The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler [133]
“How did you know what bus to take?” he asked her.
“I brought along your guidebook.”
She patted her pocket.
“Want to go to Chez Billy for breakfast?” she asked. “That’s what your book recommends.”
“No, I don’t. I can’t,” he said. “You’d better leave, Muriel.”
“Oh. Okay,” she said. She left.
Sometimes she would do that. She’d press in till he felt trapped, then suddenly draw back. It was like a tug of war where the other person all at once drops the rope, Macon thought. You fall flat on the ground; you’re so unprepared. You’re so empty-feeling.
He decided to call Sarah. At home it was barely dawn, but it seemed important to get in touch with her. He went over to the phone on the bureau and picked up the receiver. It was dead. He pressed the button a few times. Typical. He dropped his key in his pocket and went down to the lobby.
The lobby telephone was housed in an ancient wooden booth, very genteel. There was a red leather bench to sit on. Macon hunched over and listened to the ringing at the other end, far away. “Hello?” Sarah said.
“Sarah?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Macon.”
“Macon?”
She took a moment to absorb that. “Macon, where are you?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter. I just felt like talking to you.”
“What? What time is it?”
“I know it’s early and I’m sorry I woke you but I wanted to hear your voice.”
“There’s some kind of static on the line,” she said.
“It’s clear at this end.”
“You sound so thin.”
“That’s because it’s an overseas call,” he said. “How’s the weather there?”
“How’s who?”
“The weather! Is it sunny?”
“I don’t know. All the shades are down. I don’t think it’s even light yet.”
“Will you be gardening today?”
“What?”
“Gardening!”
“Well, I hadn’t thought. It depends on whether it’s sunny, I guess.”
“I wish I were there,” he said. “I could help you.”
“You hate to garden!”
“Yes, but . . .”
“Macon, are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” he said.
“How was the flight over?”
“Oh, the flight, well, goodness! Well, I don’t know; I guess I was so busy reading that I didn’t really notice,” he said.
“Reading?” she said. Then she said, “Maybe you’ve got jet lag.”
“Yes, maybe I do,” he told her.
Fried eggs, scrambled eggs, poached eggs, omelets. He walked blindly down the sidewalk, scribbling in the margins of his guidebook. He did not go near Chez Billy. It’s puzzling, he wrote, how the French are so tender in preparing their food but so rough in servingit. In the window of a restaurant, a black cat closed her eyes at him. She seemed to be gloating. She was so much at home, so sure of her place.
Displays of crushed velvet, scattered with solid gold chains and watches no thicker than poker chips. Women dressed as if for the stage: elaborate hairdos, brilliant makeup, strangely shaped trousers that had nothing to do with the human anatomy. Old ladies in little-girl ruffles and white tights and Mary Janes. Macon descended the steps to the Métro; he ostentatiously dropped his canceled ticket into a tiny receptacle marked PAPIERS. Then he turned to glare at all the others who flung their tickets on the floor, and as he turned he thought he saw Muriel, her white face glimmering in the crowd, but he must have been mistaken.
In the evening he returned to his hotel—footsore, leg muscles aching—and collapsed on his bed. Not two minutes later he heard a knock. He groaned and rose to open the door. Muriel stood there with her arms full of clothes. “Look,” she said, pushing past him. “See what-all I bought.” She dumped the clothes on the bed. She held them up one by one: a shiny black cape, a pair of brown jodhpurs, a bouffant red net evening dress sprinkled with different-sized disks of glass like the reflectors on bicycles. “Have you lost your senses?” Macon asked. “What must all this have cost?”
“Nothing! Or next to nothing,” she said. “I found a place that’s like the