The Accidental Tourist

eight

Now the days were shorter and colder, and the trees emptied oceans of leaves on the lawn but remained, somehow, as full as ever, so you’d finish raking and look upward to see a great wash of orange and yellow just waiting to cover the grass again the minute your back was turned. Charles and Porter drove over to Macon’s house and raked there as well, and lit the pilot light in the furnace and repaired the basement window. They reported that everything seemed fine. Macon heard the news without much interest. Next week he’d be out of his cast, but no one asked when he was moving back home.

Each morning he and Edward practiced heeling. They would trudge the length of the block, with Edward matching Macon’s gait so perfectly that he looked crippled himself. When they met passersby now he muttered but he didn’t attack. “See there?” Macon wanted to tell someone. Bikers were another issue, but Macon had confidence they would solve that problem too, eventually.

He would make Edward sit and then he’d draw back, holding out a palm. Edward waited. Oh, he wasn’t such a bad dog! Macon wished he could change the gestures of command — the palm, the pointed finger, all vestiges of that heartless trainer — but he supposed it was too late. He tapped his foot. Edward growled. “Dear one,” Macon said, dropping heavily beside him. “Won’t you please consider lying down?” Edward looked away. Macon stroked the soft wide space between his ears. “Ah, well, maybe tomorrow,” he said.

His family was not so hopeful. “What about when you start traveling again?” Rose said. “You’re not leaving him with me. I wouldn’t know how to handle him.”

Macon told her they would get to that when they got to it.

It was hard for him to imagine resuming his travels. Sometimes he wished he could stay in his cast forever. In fact, he wished it covered him from head to foot. People would thump faintly on his chest. They’d peer through his eyeholes. “Macon? You in there?” Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. No one would ever know.

One evening just after supper, Julian stopped by with a stack of papers. Macon had to slam Edward into the pantry before he opened the door. “Here you are!” Julian said, strolling past him. He wore corduroys and looked rugged and healthy. “I’ve been phoning you for three days straight. That dog sounds awfully close by, don’t you think?”

“He’s in the pantry,” Macon said.

“Well, I’ve brought some materials, Macon — mostly on New York. We’ve got a lot of suggestions for New York.”

Macon groaned. Julian set his papers on the couch and looked around him. “Where are the others?” he asked.

“Oh, here and there,” Macon said vaguely, but just then Rose appeared, and Charles was close behind.

“I hope I’m not interfering with supper,” Julian told them.

“No, no,” Rose said.

“We’ve finished,” Macon said triumphantly.

Julian’s face fell. “Really?” he said. “What time do you eat, anyhow?”

Macon didn’t answer that. (They ate at five-thirty. Julian would laugh.)

Rose said, “But we haven’t had our coffee. Wouldn’t you like some coffee?”

“I’d love some.”

“It seems a little silly,” Macon said, “if you haven’t eaten.”

“Well, yes,” Julian said, “I suppose it does, Macon, to someone like you. But for me, home-brewed coffee is a real treat. All the people in my apartment building eat out, and there’s nothing in any of the kitchens but a couple cans of peanuts and some diet soda.”

“What kind of place is that?” Rose asked.

“It’s the Calvert Arms — a singles building. Everybody’s single.”

“Oh! What an interesting idea.”

“Well, not really,” Julian said gloomily. “Not after a while. I started out enjoying it but now I think it’s getting me down. Sometimes I wish for the good old-fashioned way of doing things, with children and families and old people like normal buildings have.”

“Well, of course you do,” Rose told him. “I’m going to get you some nice hot coffee.”

She left, and the others sat down. “So. Are you three all there is?” Julian asked.

Macon refused to answer, but Charles said, “Oh, no, there’s Porter too.”

“Porter? Where is Porter?”

“Um, we’re not too sure.”

“Missing?”

“He went to a hardware store and we think he got lost.”

“A little while before supper.”

“Supper. You mean today.”

“He’s just running an errand,” Macon said. “Not lost in any permanent sense.”

“Where was the store?”

“Someplace on Howard Street,” Charles said. “Rose needed hinges.”

“He got lost on Howard Street.”

Macon stood up. “I’ll go help Rose,” he said.

Rose was setting their grandmother’s clear glass coffee mugs on a silver tray. “I hope he doesn’t take sugar,” she said. “The sugar-bowl is empty and Edward’s in the pantry where I keep the bag.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“Maybe you could go to the pantry and get it for me.”

