But immediately afterward, limping toward his gate, he was overcome by the lost feeling that always plagued him on these trips. He envisioned himself as a stark Figure 1 in a throng of 2’s and 3’s. Look at that group at the Information counter, those confident young people with their knapsacks and sleeping bags. Look at the family occupying one entire bench, their four little daughters so dressed up, so stiff in new plaid coats and ribboned hats, you just knew they’d be met by grandparents at the other end of the line. Even those sitting alone—the old woman with the corsage, the blonde with her expensive leather luggage—gave the impression of belonging to someone.
He sat down on a bench. A southbound train was announced and half the crowd went off to catch it, followed by the inevitable breathless, disheveled woman galloping through some time later with far too many bags and parcels. Arriving passengers began to straggle up the stairs. They wore the dazed expressions of people who had been elsewhere till just this instant. A woman was greeted by a man holding a baby; he kissed her and passed her the baby at once, as if it were a package he’d been finding unusually heavy. A young girl in jeans, reaching the top of the stairs, caught sight of another girl in jeans and threw her arms around her and started crying. Macon watched, pretending not to, inventing explanations. (She was home for their mother’s funeral? Her elopement hadn’t worked out?)
Now his own train was called, so he picked up his bag and limped behind the family with all the daughters. At the bottom of the stairs a gust of cold, fresh air hit him. Wind always seemed to be howling down these platforms, no matter what the weather elsewhere. The smallest of the daughters had to have her coat buttoned. The train came into view, slowly assembling itself around a pinpoint of yellow light.
Most of the cars were full, it turned out. Macon gave up trying to find a completely empty seat and settled next to a plump young man with a briefcase. Just to be on the safe side, he unpacked Miss MacIntosh .
The train lurched forward and then changed its mind and then lurched forward again and took off. Macon imagined he could feel little scabs of rust on the tracks; it wasn’t a very smooth ride. He watched the sights of home rush toward him and disappear—a tumble of row houses, faded vacant lots, laundry hanging rigid in the cold.
“Gum?” his seatmate asked.
Macon said, “No, thanks,” and quickly opened his book.
When they’d been traveling an hour or so, he felt his lids grow heavy. He let his head fall back. He thought he was only resting his eyes, but he must have gone to sleep. The next thing he knew, the conductor was announcing Philadelphia. Macon jerked and sat up straight and caught his book just before it slid off his lap.
His seatmate was doing some kind of paperwork, using his briefcase as a desk. A businessman, obviously—one of the people Macon wrote his guides for. Funny, Macon never pictured his readers. What did businessmen do, exactly? This one was jotting notes on index cards, referring now and then to a booklet full of graphs. One graph showed little black trucks marching across the page—four trucks, seven trucks, three and a half trucks. Macon thought the half-truck looked deformed and pitiable.
Just before they arrived, he used the restroom at the rear of the car—not ideal, but more homey than anything he’d find in New York. He went back to his seat and packed Miss MacIntosh. “Going to be cold there,” his seatmate told him.
“I imagine so,” Macon said.
“Weather report says cold and windy.”
Macon didn’t answer.
He believed in traveling without an overcoat—just one more thing to carry—but he wore a thermal undershirt and long johns. Cold was the least of his worries.
In New York the passengers scattered instantly. Macon thought of a seed pod bursting open. He refused to be rushed and made his way methodically through the crowd, up a set of clanking, dark stairs, and through another crowd that seemed more extreme than the one he had left down below. Goodness, where did these women get their clothes? One wore a bushy fur tepee and leopardskin boots. One wore an olive-drab coverall exactly like an auto mechanic’s except that it was made of leather. Macon took a firmer grip on his bag and pushed through the door to the street, where car horns blasted insistently and the air smelled gray and sharp, like the interior of a dead chimney. In his opinion, New York was a foreign city. He was forever taken aback by its pervasive atmosphere of purposefulness—the tight focus of its drivers, the brisk intensity of its pedestrians drilling their way through all obstacles without a glance to either side.
