The Accidental Tourist (25 page)

seventeen

Muriel said, “I never told you this, but a while before I met you I was dating somebody else.”

“Oh? Who was that?” Macon asked.

“He was a customer at the Rapid-Eze Copy Center. He brought me his divorce papers to copy and we started having this conversation and ended up going out together. His divorce was awful. Really messy. His wife had been two-timing him. He said he didn’t think he could ever trust a woman again. It was months before he would spend the night, even; he didn’t like going to sleep when a woman was in the same room. But bit by bit I changed all that. He relaxed. He got to be a whole different man. Moved in with me and took over the bills, paid off all I still owed. Alexander’s doctor. We started talking about getting married. Then he met an airline stewardess and eloped with her within the week.”

“I see,” Macon said.

“It was like I had, you know, cured him, just so he could elope with another woman.”

“Well,” he said.

“You wouldn’t do anything like that, would you, Macon?”

“Who, me?”

“Would you elope with someone else? Would you see someone else behind my back?”

“Oh, Muriel, of course not,” he told her.

“Would you leave me and go home to your wife?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Would you?”

“Don’t be silly,” he said.

She cocked her head and considered him. Her eyes were alert and bright and knowing, like the eyes of some small animal.

It was a rainy Tuesday morning and Edward, who was squeamish about rain, insisted he didn’t need to go out, but Macon took him anyway. While he was waiting in the backyard beneath his umbrella, he saw a young couple walking down the alley. They caught his attention because they walked so slowly, as if they didn’t realize they were getting wet. The boy was tall and frail, in ragged jeans and a soft white shirt. The girl wore a flat straw hat with ribbons down the back and a longish limp cotton dress. They swung hands, looking only at each other. They came upon a tricycle and they separated to walk around it; only instead of simply walking the girl did a little sort of dance step, spinning her skirt out, and the boy spun too and laughed and took her hand again.

Edward finally, finally peed, and Macon followed him back into the house. He set his umbrella in the kitchen sink and squatted to dry Edward off with an old beach towel. He rubbed briskly at first, and then more slowly. Then he stopped but remained on the floor, the towel bunched in his hands, the tin-can smell of wet dog rising all around him.

When he’d asked Sarah whether she was living with anyone, and Sarah had said, “Not really,” what exactly had she meant by that?

The rain stopped and they put Edward on his leash and went out shopping. Muriel needed bedroom slippers with feathers on them. “Red. High-heeled. Pointy-toed,” she said.

“Goodness. Whatever for?” Macon asked her.

“I want to clop around the house in them on Sunday mornings. Can’t you just see it? I wish I smoked cigarettes. I wish Alexander wasn’t allergic to smoke.”

Yes, he could see it, as a matter of fact. “In your black-and-gold kimono,” he said.

“Exactly.”

“But I don’t believe they sell those feathered slippers anymore.”

“In thrift shops they do.”

“Oh. Right.”

Lately, Macon had begun to like thrift shops himself. In the usual sea of plastic he had found, so far, a folding boxwood carpenter’s rule, an ingenious wheeled cookie cutter that left no waste space between cookies, and a miniature brass level for Alexander’s toolbox.

The air outside was warm and watery. Mrs. Butler was propping up the squashed geraniums that flopped in the white-washed tire in her yard. Mrs. Patel—out of her luminous sari for once, clumsy and unromantic in tight, bulgy Calvin Klein jeans—was sweeping the puddles off her front steps. And Mrs. Saddler stood in front of the hardware store waiting for it to open. “I don’t guess you’d have seen Dominick,” she said to Muriel.

“Not lately.”

“Last night he never came home,” Mrs. Saddler said. “That boy just worries the daylights out of me. He’s not what you would call bad,” she told Macon, “but he’s worrisome, know what I mean? When he’s at home he’s so much at home, those big noisy boots all over the place, but then when he’s away he’s so much away. You wouldn’t believe how the house feels; just empty. Just echoing.”

“He’ll be back,” Muriel said. “Tonight’s his turn to have the car.”

“Oh, and when he’s out with the car it’s worst of all,” Mrs. Saddler said. “Then every siren I hear, I wonder if it’s Dommie. I know how he screeches round corners! I know those fast girls he goes out with!”

