Anne Tyler - Morgan's Passing

She didn't pack the photo. And when she got back to Leon at the fountain, she was lugging not only his suitcase but hers as well.

"I don't care what you say," she told him. She started calling this at some distance from him, sh& was so anxious to get it said. She was puffing and tottering between the two suitcases. "I'm coming with you. You can't leave me here!"

"Emily?"

"I think we ought to get married. Living in sin would be inconvenient," she said, "but if that's what you prefer, then I'd do that too. And if you tell me not to come, I'll come anyway. You don't own New York! So save your breath. Til ride on the bus one seat behind you. I'll tell the taxi driver, 'Follow that cab!' I'll tell the hotel clerk, 'Give me the room next to his room,' please.'" Leon laughed. She saw she'd won him. She set down the suitcases and stood facing him, not smiling herself. In fact, what she'd won him with was a deliberate, calculated spunkiness that she really did not possess, and she was alarmed to find him so easily taken in. Or maybe he wasn't taken in at all, but knew that this was what the audience expected: that when some girl chases you down with her suitcase and behaves outrageously, you're to laugh and throw your hands up and surrender. Laughter was not his best expression. She had never seen him look so disjointed, so uneven. There was something asymmetrical about his face. "Emily," he said, "what am I going to do with you?"

"I don't know," she told him.

Already she was beginning to worry about that herself.

By evening they were on a Greyhound bus to New York City. By the next afternoon they were settled (it felt more like camping out) in a furnished room with a sink in one corner and a toilet down the haU. They were married Thursday, which was as soon as the law permitted. She'd seen more ceremony, Emily thought, when she got her driver's license. Marriage didn't cause as much of a jolt in her life as she'd expected.

Emily found a job as a waitress hi a Polish restaurant. Leon-just for the moment-cleaned a theatre after shows. In the early evenings he hung out at various coffee-houses listening to actors and poets give readings. He took Emily along, whenever she didn't have to work. "Aren't they terrible?" he would ask her. "I can do better than that." Emily thought so too. Once they heard a monologue that was so inept that she and Leon got up and walked out, and the actor stopped halfway through a line to say, "Hey, you! Don't forget to leave some money in the cup." Emily would have done it- she'd do anything to avoid a scene-but Leon got angry. She felt him draw in his breath; he seemed to grow bigger. By now she knew how far his anger could take him. She lifted her hand to form the shape of his elbow, but she didn't actually touch him. You should never touch Leon when Ms temper was up. Then he let go of his breath again and allowed her to lead him away, with the actor still shouting after them.

It turned into a very hot summer, full of rainstorms and muggy black clouds. The heat in their room was like something alive. And they were continually on the brink of having no money whatsoever. Emily had never realized how much money mattered. She felt she had to breathe shallowly, conserve her energy, walk in a held-in, unobtrusive way as she sidled between people who were richer. She and Leon began to fight about how to spend what they did have. He was more extravagant-wasteful, she said. He said she was stingy.

In July, Emily had a scare and thought she might be pregnant. She felt trapped and horrified; she didn't dare tell Leon. So when she found she wasn't pregnant after all, she couldn't share her relief with him, either. She kept that experience in her mind. She kept examining it, trying to make sense of it. What land of marriage was it if you couldn't tell your husband a thing like that? But he would have flown into a rage, and then sunk in on himself like over-risen bread. It was her idea, marrying, he'd say; and she was the one always harping on what they couldn't afford. She pictured the scene so clearly that she almost believed it had happened. She held it against him. Her eyes filled with tears sometimes as she recalled how badly he'd behaved. But he hadn't! He had never been given a chance! (he would say). She went on blaming him anyhow. She visited a family-planning clinic and she told them that her husband would kill her if she ever got pregnant. Of course she meant it figuratively, but she could tell from the way the social worker looked at her that in this neighborhood you couldn't always be sure of that. The social worker glanced at Emily's arms and asked her if she had any other problems. Emily wanted to talk about her separateness, about how she'd kept her pregnancy scare a secret from her own husband, but she knew that wasn't a serious enough problem. In this neighborhood, women were getting murdered. (She felt how frivolous she must seem to the social worker; she was wearing her leotard and wrap skirt from Modem Dance I.) Women were getting mugged in this neighborhood, or beaten up by their husbands. Emily's husband would never lay a finger on her. She was certain of that. She rested in a circle of immunity, she felt.

