The Accidental Tourist (21 page)

“What is it, you don’t believe in buying American?” Mr. Dugan asked him.

“Well, as a matter of fact—”

As a matter of fact his wife drove a Ford, he’d been going to say, but he changed his mind. He took the glass that Mr. Dugan held out to him. “I did once have a Rambler,” he said.

“You want to try a Chevy, Macon. Want to come to the show-room sometime and let me show you a Chevy. What’s your preference? Family-size? Compact?”

“Well, compact, I guess, but—”

“I’ll tell you one thing: There is no way on earth you’re going to get me to sell you a
sub
compact. No sir, you can beg and you can whine, you can get down on bended knee, I won’t sell you one of those deathtraps folks are so set on buying nowadays. I tell my customers, I say, ‘You think I got no principles? You’re looking here before you at a man of principle,’ I tell them, and I say, ‘You want a subcompact you better go to Ed Mackenzie there. He’ll sell you one without a thought. What does he care? But I’m a man of principle.’ Why Muriel here near about lost her life in one of them things.”

“Oh, Daddy, I did not,” Muriel said.

“Came a lot closer than
I’d
like to get.”

“I walked away without a scratch.”

“Car looked like a little stove-in sardine can.”

“Worst thing I got was a run in my stocking.”

“Muriel was taking a lift from Dr. Kane at the Meow-Bow,” Mr. Dugan told Macon, “one day when her car was out of whack, and some durn fool woman driver swung directly into their path. See, she was hanging a left when—”

“Let me tell it,” Mrs. Dugan said. She leaned toward Macon, gripping the wineglass that held her liqueur. “I was just coming in from the grocery store, carrying these few odds and ends I needed for Claire’s school lunches. That child eats more than some grown men I know. Phone rings. I drop everything and go to answer. Man says, ‘Mrs. Dugan?’ I say, ‘Yes.’ Man says, ‘Mrs. Dugan, this is the Baltimore City Police and I’m calling about your daughter Muriel.’ I think, ‘Oh, my God.’ Right away my heart starts up and I have to find someplace to sit. Still have my coat on, rain scarf tied around my head so I couldn’t even hear all that good but I never thought to take it off, that’s how flustered I was. It was one of those hard rainy days like someone is purposely heaving buckets of water at you. I think, ‘Oh, my God, now what has Muriel gone and—’ ”

“Lillian, you are getting way off the subject here,” Mr. Dugan said.

“How can you say that? I’m telling him about Muriel’s accident.”

“He don’t want to hear every little oh-my-God, he wants to know why he can’t have a subcompact. Lady hangs a left smack in front of Dr. Kane’s little car,” Mr. Dugan told Macon, “and he has no choice but to ram her. He had the right of way. Want to know what happened? His little car is totaled. Little bitty Pinto. Lady’s big old Chrysler barely dents its fender. Now tell me you still want a subcompact.”

“But I didn’t—”

“And the other thing is that Dr. Kane never, ever offered her another ride home, even after he got a new car,” Mrs. Dugan said.

“Well, I don’t exactly live in his neighborhood, Ma.”

“He’s a bachelor,” Mrs. Dugan told Macon. “Have you met him? Real good-looking, Muriel says. First day on the job she says, ‘Guess what, Ma.’ Calls me on the phone. ‘Guess what, my boss is single and he’s real good-looking, a professional man, the other girls tell me he isn’t even engaged.’ Then he offers her that one lift home and they go and have an accident and he never offers again. Even when she lets him know she don’t have her car some days, he never offers again.”

“He does live clear up in Towson,” Muriel said.

“I believe he thinks you’re bad luck.”

“He lives up in Towson and I live down on Singleton Street! What do you expect?”

“Next he got a Mercedes sports car,” Claire put in.

“Well, sports cars,” Mr. Dugan said. “We don’t even talk about those.”

Alexander said, “Can I be excused now?”

“I really had high hopes for Dr. Kane,” Mrs. Dugan said sadly.

“Oh, quit it, Ma.”

“You did, too! You said you did!”

“Why don’t you just hush up and drink your drink.”

Mrs. Dugan shook her head, but she took another sip of liqueur.

