The Accidental Tourist (30 page)

Macon said, “Why don’t you give her a job, Julian.”

“Job?”

“Why don’t you show her that office of yours. That filing system you never get sorted, that secretary chewing her gum and forgetting whose appointment is when. Don’t you think Rose could take all that in hand?”

“Well, sure, but—”

“Call her up and tell her your business is going to pieces. Ask if she could just come in and get things organized, get things under control. Put it that way. Use those words.
Get things under control,
tell her. Then sit back and wait.”

Julian thought that over.

“But of course, what do I know,” Macon said.

“No, you’re right.”

“Now let’s see your folder.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Julian said.

“Look at this!” Macon said. He held up the topmost letter. “Why do you bother me with this?
I just wanted to appraise you
folks of a wonderful little hotel in . . .
A man who says he wants to ‘appraise’ us, do you really suppose he’d know a good hotel when he saw one?”

“Macon,” Julian said.

“The whole damn language has been slaughtered,” Macon said.

“Macon, I know you feel I’m crass and brash.”

This took Macon a moment to answer, only partly because he first heard it as “crash and brass.” “Oh,” he said. “Why, no, Julian, not at—”

“But I just want to say this, Macon. I care about that sister of yours more than anything else in the world. It’s not just Rose, it’s the whole way she lives, that house and those turkey dinners and those evening card games. And I care about you, too, Macon. Why, you’re my best friend! At least, I hope so.”

“Oh, why, ah—” Macon said.

Julian rose and shook his hand, mangling all the bones inside, and clapped him on the shoulder and left.

Sarah came home at five-thirty. She found Macon standing at the kitchen sink with yet another cup of coffee. “Did the couch get here?” she asked him.

“All safe and sound.”

“Oh, good! Let’s see it.”

She went into the living room, leaving tracks of gray dust that Macon supposed was clay or granite. There was dust in her hair, even. She squinted at the couch and said, “What do you think?”

“Seems fine to me,” he said.

“Honestly, Macon. I don’t know what’s come over you; you used to be downright finicky.”

“It’s fine, Sarah. It looks very nice.”

She stripped off the cellophane and stood back, arms full of crackling light. “We ought to see how it opens out,” she said.

While she was stuffing the cellophane into the wastebasket, Macon pulled at the canvas strap that turned the couch into a bed. It made him think of Muriel’s house. The strap’s familiar graininess reminded him of all the times Muriel’s sister had slept over, and when the mattress slid forth he saw the gleam of Claire’s tangled golden hair.

“Maybe we should put on the sheets, now that we’ve got it open,” Sarah said. She brought the sack of linens from the front hall. With Macon positioned at the other side of the couch, she floated a sheet about the mattress and then bustled up and down, tucking it in. Macon helped, but he wasn’t as fast as Sarah. The clay dust or whatever it was had worked itself into the seams of her knuckles, he saw. There was something appealing about her small, brown, creased hands against the white percale. He said, “Let’s give the bed a trial run.”

Sarah didn’t understand at first. She looked up from unfolding the second sheet and said, “Trial run?”

But she allowed him to take the sheet away and slip her sweat shirt over her head.

Making love to Sarah was comfortable and soothing. After all their years together, her body was so well known to him that he couldn’t always tell the difference between what he was feeling and what she was feeling. But wasn’t it sad that they hadn’t the slightest uneasiness about anyone walking in on them? They were so alone. He nestled his face in her warm, dusty neck and wondered if she shared that feeling as well—if she sensed all the empty air in the house. But he would never ask.

While Sarah took a shower, he shaved. They were supposed to go to Bob and Sue Carney’s for supper. When he came out of the bathroom Sarah was standing in front of the bureau, screwing on little gold earrings. (She was the only woman Macon knew of who didn’t have pierced ears.) He thought Renoir could have painted her: Sarah in her slip with her head cocked slightly, plump tanned arms upraised. “I’m really not in the mood to go out,” she said.

“Me neither,” Macon said, opening his closet door.

“I’d be just as content to stay home with a book.”

He pulled a shirt off a hanger.

“Macon,” she said.

“Hmm.”

“You never asked me if I slept with anyone while we were separated.”

Macon paused, halfway into one sleeve.

“Don’t you want to know?” she asked him.

“No,” he said.

He put on the shirt and buttoned the cuffs.

“I would think you’d wonder.”

“Well, I don’t,” he said.

