After they landed in Baltimore, he took a shuttle bus to the parking lot and retrieved his car. It was late evening here and the sky was pale and radiant above the city. As he drove he continued to see the words from Miss MacIntosh. He continued to hear the stewardess’s gliding voice: complimentary beverages and the captain has asked us and trays in an upright position. He considered switching on the radio but he didn’t know what station it was set to. Maybe it was Muriel’s country music station. This possibility made him feel weary; he felt he wouldn’t have the strength to press the buttons, and so he drove in silence.
He came to Singleton Street and flicked his signal on but didn’t turn. After a while the signal clicked off on its own. He rode on through the city, up Charles Street, into his old neighborhood. He parked and cut the engine and sat looking at the house. The downstairs windows were dark. The upstairs windows were softly glowing. Evidently, he had come home.
nineteen
Macon and Sarah needed to buy a new couch. They set aside a Saturday for it—actually just half a Saturday, because Sarah had a class to attend in the afternoon. At breakfast, she flipped through an interior decorating book so they could get a head start on their decision. “I’m beginning to think along the lines of something flowered,” she told Macon. “We’ve never had a flowered couch before. Or would that be too frilly?”
“Well, I don’t know. I wonder about winter,” Macon said.
“Winter?”
“I mean right now in the middle of June a flowered couch looks fine, but it might seem out of place in December.”
“So you prefer something in a solid,” Sarah said.
“Well, I don’t know.”
“Or maybe stripes.”
“I’m not sure.”
“I know you don’t like plaids.”
“No.”
“How do you feel about tweeds?”
“Tweeds,” Macon said, considering.
Sarah handed over the book and started loading the dishwasher.
Macon studied pictures of angular modern couches, cozy chintz-covered couches, and period reproduction couches covered in complex fabrics. He took the book to the living room and squinted at the spot where the couch would be sitting. The old one, which had turned out to be too waterlogged to salvage, had been carted away, along with both armchairs. Now there was just a long blank wall, with the freshly plastered ceiling glaring above it. Macon observed that a room without furniture had a utilitarian feeling, as if it were merely a container. Or a vehicle. Yes, a vehicle: He had a sense of himself speeding through the universe as he stood there.
While Sarah got dressed, Macon took the dog out. It was a warm, golden morning. Neighbors were trimming their grass and weeding their flower beds. They nodded as Macon walked past. He had not been back long enough for them to feel at ease yet; there was something a little too formal about their greetings. Or maybe he was imagining that. He made an effort to remind them of how many years he had lived here: “I’ve always liked those tulips of yours!” and “Still got that nice hand mower, I see!” Edward marched beside him with a busybody waggle of his hind end.
In movies and such, people who made important changes in their lives accomplished them and were done with it. They walked out and never returned; or they married and lived happily ever after. In real life, things weren’t so clean-cut. Macon, for instance, had had to go down to Muriel’s and retrieve his dog, once he’d decided to move back home. He had had to collect his clothing and pack up his typewriter while Muriel watched in silence with her accusing, reproaching eyes. Then there were all kinds of other belongings that he discovered too late he’d forgotten—clothes that had been in the wash at the time, and his favorite dictionary, and the extra-large pottery mug he liked to drink his coffee from. But of course he couldn’t go back for them. He had to abandon them— messy, trailing strings of himself cluttering his leavetaking.
By the time he and Edward returned from their outing, Sarah was waiting in the front yard. She wore a yellow dress that made her tan glow; she looked very pretty. “I was just wondering about the azaleas,” she told Macon. “Weren’t we supposed to feed them in the spring?”
“Well, probably,” Macon said, “but they seem all right to me.”
“In April, I think,” she said. “Or maybe May. No one was here to do it.”
Macon veered away from that. He preferred to pretend that their lives had been going on as usual. “Never mind, Rose has whole sacks of fertilizer,” he said. “We’ll pick up some from her while we’re out.”
