The Accidental Tourist (13 page)

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.

nine

Back when Grandfather Leary’s mind first began to wander, no one had guessed what was happening. He was such an upright, firm old man. He was all sharp edges. Definite. “Listen,” he told Macon, “by June the twelfth I’ll need my passport from the safe deposit box. I’m setting sail for Lassaque.”

“Lassaque, Grandfather?”

“If I like it I may just stay there.”

“But where is Lassaque?”

“It’s an island off the coast of Bolivia.”

“Ah,” Macon said. And then, “Well, wait a minute . . .”

“It interests me because the Lassaquans have no written language. In fact if you bring any reading matter they confiscate it. They say it’s black magic.”

“But I don’t think Bolivia
has
a coast,” Macon said.

“They don’t even allow, say, a checkbook with your name on it. Before you go ashore you have to soak the label off your deodorant. You have to get your money changed into little colored wafers.”

“Grandfather, is this a joke?”

“A joke! Look it up if you don’t believe me.” Grandfather Leary checked his steel pocket watch, then wound it with an assured, back-and-forth motion. “An intriguing effect of their illiteracy,” he said, “is their reverence for the elderly. This is because the Lassaquans’ knowledge doesn’t come from books but from living; so they hang on every word from those who have lived the longest.”

“I see,” Macon said, for now he thought he did see. “
We
hang on
your
words, too,” he said.

“That may be so,” his grandfather told him, “but I still intend to see Lassaque before it’s corrupted.”

Macon was silent a moment. Then he went over to the bookcase and selected a volume from his grandfather’s set of faded brown encyclopedias. “Give it here,” his grandfather said, holding out both hands. He took the book greedily and started riffling through the pages. A smell of mold floated up. “Laski,” he muttered, “Lassalle, Lassaw . . .” He lowered the book and frowned. “I don’t . . .” he said. He returned to the book. “Lassalle, Lassaw . . .”

He looked confused, almost frightened. His face all at once collapsed—a phenomenon that had startled Macon on several occasions lately. “I don’t understand,” he whispered to Macon. “I don’t understand.”

“Well,” Macon said, “maybe it was a dream. Maybe it was one of those dreams that seem real.”

“Macon, this was no dream. I
know
the place. I’ve bought my ticket. I’m sailing June the twelfth.”

Macon felt a strange coldness creeping down his back.

Then his grandfather became an inventor—spoke of various projects he was tinkering with, he said, in his basement. He would sit in his red leather armchair, his suit and white shirt immaculate, his black dress shoes polished to a glare, his carefully kept hands folded in his lap, and he would announce that he’d just finished welding together a motorcycle that would pull a plow. He would earnestly discuss crankshafts and cotter pins, while Macon—though terribly distressed—had to fight down a bubble of laughter at the thought of some leather-booted Hell’s Angel grinding away at a wheatfield. “If I could just get the kinks ironed out,” his grandfather said, “I’d have my fortune made. We’ll all be rich.” For he seemed to believe he was poor again, struggling to earn his way in the world. His motorized radio that followed you from room to room, his floating telephone, his car that came when you called it— wouldn’t there be some application for those? Wouldn’t the right person pay an arm and a leg?

Having sat out on the porch for one entire June morning, studiously pinching the creases of his trousers, he announced that he had perfected a new type of hybrid: flowers that closed in the presence of tears. “Florists will be mobbing me,” he said. “Think of the dramatic effect at funerals!” He was working next on a cross between basil and tomatoes. He said the spaghetti-sauce companies would make him a wealthy man.

By then, all three of his grandsons had left home and his wife had died; so Rose alone took care of him. Her brothers began to worry about her. They took to dropping by more and more often. Then Rose said, “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

They said, “What? Do what? What are you talking about?” And other such things.

“If you’re coming so often on account of Grandfather, it’s not necessary. I’m managing fine, and so is he. He’s very happy.”

“Happy!”

“I honestly believe,” Rose said, “that he’s having the richest and most . . . colorful, really, time of his life. I’ll bet even when he was young, he never enjoyed himself this much.”

They saw what she meant. Macon felt almost envious, once he thought about it. And later, when that period was over, he was sorry it had been so short. For their grandfather soon passed to pointless, disconnected mumbles, and then to a staring silence, and at last he died.

