The Accidental Tourist

seven

“When I was a little girl,” Muriel said, “I didn’t like dogs at all or any other kinds of animals either. I thought they could read my mind. My folks gave me a puppy for my birthday and he would, like, cock his head, you know how they do? Cock his head and fix me with these bright round eyes and I said, ‘Ooh! Get him away from me! You know I can’t stand to be stared at.’ ”

She had a voice that wandered too far in all directions. It screeched upward; then it dropped to a raspy growl. “They had to take him back. Had to give him to a neighbor boy and buy me a whole different present, a beauty-parlor permanent which is what I’d set my heart on all along.”

She and Macon were standing in the entrance hall. She still had her coat on — a bulky-shouldered, three-quarter length, nubby black affair of a type last seen in the 1940s. Edward sat in front of her as he’d been ordered. He had met her at the door with his usual display, leaping and snarling, but she’d more or less walked right through him and pointed at his rump and told him to sit. He’d gaped at her. She had reached over and poked his rear end down with a long, sharp index finger.

“Now you kind of cluck your tongue,” she’d told Macon, demonstrating. “They get to know a cluck means praise. And when I hold my hand out — see? That means he has to stay.”

Edward stayed, but a yelp erupted from him every few seconds, reminding Macon of the periodic bloops from a percolator. Muriel hadn’t seemed to hear. She’d started discussing her lesson plan and then for no apparent reason had veered to her autobiography. But shouldn’t Edward be allowed to get up now? How long did she expect him to sit there?

“I guess you’re wondering why I’d want a permanent when this hair of mine is so frizzy,” she said. “Old mop! But I’ll be honest, this is not natural. My natural hair is real straight and lanky. Times I’ve just despaired of it. It was blond when I was a baby, can you believe that? Blond as a fairy-tale princess. People told my mother I’d look like Shirley Temple if she would just curl my hair, and so she did, she rolled my hair on orange juice tins. I had blue eyes, too, and they stayed that way for a long long time, a whole lot longer than most babies’ do. People thought I’d look that way forever and they talked about me going into the movies. Seriously! My mother arranged for tap-dance school when I wasn’t much more than a toddler. No one ever dreamed my hair would turn on me.”

Edward moaned. Muriel looked past Macon, into the glass of a picture that hung behind him. She cupped a hand beneath the ends of her hair, as if testing its weight. “Think what it must feel like,” she said, “waking up one morning and finding you’ve gone dark. It near about killed my mother, I can tell you. Ordinary dull old Muriel, muddy brown eyes and hair as black as dirt.”

Macon sensed he was supposed to offer some argument, but he was too anxious about Edward. “Oh, well…” he said. Then he said, “Shouldn’t we be letting him up now?”

“Up? Oh, the dog. In a minute,” she said. “So anyway. The reason it’s so frizzy is, I got this thing called a body perm. You ever heard of those? They’re supposed to just add body, but something went wrong. You think this is bad. If I was to take a brush to it, my hair would spring straight out from my head. I mean absolutely straight out. Kind of like a fright wig, isn’t that what you call it? So I can’t even brush it. I get up in the morning and there I am, ready to go. Lord, I hate to think of the tangles.”

“Maybe you could just comb it,” Macon suggested.

“Hard to drag a comb through it. All the little teeth would break off.”

“Maybe one of those thick-toothed combs that black people use.”

“I know what you mean but I’d feel silly buying one.”

“What for?” Macon asked. “They’re just hanging there in supermarkets. It wouldn’t have to be a big deal. Buy milk and bread or something and an Afro comb, no one will even think twice.”

“Well, I suppose you’re right,” she said, but now that she’d got him involved it seemed she’d lost interest in the problem herself. She snapped her fingers over Edward’s head. “Okay!” she said. Edward jumped up, barking. “That was very good,” she told him.

In fact, it was so good that Macon felt a little cross. Things couldn’t be that easy, he wanted to say. Edward had improved too quickly, the way a toothache will improve the moment you step into a dentist’s waiting room.

Muriel slipped her purse off her shoulder and set it on the hall table. Out came a long blue leash attached to a choke chain. “He’s supposed to wear this all the time,” she said. “Every minute till he’s trained. That way you can yank him back whenever he does something wrong. The leash is six dollars even, and the chain is two ninety-five. With tax it comes to, let’s see, nine forty. You can pay me at the end of the lesson.”

She slipped the choke chain over Edward’s head. Then she paused to examine a fingernail. “If I break another nail I’m going to scream,” she said. She took a step back and pointed to Edward’s rump. After a brief hesitation, he sat. Seated, he looked noble, Macon thought — chesty and solemn, nothing like his usual self. But when Muriel snapped her fingers, he jumped up as unruly as ever.

“Now you try,” Muriel told Macon.

