and me could have a drink or something and talk about what his problems are.”

“Well, I really don’t think—”

“Or you could come to my place. I’d fix you supper.”

Macon wondered how it would help Edward to be dragged to supper at some stranger’s house.

“Macon? What do you say?” she asked.

“Oh, why, um… I think for now I’ll just try to manage on my own.”

“Well, I can understand that,” she said. “Believe me. I’ve been through that stage. So what I’ll do is, I’ll wait for you to get in touch. You do still have my card, don’t you?”

Macon said he did, although he had no idea where it had got to.

“I don’t want to be pushy!” she said.

“No, well…” Macon said. Then he hung up and went back to his guidebook.

He was still on the introduction, and it was already the end of August. How would he meet his deadline? The back of the desk chair hit his spine in just the wrong place. The s key kept sticking. The typewriter tapped out audible words. “Inimitable,” it said. His typing sounded just like Sarah saying “inimitable.” “You in your inimitable way…” she told him. He gave a quick shake of his head. Generally food in England is not as jarring as in other foreign countries. Nice cooked vegetables, things in white sauce, pudding for dessert… I don’t know why some travelers complain about English food.

In September, he decided to alter his system of dressing. If he wore sweat suits at home — the zipper-free kind, nothing to scratch or bind him — he could go from one shower to the next without changing clothes. The sweat suit would serve as both pajamas and day wear.

He bought a couple of them, medium gray. The first night he wore one to bed he enjoyed the feel of it, and he liked not having to dress the next morning. In fact, it occurred to him that he might as well wear the same outfit two days in a row; skip his shower on alternate evenings. Talk about saving energy! In the morning all he had to do was shave. He wondered if he ought to grow a beard.

Around noon of the second day, though, he started feeling a little low. He was sitting at his typewriter and something made him notice his posture — stooped and sloppy. He blamed the sweat suit. He rose and went to the full-length mirror in the hall. His reflection reminded him of a patient in a mental hospital. Part of the trouble, perhaps, was his shoes — regular black tie shoes intended for dressier clothes. Should he buy sneakers? But he would hate to be mistaken for a jogger. He noticed that without a belt around his waist, he tended to let his stomach stick out. He stood up straighter. That evening when it was time to wash the first sweat suit, he used extra-hot water to shrink out some of the bagginess.

He felt much worse in the morning. It had been a warm night and he woke up sticky and cross. He couldn’t face the thought of popcorn for breakfast. He laundered a load of sheets and then, in the midst of hanging them, found himself standing motionless with his head bowed, both wrists dangling over the clothesline as if he himself had been pinned there. “Buck up,” he said aloud. His voice sounded creaky, out of practice.

This was his day for grocery shopping — Tuesday, when the supermarket was least crowded with other human beings. But somehow, he couldn’t bring himself to get going. He dreaded all that business with the address books, the three tabbed books he shopped with. (One held data from Consumer Reports — the top-rated brand of bread, for instance, listed under B. In another he noted prices, and in the third he filed his coupons.) He kept having to stop and riffle through them, muttering prices under his breath, comparing house brands to cents-off name brands. Oh, everything seemed so complicated. Why bother? Why eat at all, in fact?

On the other hand, he needed milk. And Edward was low on dog food, and Helen was completely out of cat food.

He did something he’d never done before. He telephoned The Market Basket, a small, expensive grocery that delivered. And he didn’t order just emergency rations. No, he called in the whole week’s list. “Shall we bring this to the front or the back?” the clerk asked in her tinselly voice.

“The back,” Macon said. “No, wait. Bring the perishables to the back, but put the dog food next to the coal chute.”

“Coal chute,” the clerk repeated, apparently writing it down.

“The coal chute at the side of the house. But not the cat food; that goes in back with the perishables.”

“Well, wait now—”

“And the upstairs items at the front of the house.”

“What upstairs items?”

“Toothpaste, Ivory soap, dog biscuits…”

“I thought you said the dog biscuits went to the coal chute.”

“Not the dog biscuits, the dog food! It’s the food that goes to the coal chute, dammit.”