They left in the early evening, when the last light had faded and the air seemed crystallized with cold. Claire stood in the doorway singing out, “Come back soon! Thanks for the skirt! Merry Christmas!” Mrs. Dugan shivered next to her, a sweater draped over her shoulders. Mr. Dugan merely lifted an arm and disappeared— presumably to check on the basement again.

Traffic was heavier now. Headlights glowed like little white smudges. The radio—having given up on Christmas for another year—played “I Cut My Fingers on the Pieces of Your Broken Heart,” and the toolbox rattled companionably in the backseat.

“Macon? Are you mad?” Muriel asked.

“Mad?”

“Are you mad at me?”

“Why, no.”

She glanced back at Alexander and said no more.

It was night when they reached Singleton Street. The Butler twins, bundled into identical lavender jackets, stood talking with two boys on the curb. Macon parked and opened the back door for Alexander, who had fallen asleep with his chin on his chest. He gathered him up and carried him into the house. In the living room, Muriel set down her own burdens—the toolbox, Alexander’s new game, and a pie Mrs. Dugan had pressed on them—and followed Macon up the stairs. Macon walked sideways to keep Alexander’s feet from banging into the wall. They went into the smaller of the bedrooms and he laid Alexander on the bed. “I know what you must be thinking,” Muriel said. She took Alexander’s shoes off. “You’re thinking, ‘Oh, now I see, this Muriel was just on the lookout for anybody in trousers.’ Aren’t you.”

Macon didn’t answer. (He worried they’d wake Alexander.)

“I know what you’re thinking!”

She tucked Alexander in. Turned off the light. They started back downstairs. “But that’s not the way it was; I swear it,” she said. “Oh, of course since he was single the possibility did cross my mind. Who would I be kidding if I said it didn’t? I’m all alone, raising a kid. Scrounging for money. Of course it crossed my mind!”

“Well, of course,” Macon said mildly.

“But it wasn’t like she made it sound,” Muriel told him.

She clattered after him across the living room. When he sat on the couch she sat next to him, still in her coat. “Are you going to stay?” she asked.

“If you’re not too sleepy.”

Instead of answering, she tipped her head back against the couch. “I meant are you giving up on me. I meant did you want to stop seeing me.”

“Why would I want to stop seeing you?”

“After how bad she made me look.”

“You didn’t look bad.”

“Oh, no?”

When she was tired, her skin seemed to tighten over her bones. She pressed her fingertips to her eyelids.

“Last Christmas,” Macon said, “was the first one we had without Ethan. It was very hard to get through.”

He often found himself talking with her about Ethan. It felt good to say his name out loud.

“We didn’t know how to have a childless Christmas anymore,” he said. “I thought, ‘Well, after all, we managed before we had him, didn’t we?’ But in fact I couldn’t remember how. It seemed to me we’d
always
had him; it’s so unthinkable once you’ve got children that they ever didn’t exist. I’ve noticed: I look back to when I was a boy, and it seems to me that Ethan was somehow there even then; just not yet visible, or something. So anyway. I decided what I should do was get Sarah a whole flood of presents, and I went out to Hutzler’s the day before Christmas and bought all this junk—closet organizers and such. And Sarah: She went to the other extreme. She didn’t buy anything. So there we were, each of us feeling we’d done it all wrong, acted inappropriately, but also that the other had done wrong; I don’t know. It was a terrible Christmas.”

He smoothed Muriel’s hair off her forehead. “This one was better,” he said.

She opened her eyes and studied him a moment. Then she slipped her hand in her pocket, came up with something and held it toward him—palming it, like a secret. “For you,” she said.

“For me?”

“I’d like you to have it.”

It was a snapshot stolen from her family album: Muriel as a toddler, clambering out of a wading pool.

She meant, he supposed, to give him the best of her. And so she had. But the best of her was not that child’s Shirley Temple hairdo. It was her fierceness—her spiky, pugnacious fierceness as she fought her way toward the camera with her chin set awry and her eyes bright slits of determination. He thanked her. He said he would keep it forever.

fourteen

You would have to say that he was living with her now. He began to spend all his time at her house, to contribute toward her rent and her groceries. He kept his shaving things in her bathroom and squeezed his clothes among the dresses in her closet. But there wasn’t one particular point at which he made the shift. No, this was a matter of day by day. First there was that long Christmas vacation when Alexander was home alone; so why shouldn’t Macon stay on with him once he’d spent the night there? And why not fetch his typewriter and work at the kitchen table? And then why not remain for supper, and after that for bed?

