The Accidental Tourist (27 page)

“Oh, I know just what you’re going through,” Muriel said to Rose. “All I have to do is look at a boat and I get nauseous.”

Macon swallowed and gazed down at the carpet between his feet. He waited for someone to correct her, but nobody did. That was even worse.

In bed she said, “You wouldn’t ever leave me, would you? Would you ever think of leaving me? You won’t be like the others, will you? Will you promise not to leave me?”

“Yes, yes,” he said, floating in and out of dreams.

“You do take me seriously, don’t you? Don’t you?”

“Oh, Muriel, for pity’s sake . . .” he said.

But later, when she turned in her sleep and moved away from him, his feet followed hers of their own accord to the other side of the bed.

eighteen

Macon was sitting in a hotel room in Winnipeg, Manitoba, when the phone rang. Actually it took him a second to realize it was the phone. He happened to be having a very good time with a mysterious object he’d just discovered—an ivory-painted metal cylinder affixed to the wall above the bed. He’d never noticed such a thing before, although he’d stayed in this hotel on two previous trips. When he touched the cylinder to see what it was, it rotated, disappearing into the wall, while from within the wall a light bulb swung out already lit. At the same moment, the phone rang. Macon experienced an instant of confusion during which he imagined it was the cylinder that was ringing. Then he saw the telephone on the nightstand. Still he was confused. No one had his number, so far as he knew.

He picked up the receiver and said, “Yes?”

“Macon.”

His heart lurched. He said, “Sarah?”

“Have I caught you at a bad time?”

“No, no . . . How did you know where I was?”

“Well, Julian thought you’d be in either Toronto or Winnipeg by now,” she said, “so I looked in your last guidebook, and I knew the hotels where you discussed night noises were the ones where you stayed yourself, so . . .”

“Is anything wrong?” he asked.

“No, I just needed a favor. Would it be all right with you if I moved back into our house?”

“Um—”

“Just as a place to stay,” she said hastily. “Just for a little while. My lease runs out at the end of the month and I can’t find a new apartment.”

“But the house is a mess,” he told her.

“Oh, I’ll take care of that.”

“No, I mean something happened to it over the winter, pipes burst or something, ceiling came down—”

“Yes, I know.”

“You do?”

“Your brothers told me.”

“My brothers?”

“I went to ask them your whereabouts when they wouldn’t answer their phone. And Rose said she’d been over to the house herself and—”

“You went to Rose’s, too?”

“No, Rose was at your brothers’.”

“Oh.”

“She’s living there for a while.”

“I see,” he said. Then he said, “She’s what?”

“Well, June has had her baby,” Sarah said, “so she asked Porter to keep the children a while.”

“But what does that have to do with Rose?” he said. “Does Rose imagine Porter can’t open a tin of soup for them? And how come June sent them away?”

“Oh, you know June, she always was kind of a birdbrain.”

She sounded like her old self, when she said that. Up till now there’d been something careful about her voice, something wary and ready to retreat, but now a certain chuckly, confiding quality emerged. Macon leaned back against his pillow.

“She told the children she needs time to bond,” Sarah said.

“Time to what?”

“She and her husband need to bond with the baby.”

“Good grief,” Macon said.

“When Rose heard that, she told Porter she was coming home. Anyhow she didn’t think the boys were eating right, Porter and Charles; and also there’s a crack in the side of the house and she wanted to get it patched before it spreads.”

“What kind of crack?” Macon asked.

“Some little crack in the masonry; I don’t know. When the rain comes from a certain direction water seeps in above the kitchen ceiling, Rose says, and Porter and Charles were planning to fix it but they couldn’t agree on the best way to do it.”

Macon slipped out of his shoes and hoisted his feet up onto the bed. He said, “So is Julian living alone now, or what?”

“Yes, but she brings him casseroles,” Sarah said. Then she said, “Have you thought about it, Macon?”

His heart gave another lurch. He said, “Have I thought about what?”

“About my using the house.”

“Oh. Well. It’s fine with me, but I don’t believe you realize the extent of the damage.”

“But we’d have to fix that anyway, if we were to sell it. So here’s what I was thinking: I could pay for the repairs myself—anything the insurance doesn’t cover—with what I’d ordinarily use for rent. Does that seem fair to you?”

“Yes, of course,” Macon said.

“And maybe I’ll get someone to clean the upholstery,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And the rugs.”

“Yes.”

