The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler [15]
By eight o’clock, according to his wristwatch, he was in bed. It was much too early, of course, but he could stretch the day only so far; the English thought it was midnight. Tomorrow he would start his whirlwind dashes through other cities. He’d pick out a few token hotels, sample a few token breakfasts. Coffee with caffeine and coffee without caffeine. Bacon underdone and overdone. Orange juice fresh and canned and frozen. More showerheads, more mattresses. Hair dryers supplied on request? 110-volt switches for electric shavers? When he fell asleep, he thought anonymous rooms were revolving past on a merry-go-round. He thought webbed canvas suitcase stands, ceiling sprinklers, and laminated lists of fire regulations approached and slid away and approached again, over and over all the rest of his days. He thought Ethan was riding a plaster camel and calling, “Catch me!” and falling, but Macon couldn’t get there in time and when he reached his arms out, Ethan was gone.
It was one of Macon’s bad habits to start itching to go home too early. No matter how short a stay he’d planned, partway through he would decide that he ought to leave, that he’d allowed himself far too much time, that everything truly necessary had already been accomplished—or almost everything, almost accomplished. Then the rest of his visit was spent in phone calls to travel agents and fruitless trips to airline offices and standby waits that came to nothing, so that he was forced to return to the hotel he’d just checked out of. He always promised himself this wouldn’t happen again, but somehow it always did. In England, it happened on his fourth afternoon. What more was there to do? he started wondering. Hadn’t he got the gist of the place?
Well, be honest: It was Saturday. He chanced to notice, entering the date in his expense book, that at home it was Saturday morning. Sarah would be stopping by the house for the rug.
She would open the front door and smell home. She would pass through the rooms where she’d been so happy all these years. (Hadn’t she been happy?) She would find the cat stretched out on the couch, long and lazy and languid, and she’d settle on the cushion next to her and think, How could I have left?
Unfortunately, it was summer, and the airlines were overbooked. He spent two days tracking down faint possibilities that evaporated the instant he drew close. “Anything! Get me anything! I don’t have to go to New York; I’ll go to Dulles. I’ll go to Montreal! Chicago! Shoot, I’ll go to Paris or Berlin and see if they have flights. Are there ships? How long do ships take, nowadays? What if this were an emergency? I mean my mother on her deathbed or something? Are you saying there’s just no way out of this place?”
The people he dealt with were unfailingly courteous and full of chirpy good humor—really, if not for the strain of travel he believed he might actually have liked the English—but they couldn’t solve his problem. In the end he had to stay on. He spent the rest of the week huddled in his room watching TV, chewing a knuckle, subsisting on nonperishable groceries and lukewarm soft drinks because he couldn’t face another restaurant.
So he was first in line, naturally, at the check-in counter on the day of his departure. He had his pick of seats: window, nonsmoking. Next to him was a very young couple completely absorbed in each other, so he didn’t need Miss MacIntosh but sat staring out at the clouds all the long, dull afternoon.
Afternoon was never his favorite time; that was the worst of these homeward flights. It was afternoon for hours and hours, through drinks and lunch and drinks again—all of which he waved away. It was afternoon when they showed the movie; the passengers had to pull their shades down. An orange light filled the plane, burdensome and thick.
Once when he’d been away on an unusually difficult trip—to Japan, where you couldn’t even memorize the signs in order to find your way back to a place—Sarah had met