The Accidental Tourist Page 16

  Well, this difficulty probably happened here often, didn’t it? Or maybe not this difficulty exactly but others like it—people with a fear of heights, say, going into a panic, having to call upon . . . whom? The waiter? The girl who met the elevator?

  He ventured cautiously out of the cubicle, then out of the restroom altogether, and he nearly bumped into a woman in the telephone alcove. She wore yards and yards of pale chiffon. She was just hanging up the phone, and she gathered her skirts around her and moved languidly, gracefully toward the dining room. Excuse me, ma’am, I wonder if you would be so kind as to, um . . . But the only request that came to mind rose up from his earliest childhood: Carry me!

  The woman’s little sequined evening purse was the last of her to go, trailed behind her in one white hand as she disappeared into the darkness of the restaurant.

  He stepped over to the telephone and lifted the receiver. It was cool to the touch; she hadn’t talked long. He fumbled through his pockets, found coins and dropped them in. But there was no one he could contact. He didn’t know a soul in all New York. Instead he called home, miraculously summoning up his credit card number. He worried his family would let the phone ring—it was a habit, by now—but Charles answered. “Leary.”

  “Charles?”

  “Macon!” Charles said, unusually animated.

  “Charles, I’m up on top of this building and a sort of . . . silly thing has happened. Listen: You’ve got to get me out of here.”

  “You out! What are you talking about? You’ve got to get me out!”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m shut in the pantry; your dog has me cornered.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m sorry, but . . . Charles, it’s like some kind of illness. I don’t think I can manage the elevator and I doubt I could manage a stairway either and—”

  “Macon, do you hear that barking? That’s Edward. Edward has me treed, I tell you, and you have to come home this instant.”

  “But I’m in New York! I’m up on top of this building and I can’t get down!”

  “Every time I open the door he comes roaring over and I slam the door and he attacks it, he must have clawed halfway through it by now.”

  Macon made himself take a deep breath. He said, “Charles, could I speak to Rose?”

  “She’s out.”

  “Oh.”

  “How do you think I got into this?” Charles asked. “Julian came to take her to dinner and—”

  “Julian?”

  “Isn’t that his name?”

  “Julian my boss?”

  “Yes, and Edward went into one of his fits; so Rose said, ‘Quick, shut him in the pantry.’ So I grabbed his leash and he turned on me and nearly took my hand off. So I shut myself in the pantry instead and Rose must have left by then so—”

  “Isn’t Porter there?”

  “It’s his visitation night.”

  Macon imagined how safe the pantry must feel, with Rose’s jams lined up in alphabetical order and the black dial telephone so ancient that the number on its face was still the old Tuxedo exchange. What he wouldn’t give to be there!

  Now he had a new symptom. His chest had developed a flutter that bore no resemblance to a normal heartbeat.

  “If you don’t get me out of this I’m going to call for the police to come shoot him,” Charles said.

  “No! Don’t do that!”

  “I can’t just sit here waiting for him to break through.”

  “He won’t break through. You could open the door and walk right past him. Believe me, Charles. Please. I’m up on top of this building and—”

  “Maybe you don’t know that I’m prone to claustrophobia,” Charles said.

  One possibility, Macon decided, was to tell the restaurant people he was having a coronary. A coronary was so respectable. They would send for an ambulance and he would be, yes, carried—just what he needed. Or he wouldn’t have to be carried but only touched, a mere human touch upon his arm, a hand on his shoulder, something to put him back in connection with the rest of the world. He hadn’t felt another person’s touch in so long.

  “I’ll tell them about the key in the mailbox so they won’t have to break down the door,” Charles said.

  “What? Who?”

  “The police, and I’ll tell them to—Macon, I’m sorry but you knew that dog would have to be done away with sooner or later.”

  “Don’t do it!” Macon shouted.

  A man emerging from the restroom glanced in his direction.

  Macon lowered his voice and said, “He was Ethan’s.”

  “Does that mean he’s allowed to tear my throat out?”

