Apparently an upstairs pipe (in that cold little bathroom off Ethan’s old room, Macon would bet) had frozen and burst, heaven only knew how long ago, and the water had run and run until it saturated the ceiling and started coming through the plaster. All over the room it was raining. Chunks of plaster had fallen on the furniture, turning it white and splotchy. The floorboards were mottled. The rug, when Macon stepped on it, squelched beneath his feet. He marveled at the thoroughness of the destruction; not a detail had been overlooked. Every ashtray was full of wet flakes and every magazine was sodden. There was a gray smell rising from the upholstery.
“What are you going to do?” Charles breathed.
Macon pulled himself together. “Why, turn off the water main, of course,” he said.
“But your living room!”
Macon didn’t answer. His living room was . . . appropriate, was what he wanted to say. Even more appropriate if it had been washed away entirely. (He imagined the house under twelve feet of water, uncannily clear, like a castle at the bottom of a goldfish bowl.)
He went down to the basement and shut off the valve, and then he checked the laundry sink. It was dry. Ordinarily he let the tap run all winter long, a slender stream to keep the pipes from freezing, but this year he hadn’t thought of it and neither had his brothers, evidently, when they came to light the furnace.
“Oh, this is terrible, just terrible,” Charles was saying when Macon came back upstairs. But he was in the kitchen now, where there wasn’t any problem. He was opening and shutting cabinet doors. “Terrible. Terrible.”
Macon had no idea what he was going on about. He said, “Just let me find my boots and we can leave.”
“Leave?”
He thought his boots must be in his closet. He went upstairs to the bedroom. Everything here was so dreary—the naked mattress with its body bag, the dusty mirror, the brittle yellow newspaper folded on the nightstand. He bent to root through the objects on the closet floor. There were his boots, all right, along with some wire hangers and a little booklet of some sort. A Gardener’s Diary, 1976. He flipped through it. First lawn-mowing of the spring, Sarah had written in her compact script. Forsythia still in bloom. Macon closed the diary and smoothed the cover and laid it aside.
Boots in hand, he went back downstairs. Charles had returned to the living room; he was wringing out cushions. “Never mind those,” Macon said. “They’ll just get wet again.”
“Will your insurance cover this?”
“I suppose so.”
“What would they call it? Flood damage? Weather damage?”
“I don’t know. Let’s get going.”
“You should phone our contractor, Macon. Remember the man who took care of our porch?”
“Nobody lives here anyhow,” Macon said.
Charles straightened, still holding a cushion. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.
“Mean?”
“Are you saying you’ll just let this stay?”
“Probably,” Macon told him.
“All soaked and ruined? Nothing done?”
“Oh, well,” Macon said, waving a hand. “Come along, Charles.”
But Charles hung back, still gazing around the living room. “Terrible. Even the curtains are dripping. Sarah will feel just terrible.”
“I doubt she’ll give it a thought,” Macon said.
He paused on the porch to pull his boots on. They were old and stiff, the kind with metal clasps. He tucked his wet trouser cuffs inside them and then led the way to the street.
Once they were settled in the car, Charles didn’t start the engine but sat there, key in hand, and looked soberly at Macon. “I think it’s time we had a talk,” he said.
“What about?”
“I’d like to know what you think you’re up to with this Muriel person.”
“Is that what you call her? ‘This Muriel person’?”
“No one else will tell you,” Charles said. “They say it’s none of their business. But I can’t just stand by and watch, Macon. I have to say what I think. How old are you—forty-two? Forty-three now? And she is . . . but more than that, she’s not your type of woman.”
“You don’t even know her!”
“I know her type.”
“I have to be getting home now, Charles.”
Charles looked down at his key. Then he started the car and pulled into the street, but he didn’t drop the subject. “She’s some kind of symptom, Macon! You’re not yourself these days and this Muriel person’s a symptom. Everybody says so.”
“I’m more myself than I’ve been my whole life long,” Macon told him.
“What kind of remark is that? It doesn’t even make sense!”
“And who is ‘everybody,’ anyway?”
“Why, Porter, Rose, me . . .”
“All such experts.”