They left her still standing there, distractedly fingering her coin purse, although the hardware-store owner had unlocked his door by now and was cranking down his awnings.

Outside a shop called Re-Runs, they ordered Edward to stay. He obeyed, looking put upon, while they went in. Muriel sifted through stacks of curled, brittle shoes that had hardened into the shapes of other people’s feet. She shucked off her own shoes and stepped into a pair of silver evening sandals. “What do you think?” she asked Macon.

“I thought you were looking for slippers.”

“But what do you think of these?”

“I can live without them,” he said.

He was feeling bored because Re-Runs carried nothing but clothes.

Muriel abandoned the shoes and they went next door to Garage Sale Incorporated. Macon tried to invent a need for a rusty metal Rolodex file he found in a heap of tire chains. Could he use it for his guidebooks in some way? And make it tax-deductible. Muriel picked up a tan vinyl suitcase with rounded edges; it reminded Macon of a partly sucked caramel. “Should I get this?” she asked.

“I thought you wanted slippers.”

“But for travel.”

“Since when do you travel?”

“I know where you’re going next,” she said. She came closer to him, both hands clutching the suitcase handle. She looked like a very young girl at a bus stop, say, or out hitching a ride on the highway. “I wanted to ask if I could come with you.”

“To Canada.”

“I mean the next place after that. France.”

He set down the Rolodex. (Mention of France always depressed him.)

“Julian
said
!” she reminded him. “He said it’s getting to be time to go to France again.”

“You know I can’t afford to bring you.”

Muriel replaced the suitcase and they left the shop. “But just this once,” she said, hurrying along beside him. “It wouldn’t cost much!”

Macon retrieved Edward’s leash and motioned him up. “It would cost a mint,” he said, “not to mention that you’d have to miss work.”

“No, I wouldn’t. I’ve quit.”

He looked over at her. “Quit?”

“Well, at the Meow-Bow. Then things like George and the dog training I’ll just rearrange; if I was to travel I could just—”

“You quit the Meow-Bow?”

“So what?”

He couldn’t explain the sudden weight that fell on him.

“It’s not like it really paid much,” Muriel said. “And you do buy most of the groceries now and help me with the rent and all; it’s not like I needed the money. Besides, it took so much time! Time I could spend with you and Alexander! Why, I was coming home nights literally dead with exhaustion, Macon.”

They passed Methylene’s Beauty Salon, an insurance agency, a paint-stripping shop. Edward gave an interested glance at a large, jowly tomcat basking on the hood of a pickup.

“Figuratively,” Macon said.

“Huh?”

“You were
figuratively
dead with exhaustion. Jesus, Muriel, you’re so imprecise. You’re so sloppy. And how could you quit your job like that? How could you just assume like that? You never even warned me!”

“Oh, don’t make such a big deal about it,” Muriel said.

They arrived at her favorite shop—a nameless little hole in the wall with a tumble of dusty hats in the window. Muriel started through the door but Macon stayed where he was. “Aren’t you coming in?” she asked him.

“I’ll wait here.”

“But it’s the place with all the gadgets!”

He said nothing. She sighed and disappeared.

Seeing her go was like shucking off a great, dragging burden.

He squatted to scratch behind Edward’s ears, and then he rose and studied a sun-bleached election poster as if it held some fascinating coded message. Two black women passed him, pulling wire carts full of laundry. “It was just as warm as this selfsame day I’m speaking to you but she wore a very very fur coat . . .”

“May-con.”

He turned toward the door of the shop.

“Oh, Maay-con!”

He saw a mitten, one of those children’s mittens designed to look like a puppet. The palm was a red felt mouth that widened to squeak, “Macon,
please
don’t be angry with Muriel.”

Macon groaned.

“Come into this nice store with her,” the puppet urged.

“Muriel, I think Edward’s getting restless now.”

“There’s lots of things to buy here! Pliers and wrenches and T-squares . . . There’s a silent hammer.”

“What?”

“A hammer that doesn’t make a sound. You can pound in nails in the dead of night.”

“Listen—” Macon said.

“There’s a magnifying glass all cracked and broken, and when you look at broken things through the lens you’d swear they’d turned whole again.”

“Really, Muriel.”

