Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [63]
“Were you working on something special?” asked Emily, motioning toward the typewriter.
“Yes,” Bonny said. She handed Emily a cup of coffee and sat down next to her.
“Um … what do you do for a living, Mrs. Gower?”
“I’m Morgan’s wife for a living.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Yes,” Bonny said, “but do you see that it’s a full-time job? It keeps me busy every minute, I tell you. Oh, from outside he seems so comic and light-hearted, such a character, so quaint, but imagine dealing with him. I mean, the details of it, the coping, stuck at home while he’s off somewhere, wondering who he thinks he is now. Do you suppose we couldn’t all act like that? Go swooping around in a velvet cape with a red satin lining and a feathered hat? That part’s the easy part. Imagine being his wife, finding a cleaner who does ostrich plumes. Keeping his dinner warm. Imagine waiting dinner while he’s out with one of his cronies that I have never met—Salvation Army bums or astrologists or whatever other awestruck, smitten people he digs up.”
Emily set her cup down.
“You think I don’t appreciate him. You wonder why he married me,” Bonny said.
“No, no,” said Emily. She looked across at Morgan, who seemed unperturbed. He was tipping contentedly in his chair, like a child who is confident he’s the center of attention, and puffing on a cigarette. Twisted ropes of smoke hung around his head.
“Emily,” Bonny said.
Emily turned to her.
“Emily, Morgan is the manager of a hardware store.”
Emily waited, but that was the end of it. Bonny seemed to be expecting her to speak. “Yes,” Emily said, after a minute.
“Cullen Hardware,” Bonny said.
“She knows that, Bonny,” Morgan said.
“She does?”
Bonny stared at him. Then she asked Emily, “You don’t think he’s a … rabbi or a Greek shipping magnate?”
“No,” Emily said.
She decided not to mention how they’d met.
Bonny pressed her fingers to her lips. There were freckles, Emily saw, dusting the back of her hand. After all, she was a pleasant woman; she gave a little laugh. “You must think I’ve lost my mind,” she said. “Crazy Bonny, right? Morgan’s crazy wife, Bonny.”
“Oh, no.”
“It’s just that I worried you might have been … misled. Morgan’s such a, well, a prankster, in a way.”
“Yes. I know about that.”
“You do?” Bonny said.
She glanced over at Morgan. Morgan smiled seraphically and blew out a whoosh of smoke.
“But I think he’s trying to give it up,” said Emily.
“Oh, I hope so!” Bonny said. “Why! It takes so much ingenuity to manage some of that foolishness … think what he could accomplish if he used that brain for sensible things! If he straightened out. If he decided to go straight.”
“Not much,” said Morgan cheerfully.
“What, dear?”
“There’s not much I could accomplish. What do you imagine I’d be doing instead?”
“Oh, why … just attending to things. I mean, attending to where you belong.” She turned to Emily. “There’s nothing wrong with a hardware store. Is there? My family’s always done well in hardware; it’s nothing to be sneezed at. But Uncle Ollie says Morgan’s heart’s not in it. What’s the good of a store, he says, where you have to positively wrest the merchandise from the manager? Assuming you can find the manager. I tell Uncle Ollie, ‘Oh, leave him alone. Cullen Hardware is not the be-all and end-all,’ I tell him, but it’s true that Morgan could get more narrowed in. He doesn’t know how to say no. He never refuses to be swept along.”
“Mostly it’s muscles,” Morgan said.
This must have been something he’d told her before; Bonny rolled her eyes at Emily. Morgan turned to Emily and repeated it. “It’s a matter of muscles,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
“A matter of following where they lead me. Have you ever gone out to the kitchen, say, and then forgotten what for? You stand in the kitchen and try to remember. Then your wrist makes a little twisting motion. Oh, yes! you say. That twist is what you’d do to turn a faucet on. You must have come for water! I just trust my muscles, you see, to tell me what I’m here for. To drop