“Oh, just give him his coffee straight and tell him to take it or leave it.”

“Why, Macon! This is your employer!”

“He’s only here because he hopes we’ll do something eccentric,” Macon told her. “He has this one-sided notion of us. I just pray none of us says anything unconventional around him, are you listening?”

“What would we say?” Rose asked. “We’re the most conventional people I know.”

This was perfectly true, and yet in some odd way it wasn’t. Macon couldn’t explain it. He sighed and followed her out of the kitchen.

In the living room, Charles was doggedly debating whether they should answer the phone in case it rang, in case it might be Porter, in case he needed them to consult a map. “Chances are, though, he wouldn’t bother calling,” he decided, “because he knows we wouldn’t answer. Or he thinks we wouldn’t answer. Or I don’t know, maybe he figures we would answer even so, because we’re worried.”

“Do you always give this much thought to your phone calls?” Julian asked.

Macon said, “Have some coffee, Julian. Try it black.”

“Why, thank you,” Julian said. He accepted a mug and studied the inscription that arched across it. “CENTURY OF PROGRESS 1933,” he read off. He grinned and raised the mug in a toast. “To progress,” he said.

“Progress,” Rose and Charles echoed. Macon scowled.

Julian said, “What do you do for a living, Charles?”

“I make bottle caps.”

“Bottle caps! Is that a fact!”

“Oh, well, it’s no big thing,” Charles said. “I mean it’s not half as exciting as it sounds, really.”

“And Rose? Do you work?”

“Yes, I do,” Rose said, in the brave, forthright style of someone being interviewed. “I work at home; I keep house for the boys. Also I take care of a lot of the neighbors. They’re mostly old and they need me to read their prescriptions and repair their plumbing and such.”

“You repair their plumbing?” Julian asked.

The telephone rang. The others stiffened.

“What do you think?” Rose asked Macon.

“Um…”

“But he knows we wouldn’t answer,” Charles told them.

“Yes, he’d surely call a neighbor instead.”

“On the other hand…” Charles said.

“On the other hand,” Macon said.

It was Julian’s face that decided him — Julian’s pleased, perked expression. Macon reached over to the end table and picked up the receiver. “Leary,” he said.

“Macon?”

It was Sarah.

Macon shot a glance at the others and turned his back to them. “Yes,” he said.

“Well, finally,” she said. Her voice seemed oddly flat and concrete. All at once he saw her clearly: She wore one of his cast-off shirts and she sat hugging her bare knees. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you at home,” she said. “Then it occurred to me you might be having supper with your family.”

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

He was nearly whispering. Maybe Rose understood, from that, who it was, for she suddenly began an animated conversation with the others. Sarah said, “What? I can’t hear you.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Who’s that talking?”

“Julian’s here.”

“Oh, Julian! Give him my love. How’s Sukie?”

“Sukie?”

“His boat, Macon.”

“It’s fine,” he said. Or should he have said “she”? For all he knew, Sukie was at the bottom of the Chesapeake.

“I called because I thought we should talk,” Sarah said. “I was hoping we could meet for supper some night.”

“Oh. Well. Yes, we could do that,” Macon said.

“Would tomorrow be all right?”

“Certainly.”

“What restaurant?”

“Well, why not the Old Bay,” Macon said.

“The Old Bay. Of course,” Sarah said. She either sighed or laughed, he wasn’t sure which.

“It’s only because you could walk there,” he told her. “That’s the only reason I suggested it.”

“Yes, well, let’s see. You like to eat early; shall we say six o’clock?”

“Six will be fine,” he said.

When he hung up, he found Rose embarked on a discussion of the English language. She pretended not to notice he had rejoined them. It was shocking, she was saying, how sloppy everyday speech had become. How the world seemed bound and determined to say “the hoi polloi,” a clear redundancy in view of the fact that “hoi” was an article. How “chauvinist” had come to be a shorthand term for “male chauvinist,” its original meaning sadly lost to common knowledge. It was incredible, Charles chimed in, that a female movie star traveled “incognito” when any fool should know she was “incognita” instead. Julian appeared to share their indignation. It was more incredible still, he said, how everyone slung around the word “incredible” when really there was very little on earth that truly defied credibility. “Credence,” Macon corrected him, but Rose rushed in as if Macon hadn’t spoken. “Oh, I know just what you mean,” she told Julian. “Words are getting devalued, isn’t that right?” She tugged handfuls of her gray tube skirt over her knees in a childlike gesture. You would think she had never been warned that outsiders were not to be trusted.