After all these years, he knew when she was leading up to something. He recognized that distracted tone that meant she was bracing herself for what she really wanted to say.

“Incidentally,” she said, “the papers came through from the lawyer.”

“Ah.”

“The final arrangements. You know. Things I have to sign.”

“Yes.”

“It was kind of a shock.”

He said nothing.

“I mean, of course I knew that they were coming; it’s been nearly a year; in fact he called ahead and told me they were coming, but when I saw them in black and white they just seemed so brisk. They didn’t take into account the feelings of the thing. I guess I wasn’t expecting that.”

Macon had a sense of some danger approaching, something he couldn’t handle. He said, “Ah! Yes! Certainly! That seems a natural reaction. So anyway, good luck with the house, Sarah.”

He hung up quickly.

His seatmate on the flight to Edmonton was a woman who was scared of flying. He knew that before the plane had left the ground, before he’d looked in her direction. He was gazing out the window, keeping to himself as usual, and he heard her swallowing repeatedly. She kept tightening and releasing her grasp on the armrests and he could feel that, too. Finally he turned to see who this was. A pair of pouched eyes met his. A very old, baggy woman in a flowered dress was staring at him intently, had perhaps been willing him to turn. “Do you think this plane is safe,” she said flatly, not exactly asking.

“It’s perfectly safe,” he told her.

“Then why have all these signs about. Oxygen. Life vests. Emergency exits. They’re clearly expecting the worst.”

“That’s just federal regulations,” Macon said.

Then he started thinking about the word “federal.” In Canada, would it apply? He frowned at the seat ahead of him, considering. Finally he said, “
Government
regulations.” When he checked the old woman’s expression to see if this made any better sense to her, he discovered that she must have been staring at him all this time. Her face lunged toward him, gray and desperate. He began to worry about her. “Would you like a glass of sherry?” he asked.

“They don’t give us sherry till we’re airborne. By then it’s much too late.”

“Just a minute,” he said.

He bent to unzip his bag, and from his shaving kit he took a plastic travel flask. This was something he always packed, in case of sleepless nights. He had never used it, though—not because he’d never had a sleepless night but because he’d gone on saving it for some occasion even worse than whatever the current one was, something that never quite arrived. Like his other emergency supplies (the matchbook-sized sewing kit, the tiny white Lomotil tablet), this flask was being hoarded for the
real
emergency. In fact, its metal lid had grown rusty inside, as he discovered when he unscrewed it. “I’m afraid this may have . . . turned a bit, or whatever sherry does,” he told the old woman. She didn’t answer but continued staring into his eyes. He poured the sherry into the lid, which was meant to double as a cup. Meanwhile the plane gave a creak and started moving down the runway. The old woman drank off the sherry and handed him the cup. He understood that she was not returning it for good. He refilled it. She drank that more slowly and then let her head tip back against her seat.

“Better?” he asked her.

“My name is Mrs. Daniel Bunn,” she told him.

He thought it was her way of saying she was herself again—her formal, dignified self. “How do you do,” he said. “I’m Macon Leary.”

“I know it’s foolish, Mr. Leary,” she said, “but a drink does give the illusion one is doing something to cope, does it not.”

“Absolutely,” Macon said.

He wasn’t convinced, though, that she was coping all that well. As the plane gathered speed, her free hand tightened on the armrest. Her other hand—the one closest to him, clutching the cup— grew white around the nails. All at once the cup popped up in the air, squeezed out of her grip. Macon caught it nimbly and said, “Whoa there!” and screwed it onto the flask. Then he replaced the flask in his bag. “Once we’re off the ground—” he said.

But a glance at her face stopped him. She was swallowing again. The plane was beginning to rise now—the nose was lifting off— and she was pressed back against her seat. She seemed flattened. “Mrs. Bunn?” Macon said. He was scared she was having a heart attack.

Instead of answering, she turned toward him and crumpled onto his shoulder. He put an arm around her. “Never mind,” he said. “Goodness. You’ll be all right. Never mind.”

The plane continued slanting backward. When the landing gear retracted (groaning), Macon felt the shudder through Mrs. Bunn’s body. Her hair smelled like freshly ironed tea cloths. Her back was large and boneless, a mounded shape like the back of a whale.

He was impressed that someone so old still wanted so fiercely to live.

