“Wonderful. I’ll send you a new contract then, Mr. Leary, and thank you for—”
“And would that still include replacement of the tank?” Macon asked.
“Oh, yes. Every part is covered.”
“And they’d still do the yearly checkups.”
“Why, yes.”
“I’ve always liked that. A lot of the other stores don’t offer it; I remember from when I was shopping around.”
“So I’ll send you the contract, Mr.—”
“But I would have to arrange for the checkup myself, as I recall.”
“Yes, the customer schedules the checkup.”
“Maybe I’ll just schedule it now. Could I do that?”
“That’s a whole different department, Mr. Leary. I’ll mail you out the contract and you can read all about it. Bye bye.”
She hung up.
Macon hung up too.
He thought a while.
He had an urge to go on talking; anyone would do. But he couldn’t think what number to dial. Finally he called the time lady. She answered before the first ring was completed. (She had no worries about seeming overeager.) “At the tone,” she said, “the time will be one . . . forty-nine. And ten seconds.” What a voice. So melodious, so well modulated. “At the tone the time will be one . . . forty-nine. And twenty seconds.”
He listened for over a minute, and then the call was cut off. The line clicked and the dial tone started. This made him feel rebuffed, although he knew he was being foolish. He bent to pat the cat. The cat allowed it briefly before walking away.
There was nothing to do but sit down at his typewriter.
He was behind schedule with this guidebook. Next week he was supposed to start on France, and he still hadn’t finished the conclusion to the Canada book. He blamed it on the season. Who could sit alone indoors when everything outside was blooming? Travelers should be forewarned, he typed, but then he fell to admiring a spray of white azaleas that trembled on the ledge of his open window. A bee crawled among the blossoms, buzzing. He hadn’t known the bees were out yet. Did Muriel know? Would she recall what a single bee could do to Alexander?
. . . should be forewarned, he read over, but his concentration was shot now.
She was so careless, so unthinking; how could he have put up with her? That unsanitary habit she had of licking her finger before she turned a magazine page; her tendency to use the word “enormity” as if it referred to size. There wasn’t a chance in this world that she’d remember about bee stings.
He reached for the phone on his desk and dialed her number. “Muriel?”
“What,” she said flatly.
“This is Macon.”
“Yes, I know.”
He paused. He said, “Um, it’s bee season, Muriel.”
“So?”
“I wasn’t sure you were aware. I mean summer just creeps up, I know how summer creeps up, and I was wondering if you’d thought about Alexander’s shots.”
“Don’t you believe I can manage that much for myself?” she screeched.
“Oh. Well.”
“What do you think I am, some sort of ninny? Don’t you think I know the simplest dumbest thing?”
“Well, I wasn’t sure, you see, that—”
“A fine one you are! Ditch that child without a word of farewell and then call me up on the telephone to see if I’m raising him right!”
“I just wanted to—”
“Criticize, criticize! Tell me Oodles of Noodles is not a balanced meal and then go off and desert him and then have the nerve to call me up and tell me I’m not a good mother!”
“No, wait, Muriel—”
“Dominick is dead,” she said.
“What?”
“Not that you would care. He died.”
Macon noticed how the sounds in the room had stopped. “Dominick Saddler?” he asked.
“It was his night to take my car and he went to a party in Cockeysville and coming home he crashed into a guardrail.”
“Oh, no.”
“The girl he had with him didn’t get so much as a scratch.”
“But Dominick . . .” Macon said, because he didn’t believe it yet.
“But Dominick died instantly.”
“Oh, my Lord.”
He saw Dominick on the couch with Alexander, holding aloft a can of paste wax.
“Want to hear something awful? My car will be just fine,” Muriel said. “Straighten the front end and it’ll run good as ever.”
Macon rested his head in his hand.
“I have to go now and sit with Mrs. Saddler in the funeral home,” she said.
“Is there something I can do?”
