Muriel said, “I never told you this, but a while before I met you I was dating somebody else.”
“Oh? Who was that?” Macon asked.
“He was a customer at the Rapid-Eze Copy Center. He brought me his divorce papers to copy and we started having this conversation and ended up going out together. His divorce was awful. Really messy. His wife had been two-timing him. He said he didn’t think he could ever trust a woman again. It was months before he would spend the night, even; he didn’t like going to sleep when a woman was in the same room. But bit by bit I changed all that. He relaxed. He got to be a whole different man. Moved in with me and took over the bills, paid off all I still owed. Alexander’s doctor. We started talking about getting married. Then he met an airline stewardess and eloped with her within the week.”
“I see,” Macon said.
“It was like I had, you know, cured him, just so he could elope with another woman.”
“Well,” he said.
“You wouldn’t do anything like that, would you, Macon?”
“Who, me?”
“Would you elope with someone else? Would you see someone else behind my back?”
“Oh, Muriel, of course not,” he told her.
“Would you leave me and go home to your wife?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Would you?”
“Don’t be silly,” he said.
She cocked her head and considered him. Her eyes were alert and bright and knowing, like the eyes of some small animal.
It was a rainy Tuesday morning and Edward, who was squeamish about rain, insisted he didn’t need to go out, but Macon took him anyway. While he was waiting in the backyard beneath his umbrella, he saw a young couple walking down the alley. They caught his attention because they walked so slowly, as if they didn’t realize they were getting wet. The boy was tall and frail, in ragged jeans and a soft white shirt. The girl wore a flat straw hat with ribbons down the back and a longish limp cotton dress. They swung hands, looking only at each other. They came upon a tricycle and they separated to walk around it; only instead of simply walking the girl did a little sort of dance step, spinning her skirt out, and the boy spun too and laughed and took her hand again.
Edward finally, finally peed, and Macon followed him back into the house. He set his umbrella in the kitchen sink and squatted to dry Edward off with an old beach towel. He rubbed briskly at first, and then more slowly. Then he stopped but remained on the floor, the towel bunched in his hands, the tin-can smell of wet dog rising all around him.
When he’d asked Sarah whether she was living with anyone, and Sarah had said, “Not really,” what exactly had she meant by that?
The rain stopped and they put Edward on his leash and went out shopping. Muriel needed bedroom slippers with feathers on them. “Red. High-heeled. Pointy-toed,” she said.
“Goodness. Whatever for?” Macon asked her.
“I want to clop around the house in them on Sunday mornings. Can’t you just see it? I wish I smoked cigarettes. I wish Alexander wasn’t allergic to smoke.”
Yes, he could see it, as a matter of fact. “In your black-and-gold kimono,” he said.
“Exactly.”
“But I don’t believe they sell those feathered slippers anymore.”
“In thrift shops they do.”
“Oh. Right.”
Lately, Macon had begun to like thrift shops himself. In the usual sea of plastic he had found, so far, a folding boxwood carpenter’s rule, an ingenious wheeled cookie cutter that left no waste space between cookies, and a miniature brass level for Alexander’s toolbox.
The air outside was warm and watery. Mrs. Butler was propping up the squashed geraniums that flopped in the white-washed tire in her yard. Mrs. Patel — out of her luminous sari for once, clumsy and unromantic in tight, bulgy Calvin Klein jeans — was sweeping the puddles off her front steps. And Mrs. Saddler stood in front of the hardware store waiting for it to open. “I don’t guess you’d have seen Dominick,” she said to Muriel.
“Not lately.”
“Last night he never came home,” Mrs. Saddler said. “That boy just worries the daylights out of me. He’s not what you would call bad,” she told Macon, “but he’s worrisome, know what I mean? When he’s at home he’s so much at home, those big noisy boots all over the place, but then when he’s away he’s so much away. You wouldn’t believe how the house feels; just empty. Just echoing.”
“He’ll be back,” Muriel said. “Tonight’s his turn to have the car.”
“Oh, and when he’s out with the car it’s worst of all,” Mrs. Saddler said. “Then every siren I hear, I wonder if it’s Dommie. I know how he screeches round corners! I know those fast girls he goes out with!”
They left her still standing there, distractedly fingering her coin purse, although the hardware-store owner had unlocked his door by now and was cranking down his awnings.
Outside a shop called Re-Runs, they ordered Edward to stay. He obeyed, looking put upon, while they went in. Muriel sifted through stacks of curled, brittle shoes that had hardened into the shapes of other people’s feet. She shucked off her own shoes and stepped into a pair of silver evening sandals. “What do you think?” she asked Macon.
“I thought you were looking for slippers.”
“But what do you think of these?”
“I can live without them,” he said.
He was feeling bored because Re-Runs carried nothing but clothes.
Muriel abandoned the shoes and they went next door to Garage Sale Incorporated. Macon tried to invent a need for a rusty metal Rolodex file he found in a heap of tire chains. Could he use it for his guidebooks in some way? And make it tax-deductible. Muriel picked up a tan vinyl suitcase with rounded edges; it reminded Macon of a partly sucked caramel. “Should I get this?” she asked.
“I thought you wanted slippers.”
“But for travel.”
“Since when do you travel?”
“I know where you’re going next,” she said. She came closer to him, both hands clutching the suitcase handle. She looked like a very young girl at a bus stop, say, or out hitching a ride on the highway. “I wanted to ask if I could come with you.”
“To Canada.”
“I mean the next place after that. France.”
He set down the Rolodex. (Mention of France always depressed him.)
“Julian
“You know I can’t afford to bring you.”
Muriel replaced the suitcase and they left the shop. “But just this once,” she said, hurrying along beside him. “It wouldn’t cost much!”
Macon retrieved Edward’s leash and motioned him up. “It would cost a mint,” he said, “not to mention that you’d have to miss work.”
“No, I wouldn’t. I’ve quit.”
He looked over at her. “Quit?”
“Well, at the Meow-Bow. Then things like George and the dog training I’ll just rearrange; if I was to travel I could just—”
“You quit the Meow-Bow?”
“So what?”
He couldn’t explain the sudden weight that fell on him.
