Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [29]
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, she 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. I’ll 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 hall. 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 in 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 his 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