Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [101]
Once Morgan asked what she was running for.
“I just am,” she told him.
“I mean, your heart? Your figure? Your circulation? Are you training for a marathon?”
“I’m just running,” she said.
“But why push yourself?”
“I’m not pushing myself.”
She was, though. After a run, there was something intense about her. She’d be glossy with sweat, strung up, a bundle of wiry muscles, vibrating. Her hair, loosened, flew out in an electric spray, each strand as crinkled as her amber-colored, crinkly hairpins. She was so different from other women that Morgan didn’t know quite how to go about her. He was baffled and moved and fascinated, and he loved to slide his fingers down the two new, tight cords behind each of her knees. He couldn’t imagine what it felt like to be Emily.
In the hardware store one afternoon he closed his eyes and said, “Tell me what you see. Be my seeing eye.” She said, “A desk. A filing cabinet. A couch.” Then she seemed to give up. He opened his eyes and found her looking helpless, wondering what he wanted of her. But that was all he wanted: her pure, plain view of things. Not that he would ever really possess it.
Morgan himself wasn’t so fond of exercise. He hated exercise, to tell the truth. (Oh, to tell the truth, he was a much, much older man, and not in such very good condition.) And Leon had no interest in it either. Leon was one of those people who seem permanently athletic without effort. He was in fine shape, heavy and solid, sleekly muscled. He watched Emily’s jogging distantly, with a tolerant expression on his face. “She’s going about it all wrong,” he told Morgan. “She’s driving herself too hard.”
“Ah! Didn’t I say the same thing?”
“She has to be in charge so. Has to win.”
They were sitting on the front stoop of the apartment building on a sunny day in March. The weather felt tentative. After this bitter, shocking winter, people seemed to view spring as a trick. They went on wearing woolen clothes, and removed them piece by piece each day as they grew warmer. Bonny still had her boxwoods shrouded in burlap. She mourned for her camellia buds, which had been fooled into emerging and would surely drop off with the next freeze. But spring continued. The camellia buds opened out triumphantly, a vivid pink with full, bloused petals. Morgan and Leon sat in their shirtsleeves, almost warm enough, too lazy to go in for their jackets, and around the corner came Emily: a little black butterfly of a person with yellow feet, far away. There was something about her running that seemed eternal. She was like the braided peasant girl in a weatherhouse, traveling forever on her appointed path, rain or shine, endearingly steadfast. Morgan felt himself grow weightless with happiness, and he expanded in the sunlight and beamed at everything with equal love: at Leon and the spindly, striving trees and Emily jogging up and away and the seagull wheeling overhead, floating through the chimneys in a languid search for the harbor.
3
Leon’s father had a heart attack, and Leon drove to Richmond to see him. Morgan visited Emily that evening. In the kitchen Gina was mixing a cake for her school’s bake sale. She kept coming into the living room and asking where the vanilla was, or the sifter, or prancing around Morgan and checking all his pockets for the coughdrops she was fond of. Morgan was patient with her. He held his arms out passively while she searched him. Then when she returned to the kitchen, he and Emily made casual, artificial conversation. He might have lounged on the couch beside her in the old days, not giving it a thought, but now he was careful to sit some distance from her on a