The Accidental Tourist

She thought it over, frowning down at Edward. Her eyes were very small, like caraway seeds, and her face was sharp and colorless.

“Please,” Macon said. “I’m about to catch a plane. I’m leaving for a week, and I don’t have a soul to look after him. I’m desperate, I tell you.”

From the glance she shot at him, he sensed he had surprised her in some way. “Can’t you leave him home with your wife?” she asked.

He wondered how on earth her mind worked.

“If I could do that,” he said, “why would I be standing here?”

“Oh,” she said. “You’re not married?”

“Well, I am, but she’s… living elsewhere. They don’t allow pets.”

“Oh.”

She came out from behind the counter. She was wearing very short red shorts; her legs were like sticks. “I’m a divorsy myself,” she said. “I know what you’re going through.”

“And see,” Macon said, “there’s this place I usually board him but they suddenly claim he bites. Claim he bit an attendant and they can’t admit him anymore.”

“Edward? Do you bite?” the woman said.

Macon realized he should not have mentioned that, but she seemed to take it in stride. “How could you do such a thing?” she asked Edward. Edward grinned up at her and folded his ears back, inviting a pat. She bent and stroked his head.

“So will you keep him?” Macon said.

“Oh, I guess,” she said, straightening. “If you’re desperate.” She stressed the word — fixing Macon with those small brown eyes — as if giving it more weight than he had intended. “Fill this out,” she told him, and she handed him a form from a stack on the counter. “Your name and address and when you’ll be back. Don’t forget to put when you’ll be back.”

Macon nodded, uncapping his fountain pen.

“I’ll most likely see you again when you come to pick him up,” she said. “I mean if you put the time of day to expect you. My name’s Muriel.”

“Is this place open evenings?” Macon asked.

“Every evening but Sundays. Till eight.”

“Oh, good.”

“Muriel Pritchett,” she said.

Macon filled out the form while the woman knelt to unbuckle Edward’s collar. Edward licked her cheekbone; he must have thought she was just being friendly. So when Macon had finished, he didn’t say good-bye. He left the form on the counter and walked out very quickly, keeping a hand in his pocket to silence his keys.

On the flight to New York, he sat next to a foreign-looking man with a mustache. Clamped to the man’s ears was a headset for one of those miniature tape recorders. Perfect: no danger of conversation. Macon leaned back in his seat contentedly.

He approved of planes. When the weather was calm, you couldn’t even tell you were moving. You could pretend you were sitting safe at home. The view from the window was always the same — air and more air — and the interior of the plane was practically interchangeable with the interior of any other.

He accepted nothing from the beverage cart, but the man beside him took off his headset to order a Bloody Mary. A tinny, intricate, Middle Eastern melody came whispering out of the pink sponge earplugs. Macon stared down at the little machine and wondered if he should buy one. Not for the music, heaven knows — there was far too much noise in the world already — but for insulation. He could plug himself into it and no one would disturb him. He could play a blank tape: thirty full minutes of silence. Turn the tape over and play thirty minutes more.

They landed at Kennedy and he took a shuttle bus to his connecting flight, which wasn’t due to leave till evening. Once settled in the terminal, he began filling out a crossword puzzle that he’d saved for this occasion from last Sunday’s New York Times. He sat inside a kind of barricade — his bag on one chair, his suit coat on another. People milled around him but he kept his eyes on the page, progressing smoothly to the acrostic as soon as he’d finished the crossword. By the time he’d solved both puzzles, they were beginning to board the plane.

His seatmate was a gray-haired woman with glasses. She had brought her own knitted afghan. This was not a good sign, Macon felt, but he could handle it. First he bustled about, loosening his tie and taking off his shoes and removing a book from his bag. Then he opened the book and ostentatiously started reading.

The name of his book was Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, and it was 1,198 pages long. (Always bring a book, as protection against strangers. Magazines don’t last. Newspapers from home will make you homesick, and newspapers from elsewhere will remind you you don’t belong. You know how alien another paper’s typeface seems.) He’d been lugging around Miss MacIntosh for years. It had the advantage of being plotless, as far as he could tell, but invariably interesting, so he could dip into it at random. Any time he raised his eyes, he was careful to mark a paragraph with his finger and to keep a bemused expression on his face.

There was the usual mellifluous murmur from the loudspeaker about seatbelts, emergency exits, oxygen masks. He wondered why stewardesses accented such unlikely words. “On our flight this evening we will be offering…” The woman next to him asked if he wanted a Lifesaver. “No, thank you,” Macon said, and he went on with his book. She rustled some little bit of paper, and shortly afterward the smell of spearmint drifted over to him.

He refused a cocktail and he refused a supper tray, although he did accept the milk that was offered with it. He ate an apple and a little box of raisins from his bag, drank the milk, and went off to the lavatory to floss and brush his teeth. When he returned, the plane was darker, dotted here and there with reading lamps. Some of the passengers were already asleep. His seatmate had rolled her hair into little O’s and X-ed them over with bobby pins. Macon found it amazing that people could be so unselfconscious on airplanes. He’d seen men in whole suits of pajamas; he’d seen women slathered in face cream. You would think they felt no need to be on guard.

He angled his book beneath a slender shaft of light and turned a page. The engines had a weary, dogged sound. It was the period he thought of as the long haul — the gulf between supper and breakfast when they were suspended over the ocean, waiting for that lightening of the sky that was supposed to be morning although, of course, it was nowhere near morning back home. In Macon’s opinion, morning in other time zones was like something staged — a curtain painted with a rising sun, superimposed upon the real dark.

He let his head tip back against the seat and closed his eyes. A stewardess’s voice, somewhere near the front of the plane, threaded in and out of the droning of the engines. “We just sat and sat and there wasn’t a thing to do and all we had was the Wednesday paper and you know how news just never seems to happen on a Wednesday…”

Macon heard a man speaking levelly in his ear. “Macon.” But he didn’t even turn his head. By now he knew these tricks of sound on planes at night. He saw behind his eyelids the soap dish on the kitchen sink at home — another trick, this concreteness of vision. It was an oval china soap dish painted with yellow roses, containing a worn-down sliver of soap and Sarah’s rings, her engagement ring and her wedding band, just as she had left them when she walked out.

“I got the tickets,” he heard Ethan say. “And they’re opening the doors in five minutes.”

“All right,” Macon told him, “let’s plan our strategy.”

“Strategy?”

“Where we’re going to sit.”

“Why would we need strategy for that?”

“It’s you who asked to see this movie, Ethan. I would think you’d take an interest in where you’re sitting. Now, here’s my plan. You go around to that line on the left. Count the little kids. I’ll count the line on the right.”

“Aw, Dad—”

“Do you want to sit next to some noisy little kid?”

“Well, no.”

“And which do you prefer: an aisle seat?”