To enter the Old Bay Restaurant, Macon had to climb a set of steps. Before he broke his leg he hadn’t even noticed those steps existed — let alone that they were made of smooth, unblemished marble, so that his crutches kept threatening to slide out from under him. Then he had to fight the heavy front door, hurrying a bit because Rose had taken a wrong turn driving him down and it was already five after six.

The foyer was dark as night. The dining room beyond was only slightly brighter, lit by netted candles on the tables. Macon peered into the gloom. “I’m meeting someone,” he told the hostess. “Is she here yet?”

“Not as I know of, hon.”

She led him past a tankful of sluggish lobsters, past two old ladies in churchy hats sipping pale pink drinks, past a whole field of empty tables. It was too early for anyone else to be eating; all the other customers were still in the bar. The tables stood very close together, their linens brushing the floor, and Macon had visions of catching a crutch on a tablecloth and dragging the whole thing after him, candle included. The maroon floral carpet would burst into flames. His grandfather’s favorite restaurant — his greatgrandfather’s too, quite possibly — would be reduced to a heap of charred metal crab pots. “Miss! Slow down!” he called, but the hostess strode on, muscular and athletic in her off-the-shoulder square-dance dress and sturdy white crepe-soled shoes.

She put him in a corner, which was lucky because it gave him a place to lean his crutches. But just as he was matching them up and preparing to set them aside, she said, “I’ll take those for you, darlin’.”

“Oh, they’ll be fine here.”

“I need to check them up front, sweetheart. It’s a rule.”

“You have a rule about crutches?”

“They might trip the other customers, honeybunch.”

This was unlikely, since the two other customers were clear across the room, but Macon handed his crutches over. Come to think of it, he might be better off without them. Then Sarah wouldn’t get the impression (at least at first glance) that he’d fallen apart in her absence.

As soon as he was alone he tugged each shirt cuff till a quarter-inch of white showed. He was wearing his gray tweed suit coat with gray flannel trousers — an old pair of trousers, so it hadn’t mattered if he cut one leg off. Charles had fetched them from home and Rose had hemmed them, and she’d also trimmed his hair. Porter had lent him his best striped tie. They had all been so discreetly helpful that Macon had felt sad, for some reason.

The hostess reappeared in the doorway, followed by Sarah. Macon had an instant of stunned recognition; it was something like accidentally glimpsing his own reflection in a mirror. Her halo of curls, the way her coat fell around her in soft folds, her firm, springy walk in trim pumps with wineglass heels — how had he forgotten all that?

He half stood. Would she kiss him? Or just, God forbid, coolly shake hands. But no, she did neither; she did something much worse. She came around the table and pressed her cheek to his briefly, as if they were mere acquaintances meeting at a cocktail party.

“Hello, Macon,” she said.

He waved her speechlessly into the chair across from his. He sat again, with some effort.

“What happened to your leg?” she asked.

“I had a kind of… fall.”

“Is it broken?”

He nodded.

“And what did you do to your hand?”

He held it up to examine. “Well, it’s a sort of dog bite. But it’s nearly healed by now.”

“I meant the other one.”

The other one had a band of gauze around the knuckles. “Oh, that,” he said. “It’s just a scrape. I’ve been helping Rose build a cat door.”

She studied him.

“But I’m all right!” he told her. “In fact the cast is almost comfortable. Almost familiar! I’m wondering if I broke a leg once before in some previous incarnation.”

Their waitress asked, “Can I bring you something from the bar?”

She was standing over them, pad and pencil poised. Sarah started flipping hastily through the menu, so Macon said, “A dry sherry, please.” Then he and the waitress turned back to Sarah. “Oh, my,” Sarah said. “Let me see. Well, how about a Rob Roy. Yes, a Rob Roy would be nice, with extra cherries.”

That was something else he’d forgotten — how she loved to order complicated drinks in restaurants. He felt the corners of his mouth twitching upward.

“So,” Sarah said when the waitress had gone. “Why would Rose be building a cat door? I thought they didn’t have any pets.”

“No, this is for our cat. Helen. Helen and I have been staying there.”

“What for?”

“Well, because of my leg.”

Sarah said nothing.

