When Macon arrived, he said, “Are you all right?”
Alexander nodded and got to his feet.
“What was that all about?” Macon asked him.
Alexander said, “Nothing.”
But when they started walking again, he slipped his hand into Macon’s.
Those cool little fingers were so distinct, so particular, so full of character. Macon tightened his grip and felt a pleasant kind of sorrow sweeping through him. Oh, his life had regained all its old perils. He was forced to worry once again about nuclear war and the future of the planet. He often had the same secret, guilty thought that had come to him after Ethan was born: From this time on I can never be completely happy.
Not that he was before, of course.
Macon’s U.S. edition was going to be five separate pamphlets now, divided geographically, slipcased together so you had to buy all five even if you needed only one. Macon thought this was immoral. He said so when Julian stopped by for the West Coast material. “What’s immoral about it?” Julian asked. He wasn’t really paying attention; Macon could see that. He was filing mental notes on Muriel’s household, no doubt the real purpose of this unannounced, unnecessary visit. Even though he’d already collected his material, he was wandering around the living room in an abstracted way, first examining a framed school photo of Alexander and then a beaded moccasin that Claire had left on the couch. It was Saturday and the others were in the kitchen, but Macon had no intention of letting Julian meet them.
“It’s always immoral to force a person to buy something he doesn’t want,” Macon said. “If he only wants the Midwest, he shouldn’t have to buy New England too, for heaven’s sake.”
Julian said, “Is that your friend I hear out there? Is it Muriel?”
“Yes, I suppose it is,” Macon said.
“Aren’t you going to introduce us?”
“She’s busy.”
“I’d really like to meet her.”
“Why? Hasn’t Rose given you a full report?”
“Macon,” Julian said, “I’m soon going to be a relative of yours.”
“Ah, God.”
“It’s only natural I’m interested in knowing her.”
Macon said nothing.
“Besides,” Julian told him, “I want to invite her to the wedding.”
“You do?”
“So can I talk to her?”
“Oh. Well. I guess so.”
Macon led the way to the kitchen. He felt he’d made a mistake— that having acted so thorny, he’d caused this meeting to seem more important than it was. But Julian, as it happened, was breezy and offhand. “Hello, ladies,” he said.
They looked up—Muriel, Claire, and Bernice, seated around a sheaf of notebook paper. Macon reeled their names off rapidly but got stuck on Julian’s. “Julian, ah, Edge, my . . .”
“Future brother-in-law,” Julian said.
“My boss.”
“I’ve come to invite you to the wedding, Muriel. Also your little boy, if—where’s your little boy?”
“He’s out walking the dog,” Muriel said. “But he’s not too good in churches.”
“This’ll be a garden wedding.”
“Well, maybe, then, I don’t know . . .”
Muriel was wearing what she called her “paratrooper look”— a coverall from Sunny’s Surplus—and her hair was concealed beneath a wildly patterned silk turban. A ballpoint pen mark slashed across one cheekbone. “We’re entering this contest,” she told Julian. “Write a country-music song and win a trip for two to Nashville. We’re working on it all together. We’re going to call it ‘Happier Days.’ ”
“Hasn’t that already been written?”
“Oh, I hope not. You know how they always have these photographs of couples in magazines? ‘Mick Jagger and Bianca in happier days.’ ‘Richard Burton and Liz Taylor, in—’ ”
“Yes, I get it.”
“So this man is talking about his ex-wife. ‘I knew her in another time and place . . .’ ”
She sang it right out, in her thin scratchy voice that gave a sense of distance, like a used-up phonograph record:
When we kissed in the rain,
When we shared every pain,
When we both enjoyed happier days.
“Very catchy,” Julian said, “but I don’t know about ‘shared every pain.’ ”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“I mean, in happier days they had pain?”
“He’s right,” Bernice told Muriel.
“Rain, brain, drain,” Julian reflected. “ ‘When our lives were more sane,’ ‘When we used to raise Cain . . .’ ”
“Let it be, why don’t you,” Macon told him.