“No,” she said, and then spitefully, “How could you be any help?”
“I could stay with Alexander, maybe.”
“Alexander’s got people of our own to stay with him,” she said.
The doorbell rang, and Edward started barking. Macon heard him in the front hall.
“Well, I’ll say good-bye now,” Muriel said. “Sounds like you have company.”
“Never mind that.”
“I’ll let you get back to your life,” she said. “So long.”
He kept the receiver to his ear for a moment, but she had hung up.
He went out to the hall and tapped his foot at Edward. “Down!” he said. Edward lay down, the hump on his back still bristling. Macon opened the door and found a boy with a clipboard.
“Modern Housewares,” the boy told him.
“Oh. The couch.”
While the couch was being unloaded, Macon shut Edward in the kitchen. Then he returned to the hall and watched the couch lumbering toward him, borne by the first boy and another, just slightly older, who had an eagle tattooed on his forearm. Macon thought of Dominick Saddler’s muscular, corded arms grappling beneath the hood of Muriel’s car. The first boy spat as he approached the house, but Macon saw how young and benign his face was. “Aw, man,” the second one said, stumbling over the doorstep.
Macon said, “That’s all right,” and gave them each a five-dollar bill when they’d placed the couch where he directed.
After they’d gone he sat down on the couch, which still had some sort of cellophane covering. He rubbed his hands on his knees. Edward barked in the kitchen. Helen padded in softly, stopped still, eyed the couch, and continued through the room with an offended air. Macon went on sitting.
When Ethan died, the police had asked Macon to identify the body. But Sarah, they suggested, might prefer to wait outside. Yes, Sarah had said; she would. She had taken a seat on a molded beige chair in the hallway. Then she’d looked up at Macon and said, “Can you do this?”
“Yes,” he’d told her, evenly. He had felt he was barely breathing; he was keeping himself very level, with most of the air emptied out of his lungs.
He had followed a man into a room. It was not as bad as it could have been because someone had folded a wad of toweling under the back of Ethan’s head to hide the damage. Also it wasn’t Ethan. Not the real Ethan. Odd how clear it suddenly became, once a person had died, that the body was the very least of him. This was simply an untenanted shell, although it bore a distant resemblance to Ethan—the same groove down the upper lip, same cowlick over the forehead. Macon had a sensation like pressing against a blank wall, willing with all his being something that could never happen: Please, please come back inside. But finally he said, “Yes. That is my son.”
He’d returned to Sarah and given her a nod. Sarah had risen and put her arms around him. Later, when they were alone in their motel, she’d asked him what he had seen. “Not really much of anything, sweetheart,” he had told her. She kept at him. Was Ethan . . . well, hurt-looking? Scared? He said, “No, he was nothing.” He said, “Let me get you some tea.”
“I don’t want tea, I want to hear!” she’d said. “What are you hiding?” He had the impression she was blaming him for something. Over the next few weeks it seemed she grew to hold him re
sponsible, like a bearer of bad tidings—the only one who could say for a fact that Ethan had truly died. She made several references to Macon’s chilliness, to his appalling calm that night in the hospital morgue. Twice she expressed some doubt as to whether, in fact, he was really capable of distinguishing Ethan from some similar boy. In fact, that may not have been Ethan at all. It may have been somebody else who had died. She should have ascertained for herself. She was the mother, after all; she knew her child far better; what did Macon know?
Macon said, “Sarah. Listen. I will tell you as much as I can. He was very pale and still. You wouldn’t believe how still. He didn’t have any expression. His eyes were closed. There was nothing bloody or gruesome, just a sense of . . . futility. I mean I wondered what the purpose had been. His arms were down by his sides and I thought about last spring when he started lifting weights. I thought, ‘Is this what it comes to? Lift weights and take vitamins and build yourself up and then—nothing?’ ”
He hadn’t been prepared for Sarah’s response. “So what are you saying?” she asked him. “We die in the end, so why bother living in the first place? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No—” he said.