“I mean, can you see me managing those steps at home?” Macon asked her. “Taking Edward for walks? Lugging the trash cans out?”

But she was busy shucking off her coat. Beneath it she wore a gathered wool dress in an indeterminate color. (The candlelight turned everything to shades of sepia, like an old-fashioned photograph.) Macon had time to wonder if he’d given her the wrong idea. It sounded, perhaps, as if he were complaining — as if he were reproaching her for leaving him alone.

“But really,” he said, “I’ve been getting along wonderfully.”

“Good,” Sarah said, and she smiled at him and went back to her menu.

Their drinks were set before them on little cardboard disks embossed with crabs. The waitress said, “Ready to order, dearies?”

“Well,” Sarah said, “I think I’ll have the hot antipasto and the beef Pierre.”

The waitress, looking startled, peered over Sarah’s shoulder at the menu. (Sarah had never seemed to realize what the Old Bay Restaurant was all about.) “Here,” Sarah said, pointing, “and here.”

“If you say so,” the waitress said, writing it down.

“I’ll just have the, you know,” Macon said. “Crab soup, shrimp salad platter…” He handed back his menu. “Sarah, do you want wine?”

“No, thank you.”

When they were alone again, she said, “How long have you been at your family’s?”

“Since September,” Macon said.

“September! Your leg’s been broken all that time?”

He nodded and took a sip of his drink. “Tomorrow I get the cast off,” he said.

“And is Edward over there too?”

He nodded again.

“Was it Edward who bit your hand?”

“Well, yes.”

He wondered if she’d act like the others, urge him to call the S.P.C.A.; but instead she meditatively plucked a cherry off the plastic sword from her drink. “I guess he’s been upset,” she said.

“Yes, he has, in fact,” Macon said. “He’s not himself at all.”

“Poor Edward.”

“He’s getting kind of out of control, to tell the truth.”

“He always did have a sensitivity to change,” Sarah said.

Macon took heart. “Actually, he’s been attacking right and left,” he told her. “I had to hire a special trainer. But she was too harsh; let’s face it, she was brutal. She nearly strangled him when he tried to bite her.”

“Ridiculous,” Sarah said. “He was only frightened. When Edward’s frightened he attacks; that’s just the way he is. There’s no point scaring him more.”

Macon felt a sudden rush of love.

Oh, he’d raged at her and hated her and entirely forgotten her, at different times. He’d had moments when he imagined he’d never cared for her to begin with; only went after her because everybody else had. But the fact was, she was his best friend. The two of them had been through things that no one else in the world knew of. She was embedded in his life. It was much too late to root her out.

“What he wants,” she was saying, “is a sense of routine. That’s all he needs: reassurance.”

“Sarah,” he said, “it’s been awful living apart.”

She looked at him. Some trick of light made her eyes appear a darker blue, almost black.

“Hasn’t it?” he said.

She lowered her glass. She said, “I asked you here for a reason, Macon.”

He could tell it was something he didn’t want to hear.

She said, “We need to spell out the details of our separation.”

“We’ve been separated; what’s to spell out?” he asked.

“I meant in a legal way.”

“Legal. I see.”

“Now, according to the state of Maryland—”

“I think you ought to come home.”

Their first course arrived, placed before them by a hand that, as far as Macon was concerned, was not attached to a body. Condiment bottles were shifted needlessly; a metal stand full of sugar packets was moved a half-inch over. “Anything else?” the waitress asked.

“No!” Macon said. “Thank you.”

She left.

He said, “Sarah?”

“It’s not possible,” she told him.

She was sliding a single pearl up and down the chain at her throat. He had given her that pearl when they were courting. Was there any significance in her wearing it this evening? Or maybe she cared so little now, it hadn’t even occurred to her to leave it off. Yes, that was more likely.

“Listen,” he said. “Don’t say no before you hear me out. Have you ever considered we might have another baby?”

He had shocked her, he saw; she drew in a breath. (He had shocked himself.)

“Why not?‘ he asked her. “We’re not too old.”

“Oh, Macon.”

“This time, it would be easy,” he said. “It wouldn’t take us seven years again; I bet you’d get pregnant in no time!” He leaned toward her, straining to make her see it: Sarah blossoming in that luscious pink maternity smock she used to wear. But oddly enough, what flashed across his mind instead was the memory of those first seven years — their disappointment each month. It had seemed to Macon back then (though of course it was pure superstition) that their failures were a sign of something deeper, some essential incompatibility. They had missed connections in the most basic and literal sense. When she finally got pregnant, he had felt not only relieved but guilty, as if they had succeeded in putting something over on someone.