“ ‘When I hadn’t met Jane,’ ‘When she didn’t know Wayne . . .’ ”
“Wait!” Bernice said, scribbling furiously.
“I may have tapped some hidden talent here,” Julian told Macon.
“I’ll see you to the door,” Macon said.
“ ‘When our love had no stain,’ ‘When she wasn’t insane . . .’ ” Julian said, trailing Macon through the living room. “Don’t forget the wedding!” he called back. He told Macon, “If she wins, you could cover Nashville free for your next U.S. edition.”
“I think she’s planning on taking Bernice,” Macon told him.
“ ‘When we guzzled champagne . . .’ ” Julian mused.
“I’ll be in touch,” Macon said, “as soon as I start on the Canada guide.”
“Canada! Aren’t you coming to the wedding?”
“Well, that too, of course,” Macon said, opening the door.
“Wait a minute, Macon. What’s your hurry? Wait, I want to show you something.”
Julian set down the West Coast material to search his pockets. He pulled out a shiny, colored advertisement. “Hawaii,” he said.
“Well, I certainly see no point in covering—”
“Not for you; for me! For our honeymoon. I’m taking Rose.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Look,” Julian said. He unfolded the ad. It turned out to be a map—one of those useless maps that Macon detested, with out-sized, whimsical drawings of pineapples, palm trees, and hula dancers crowding the apple-green islands. “I got this from The Travel People Incorporated. Have you heard of them? Are they reliable? They suggested a hotel over here on . . .” He drew a forefinger across the page, hunting down the hotel.
“I know nothing at all about Hawaii,” Macon said.
“Somewhere here . . .” Julian said. Then he gave up, perhaps just at that moment hearing what Macon had told him, and refolded the map. “She may be exactly what you need,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“This Muriel person.”
“Why does everyone call her—”
“She’s not so bad! I don’t think your family understands how you’re feeling.”
“No, they don’t. They really don’t,” Macon said. He was surprised that it was Julian, of all people, who saw that.
Although Julian’s parting words were, “ ‘When we stuffed on chow mein . . .’ ”
Macon shut the door firmly behind him.
He decided to buy Alexander some different clothes. “How would you like some blue jeans?” he asked. “How would you like some work shirts? How would you like a cowboy belt with ‘Budweiser Beer’ on the buckle?”
“You serious?”
“Would you wear that kind of thing?”
“Yes! I would! I promise!”
“Then let’s go shopping.”
“Is Mama coming?”
“We’ll surprise her.”
Alexander put on his spring jacket—a navy polyester blazer that Muriel had just paid a small fortune for. Macon didn’t know if she would approve of jeans, which was why he’d waited till she was off buying curtains for a woman in Guilford.
The store he drove to was a Western-wear place where he used to take Ethan. It hadn’t changed a bit. Its wooden floorboards creak
ed, its aisles smelled of leather and new denim. He steered Alexander to the boys’ department, where he spun a rack of shirts. How many times had he done this before? It wasn’t even painful. Only disorienting, in a way, to see that everything continued no matter what. The student jeans were still stacked according to waist and inseam. The horsey tie pins were still arrayed behind glass. Ethan was dead and gone but Macon was still holding up shirts and asking, “This one? This one? This one?”
“What I’d really like is T-shirts,” Alexander said.
“T-shirts. Ah.”
“The kind with a sort of stretched-out neck. And jeans with raggedy bottoms.”
“Well, that you have to do for yourself,” Macon said. “You have to break them in.”
“I don’t want to look new.”
“Tell you what. Everything we buy, we’ll wash about twenty times before you wear it.”
“But nothing prewashed,” Alexander said.
“No, no.”
“Only nerds wear prewashed.”
“Right.”
Alexander chose several T-shirts, purposely too big, along with an assortment of jeans because he wasn’t sure of his size. Then he went off to try everything on. “Shall I come with you?” Macon asked.
“I can do it myself.”
“Oh. All right.”
That was familiar, too.