Though if you needed to put a date on it, you might say he truly moved in the afternoon he moved Edward in. He’d just got back from a business trip—an exhausting blitz of five southern cities, not one of which was any warmer than Baltimore—and he stopped by Rose’s house to check the animals. The cat was fine, Rose said. (She had to speak above Edward’s yelps; he was frantic with joy and relief.) The cat had probably not noticed Macon was missing. But Edward, well . . . “He spends a lot of time sitting in the hall,” she said, “staring at the door. He keeps his head cocked and he waits for you to come back.”

That did it. He brought Edward with him when he returned to Singleton Street.

“What do you think?” he asked Muriel. “Could we keep him just a day or two? See if Alexander can take it, without any shots?”

“I can take it!” Alexander said. “It’s cats that get to me; not dogs.”

Muriel looked doubtful, but she said they could give it a try.

Meanwhile, Edward darted madly all over the house snuffling into corners and under furniture. Then he sat in front of Muriel and grinned up at her. He reminded Macon of a schoolboy with a crush on his teacher; all his fantasies were realized, here he was at last.

For the first few hours they tried to keep him in a separate part of the house, which of course was hopeless. He had to follow Macon wherever he went, and also he developed an immediate interest in Alexander. Lacking a ball, he kept dropping small objects at Alexander’s feet and then stepping back to look expectantly into his face. “He wants to play fetch,” Macon explained. Alexander picked up a matchbook and tossed it, angling his arm behind him in a prissy way. While Edward went tearing after it, Macon made a mental note to buy a ball first thing in the morning and teach Alexander how to throw.

Alexander watched TV and Edward snoozed on the couch beside him, curled like a little blond cashew nut with a squinty, blissful expression on his face. Alexander hugged him and buried his face in Edward’s ruff. “Watch it,” Macon told him. He had no idea what to do if Alexander started wheezing. But Alexander didn’t wheeze. By bedtime he just had a stuffy nose, and he usually had that anyhow.

Macon liked to believe that Alexander didn’t know he and Muriel slept together. “Well, that’s just plain ridiculous,” Muriel said. “Where does he imagine you spend the night—on the living room couch?”

“Maybe,” he said. “I’m sure he has some explanation. Or maybe he doesn’t. All I’m saying is, we shouldn’t hit him in the face with it. Let him think what he wants to think.”

So every morning, Macon rose and dressed before Alexander woke. He started fixing breakfast and then roused him. “Seven o’clock! Time to get up! Go call your mother, will you?” In the past, he learned, Muriel had often stayed in bed while Alexander woke up on his own and got ready for school. Sometimes he left the house while she was still asleep. Macon thought that was shocking. Now he made a full breakfast, and he insisted that Muriel sit at the table with them. Muriel claimed breakfast made her sick to her stomach. Alexander said it made him sick, too, but Macon said that was just too bad. “Ninety-eight percent of all A students eat eggs in the morning,” he said (making it up as he went along). “Ninety-nine percent drink milk.” He untied his apron and sat down. “Are you listening, Alexander?”

“I’ll throw up if I drink milk.”

“That’s all in your head.”

“Tell him, Mama!”

“He throws up,” Muriel said gloomily. She sat hunched at the table in her long silk robe, resting her chin on one hand. “It’s something to do with enzymes,” she said. She yawned. Her hair, growing out of its permanent at last, hung down her back in even ripples like the crimps on a bobby pin.