  “Listen. Let’s not be hasty. Let’s think this through. Now, I’m going to . . . I’m going to telephone Sarah. I’m going to ask her to come over and take charge of Edward. Are you listening, Charles?”

  “But what if he attacks her too?” Charles asked.

  “He won’t, believe me. Now, don’t do anything till she comes, you understand? Don’t do anything hasty.”

  “Well . . .” Charles said doubtfully.

  Macon hung up and took his wallet from his pocket. He rummaged through the business cards and torn-off snippets of paper, some of them yellow with age, that he kept in the secret compartment. When he found Sarah’s number he punched it in with a trembling finger and held his breath. Sarah, he would say, I’m up on top of this building and—

  She didn’t answer.

  That possibility hadn’t occurred to him. He listened to her phone ring. What now? What on earth now?

  Finally he hung up. He sifted despairingly through the other numbers in his wallet—dentist, pharmacist, animal trainer . . .

  Animal trainer?

  He thought at first of someone from a circus—a brawny man in satin tights. Then he saw the name: Muriel Pritchett. The card was handwritten, even hand-cut, crookedly snipped from a larger piece of paper.

  He called her. She answered at once. “Hel-lo,” roughly, like a weary barmaid.

  “Muriel? It’s Macon Leary,” he told her.

  “Oh! How you doing?”

  “I’m fine. Or, rather . . . See, the trouble is, Edward’s got my brother cornered in the pantry, overreacting. Charles I mean, he always overreacts, and here I am on top of this building in New York and I’m having this kind of, um, disturbance, you know? I was looking down at the city and it was miles away, miles. I can’t describe to you how—”

  “Let’s make sure I’ve got this right,” Muriel said. “Edward’s in your pantry—”

  Macon collected himself. He said, “Edward’s outside the pantry, barking. My brother’s inside. He says he’s going to call the police and tell them to come shoot Edward.”

  “Well, what a dumb fool idea.”

  “Yes!” Macon said. “So I thought if you could go over and get the key from the mailbox, it’s lying on the bottom of the mailbox—”

  “I’ll go right away.”

  “Oh, wonderful.”

  “So good-bye for now, Macon.”

  “Well, but also—” he said.

  She waited.

  “See, I’m up on top of this building,” he said, “and I don’t know what it is but something has scared the hell out of me.”

  “Oh, Lord, I’d be scared too after I went and saw Towering Inferno.”

  “No, no, it’s nothing like that, fire or heights—”

  “Did you see Towering Inferno? Boy, after that you couldn’t get me past jumping level in any building. I think people who go up in skyscrapers are just plain brave. I mean if you think about it, Macon, you have to be brave to be standing where you are right now.”

  “Oh, well, not so brave as all that,” Macon said.

  “No, I’m serious.”

  “You’re making too much out of it. It’s nothing, really.”

  “You just say that because you don’t realize what you went through before you stepped into the elevator. See, underneath you said, ‘Okay, I’ll trust it.’ That’s
what everyone does; I bet it’s what they do on airplanes, too. ‘This is dangerous as all get-out but what the hay,’ they say, ‘let’s fling ourselves out on thin air and trust it.’ Why, you ought to be walking around that building so amazed and proud of yourself!”

  Macon gave a small, dry laugh and gripped the receiver more tightly.

  “Now here’s what I’m going to do,” she said. “I’m going to go get Edward and take him to the Meow-Bow. It doesn’t sound to me like your brother is much use with him. Then when you get back from your trip, we need to talk about his training. I mean, things just can’t go on this way, Macon.”

  “No, they can’t. You’re right. They can’t,” Macon said.

  “I mean this is ridiculous.”

  “You’re absolutely right.”

  “See you, then. Bye.”

  “Well, wait!” he said.

  But she was gone.

  After he hung up, he turned and saw the latest arrivals just heading toward him from the elevator. First came three men, and then three women in long gowns. Behind them was a couple who couldn’t be past their teens. The boy’s wrist bones stuck out of the sleeves of his suit. The girl’s dress was clumsy and touching, her small chin obscured by a monstrous orchid.

