The Accidental Tourist

While the train racketed along, he sorted his currency into envelopes that he’d brought from home — each envelope clearly marked with a different denomination. (No fumbling with unfamiliarcoins, no peering at misleading imprints, if you separate and classifyforeign money ahead of time.) Across from him a row of faces watched. People looked different here, although he couldn’t say just how. He thought they were both finer and unhealthier. A woman with a fretful baby kept saying, “Hush now, love. Hush now, love,” in that clear, floating, effortless English voice. It was hot, and her forehead had a pallid shine. So did Macon’s, no doubt. He slid the envelopes into his breast pocket. The train stopped and more people got on. They stood above him, clinging not to straps but to bulbs attached to flexible sticks, which Macon on his first visit had taken for some kind of microphone.

He was based in London, as usual. From there he would make brief forays into other cities, never listing more than a handful of hotels, a handful of restaurants within a tiny, easily accessible radius in each place; for his guidebooks were anything but all-inclusive. (“Plenty of other books say how to see as much of the city as possible,” his boss had told him. “You should say how to see as little.”) The name of Macon’s hotel was the Jones Terrace. He would have preferred one of the American chain hotels, but those cost too much. The Jones Terrace was all right, though — small and well kept. He swung into action at once to make his room his own, stripping off the ugly bedspread and stuffing it into a closet, unpacking his belongings and hiding his bag. He changed clothes, rinsed the ones he’d worn and hung them in the shower stall. Then, after a wistful glance at the bed, he went out for breakfast. It was nowhere near morning back home, but breakfast was the meal that businessmen most often had to manage for themselves. He made a point of researching it thoroughly wherever he went.

He walked to the Yankee Delight, where he ordered scrambled eggs and coffee. The service here was excellent. Coffee came at once, and his cup was kept constantly filled. The eggs didn’t taste like eggs at home, but then, they never did. What was it about restaurant eggs? They had no character, no backbone. Still, he opened his guidebook and put a checkmark next to the Yankee Delight. By the end of the week, these pages would be barely legible. He’d have scratched out some names, inserted others, and scrawled notes across the margins. He always revisited past entries — every hotel and restaurant. It was tedious but his boss insisted. “Just think how it would look,” Julian said, “if a reader walked into some café you’d recommended and found it taken over by vegetarians.”

When he’d paid his bill, he went down the street to the New America, where he ordered more eggs and more coffee. “Decaffeinated,” he added. (He was a jangle of nerves by now.) The waiter said they didn’t have decaffeinated. “Oh, you don’t,” Macon said. After the waiter had left, Macon made a note in his guidebook.

His third stop was a restaurant called the U.S. Open, where the sausages were so dry that they might have been baked on a rooftop. It figured: The U.S. Open had been recommended by a reader. Oh, the places that readers wrote in to suggest! Macon had once (before he’d grown wiser) reserved a motel room purely on the strength of such a suggestion — somewhere in Detroit or was it Pittsburgh, some city or other, for Accidental Tourist in America. He had checked out again at first sight of the linens and fled across the street to a Hilton, where the doorman had rushed to meet him and seized his bag with a cry of pity as if Macon had just staggered in from the desert. Never again, Macon had vowed. He left the sausages on his plate and called for his bill.