Macon accepted the leash and pointed to Edward’s rump. Edward stood fast. Macon frowned and pointed more sternly. He felt foolish. Edward knew, if this woman didn’t, how little authority Macon had.

“Poke him down,” Muriel said.

This was going to be awkward. He propped a crutch against the radiator and bent stiffly to jab Edward with one finger. Edward sat. Macon clucked. Then he straightened and backed away, holding out his palm, but instead of staying, Edward rose and followed him. Muriel hissed between her teeth. Edward shrank down again. “He doesn’t take you seriously,” Muriel said.

“Well, I know that,” Macon snapped.

His broken leg was starting to ache.

“In fact I didn’t have so much as a kitten the whole entire time I was growing up,” Muriel said. Was she just going to leave Edward sitting there? “Then a couple of years ago I saw this ad in the paper, Make extra money in your off hours. Work as little or as much as you like. Place was a dog-training firm that went around to people’s houses. Doggie, Do, it was called. Don’t you just hate that name? Reminds me of dog-do. But anyhow, I answered the ad. ‘To be honest I don’t like animals,’ I said, but Mr. Quarles, the owner, he told me that was just as well. He told me it was people who got all mushy about them that had the most trouble.”

“Well, that makes sense,” Macon said, glancing at Edward. He had heard that dogs developed backaches if they were made to sit too long.

“I was just about his best pupil, it turns out. Seems I had a way with animals. So then I got a job at the Meow-Bow. Before that I worked at the Rapid-Eze Copy Center and believe me, I was looking for a change. Who’s the lady?”

“Lady?”

“The lady I just saw walking through the dining room.”

“That’s Rose.”

“Is she your ex-wife? Or what.”

“She’s my sister.”

“Oh, your sister!”

“This house belongs to her,” Macon said.

“I don’t live with anybody either,” Muriel told him.

Macon blinked. Hadn’t he just said he lived with his sister?

“Sometimes late at night when I get desperate for someone to talk to I call the time signal,” Muriel said. “ ‘At the tone the time will be eleven… forty-eight. And fifty seconds.’ ” Her voice took on a fruity fullness. “ ‘At the tone the time will be eleven… forty-nine. Exactly.’ You can release him now.”

“Pardon?”

“Release your dog.”

Macon snapped his fingers and Edward jumped up, yapping.

“How about you?” Muriel asked. “What do you do for a living?”

Macon said, “I write tour guides.”

“Tour guides! Lucky.”

“What’s lucky about it?”

“Why, you must get to travel all kinds of places!”

“Oh, well, travel,” Macon said.

“I’d love to travel.”

“It’s just red tape, mostly,” Macon said.

“I’ve never even been on an airplane, you realize that?”

“It’s red tape in motion. Ticket lines, custom lines. Should Edward be barking that way?”

Muriel gave Edward a slit-eyed look and he quieted.

“If I could go anywhere I’d go to Paris,” she said.

“Paris is terrible. Everybody’s impolite.”

“I’d walk along the Seine, like they say in the song. ‘You will find your love in Paris,’ ” she sang scratchily, “ ‘if you walk along the—’ I just think it sounds so romantic.”

“Well, it’s not,” Macon said.

“I bet you don’t know where to look, is all. Take me with you next time! I could show you the good parts.”

Macon cleared his throat. “Actually, I have a very limited expense account,” he told her. “I never even took my wife, or, um, my… wife.”

“I was only teasing,” she told him.

“Oh.”

“You think I meant it?”

“Oh, no.”

She grew suddenly brisk. “That will be fourteen forty, including the leash and the choke chain.” Then while Macon was fumbling through his wallet she said, “You have to practice what he’s learned, and no one else can practice for you. I’ll come back tomorrow for the second lesson. Will eight in the morning be too early? I’ve got to be at the Meow-Bow at nine.”

“Eight will be fine,” Macon told her. He counted out fourteen dollars and all the change he had loose in his pocket — thirty-six cents.

“You can pay me the other four cents tomorrow,” she said.

Then she made Edward sit and she handed the leash to Macon. “Release him when I’m gone,” she said.

Macon held out his palm and stared hard into Edward’s eyes, begging him to stay. Edward stayed, but he moaned when he saw Muriel leave. When Macon snapped his fingers, Edward jumped up and attacked the front door.

All that afternoon and evening, Macon and Edward practiced. Edward learned to plop his rump down at the slightest motion of a finger. He stayed there, complaining and rolling his eyes, while Macon clucked approvingly. By suppertime, a cluck was part of the family language. Charles clucked over Rose’s pork chops. Porter clucked when Macon dealt him a good hand of cards.

“Imagine a flamenco dancer with galloping consumption,” Rose told Charles and Porter. “That’s Edward’s trainer. She talks non-stop, I don’t know when she comes up for air. When she talked about her lesson plan she kept saying ‘simplistic’ for ‘simple.’ ”

“I thought you were going to stay out of sight,” Macon told Rose.