He hailed a cab, slid across the worn, slippery seat, and gave the address of his hotel. The driver started talking at once about his daughter. “I mean she’s thirteen years old,” he said, nosing out into traffic, “and got three sets of holes in her ears and an earring in each hole, and now she wants to get another set punched up toward the top. Thirteen years old!” He either had or had not heard the address. At any rate, he was driving along. “I wasn’t even in favor of the first set of holes,” he said. “I told her, ‘What; you don’t read Ann Landers?’ Ann Landers says piercing your ears is mutilating your body. Was it Ann Landers? I think it was Ann Landers. You might as well wear a ring through your nose like the Africans, right? I told my daughter that. She says, ‘So? What’s wrong with a ring through my nose? Maybe that’s what I’ll get next.’ I wouldn’t put it past her, either. I would not put it past her. Now this fourth set goes through cartilage and most of these ear-piercing places won’t do that; so you see how crazy it is. Cartilage is a whole different ball game. It’s not your earlobe, all spongy.”
Macon had the feeling he wasn’t fully visible. He was listening to a man who was talking to himself, who may have been talking before he got in and might possibly go on talking after he got out. Or was he present in this cab at all? Such thoughts often attacked while he was traveling. In desperation, he said, “Um—”
The driver stopped speaking, surprisingly enough. The back of his neck took on an alert look. Macon had to continue. He said, “Tell her something scary.”
“Like what?”
“Like . . . tell her you know a girl whose ears dropped off.”
“She’d never go for that.”
“Make it scientific. Say if you puncture cartilage, it will wither right away.”
“Hmm,” the driver said. He honked his horn at a produce truck.
“ ‘Imagine how you’d feel,’ tell her, ‘having to wear the same hairstyle forever. Covering up your withered ears.’ ”
“Think she’d believe me?”
“Why not?” Macon asked. And then, after a pause, “In fact, it may be true. Do you suppose I could have read it someplace?”
“Well, now, maybe you did,” the driver said. “There’s this sort of familiar ring to it.”
“I might even have seen a photograph,” Macon said. “Somebody’s ears, shriveled. All shrunken.”
“Wrinkly, like,” the driver agreed.
Macon said, “Like two dried apricots.”
“Christ! I’ll tell her.”
The taxi stopped in front of Macon’s hotel. Macon paid the fare and said, as he slid out, “I hope it works.”
“Sure it will,” the driver said, “till next time. Till she wants a nose ring or something.”
“Noses are cartilage too, remember! Noses can wither too!”
The driver waved and pulled into traffic again.
After Macon had claimed his room, he took a subway to the Buford Hotel. An electronics salesman had written to suggest it; the Buford rented small apartments, by the day or the week, to businessmen. The manager, a Mr. Aggers, turned out to be a short, round man who walked with a limp exactly like Macon’s. Macon thought they must look very odd together, crossing the lobby to the elevators. “Most of our apartments are owned by corporations,” Mr. Aggers said. He pressed the “Up” button. “Companies who send their men to the city regularly will often find it cheaper to buy their own places. Then those weeks the apartments are empty, they look to me to fi
nd other tenants, help defray the costs.”
Macon made a note of this in the margin of his guidebook. Using an infinitesimal script, he also noted the decor of the lobby, which reminded him of some old-fashioned men’s club. On the massive, claw-footed table between the two elevators stood a yard-high naked lady in brass, trailing brass draperies and standing on brass clouds, holding aloft a small, dusty light bulb with a frayed electric cord dangling from it. The elevator, when it arrived, had dim floral carpeting and paneled walls.
“May I ask,” Mr. Aggers said, “whether you personally write the Accidental Tourist series?”
“Yes, I do,” Macon told him.
“Well!” Mr. Aggers said. “This is a real honor, then. We keep your books in the lobby for our guests. But I don’t know, I somehow pictured you looking a little different.”
“How did you think I would look?” Macon asked.
“Well, maybe not quite so tall. Maybe a bit, well, heavier. More . . . upholstered.”
“I see,” Macon said.