Early Wednesday morning, Macon dreamed Grandfather Leary woke him and asked where the center punch was. “What are you talking about?” Macon said. “I never had your center punch.”

“Oh, Macon,” his grandfather said sadly, “can’t you tell that I’m not saying what I mean?”

“What do you mean, then?”

“You’ve lost the center of your
life
, Macon.”

“Yes, I know that,” Macon said, and it seemed that Ethan stood just slightly to the left, his bright head nearly level with the old man’s.

But his grandfather said, “No, no,” and made an impatient, shaking-off gesture and went over to the bureau. (In this dream, Macon was not in the sun porch but upstairs in his boyhood bedroom, with the bureau whose cut-glass knobs Rose had stolen long ago to use as dishes for her dolls.) “It’s Sarah I mean,” his grandfather said, picking up a hairbrush. “Where is Sarah?”

“She’s left me, Grandfather.”

“Why, Sarah’s the best of all of us!” his grandfather said. “You want to sit in this old house and rot, boy? It’s time we started digging out! How long are we going to stay fixed here?”

Macon opened his eyes. It wasn’t morning yet. The sun porch was fuzzy as blotting paper.

There was still a sense of his grandfather in the air. His little shaking-off gesture was one that Macon had forgotten entirely; it had reappeared on its own. But Grandfather Leary would never have said in real life what he’d said in the dream. He had liked Sarah well enough, but he seemed to view wives as extraneous, and he’d attended each of his grandsons’ weddings with a resigned and tolerant expression. He wouldn’t have thought of any woman as a “center.” Except, perhaps Macon thought suddenly, his own wife, Grandmother Leary. After whose death—why, yes, immediately after—his mind had first begun to wander.

Macon lay awake till dawn. It was a relief to hear the first stir-rings overhead. Then he got up and shaved and dressed and sent Edward out for the paper. By the time Rose came downstairs, he had started the coffee perking. This seemed to make her anxious. “Did you use the morning beans or the evening beans?” she asked.

“The morning beans,” he assured her. “Everything’s under control.”

She moved around the kitchen raising shades, setting the table, opening a carton of eggs. “So today’s the day you get your cast off,” she said.

“Looks that way.”

“And this afternoon’s your New York trip.”

“Oh, well . . .” he said vaguely, and then he asked if she wanted a bacon coupon he’d spotted in the paper.

She persisted: “Isn’t it this afternoon you’re going?”

“Well, yes.”

The fact of the matter was, he was leaving for New York without having made any arrangements for Edward. The old place wouldn’t accept him, the new place had that Muriel woman . . . and in Macon’s opinion, Edward was best off at home with the family. Rose, no doubt, would disagree. He held his breath, but Rose started humming “Clementine” and breaking eggs into a skillet.

At nine o’clock, in an office down on St. Paul Street, the doctor removed Macon’s cast with a tiny, purring electric saw. Macon’s leg emerged dead-white and wrinkled and ugly. When he stood up, his ankle wobbled. He still had a limp. Also, he’d forgotten to bring different trousers and he was forced to parade back through the other patients in his one-legged summer khakis, exposing his repulsive-looking shin. He wondered if he’d ever return to his old, unbroken self.

Driving him home, Rose finally thought to ask where he planned to board Edward. “Why, I’m leaving him with you,” Macon said, acting surprised.

“With me? Oh, Macon, you know how out of hand he gets.”

“What could happen in such a short time? I’ll be home by tomorrow night. If worst comes to worst you could lock him in the pantry; toss him some kibble now and then till I get back.”

“I don’t like this at all,” Rose said.

“It’s visitors that set him off. It’s not as if you’re expecting any visitors.”

“Oh, no,” she said, and then she let the subject drop, thank heaven. He’d been fearing more of a battle.

He took a shower, and he dressed in his traveling suit. Then he had an early lunch. Just before noon Rose drove him down to the railroad station, since he didn’t yet trust his clutch foot. When he stepped from the car, his leg threatened to buckle. “Wait!” he said to Rose, who was handing his bag out after him. “Do you suppose I’m up to this?”

“I’m sure you are,” she said, without giving it anywhere near enough thought. She pulled the passenger door shut, waved at him, and drove off.