“We’re just worried for you, Macon.”
“Could we switch to some other topic?”
“I had to tell you what I thought,” Charles said.
“Well, fine. You’ve told me.”
But Charles didn’t look satisfied.
The car wallowed back through the slush, with ribbons of bright water trickling down the windshield from the roof. Then out on the main road, it picked up speed. “Hate to think what all that salt is doing to your underbody,” Macon said.
Charles said, “I never told you this before, but it’s my opinion sex is overrated.”
Macon looked at him.
“Oh, when I was in my teens I was as interested as anyone,” Charles said. “I mean it occupied my thoughts for every waking moment and all that. But that was just the idea of sex, you know? Somehow, the real thing was less . . . I don’t mean I’m opposed to it, but it’s just not all I expected. For one thing, it’s rather messy. And then the weather is such a problem.”
“Weather,” Macon said.
“When it’s cold you hate to take your clothes off. When it’s hot you’re both so sticky. And in Baltimore, it does always seem to be either too cold or too hot.”
“Maybe you ought to consider a change of climate,” Macon said. He was beginning to enjoy himself. “Do you suppose anyone’s done a survey? City by city? Maybe the Businessman’s Press could put out some sort of pamphlet.”
“And besides it often leads to children,” Charles said. “I never really cared much for children. They strike me as disruptive.”
“Well, if that’s why you brought this up, forget it,” Macon said. “Muriel can’t have any more.”
Charles gave a little cough. “That’s good to hear,” he said, “but it’s not why I brought it up. I believe what I was trying to say is, I just don’t think sex is important enough to ruin your life for.”
“So? Who’s ruining his life?”
“Macon, face it. She’s not worth it.”
“How can you possibly know that?”
“Can you tell me one unique thing about her?” Charles asked. “I mean one really special quality, Macon, not something sloppy like ‘She appreciates me’ or ‘She listens . . .’ ”
She looks out hospital windows and imagines how the Martians would see us, Macon wanted to say. But Charles wouldn’t understand that, so instead he said, “I’m not such a bargain myself, in case you haven’t noticed. I’m kind of, you could say, damaged merchandise. Somebody ought to warn her away from me, when you get right down to it.”
“That’s not true. That’s not true at all. As a matter of fact, I imagine her people are congratulating her on her catch.”
“Her catch!”
“Someone to support her. Anyone,” Charles said. “She’d be lucky to find anyone. Why, she doesn’t even speak proper English! She lives in that slummy house, she dresses like some kind of bag lady, she’s got that little boy who appears to have hookworm or something—”
“Charles, just shut the hell up,” Macon said.
Charles closed his mouth.
They had reached Muriel’s neighb
orhood by now. They were driving past the stationery factory with its tangled wire fence like old bedsprings. Charles took a wrong turn. “Let’s see, now,” he said, “where do I . . .”
Macon didn’t offer to help.
“Am I heading in the right direction? Or not. Somehow I don’t seem to . . .”
They were two short blocks from Singleton Street, but Macon hoped Charles would drive in circles forever. “Lots of luck,” he said, and he opened the door and hopped out.
“Macon?”
Macon waved and ducked down an alley.
Freedom! Sunlight glinting off blinding white drifts, and children riding sleds and TV trays. Cleared parking spaces guarded with lawn chairs. Throngs of hopeful boys with shovels. And then Muriel’s house with its walk still deep in snow, its small rooms smelling of pancakes, its cozy mix of women lounging about in the kitchen. They were drinking cocoa now. Bernice was braiding Claire’s hair. Alexander was painting a picture. Muriel kissed Macon hello and squealed at his cold cheeks. “Come in and get warm! Have some cocoa! Look at Alexander’s picture,” she said. “Don’t you love it? Isn’t he something? He’s a regular da Vinci.”
“Leonardo,” Macon said.
“What?”
“Not da Vinci. For God’s sake. It’s Leonardo,” he told her. Then he stamped upstairs to change out of his clammy trousers.
fifteen
I’m sorry I’m so fat,” Macon’s seatmate said.
