The Accidental Tourist

“She didn’t leave me,” Macon said. “I mean it’s not the way you make it sound. We discussed it like adults and decided to separate, that’s all. The last thing I need is my family gathered around me saying, ‘Oh, poor Macon, how could Sarah do this to you—’ ”

“Why would I say that?” Rose asked. “Everybody knows the Leary men are difficult to live with.”

“Oh,” Macon said.

“Where is she?”

“She’s got a place downtown,” he said. “And look,” he added, “you don’t have to bend over backwards, either, and go asking her to dinner or something. She does have a family of her own. You’re supposed to take my side in this.”

“I thought you didn’t want us to take sides.”

“No, no, I don’t. I mean you shouldn’t take her side, is what I’m trying to say.”

“When Charles’s wife got her divorce,” Rose said, “we went on having her to dinner every Christmas, just like always. Remember?”

“I remember,” Macon said wearily. Charles was their oldest brother.

“I suppose she’d still be coming, if she hadn’t got remarried to someone so far away.”

“What? If her husband had been a Baltimore man you’d have gone on inviting them both?”

“She and Porter’s wife and Sarah used to sit around the kitchen— this was before Porter’s wife got her divorce — and they’d go on and on about the Leary men. Oh, it was the Leary men this, the Leary men that: how they always had to have everything just so, always so well thought out beforehand, always clamping down on the world as if they really thought they could keep it in line. The Leary men! I can hear them still. I had to laugh: One Thanksgiving Porter and June were getting ready to leave, back when their children were small, and June was heading toward the door with the baby in her arms and Danny hanging onto her coat and this load of toys and supplies when Porter called out, ‘Halt!’ and started reading from one of those cash-register tapes that he always writes his lists on: blanket, bottles, diaper bag, formula out of the fridge . June just looked over at the other two and rolled her eyes.”

“Well, it wasn’t such a bad idea,” Macon said, “when you consider June.”

“No, and you notice it was alphabetical, too,” Rose said. “I do think alphabetizing helps to sort things out a little.”

Rose had a kitchen that was so completely alphabetized, you’d find the allspice next to the ant poison. She was a fine one to talk about the Leary men.

“At any rate,” she said. “Has Sarah been in touch since she left?”

“She’s come by once or twice. Once, actually,” Macon said. “For things she needed.”

“What kind of things?”

“Well, a double boiler. Things like that.”

“It’s an excuse, then,” Rose said promptly. “She could get a double boiler at any dimestore.”

“She said she liked ours.”

“She was checking to see how you’re doing. She still cares. Did you talk at all?”

“No,” Macon said, “I just handed her the double boiler. Also that gadget that unscrews bottle tops.”

“Oh, Macon. You might have asked her in.”

“I was scared she’d say no,” he said.

There was a silence. “Well. Anyhow,” Rose said finally.

“But I’m getting along!”

“Yes, of course you are,” she told him.

Then she said she had something in the oven and hung up.

Macon went over to his study window. It was a hot day in early July, the sky so blue it made his eyes ache. He rested his forehead against the glass and stared out at the yard, keeping his hands stuffed deep in the rear pockets of his khakis. Up in one of the oak trees, a bird sang what sounded like the first three notes of “My Little Gypsy Sweetheart.” “Slum. ber. on. ” it sang. Macon wondered if even this moment would become, one day, something he looked back upon wistfully. He couldn’t imagine it; he couldn’t think of any period bleaker than this in all his life, but he’d noticed how time had a way of coloring things. That bird, for instance, had such a pure, sweet, piercing voice.

He turned away from the window, covered his typewriter, and left the room.

He didn’t eat real meals anymore. When he was hungry he drank a glass of milk, or he spooned a bit of ice cream directly from the carton. After the smallest snack he felt overfed and heavy, but he noticed when he dressed in the mornings that he seemed to be losing weight. His shirt collar stood out around his neck. The vertical groove between his nose and mouth had deepened so that he had trouble shaving it. His hair, which Sarah used to cut for him, jutted over his forehead like a shelf. And something had caused his lower lids to droop. He used to have narrow gray slits of eyes; now they were wide and startled. Could this be a sign of malnutrition?