The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler [120]
He was near an open window, and he could look out upon a strangely beautiful landscape: an expanse of mathematical flatness, with straight-edged buildings rising in the distance like a child’s toy blocks on a rug. It was difficult, in these surroundings, to remember why he’d had a popcorn popper in the bedroom.
“So how’s the weather there?” Sarah asked.
“Kind of gray.”
“Here it’s sunny. Sunny and humid.”
“Well, it’s certainly not humid here,” he told her. “The air’s so dry that rain disappears before it hits the ground.”
“Really? Then how can you tell it’s raining?”
“You can see it above the plains,” he said. “It looks like stripes that just fade away about halfway down from the sky.”
“I wish I were there to watch it with you,” Sarah said.
Macon swallowed.
Gazing out of the window, he all at once recalled Ethan as an infant. Ethan used to cry unless he was tightly wrapped in a blanket; the pediatrician had explained that new babies have a fear of flying apart. Macon had not been able to imagine that at the time, but now he had no trouble. He could picture himself separating, falling into pieces, his head floating away with terrifying swiftness in the eerie green air of Alberta.
In Vancouver she asked if the rain vanished there as well. “No,” he said.
“No?”
“No, it rains in Vancouver.”
It was raining this minute—a gentle night rain. He could hear it but not see it, except for the cone of illuminated drops spilling beneath a street lamp just outside his hotel room. You could almost suppose it was the lamp itself that was raining.
“Well, I’ve moved back into the house,” she said. “Mostly I just stay upstairs. The cat and I: We camp in the bedroom. Creep downstairs for meals.”
“What cat is that?” he asked.
“Helen.”
“Oh, yes.”
“I went and picked her up at Rose’s. I needed company. You wouldn’t believe how lonely it is.”
Yes, he would believe it, he could have said. But didn’t.
So here they were in the same old positions, he could have said: He had won her attention only by withdrawing. He wasn’t surprised when she said, “Macon? Do you . . . What’s her name? The person you live with?”
“Muriel,” he said.
Which she knew before she asked, he suspected.
“Do you plan on staying with Muriel forever?”
“I really couldn’t say,” he said.
He was noticing how oddly the name hung in this starchy, old-fashioned hotel room. Muriel. Such a peculiar sound. So unfamiliar, suddenly.
On the flight back, his seatmate was an attractive young woman in a tailored suit. She spread the contents of her briefcase on her folding tray, and she riffled through computer printout sheets with her perfectly manicured hands. Then she asked Macon if he had a pen she might borrow. This struck him as amusing—her true colors shining out from beneath her businesslike exterior. However, his only pen was a fountain pen that he didn’t like lending, so he said no. She seemed relieved; she cheerfully repacked all she’d taken from her briefcase. “I could have sworn I swiped a ballpoint from my last hotel,” she said, “but maybe that was the one before this one; you know how they all run together in your mind.”
“You must do a lot of traveling,” Macon said politely.
“Do I? Some mornings when I wake up I have to check my hotel stationery just to find out what city I’m in.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Oh, I like it,” she said, bending to slip her briefcase under her seat. “It’s the only time I can relax anymore. When I come home I’m all nervous, can’t sit still. I prefer to be a . . . moving target, you could say.”
Macon thought of something he’d once read about heroin: how it’s not a pleasure, really, but it so completely alters the users’ body chemistry that they’re forced to go on once they’ve started.
He turned down drinks and dinner, and so did his seatmate; she rolled her suit jacket expertly into a pillow and went to sleep. Macon got out Miss MacIntosh and stared at a single page for a while. The top line began with brows bristling, her hair streaked with white. He studied the words so long that he almost wondered if they were words; the whole