“How are you, girls.”
“You going to see Muriel?”
“I thought I might.”
He climbed Muriel’s steps, holding the pizza level, and knocked on the door. Debbie and Dorrie continued to watch him. He flashed them a broad smile. They sometimes baby-sat with Alexander; he had to be nice to them. Half the neighborhood sat with Alexander, it seemed. He still felt confused by Muriel’s network of arrangements.
It was Alexander who opened the door. “Pizza man!” Macon told him.
“Mama’s on the phone,” Alexander said flatly. He turned away and wandered back to the couch, adjusting his glasses on his nose. Evidently he was watching TV.
“Extra-large combination, no anchovies,” Macon said.
“I’m allergic to pizza.”
“What part of it?”
“Huh?”
“What part are you allergic to? The pepperoni? Sausage? Mushrooms? We could take those off.”
“All of it,” Alexander said.
“You can’t be allergic to all of it.”
“Well, I am.”
Macon went on into the kitchen. Muriel stood with her back to him, talking on the phone with her mother. He could tell it was her mother because of Muriel’s high, sad, querulous tone. “Aren’t you going to ask how Alexander is? Don’t you want to know about his rash? I ask after your health, why don’t you ask about ours?”
He stepped up behind her soundlessly. “You didn’t even ask what happened with his eye doctor,” she said, “and here I was so worried about it. I swear sometimes you’d think he wasn’t your grandson! That time I sprained my ankle falling off my shoes and called to see if you’d look after him, what did you say? Said, ‘Now let me get this straight. You want me to come all the way down to your house.’ You’d think Alexander was nothing to do with you!”
Macon presented himself in front of her, holding out the pizza. “Ta-da!” he whispered. She looked up at him and gave that perky smile of hers—an ornate, Victorian V.
“Ma,” she said, “I’m going now! Macon’s here!”
It had been a long, long time since anyone made such an event of his arrival.
He went to Julian’s office on a Monday afternoon and handed over what he’d done on the U.S. guidebook. “That wraps up the Northeast,” he said. “I guess next I’ll start on the South.”
“Well, good,” Julian told him. He was bent over behind his desk, rummaging through a drawer. “Excellent. Like to show you something, Macon. Now, where in hell—ah.”
He straightened, with his face flushed. He gave Macon a tiny blue velvet box. “Your sister’s Christmas present,” he said.
Macon raised the lid. Inside, on a bed of white satin, was a diamond ring. He looked at Julian.
“What is it?” he asked.
“What is it?”
“I mean, is this a . . . what you would call, dinner ring? Or is it meant to be, rather . . .”
“It’s an engagement ring, Macon.”
“Engagement?”
“I want to marry her.”
“You want to marry Rose?”
“What’s so odd about that?”
“Well, I—” Macon said.
“If she’ll agree to it, that is.”
“What, you haven’t asked her yet?”
“I’ll ask her at Christmas, when I give her the ring. I want to do this properly. Old-fashioned. Do you think she’ll have me?”
“Well, I really couldn’t say,” Macon said. Unfortunately, he was sure she would, but he’d be damned if he’d tell Julian that.
“She’s got to,” Julian said. “I am thirty-six years old, Macon, but I tell you, I feel like a schoolboy about that woman. She’s everything those girls in my apartment building are not. She’s so . . . true. Want to know something? I’ve never even slept with her.”
“Well, I don’t care to hear about that,” Macon said hastily.
“I want us to have a real wedding night,” Julian told him. “I want to do everything right. I want to join a real family. God, Macon, isn’t it amazing how two separate lives can link up together? I mean two differentnesses? What do you think of the ring?”
Macon said, “It’s okay.” He looked down at it. Then he said, “It’s very nice, Julian,” and he closed the box gently and handed it back.
“Now, this is not your ordinary airplane,” Macon told Muriel. “I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea. This is what they call a commuter plane. It’s something a businessman would take, say, to hop to the nearest city for a day and make a few sales and hop back again.”
