Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist

It was one of Macon’s bad habits to start itching to go home too early. No matter how short a stay he’d planned, partway through he would decide that he ought to leave, that he’d allowed himself far too much time, that everything truly necessary had already been accomplished — or almost everything, almost accomplished. Then the rest of his visit was spent in phone calls to travel agents and fruitless trips to airline offices and standby waits that came to nothing, so that he was forced to return to the hotel he’d just checked out of. He always promised himself this wouldn’t happen again, but somehow it always did. In England, it happened on his fourth afternoon. What more was there to do? he started wondering. Hadn’t he got the gist of the place?

Well, be honest: It was Saturday. He chanced to notice, entering the date in his expense book, that at home it was Saturday morning. Sarah would be stopping by the house for the rug.

She would open the front door and smell home. She would pass through the rooms where she’d been so happy all these years. (Hadn’t she been happy?) She would find the cat stretched out on the couch, long and lazy and languid, and she’d settle on the cushion next to her and think, How could I have left?

Unfortunately, it was summer, and the airlines were overbooked. He spent two days tracking down faint possibilities that evaporated the instant he drew close. “Anything! Get me anything! I don’t have to go to New York; I’ll go to Dulles. I’ll go to Montreal! Chicago! Shoot, I’ll go to Paris or Berlin and see if they have flights. Are there ships? How long do ships take, nowadays? What if this were an emergency? I mean my mother on her deathbed or something? Are you saying there’s just no way out of this place?”

The people he dealt with were unfailingly courteous and full of chirpy good humor — really, if not for the strain of travel he believed he might actually have liked the English — but they couldn’t solve his problem. In the end he had to stay on. He spent the rest of the week huddled in his room watching TV, chewing a knuckle, subsisting on nonperishable groceries and lukewarm soft drinks because he couldn’t face another restaurant.

So he was first in line, naturally, at the check-in counter on the day of his departure. He had his pick of seats: window, nonsmoking. Next to him was a very young couple completely absorbed in each other, so he didn’t need Miss MacIntosh but sat staring out at the clouds all the long, dull afternoon.

Afternoon was never his favorite time; that was the worst of these homeward flights. It was afternoon for hours and hours, through drinks and lunch and drinks again — all of which he waved away. It was afternoon when they showed the movie; the passengers had to pull their shades down. An orange light filled the plane, burdensome and thick.

Once when he’d been away on an unusually difficult trip — to Japan, where you couldn’t even memorize the signs in order to find your way back to a place — Sarah had met his plane in New York. It was their fifteenth anniversary and she had wanted to surprise him. She called Becky at the travel agency to ask his flight number and then she left Ethan with her mother and flew to Kennedy, bringing with her a picnic hamper of wine and cheeses which they shared in the terminal while waiting for their plane home. Every detail of that meal remained in Macon’s memory: the cheeses set out on a marble slab, the wine in stemmed crystal glasses that had somehow survived the trip. He could still taste the satiny Brie. He could still see Sarah’s small, shapely hand resolutely slicing the bread.

But she didn’t meet him in New York today.

She didn’t even meet him in Baltimore.

He collected his car from the lot and drove into the city through a glowering twilight that seemed to promise something — a thunder-storm or heat lightning, something dramatic. Could she be waiting at home? In her striped caftan that he was so fond of? With a cool summer supper laid out on the patio table?

Careful not to take anything for granted, he stopped at a Seven-Eleven for milk. He drove to the vet’s to pick up Edward. He arrived at the Meow-Bow minutes before closing time; somehow, he’d managed to lose his way. There was no one at the counter. He had to ring the service bell. A girl with a ponytail poked her head through a door, letting in a jumble of animal sounds that rose at all different pitches like an orchestra tuning up. “Yes?” she said.

“I’m here for my dog.”

She came forward to open a folder that lay on the counter. “Your last name?”

“Leary.”

“Oh,” she said. “Just a minute.”

Macon wondered what Edward had done wrong this time.

The girl disappeared, and a moment later the other one came out, the frizzy one. This evening she wore a V-necked black dress splashed with big pink flowers, its shoulders padded and its skirt too skimpy; and preposterously high-heeled sandals. “Well, hi there!” she said brightly. “How was your trip?”

“Oh, it was… where’s Edward? Isn’t he all right?”

“Sure, he’s all right. He was so good and sweet and friendly!”

“Well, fine,” Macon said.

“We just got on like a house afire. Seems he took a shine to me, I couldn’t say why.”

“Wonderful,” Macon said. He cleared his throat. “So could I have him back, please?”

“Caroline will bring him.”

“Ah.”

There was a silence. The woman waited, facing him and wearing a perky smile, with her fingers laced together on the counter. She had painted her nails dark red, Macon saw, and put on a blackish lipstick that showed her mouth to be an unusually complicated shape — angular, like certain kinds of apples.

“Um,” Macon said finally. “Maybe I could pay.”

“Oh, yes.”

She stopped smiling and peered down at the open folder. “That’ll be forty-two dollars,” she said.

Macon gave her a credit card. She had trouble working the embossing machine; everything had to be done with the flats of her hands, to spare her nails. She filled in the blanks in a jerky scrawl and then turned the bill in his direction. “Signature and phone,” she said. She leaned over the counter to watch what he wrote. “Is that your home phone, or your business?”

“It’s both. Why? What difference does it make?” he asked.

“I was just wondering,” she told him. She tore off his copy, in that splay-fingered style of hers, and put the rest of the bill in a drawer. “I don’t know if I mentioned before that it so happens I train dogs.”

“Is that right,” Macon said.

He looked toward the door where the first girl had disappeared. It always made him nervous when they took too long bringing Edward. What were they doing back there — getting rid of some evidence?

“My speciality is dogs that bite,” the woman said.

“Specialty.”

“Pardon?”

“Webster prefers ‘specialty.’ ”

She gave him a blank look.

“That must be a dangerous job,” Macon said politely.

“Oh, not for me! I’m not scared of a thing in this world.”

There was a scuffling sound at the door behind her. Edward burst through, followed by the girl with the ponytail. Edward was giving sharp yelps and flinging himself about so joyfully that when Macon bent to pat him, he couldn’t really connect.

“Now, stop that,” the girl told Edward. She was trying to buckle his collar. Meanwhile, the woman behind the counter was saying, “Biters, barkers, deaf dogs, timid dogs, dogs that haven’t been treated right, dogs that have learned bad habits, dogs that grew up in pet shops and don’t trust human beings. I can handle all of those.”

“Well, good,” Macon said.