The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler [47]
All that afternoon and evening, Edward refused to lie down. Macon wheedled, threatened, cajoled; Edward muttered ominously and stood firm. Rose and the boys edged around the two of them, politely averting their eyes as if they’d stumbled on some private quarrel.
Then the next morning, Edward charged the mailman. Macon managed to grab the leash, but it raised some doubts in his mind. What did all this sitting and heeling have to do with Edward’s real problem? “I should just ship you off to the pound,” he told Edward. He tapped his foot twice. Edward did not lie down.
In the afternoon, Macon called the Meow-Bow. “May I speak to Muriel, please?” he asked. He couldn’t think of her last name.
“Muriel’s not working today,” a girl told him.
“Oh, I see.”
“Her little boy is sick.”
He hadn’t known she had a little boy. He felt some inner click of adjustment; she was a slightly different person from the one he’d imagined. “Well,” he said, “this is Macon Leary. I guess I’ll talk to her tomorrow.”
“Oh, Mr. Leary. You want to call her at home?”
“No, that’s all right.”
“I can give you her number if you want to call her at home.”
“I’ll just talk to her tomorrow. Thank you.”
Rose had an errand downtown, so she agreed to drop him off at the Businessman’s Press. He wanted to deliver the rest of his guidebook. Stretched across the backseat with his crutches, he gazed at the passing scenery: antique office buildings, tasteful restaurants, health food stores and florists’ shops, all peculiarly hard-edged and vivid in the light of a brilliant October afternoon. Rose perched behind the wheel and drove at a steady, slow pace that was almost hypnotic. She wore a little round basin-shaped hat with ribbons down the back. It made her look prim and Sunday schoolish.
One of the qualities that all four Leary children shared was a total inability to find their way around. It was a kind of dyslexia, Macon believed—a geographic dyslexia. None of them ever stepped outside without obsessively noting all available landmarks, clinging to a fixed and desperate mental map of the neighborhood. Back home, Macon had kept a stack of index cards giving detailed directions to the houses of his friends—even friends he’d known for decades. And it used to be that whenever Ethan met a new boy, Macon’s first anxious question was, “Where exactly does he live, do you know?” Ethan had had a tendency to form inconvenient alliances. He couldn’t just hang out with the boy next door; oh, no, it had to be someone who lived way beyond the Beltway. What did Ethan care? He had no trouble navigating. This was because he’d lived all his life in one house, was Macon’s theory; while a person who’d been moved around a great deal never acquired a fixed point of reference but wandered forever in a fog—adrift upon the planet, helpless, praying that just by luck he might stumble across his destination.
At any rate, Rose and Macon got lost. Rose knew where she wanted to go—a shop that sold a special furniture oil—and Macon had visited Julian’s office a hundred times; but even so, they drove in circles till Macon noticed a familiar steeple. “Stop! Turn left,” he said. Rose pulled up where he directed. Macon struggled out. “Will you be all right?” he asked Rose. “Do you think you can find your way back to pick me up?”
“I hope so.”
“Look for the steeple, remember.”
She nodded and drove away.
Macon swung up three granite steps to the brick mansion that housed the Businessman’s Press. The door was made of polished, golden wood. The floor inside was tiled with tiny black and white hexagons, just uneven enough to give purchase to Macon’s crutches.
This wasn’t an ordinary office. The secretary typed in a back room while Julian, who couldn’t stand being alone, sat out front. He was talking on a red telephone, lounging behind a desk that was laden with a clutter of advertisements, pamphlets, unpaid bills, unanswered letters, empty Chinese carryout cartons, and Perrier bottles. The walls were covered with sailing charts. The bookshelves