four
When the phone rang, Macon dreamed it was Ethan. He dreamed Ethan was calling from camp, wondering why they’d never come to get him. “But we thought you were dead,” Macon said, and Ethan said—in that clear voice of his that cracked on the high notes—“Why would you think that?” The phone rang again and Macon woke up. There was a thud of disappointment somewhere inside his rib cage. He understood why people said hearts “sank.”
In slow motion, he reached for the receiver. “Yes,” he said.
“Macon! Welcome back!”
It was Julian Edge, Macon’s boss, his usual loud and sprightly self even this early in the morning. “Oh,” Macon said.
“How was the trip?”
“It was okay.”
“You just get in last night?”
“Yes.”
“Find any super new places?”
“Well, ‘super’ would be putting it a bit strongly.”
“So now I guess you start writing it up.”
Macon said nothing.
“Just when do you figure to bring me a manuscript?” Julian asked.
“I don’t know,” Macon said.
“Soon, do you figure?”
“I don’t know.”
There was a pause.
“I guess I woke you,” Julian said.
“Yes.”
“Macon Leary in bed,” Julian said. He made it sound like the title of something. Julian was younger than Macon and brasher, breezier, not a serious man. He seemed to enjoy pretending that Macon was some kind of character. “So anyway, can I expect it by the end of the month?”
“No,” Macon said.
“Why not?”
“I’m not organized.”
“Not organized! What’s to organize? All you have to do is retype your old one, basically.”
“There’s a lot more to it than that,” Macon said.
“Look. Fellow. Here it is—” Julian’s voice grew fainter. He’d be drawing back to frown at his flashy gold calendar watch with the perforated leather racing band. “Here it is the third of August. I want this thing on the stands by October. That means I’d need your manuscript by August thirty-first.”
“I can’t do it,” Macon said.
In fact, it amazed him he’d found the strength to carry on this conversation.
“August thirty-first, Macon. That’s four full weeks away.”
“It’s not enough,” Macon said.
“Not enough,” Julian said. “Well. All right, then: mid-September. It’s going to knock a good many things out of whack, but I’ll give you till mid-September. How’s that?”
“I don’t know,” Macon said.
The dullness of his voice interested him. He felt strangely distant from himself. Julian might have sensed this, for after another pause he said, “Hey. Pal. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Macon told him.
“I know you’ve been through a lot, pal—”
“I’m fine! Just fine! What could be wrong? All I need is time to get organized. I’ll have the manuscript in by September fifteenth. Possibly earlier. Yes, very possibly earlier. Maybe the end of August. All right?”
Then he hung up.
But his study was so dim and close, and it gave off the salty, inky smell of mental fidgeting. He walked in and felt overwhelmed by his task, as if finally chaos had triumphed. He turned around and walked out again.
Maybe he couldn’t get his guidebook organized, but organizing the household was another matter entirely. There was something fulfilling about that, something consoling—or more than consoling; it gave him the sense of warding off a danger. Over the next week or so, he traveled through the rooms setting up new systems. He radically rearranged all the kitchen cupboards, tossing out the little bits of things in sticky, dusty bottles that Sarah hadn’t opened in years. He plugged the vacuum cleaner into a hundred-foot extension cord originally meant for lawn mowers. He went out to the yard and weeded, trimmed, pruned, clipped—stripping down, he pictured it. Up till now Sarah had done the gardening, and certain features of it came as a surprise to him. One variety of weed shot off seeds explosively the instant he touched it, a magnificent last-ditch stand, while others gave way so easily—too easily, breaking at the topmost joint so their roots remained in the ground. Such tenacity! Such genius for survival! Why couldn’t human beings do as well?
He stretched a clothesline across the basement so he wouldn’t have to use the dryer. Dryers were a terrible waste of energy. Then he disconnected the dryer’s wide flexible exhaust tube, and he taught the cat to go in and out through the empty windowpane where the tube had exited. This meant no more litterbox. Several times a day the cat leapt soundlessly to the laundry sink, stood up long and sinewy on her hind legs, and sprang through the window.