“Well? Did you ever see me?”

“Muriel did.”

“I guess so! The way she was always peering around your back and snooping.”

There were constant slamming sounds from the living room, because Edward’s new leash kept catching on the rocking chair and dragging it behind him. During the course of the evening he chewed a pencil to splinters, stole a pork-chop bone from the garbage bin, and threw up on the sun porch rug; but now that he could sit on command, everyone felt more hopeful.

“When I was in high school I made nothing but A’s,” Muriel said. “You’re surprised at that, aren’t you. You think I’m kind of like, not an intellect. I know what you’re thinking! You’re surprised.”

“No, I’m not,” Macon said, although he was, actually.

“I made A’s because I caught on to the trick,” Muriel told him. “You think it’s not a trick? There’s a trick to everything; that’s how you get through life.”

They were in front of the house — both of them in raincoats, for it was a damp, drippy morning. Muriel wore truncated black suede boots with witchy toes and needle heels. Her legs rose out of them like toothpicks. The leash trailed from her fingers. Supposedly, she was teaching Edward to walk right. Instead she went on talking about her schooldays.

“Some of my teachers told me I should go to college,” she said. “This one in particular, well she wasn’t a teacher but a librarian. I worked in the library for her, shelving books and things; she said, ‘Muriel, why don’t you go on to Towson State?’ But I don’t know… and now I tell my sister, ‘You be thinking of college, hear? Don’t drop out like I dropped out.’ I’ve got this little sister? Claire? Her hair never turned. She’s blond as an angel. Here’s what’s funny, though: she couldn’t care less. Braids her hair back any old how to keep it out of her eyes. Wears raggy jeans and forgets to shave her legs. Doesn’t it always work that way? My folks believe she’s wonderful. She’s the good one and I’m the bad one. It’s not her fault, though; I don’t blame Claire. People just get fixed in these certain frames of other people’s opinions, don’t you find that’s true? Claire was always Mary in the Nativity Scene at Christmas. Boys in her grade school were always proposing, but there I was in high school and no one proposed to me, I can tell you. Aren’t high school boys just so frustrating? I mean they’d invite me out and all, like to drive-in movies and things, and they’d act so tense and secret, sneaking one arm around my shoulder inch by inch like they thought I wouldn’t notice and then dropping a hand down, you know how they do, lower and lower while all the time staring straight ahead at the movie like it was the most fascinating spectacle they’d ever seen in their lives. You just had to feel sorry for them. But then Monday morning there they were like nothing had taken place, real boisterous and horsing around with their friends and nudging each other when I walked past but not so much as saying hello to me. You think that didn’t hurt my feelings? Not one boy in all that time treated me like a steady girlfriend. They’d ask me out on Saturday night and expect me to be so nice to them, but you think they ever ate lunch with me next Monday in the school cafeteria, or walked me from class to class?”

She glanced down at Edward. Abruptly, she slapped her hip; her black vinyl raincoat made a buckling sound. “That’s the ‘heel’ command,” she told Macon. She started walking. Edward followed uncertainly. Macon stayed behind. It had been hard enough getting down the front porch steps.

“He’s supposed to match his pace to anything,” she called back. “Slow, fast, anything I do.” She speeded up. When Edward crossed in front of her, she walked right into him. When he dawdled, she yanked his leash. She tip-tapped briskly eastward, her coat a stiff, swaying triangle beneath the smaller triangle of her hair blowing back. Macon waited, ankle-deep in wet leaves.

On the return trip, Edward kept close to Muriel’s left side. “I think he’s got the hang of it,” she called. She arrived in front of Macon and offered him the leash. “Now you.”

He attempted to slap his hip — which was difficult, on crutches. Then he set off. He was agonizingly slow and Edward kept pulling ahead. “Yank that leash!” Muriel said, clicking along behind. “He knows what he’s supposed to do. Contrary thing.”

Edward fell into step, finally, although he gazed off in a bored, lofty way. “Don’t forget to cluck,” Muriel said. “Every little minute, you have to praise him.” Her heels made a scraping sound behind them. “Once I worked with this dog that had never in her life been housebroken. Two years old and not one bit housebroken and the owners were losing their minds. First I can’t figure it out; then it comes to me. That dog thought she wasn’t supposed to piddle anyplace, not indoors or outdoors, either one. See, no one had ever praised her when she did it right. Did you ever hear of such a thing? I had to catch her peeing outdoors which wasn’t easy, believe me, because she was all the time ashamed and trying to hide it, and then I praised her to bits and after a while she caught on.”

They reached the corner. “Now, when you stop, he has to sit,” she said.

“But how will I practice?” Macon asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m on these crutches.”

“So? It’s good exercise for your leg,” she said. She didn’t ask how the leg had been broken. Come to think of it, there was something impervious about her, in spite of all her interest in his private life. She said, “Practice lots, ten minutes a session.”