“No one was here to seed the lawn, either.”
“The lawn looks fine,” he said, more forcefully than he’d meant to.
They shut Edward in the house and climbed into Macon’s car. Sarah had brought along a newspaper because there were several furniture ads. “Modern Housewares,” she read off. “But that’s all the way down on Pratt Street.”
“Might as well give it a try,” Macon said. Pratt was one of the few streets he knew how to find.
After they left their neighborhood, with its trees arching overhead, the car grew hotter and Macon rolled his window down. Sarah lifted her face to the sunlight. “Be a good day to go to the pool,” she said.
“Well, if we have time. I was thinking of asking you to lunch.”
“Oh, where?”
“Anywhere you like. Your choice.”
“Aren’t you nice,” she said.
Macon drove past two unshaven men talking on a corner. Sarah locked her door. Macon thought of what the men would be saying: “What’s coming down, man?” “Not all that much.”
The sidewalks grew more crowded. Women lugged string-handled shopping bags, an old man dragged a grocery cart, and a girl in a faded dress leaned her head against a bus stop sign.
At Modern Homewares, huge paper banners covered the plate glass windows. SPECIAL FOR FATHER’S DAY! they read. Sarah hadn’t mentioned that this was a Father’s Day sale. Macon made a point of mentioning it himself, to show it didn’t bother him. Taking her arm as they entered, he said, “Isn’t that typical. Father’s Day! They’ll capitalize on anything.”
Sarah looked away from him and said, “All they seem to have is beds.”
“I suppose it began with reclining chairs,” Macon said. “A Barcalounger for Dad, and next thing you know it’s a whole dinette set.”
“Could we see your couches,” Sarah told a salesman firmly.
The couches were all of the straight-back, Danish sort, which was fine with Macon. He didn’t really care. Sarah said, “What do you think? Legs? Or flush with the floor.”
“It’s all the same to me,” he said. He sat down heavily on something covered in leather.
Sarah chose a long, low couch that opened into a queen-sized bed. “Macon? What do you say?” she asked. “Do you like what you’re sitting on better?”
“No, no,” he said.
“Well, what do you think of this one?”
“It’s fine.”
“Don’t you have any opinion?”
“I just gave you my opinion, Sarah.”
Sarah sighed and asked the salesman if he offered same-day delivery.
They’d been so efficient about picking out the couch that time remained for other errands as well. First they drove to Hutzler’s and bought queen-sized sheets. Then they checked the furniture department for armchairs; there was a Father’s Day sale there, too. “Maybe we’re on a roll,” Sarah told Macon. But they weren’t as lucky with the armchairs; nothing looked just right. Not to Macon, at least. He gave up trying and stood watching a kiddie show on a row of television sets.
After Hutzler’s they went to get fertilizer from Rose, but Macon braked on the way and said, “Wait! There’s my bank.” It had come upon him unexpectedly—the branch where he rented a safe deposit box. “I need my passport for the France trip,‘ he told Sarah. “Might as well pick it up while I’m here.”
Sarah said she’d just wait in the car.
&nbs
p; He had to stand in line; two elderly women were ahead of him. They were checking out their jewels for Saturday night, he liked to imagine. Or clipping their coupons—whatever coupons were. While he stood there he kept feeling the presence of someone behind him. For some reason he didn’t want to turn and find out who it was. He just kept staring ahead, every now and then glancing at his watch in a businesslike way. This person breathed very gently and smelled like flowers—bitter, real-life flowers, not the kind in perfume bottles. But when he finally squared his shoulders and looked around, he found only another stranger waiting for her jewels.
It wasn’t true that Muriel had watched in silence as he packed. Actually, she had spoken. She had said, “Macon? Are you really doing this? Do you mean to tell me you can just use a person up and then move on? You think I’m some kind of . . . bottle of something you don’t have any further need for? Is that how you see me, Macon?”