“The trouble with you is, Macon—”

It was astonishing, the instantaneous flare of anger he felt. “Sarah,” he said, “don’t even start. By God, if that doesn’t sum up every single thing that’s wrong with being married. ‘The trouble with you is, Macon—’ and, ‘I know you better than you know yourself, Macon—’ ”

“The trouble with you is,” she continued steadily, “you think people should stay in their own sealed packages. You don’t believe in opening up. You don’t believe in trading back and forth.”

“I certainly don’t,” Macon said, buttoning his shirt front.

“You know what you remind me of? The telegram Harpo Marx sent his brothers:
No message. Harpo.
”

That made him grin. Sarah said, “You
would
think it was funny.”

“Well? Isn’t it?”

“It isn’t at all! It’s sad! It’s infuriating! It would be infuriating to go to your door and sign for that telegram and tear it open and find no message!”

He took a tie from the rack in his closet.

“For your information,” she said, “I didn’t sleep with anyone the whole entire time.”

He felt like she’d won some kind of contest. He pretended he hadn’t heard her.

Bob and Sue had invited just neighbors—the Bidwells and a new young couple Macon hadn’t met before. Macon stuck mainly to the new couple because with them, he had no history. When they asked if he had children, he said, “No.” He asked if they had any children.

“No,” Brad Frederick said.

“Ah.”

Brad’s wife was in transit between girlhood and womanhood. She wore her stiff navy blue dress and large white shoes as if they belonged to her mother. Brad himself was still a boy. When they all went out back to watch the barbecue, Brad found a Frisbee in the bushes and flung it to little Delilah Carney. His white polo shirt pulled loose from his trousers. Dominick Saddler came to Macon’s mind like a deep, hard punch. He remembered how, after his grandfather died, the sight of any old person could make his eyes fill with tears. Lord, if he wasn’t careful he could end up feeling sorry for the whole human race. “Throw that thing here,” he said briskly to Delilah, and he set aside his sherry and held out a hand for the Frisbee. Before long they had a real game going—all the guests joining in except Brad’s wife, who was still too close to childhood to risk getting stuck there on a visit back.

At supper, Sue Carney seated Macon at her right. She put a hand on his and said it was wonderful that he and Sarah had worked things out. “Well, thank you,” Macon said. “Gosh you make a really good salad, Sue.”

“We all have our ups and downs,” she said. For a second he thought she meant her salads weren’t consistently successful. “I’ll be honest,” she told him, “there’ve been times when I have wondered if Bob and I would make it. There’s times I feel we’re just hanging in there, you know what I mean? Times I say, ‘Hi, honey, how was your day?’ but inside I’m feeling like a Gold Star mother.”

Macon turned the stem of his glass and tried to think what step he’d missed in her logic.

“Like someone who’s suffered a loss in a war,” she said, “and then forever afterward she has to go on supporting the war; she has to support it louder than anyone else, because otherwise she’d be admitting the loss was for no purpose.”

“Um . . .”

“But that’s just a passing mood,” she said.

“Well, naturally,” Macon said.

He and Sarah walked home through air as heavy as water. It was eleven o’clock and the teenagers who had eleven o’clock curfews were just returning. These were the youngest ones, most of them too young to drive, and so they were chauffeured by grownups. They jumped out of cars shouting, “See you! Thanks! Call me tomorrow, hear?” Keys jingled. Front doors blinked open and blinked shut again. The cars moved on.

Sarah’s skirt had the same whispery sound as the Tuckers’ lawn sprinkler, which was still revolving slowly in a patch of ivy.

When they reached the house, Macon let Edward out for one last run. He tried to get the cat to come in, but she stayed hunched on the kitchen window ledge glaring down at him, owlish and stubborn; so he let her be. He moved through the rooms turning off lights. By the time he came upstairs Sarah was already in bed, propped against the headboard with a glass of club soda. “Have some,” she said, holding out the glass. But he said no, he was tired; and he undressed and slid under the covers.

The tinkling of Sarah’s ice cubes took on some meaning in his mind. It seemed that with every tinkle, he fell deeper. Finally he opened a door and traveled down an aisle and stepped into the witness stand. They asked him the simplest of questions. “What color were the wheels?” “Who brought the bread?” “Were the shutters closed or open?” He honestly couldn’t remember. He tried but he couldn’t remember. They took him to the scene of the crime, a winding road like something in a fairy tale. “Tell us all you know,” they said. He didn’t know a thing. By now it was clear from their faces that he wasn’t merely a witness; they suspected him. So he racked his brain, but still he came up empty. “You have to see my side of this!” he cried. “I put it all out of my mind; I worked to put it out! Now I can’t bring it back.”