Alexander walked to school with Buddy and Sissy Ebbetts, two tough-looking older children from across the street. Muriel either went back to bed or dressed and left for one or another of her jobs, depending on what day it was. Then Macon did the breakfast dishes and took Edward out. They didn’t go far; it was much too cold. The few people they encountered walked rapidly, with jerky steps, like characters in a silent film. They knew Macon by sight now and would allow their eyes to flick over his face as they passed—a gesture like a nod—but they didn’t speak. Edward ignored them. Other dogs could come up and sniff him and he wouldn’t even break stride. Mr. Marcusi, unloading crates outside Marcusi’s Grocery, would pause to say, “Well, hey there, stubby. Hey there, tub of lard.” Edward, smugly oblivious, marched on. “Weirdest animal I ever saw,” Mr. Marcusi called after Macon. “Looks like something that was badly drawn.” Macon always laughed.

He was beginning to feel easier here. Singleton Street still unnerved him with its poverty and its ugliness, but it no longer seemed so dangerous. He saw that the hoodlums in front of the Cheery Moments Carry-Out were pathetically young and shabby— their lips chapped, their sparse whiskers ineptly shaved, an uncertain, unformed look around their eyes. He saw that once the men had gone off to work, the women emerged full of good intentions and swept their front walks, picked up the beer cans and potato chip bags, even rolled back their coat sleeves and scrubbed their stoops on the coldest days of the year. Children raced past like so many scraps of paper blowing in the wind—mittens mismatched, noses running—and some woman would brace herself on her broom to call, “You there! I see you! Don’t think I don’t know you’re skipping school!” For this street was always backsliding, Macon saw, always falling behind, but was caught just in time by these women with their carrying voices and their pushy jaws.

Returning to Muriel’s house, he would warm himself with a cup of coffee. He would set his typewriter on the kitchen table and sit down with his notes and brochures. The window next to the table had large, cloudy panes that rattled whenever the wind blew. Something about the rattling sound reminded him of train travel.
The airport in Atlanta must have ten miles of corridors
, he typed, and then a gust shook the panes and he had an eerie sensation of movement, as if the cracked linoleum floor were skating out from under him.

He would telephone hotels, motels, Departments of Commerce, and his travel agent, arranging future trips. He would note these arrangements in the datebook that Julian gave him every Christmas—a Businessman’s Press product, spiral-bound. In the back were various handy reference charts that he liked to thumb through. The birthstone for January was a garnet; for February, an amethyst. One square mile equaled 2.59 square kilometers. The proper gift for a first anniversary was paper. He would ponder these facts dreamily. It seemed to him that the world was full of equations; that there must be an answer for everything, if only you knew how to set forth the questions.

Then it was lunchtime, and he would put away his work and make himself a sandwich or heat a can of soup, let Edward have a quick run in the tiny backyard. After that he liked to putter around the house a bit. There was so much that needed fixing! And all of it somebody else’s, not his concern, so he could approach it lightheartedly. He whistled while he probed the depth of a crack. He hummed as he toured the basement, shaking his head at the disarray. Upstairs he found a three-legged bureau leaning on a can of tomatoes, and he told Edward, “Scandalous!” in a tone of satisfaction.

It occurred to him—as he oiled a hinge, as he tightened a doorknob—that the house reflected amazingly little of Muriel. She must have lived here six or seven years by now, but still the place had an air of transience. Her belongings seemed hastily placed, superimposed, not really much to do with her. This was a disappointment, for Macon was conscious while he worked of his intense curiosity about her inner workings. Sanding a drawer, he cast a guilty eye upon its contents but found only fringed shawls and yellowed net gloves from the forties—clues to other people’s lives, not hers.

But what was it he wanted to know? She was an open book, would tell him anything—more than he felt comfortable with. Nor did she attempt to hide her true nature, which was certainly far from perfect. It emerged that she had a nasty temper, a shrewish tongue, and a tendency to fall into spells of self-disgust from which no one could rouse her for hours. She was inconsistent with Alexander to the point of pure craziness—one minute overprotective, the next minute callous and offhand. She was obviously intelligent, but she counteracted that with the most global case of superstition Macon had ever witnessed. Hardly a day passed when she didn’t tell him some dream in exhaustive detail and then sift through it for omens. (A dream of white ships on a purple sea came true the very next morning, she claimed, when a door-to-door salesman showed up in a purple sweater patterned with little white boats. “The very same purple! Same shape of ship!” Macon only wondered what kind of salesman would wear such clothing.) She believed in horoscopes and tarot cards and Ouija boards. Her magic number was seventeen. In a previous incarnation she’d been a fashion designer, and she swore she could recall at least one of her deaths. (“We think she’s passed on,” they told the doctor as he entered, and the doctor unwound his muffler.) She was religious in a blurry, nondenominational way and had no doubt whatsoever that God was looking after her personally—ironic, it seemed to Macon, in view of how she’d had to fight for every little thing she wanted.