“It all comes down to a question of economy?” she asked.
“No, Sarah. Wait,” he had said.
Thinking back on that conversation now, he began to believe that people could, in fact, be used up—could use each other up, could be of no further help to each other and maybe even do harm to each other. He began to think that who you are when you’re with somebody may matter more than whether you love her.
Lord knows how long he sat there.
Edward had been barking in the kitchen all this time, but now he went into a frenzy. Somebody must have knocked. Macon rose and went to the front of the house, where he found Julian standing on the porch with a file folder. “Oh. It’s you,” Macon said.
“What’s all that barking I hear?”
“Don’t worry, he’s shut in the kitchen. Come on in.”
He held the screen door open and Julian stepped inside. “Thought I’d bring you the material for Paris,” Julian said.
“I see,” Macon said. But he suspected he was really here for some other reason. Probably hoping to hurry the Canada book. “Well, I was just this minute touching up my conclusion,” he said, leading the way to the living room. And then, hastily, “Few details here and there I’m not entirely happy with; may be a little while yet . . .”
Julian didn’t seem to be listening. He sat down on the cellophane that covered the couch. He tossed the folder aside and said, “Have you seen Rose lately?”
“Yes, we were over there just this morning.”
“Do you think she’s not coming back?”
Macon hadn’t expected him to be so direct. In fact, Rose’s situation had begun to look like one of those permanent irregularities that couples never refer to. “Oh, well,” he told Julian, “you know how it is. She’s worried about the boys. They’re eating glop or something.”
“Those are not boys, Macon. They’re men in their forties.”
Macon stroked his chin.
“I’m afraid she’s left me,” Julian said.
“Oh, now, you can’t be sure of that.”
“And not even for a decent reason!” Julian said. “Or for any reason. I mean our marriage was working out fine; that much I can swear to. But she’d worn herself a groove or something in that house of hers, and she couldn’t help swerving back into it. At least, I can’t think of any other explanation.”
“Well, it sounds about right,” Macon told him.
“I went to see her two days ago,” Julian said, “but she was out. I was standing in the yard wondering where she’d got to when who should drive past but Rose in person, with her car stuffed full of old ladies. All the windows packed with these little old faces and feathered hats. I shouted after her, I said, ‘Rose! Wait!’ but she didn’t hear me and she drove on by. Then just at the last minute she caught sight of me, I guess, and she turned and stared, and I got the funniest feeling, like the car was driving her—like she was just gliding past helpless and couldn’t do a thing but send me one long look before she disappeared.”
Macon said, “Why don’t you give her a job, Julian.”
“Job?”
“Why don’t you show her that office of yours. That filing system you never get sorted, that secretary chewing her gum and forgetting whose appointment is when. Don’t you think Rose could take all that in hand?”
“Well, sure, but—”
“Call her up and tell her your business is going to pieces. Ask if she could just come in and get things organized, get things under control. Put it that way. Use those words. Get things under control, tell her. Then sit back and wait.”
Julian thought that over.
“But of course, what do I know,” Macon said.
“No, you’re right.”
“Now let’s see your folder.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Julian said.
“Look at this!” Macon said. He held up the topmost letter. “Why do you bother me with this? I just wanted to appraise you folks of a wonderful little hotel in . . . A man who says he wants to ‘appraise’ us, do you really suppose he’d know a good hotel when he saw one?”
“Macon,” Julian said.
“The whole damn language has been slaughtered,” Macon said.
“Macon, I know you feel I’m crass and brash.”
This took Macon a moment to answer, only partly because he first heard it as “crash and brass.” “Oh,” he said. “Why, no, Julian, not at—”
“But I just want to say this, Macon. I care about that sister of yours more than anything else in the world. It’s not just Rose, it’s the whole way she lives, that house and those turkey dinners and those evening card games. And I care about you, too, Macon. Why, you’re my best friend! At least, I hope so.”