“Not even to defend yourself?” they asked.

He opened his eyes. The room was dark, and Sarah breathed softly next to him. The clock radio said it was midnight. The midnight-curfew group was just returning. Hoots and laughter rang out, tires scraped a curb, and a fanbelt whinnied as someone struggled to park. Then gradually the neighborhood fell silent. It would stay that way, Macon knew, till time for the one-o’clock group. He would first hear faint strands of their music and then more laughter, car doors slamming, house doors slamming. Porch lights would switch off all along the street, gradually dimming the ceiling as he watched. In the end, he would be the only one left awake.

twenty

The plane to New York was a little bird of a thing, but the plane to Paris was a monster, more like a building. Inside, great crowds were cramming coats and bags into overhead compartments, stuffing suitcases under seats, arguing, calling for stewardesses. Babies were crying and mothers were snapping at children. Steerage could not have been worse than this, Macon felt.

He took his place next to a window and was joined almost immediately by an elderly couple speaking French. The man sat next to Macon and gave him a deep, unsmiling nod. Then he said something to his wife, who passed him a canvas bag. He unzipped it and sorted through its contents. Playing cards, an entire tin of Band-aids, a stapler, a hammer, a lightbulb . . . Macon was fascinated. He kept sliding his eyes to the right to try and see more. When a wooden mousetrap tumbled out, he began to wonder if the man might be some sort of lunatic; but of course even a mousetrap could be explained, given a little thought. Yes, what he was witnessing, Macon decided, was just one answer to the traveler’s eternal choice: Which was better? Take all you own, and struggle to carry it? Or travel light, and spend half your trip combing the shops for what you’ve left behind? Either way had its drawbacks.

He glanced up the aisle, where more passengers were arriving. A Japanese man festooned with cameras, a nun, a young girl in braids. A woman with a little red vanity kit, her hair a dark tent, her face a thin triangle.

Muriel.

First he felt a kind of flush sweep through him—that flood of warmth that comes when someone familiar steps forth from a mass of strangers. And then:
Oh, my God,
he thought, and he actually looked around for some means of escape.

She walked toward him in a graceful, picky way, watching her feet, and then when she was next to him she raised her eyes and he saw that she’d known all along he was there. She wore a white suit that turned her into one of those black-white-and-red women he used to admire on movie screens as a child.

“I’m going to France,” she told him.

“But you can’t!” he said.

The French couple peered at him curiously, the wife sitting slightly forward so as to see him better.

More passengers arrived behind Muriel. They muttered and craned around her, trying to edge past. She stood in the aisle and said, “I’m going to walk along the Seine.”

The wife made a little O with her mouth.

Then Muriel noticed the people behind her and moved on.

Macon wasn’t even sure it was possible to walk along the Seine.

As soon as the aisle was cleared he half stood and peered over the back of his seat, but she had vanished. The French couple turned to him, eyes expectant. Macon settled down again.

Sarah would find out about this. She would just somehow know. She had always said he had no feelings and this would confirm it—that he could tell her good-bye so fondly and then fly off to Paris with Muriel.

Well, it was none of his doing and he’d be damned if he’d assume the blame.

By the time it was dark they were airborne, and some kind of order had emerged inside the plane. It was one of those flights as fully programmed as a day in kindergarten. Safety film, drinks, headphones, dinner, movie. Macon turned down all he was offered and studied Julian’s file folder instead. Most of the material was ridiculous. Sam’n’Joe’s Hotel, indeed! He wondered if Julian had made it up to tease him.

A woman passed wearing white and he glanced at her surreptitiously, but it was no one he knew.

Just before the end of the movie, he got out his shaving kit and went to use one of the lavatories near the rear. Unfortunately other people had had the same idea. Both doors were locked, and he was forced to wait in the aisle. He felt someone arrive at his side. He looked and there was Muriel.

He said, “Muriel, what in—”

“You don’t own this plane!” she told him.

Heads turned.

“And you don’t own Paris, either,” she said.

