“Yes.”
He said, “Why, Muriel?”
“Oh, I just had this irresistible urge to try it out,” she said.
Then she looked at him with slitted eyes, tilting her chin. He felt she was challenging him to take some action, but he said nothing. He picked up his car keys and went out to buy another bottle.
Macon felt shy about attending this dinner, as if Rose had turned into a stranger. He took longer than usual dressing, unable to decide between two shirts, and Muriel seemed to be having some trouble too. She kept putting on outfits and taking them off; brightly colored fabrics began to mount on the bed and on the floor all around it. “Oh, Lord, I wish I was just a totally nother person,” she sighed. Macon, concentrating on tying his tie, said nothing. Her baby photo grinned out at him from the frame of the mirror. He happened to notice the date on the border: AUG 60. Nineteen sixty.
When Muriel was two years old, Macon and Sarah were already engaged to be married.
Downstairs, Dominick Saddler was sitting on the couch with Alexander. “Now this here is your paste wax,” he was saying. He held up a can. “You never want to polish a car with anything but paste wax. And here we have a diaper. Diapers make real good rags because they don’t shed hardly no lint. I generally buy a dozen at a time from Sears and Roebuck. And chamois skins: well, you know chamois skins. So what you do is, you get yourself these here supplies and a case of good beer and a girl, and you head on out to Loch Raven. Then you park in the sun and you take off your shirt and you and the girl start to polishing. Ain’t no sweeter way that I know of to use up a spring afternoon.”
Dominick’s version of a bedtime story, Macon supposed. He was baby-sitting tonight. (The Butler twins had dates, and Claire was out with the General. As everybody referred to him now.) In payment, Muriel’s car would be Dominick’s to use for a week; mere money would never have persuaded him. He slouched next to Alexander with the diaper spread over one knee, muscles bulging under a T-shirt that read WEEKEND WARRIOR. A Greek sailor cap was tipped back on his head with a Judas Priest button pinned above the visor. Alexander looked enthralled.
Muriel came tapping down the stairs; she arrived craning her neck to see if her slip showed. “Is this outfit okay?” she asked Macon.
“It’s very nice,” he said, which was true, although it was also totally unlike her. Evidently, she had decided to take Rose for her model. She had pulled her hair back in a low bun and she wore a slim gray dress with shoulder pads. Only her spike-heeled sandals seemed her own; probably she didn’t possess any shoes so sensible as Rose’s schoolgirl flats. “I want you to tell me if there’s anything not right,” she said to Macon. “Anything you think is tacky.”
“Not a thing,” Macon assured her.
She kissed Alexander, leaving a dark red mark on his cheek. She made one last survey in the mirror beside the front door, meanwhile calling, “Don’t let him stay up too late now, Dommie; don’t let him watch anything scary on TV—”
Macon said,
“I look like the wrath of God.”
Macon? Do youto believe that when an invitation involved a meal, the guests should arrive exactly on time. Never mind that they often caught their hostess in curlers; they went on doing what they were taught. So Macon pressed the buzzer in the lobby at precisely six twenty-seven, and Porter and Charles joined them in front of the elevator. They both told Muriel it was nice to see her. Then they rode upward in a gloomy silence, eyes fixed on the numbers over the door. Charles carried a potted jade tree, Porter another bottle of wine.
“Isn’t this exciting?” Muriel said. “We’re their first invited guests.”
“At home now we’d be watching the CBS Evening News,” Charles told her.
Muriel couldn’t seem to think of any answer to that.
By six thirty sharp they were ringing the doorbell, standing in a hushed corridor carpeted in off-white. Rose opened the door and called, “They’re here!” and set her face lightly against each of theirs. She wore Grandmother Leary’s lace-trimmed company apron and she smelled of lavender soap, the same as always.
But there was a strip of peeling sunburn across the bridge of her nose.
Julian, natty and casual in a navy turtleneck and white slacks (when it wasn’t yet Memorial Day), fixed the drinks while Rose retreated to the kitchen. This was one of those ultra-modern apartments where the rooms all swam into each other, so they could see her flitting back and forth. Julian passed around snapshots of Hawaii. Either he had used inferior film or else Hawaii was a very different place from Baltimore, because some of the colors were wrong. The trees appeared to be blue. In most of the photos Rose stood in front of flower beds or flowering shrubs, wearing a white sleeveless dress Macon had never seen before, hugging her arms and smiling too broadly so that she looked older than she was. “I tell Rose you’d think she went on our honeymoon by herself,” Julian said. “I’m the one who took the pictures because Rose never did learn how to work my camera.”
“She didn’t?” Macon asked.
“It was one of those German models with all the buttons.”
“She couldn’t figure out the buttons?”
“I tell her, ‘People will think I wasn’t even there.’ ”
“Why, Rose could have taken that camera apart and put it together twice over,” Macon said.
“No, this was one of those German models with—”
“It wasn’t very logically constructed,” Rose called from the kitchen.
“Ah,” Macon said, sitting back.
She entered the room with a tray and placed it on the glass coffee table. Then she knelt and began to spread pate on little crackers. There was some change in the way she moved, Macon noticed. She was more graceful, but also more self-conscious. She offered the pate first to Muriel, then to each of her brothers, last to Julian. “In Hawaii I started learning to sail,” she said. She pronounced the two
“She’s trying to find her sea legs,” Julian said. “She tends to feel motion-sick.”
Macon bit into his cracker. The pate was something familiar. It was rough in texture but delicate in taste; there was a kind of melting flavor that he believed came from adding a great amount of butter. The recipe was Sarah’s. He sat very still, not chewing. He was flooded by a subtle blend of tarragon and cream and home.
“Oh, I know just what you’re going through,” Muriel said to Rose. “All I have to do is look at a boat and I get nauseous.”
Macon swallowed and gazed down at the carpet between his feet. He waited for someone to correct her, but nobody did. That was even worse.
In bed she said, “You wouldn’t ever leave me, would you? Would you ever think of leaving me? You won’t be like the others, will you? Will you promise not to leave me?”
“Yes, yes,” he said, floating in and out of dreams.
“You do take me seriously, don’t you? Don’t you?”
“Oh, Muriel, for pity’s sake…” he said.
But later, when she turned in her sleep and moved away from him, his feet followed hers of their own accord to the other side of the bed.
eighteen
Macon was sitting in a hotel room in Winnipeg, Manitoba, when the phone rang. Actually it took him a second to realize it was the phone. He happened to be having a very good time with a mysterious object he’d just discovered — an ivory-painted metal cylinder affixed to the wall above the bed. He’d never noticed such a thing before, although he’d stayed in this hotel on two previous trips. When he touched the cylinder to see what it was, it rotated, disappearing into the wall, while from within the wall a light bulb swung out already lit. At the same moment, the phone rang. Macon experienced an instant of confusion during which he imagined it was the cylinder