It was a pity Edward couldn’t do the same. Macon hated walking him; Edward had never been trained to heel and kept winding his leash around Macon’s legs. Oh, dogs were so much trouble. Dogs ate mammoth amounts of food, too; Edward’s kibble had to be lugged home from the supermarket, dragged out of the car trunk and up the steep front steps and through the house to the pantry. But for that, at least, Macon finally thought of a solution. At the foot of the old coal chute in the basement he set a plastic trash can, with a square cut out of the bottom. Then he poured the remainder of a sack of kibble into the trash can, which magically became a continuous feeder like the cat’s. Next time he bought dog food, he could just drive around to the side of the house and send it rattling down the coal chute.
The only hitch was, Edward turned out to be scared of the basement. Every morning he went to the pantry where his breakfast used to be served, and he sat on his fat little haunches and whimpered. Macon had to carry him bodily down the basement stairs, staggering slightly while Edward scrabbled in his arms. Since the whole idea had been to spare Macon’s trick back, he felt he’d defeated his purpose. Still, he kept trying.
Also with his back in mind, he tied the clothes basket to Ethan’s old skateboard and he dropped a drawstring bag down the laundry chute at the end of a rope. This meant he never had to carry the laundry either up or down the stairs, or even across the basement. Sometimes, though—laboriously scooting the wheeled basket from the clothesline to the laundry chute, stuffing clean sheets into the bag, running upstairs to haul them in by the long, stiff rope— Macon felt a twinge of embarrassment. Was it possible that this might be sort of silly?
Well, everything was silly, when you got right down to it.
The neighborhood must have learned by now that Sarah had left him. People started telephoning on ordinary weeknights and inviting him to take “potluck” with them. Macon thought at first they meant one of those arrangements where everybody brings a different pot of something and if you’re lucky you end up with a balanced meal. He arrived at Bob and Sue Carney’s with a bowl of macaroni and cheese. Since Sue was serving spaghetti, he didn’t feel he’d been all that lucky. She set his macaroni at one end of the table and no one ate it but Delilah, the three-year-old. She had several helpings, though.
Macon hadn’t expected to find the children at the table. He saw he was somebody different now, some kind of bachelor uncle who was assumed to need a glimpse of family life from time to time. But the fact was, he had never much liked other people’s children. And gatherings of any sort depressed him. Physical contact with people not related to him—an arm around his shoulder, a hand on his sleeve—made him draw inward like a snail. “You know, Macon,” Sue Carney said, leaning across the table to pat his wrist, “whenever you get the urge, you’re welcome to drop in on us. Don’t wait for an invitation.”
“That’s nice of you, Sue,” he said. He wondered why it was that outsiders’ skin felt so unreal—almost waxy, as if there were an invisible extra layer between him and them. As soon as possible, he moved his wrist.
“If you could live any way you wanted,” Sarah had once told him, “I suppose you’d end up on a desert island with no oth
er human beings.”
“Why! That’s not true at all,” he’d said. “I’d have you, and Ethan, and my sister and brothers . . .”
“But no people. I mean, people there just by chance, people you didn’t know.”
“Well, no, I guess not,” he’d said. “Would you?”
But of course she would—back then. Back before Ethan died. She’d always been a social person. When there was nothing else to do she’d stroll happily through a shopping mall—Macon’s notion of hell, with all those strangers’ shoulders brushing his. Sarah thought crowds were exciting. She liked to meet new people. She was fond of parties, even cocktail parties. You’d have to be crazy to like cocktail parties, Macon thought—those scenes of confusion she used to drag him to, where he was made to feel guilty if he managed by some fluke to get involved in a conversation of any depth. “Circulate. Circulate,” Sarah would hiss, passing behind him with her drink.
That had changed during this past year. Sarah didn’t like crowds anymore. She never went near a mall, hadn’t made him go to any parties. They attended only quiet little dinners and she herself had not given a dinner since Ethan died. He’d asked her once, “Shouldn’t we have the Smiths and Millards over? They’ve had us so often.”