The plane he was referring to—a little fifteen-seater that resembled a mosquito or a gnat—stood just outside the door of the commuter’s waiting room. A girl in a parka was loading it with baggage. A boy was checking something on the wings. This appeared to be an airline run by teenagers. Even the pilot was a teenager, it seemed to Macon. He entered the waiting room, carrying a clipboard. He read off a list of names. “Marshall? Noble? Albright?” One by one the passengers stepped forward—just eight or ten of them. To each the pilot said, “Hey, how you doing.” He let his eyes rest longest on Muriel. Either he found her the most attractive or else he was struck by her outfit. She wore her highest heels, black stockings spattered with black net roses, and a flippy little fuchsia dress under a short fat coat that she referred to as her “fun fur.” Her hair was caught all to one side in a great bloom of frizz, and there was a silvery dust of some kind on her eyelids. Macon knew she’d overdone it, but at the same time he liked her considering this such an occasion.
The pilot propped open the door and they followed him outside, across a stretch of concrete, and up two rickety steps into the plane. Macon had to bend almost double as he walked down the aisle. They threaded between two rows of single seats, each seat as spindly as a folding chair. They found spaces across from each other and settled in. Other passengers struggled through, puffing and bumping into things. Last came the copilot, who had round, soft, baby cheeks and carried a can of Diet Pepsi. He slammed the door shut behind him and went up front to the controls. Not so much as a curtain hid the cockpit. Macon could lean out into the aisle and see the banks of knobs and gauges, the pilot positioning his headset, the copilot taking a final swig and setting his empty can on the floor.
“Now, on a bigger plane,” Macon called to Muriel as the engines roared up, “you’d hardly feel the takeoff. But here you’d better brace yourself.”
Muriel nodded, wide-eyed, gripping the seat ahead of her. “What’s that light that’s blinking in front of the pilot?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What’s that little needle that keeps sweeping round and round?”
“I don’t know.”
He felt he’d disappointed her. “I’m used to jets, not these toys,” he told her. She nodded again, accepting that. It occurred to Macon that he was really a very worldly and well-traveled man.
The plane started taxiing. Every pebble on the runway jolted it; every jolt sent a series of creaks through the framework. They gathered speed. The crew, suddenly grave and professional, made complicated adjustments to their instruments. The wheels left the ground. “Oh!” Muriel said, and she turned to Macon with her face all lit up.
“We’re off,” he told her.
“I’m flying!”
They rose—with some effort, Macon felt—over the fields surrounding the airport, over a stand of trees and a grid of houses. Above-ground swimming pools dotted backyards here and there like pale blue thumbtacks. Muriel pressed so close to her window that she left a circle of mist on the glass. “Oh, look!” she said to Macon, and then she said something else that he couldn’t hear. The engines on this plane were loud and harsh, and the Pepsi can was rolling around with a clattering sound, and also the pilot was bellowing to the copilot, saying something about his refrigerator. “So I wake up in the middle of the night,” he was shouting, “damn thing’s thudding and thumping—”
> Muriel said, “Wouldn’t Alexander enjoy this!”
Macon hadn’t seen Alexander enjoying anything yet, but he said dutifully, “We’ll have to bring him sometime.”
“We’ll have to take just lots of trips! France and Spain and Switzerland . . .”
“Well,” Macon said, “there’s the little matter of money.”
“Just America, then. California, Florida . . .”
California and Florida took money too, Macon should have said (and Florida wasn’t even given space in his guidebook), but for the moment, he was borne along by her vision of things. “Look!” she said, and she pointed to something. Macon leaned across the aisle to see what she meant. The airplane flew so low that it might have been following road signs; he had an intimate view of farmlands, woodlands, roofs of houses. It came to him very suddenly that every little roof concealed actual lives. Well, of course he’d known that, but all at once it took his breath away. He saw how real those lives were to the people who lived them—how intense and private and absorbing. He stared past Muriel with his mouth open. Whatever she had wanted him to look at must be long past by now, but still he went on gazing out her window.
