The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler [65]
He dropped the glass, causing a meaningless little flurry of voices, and he spun around and ran lopsidedly across the room and out the door. But there was that endless corridor, and he couldn’t manage the trip. He took a right turn instead. He passed a telephone alcove and stumbled into a restroom—yes, a men’s room, luckily. More marble, mirrors, white enamel. He thought he was going to throw up, but when he entered one of the cubicles the sick feeling left his stomach and floated to his head. He noticed how light his brain felt. He stood above the hotel pressing his temples. It occurred to him to wonder how many feet of pipe a toilet at this altitude required.
He heard someone else come in, coughing. A cubicle door slammed shut. He opened his own door a crack and looked out. The impersonal lushness of the room made him think of sciencefiction movies.
Well, this difficulty probably happened here often, didn’t it? Or maybe not this difficulty exactly but others like it—people with a fear of heights, say, going into a panic, having to call upon . . . whom? The waiter? The girl who met the elevator?
He ventured cautiously out of the cubicle, then out of the restroom altogether, and he nearly bumped into a woman in the telephone alcove. She wore yards and yards of pale chiffon. She was just hanging up the phone, and she gathered her skirts around her and moved languidly, gracefully toward the dining room. Excuse me, ma’am, I wonder if you would be so kind as to, um . . . But the only request that came to mind rose up from his earliest childhood: Carry me!
The woman’s little sequined evening purse was the last of her to go, trailed behind her in one white hand as she disappeared into the darkness of the restaurant.
He stepped over to the telephone and lifted the receiver. It was cool to the touch; she hadn’t talked long. He fumbled through his pockets, found coins and dropped them in. But there was no one he could contact. He didn’t know a soul in all New York. Instead he called home, miraculously summoning up his credit card number. He worried his family would let the phone ring—it was a habit, by now—but Charles answered. “Leary.”
“Charles?”
“Macon!” Charles said, unusually animated.
“Charles, I’m up on top of this building and a sort of . . . silly thing has happened. Listen: You’ve got to get me out of here.”
“You out! What are you talking about? You’ve got to get me out!”
“Pardon?”
“I’m shut in the pantry; your dog has me cornered.”
“Oh. Well, I’m sorry, but . . . Charles, it’s like some kind of illness. I don’t think I can manage the elevator and I doubt I could manage a stairway either and—”
“Macon, do you hear that barking? That’s Edward. Edward has me treed, I tell you, and you have to come home this instant.”
“But I’m in New York! I’m up on top of this building and I can’t get down!”
“Every time I open the door he comes roaring over and I slam the door and he attacks it, he must have clawed halfway through it by now.”
Macon made himself take a deep breath. He said, “Charles, could I speak to Rose?”
“She’s out.”
“Oh.”
“How do you think I got into this?” Charles asked. “Julian came to take her to dinner and—”
“Julian?”
“Isn’t that his name?”
“Julian my boss?”
“Yes, and Edward went into one of his fits; so Rose said, ‘Quick, shut him in the pantry.’ So I grabbed his leash and he turned on me and nearly took my hand off. So I shut myself in the pantry instead and Rose must have left by then so—”
“Isn’t Porter there?”
“It’s his visitation night.”
Macon imagined how safe the pantry must feel, with Rose’s jams lined up in alphabetical order and the black dial telephone so ancient that the number on its face was still the old Tuxedo exchange. What