The Accidental Tourist Read Online Free PDF Page B

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