“Ten minutes!”

“Now let’s start back.”

She led the way, her angular, sashaying walk broken by the jolt of her sharp heels. Macon and Edward followed. When they reached the house, she asked what time it was. “Eight fifty,” Macon said severely. He mistrusted women who wore no watches.

“I have to get going. That will be five dollars, please, and the four cents you owe me from yesterday.”

He gave her the money and she stuffed it in her raincoat pocket. “Next time, I’ll stay longer and talk,” she said. “That’s a promise.” She trilled her fingers at him, and then she clicked off toward a car that was parked down the street — an aged, gray, boat-like sedan polished to a high shine. When she slid in and slammed the door behind her, there was a sound like falling beer cans. The engine twanged and rattled before it took hold. Macon shook his head, and he and Edward returned to the house.

Between Wednesday and Thursday, Macon spent what seemed a lifetime struggling up and down Dempsey Road beside Edward. His armpits developed a permanent ache. There was a vertical seam of pain in his thigh. This made no sense; it should have been in the shin. He wondered if something had gone wrong — if the break had been set improperly, for instance, so that some unusual strain was being placed upon the thighbone. Maybe he’d have to go back to the hospital and get his leg rebroken, probably under general anesthesia with all its horrifying complications; and then he’d spend months in traction and perhaps walk the rest of his life with a limp. He imagined himself tilting across intersections with a grotesque, lopsided gait. Sarah, driving past, would screech to a halt. “Macon?” She would roll down her window. “Macon, what happened?”

He would raise one arm and let it flop and totter away from her.

Or tell her, “I’m surprised you care enough to inquire.”

No, just totter away.

Most likely these little spells of self-pity (an emotion he despised ordinarily) were caused by sheer physical exhaustion. How had he got himself into this? Slapping his haunch was the first problem; then summoning his balance to jerk the leash when Edward fell out of step, and staying constantly alert for any squirrel or pedestrian. “Sss!” he kept saying, and “Cluck-cluck!” and “Sss!” again. He supposed passersby must think he was crazy. Edward loped beside him, occasionally yawning, looking everywhere for bikers. Bikers were his special delight. Whenever he saw one, the hair between his shoulders stood on end and he lunged forward. Macon felt like a man on a tightrope that was suddenly set swinging.

At this uneven, lurching pace, he saw much more than he would have otherwise. He had a lengthy view of every bush and desiccated flower bed. He memorized eruptions in the sidewalk that might trip him. It was an old people’s street, and not in the best of repair. The neighbors spent their days telephoning back and forth among themselves, checking to see that no one had suffered a stroke alone on the stairs or a heart attack in the bathroom, a broken hip, blocked windpipe, dizzy spell over the stove with every burner alight. Some would set out for a walk and find themselves hours later in the middle of the street, wondering where they’d been headed. Some would start fixing a bite to eat at noon, a soft-boiled egg or a cup of tea, and by sundown would still be puttering in their kitchen, fumbling for the salt and forgetting how the toaster worked. Macon knew all this through his sister, who was called upon by neighbors in distress. “Rose, dear! Rose, dear!” they would quaver, and they’d stumble into her yard waving an overdue bill, an alarming letter, a bottle of pills with a childproof top.

In the evening, taking Edward for his last walk, Macon glanced in windows and saw people slumped in flowered armchairs, lit blue and shivery by their TV sets. The Orioles were winning the second game of the World Series, but these people seemed to be staring at their own thoughts instead. Macon imagined they were somehow dragging him down, causing him to walk heavily, to slouch, to grow short of breath. Even the dog seemed plodding and discouraged.

And when he returned to the house, the others were suffering one of their fits of indecisiveness. Was it better to lower the thermostat at night, or not? Wouldn’t the furnace have to work harder if it were lowered? Hadn’t Porter read that someplace? They debated back and forth, settling it and then beginning again. Why! Macon thought. They were not so very different from their neighbors. They were growing old themselves. He’d been putting in his own two bits (by all means, lower the thermostat), but now his voice trailed off, and he said no more.

That night, he dreamed he was parked near Lake Roland in his grandfather’s ’57 Buick. He was sitting in the dark and some girl was sitting next to him. He didn’t know her, but the bitter smell of her perfume seemed familiar, and the rustle of her skirt when she moved closer. He turned and looked at her. It was Muriel. He drew a breath to ask what she was doing here, but she put a finger to his lips and stopped him. She moved closer still. She took his keys from him and set them on the dashboard. Gazing steadily into his face, she unbuckled his belt and slipped a cool, knowing hand down inside his trousers.

He woke astonished and embarrassed, and sat bolt upright in his bed.