Alexander disappeared into one of the stalls and Macon went on a tour of the men’s department. He tried on a leather cowboy hat but took it off immediately. Then he went back to the stall. “Alexander?”
“Huh?”
“How’s it going?”
“Okay.”
In the space below the door, Macon saw Alexander’s shoes and his trouser cuffs. Evidently he hadn’t got around to putting on the jeans yet.
Someone said, “Macon?”
He turned and found a woman in a trim blond pageboy, her wrap skirt printed with little blue whales. “Yes,” he said.
“Laurel Canfield. Scott’s mother, remember?”
“Of course,” Macon said, shaking her hand. Now he caught sight of Scott, who had been in Ethan’s class at school—an unexpectedly tall, gawky boy lurking at his mother’s elbow with an armload of athletic socks. “Why, Scott. Nice to see you,” Macon said.
Scott flushed and said nothing. Laurel Canfield said, “It’s nice to see you. Are you doing your spring shopping?”
“Oh, well, ah—”
He looked toward the stall. Now Alexander’s trousers were slumped around his ankles. “I’m helping the son of a friend,” he explained.
“We’ve just been buying out the sock department.”
“Yes, I see you have.”
“Seems every other week I find Scott’s run through his socks again; you know how they are at this age—”
She stopped herself. She looked horrified. She said, “Or, rather . . .”
“Yes, certainly!” Macon said. “Amazing, isn’t it?” He felt so embarrassed for her that he was pleased, at first, to see another familiar face behind her. Then he realized whose it was. There stood his mother-in-law. “Why!” he said. Was she still Mother Sidey? Mrs. Sidey? Who, for God’s sake?
Luckily, it turned out that Laurel Canfield knew her too. “Paula Sidey,” she said. “I haven’t seen you since last year’s Hunt Cup.”
“Yes, I’ve been away,” Mrs. Sidey told her, and then she dropped her lids somewhat, as if drawing a curtain, before saying, “Macon.”
“How are you?” Macon said.
She was flawlessly groomed, industriously tended—a blue-haired woman in tailored slacks and a turtleneck. He used to worry that Sarah would age the same way, develop the same brittle carapace, but now he found himself admiring Mrs. Sidey’s resolve. “You’re looking well,” he told her.
“Thank you,” she said, touching her hairdo. “I suppose you’re here for your spring wardrobe.”
“Oh, Macon’s helping a friend!” Laurel Canfield caroled. She was so chirpy, all of a sudden, that Macon suspected she’d just now recalled Mrs. Sidey’s relationship to him. She looked toward Alexander’s stall. Alexander was in his socks now. One sock rose and vanished, stepping into a flood of blue denim. “Isn’t shopping for boys so difficult?” she said.
“I wouldn’t know,” Mrs. Sidey said. “I never had one. I’m here for the denim skirts.”
“Oh, the skirts, well, I notice they’re offering a—”
“What friend are you helping to buy for?” Mrs. Sidey asked Macon.
Macon didn’t know what to tell her. He looked toward the stall. If only Alexander would just stay hidden forever, he thought. How to explain this scrawny little waif, this poor excuse of a child who could never hold a candle to the real child?
Contrary as always, Alexander chose that moment to step forth.
He wore an oversized T-shirt that slipped a bit off one shoulder, as if he’d just emerged from some rough-and-tumble game. His jeans were comfortably baggy. His face, Macon saw, had somehow filled out in the past few weeks without anybody’s noticing; and his hair—which Macon had started cutting at home—had lost that shaved prickliness and grown thick and floppy.
“I look wonderful!” Alexander said.
Macon turned to the women and said, “Actually, I find shopping for boys is a pleasure.”
sixteen
There is no sound more peaceful than rain on the roof, if you’re safe asleep in someone else’s house. Macon heard the soft pattering; he heard Muriel get up to close a window. She crossed his vision like the gleam of headlights crossing a ceiling, white and slim and watery in a large plain slip from Goodwill Industries. She shut the window and the stillness dropped over him and he went back to sleep.