She herself was not an. angry kind of person. The most she could manage was a little spark of delayed resentment, every now and then, when something had happened earlier that she really should have objected to if he'd only realized. Maybe if she'd had a temper herself, she would have known what string would pull Leon back down into calm. As it was, she just had to stand by. She had to remind herself: "He might hurt other people, but he's never laid a finger on me." This gave her a little flicker of pleasure. "He's crazy sometimes," she told the social worker, "but he's never harmed a hair of my head." Then she smoothed her skirt and looked down at her white, bloodless hands.

In August, Leon met up with four actors who were forming an improvisational group called OS the Cuff. One of them had a van; they were planning to travel down the eastern seaboard. ("New York is too hard to break into," the girl named Paula said.) Leon joined them. From the start he was their very best member, Emily thought-otherwise they might not have let him in, with his deadwood wife who froze in public and would only take up space in the van. "I can build sets, at least," Emily told them, but it seemed they never used sets. They acted on a bare stage. They planned to get up in front of a nightclub audience and request ideas that they could extemporize upon. The very thought terrified Emily, but Leon said it was the finest training he could hope to have. He practiced with them at the apartment of Barry May, the boy who owned the van. There was no way they could truly rehearse, of course, but at least they could practice working together, sending signals, feeding each other lines that propelled them toward some sort of ending. They-were planning on comedy; you could not, they said, hope for much else in a nightclub. They built their comedy upon situations that made Emily anxious-lost luggage, a dentist gone berserk-and while she watched she wore a small, quirked frown that never really left her, even when she laughed. In fact it was terrible to lose your luggage. (She'd once had it actually happen. She'd lain awake all one night before it was recovered.) And it was much too easy to imagine your dentist going berserk. She chewed on a knuckle, observing how Leon took over the stage with his wide, crisp gestures, his swinging stride that came from the hip. In one skit he was Paula's husband. In another he was her fiancé. He kissed her on the lips. It was only acting, but who knows: sometimes you act like a certain person long enough, you become that person. Wasn't it possible?

They started on tour in September. They left New York in the van with all their worldly goods piled on top, including Emily's and Leon's two fat suitcases and the fluted silver coffeepot that Aunt Mercer had sent for a wedding gift. They went first to Philadelphia, where Barry knew a boy whose uncle owned a bar. For three nights they played out their skits in front of an audience that did not stop talking once, and they had to cull then: ideas from Emily, whom they'd fed a few suggestions and planted on a barstool just in case. Then they moved on to Haightsville, south of Philadelphia. They thought they had a connection there, but that fell through, and they ended up in a tavern called the Bridle Club that was decorated to look like a stable. Emily had the impression that most of the customer^ were married to other people waiting at home. It was a middle-aged crowd-squat men in business suits, women with sprayed and gilded hair and dresses that looked one size too small. These people, too, talked among themselves throughout the skits, but they did offer a few ideas. A man wanted a scene in which a teenager announced to her parents that she was quitting school to become an exotic dancer. A woman proposed that a couple have a quarrel about the wife's attempts to introduce a few gourmet foods to her husband. Both of these suggestions, when they were made, caused a little ripple of amusement through the room, and the group turned them into fairly funny skits; but Emily kept imagining that they might be true. The man did have the seedy, desolate look of a failed father; the woman was so frantically gay that she could very well have just escaped from a stodgy husband. What the audience was doing was handing over its pain, Emily felt. Even the laughter seemed painful, issuing from these men with their red, bunchy faces and the women bearing up bravely beneath their towering burdens of hair. For the third skit, a man sitting with three other men proposed the following: a wife develops the notion that her husband, a purely social drinker who can take it or leave it and quit whenever he wants to, supposing he ever did want to, is in fact an alcoholic, "Pretend like this woman gets more and more out of line," he said. "Pretend like she goes around watering the Jack Daniels, calling up the doctor and the AA people. When he asks for a drink, she brings him ginger ale with a spoonful of McCormick's brandy extract stirred in, When he wants to go out for a friendly night with his buddies, she says-"