“Everybody always asks me, ‘What is your dog like?’ ” Muriel said. “ ‘I bet he’s a model of good behavior,’ they tell me. But you want to hear something funny? I don’t own a dog. In fact, the one time I had one around, he ran off. That was Norman’s dog, Spook. My ex-husband’s. First night we were married, Spook ran off to Norman’s mom’s. I think he hated me.”

“Oh, surely not,” Macon said.

“He hated me. I could tell.”

They were outdoors again, preparing to put Edward through his paces. By now, Macon had adjusted to the rhythm of these lessons. He waited, gripping Edward’s leash. Muriel said, “It was just like one of those Walt Disney movies. You know: where the dog walks all the way to the Yukon or something. Except Spook only walked to Timonium. Me and Norman had him downtown in our apartment, and Spook took off and traveled the whole however many miles it was back to Norman’s mom’s house in Timonium. His mom calls up: ‘When did you drop Spook off?’ ‘What’re you talking about?’ Norman asks her.”

She changed her voice to match each character. Macon heard the thin whine of Norman’s mother, the stammering boyishness of Norman himself. He remembered last night’s dream and felt embarrassed all over again. He looked at her directly, hoping for flaws, and found them in abundance — a long, narrow nose, and sallow skin, and two freckled knobs of collarbone that promised an unluxurious body.

“Seems his mom woke up in the morning,” she was saying, “and there was Spook, sitting on the doorstep. But that was the first we realized he was missing. Norman goes, ‘I don’t know what got into him. He never ran off before.’ And gives me this doubtful kind of look. I could tell he wondered if it might be my fault. Maybe he thought it was an omen or something. We were awful young to get married. I can see that now. I was seventeen. He was eighteen — an only child. His mother’s pet. Widowed mother. He had this fresh pink face like a girl’s and the shortest hair of any boy in my school and he buttoned his shirt collars all the way to the neck. Moved in from Parkville the end of junior year. Caught sight of me in my strapless sundress and goggled at me all through every class; other boys teased him but he didn’t pay any mind. He was just so… innocent, you know? He made me feel like I had powers. There he was following me around the halls with his arms full of books and I’d say, ‘Norman? You want to eat lunch with me?’ and he’d blush and say, ‘Oh, why, uh, you serious?’ He didn’t even know how to drive, but I told him if he got his license I’d go out with him. ‘We could ride to someplace quiet and talk and be alone,’ I’d say, ‘you know what I mean?’ Oh, I was bad. I don’t know what was wrong with me, back then. He got his license in no time flat and came for me in his mother’s Chevy, which incidentally she happened to have purchased from my father, who was a salesman for Ruggles Chevrolet. We found that out at the wedding. Got married the fall of senior year, he was just dying to marry me so what could I say? and at the wedding my daddy goes to Norman’s mom, ‘Why, I believe I sold you a car not long ago,’ but she was too busy crying to take much notice. That woman carried on like marriage was a fate worse than death. Then when Spook runs off to her house she tells us, ‘I suppose I’d best keep him, it’s clear as day he don’t like it there with you-all.’ With me, is what she meant. She held it against me I took her son away. She claimed I ruined his chances; she wanted him to get his diploma. But I never kept him from getting his diploma. He was the one who said he might as well drop out; said why bother staying in school when he could make a fine living on floors.”

“On what?” Macon asked.

“Floors. Sanding floors. His uncle was Pritchett Refinishing. Norman went into the business as soon as we got married and his mom was always talking about the waste. She said he could have been an accountant or something, but I don’t know who she thought she was kidding. He never mentioned accounting to me.”

She pulled a dog hair off her coat sleeve, examined it, and flicked it away. “So let’s see him,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Let’s see him heel.”

Macon slapped his hip and started off, with Edward lagging just a bit behind. When Macon stopped, Edward stopped too and sat down. Macon was pleasantly surprised, but Muriel said, “He’s not sitting.”

“What? What do you call it, then?”

“He’s keeping his rear end about two inches off the ground. Trying to see what he can get away with.”

“Oh, Edward,” Macon said sadly.

He pivoted and returned. “Well, you’ll have to work on that,” Muriel said. “But meantime, we’ll go on to the down-stay. Let’s try it in the house.”

Macon worried they’d meet up with Rose, but she was nowhere to be seen. The front hall smelled of radiator dust. The clock in the living room was striking the half hour.

“This is where we start on Edward’s real problem,” Muriel said. “Getting him to lie down and stay, so he won’t all the time be jumping at the door.”

She showed him the command: two taps of the foot. Her boot made a crisp sound. When Edward didn’t respond, she bent and pulled his forepaws out from under him. Then she let him up and went through it again, several times over. Edward made no progress. When she tapped her foot, he panted and looked elsewhere. “Stubborn,” Muriel told him. “You’re just as stubborn as they come.” She said to Macon, “A lot of dogs will act like this. They hate to lie down; I don’t know why. Now you.”

Macon tapped his foot. Edward seemed fascinated by something off to his left.

