The Accidental Tourist

her meal, which was something brown and gluey.

“You’re welcome to half my shrimp salad,” Macon told her when the waitress had gone.

She shook her head. Her eyes were deep with tears, but they hadn’t spilled over.

“Macon,” she said, “ever since Ethan died I’ve had to admit that people are basically bad. Evil, Macon. So evil they would take a twelve-year-old boy and shoot him through the skull for no reason. I read a paper now and I despair; I’ve given up watching the news on TV. There’s so much wickedness, children setting other children on fire and grown men throwing babies out second-story windows, rape and torture and terrorism, old people beaten and robbed, men in our very own government willing to blow up the world, indifference and greed and instant anger on every street corner. I look at my students and they’re so ordinary, but they’re exactly like the boy who killed Ethan. If it hadn’t said beneath that boy’s picture what he’d been arrested for, wouldn’t you think he was just anyone? Someone who’d made the basketball team or won a college scholarship? You can’t believe in a soul. Last spring, Macon, I didn’t tell you this, I was cutting back our hedge and I saw the bird feeder had been stolen out of the crape myrtle tree. Someone will even steal food from little birds! And I just, I don’t know, went kind of crazy and attacked the crape myrtle. Cut it all up, ripped off the branches, slashed it with my pruning shears…”

Tears were running down her face now. She leaned across the table and said, “There are times when I haven’t been sure I could — I don’t want to sound melodramatic but — Macon, I haven’t been sure I could live in this kind of a world anymore.”

Macon felt he had to be terribly careful. He had to choose exactly the right words. He cleared his throat and said, “Yes, um, I see what you mean but…” He cleared his throat again. “It’s true,” he said, “what you say about human beings. I’m not trying to argue. But tell me this, Sarah: Why would that cause you to leave me?”

She crumpled up her napkin and dabbed at her nose. She said, “Because I knew you wouldn’t try to argue. You’ve believed all along they were evil.”

“Well, so—”

“This whole last year I felt myself retreating. Withdrawing. I could feel myself shrinking. I stayed away from crowds, I didn’t go to parties, I didn’t ask our friends in. When you and I went to the beach in the summer I lay on my blanket with all those people around me, their squawking radios and their gossip and their quarrels, and I thought, ‘Ugh, they’re so depressing. They’re so unlikable. So vile, really.’ I felt myself shrinking away from them. Just like you do, Macon — just as you do; sorry. Just as you have always done. I felt I was turning into a Leary.”

Macon tried for a lighter tone. He said, “Well, there are worse disasters than that, I guess.”

She didn’t smile. She said, “I can’t afford it.”

“Afford?”

“I’m forty-two years old. I don’t have enough time left to waste it holing up in my shell. So I’ve taken action. I’ve cut myself loose. I live in this apartment you’d hate, all clutter. I’ve made a whole bunch of new friends, and you wouldn’t like them much either, I guess. I’m studying with a sculptor. I always did want to be an artist, only teaching seemed more sensible. That’s how you would think: sensible. You’re so quick to be sensible, Macon, that you’ve given up on just about everything.”

“What have I given up on?”

She refolded the napkin and blotted her eyes. An appealing blur of mascara shadowed the skin beneath them. She said, “Remember Betty Grand?”

“No.”

“Betty Grand, she went to my school. You used to like her before you met me.”

“I never liked anyone on earth before I met you,” Macon said.

“You liked Betty Grand, Macon. You told me so when we first went out. You asked me if I knew her. You said you used to think she was pretty and you’d invited her to a ball game but she turned you down. You told me you’d changed your mind about her being pretty. Her gums showed any time she smiled, you said.”

Macon still didn’t remember, but he said, “Well? So?”

“Everything that might touch you or upset you or disrupt you, you’ve given up without a murmur and done without, said you never wanted it anyhow.”

“I suppose I would have done better if I’d gone on pining for Betty Grand all my life.”

“Well, you would have shown some feeling, at least.”

“I do show feeling, Sarah. I’m sitting here with you, am I not? You don’t see me giving up on you.”

She chose not to hear this. “And when Ethan died,” she said, “you peeled every single Wacky Pack sticker off his bedroom door. You emptied his closet and his bureau as if you couldn’t be rid of him soon enough. You kept offering people his junk in the basement, stilts and sleds and skateboards, and you couldn’t understand why they didn’t accept them. ‘I hate to see stuff there useless,’ you said. Macon, I know you loved him but I can’t help thinking you didn’t love him as much as I did, you’re not so torn apart by his going. I know you mourned him but there’s something so what-do-you-call, so muffled about the way you experience things, I mean love or grief or anything; it’s like you’re trying to slip through life unchanged. Don’t you see why I had to get out?”

“Sarah, I’m not muffled. I… endure. I’m trying to endure. I’m standing fast, I’m holding steady.”

“If you really think that,” Sarah said, “then you’re fooling yourself. You’re not holding steady; you’re ossified. You’re encased. You’re like something in a capsule. You’re a dried-up kernel of a man that nothing real penetrates. Oh, Macon, it’s not by chance you write those silly books telling people how to take trips without a jolt. That traveling armchair isn’t just your logo; it’s you.”

“No, it’s not,” Macon said. “It’s not!”

Sarah pulled her coat on, making a sloppy job of it. One corner of her collar was tucked inside. “So anyway,” she said. “This is what I wanted to tell you: I’m having John Albright send you a letter.”

“Who’s John Albright?”

“He’s an attorney.”

“Oh,” Macon said.

It was at least a full minute before he thought to say, “I guess you must mean a lawyer.”

Sarah collected her purse, stood up, and walked out.

Macon made his way conscientiously through his shrimp salad. He ate his cole slaw for the vitamin C. Then he finished every last one of his potato chips, although he knew his tongue would feel shriveled the following morning.

Once when Ethan was little, not more than two or three, he had run out into the street after a ball. Macon had been too far away to stop him. All he could do was shout, “No!” and then watch, frozen with horror, as a pickup truck came barreling around the curve. In that instant, he released his claim. In one split second he adjusted to a future that held no Ethan — an immeasurably bleaker place but also, by way of compensation, plainer and simpler, free of the problems a small child trails along with him, the endless demands and the mess and the contests for his mother’s attention. Then the truck stopped short and Ethan retrieved his ball, and Macon’s knees went weak with relief. But he remembered forever after how quickly he had adjusted. He wondered, sometimes, if that first adjustment had somehow stuck, making what happened to Ethan later less of a shock than it might have been. But if people didn’t adjust, how could they bear to go on?

He called for his bill and paid it. “Was there something wrong?” the waitress asked. “Did your friend not like her meal? She could always have sent it back, hon. We always let you send it back.”

“I know that,” Macon said.

“Maybe it was too spicy for her.”

“It was fine,” he said. “Could I have my crutches, please?”

She went off to get them, shaking her head.

He would have to locate a taxi. He’d made no arrangements for Rose to pick him up. Secretly, he’d been hoping to go home with Sarah. Now that hope seemed pathetic. He looked around the dining room and saw that most of the tables were filled, and that every person had someone else to eat with. Only Macon sat alone. He kept very erect and dignified but inside, he knew, he was crumbling. And when the waitress brought him his crutches and he stood to leave, it seemed appropriate that he had to walk nearly doubled, his chin sunk low on his chest and his elbows jutting out awkwardly like the wings of a baby bird. People stared at him as he passed. Some snickered. Was his foolishness so obvious? He passed the two churchy old ladies and one of them tugged at his sleeve. “Sir?