Porter and the others were talking money. Or Porter was talking money and the others were half listening. Porter was planning ahead for income taxes. He was interested in something called a chicken straddle. “The way it works,” he said, “you invest in baby chicks right now, before the end of the year. Deduct the cost of feed and such. Then sell the grown hens in January and collect the profit.”
Rose wrinkled her forehead. She said, “But chickens are so prone to colds. Or would you call it distemper. And December and January aren’t usually all that warm here.”
“They wouldn’t be here in Baltimore, Rose. God knows where they’d be. I mean these are not chickens you actually see; they’re a way to manage our taxes.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Charles said. “I hate to get involved in things someone else would be handling. It’s someone else’s word those chickens even exist.”
“You people have no imagination,” Porter said.
The four of them stood around the card table in the sun porch, helping Rose with her Christmas present for Liberty. She had constructed an addition to Liberty’s dollhouse—a garage with a guest apartment above it. The garage was convincingly untidy. Miniature wood chips littered the floor around a stack of twig-sized fire logs, and a coil of green wire made a perfect garden hose. Now they were working on the upstairs. Rose was stuffing an armchair cushion no bigger than an aspirin. Charles was cutting a sheet of wallpaper from a sample book. Porter was drilling holes for the curtain rods. There was hardly elbow room; so Macon, who had just come in with Edward, stood back and merely watched.
“Besides,” Charles said, “chickens are really not, I don’t know, very classy animals. I would hate to go round saying I’m a chicken magnate.”
“You don’t even have to mention the fact,” Porter said.
“Beef magnate, now; that I wouldn’t mind. Beef has more of a ring to it.”
“They’re not offering a straddle for beef, Charles.”
Macon picked up some color photos that sat beside the wallpaper book. The top photo showed a window in a room he didn’t recognize—a white-framed window with louvered shutters closed across its lower half. The next was a group portrait. Four people— blurry, out of focus—stood in a line in front of the couch. The woman wore an apron, the men wore black suits. There was something artificial about their posture. They were lined up too precisely; none of them touched the others. “Who are these people?” Macon asked.
Rose glanced over. “That’s the family from Liberty’s dollhouse,” she said.
“Oh.”
“Her mother sent me those pictures.”
“It’s a family with nothing but grown-ups?” he asked.
“One’s a boy; you just can’t tell. And one’s a grandpa or a butler; June says Liberty switches him back and forth.”
Macon laid the photos aside without looking at the rest of them. He knelt to pat Edward. “A cattle straddle,” Charles was saying thoughtfully. Macon suddenly wished he were at Muriel’s. He wrapped his arms around Edward and imagined he smelled her sharp perfume deep in Edward’s fur.
Oh, above all else he was an orderly man. He was happiest with a regular scheme of things. He tended to eat the same meals over and over and to wear the same clothes; to drop off his cleaning on a certain set day and to pay all his bills on another. The teller who helped him on his first trip to a bank was the teller he went to forever after, even if she proved not to be efficient, even if the next teller’s line was shorter. There was no room in his life for anyone as unpredictable as Muriel. Or as extreme. Or as . . . well, unlikable, sometimes.
Her youthfulness was not appealing but unsettling. She barely remembered Vietnam and had no idea where she’d been when Kennedy was shot. She made him anxious about his own age, which had not previously troubled him. He realized how stiffly he walked after he had been sitting in one position too long; how he favored his back, always expecting it to go out on him again; how once was plenty whenever they made love.
And she talked so much—almost ceaselessly; while Macon was the kind of man to whom silence was better than music. (“Listen! They’re playing my song,” he used to say when Sarah switched the radio off.) She talked about blushers, straighteners, cellulite, hemlines, winter skin. She was interested in the appearance of things, only the appearance: in lipstick shades and nail wrapping and facial masques and split ends. Once, on one of her more attractive days, he told her she was looking very nice, and she grew so flustered that she stumbled over a curb. She asked if that was because she had tied her hair back; and was it the hair itself or the ribbon; or rather the color of the ribbon, which she’d feared might be just a little too bright and set off the tone of her complexion wrong. And didn’t he think her hair was hopeless, kerblamming out the way it did in the slightest bit of humidity? Till he was sorry he had ever brought it up. Well, not sorry, exactly, but tired. Exhausted.