“Grab his paws,” Muriel said.

“On crutches?”

“Sure.”

Macon sighed and propped his crutches in the corner. He lowered himself to the floor with his cat in front of him, took Edward’s paws and forced him down. Edward rumbled threateningly, but in the end he submitted. To get up again, Macon had to hold onto the lamp table. “This is really very difficult,” he said, but Muriel said, “Listen, I’ve taught a man with no legs at all.”

“You have?” Macon said. He pictured a legless man dragging along the sidewalk with some vicious breed of dog, Muriel standing by unconcerned and checking her manicure. “I don’t suppose you ever broke a leg,” he accused her. “Getting around is harder than it looks.”

“I broke an arm once,” Muriel said.

“An arm is no comparison.”

“I did it training dogs, in fact. Got knocked off a porch by a Doberman pinscher.”

“A Doberman!”

“Came to to find him standing over me, showing all his teeth. Well, I thought of what they said at Doggie, Do: Only one of you can be boss. So I tell him, ‘Absolutely not.’ Those were the first words that came to me — what my mother used to say when she wasn’t going to let me get away with something. ‘Absolutely not,’ I tell him and my right arm is broken so I hold out my left, hold out my palm and stare into his eyes — they can’t stand for you to meet their eyes — and get to my feet real slow. And durned if that dog doesn’t settle right back on his haunches.”

“Good Lord,” Macon said.

“I’ve had a cocker spaniel fly directly at my throat. Meanest thing you ever saw. Had a German shepherd take my ankle in his teeth. Then he let it go.”

She lifted a foot and rotated it. Her ankle was about the thickness of a pencil.

“Have you ever met with a failure?” Macon asked her. “Some dog you just gave up on?”

“Not a one,” she said. “And Edward’s not about to be the first.”

But Edward seemed to think otherwise. Muriel worked with him another half hour, and although he would stay once he was down, he flatly refused to lie down on his own. Each time, he had to be forced. “Never mind,” Muriel said. “This is the way most of them do. I bet tomorrow he’ll be just as stubborn, so I’m going to skip a day. You keep practicing, and I’ll be back this same time Saturday.”

Then she told Edward to stay, and she accepted her money and slipped out the door. Observing Edward’s erect, resisting posture, Macon felt discouraged. Why hire a trainer at all, if she left him to do the training? “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know,” he said. Edward gave a sigh and walked off, although he hadn’t been released.

All that afternoon and evening, Edward refused to lie down. Macon wheedled, threatened, cajoled; Edward muttered ominously and stood firm. Rose and the boys edged around the two of them, politely averting their eyes as if they’d stumbled on some private quarrel.

Then the next morning, Edward charged the mailman. Macon managed to grab the leash, but it raised some doubts in his mind. What did all this sitting and heeling have to do with Edward’s real problem? “I should just ship you off to the pound,” he told Edward. He tapped his foot twice. Edward did not lie down.

In the afternoon, Macon called the Meow-Bow. “May I speak to Muriel, please?” he asked. He couldn’t think of her last name.

“Muriel’s not working today,” a girl told him.

“Oh, I see.”

“Her little boy is sick.”

He hadn’t known she had a little boy. He felt some inner click of adjustment; she was a slightly different person from the one he’d imagined. “Well,” he said, “this is Macon Leary. I guess I’ll talk to her tomorrow.”

“Oh, Mr. Leary. You want to call her at home?”

“No, that’s all right.”

“I can give you her number if you want to call her at home.”

“I’ll just talk to her tomorrow. Thank you.”

Rose had an errand downtown, so she agreed to drop him off at the Businessman’s Press. He wanted to deliver the rest of his guidebook. Stretched across the backseat with his crutches, he gazed at the passing scenery: antique office buildings, tasteful restaurants, health food stores and florists’ shops, all peculiarly hard-edged and vivid in the light of a brilliant October afternoon. Rose perched behind the wheel and drove at a steady, slow pace that was almost hypnotic. She wore a little round basin-shaped hat with ribbons down the back. It made her look prim and Sunday schoolish.

One of the qualities that all four Leary children shared was a total inability to find their way around. It was a kind of dyslexia, Macon believed — a geographic dyslexia. None of them ever stepped outside without obsessively noting all available landmarks, clinging to a fixed and desperate mental map of the neighborhood. Back home, Macon had kept a stack of index cards giving detailed directions to the houses of his friends — even friends he’d known for decades. And it used to be that whenever Ethan met a new boy, Macon’s first anxious question was, “Where exactly does he live, do you know?” Ethan had had a tendency to form inconvenient alliances. He couldn’t just hang out with the boy next door; oh, no, it had to be someone who lived way beyond the Beltway. What did Ethan care? He had no trouble navigating. This was because he’d lived all his life in one house, was Macon’s theory; while a person who’d been moved around a great deal never acquired a fixed point of reference but wandered forever in a fog — adrift upon the planet, helpless, praying that just by luck he might stumble across his destination.