“I’m not Muriel! I’m Mitchell Mitten! Macon, don’t you know Muriel can always take care of herself?” the puppet asked him. “Don’t you know she could find another job tomorrow, if she wanted? So come inside! Come along! There’s a pocket-knife here with its own whetstone blade.”

“Oh, for Lord’s sake,” Macon said.

But he gave a grudging little laugh.

And went on inside.

Over the next few days she kept bringing up France again and again. She sent him an anonymous letter pasted together from magazine print:
Don’t FoRget tO BUY plANe Ticket for MuRiel.
(And the telltale magazine—with little blocks clipped out of its pages—still lay on the kitchen table.) She asked him to get her her keys from her purse and when he opened her purse he found photographs, two slick colored squares on thin paper showing Muriel’s eyes at half mast. Passport photos, plainly. She must have meant for him to see them; she was watching him so intently. But all he did was drop her keys in her palm without comment.

He had to admire her. Had he ever known such a fighter? He went grocery shopping with her unusually late one evening, and just as they were crossing a shadowed area a boy stepped forth from a doorway. “Give over all what you have in your purse,” he told Muriel. Macon was caught off guard; the boy was hardly more than a child. He froze, hugging the sack of groceries. But Muriel said, “The hell I will!” and swung her purse around by its strap and clipped the boy in the jaw. He lifted a hand to his face. “You get on home this instant or you’ll be sorry you were ever born,” Muriel told him. He slunk away, looking back at her with a puzzled expression.

When Macon had caught his breath again, he told Muriel she was a fool. “He might have had a gun, for all you knew,” he said. “Anything might have happened! Kids show less mercy than grownups; you can see that any day in the papers.”

“Well, it turned out fine, didn’t it?” Muriel asked. “What are you so mad at?”

He wasn’t sure. He supposed he might be mad at himself. He had done nothing to protect her, nothing strong or chivalrous. He hadn’t thought as fast as she had or thought at all, in fact. While Muriel . . . why, Muriel hadn’t even seemed surprised. She might have strolled down that street expecting a neighbor here, a stray dog there, a holdup just beyond—all equally part of life. He felt awed by her, and diminished. Muriel just walked on, humming “Great Speckled Bird” as if nothing particular had happened.

“I don’t think Alexander’s getting a proper education,” he said to her one evening.

“Oh, he’s okay.”

“I asked him to figure what change they’d give back when we bought the milk today, and he didn’t have the faintest idea. He didn’t even know he’d have to subtract.”

“Well, he’s only in second grade,” Muriel said.

“I think he ought to switch to a private school.”

“Private schools cost money.”

“So? I’ll pay.”

She stopped flipping the bacon and looked over at him. “What are you saying?” she asked.

“Pardon?”

“What are you saying, Macon? Are you saying you’re committed?”

Macon cleared his throat. He said, “Committed.”

“Alexander’s got ten more years of school ahead of him. Are you saying you’ll be around for all ten years?”

“Um . . .”

“I can’t just put him in a school and take him out again with every passing whim of yours.”

He was silent.

“Just tell me this much,” she said. “Do you picture us getting married sometime? I mean when your divorce comes through?”

He said, “Oh, well, marriage, Muriel . . .”

“You don’t, do you. You don’t know
what
you want. One minute you like me and the next you don’t. One minute you’re ashamed to be seen with me and the next you think I’m the best thing that ever happened to you.”

He stared at her. He had never guessed that she read him so clearly.

“You think you can just drift along like this, day by day, no plans,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow you’ll be here, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll just go on back to Sarah. Oh yes! I saw you at Rose’s wedding. Don’t think I didn’t see how you and Sarah looked at each other.”

Macon said, “All I’m saying is—”

“All
I’m
saying,” Muriel told him, “is take care what you promise my son. Don’t go making him promises you don’t intend to keep.”

“But I just want him to learn to subtract!” he said.

She didn’t answer, and so the last word rang in the air for moments afterward. Subtract. A flat, sharp, empty sound that dampened Macon’s spirits.

At supper she was too quiet; even Alexander was quiet, and excused himself the minute he’d finished his BLT. Macon, though, hung around the kitchen. Muriel was running a sinkful of water. He said, “Shall I dry?” Without any sort of warning, she whirled and flung a wet sponge in his face. Macon said, “Muriel?”