His turn for the vault had arrived, and he followed a girl in a miniskirt across a carpeted area, into the windowless cubicle lined with drawers. “I won’t need to take my box to the other room,” he told the girl. “I just want to get one thing.”
She gave him his card to sign and accepted his key. After she had unlocked his box she stood back, scrutinizing her nails, while he rummaged through various papers for his passport. Then he turned to tell her he was finished, but all at once he was so moved by her tact in looking elsewhere, by the delicacy that people could come up with on their own (for surely it wouldn’t have been written into the bank’s instructions) . . . Well, he must be going soft in the head. It was the weather or something; it was the season or something; he had not been sleeping well. He said, “Thank you very much,” and took back his key and left.
At his grandfather’s house, Rose was out front pruning the hedge. Her gardening smock was an enormous gray workshirt inherited from Charles. When she saw their car pull up she straightened and waved. Then she went on pruning while they consulted her about fertilizers. “For azaleas and what else do you have, andromeda, acid-loving plants . . .” she mused.
Sarah said, “Where are the children today?”
“Children?”
“Your nephew and nieces.”
“Oh, they went home to their mother.”
Sarah said, “I just assumed, since you hadn’t moved back with Julian . . .”
“Well, not yet, of course,” Rose said.
Macon, anxious to guard her privacy, murmured, “No, of course not,” practically at the same moment, but Sarah said, “Why? What’s keeping you?”
“Oh, Sarah, you wouldn’t believe what a state I found the boys in when I came back here,” Rose said. “They were living in their pajamas so as not to have too much laundry. They were eating gorp for their suppers.”
“I’m not even going to ask what gorp is,” Sarah said.
“It’s a mixture of wheat germ and nuts and dried—”
“But what about your apartment, Rose? What about Julian?”
“Oh, you know, I kept losing that apartment every time I turned around,” Rose said vaguely. “I’d head one block east to the grocery store and then turn west to get back again and I’d always be wrong; always. The apartment building would have worked over to the east somehow; I don’t know how.”
There was a silence. Finally Macon said, “Well, if you could get us some of that fertilizer, Rose . . .”
“Certainly,” she said. And she went off to the toolshed.
They had lunch at the Old Bay Restaurant—Sarah’s idea. Macon said, “Are you sure?” and Sarah said, “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“But you always tell me it’s boring,” Macon said.
“There are worse things than boring, I’ve decided.”
He didn’t think that was much of a recommendation, but he went along with it.
The restaurant was full, even though it was barely noon, and they had to wait a few minutes to be seated. Macon stood by the hostess’s podium trying to adjust to the dimness. He surveyed the other diners and found something odd about them. They were not the usual Old Bay crowd—middle aged, one face much like the next—but an assortment of particular and unusual individuals. He saw a priest offering a toast to a woman in a tennis dress, and a smartly suited woman with a young man in an orange gauze robe, and two cheerful schoolgirls loading all their potato chips onto the plate of a small boy. From where he stood Macon couldn’t hear what any of these people were saying; he had to guess. “Maybe the woman wants to join a convent,” he told Sarah, “and the priest is trying to discourage her.”
“Pardon?”
“He’s pointing out that sorting her husband’s socks can be equally whatever-he’d-call-it, equally holy. And the young man in gauze, well . . .”
“The young man in gauze is Ashley Demming,” Sarah said. “You know Ashley. Peter and Lindy Demming’s son. My, he’s aged poor Lindy twenty years in the last six months, hasn’t he? I don’t think they’re ever going to get over this.”
“Ah, well,” Macon said.
Then they were shown to a table.
Sarah ordered something called a White Lady and Macon ordered a sherry. With their meal they had a bottle of wine. Macon wasn’t used to drinking in the daytime; he grew a little fuzzy. So did Sarah, evidently, for she drifted off in the middle of a sentence about upholstery fabrics. She touched his hand, which was lying on the tablecloth. “We ought to do this more often,” she said.
