bedroom. Creep downstairs for meals.”
“What cat is that?” he asked.
“Helen.”
“Oh, yes.”
“I went and picked her up at Rose’s. I needed company. You wouldn’t believe how lonely it is.”
Yes, he would believe it, he could have said. But didn’t.
So here they were in the same old positions, he could have said: He had won her attention only by withdrawing. He wasn’t surprised when she said, “Macon? Do you… What’s her name? The person you live with?”
“Muriel,” he said.
Which she knew before she asked, he suspected.
“Do you plan on staying with Muriel forever?”
“I really couldn’t say,” he said.
He was noticing how oddly the name hung in this starchy, old-fashioned hotel room. Muriel. Such a peculiar sound. So unfamiliar, suddenly.
On the flight back, his seatmate was an attractive young woman in a tailored suit. She spread the contents of her briefcase on her folding tray, and she riffled through computer printout sheets with her perfectly manicured hands. Then she asked Macon if he had a pen she might borrow. This struck him as amusing — her true colors shining out from beneath her businesslike exterior. However, his only pen was a fountain pen that he didn’t like lending, so he said no. She seemed relieved; she cheerfully repacked all she’d taken from her briefcase. “I could have sworn I swiped a ballpoint from my last hotel,” she said, “but maybe that was the one before this one; you know how they all run together in your mind.”
“You must do a lot of traveling,” Macon said politely.
“Do I? Some mornings when I wake up I have to check my hotel stationery just to find out what city I’m in.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Oh, I like it,” she said, bending to slip her briefcase under her seat. “It’s the only time I can relax anymore. When I come home I’m all nervous, can’t sit still. I prefer to be a… moving target, you could say.”
Macon thought of something he’d once read about heroin: how it’s not a pleasure, really, but it so completely alters the users’ body chemistry that they’re forced to go on once they’ve started.
He turned down drinks and dinner, and so did his seatmate; she rolled her suit jacket expertly into a pillow and went to sleep. Macon got out
After they landed in Baltimore, he took a shuttle bus to the parking lot and retrieved his car. It was late evening here and the sky was pale and radiant above the city. As he drove he continued to see the words from
He came to Singleton Street and flicked his signal on but didn’t turn. After a while the signal clicked off on its own. He rode on through the city, up Charles Street, into his old neighborhood. He parked and cut the engine and sat looking at the house. The downstairs windows were dark. The upstairs windows were softly glowing. Evidently, he had come home.
nineteen
Macon and Sarah needed to buy a new couch. They set aside a Saturday for it — actually just half a Saturday, because Sarah had a class to attend in the afternoon. At breakfast, she flipped through an interior decorating book so they could get a head start on their decision. “I’m beginning to think along the lines of something flowered,” she told Macon. “We’ve never had a flowered couch before. Or would that be too frilly?”
“Well, I don’t know. I wonder about winter,” Macon said.
“Winter?”
“I mean right now in the middle of June a flowered couch looks fine, but it might seem out of place in December.”
“So you prefer something in a solid,” Sarah said.
“Well, I don’t know.”
“Or maybe stripes.”
“I’m not sure.”
“I know you don’t like plaids.”
“No.”
“How do you feel about tweeds?”
“Tweeds,” Macon said, considering.
Sarah handed over the book and started loading the dishwasher.
Macon studied pictures of angular modern couches, cozy chintz-covered couches, and period reproduction couches covered in complex fabrics. He took the book to the living room and squinted at the spot where the couch would be sitting. The old one, which had turned out to be too waterlogged to salvage, had been carted away, along with both armchairs. Now there was just a long blank wall, with the freshly plastered ceiling glaring above it. Macon observed that a room without furniture had a utilitarian feeling, as if it were merely a container. Or a vehicle. Yes, a vehicle: He had a sense of himself speeding through the universe as he stood there.
While Sarah got dressed, Macon took the dog out. It was a warm, golden morning. Neighbors were trimming their grass and weeding their flower beds. They nodded as Macon walked past. He had not been back long enough for them to feel at ease yet; there was something a little too formal about their greetings. Or maybe he was imagining that. He made an effort to remind them of how many years he had lived here: “I’ve always liked those tulips of yours!” and “Still got that nice hand mower, I see!” Edward marched beside him with a busybody waggle of his hind end.
In movies and such, people who made important changes in their lives accomplished them and were done with it. They walked out and never returned; or they married and lived happily ever after. In real life, things weren’t so clean-cut. Macon, for instance, had had to go down to Muriel’s and retrieve his dog, once he’d decided to move back home. He had had to collect his clothing and pack up his typewriter while Muriel watched in silence with her accusing, reproaching eyes. Then there were all kinds of other belongings that he discovered too late he’d forgotten — clothes that had been in the wash at the time, and his favorite dictionary, and the extra-large pottery mug he liked to drink his coffee from. But of course he couldn’t go back for them. He had to abandon them — messy, trailing strings of himself cluttering his leavetaking.
By the time he and Edward returned from their outing, Sarah was waiting in the front yard. She wore a yellow dress that made her tan glow; she looked very pretty. “I was just wondering about the azaleas,” she told Macon. “Weren’t we supposed to feed them in the spring?”
“Well, probably,” Macon said, “but they seem all right to me.”
“In April, I think,” she said. “Or maybe May. No one was here to do it.”
Macon veered away from that. He preferred to pretend that their lives had been going on as usual. “Never mind, Rose has whole sacks of fertilizer,” he said. “We’ll pick up some from her while we’re out.”
“No one was here to seed the lawn, either.”
“The lawn looks fine,” he said, more forcefully than he’d meant to.