The elevator had stopped by now but it took its time sliding open. Then Mr. Aggers led Macon down a hall. A woman with a laundry cart stood aside to let them pass. “Here we are,” Mr. Aggers said. He unlocked a door and turned on a light.
Macon walked into an apartment that could have come straight from the 1950s. There was a square sofa with metallic threads in its fabric, a chrome-trimmed dinette set, and in the bedroom a double bed whose headboard was quilted in cream-colored vinyl. He tested the mattress. He took off his shoes, lay down, and thought a while. Mr. Aggers stood above him with his fingers laced. “Hmm,” Macon said. He sat up and put his shoes back on. Then he went into the bathroom, where the toilet bore a white strip reading SANITIZED. “I’ve never understood these things,” he said. “Why should it reassure me to know they’ve glued a paper band across my toilet seat?” Mr. Aggers made a helpless gesture with both hands. Macon drew aside a shower curtain printed with pink and blue fish, and he inspected the tub. It looked clean enough, although there was a rust stain leading down from the faucet.
In the kitchenette he found a single saucepan, two faded plastic plates and mugs, and an entire shelf of highball glasses. “Usually our guests don’t cook much,” Mr. Aggers explained, “but they might have their associates in for drinks.” Macon nodded. He was faced with a familiar problem, here: the narrow line between “comfortable” and “tacky.” In fact, sometimes comfortable was tacky. He opened the refrigerator, a little undercounter affair. The ice trays in the freezing compartment were exactly the same kind of trays— scummy aqua plastic, heavily scratched—that Rose had back in Baltimore.
“You have to admit it’s well stocked,” Mr. Aggers said. “See? An apron in the kitchen drawer. My wife’s idea. Protects their suits.”
“Yes, very nice,” Macon said.
“It’s just like home away from home; that’s how I like to think of it.”
“Oh, well, home,” Macon said. “Nothing’s home , really.”
“Why? What’s missing?” Mr. Aggers asked. He had very pale, fine-grained skin that took on a shine when he was anxious. “What more would you like to see added?”
“To tell the truth,” Macon said, “I’ve always thought a hotel ought to offer optional small animals.”
“Animals?”
“I mean a cat to sleep on your bed at night, or a dog of some kind to act pleased when you come in. You ever notice how a hotel room feels so lifeless?”
“Yes, but—well, I don’t see how I could—there are surely health regulations or something . . . complications, paperwork, feeding all those different . . . and allergies, of course, many guests have—”
“Oh, I understand, I understand,” Macon said. In the margin of his guidebook he was noting the number of wastebaskets: four. Excellent. “No,” he said, “it doesn’t seem that people ever take me up on that.”
“Will you recommend us anyway?”
“Certainly,” Macon said, and he closed his guidebook and asked for a list of the rates.
The rest of the afternoon he spent in hotels that he’d covered before. He visited managers in their offices, took brief guided tours to see that nothing had slid into ruin, and listened to talk of rising costs and remodeling plans and new, improved conference settings. Then he returned to his room and switched on the evening news. The world was doing poorly; but watching this unfamiliar TV set, propping his aching leg and braced in this chair that seemed designed for someone else’s body, Macon had the feeling that none of the wars and famines he saw were real. They were more like, oh, staged. He turned off the set and went downstairs to hail a cab.
At Julian’s suggestion, he was dining on the very top of an impossibly tall building. (Julian had a fondness for restaurants with gimmicks, Macon had noticed. He wasn’t happy unless a place revolved, or floated, or could be reached only by catwalk.) “Imagine,” Julian had said, “the effect on your out-of-town client. Yes, he’d have to be from out of town; I don’t suppose a native New Yorker . . .” Macon had snorted. Now the cabdriver snorted, too. “Cup of coffee there will cost you five bucks,” he told Macon.
“It figures.”
“You’re better off at one of those little Frenchy places.”
“That’s for tomorrow. In-town clients.”
The taxi coasted down streets that grew darker and more silent, leading away from the crowds. Macon peered out of his window. He saw a lone man huddled in a doorway, wrapped in a long coat. Wisps of steam drifted up from manhole covers. All the shops were locked behind iron grilles.
