Anne Tyler - The Accidental Tourist

“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.”

“I wish I were there to watch it with you,” Sarah said.

Macon swallowed.

Gazing out of the window, he all at once recalled Ethan as an infant. Ethan used to cry unless he was tightly wrapped in a blanket; the pediatrician had explained that new babies have a fear of flying apart. Macon had not been able to imagine that at the time, but now he had no trouble. He could picture himself separating, falling into pieces, his head floating away with terrifying swiftness in the eerie green air of Alberta.

In Vancouver she asked if the rain vanished there as well. “No,” he said.

“No?”

“No, it rains in Vancouver.”

It was raining this minute — a gentle night rain. He could hear it but not see it, except for the cone of illuminated drops spilling beneath a street lamp just outside his hotel room. You could almost suppose it was the lamp itself that was raining.

“Well, I’ve moved back into the house,” she said. “Mostly I just stay upstairs. The cat and I: We camp in the bedroom. Creep downstairs for meals.”

“What cat is that?” he asked.

“Helen.”

“Oh, yes.”

“I went and picked her up at Rose’s. I needed company. You wouldn’t believe how lonely it is.”

Yes, he would believe it, he could have said. But didn’t.

So here they were in the same old positions, he could have said: He had won her attention only by withdrawing. He wasn’t surprised when she said, “Macon? Do you… What’s her name? The person you live with?”

“Muriel,” he said.

Which she knew before she asked, he suspected.

“Do you plan on staying with Muriel forever?”

“I really couldn’t say,” he said.

He was noticing how oddly the name hung in this starchy, old-fashioned hotel room. Muriel. Such a peculiar sound. So unfamiliar, suddenly.

On the flight back, his seatmate was an attractive young woman in a tailored suit. She spread the contents of her briefcase on her folding tray, and she riffled through computer printout sheets with her perfectly manicured hands. Then she asked Macon if he had a pen she might borrow. This struck him as amusing — her true colors shining out from beneath her businesslike exterior. However, his only pen was a fountain pen that he didn’t like lending, so he said no. She seemed relieved; she cheerfully repacked all she’d taken from her briefcase. “I could have sworn I swiped a ballpoint from my last hotel,” she said, “but maybe that was the one before this one; you know how they all run together in your mind.”

“You must do a lot of traveling,” Macon said politely.

“Do I? Some mornings when I wake up I have to check my hotel stationery just to find out what city I’m in.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Oh, I like it,” she said, bending to slip her briefcase under her seat. “It’s the only time I can relax anymore. When I come home I’m all nervous, can’t sit still. I prefer to be a… moving target, you could say.”

Macon thought of something he’d once read about heroin: how it’s not a pleasure, really, but it so completely alters the users’ body chemistry that they’re forced to go on once they’ve started.

He turned down drinks and dinner, and so did his seatmate; she rolled her suit jacket expertly into a pillow and went to sleep. Macon got out Miss MacIntosh and stared at a single page for a while. The top line began with brows bristling, her hair streaked with white. He studied the words so long that he almost wondered if they were words; the whole English language seemed chunky and brittle. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the loudspeaker said, “we will be starting our descent…” and the word “descent” struck him as an invention, some new euphemism concocted by the airlines.

After they landed in Baltimore, he took a shuttle bus to the parking lot and retrieved his car. It was late evening here and the sky was pale and radiant above the city. As he drove he continued to see the words from Miss MacIntosh . He continued to hear the stewardess’s gliding voice: complimentary beverages and the captain has asked us and trays in an upright position . He considered switching on the radio but he didn’t know what station it was set to. Maybe it was Muriel’s country music station. This possibility made him feel weary; he felt he wouldn’t have the strength to press the buttons, and so he drove in silence.

He came to Singleton Street and flicked his signal on but didn’t turn. After a while the signal clicked off on its own. He rode on through the city, up Charles Street, into his old neighborhood. He parked and cut the engine and sat looking at the house. The downstairs windows were dark. The upstairs windows were softly glowing. Evidently, he had come home.

Macon and Sarah needed to buy a new couch. They set aside a Saturday for it — actually just half a Saturday, because Sarah had a class to attend in the afternoon. At breakfast, she flipped through an interior decorating book so they could get a head start on their decision. “I’m beginning to think along the lines of something flowered,” she told Macon. “We’ve never had a flowered couch before. Or would that be too frilly?”