Yet she could raise her chin sometimes and pierce his mind like a blade. Certain images of her at certain random, insignificant moments would flash before him: Muriel at her kitchen table, ankles twined around her chair rungs, filling out a contest form for an all-expense-paid tour of Hollywood. Muriel telling her mirror, “I look like the wrath of God”—a kind of ritual of leavetaking. Muriel doing the dishes in her big pink rubber gloves with the crimson fingernails, raising a soapy plate and trailing it airily over to the rinse water and belting out one of her favorite songs—“War is Hell on the Home Front Too” or “I Wonder if God Likes Country Music.” (Certainly she liked country music—long, complaining ballads about the rocky road of life, the cold gray walls of prison, the sleazy, greasy heart of a two-faced man.) And Muriel at the hospital window, as he’d never actually seen her, holding a mop and gazing down at the injured coming in.
Then he knew that what mattered was the pattern of her life; that although he did not love her he loved the surprise of her, and also the surprise of himself when he was with her. In the foreign country that was Singleton Street he was an entirely different person. This person had never been suspected of narrowness, never been accused of chilliness; in fact, was mocked for his soft heart. And was anything but orderly.
“Why don’t you come to my folks’ house for Christmas dinner?” she asked him.
Macon was in her kitchen at the time. He was crouched beneath the sink, turning off a valve. For a moment he didn’t answer; then he emerged and said, “Your folks?”
“For Christmas dinner.”
“Oh, well, I don’t know,” he said.
“Come on, Macon, please say yes! I want you to meet them. Ma thinks I’m making you up. ‘You made him up,’ she says. You know how she is.”
Yes, Macon did know, at least from second hand, and he could just imagine what that dinner would be like. Booby-trapped. Full of hidden digs and hurt
feelings. The fact was, he just didn’t want to get involved.
So instead of answering, he turned his attention to Alexander. He was trying to teach Alexander how to fix a faucet. “Now,” he said, “you see I shut the valve off. What did I do that for?”
All he got was a glassy pale stare. This was Macon’s idea, not Alexander’s. Alexander had been hauled away from the TV like a sack of stones, plunked on a kitchen chair, and instructed to watch closely. “Oh,” Muriel said, “I’m not sure about this. He’s not so very strong.”
“You don’t have to be Tarzan to fix a kitchen faucet, Muriel.”
“Well, no, but I don’t know . . .”
Sometimes Macon wondered if Alexander’s ailments were all in Muriel’s head.
“Why did I shut off the valve, Alexander?” he asked.
Alexander said, “Why.”
“You tell me.”
“You tell me.”
“No, you,” Macon said firmly.
There was a bad moment or two in which it seemed that Alexander might keep up that stare of his forever. He sat C-shaped in his chair, chin on one hand, eyes expressionless. The shins emerging from his trousers were thin as Tinkertoys, and his brown school shoes seemed very large and heavy. Finally he said, “So the water won’t whoosh all over.”
“Right.”
Macon was careful not to make too much of his victory.
“Now, this leak is not from the spout, but from the handle,” he said. “So you want to take the handle apart and replace the packing. First you unscrew the top screw. Let’s see you do it.”
“Me?”
Macon nodded and offered him the screwdriver.
“I don’t want to,” Alexander said.
“Let him just watch,” Muriel suggested.
“If he just watched he won’t know how to fix the one in the bathtub, and I’m going to ask him to manage that without me.”
Alexander took the screwdriver, in one of those small, stingy gestures of his that occupied a minimum of space. He inched off the chair and came over to the sink. Macon pulled another chair up close and Alexander climbed onto it. Then there was the problem of fitting the screwdriver into the slot of the screw. It took him forever. He had tiny fingers, each tipped with a little pink pad above painfully bitten nails. He concentrated, his glasses slipping down on his nose. Always a mouth-breather, he was biting his tongue now and panting slightly.