He pushed these thoughts back down. “I realize,” he said, “that it wouldn’t be Ethan. I realize we can’t replace him. But—”

“No,” Sarah said.

Her eyes were very steady. He knew that look. She’d never change her mind.

Macon started on his soup. It was the best crab soup in Baltimore, but unfortunately the spices had a tendency to make his nose run. He hoped Sarah wouldn’t think he was crying.

“I’m sorry,” she said more gently. “But it would never work.”

He said, “All right, forget that. It was crazy, right? Crazy notion. By the time that baby was twenty we’d be… Aren’t you going to eat?”

She glanced down at her plate. Then she picked up a fork.

“Suppose I did this,” Macon said. “Suppose I packed a suitcase with your clothes and knocked on your door and said, ‘Come on, we’re going to Ocean City. We’ve wasted long enough.’ ”

She stared, an artichoke heart raised halfway to her mouth.

“Ocean City?” she said. “You hate Ocean City!”

“Yes, but I meant—”

“You always said it was way too crowded.”

“Yes, but—”

“And what clothes could you be talking about? They’re all in my apartment.”

“It was only a manner of speaking,” Macon said.

“Really, Macon,” she told him. “You don’t even communicate when you communicate.”

“Oh, communicate,” he said. (His least favorite word.) “All I’m saying is, I think we ought to start over.”

“I am starting over,” she said. She returned the artichoke heart to her plate. “I’m doing everything I can to start over,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean I want to live the same life twice. I’m trying to branch off in new directions. I’m taking some courses. I’m even dating, a little.”

“Dating?”

“I’ve been going out with this physician.”

There was a pause.

Macon said, “Why not just call him a doctor.”

Sarah briefly closed her eyes.

“Look,” she said. “I know this is hard for you. It’s hard for both of us. But we really didn’t have much left, don’t you see? Look who you turned to when you broke your leg: your sister Rose! You didn’t even let me know, and you do have my telephone number.”

“If I’d turned to you instead,” he said, “would you have come?”

“Well… but at least you could have asked. But no, you called on your family. You’re closer to them than you ever were to me.”

“That’s not true,” Macon said. “Or rather, it’s true but it’s not the point. I mean, in one sense, of course we’re closer; we’re blood relations.”

“Playing that ridiculous card game no one else can fathom,” Sarah said. “Plotting your little household projects, Rose with her crescent wrench and her soldering gun. Cruising hardware stores like other people cruise boutiques.”

“As other people cruise boutiques,” Macon said. And then regretted it.

“Picking apart people’s English,” Sarah said. “Hauling forth the dictionary at every opportunity. Quibbling over method. The kind of family that always fastens their seatbelts.”

“For God’s sake, Sarah, what’s wrong with fastening your seatbelt?”

“They always go to one restaurant, the one their grandparents went to before them, and even there they have to rearrange the silver and set things up so they’re sitting around the table the same way they sit at home. They dither and deliberate, can’t so much as close a curtain without this group discussion back and forth, to and fro, all the pros and cons. ‘Well, if we leave it open it will be so hot but if we close it things will get musty…’ They have to have their six glasses of water every day. Their precious baked potatoes every night. They don’t believe in ballpoint pens or electric typewriters or automatic transmissions. They don’t believe in hello and good-bye.”

“Hello? Good-bye?” Macon said.

“Just watch yourself some time! People walk in and you just, oh, register it with your eyes; people leave and you just look away quickly. You don’t admit to comings and goings. And the best house in the world might come on the market, but you can’t buy it because you’ve ordered these address labels for the old house, a thousand five hundred gummed labels, and you have to use them up before you move.”

“That wasn’t me, it was Charles,” Macon said.

“Yes, but it could have been you. And his wife divorced him for it, and I don’t blame her.”

“And now you’re about to do the same damn thing,” Macon said. “Ruin twenty years of marriage over whether I fasten my seatbelt.”

“They were ruined long ago, believe me,” Sarah said.

Macon laid down his spoon. He forced himself to take a deep breath.

“Sarah,” he said. “We’re getting away from the point.”

After a silence, Sarah said, “Yes, I guess we are.”