At any rate, Rose and Macon got lost. Rose knew where she wanted to go — a shop that sold a special furniture oil — and Macon had visited Julian’s office a hundred times; but even so, they drove in circles till Macon noticed a familiar steeple. “Stop! Turn left,” he said. Rose pulled up where he directed. Macon struggled out. “Will you be all right?” he asked Rose. “Do you think you can find your way back to pick me up?”

“I hope so.”

“Look for the steeple, remember.”

She nodded and drove away.

Macon swung up three granite steps to the brick mansion that housed the Businessman’s Press. The door was made of polished, golden wood. The floor inside was tiled with tiny black and white hexagons, just uneven enough to give purchase to Macon’s crutches.

This wasn’t an ordinary office. The secretary typed in a back room while Julian, who couldn’t stand being alone, sat out front. He was talking on a red telephone, lounging behind a desk that was laden with a clutter of advertisements, pamphlets, unpaid bills, unanswered letters, empty Chinese carryout cartons, and Perrier bottles. The walls were covered with sailing charts. The bookshelves held few books but a great many antique brass mariners’ instruments that probably didn’t even work anymore. Anybody with eyes could see that Julian’s heart was not in the Businessman’s Press but out on the Chesapeake Bay someplace. This was to Macon’s advantage, he figured. Surely no one else would have continued backing his series, with its staggering expenses and its constant need for updating.

“Rita’s bringing croissants,” Julian said into the phone. “Joe is making his quiche.” Then he caught sight of Macon. “Macon!” he said. “Stefanie, I’ll get back to you.” He hung up. “How’s the leg? Here, have a seat.”

He dumped a stack of yachting magazines off a chair. Macon sat down and handed over his folder. “Here’s the rest of the material on England,” he said.

“Well, finally!”

“This edition as I see it is going to run about ten or twelve pages longer than the last one,” Macon said. “It’s adding the business women that does it — listing which hotels offer elevator escorts, which ones serve drinks in the lobbies. I think I ought to be paid more.”

“I’ll talk it over with Marvin,” Julian said, flipping through the manuscript.

Macon sighed. Julian spent money like water but Marvin was more cautious.

“So now you’re on the U.S. again,” Julian said.

“Well, if you say so.”

“I hope it’s not going to take you long.”

“I can only go so fast,” Macon said. “The U.S. has more cities.”

“Yes, I realize that. In fact I might print this edition in sections: northeast, mid-Atlantic, and so forth; I don’t know…” But then he changed the subject. (He had a rather skittery mind.) “Did I tell you my new idea? Doctor friend of mine is looking into it: Accidental Tourist in Poor Health. A list of American-trained doctors and dentists in every foreign capital, plus maybe some suggestions for basic medical supplies: aspirin, Merck Manual—”

“Oh, not a Merck Manual away from home!” Macon said. “Every hangnail could be cancer, when you’re reading a Merck Manual.”

“Well, I’ll make a note of that,” Julian said (without so much as lifting a pencil). “Aren’t you going to ask me to autograph your cast? It’s so white.”

“I like it white,” Macon said. “I polish it with shoe polish.”

“I didn’t realize you could do that.”

“I use the liquid kind. It’s the brand with a nurse’s face on the label, if you ever need to know.”

“Accidental Tourist on Crutches,” Julian said, and he rocked back happily in his chair.

Macon could tell he was about to start his Macon Leary act. He got hastily to his feet and said, “Well, I guess I’ll be going.”

“So soon? Why don’t we have a drink?”

“No, thanks, I can’t. My sister’s picking me up as soon as she gets done with her errand.”

“Ah,” Julian said. “What kind of errand?”

Macon looked at him suspiciously.

“Well? Dry cleaner’s? Shoe repair?”

“Just an ordinary errand, Julian. Nothing special.”

“Hardware store? Pharmacy?”

“No.”

“So what is it?”

“Uh… she had to buy Furniture Food.”

Julian’s chair rocked so far back, Macon thought he was going to tip over. He wished he would, in fact. “Macon, do me a favor,” Julian said. “Couldn’t you just once invite me to a family dinner?”

“We’re really not much for socializing,” Macon told him.

“It wouldn’t have to be fancy. Just whatever you eat normally. What do you eat normally? Or I’ll bring the meal myself. You could lock the dog up… what’s his name again?”

“Edward.”

“Edward. Ha! And I’ll come spend the evening.”

“Oh, well,” Macon said vaguely. He arranged himself on his crutches.

“Why don’t I step outside and wait with you.”

“I’d really rather you didn’t,” Macon said.

He couldn’t bear for Julian to see his sister’s little basin hat.

He pegged out to the curb and stood there, gazing in the direction Rose should be coming from. He supposed she was lost again. The cold was already creeping through the stretched-out sock he wore over his cast.