At the end of the darkest street of all, the taxi stopped. The driver gave another snort, and Macon paid his fare and stepped out. He wasn’t prepared for the wind, which rushed up against him like a great flat sheet of something. He hurried across the sidewalk, or was propelled, while his trousers twisted and flapped about his legs. Just before entering the building, he thought to look up. He looked up and up and up, and finally he saw a faint white pinnacle dwindling into a deep, black, starless sky eerily far away. He thought of once long ago when Ethan, visiting the zoo as a toddler, had paused in front of an elephant and raised his face in astonishment and fallen over backwards.
Inside, everything was streaky pink marble and acres of texture-less carpeting. An elevator the size of a room stood open, half filled with people, and Macon stepped in and took his place between two women in silks and diamonds. Their perfume was almost visible. He imagined he could see it rippling the air.
Have chewing gum handy, he wrote in his guidebook as the elevator shot upward. His ears were popping. There was a dense, un-resonant stillness that made the women’s voices sound tinny. He tucked his guidebook in his pocket and glanced at the numbers flashing overhead. They progressed by tens: forty, fifty, sixty . . . One of the men said they’d have to bring Harold sometime— remember Harold when he got so scared on the ski lift?—and everyone laughed.
The elevator gave a sort of lilt and the door slid open without a sound. A girl in a white trouser suit directed them down a corridor, into a spacious darkness flickering with candles. Great black windows encircled the room from floor to ceiling, but Macon was taken to a table without a view. Lone diners, he supposed, were an embarrassment here. He might be the first they’d ever had. The array of silver at his single place could easily serve a family of four.
His waiter, far better dressed than Macon, handed him a menu and asked what he wanted to drink. “Dry sherry, please,” Macon said. The minute the waiter left, Macon folded his menu in two and sat on it. Then he looked around at his neighbors. Everyone seemed to be celebrating something. A man and a pregnant woman held hands and smiled across the moony glow of their candle. A boisterous group to his left toasted the same man over and over.
The waiter returned, balancing a sherry neatly on a tray. “Very good,” Macon said. “And now perhaps a menu.”
“Menu? Didn’t I give you one?”
“There could have been an oversight,” he said,
not exactly lying.
A second menu was brought and opened with a flourish before him. Macon sipped his sherry and considered the prices. Astronomical. He decided, as usual, to eat what he thought his readers might eat—not the quenelles or the sweetbreads but the steak, medium rare. After he’d given his order, he rose and slid his chair in and took his sherry over to a window.
All of a sudden he thought he had died.
He saw the city spread below like a glittering golden ocean, the streets tiny ribbons of light, the planet curving away at the edges, the sky a purple hollow extending to infinity. It wasn’t the height; it was the distance. It was his vast, lonely distance from everyone who mattered. Ethan, with his bouncy walk—how would he ever know that his father had come to be trapped in this spire in the heavens? How would Sarah know, lazily tanning herself in the sunshine? For he did believe the sun could be shining wherever she was at this moment; she was so removed from him. He thought of his sister and brothers going about their business, playing their evening card game, unaware of how far behind he’d left them. He was too far gone to return. He would never, ever get back. He had somehow traveled to a point completely isolated from everyone else in the universe, and nothing was real but his own angular hand clenched around the sherry glass.
He dropped the glass, causing a meaningless little flurry of voices, and he spun around and ran lopsidedly across the room and out the door. But there was that endless corridor, and he couldn’t manage the trip. He took a right turn instead. He passed a telephone alcove and stumbled into a restroom—yes, a men’s room, luckily. More marble, mirrors, white enamel. He thought he was going to throw up, but when he entered one of the cubicles the sick feeling left his stomach and floated to his head. He noticed how light his brain felt. He stood above the hotel pressing his temples. It occurred to him to wonder how many feet of pipe a toilet at this altitude required.
He heard someone else come in, coughing. A cubicle door slammed shut. He opened his own door a crack and looked out. The impersonal lushness of the room made him think of sciencefiction movies.