In the period since Macon’s last train trip, something wonderful had happened to the railroad station. A skylight in shades of watery blue arched gently overhead. Pale globe lamps hung from brass hooks. The carpenters’ partitions that had divided the waiting room for so long had disappeared, revealing polished wooden benches. Macon stood bewildered at the brand-new, gleaming ticket window. Maybe, he thought, travel was not so bad. Maybe he’d got it all wrong. He felt a little sprig of hopefulness beginning.

But immediately afterward, limping toward his gate, he was overcome by the lost feeling that always plagued him on these trips. He envisioned himself as a stark Figure 1 in a throng of 2’s and 3’s. Look at that group at the Information counter, those confident young people with their knapsacks and sleeping bags. Look at the family occupying one entire bench, their four little daughters so dressed up, so stiff in new plaid coats and ribboned hats, you just knew they’d be met by grandparents at the other end of the line. Even those sitting alone—the old woman with the corsage, the blonde with her expensive leather luggage—gave the impression of belonging to someone.

He sat down on a bench. A southbound train was announced and half the crowd went off to catch it, followed by the inevitable breathless, disheveled woman galloping through some time later with far too many bags and parcels. Arriving passengers began to straggle up the stairs. They wore the dazed expressions of people who had been elsewhere till just this instant. A woman was greeted by a man holding a baby; he kissed her and passed her the baby at once, as if it were a package he’d been finding unusually heavy. A young girl in jeans, reaching the top of the stairs, caught sight of another girl in jeans and threw her arms around her and started crying. Macon watched, pretending not to, inventing explanations. (She was home for their mother’s funeral? Her elopement hadn’t worked out?)

Now his own train was called, so he picked up his bag and limped behind the family with all the daughters. At the bottom of the stairs a gust of cold, fresh air hit him. Wind always seemed to be howling down these platforms, no matter what the weather elsewhere. The smallest of the daughters had to have her coat buttoned. The train came into view, slowly assembling itself around a pinpoint of yellow light.

Most of the cars were full, it turned out. Macon gave up trying to find a completely empty seat and settled next to a plump young man with a briefcase. Just to be on the safe side, he unpacked
Miss
MacIntosh
.

The train lurched forward and then changed its mind and then lurched forward again and took off. Macon imagined he could feel little scabs of rust on the tracks; it wasn’t a very smooth ride. He watched the sights of home rush toward him and disappear—a tumble of row houses, faded vacant lots, laundry hanging rigid in the cold.

“Gum?” his seatmate asked.

Macon said, “No, thanks,” and quickly opened his book.

When they’d been traveling an hour or so, he felt his lids grow heavy. He let his head fall back. He thought he was only resting his eyes, but he must have gone to sleep. The next thing he knew, the conductor was announcing Philadelphia. Macon jerked and sat up straight and caught his book just before it slid off his lap.

His seatmate was doing some kind of paperwork, using his briefcase as a desk. A businessman, obviously—one of the people Macon wrote his guides for. Funny, Macon never pictured his readers. What did businessmen do, exactly? This one was jotting notes on index cards, referring now and then to a booklet full of graphs. One graph showed little black trucks marching across the page—four trucks, seven trucks, three and a half trucks. Macon thought the half-truck looked deformed and pitiable.

Just before they arrived, he used the restroom at the rear of the car—not ideal, but more homey than anything he’d find in New York. He went back to his seat and packed
Miss MacIntosh
. “Going to be cold there,” his seatmate told him.

“I imagine so,” Macon said.

“Weather report says cold and windy.”

Macon didn’t answer.

He believed in traveling without an overcoat—just one more thing to carry—but he wore a thermal undershirt and long johns. Cold was the least of his worries.

In New York the passengers scattered instantly. Macon thought of a seed pod bursting open. He refused to be rushed and made his way methodically through the crowd, up a set of clanking, dark stairs, and through another crowd that seemed more extreme than the one he had left down below. Goodness, where did these women get their clothes? One wore a bushy fur tepee and leopardskin boots. One wore an olive-drab coverall exactly like an auto mechanic’s except that it was made of leather. Macon took a firmer grip on his bag and pushed through the door to the street, where car horns blasted insistently and the air smelled gray and sharp, like the interior of a dead chimney. In his opinion, New York was a foreign city. He was forever taken aback by its pervasive atmosphere of purposefulness—the tight focus of its drivers, the brisk intensity of its pedestrians drilling their way through all obstacles without a glance to either side.