Macon said, “Oh, er, ah—”
“I know I’m using more than my share of space,” the man told him. “Do you think I’m not aware of that? Every trip I take, I have to ask the stewardess for a seatbelt extender. I have to balance my lunch on my knees because the tray can’t unfold in front of me. Really I ought to purchase two seats but I’m not a wealthy man. I ought to purchase two tickets and not spread all over my fellow passengers.”
“Oh, you’re not spreading all over me,” Macon said.
This was because he was very nearly sitting in the aisle, with his knees jutting out to the side so that every passing stewardess ruffled the pages of Miss MacIntosh. But he couldn’t help feeling touched by the man’s great, shiny, despairing face, which was as round as a baby’s. “Name’s Lucas Loomis,” the man said, holding out a hand. When Macon shook it, he was reminded of risen bread dough.
“Macon Leary,” Macon told him.
“The stupid thing is,” Lucas Loomis said, “I travel for a living.”
“Do you.”
“I demonstrate software to computer stores. I’m sitting in an airplane seat six days out of seven sometimes.”
“Well, none of us finds them all that roomy,” Macon said.
“What do you do, Mr. Leary?”
“I write guidebooks,” Macon said.
“Is that so? What kind?”
“Oh, guides for businessmen. People just like you, I guess.”
“Accidental Tourist,” Mr. Loomis said instantly.
“Why, yes.”
“Really? Am I right? Well, what do you know,” Mr. Loomis said. “Look at this.” He took hold of his own lapels, which sat so far in front of him that his arms seemed too short to reach them. “Gray suit,” he told Macon. “Just what you recommend. Appropriate for all occasions.” He pointed to the bag at his feet. “See my luggage? Carry-on. Change of underwear, clean shirt, packet of detergent powder.”
“Well, good,” Macon said. This had never happened to him before.
“You’re my hero!” Mr. Loomis told him. “You’ve improved my trips a hundred percent. You’re the one who told me about those springy items that turn into clotheslines.”
“Oh, well, you could have run across those in any drugstore,” Macon said.
“I’ve stopped relying on hotel laundries; I hardly need to venture into the streets anymore. I tell my wife, I say, you just ask her, I tell her often, I say, ‘Going with the Accidental Tourist is like going in a capsule, a cocoon. Don’t forget to pack my Accidental Tourist !’ I tell her.”
“Well, this is very nice to hear,” Macon said.
“Times I’ve flown clear to Oregon and hardly knew I’d left Baltimore.”
“Excellent.”
There was a pause.
“Although,” Macon said, “lately I’ve been wondering.”
Mr. Loomis had to turn his entire body to look at him, like someone encased in a hooded parka.
“I mean,” Macon said, “I’ve been out along the West Coast. Updating my U.S. edition. And of course I’ve covered the West Coast before, Los Angeles and all that; Lord, yes, I knew the place as a child; but this was the first I’d seen of San Francisco. My publisher wanted me to add it in. Have you been to San Francisco?”
“That’s where we just now got on the plane,” Mr. Loomis reminded him.
“San Francisco is certainly, um, beautiful,” Macon said.
Mr. Loomis thought that over.
“Well, so is Baltimore too, of course,” Macon said hastily. “Oh, no place on earth like Baltimore! But San Francisco, well, I mean it struck me as, I don’t know . . .”
“I was born and raised in Baltimore, myself,” Mr. Loomis said. “Wouldn’t live anywhere else for the world.”
“No, of course not,” Macon said. “I just meant—”
“Couldn’t pay me to leave it.”
“No, me either.”
“You a Baltimore man?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“No place like it.”
“Certainly isn’t,” Macon said.
But a picture came to his mind of San Francisco floating on mist like the Emerald City, viewed from one of those streets so high and steep that you really could hang your head over and hear the wind blow.
He’d left Baltimore on a sleety day with ice coating the airport runways, and he hadn’t been gone all that long; but when he returned it was spring. The sun was shining and the trees were tipped with green. It was still fairly cool but he drove with his windows down. The breeze smelled exactly like Vouvray—flowery with a hint of mothballs underneath.
