MacGregor Tells the World by Elizabeth McKenzie

Author:Elizabeth McKenzie [McKenzie, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48782-7
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Once, at a yard sale in Medford, Mac’s mother had spotted a tribal kilim spread out upon the grass, on sale, with various items also up for grabs scattered haphazardly on its surface. So excited was she by the carpet, into which had been woven the crude figures of birds and goats, and best, bearing a price tag of twenty-five dollars, that she single-handedly pulled the thing out from under everything on top of it, a feat of uniquely focused strength.

“Hey, lady, whatcha doing?” the man conducting the sale yelled.

“Buying your rug,” she said.

“You just made a disaster area outta my yard sale!” the man barked. Cups, saucers, and kitchenware, and all kinds of junk rolled into the ragged summer weeds. She gathered up the rug and hauled it to their car like a leopard with its kill, then carried on about it for weeks. She checked a book out of the library to identify it. She proudly showed it to everyone who came by. She washed it on the hot sidewalk with nothing more than a hose, had seen rugs cleaned this way on her travels, before he was born.

Mac carried on the tradition. No matter where he was, he always noticed the rugs. He felt attracted to carpets in a way he wasn’t attracted to any other material thing. Along with the box, Helen had recently given him the rug, and he was considering bestowing it on Carolyn. It was rolled, standing on end in the corner of his room, sagging and leaning like a midget at a bus stop.

He’d been poring all night through the pages of Tangier, examining the parts about William Galeotto. The midget image was a steal from the final chapter. Jim Bright (Ware) puts Nick Macchiato (Galeotto) on a bus in Chicago bound for California and has a skewed chat with a suicidal little person as the great Macchiato disappears into the sunset. Macchiato is hope, possibility, life; the dwarf, quite unfairly, stands for the reduced options Jim Bright feels he is left behind with.

William Galeotto as Nick Macchiato was the hero of this cult favorite; it could be said that Ware’s character didn’t exist without Galeotto’s. It could be said that Jim Bright was a complete cipher. In criticism, it was said. (The opposite of what Ware had pronounced to the sycophants.) This new edition had a modish cover; and it included a lengthy introduction by P. G. Blackman on precisely that subject. The novel “glorifies the narcotic effect of one young man on another,” Blackman said. But Blackman pointed out that Bright, too, had a charming façade, an allure. “Bright’s education and moneyed refinement empower him; Bright alone enables the never obviously acquisitive Macchiato to indulge in his fabulous desires and dreams.”

Mac was agitated, his mind crawling with ideas. He was departing from the track he was on with Carolyn and it would feel like a betrayal. It was like clubbing your guide in the catacombs and charging off into darkened, untraveled, possibly even dangerous passages alone.

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