The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler [116]
But there was a strip of peeling sunburn across the bridge of her nose.
Julian, natty and casual in a navy turtleneck and white slacks (when it wasn’t yet Memorial Day), fixed the drinks while Rose retreated to the kitchen. This was one of those ultra-modern apartments where the rooms all swam into each other, so they could see her flitting back and forth. Julian passed around snapshots of Hawaii. Either he had used inferior film or else Hawaii was a very different place from Baltimore, because some of the colors were wrong. The trees appeared to be blue. In most of the photos Rose stood in front of flower beds or flowering shrubs, wearing a white sleeveless dress Macon had never seen before, hugging her arms and smiling too broadly so that she looked older than she was. “I tell Rose you’d think she went on our honeymoon by herself,” Julian said. “I’m the one who took the pictures because Rose never did learn how to work my camera.”
“She didn’t?” Macon asked.
“It was one of those German models with all the buttons.”
“She couldn’t figure out the buttons?”
“I tell her, ‘People will think I wasn’t even there.’ ”
“Why, Rose could have taken that camera apart and put it together twice over,” Macon said.
“No, this was one of those German models with—”
“It wasn’t very logically constructed,” Rose called from the kitchen.
“Ah,” Macon said, sitting back.
She entered the room with a tray and placed it on the glass coffee table. Then she knelt and began to spread pâté on little crackers. There was some change in the way she moved, Macon noticed. She was more graceful, but also more self-conscious. She offered the pâté first to Muriel, then to each of her brothers, last to Julian. “In Hawaii I started learning to sail,” she said. She pronounced the two i’s in “Hawaii” separately; Macon thought it sounded affected. “Now I’m going to practice out on the Bay.”
“She’s trying to find her sea legs,” Julian said. “She tends to feel motion-sick.”
Macon bit into his cracker. The pâté was something familiar. It was rough in texture but delicate in taste; there was a kind of melting flavor that he believed came from adding a great amount of butter. The recipe was Sarah’s. He sat very still, not chewing. He was flooded by a subtle blend of tarragon and cream and home.
“Oh, I know just what you’re going through,” Muriel said to Rose. “All I have to do is look at a boat and I get nauseous.”
Macon swallowed and gazed down at the carpet between his feet. He waited for someone to correct her, but nobody did. That was even worse.
In bed she said, “You wouldn’t ever leave me, would you? Would you ever think of leaving me? You won’t be like the others, will you? Will you promise not to leave me?”
“Yes, yes,” he said, floating in and out of dreams.
“You do take me seriously, don’t you? Don’t you?”
“Oh, Muriel, for pity’s sake . . .” he said.
But later, when she turned in her sleep and moved away from him, his feet followed hers of their own accord to the other side of the bed.
eighteen
Macon was sitting in a hotel room in Winnipeg, Manitoba, when the phone rang. Actually it took him a second to realize it was the phone. He happened to be having a very good time with a mysterious object he’d just discovered—an ivory-painted metal cylinder affixed to the wall above the bed. He’d never noticed such a thing before, although he’d stayed in this hotel on two previous trips. When he touched the cylinder to see what it was, it rotated, disappearing into the wall, while from within the wall a light bulb swung out already lit. At the same moment, the phone rang. Macon experienced an instant of confusion during which he imagined it was the cylinder that was ringing. Then he saw the telephone on the nightstand. Still he was confused. No one had his number, so far as he knew.
He picked up the