“It’s what happened to Ethan that ruined us,” Macon told her.

She set an elbow on the table and covered her eyes.

“But it wouldn’t have to,” he said. “Why, some people, a thing like this brings them closer together. How come we’re letting it part us?”

The waitress said, “Is everything all right?”

Sarah sat up straighter and started rummaging through her purse.

“Yes, certainly,” Macon said.

The waitress was carrying a tray with their main dishes. She cast a doubtful look at Sarah’s antipasto. “Isn’t she going to eat that, or what?” she asked Macon.

“No, I guess, um, maybe not.”

“Didn’t she like it?”

“She liked it fine. Take it away.”

The waitress bustled around the table in an offended silence. Sarah put aside her purse. She looked down at her meal, which was something brown and gluey.

“You’re welcome to half my shrimp salad,” Macon told her when the waitress had gone.

She shook her head. Her eyes were deep with tears, but they hadn’t spilled over.

“Macon,” she said, “ever since Ethan died I’ve had to admit that people are basically bad. Evil, Macon. So evil they would take a twelve-year-old boy and shoot him through the skull for no reason. I read a paper now and I despair; I’ve given up watching the news on TV. There’s so much wickedness, children setting other children on fire and grown men throwing babies out second-story windows, rape and torture and terrorism, old people beaten and robbed, men in our very own government willing to blow up the world, indifference and greed and instant anger on every street corner. I look at my students and they’re so ordinary, but they’re exactly like the boy who killed Ethan. If it hadn’t said beneath that boy’s picture what he’d been arrested for, wouldn’t you think he was just anyone? Someone who’d made the basketball team or won a college scholarship? You can’t believe in a soul. Last spring, Macon, I didn’t tell you this, I was cutting back our hedge and I saw the bird feeder had been stolen out of the crape myrtle tree. Someone will even steal food from little birds! And I just, I don’t know, went kind of crazy and attacked the crape myrtle. Cut it all up, ripped off the branches, slashed it with my pruning shears…”

Tears were running down her face now. She leaned across the table and said, “There are times when I haven’t been sure I could — I don’t want to sound melodramatic but — Macon, I haven’t been sure I could live in this kind of a world anymore.”

Macon felt he had to be terribly careful. He had to choose exactly the right words. He cleared his throat and said, “Yes, um, I see what you mean but…” He cleared his throat again. “It’s true,” he said, “what you say about human beings. I’m not trying to argue. But tell me this, Sarah: Why would that cause you to leave me?”

She crumpled up her napkin and dabbed at her nose. She said, “Because I knew you wouldn’t try to argue. You’ve believed all along they were evil.”

“Well, so—”

“This whole last year I felt myself retreating. Withdrawing. I could feel myself shrinking. I stayed away from crowds, I didn’t go to parties, I didn’t ask our friends in. When you and I went to the beach in the summer I lay on my blanket with all those people around me, their squawking radios and their gossip and their quarrels, and I thought, ‘Ugh, they’re so depressing. They’re so unlikable. So vile, really.’ I felt myself shrinking away from them. Just like you do, Macon — just as you do; sorry. Just as you have always done. I felt I was turning into a Leary.”

Macon tried for a lighter tone. He said, “Well, there are worse disasters than that, I guess.”

She didn’t smile. She said, “I can’t afford it.”

“Afford?”

“I’m forty-two years old. I don’t have enough time left to waste it holing up in my shell. So I’ve taken action. I’ve cut myself loose. I live in this apartment you’d hate, all clutter. I’ve made a whole bunch of new friends, and you wouldn’t like them much either, I guess. I’m studying with a sculptor. I always did want to be an artist, only teaching seemed more sensible. That’s how you would think: sensible. You’re so quick to be sensible, Macon, that you’ve given up on just about everything.”

“What have I given up on?”

She refolded the napkin and blotted her eyes. An appealing blur of mascara shadowed the skin beneath them. She said, “Remember Betty Grand?”

“No.”

“Betty Grand, she went to my school. You used to like her before you met me.”

“I never liked anyone on earth before I met you,” Macon said.

“You liked Betty Grand, Macon. You told me so when we first went out. You asked me if I knew her. You said you used to think she was pretty and you’d invited her to a ball game but she turned you down. You told me you’d changed your mind about her being pretty. Her gums showed any time she smiled, you said.”

