The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler [85]
“Besides,” Charles said, “chickens are really not, I don’t know, very classy animals. I would hate to go round saying I’m a chicken magnate.”
“You don’t even have to mention the fact,” Porter said.
“Beef magnate, now; that I wouldn’t mind. Beef has more of a ring to it.”
“They’re not offering a straddle for beef, Charles.”
Macon picked up some color photos that sat beside the wallpaper book. The top photo showed a window in a room he didn’t recognize—a white-framed window with louvered shutters closed across its lower half. The next was a group portrait. Four people— blurry, out of focus—stood in a line in front of the couch. The woman wore an apron, the men wore black suits. There was something artificial about their posture. They were lined up too precisely; none of them touched the others. “Who are these people?” Macon asked.
Rose glanced over. “That’s the family from Liberty’s dollhouse,” she said.
“Oh.”
“Her mother sent me those pictures.”
“It’s a family with nothing but grown-ups?” he asked.
“One’s a boy; you just can’t tell. And one’s a grandpa or a butler; June says Liberty switches him back and forth.”
Macon laid the photos aside without looking at the rest of them. He knelt to pat Edward. “A cattle straddle,” Charles was saying thoughtfully. Macon suddenly wished he were at Muriel’s. He wrapped his arms around Edward and imagined he smelled her sharp perfume deep in Edward’s fur.
Oh, above all else he was an orderly man. He was happiest with a regular scheme of things. He tended to eat the same meals over and over and to wear the same clothes; to drop off his cleaning on a certain set day and to pay all his bills on another. The teller who helped him on his first trip to a bank was the teller he went to forever after, even if she proved not to be efficient, even if the next teller’s line was shorter. There was no room in his life for anyone as unpredictable as Muriel. Or as extreme. Or as . . . well, unlikable, sometimes.
Her youthfulness was not appealing but unsettling. She barely remembered Vietnam and had no idea where she’d been when Kennedy was shot. She made him anxious about his own age, which had not previously troubled him. He realized how stiffly he walked after he had been sitting in one position too long; how he favored his back, always expecting it to go out on him again; how once was plenty whenever they made love.
And she talked so much—almost ceaselessly; while Macon was the kind of man to whom silence was better than music. (“Listen! They’re playing my song,” he used to say when Sarah switched the radio off.) She talked about blushers, straighteners, cellulite, hemlines, winter skin. She was interested in the appearance of things, only the appearance: in lipstick shades and nail wrapping and facial masques and split ends. Once, on one of her more attractive days, he told her she was looking very nice, and she grew so flustered that she stumbled over a curb. She asked if that was because she had tied her hair back; and was it the hair itself or the ribbon; or rather the color of the ribbon, which she’d feared might be just a little too bright and set off the tone of her complexion wrong. And didn’t he think her hair was hopeless, kerblamming out the way it did in the slightest bit of humidity? Till he was sorry he had ever brought it up. Well, not sorry, exactly, but tired. Exhausted.
Yet she could raise her chin sometimes and pierce his mind like a blade. Certain images of her at certain random, insignificant moments would flash before him: Muriel at her kitchen table,