Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [22]
Ruin echoed off the high, sculptured ceiling. Bonny brought the cookies from the sideboard; the girls took two and three apiece as the plate went past. Morgan let his chair tip suddenly forward. He studied Brindle with a curious, alert expression on his face, but she didn’t seem to notice.
6
Now he and Bonny were returning from a movie. They slogged down the glassy black pavement toward the bus stop. It was a misty, damp night, warmer than it had been all day. Neon signs blurred into rainbows, and the taillights of cars, sliding off into the fog, seemed to contract and then vanish. Bonny had her arm linked through Morgan’s. She wore a wrinkled raincoat she had owned since he first met her, and crepe-soled shoes that made a luff-luffing sound. “Maybe tomorrow,” she said, “you could get the car put back together.”
“Yes, maybe,” said Morgan absently.
“We’ve been riding buses all week.”
Morgan was thinking about the movie. It hadn’t seemed very believable to him. Everyone had been so sure of what everyone else was going to do. The hero, who was some kind of double agent, had laid all these elaborate plans that depended on some other, unknowing person appearing in a certain place or making a certain decision, and the other person always obliged. Sentries looked away at crucial moments. High officials went to dinner just when they usually went to dinner. Didn’t B ever happen instead of A, in these people’s lives? Morgan plodded steadily, frowning at his feet. From out of nowhere the memory came to him of the hero’s manicured, well-tended hands expertly assembling a rifle from random parts smuggled through in a leather briefcase.
They reached the bus stop; they halted and peered down the street. “Watch it take all night,” Bonny said good-naturedly. She removed her pleated plastic rain-scarf and shook the droplets from it.
“Bonny,” Morgan said, “why don’t I own a corduroy jacket?”
“You do,” she told him.
“I do?”
“You have that black one with the suede lapels.”
“Oh, that,” he said.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“I’d prefer to have rust,” he said.
She looked over at him. She seemed about to speak, but then she must have changed her mind.
A bus lumbered into view, its windows lit with golden lights—an entire civilization, Morgan imagined, cruising through space. It stopped with a wheeze and let them climb on. For such a late hour, it seemed unusually crowded. There were no double seats left. Bonny settled beside a woman in a nurse’s uniform, and instead of finding someplace else Morgan stood rocking above her in the aisle. “I’d like a nice rust jacket with the elbows worn,” he told her.
“Well,” she said dryly, “you’d have to wear down your own elbows, I expect.”
“I don’t know; I might find something in a secondhand store.”
“Morgan, can’t you stay out of secondhand stores? Some of those people have died, the owners of those things you buy.”
“That’s no reason to let a perfectly good piece of clothing go to waste.”
Bonny wiped the rain off her face with a balled-up Kleenex from her pocket.
“Also,” Morgan said, “I’d like a pair of khaki trousers and a really old, soft, clean white shirt.”
She replaced the Kleenex in her pocket. She jolted along with the bus in silence for a moment, looking straight ahead of her. Then she said, “Who is it this time?”
“Who is what?”
“Who is it that wears those clothes?”
“No one!” he said. “What do you mean?”
“You think I’m blind? You think I haven’t been through this a hundred times before?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Bonny shrugged and turned her gaze out the window.
They were near their own neighborhood now. Lamps glowed over the entranceways of brick houses and apartment buildings. A man in a hat was walking his beagle. A boy cupped a match and lit a girl’s cigarette. In the seat behind Bonny, two women in fur coats were having a conversation. “I guess you heard the news by now,” one of them told the other. “Angle’s husband died.”
“Died?” asked the other.
“Just up and died.”
“How’d it happen?”
“Well, he finished shaving and he put