She was standing very close to him, face to face. She gave off a scent that barely eluded him; it was not just her perfume, no, but her house; yes, that was it—the smell inside her closet, the tantalizing unsettling smell of other people’s belongings. Macon pressed his left temple. He said, “I don’t understand any of this. I don’t see how you knew which flight to take, even.”

“I called your travel agent.”

“Becky? You called Becky? What must she have thought?”

“She thought I was your editorial assistant.”

“And how could you afford the fare?”

“Oh, some I borrowed from Bernice and then some from my sister, she had this money she earned at . . . and I did everything economy-style, I took a train to New York instead of a plane—”

“Well,
that
wasn’t smart,” Macon said. “It probably cost you the same, in the long run, or maybe even more.”

“No, what I did was—”

“But the point is, why, Muriel? Why are you doing this?”

She lifted her chin. (Her chin could get so sharp, sometimes.) “Because I felt like it,” she said.

“You felt like spending five days alone in a Paris hotel? That’s what it will be, Muriel.”

“You need to have me around,” she said.

“Need you!”

“You were falling to pieces before you had me.”

A latch clicked and a man stepped out of one of the lavatories. Macon stepped inside and locked the door quickly behind him.

He wished he could just vanish. If there had been a window, he believed he would have pried it open and jumped—not because he wanted to commit any act so definite as suicide but because he wanted to erase it all; oh, Lord, just go back and erase all the untidy, unthinking things he’d been responsible for in his life.

If she had read even one of his guidebooks, she’d have known not to travel in white.

When he emerged, she was gone. He went back to his seat. The French couple drew in their knees to let him slide past; they were transfixed by the movie screen, where a blonde wearing nothing but a bath towel was pounding on a front door. Macon got out
Miss
MacIntosh
just for something to pin his mind to. It didn’t work, though. Words flowed across his vision in a thin, transparent stream, meaningless. He was conscious only of Muriel somewhere behind him. He felt wired to her. He caught himself wondering what she made of this—the darkened plane, the invisible ocean beneath her, the murmur of half-real voices all around her. When he turned off his reading light and shut his eyes, he imagined he could sense that she was still awake. It was a feeling in the air—something alert, tense, almost vibrating.

By morning he was resolved. He used a different lavatory, toward the front. For once he was glad to be in such a large crowd. When they landed he was almost the first one off, and he cleared Immigration quickly and darted through the airport. The airport was Charles de Gaulle, with its space-age pods of seats. Muriel would be thoroughly lost. He exchanged his money in haste. Muriel must still be at Baggage Claims. He knew she would carry lots of baggage.

There was no question of waiting for a bus. He hailed a cab and sped off, feeling wonderfully lightweight all of a sudden. The tangle of silvery highways struck him as actually pleasant. The city of Paris, when he entered, was as wide and pale and luminous as a cool gray stare, and he admired the haze that hung over it. His cab raced down misty boulevards, turned onto a cobbled street, lurched to a stop. Macon sifted through his envelopes of money.

Not till he was entering his hotel did he recall that his travel agent knew exactly where he was staying.

It wasn’t a very luxurious hotel—a small brown place where mechanical things tended to go wrong, as Macon had discovered on past visits. This time, according to a sign in the lobby, one of the two elevators was not marching. The bellman led him into the other, then up to the third floor and down a carpeted corridor. He flung open a door, loudly exclaiming in French as if overcome by such magnificence. (A bed, a bureau, a chair, an antique T V.) Macon burrowed into one of his envelopes. “Thank you,” he said, offering his tip.

Once he was alone, he unpacked and he hung up his suit coat, then he went to the window. He stood looking out over the roof-tops; the dust on the glass made them seem removed in time, part of some other age.

How would she manage alone in such an unaccustomed place?

He thought of the way she navigated a row of thrift shops—the way she cruised a street, deft and purposeful, greeting passersby by name. And the errands she took the neighbors on: chauffeuring Mr. Manion to the reflexologist who dissolved his kidney stones by massaging his toes; Mr. Runkle to the astrologer who told him when he’d win the million-dollar lottery; Mrs. Carpaccio to a certain tiny grocery near Johns Hopkins where the sausages hung from the ceiling like strips of flypaper. The places Muriel knew!

But she didn’t know Paris. And she was entirely on her own. She didn’t even have a credit card, probably carried very little money, might not have known to change what she did carry into francs. Might be wandering helpless, penniless, unable to speak a word of the language.

By the time he heard her knock, he was so relieved that he rushed to open the door.