  Halfway down the corridor, the boy and girl stopped to gaze around them. They looked at the ceiling, and then at the floor. Then they looked at each other. The boy said, “Hoo!” and grabbed both the girl’s hands, and they stood there a moment, laughing, before they went into the restaurant.

  Macon followed them. He felt soothed and tired and terribly hungry. It was good to find the waiter just setting his food in place when he sank back into his seat.

  ten

  I’ll be honest,” Muriel said, “My baby was not exactly planned for. I mean we weren’t exactly even married yet, if you want to know the truth. If you want to know the truth the baby was the reason we got married in the first place, but I did tell Norman he didn’t have to go through with it if he didn’t want to. It’s not like I pushed him into it or anything.”

  She looked past Macon at Edward, who lay prone on the front hall rug. He’d had to be forced into position, but at least he was staying put.

  “Notice I let him move around some, as long as he stays down,” she said. “Now I’m going to turn my back, and you watch how he does.”

  She wandered into the living room. She lifted a vase from a table and examined its underside. “So anyhow,” she said, “we went ahead and got married, with everybody acting like it was the world’s biggest tragedy. My folks really never got over it. My mom said, ‘Well, I always knew this was going to happen. Back when you were hanging out with Dana Scully and them, one or another of them no-count boys always honking out front for you, didn’t I tell you this was going to happen?’ We had a little bitty wedding at my folks’ church, and we didn’t take a honeymoon trip but went straight to our apartment and next day Norman started work at his uncle’s. He just settled right into being married—shopping with me for groceries and picking out curtains and such. Oh, you know, sometimes I get to thinking what kids we were. It was almost like playing house! It was pretend! The candles I lit at suppertime, flowers on the table, Norman calling me ‘hon’ and bringing his plate to the sink for me to wash. And then all at once it turned serious. Here I’ve got this little boy now, this great big seven-year-old boy with his clompy leather shoes, and it wasn’t playing house after all. It was for real, all along, and we just didn’t know it.”

  She sat on the couch and raised one foot in front of her. She turned it admiringly this way and that. Her stockings bagged at the ankle.

  “What is Edward up to?” she asked.

  Macon said, “He’s still lying down.”

  “Pretty soon he’ll do that for three hours straight.”

  “Three hours?”

  “Easy.”

  “Isn’t that sort of cruel?”

  “I thought you promised not to talk like that,” she told him.

  “Right. Sorry,” Macon said.

  “Maybe tomorrow he’ll lie down on his own.”

  “You think so?”

  “If you practice. If you don’t give in. If you don’t go all soft-hearted.”

  Then she stood up and came over to Macon. She patted his arm. “But never mind,” she told him, “I think soft-hearted men are sweet.”

  Macon backed away. He just missed stepping on Edward.

  It was getting close to Thanksgiving, and the Learys were debating as usual about Thanksgiving dinner. The fact was, none of them cared for turkey. Still, Rose said, it didn’t seem right to serve anything else. It would just feel wrong. Her brothers pointed out that she’d have to wake up at five a.m. to put a turkey in the oven. But it was she who’d be doing it, Rose said. It wouldn’t be troubling them any.

  Then it began to seem she had had an ulterior motive, for as soon as they settled on turkey she announced that she might just invite Julian Edge. Poor Julian, she said, had no close family nearby, and he and his neighbors gathered forlornly at holidays, each bringing his or her specialty. Thanksgiving dinner last year had been a vegetarian pasta casserole and goat cheese on grape leaves and kiwi tarts. The least she could do was offer him a normal family dinner.

  “What!” Macon said, acting surprised and disapproving, but unfortunately, it wasn’t that much of a surprise. Oh, Julian was up to something, all right. But what could it be? Whenever Rose came down the stairs in her best dress and two spots of rouge, whenever she asked Macon to shut Edward in the pantry because Julian would be stopping by to take her this place or that—well, Macon had a very strong urge to let Edward accidentally break loose. He made a point of meeting Julian at the door, eyeing him for a long, silent moment before calling Rose. But Julian behaved; no glint of irony betrayed him. He was respectful with Rose, almost shy, and hovered clumsily when he ushered her out the door. Or was that the irony? His Rose Leary act. Macon didn’t like the looks of this.