“Oh, why, ah—” Macon said.
Julian rose and shook his hand, mangling all the bones inside, and clapped him on the shoulder and left.
Sarah came home at five-thirty. She found Macon standing at the kitchen sink with yet another cup of coffee. “Did the couch get here?” she asked him.
“All safe and sound.”
“Oh, good! Let’s see it.”
She went into the living room, leaving tracks of gray dust that Macon supposed was clay or granite. There was dust in her hair, even. She squinted at the couch and said, “What do you think?”
“Seems fine to me,” he said.
“Honestly, Macon. I don’t know what’s come over you; you used to be downright finicky.”
“It’s fine, Sarah. It looks very nice.”
She stripped off the cellophane and stood back, arms full of crackling light. “We ought to see how it opens out,” she said.
While she was stuffing the cellophane into the wastebasket, Macon pulled at the canvas strap that turned the couch into a bed. It made him think of Muriel’s house. The strap’s familiar graininess reminded him of all the times Muriel’s sister had slept over, and when the mattress slid forth he saw the gleam of Claire’s tangled golden hair.
“Maybe we should put on the sheets, now that we’ve got it open,” Sarah said. She brought the sack of linens from the front hall. With Macon positioned at the other side of the couch, she floated a sheet about the mattress and then bustled up and down, tucking it in. Macon helped, but he wasn’t as fast as Sarah. The clay dust or whatever it was had worked itself into the seams of her knuckles, he saw. There was something appealing about her small, brown, creased hands against the white percale. He said, “Let’s give the bed a trial run.”
Sarah didn’t understand at first. She looked up from unfolding the second sheet and said, “Trial run?”
But she allowed him to take the sheet away and slip her sweat shirt over her head.
Making love to Sarah was comfortable and soothing. After all their years together, her body was so
well known to him that he couldn’t always tell the difference between what he was feeling and what she was feeling. But wasn’t it sad that they hadn’t the slightest uneasiness about anyone walking in on them? They were so alone. He nestled his face in her warm, dusty neck and wondered if she shared that feeling as well—if she sensed all the empty air in the house. But he would never ask.
While Sarah took a shower, he shaved. They were supposed to go to Bob and Sue Carney’s for supper. When he came out of the bathroom Sarah was standing in front of the bureau, screwing on little gold earrings. (She was the only woman Macon knew of who didn’t have pierced ears.) He thought Renoir could have painted her: Sarah in her slip with her head cocked slightly, plump tanned arms upraised. “I’m really not in the mood to go out,” she said.
“Me neither,” Macon said, opening his closet door.
“I’d be just as content to stay home with a book.”
He pulled a shirt off a hanger.
“Macon,” she said.
“Hmm.”
“You never asked me if I slept with anyone while we were separated.”
Macon paused, halfway into one sleeve.
“Don’t you want to know?” she asked him.
“No,” he said.
He put on the shirt and buttoned the cuffs.
“I would think you’d wonder.”
“Well, I don’t,” he said.
“The trouble with you is, Macon—”
It was astonishing, the instantaneous flare of anger he felt. “Sarah,” he said, “don’t even start. By God, if that doesn’t sum up every single thing that’s wrong with being married. ‘The trouble with you is, Macon—’ and, ‘I know you better than you know yourself, Macon—’ ”
“The trouble with you is,” she continued steadily, “you think people should stay in their own sealed packages. You don’t believe in opening up. You don’t believe in trading back and forth.”
“I certainly don’t,” Macon said, buttoning his shirt front.
“You know what you remind me of? The telegram Harpo Marx sent his brothers: No message. Harpo.”
That made him grin. Sarah said, “You would think it was funny.”
“Well? Isn’t it?”
“It isn’t at all! It’s sad! It’s infuriating! It would be infuriating to go to your door and sign for that telegram and tear it open and find no message!”