He knew all this and yet, finding a folded sheet of paper on the counter, he opened it and devoured her lurching scrawl as if she were a stranger.
Pretzels. Pantyhose. Dentist
, he read.
Pick up Mrs.
Arnold’s laundry.

No, not that. Not that.

Then it was three o’clock and Alexander was home from school, letting himself in with a key that he wore on a shoelace around his neck. “Macon?” he’d call tentatively. “Is that you out there?” He was scared of burglars. Macon said, “It’s me.” Edward leapt up and went running for his ball. “How was your day?” Macon always asked.

“Oh, okay.”

But Macon had the feeling that school never went very well for Alexander. He came out of it with his face more pinched than ever, his glasses thick with fingerprints. He reminded Macon of a home-work paper that had been erased and rewritten too many times. His clothes, on the other hand, were as neat as when he’d left in the morning. Oh, those clothes! Spotless polo shirts with a restrained brown pinstripe, matching brown trousers gathered bulkily around his waist with a heavy leather belt. Shiny brown shoes. Blinding white socks. Didn’t he ever play? Didn’t kids have recess anymore?

Macon gave him a snack: milk and cookies. (Alexander drank milk in the afternoons without complaint.) Then he helped him with his schoolwork. It was the simplest sort—arithmetic sums and reading questions. “Why did Joe need the dime? Where was Joe’s daddy?”

“Umm . . .” Alexander said. Blue veins pulsed in his temples.

He was not a stupid child but he was limited, Macon felt. Limited. Even his walk was constricted. Even his smile never dared to venture beyond two invisible boundaries in the center of his face. Not that he was smiling now. He was wrinkling his forehead, raising his eyes fearfully to Macon.

“Take your time,” Macon told him. “There’s no hurry.”

“But I can’t! I don’t know! I don’t know!”

“You remember Joe,” Macon said patiently.

“I don’t think I do!”

Sometimes Macon stuck with it, sometimes he simply dropped it. After all, Alexander had managed without him up till now, hadn’t he? There was a peculiar kind of luxury here: Alexander was not his own child. Macon felt linked to him in all sorts of complicated ways, but not in that inseparable, inevitable way that he’d been linked to Ethan. He could still draw back from Alexander; he could still give up on him. “Oh, well,” he could say, “talk it over with your teacher tomorrow.” And then his thoughts could wander off again.

The difference was, he realized, that he was not held responsible here. It was a great relief to know that.

When Muriel came home she brought fresh air and bustle and excitement. “Is it ever cold! Is it ever windy! Radio says three below zero tonight. Edward, down, this minute. Who wants lemon pie for dessert? Here’s what happened: I had to go shopping for Mrs. Quick. First I had to buy linens for her daughter who’s getting married, then I had to take them back because they were all the wrong color, her daughter didn’t want pastel but white and told her mother plain as day, she said . . . and then I had to pick up pastries for the bridesmaids’ party and when Mrs. Quick sees the lemon pie she says, ‘Oh, no, not lemon! Not that tacky lemon that always tastes like Kool-Aid!’ I’m like, ‘Mrs. Quick, you don’t have any business telling me what is tacky. This is a fresh-baked, lemon meringue pie without a trace of artificial . . .’ So anyway, to make a long story short, she said to take it home to my little boy. ‘Well, for your information I’m certain he can’t eat it,’ I say. ‘Chances are he’s allergic.’ But I took it.”

She ranged around the kitchen putting together a supper— BLT’s, usually, and vegetables from a can. Sometimes things were not where she expected (Macon’s doing—he couldn’t resist reorganizing), but she adapted cheerfully. While the bacon sputtered in the skillet she usually phoned her mother and went over all she’d just told Macon and Alexander. “But the daughter wanted white and . . . ‘oh, not that tacky lemon pie!’ she says . . .”