The trouble was, he decided, Julian had never had anything happen to him. His ruddy, cheerful face was unscarred by anything but sunburn; his only interest was a ridiculously inefficient form of transportation. His brief marriage had ended amicably. He had no children. Macon didn’t want to sound prejudiced, but he couldn’t help feeling that people who had no children had never truly grown up. They weren’t entirely… real, he felt.

Unexpectedly, he pictured Muriel after the Doberman had knocked her off the porch. Her arm hung lifeless; he knew the leaden look a broken limb takes on. But Muriel ignored it; she didn’t even glance at it. Smudged and disheveled and battered, she held her other hand up. “Absolutely not,” she said.

She arrived the next morning with a gauzy bouffant scarf swelling over her hair, her hands thrust deep in her coat pockets. Edward danced around her. She pointed to his rump. He sat, and she bent to pick up his leash.

“How’s your little boy?” Macon asked her.

She looked over at him. “What?” she said.

“Wasn’t he sick?”

“Who told you that?”

“Someone at the vet’s, when I phoned.”

She went on looking at him.

“What was it? The flu?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, probably,” she said after a moment. “Some little stomach thing.”

“It’s that time of year, I guess.”

“How come you phoned?” she asked him.

“I wanted to know why Edward wouldn’t lie down.”

She turned her gaze toward Edward. She wound the leash around her hand and considered him.

“I tap my foot but he never obeys me,” Macon said. “Something’s wrong.”

“I told you he’d be stubborn about it.”

“Yes, but I’ve been practicing two days now and he’s not making any—”

“What do you expect? You think I’m magical or something? Why blame me?”

“Oh, I’m not blaming—”

“You most certainly are. You tell me something’s wrong, you call me on the phone—”

“I just wanted to—”

“You think it’s weird I didn’t mention Alexander, don’t you?”

“Alexander?”

“You think I’m some kind of unnatural mother.”

“What? No, wait a minute—”

“You’re not going to give me another thought, are you, now you know I’ve got a kid. You’re like, ‘Oh, forget it, no point getting involved in that,’ and then you wonder why I didn’t tell you about him right off. Well, isn’t it obvious? Don’t you see what happens when I do?”

Macon wasn’t quite following her logic, perhaps because he was distracted by Edward. The shriller Muriel’s voice grew, the stiffer Edward’s hair stood up on the back of his neck. A bad sign. A very bad sign. Edward’s lip was slowly curling. Gradually, at first almost soundlessly, he began a low growl.

Muriel glanced at him and stopped speaking. She didn’t seem alarmed. She merely tapped her foot twice. But Edward not only failed to lie down; he rose from his sitting position. Now he had a distinct, electrified hump between his shoulders. He seemed to have altered his basic shape. His ears were flattened against his skull.

“Down,” Muriel said levelly.

With a bellow, Edward sprang straight at her face. Every tooth was bare and gleaming. His lips were drawn back in a horrible grimace and flecks of white foam flew from his mouth. Muriel instantly raised the leash. She jerked it upward with both fists and lifted Edward completely off the floor. He stopped barking. He started making gargling sounds.

“He’s choking,” Macon said.

Edward’s throat gave an odd sort of click.

“Stop it. It’s enough! You’re choking him!”

Still, she let him hang. Now Edward’s eyes rolled back in their sockets. Macon grabbed at Muriel’s shoulder but found himself with a handful of coat, bobbled and irregular like something alive. He shook it, anyhow. Muriel lowered Edward to the floor. He landed in a boneless heap, his legs crumpling beneath him and his head flopping over. Macon crouched at his side. “Edward? Edward? Oh, God, he’s dead!”

Edward raised his head and feebly licked his lips.

“See that? When they lick their lips it’s a sign they’re giving in,” Muriel said cheerfully. “Doggie, Do taught me that.”

Macon stood up. He was shaking.

“When they lick their lips it’s good but when they put a foot on top of your foot it’s bad,” Muriel said. “Sounds like a secret language, just about, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t you ever, ever do that again,” Macon told her.

“Huh?”

“In fact, don’t even bother coming again.”

There was a startled silence.

“Well, fine,” Muriel said, tightening her scarf. “If that’s the way you feel, just fine and dandy.” She stepped neatly around Edward and opened the front door. “You want a dog you can’t handle? Fine with me.”

“I’d rather a barking dog than a damaged, timid dog,” Macon said.

“You want a dog that bites all your friends? Scars neighbor kids for life? Gets you into lawsuits? You want a dog that hates the whole world? Evil, nasty, angry dog? That kills the whole world?”

She slipped out the screen door and closed it behind her. Then she looked through the screen directly into Macon’s eyes. “Why, yes, I guess you do,” she said.

From the hall floor, Edward gave a moan and watched her walk away.