Sarah said, “Yes. You’re right. Pretty soon.” And then did nothing about it.
He and she had met at a party. They’d been seventeen years old. It was one of those mixer things, combining their two schools. Even at that age Macon had disliked parties, but he was secretly longing to fall in love and so he had braved this mixer but then stood off in a corner looking unconcerned, he hoped, and sipping his ginger ale. It was 1958. The rest of the world was in button-down shirts, but Macon wore a black turtleneck sweater, black slacks, and sandals. (He was passing through his poet stage.) And Sarah, a bubbly girl with a tumble of copper-brown curls and a round face, large blue eyes, a plump lower lip—she wore something pink, he remembered, that made her skin look radiant. She was ringed by admiring boys. She was short and tidily made, and there was something plucky about the way her little tan calves were so firmly braced, as if she were determined that this looming flock of basketball stars and football stars would not bowl her over. Macon gave up on her at once. No, not even that—he didn’t even consider her, not for a single second, but gazed beyond her to other, more attainable girls. So it had to be Sarah who made the first move. She came over to him and asked what he was acting so stuck-up about. “Stuck-up!” he said. “I’m not stuck-up.”
“You sure do look it.”
“No, I’m just . . . bored,” he told her.
“Well, so do you want to dance, or not?”
They danced. He was so unprepared that it passed in a blur. He enjoyed it only later, back home, where he could think it over in a calmer state of mind. And thinking it over, he saw that if he hadn’t looked stuck-up she never would have noticed him. He was the only boy who had not openly pursued her. He would be wise not to pursue her in the future; not to seem too eager, not to show his feelings. With Sarah you had to keep your dignity, he sensed.
Lord knows, though, keeping his dignity wasn’t easy. Macon lived with his grandparents, and they believed that no one under eighteen ought to have a driver’s license. (Never mind if the state of Maryland felt otherwise.) So Grandfather Leary drove Macon and Sarah on their dates. His car was a long black Buick with a velvety gray backseat on which Macon sat all by himself, for his grandfather considered it unseemly for the two of them to sit there together. “I am not your hired chauffeur,” he said, “and besides, the backseat has connotations.” (Much of Macon’s youth was ruled by connotations.) So Macon sat alone in back and Sarah sat up front with Grandfather Leary. Her cloud of hair, seen against the glare of oncoming headlights, reminded Macon of a burning bush. He would lean forward, clear his throat, and ask, “Um, did you finish your term paper?”
Sarah would say, “Pardon?”
“Term paper,” Grandfather Leary would tell her. “Boy wants to know if you finished it.”
“Oh. Yes, I finished it.”
“She finished it,” Grandfather Leary relayed to Macon.
“I do have ears, Grandfather.”
“You want to get out and walk? Because I don’t have to stand for any mouthing off. I could be home with my loved ones, not motoring around in the dark.”
“Sorry, Grandfather.”
Macon’s only hope was silence. He sat back, still and aloof, knowing that when Sarah looked she’d see nothing but a gleam of blond hair and a blank face—the rest darkness, his black turtleneck blending into the shadows. It worked. “What do you think about all the time?” she asked in his ear as they two-stepped around her school gym. He only quirked a corner of his mouth, as if amused, and didn’t answer.
Things weren’t much different when he got his license. Things weren’t much different when he went away to college, though he did give up his black turtlenecks and turn into a Princeton man, crisply, casually attired in white shirts and khakis. Separated from Sarah, he felt a constant hollowness, but in his letters he talked only about his studies. Sarah, home at Goucher, wrote back, Don’t you miss me a little? I can’t go anywhere we’ve been for fear I’ll see you looking so mysterious across the room. She signed her letters I love you and he signed his Fondly . At night he dreamed she lay next to him, her curls making a whispery sound against his pillow, although all they’d done in real life was a lengthy amount of kissing. He wasn’t sure, to tell the truth, that he could manage much more without . . . how did they put it in those days? Losing his cool. Sometimes, he was almost angry with Sarah. He felt he’d been backed into a false position. He was forced to present this impassive front if he wanted her to love him. Oh, so much was expected of men!
