Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [37]
Leon had stopped chewing. Emily felt her chest tightening up. Victor was smaller than Leon, and so young and meek he would never hit back. She imagined him cowering against the window, shielding his head with his arms, but she didn’t know how to step in and stop this.
“I realize I’m not as old as Emily,” Victor said, “but I could take much better care of her. I would treat her better; I’d appreciate her; I’d sit admiring her all day long, if you want to know. We’d live a real life, not like this, with her ducked over her sewing machine and you off brooding in some corner, paying her no attention, holding some grudge that no one can guess at … Well, I’ll say it right out: I want to take Emily away with me.”
Leon turned and looked at Emily. She saw that he wasn’t angry at all. He was relaxed and amused, smiling a tolerant, kindly smile. “Well, Emily?” he said. “Do you want to go away with Victor?”
She felt suddenly flattened.
“Thank you, Victor,” she said, pressing her palms together. “It’s nice of you, but I’m fine as I am, thank you.”
“Oh,” said Victor.
“I appreciate the thought.”
“Well,” Victor said, “I didn’t want to sneak around about it.”
Then he sat back down on the windowsill and picked up his plate of beans.
The next morning he was gone—Victor and his tangle of blankets and his canvas backpack and his cardboard carton of LP records. He hadn’t even said goodbye to Mrs. Apple. Well, it was a relief, in a way. How could they act natural after that? And she and Leon did need to be on their own. They were a married couple; it began to seem that they really were married. She was starting to think about a baby. Leon didn’t want one, but in time he would come around. They could use Victor’s room for a workshop now, and then for the baby later on. It was lucky Victor had left, in fact.
But she hated how his woodsy, brown boy-smell hung in the empty room for days after he had gone.
Several times in Emily’s life, similar things had happened. Men had seemed to affix themselves to her—but not to her personally, she thought. What they liked was their idea of her. She remembered a boy in her logic class who used to write her notes asking if she would take down her hair for him. Her hair: a bunch of dead cells that had nothing to do with her. “Think of it as longer, thinner fingernails,” she had written back coolly. She disliked being seen from outside that way—as someone with blond hair, someone with an old-fashioned face. Once, in New York, a man had started eating every day at the restaurant where she worked, and any time she so much as passed his table he would tell her about his ex-wife, who had also worn braids on top of her head. It was a continuing story: Emily would bring his rolls and he would say, “On our second date we went to the zoo.” She’d refill his coffee cup and he would say, “I’m pretty certain she loved me to begin with.” After a couple of weeks he went away, but Emily couldn’t forget the ex-wife. She was Emily’s other self; they would have understood each other, but she had slipped off and left Emily to take the blame. Now, with Victor, Emily wondered who he’d had in mind. Not Emily, she was sure—poking around in her linty old clothes, hunting up noses for her puppets. It must have been someone else who looked like Emily but had the capacity for a greater number of people in her life. Poor Victor!