“Your room is bigger than mine is,” she said. She walked past him to the window. “I have a better view, though. Just think, we’re really in Paris! The bus driver said it might rain but
I
told him I didn’t care. Rain or shine, it’s Paris.”

“How did you know what bus to take?” he asked her.

“I brought along your guidebook.”

She patted her pocket.

“Want to go to Chez Billy for breakfast?” she asked. “That’s what your book recommends.”

“No, I don’t. I can’t,” he said. “You’d better leave, Muriel.”

“Oh. Okay,” she said. She left.

Sometimes she would do that. She’d press in till he felt trapped, then suddenly draw back. It was like a tug of war where the other person all at once drops the rope, Macon thought. You fall flat on the ground; you’re so unprepared. You’re so empty-feeling.

He decided to call Sarah. At home it was barely dawn, but it seemed important to get in touch with her. He went over to the phone on the bureau and picked up the receiver. It was dead. He pressed the button a few times. Typical. He dropped his key in his pocket and went down to the lobby.

The lobby telephone was housed in an ancient wooden booth, very genteel. There was a red leather bench to sit on. Macon hunched over and listened to the ringing at the other end, far away. “Hello?” Sarah said.

“Sarah?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Macon.”

“Macon?”

She took a moment to absorb that. “Macon, where are you?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter. I just felt like talking to you.”

“What? What time is it?”

“I know it’s early and I’m sorry I woke you but I wanted to hear your voice.”

“There’s some kind of static on the line,” she said.

“It’s clear at this end.”

“You sound so thin.”

“That’s because it’s an overseas call,” he said. “How’s the weather there?”

“How’s who?”

“The weather! Is it sunny?”

“I don’t know. All the shades are down. I don’t think it’s even light yet.”

“Will you be gardening today?”

“What?”

“Gardening!”

“Well, I hadn’t thought. It depends on whether it’s sunny, I guess.”

“I wish I were there,” he said. “I could help you.”

“You hate to garden!”

“Yes, but . . .”

“Macon, are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine,” he said.

“How was the flight over?”

“Oh, the flight, well, goodness! Well, I don’t know; I guess I was so busy reading that I didn’t really notice,” he said.

“Reading?” she said. Then she said, “Maybe you’ve got jet lag.”

“Yes, maybe I do,” he told her.

Fried eggs, scrambled eggs, poached eggs, omelets. He walked blindly down the sidewalk, scribbling in the margins of his guidebook. He did not go near Chez Billy.
It’s puzzling,
he wrote,
how
the French are so tender in preparing their food but so rough in servingit
. In the window of a restaurant, a black cat closed her eyes at him. She seemed to be gloating. She was so much at home, so sure of her place.

Displays of crushed velvet, scattered with solid gold chains and watches no thicker than poker chips. Women dressed as if for the stage: elaborate hairdos, brilliant makeup, strangely shaped trousers that had nothing to do with the human anatomy. Old ladies in little-girl ruffles and white tights and Mary Janes. Macon descended the steps to the Métro; he ostentatiously dropped his canceled ticket into a tiny receptacle marked PAPIERS. Then he turned to glare at all the others who flung their tickets on the floor, and as he turned he thought he saw Muriel, her white face glimmering in the crowd, but he must have been mistaken.

In the evening he returned to his hotel—footsore, leg muscles aching—and collapsed on his bed. Not two minutes later he heard a knock. He groaned and rose to open the door. Muriel stood there with her arms full of clothes. “Look,” she said, pushing past him. “See what-all I bought.” She dumped the clothes on the bed. She held them up one by one: a shiny black cape, a pair of brown jodhpurs, a bouffant red net evening dress sprinkled with different-sized disks of glass like the reflectors on bicycles. “Have you lost your senses?” Macon asked. “What must all this have cost?”

“Nothing! Or next to nothing,” she said. “I found a place that’s like the granddaddy of all garage sales. A whole city of garage sales! This French girl was telling me about it where I went to have my breakfast. I complimented her hat and she told me where she got it. I took a subway train to find it; your book’s really helpful about the subways; and sure enough there’s everything there. Tools and gadgets too, Macon. Old car batteries, fuse boxes . . . and if you say something’s too expensive, they’ll bring the price down till it’s cheap enough. I saw this leather coat I would have killed for but that never did get cheap enough; the man wanted thirty-five francs.”