The Accidental Tourist Read online

  Tears were running down her face now. She leaned across the table and said, “There are times when I haven’t been sure I could— I don’t want to sound melodramatic but—Macon, I haven’t been sure I could live in this kind of a world anymore.”

  Macon felt he had to be terribly careful. He had to choose exactly the right words. He cleared his throat and said, “Yes, um, I see what you mean but . . .” He cleared his throat again. “It’s true,” he said, “what you say about human beings. I’m not trying to argue. But tell me this, Sarah: Why would that cause you to leave me?”

  She crumpled up her napkin and dabbed at her nose. She said, “Because I knew you wouldn’t try to argue. You’ve believed all along they were evil.”

  “Well, so—”

  “This whole last year I felt myself retreating. Withdrawing. I could feel myself shrinking. I stayed away from crowds, I didn’t go to parties, I didn’t ask our friends in. When you and I went to the beach in the summer I lay on my blanket with all those people around me, their squawking radios and their gossip and their quarrels, and I thought, ‘Ugh, they’re so depressing. They’re so unlikable. So vile, really.’ I felt myself shrinking away from them. Just like you do, Macon—just as you do; sorry. Just as you have always done. I felt I was turning into a Leary.”

  Macon tried for a lighter tone. He said, “Well, there are worse disasters than that, I guess.”

  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 repu
lsive-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.