Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [28]
“I’ll go to New York,” he said, as if he’d been planning this for months.
She had always dreamed of seeing New York. She tightened her hand on his arm. But he didn’t invite her along.
To escape his parents, in case they came hunting him, they walked to a dark little Italian restaurant near the campus. Leon went on talking about New York: he might get something in summer stock, he said, or, with luck, a bit part Off-Broadway. Always he said “I,” not “we.” She began to despair. She wished she could find some flaw in his face, which seemed to give off a light of its own in the gloom of the restaurant. “Do me a favor,” he told her. “Go to my room and pack my things, just a few necessities. I’m worried Mom and Dad will be waiting for me there.”
“All right,” she said.
“And bring my checkbook from the top dresser drawer. I’m going to need that money.”
“Leon, I have eighty-seven dollars.”
“Keep it.”
“It’s left over from the spending money Aunt Mercer gave me. I won’t have any use for it.”
“Will you please stop fussing?” Then he said, “Sorry.”
“That’s all right.”
They walked back to campus, and while he waited beside the fountain, she went to his dorm. His parents weren’t in the parlor. The two armchairs they had sat in were empty; the upholstery sighed as it rose by degrees, erasing the dents they had left.
She climbed the stairs to the sleeping quarters, where she’d rarely been before. Girls were allowed here, but they didn’t often come; there was something uncouth about the place. A couple of boys were tossing a soft-ball in the corridor. They paused grudgingly as she edged by, and the instant she had passed, she heard the slap of the ball again just behind her. She knocked at the door of 241. Leon’s roommate said, “Yeah.”
“It’s Emily Cathcart. Can I come in and get some things for Leon?”
“Sure.”
He was seated at his desk, tilted back, apparently doing nothing but shooting paper clips with a rubber band. (How would she ever love another boy after Leon left?) The paper clips kept hitting a bulletin board and then pinging into the metal wastebasket underneath it.
“I’ll need to find his suitcase,” Emily said.
“Under that bed.”
She dragged it out. It was covered with dust.
“Meredith leaving us?” he asked.
“He’s going to New York. Don’t tell his parents.”
“New York, eh?” said the roommate, without much interest.
From the closet by Leon’s bed Emily started taking the clothes she’d seen him wear most often—white shirts, khaki trousers, a corduroy jacket she knew he was fond of. Everything smelled of him, starchy and clean. She was pleased by the length of his trousers, in which she herself would be lost.
“You going with him?” the roommate said.
“I don’t think he wants me to.”
Another paper clip snapped against the bulletin board.
“I would if he asked me, but he hasn’t,” Emily said.
“Oh, well, you’ve got exams coming up. Got to get your A’s and A-pluses.”
“I’d go without a thought,” she said.
“The man wants to travel light, I guess.”
“Is this his bureau?”
He nodded and let his chair thud forward. “You don’t think your picture’d be on my bureau,” he said. “No offense, of course.”
She glanced at the picture—her Christmas present to Leon. It stood behind an alarm clock, still in the deckle-edged cardboard folder supplied by the studio. The person it showed only faintly resembled her, she hoped. Emily hated being made to feel conscious of her physical appearance. She walked around most of the time peering out of the eye holes of her body without giving it much thought, and she found it an unpleasant shock to be pressed