“Now, look here,” the clerk said. “There’s no call to be rude.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Macon told her, “but I just want the simplest thing, it seems to me: one puny box of Milkbone biscuits up beside my bed. If I give Edward my buttered popcorn it upsets his stomach. Otherwise I wouldn’t mind; it’s not as if I’m hoarding it all for myself or something, but he has this sensitivity to fats and I’m the only one in the house, it’s me who has to clean up if he gets sick. I’m the only one to do it; I’m all alone; it’s just me; it seems everybody’s just… fled from me, I don’t know, I’ve lost them, I’m left standing here saying, ‘Where’d they go? Where is everybody? Oh, God, what did I do that was so bad?’ ”

His voice was not behaving right and he hung up. He stood over the telephone rubbing his forehead. Had he given her his name? Or not. He couldn’t remember. Please, please, let him not have given her his name.

He was falling apart; that much was obvious. He would have to get a grip on himself. First thing: out of this sweat suit. It was some kind of jinx. He clapped his hands together briskly, and then he climbed the stairs. In the bathroom, he yanked off the sweat suit and dropped it into the tub. Yesterday’s hung from the shower curtain rod, still damp. There wasn’t a chance it would be dry by tonight. What a mistake! He felt like a fool. He’d come within an inch, within a hairsbreadth of turning into one of those pathetic creatures you see on the loose from time to time — unwashed, unshaven, shapeless, talking to themselves, padding along in their institutional garb.

Neatly dressed now in a white shirt and khakis, he gathered the damp sweat suit and carried it down to the basement. It would make good winter pajamas, at least. He put it in the dryer, wedged the exhaust tube in the window again, and set the dials. Better to consume a little energy than to fall into despair over a soggy sweat suit.

At the top of the basement stairs, Edward was complaining. He was hungry, but not brave enough to descend the stairs on his own. When he caught sight of Macon he lay flat, with his nose poking over the topmost step, and put on a hopeful expression. “Coward,” Macon told him. He scooped Edward up in both arms and turned to lumber back down. Edward’s teeth started chattering — a ticketytick like rice in a cup. It occurred to Macon that Edward might know something he didn’t. Was the basement haunted, or what? It had been weeks now, and Edward was still so frightened that sometimes, set in front of his food, he just stood there dismally and made a puddle without bothering to lift his leg. “You’re being very silly, Edward,” Macon told him.

Just then, an eerie howl rose from… where? From the basement’s very air, it seemed. It continued steadily; it grew. Edward, who must have been expecting this all along, kicked off instantly with his sturdy, clawed hind legs against Macon’s diaphragm. Macon felt the wind knocked out of him. Edward whomped into the wall of damp body bags on the clothesline, rebounded, and landed in the center of Macon’s stomach. Macon set one foot blindly in the wheeled basket and his legs went out from under him. He stepped down hard into empty space.

He was lying on his back, on the clammy cement floor, with his left leg doubled beneath him. The sound that had set all this in motion paused for one split second and then resumed. It was clear now that it came from the dryer’s exhaust tube. “Shoot,” Macon said to Edward, who lay panting on top of him. “Wouldn’t you think that idiot cat would know the dryer was running?”

He could see how it must have happened. Attempting to enter from outside, she’d been met by a whistling wind, but she had stubbornly continued into the tube. He pictured her eyes pressed into slits, her ears flattened back by a lint-filled gale. Wailing and protesting, she had nonetheless clung to her course. What persistence!

Macon shook Edward off and rolled over on his stomach. Even so small a movement caused him agony. He felt a lump of nausea beginning in his throat, but he rolled once more, dragging his leg behind him. With his teeth set, he reached for the door of the dryer and pulled it open. The sweat suit slowly stopped revolving. The cat stopped howling. Macon watched her bumbling, knobby shape inching backward through the tube. Just as she reached her exit, the entire tube fell out of the window and into the laundry sink, but Helen didn’t fall with it. He hoped she was all right. He watched until she scurried past the other window, looking just slightly rumpled. Then he drew a breath and began the long, hard trip up the stairs for help.