Then the plane leveled off and she pulled herself together— straightening and drawing away from him, brushing at the teardrops that lay in the folds beneath her eyes. She was full of folds, wide and plain and sagging, but valiantly wore two pearl buttons in her long, spongy earlobes and maintained a coat of brave red lipstick on a mouth so wrinkled that it didn’t even have a clear outline.

He asked, “Are you all right?”

“Yes, and I apologize a thousand times,” she said. And she patted the brooch at her throat.

When the drink cart came he ordered her another sherry, which he insisted on paying for, and he ordered one for himself as well, even though he didn’t plan to drink it. He thought it might be needed for Mrs. Bunn. He was right, as things turned out, because their flight was unusually rough. The seatbelt sign stayed lit the whole way, and the plane bounced and grated as if rolling over gravel. Every now and then it dropped sharply and Mrs. Bunn winced, but she went on taking tiny sips of sherry. “This is nothing,” Macon told her. “I’ve been in much worse than this.” He told her how to give with the bumps. “It’s like traveling on a boat,” he said. “Or on wheels, on roller skates. You keep your knees loose. You bend. Do you understand what I’m saying? You go along with it. You ride it out.”

Mrs. Bunn said she’d certainly try.

Not only was the air unsteady, but also little things kept going wrong inside the plane. The drink cart raced away from the stewardess every time she let go of it. Mrs. Bunn’s tray fell into her lap twice without warning. At each new mishap Macon laughed and said, “Ah, me,” and shook his head. “Oh, not again,” he said. Mrs. Bunn’s eyes remained fixed on his face, as if Macon were her only hope. Once there was a bang and she jumped; the door to the cockpit had flung itself open for no good reason. “What? What?” she said, but Macon pointed out that now she could see for herself how unconcerned the pilot was. They were close enough to the front so she could even hear what the pilot was talking about; he was shouting some question to the copilot, asking why any ten-year-old girl with half a grain of sense would wear a metal nightbrace in a sauna room. “You call that a worried man?” Macon asked Mrs. Bunn. “You think a man about to bail out of his plane would be discussing orthodontia?”

“Bail out!” Mrs. Bunn said. “Oh, my, I never thought of that!”

Macon laughed again.

He was reminded of a trip he’d taken alone as a boy, touring colleges. Heady with his new independence, he had lied to the man sitting next to him and said he came from Kenya, where his father led safaris. In the same way he was lying now, presenting himself to Mrs. Bunn as this merry, tolerant person.

But after they had landed (with Mrs. Bunn hardly flinching, bolstered by all those sherries), and she had gone off with her grown daughter, a very small child ran headlong into Macon’s kneecap. This child was followed by another and another, all more or less the same size—some kind of nursery school, Macon supposed, visiting the airport on a field trip—and each child, as if powerless to veer from the course the first had set, careened off Macon’s knees and said, “Oops!” The call ran down the line like little bird cries—“Oops!” “Oops!” “Oops!”—while behind the children, a harassed-looking woman clapped a hand to her cheek. “Sorry,” she said to Macon, and he said, “No harm done.”

Only later, when he passed a mirror and noticed the grin on his face, did he realize that, in fact, he might not have been lying to Mrs. Bunn after all.

“The plumber says it won’t be hard to fix,” Sarah told him. “He says it
looks
bad but really just one pipe is cracked.”

“Well, good,” Macon said.

He was not as surprised this time by her call, of course, but he did feel there was something disconcerting about it—standing in an Edmonton hotel room on a weekday afternoon, listening to Sarah’s voice at the other end of the line.

“I went over there this morning and straightened up a little,” she said. “Everything’s so disorganized.”

“Disorganized?”

“Why are some of the sheets sewn in half? And the popcorn popper’s in the bedroom. Were you eating popcorn in the bedroom?”

“I guess I must have been,” he said.

He was near an open window, and he could look out upon a strangely beautiful landscape: an expanse of mathematical flatness, with straight-edged buildings rising in the distance like a child’s toy blocks on a rug. It was difficult, in these surroundings, to remember why he’d had a popcorn popper in the bedroom.

“So how’s the weather there?” Sarah asked.

“Kind of gray.”

“Here it’s sunny. Sunny and humid.”

“Well, it’s certainly not humid here,” he told her. “The air’s so dry that rain disappears before it hits the ground.”

“Really? Then how can you tell it’s raining?”

“You can see it above the plains,” he said. “It looks like stripes that just fade away about halfway down from the sky.”