Macon still didn’t remember, but he said, “Well? So?”

“Everything that might touch you or upset you or disrupt you, you’ve given up without a murmur and done without, said you never wanted it anyhow.”

“I suppose I would have done better if I’d gone on pining for Betty Grand all my life.”

“Well, you would have shown some feeling, at least.”

“I do show feeling, Sarah. I’m sitting here with you, am I not? You don’t see me giving up on you.”

She chose not to hear this. “And when Ethan died,” she said, “you peeled every single Wacky Pack sticker off his bedroom door. You emptied his closet and his bureau as if you couldn’t be rid of him soon enough. You kept offering people his junk in the basement, stilts and sleds and skateboards, and you couldn’t understand why they didn’t accept them. ‘I hate to see stuff there useless,’ you said. Macon, I know you loved him but I can’t help thinking you didn’t love him as much as I did, you’re not so torn apart by his going. I know you mourned him but there’s something so what-do-you-call, so muffled about the way you experience things, I mean love or grief or anything; it’s like you’re trying to slip through life unchanged. Don’t you see why I had to get out?”

“Sarah, I’m not muffled. I… endure. I’m trying to endure. I’m standing fast, I’m holding steady.”

“If you really think that,” Sarah said, “then you’re fooling yourself. You’re not holding steady; you’re ossified. You’re encased. You’re like something in a capsule. You’re a dried-up kernel of a man that nothing real penetrates. Oh, Macon, it’s not by chance you write those silly books telling people how to take trips without a jolt. That traveling armchair isn’t just your logo; it’s you.”

“No, it’s not,” Macon said. “It’s not!”

Sarah pulled her coat on, making a sloppy job of it. One corner of her collar was tucked inside. “So anyway,” she said. “This is what I wanted to tell you: I’m having John Albright send you a letter.”

“Who’s John Albright?”

“He’s an attorney.”

“Oh,” Macon said.

It was at least a full minute before he thought to say, “I guess you must mean a lawyer.”

Sarah collected her purse, stood up, and walked out.

Macon made his way conscientiously through his shrimp salad. He ate his cole slaw for the vitamin C. Then he finished every last one of his potato chips, although he knew his tongue would feel shriveled the following morning.

Once when Ethan was little, not more than two or three, he had run out into the street after a ball. Macon had been too far away to stop him. All he could do was shout, “No!” and then watch, frozen with horror, as a pickup truck came barreling around the curve. In that instant, he released his claim. In one split second he adjusted to a future that held no Ethan — an immeasurably bleaker place but also, by way of compensation, plainer and simpler, free of the problems a small child trails along with him, the endless demands and the mess and the contests for his mother’s attention. Then the truck stopped short and Ethan retrieved his ball, and Macon’s knees went weak with relief. But he remembered forever after how quickly he had adjusted. He wondered, sometimes, if that first adjustment had somehow stuck, making what happened to Ethan later less of a shock than it might have been. But if people didn’t adjust, how could they bear to go on?

He called for his bill and paid it. “Was there something wrong?” the waitress asked. “Did your friend not like her meal? She could always have sent it back, hon. We always let you send it back.”

“I know that,” Macon said.

“Maybe it was too spicy for her.”

“It was fine,” he said. “Could I have my crutches, please?”

She went off to get them, shaking her head.

He would have to locate a taxi. He’d made no arrangements for Rose to pick him up. Secretly, he’d been hoping to go home with Sarah. Now that hope seemed pathetic. He looked around the dining room and saw that most of the tables were filled, and that every person had someone else to eat with. Only Macon sat alone. He kept very erect and dignified but inside, he knew, he was crumbling. And when the waitress brought him his crutches and he stood to leave, it seemed appropriate that he had to walk nearly doubled, his chin sunk low on his chest and his elbows jutting out awkwardly like the wings of a baby bird. People stared at him as he passed. Some snickered. Was his foolishness so obvious? He passed the two churchy old ladies and one of them tugged at his sleeve. “Sir? Sir?”

He came to a stop.

“I suspect they may have given you my crutches,” she said.

He looked down at the crutches. They were, of course, not his. They were diminutive — hardly more than child-sized. Any other time he would have grasped the situation right off, but today it had somehow escaped him. Any other time he would have swung into action — called for the manager, pointed out the restaurant’s lack of concern for the handicapped. Today he only stood hanging his head, waiting for someone to help him.