The Accidental Tourist

but certainly it was years and years ago. He almost felt that Sarah was a ghost — that she was dead. In a way (he thought, turning off the faucet), she was dead, that young, vivid Sarah from their first enthusiastic apartment on Cold Spring Lane. When he tried to recall those days, any image of Sarah was altered by the fact that she had left him. When he pictured their introduction — back when they were barely out of childhood — it seemed nothing more than the beginning of their parting. When she had looked up at him that first night and rattled the ice cubes in her paper cup, they were already moving toward their last edgy, miserable year together, toward those months when anything either of them said was wrong, toward that sense of narrowly missed connections. They were like people who run to meet, holding out their arms, but their aim is wrong; they pass each other and keep running. It had all amounted to nothing, in the end. He gazed down at the sink, and the warmth from the dishes drifted gently up into his face.

Well, you have to carry on. You have to carry on. He decided to switch his shower from morning to night. This showed adaptability, he felt — some freshness of spirit. While he showered he let the water collect in the tub, and he stalked around in noisy circles, sloshing the day’s dirty clothes underfoot. Later he wrung out the clothes and hung them on hangers to dry. Then he dressed in tomorrow’s underwear so he wouldn’t have to launder any pajamas. In fact, his only real laundry was a load of towels and sheets once a week — just two towels, but quite a lot of sheets. This was because he had developed a system that enabled him to sleep in clean sheets every night without the trouble of bed changing. He’d been proposing the system to Sarah for years, but she was so set in her ways. What he did was strip the mattress of all linens, replacing them with a giant sort of envelope made from one of the seven sheets he had folded and stitched together on the sewing machine. He thought of this invention as a Macon Leary Body Bag. A body bag required no tucking in, was unmussable, easily changeable, and the perfect weight for summer nights. In winter he would have to devise something warmer, but he couldn’t think of winter yet. He was barely making it from one day to the next as it was.

At moments — while he was skidding on the mangled clothes in the bathtub or struggling into his body bag on the naked, rust-stained mattress — he realized that he might be carrying things too far. He couldn’t explain why, either. He’d always had a fondness for method, but not what you would call a mania. Thinking then of Sarah’s lack of method, he wondered if that had got out of hand now too. Maybe all these years, they’d been keeping each other on a reasonable track. Separated, demagnetized somehow, they wandered wildly off course. He pictured Sarah’s new apartment, which he had never seen, as chaotic to the point of madness, with sneakers in the oven and the sofa heaped with china. The mere thought of it upset him. He looked gratefully at his own surroundings.

Most of his work was done at home; otherwise he might not have cared so about the mechanics of the household. He had a little study in the spare room off the kitchen. Seated in a stenographer’s chair, tapping away at a typewriter that had served him through four years of college, he wrote a series of guidebooks for people forced to travel on business. Ridiculous, when you thought about it: Macon hated travel. He careened through foreign territories on a desperate kind of blitz — squinching his eyes shut and holding his breath and hanging on for dear life, he sometimes imagined — and then settled back home with a sigh of relief to produce his chunky, passport- sized paperbacks. Accidental Tourist in France. Accidental Tourist in Germany. In Belgium. No author’s name, just a logo: a winged armchair on the cover.

He covered only the cities in these guides, for people taking business trips flew into cities and out again and didn’t see the countryside at all. They didn’t see the cities, for that matter. Their concern was how to pretend they had never left home. What hotels in Madrid boasted king-sized Beautyrest mattresses? What restaurants in Tokyo offered Sweet’n’Low? Did Amsterdam have a McDonald’s? Did Mexico City have a Taco Bell? Did any place in Rome serve Chef Boyardee ravioli? Other travelers hoped to discover distinctive local wines; Macon’s readers searched for pasteurized and homogenized milk.

As much as he hated the travel, he loved the writing — the virtuous delights of organizing a disorganized country, stripping away the inessential and the second-rate, classifying all that remained in neat, terse paragraphs. He cribbed from other guidebooks, seizing small kernels of value and discarding the rest. He spent pleasurable hours dithering over questions of punctuation. Righteously, mercilessly, he weeded out the passive voice. The effort of typing made the corners of his mouth turn down, so that no one could have guessed how much he was enjoying himself. I am happy to say, he pecked out, but his face remained glum and intense. I am happy to say that it’s possible now to buy Kentucky Fried Chicken in Stockholm.Pita bread, too , he added as an afterthought. He wasn’t sure how it had happened, but lately pita had grown to seem as American as hot dogs.

“Of course you’re managing,” his sister told him over the phone. “Did I say you weren’t? But at least you could have let us know. Three weeks, it’s been! Sarah’s been gone three weeks and I only hear about it today. And by chance, at that. If I hadn’t asked to speak to her, would you ever have told us she’d left you?”

“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!”