“Yes, we ought to.”
“You know what I missed most when we were separated? The little, habitual things. The Saturday errands. Going to Eddie’s for coffee beans. Even things that used to seem tiresome, like the way you’d take forever in the hardware store.”
When he folded her hand into a fist it was round, like a bird. It had no sharp angles.
“I’m not sure if you know this,” she said, “but for a while I was seeing another man.”
“Well, fine; whatever; eat your salad,” he told her.
“No, I want to say it, Macon. He was just getting over the death of his wife, and I was getting over things too so of course . . . Well, we started out very slowly, we started as friends, but then he began talking about getting married someday. After we’d given ourselves some time, he meant. In fact I think he really loved me. He took it hard when I told him you’d moved back.”
She looked straight at Macon when she said that, her eyes a sudden blue flash. He nodded.
“But there were these things I had trouble with,” she said. “I mean good things; qualities I’d always wished for. He was a very dashing driver, for instance. Not unsafe; just dashing. At first, I liked that. Then bit by bit it began to feel wrong. ‘Double-check your rearview mirror!’ I wanted to tell him. ‘Fasten your seatbelt! Inch past stop signs the way my husband does!’ He never examined a restaurant bill before he paid it—shoot, he didn’t even take his credit card receipt when he walked away from a table—and I thought of all the times I sat stewing while you totted up every little item. I thought, ‘Why do I miss that? It’s perverse!’ ”
Like “eck cetera,” Macon thought.
Like Muriel saying, “eck cetera.” And Macon wincing.
And the emptiness now, the thinness when he heard it pronounced correctly.
He stroked the dimpled peaks that were Sarah’s knuckles.
“Macon, I think that after a certain age people just don’t have a choice,” Sarah said. “You’re who I’m with. It’s too late for me to change. I’ve used up too much of my life now.”
You mean to tell me you can just use a person up and then move on? Muriel had asked.
Evidently so, was the answer. For even if he had stayed with Muriel, then wouldn’t Sarah have been left behind?
“After a certain age,” he told Sarah, “it seems to me you can only choose what to lose.”
“What?” she said.
“I mean there’s going to be something you have to give up, whichever way you cut it.”
“Well, of course,??
? she said.
He supposed she’d always known that.
They finished their meal but they didn’t order coffee because they were running late. Sarah had her class; she was studying with a sculptor on Saturdays. Macon called for the bill and paid it, self-consciously totaling it first. Then they stepped out into the sunshine. “What a pretty day,” Sarah said. “It makes me want to play hooky.”
“Why don’t you?” Macon asked. If she didn’t go to class, he wouldn’t have to work on his guidebook.
But she said, “I can’t disappoint Mr. Armistead.”
They drove home, and she changed into a sweat suit and set off again. Macon carried in the fertilizer, which Rose had poured into a bucket. It was something shredded that had no smell—or only a harsh, chemical smell, nothing like the truckloads of manure the men used to bring for his grandmother’s camellias. He set it on the pantry floor and then he took the dog out. Then he made himself a cup of coffee to clear his head. He drank it at the kitchen sink, staring into the yard. The cat rubbed against his ankles and purred. The clock over the stove ticked steadily. There was no other sound.
When the telephone rang, he was glad. He let it ring twice before he answered so as not to seem overeager. Then he picked up the receiver and said, “Hello?”
“Mr. Leary?”
“Yes!”
“This is Mrs. Morton calling, at Merkle Appliance Store. Are you aware that the maintenance policy on your hot water heater expires at the end of the month?”
“No, I hadn’t realized,” Macon said.
“You had a two-year policy at a cost of thirty-nine eighty-eight. Now to renew it for another two years the cost of course would be slightly higher since your hot water heater is older.”
“Well, that makes sense,” Macon said. “Gosh! How old is that thing by now?”
“Let’s see. You purchased it three years ago this July.”
“Well, I’d certainly like to keep the maintenance policy.”