On Singleton Street, crocuses were poking through the hard squares of dirt in front of basement windows. Rugs and bedspreads flapped in backyards. A whole cache of babies had surfaced. They cruised imperiously in their strollers, propelled by their mothers or by pairs of grandmothers. Old people sat out on the sidewalk in beach chairs and wheelchairs, and groups of men stood about on corners, their hands in their pockets and their posture elaborately casual—the unemployed, Macon imagined, emerging from the darkened living rooms where they’d spent the winter watching T V. He caught snatches of their conversation:
“What’s going down, man?”
“Nothing much.”
“What you been up to?”
“Not a whole lot.”
He parked in front of Muriel’s house, where Dominick Saddler was working on Muriel’s car. The hood was open and Dominick was deep in its innards; all Macon saw was his jeans and his gigantic, ragged sneakers, a band of bare flesh showing above his cowhide belt. On either side of him stood the Butler twins, talking away a mile a minute. “So she says to us we’re grounded—”
“Can’t go out with no one till Friday—”
“Takes away our fake i.d.’s—”
“Won’t let us answer the phone—”
“We march upstairs and slam our bedroom door, like, just a little slam to let her know what we think of her—”
“And up she comes with a screwdriver and takes our door off its hinges!”
“Hmm,” Dominick said.
Macon rested his bag on the hood and peered down into the engine. “Car acting up again?” he asked.
The Butler twins said, “Hey there, Macon,” and Dominick straightened and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He was a dark, good-looking boy whose bulging muscles made Macon feel inadequate. “Damn thing keeps stalling out,” he said.
“How’d Muriel get to work?”
“Had to take the bus.
”
Macon was hoping to hear she’d stayed home.
He climbed the steps and unlocked the front door. Just inside, Edward greeted him, squeaking and doing back flips and trying to hold still long enough to be petted. Macon walked through the rest of the house. Clearly, everyone had left in a hurry. The sofa was opened out. (Claire must have had another fight with her folks.) The kitchen table was littered with dishes and no one had put the cream away. Macon did that. Then he took his bag upstairs. Muriel’s bed was unmade and her robe was slung across a chair. There was a snarl of hair in the pin tray on her bureau. He picked it up between thumb and index finger and dropped it into the wastebasket. It occurred to him (not for the first time) that the world was divided sharply down the middle: Some lived careful lives and some lived careless lives, and everything that happened could be explained by the difference between them. But he could not have said, not in a million years, why he was so moved by the sight of Muriel’s thin quilt trailing across the floor where she must have dragged it when she rose in the morning.
It wasn’t quite time for Alexander to come home from school, so he thought he would walk the dog. He put Edward on his leash and let himself out the front door. When he passed the Butler twins again they said, “Hey, there, Macon,” singsong as ever, while Dominick cursed and reached for a wrench.
The men standing on the corner were discussing a rumor of jobs in Texas. Someone’s brother-in-law had found work there. Macon passed with his head lowered, feeling uncomfortably privileged. He skirted a welcome mat that had been scrubbed and set out to dry on the pavement. The women here took spring cleaning seriously, he saw. They shook their dust mops out of upstairs windows; they sat on their sills to polish the panes with crumpled sheets of newspapers. They staggered between houses with borrowed vacuum cleaners, rug machines, and gallon jugs of upholstery shampoo. Macon rounded the block and started home, having paused to let Edward pee against a maple sapling.
Just as he was approaching Singleton Street, whom should he see but Alexander scurrying up ahead. There was no mistaking that stiff little figure with the clumsy backpack. “Wait!” Alexander was crying. “Wait for me!” The Ebbetts children, some distance away, turned and called something back. Macon couldn’t hear what they said but he knew the tone, all right—that high, mocking chant. “Nyah-nyah-nyah-NYAH-nyah!” Alexander started running, stumbling over his own shoes. Behind him came another group, two older boys and a girl with red hair, and they began jeering too. Alexander wheeled and looked at them. His face was somehow smaller than usual. “Go,” Macon told Edward, and he dropped the leash. Edward didn’t need any urging. His ears had perked at the sound of Alexander’s voice, and now he hurtled after him. The three older children scattered as he flew through them, barking. He drew up short in front of Alexander, and Alexander knelt to hug his neck.