She wrote she wasn’t dating other people. Neither was Macon, but of course he didn’t say so. He came home in the summer and worked at his grandfather’s factory; Sarah worked on a tan at the neighborhood pool. Halfway through that summer, she said she wondered why he’d never asked to sleep with her. Macon thought about that and then said, levelly, that in fact he’d like to ask her now. They went to her parents’ house; her parents were vacationing in Rehoboth. They climbed the stairs to her little bedroom, all white ruffles and hot sunlight baking the smell of fresh paint. “Did you bring a whatchamacallit?” Sarah asked, and Macon, unwilling to admit that he hardly knew what one looked like, barked, “No, I didn’t bring a whatchamacallit, who do you think I am?”—a senseless question, if you stopped to examine it, but Sarah took it to mean that he was shocked by her, that he thought her too forward, and she said, “Well, excuse me for living!” and ran down the stairs and out of the house. It took him half an hour to find her, and longer than that to make her stop crying. Really, he said, he’d only been thinking of her welfare: In his experience, whatchamacallits weren’t all that safe. He tried to sound knowledgeable and immune to passions of the moment. He suggested she visit a doctor he knew—it happened to be the doctor who treated his grandmother’s Female Complaint. Sarah dried her tears and borrowed Macon’s pen to write the doctor’s name on the back of a chewing gum wrapper. But wouldn’t the doctor refuse her? she asked. Wouldn’t he say she ought to be at least engaged? Well, all right, Macon said, they would get engaged. Sarah said that would be lovely.
Their engagement lasted three years, all through college. Grandfather Leary felt the wedding should be delayed even further, till Macon was firmly settled in his place of employment; but since his place of employment would be Leary Metals, which manufactured cork-lined caps for soft drink bottles, Macon couldn’t see himself concentrating on that even briefly. Besides, the rush to and from Sarah’s bedroom on her mother’s Red Cross days had begun to tell on them both.
So they married the spring they graduated from college, and Macon went to work at the factory while Sarah taught English at a private school. It was seven years before Ethan was born. By that time, Sarah was no longer calling Macon “mysterious.” When he was quiet
now it seemed to annoy her. Macon sensed this, but there was nothing he could do about it. In some odd way, he was locked inside the standoffish self he’d assumed when he and she first met. He was frozen there. It was like that old warning of his grandmother’s: Don’t cross your eyes, they might get stuck that way. No matter how he tried to change his manner, Sarah continued to deal with him as if he were someone unnaturally cool-headed, someone more even in temperament than she but perhaps not quite as feeling.
He had once come upon a questionnaire that she’d filled out in a ladies’ magazine—one of those “How Happy Is Your Marriage?” things—and where it said, I believe I love my spouse more than he/she loves me, Sarah had checked True. The unsettling part was that after Macon gave his automatic little snort of denial, he had wondered if it might be true after all. Somehow, his role had sunk all the way through to the heart. Even internally, by now, he was a fairly chilly man, and if you didn’t count his son (who was easy, easy; a child is no test at all), there was not one person in his life whom he really agonized over.
When he thought about this now, it was a relief to remind himself that he did miss Sarah, after all. But then his relief seemed unfeeling too, and he groaned and shook his head and tugged his hair in great handfuls.
Some woman phoned and said, “Macon?” He could tell at once it wasn’t Sarah. Sarah’s voice was light and breathy; this one was rough, tough, wiry. “It’s Muriel,” she said.
“Muriel,” he said.
“Muriel Pritchett.”
“Ah, yes,” he said, but he still had no clue who she was.
“From the vet’s?” she asked. “Who got on so good with your dog?”
“Oh, the vet’s!”
He saw her, if dimly. He saw her saying her own name, the long u sound and the p drawing up her dark red mouth.
“I was just wondering how Edward was.”