  Then it turned out that Porter’s children would be coming for Thanksgiving too. They usually came at Christmas instead, but wanted to trade off this year due to some complication with their grandparents on their stepfather’s side. So really, Rose said, wasn’t it good they were having turkey? Children were such traditionalists. She set to work baking pumpkin pies. “We gather together,” she sang, “to ask the Lord’s blessing . . .” Macon looked up from the sheaf of stolen menus he was spreading across the kitchen table. There was a note of gaiety in her voice that made him uneasy. He wondered if she had any mistaken ideas about Julian—if, for instance, she hoped for some kind of romance. But Rose was so plain and sensible in her long white apron. She reminded him of Emily Dickinson; hadn’t Emily Dickinson also baked for her nieces and nephews? Surely there was no need for concern.

  “My son’s name is Alexander,” Muriel said. “Did I tell you that? I named him Alexander because I thought it sounded high-class. He was never an easy baby. For starters something went wrong while I was carrying him and they had to do a Caesarean and take him out early and I got all these complications and can’t ever have any more children. And then Alexander was so teeny he didn’t even look like a human, more like a big-headed newborn kitten, and he had to stay in an incubator forever, just about, and nearly died. Norman said, ‘When’s it going to look like other babies?’ He always called Alexander ‘it.’ I adjusted better; I mean pretty soon it seemed to me that that was what a baby ought to look like, and I hung around the hospital nursery but Norman wouldn’t go near him, he said it made him too nervous.”

  Edward whimpered. He was just barely lying down—his haunches braced, his claws digging into the carpet. But Muriel gave no sign she had noticed.

  “Maybe you and Alexander should get together some time,” she told Macon.

  “Oh, I, ah . . .” Macon said.

  “He doesn’t have enough men in his life.”

  “Well, but—”

  “He’s supposed to see men a lot; it’s suppos
ed to show him how to act. Maybe the three of us could go to a movie. Don’t you ever go to movies?”

  “No, I don’t,” Macon said truthfully. “I haven’t been to a movie in months. I really don’t care for movies. They make everything seem so close up.”

  “Or just out to a McDonald’s, maybe.”

  “I don’t think so,” Macon said.

  Porter’s children arrived the evening before Thanksgiving, traveling by car because Danny, the oldest, had just got his driver’s license. That worried Porter considerably. He paced the floor from the first moment they could be expected. “I don’t know where June’s brain is,” he said. “Letting a sixteen-year-old boy drive all the way from Washington the first week he has his license! With his two little sisters in the car! I don’t know how her mind works.”

  To make it worse, the children were almost an hour late. When Porter finally saw their headlights, he rushed out the door and down the steps well ahead of the others. “What kept you?” he cried.

  Danny unfurled himself from the car with exaggerated nonchalance, yawning and stretching, and shook Porter’s hand as a kind of afterthought while turning to study his tires. He was as tall as Porter now but very thin, with his mother’s dark coloring. Behind him came Susan, fourteen—just a few months older than Ethan would have been. It was lucky she was so different from Ethan, with her cap of black curls and her rosy cheeks. This evening she wore jeans and hiking boots and one of those thick down jackets that made young people look so bulky and graceless. Then last came Liberty. What a name, Macon always thought. It was an invention of her mother’s—a flighty woman who had run away from Porter with a hippie stereo salesman eight and a half years ago and discovered immediately afterward that she was two months pregnant. Ironically, Liberty was the one who looked most like Porter. She had fair, straight hair and a chiseled face and she was dressed in a little tailored coat. “Danny got lost,” she said severely. “What a dummy.” She kissed Porter and her aunt and uncles, but Susan wandered past them in a way that let everyone know she had outgrown all that.