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By Root 497 0

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 kind 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 Modern 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 she’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 Off 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