But in the morning his first thought was, Oh, no! Rain! On Rose’s wedding day!
He got up, careful not to wake Muriel, and looked out. The sky was bright but flat, the color of oyster shells—not a good sign. The scrawny little dogwood in back was dripping from every twig and bud. Next door, Mr. Butler’s ancient heap of scrap lumber had grown several shades darker.
Macon went downstairs, tiptoeing through the living room where Claire lay snoring in a tangle of blankets. He fixed a pot of coffee and then called Rose on the kitchen phone. She answered instantly, wide awake. “Are you moving the wedding indoors?” he asked her.
“We’ve got too many guests to move it indoors.
“Why? How many are coming?”
“Everyone we’ve ever known.”
“Good grief, Rose.”
“Never mind, it will clear.”
“But the grass is all wet!”
“Wear galoshes,” she told him. She hung up.
Since she’d met Julian she’d grown so airy, Macon thought. So flippant. Lacking in depth.
She was right about the weather, though. By afternoon there was a weak, pale sun. Muriel decided to wear the short-sleeved dress she’d planned on, but maybe with a shawl tossed over her shoulders. She wanted Alexander to put on a suit—he did have one, complete with waistcoat. He protested, though, and so did Macon. “Jeans and a good white shirt. That’s plenty,” Macon told her.
“Well, if you’re sure.”
Lately, she’d been deferring to him about Alexander. She had finally given in on the question of sneakers and she’d stopped policing his diet. Contrary to her predictions, Alexander’s arches did not fall flat and he was not overtaken by raging eczema. At worst, he suffered a mild skin rash now and then.
The wedding was set for three o’clock. Around two thirty they started out, proceeding self-consciously toward Macon’s car. It was a Saturday and no one else in the neighborhood was so dressed up. Mr. Butler was standing on a ladder with a hammer and a sack of nails. Rafe Daggett was taking his van apart. The Indian woman was hosing down a glowing threadbare carpet that she’d spread across the sidewalk, and then she turned off the water and lifted the hem of her sari and stamped around so the carpet radiated little bursts of droplets. Every passing c
ar, it seemed, labored under a top-heavy burden of mattresses and patio furniture, reminding Macon of those ants who scuttle back to their nests with loads four times their own size.
“I think I’m supposed to be the best man,” Macon told Muriel after he’d started driving.
“You didn’t mention that!”
“And Charles is giving her away.”
“It’s a real wedding, then,” Muriel said. “Not just two people standing up together.”
“That’s what Rose said she wanted.”
“I wouldn’t do it like that at all,” Muriel said. She glanced toward the rear and said, “Alexander, quit kicking my seat. You’re about to drive me crazy. No,” she said, facing forward, “if I was to marry, know what I’d do? Never tell a soul. Act like I’d been married for years. Slip off somewheres to a justice of the peace and come back like nothing had happened and make out like I’d been married all along.”
“This is Rose’s first time, though,” Macon told her.
“Yes, but even so, people can say, ‘It sure took you long enough.’ I can hear my mother now; that’s what she’d say for certain. ‘Sure took you long enough. I thought you’d never get around to it,’ is what she’d say. If I was ever to marry.”
Macon braked for a traffic light.
“If I was ever to decide to marry,” Muriel said.
He glanced over at her and was struck by how pretty she looked, with the color high in her cheeks and the splashy shawl flung around her shoulders. Her spike-heeled shoes had narrow, shiny ankle straps. He never could figure out why ankle straps were so seductive.
The first person they saw when they arrived was Macon’s mother. For some reason it hadn’t occurred to Macon that Alicia would be invited to her daughter’s wedding, and when she opened the front door it took him a second to place her. She was looking so different, for one thing. She had dyed her hair a dark tomato red. She wore a long white caftan trimmed with vibrant bands of satin, and when she reached up to hug him a whole culvert of metal bangles clattered and slid down her left arm. “Macon, dear!” she said. She smelled of bruised gardenias. “And who may this be?” she asked, peering past him.