Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [92]
Emily nodded gravely. She sympathized with Bonny: he must be exasperating to live with. But, after all, it wasn’t Emily who had to live with him.
She recalled how odd he’d seemed when they first knew him—his hats and costumes, his pedantic, elderly style of speech. Now he seemed … not ordinary, exactly, but understandable. She was beginning to want to believe his assumption that events don’t necessarily have a reason behind them. Last month she and Leon were sitting with him in Eunola’s Restaurant when Morgan glanced out the window and said, “How funny, there’s Lamont. I thought he was dead.” He didn’t act very surprised. “That happens more and more often,” he said cheerfully. “I often think I see, for instance, my mother’s father, Grandfather Brindle, walking down the street, and he’s been dead for forty years. I tell myself he might not really have died at all—just got tired of his old existence and left to start a new one without us. Who’s to say it couldn’t happen? Someplace there may be a whole little settlement—even a town, perhaps—full of people who supposedly died but really didn’t. Have you thought of that?”
Then Leon gave a tired hiss, the way he did when Emily said something silly. Well, why shouldn’t there be such a town? What was so impossible about it? Emily sat straighter, and looked guiltily into her lap. “The world is a peculiar place,” Morgan said. “Tottery old ladies, people you wouldn’t trust to navigate a grocery cart, are heading two-ton cars in your direction at speeds of seventy miles per hour. Our lives depend on total strangers. So much lacks logic, or a proper sequence.”
“Jesus,” said Leon.
But Emily felt encouraged; everything looked brighter. (This was shortly after she’d come back from Taney. Morgan’s kind of spaciousness sounded wonderful to her.) She smiled at him. He smiled back. He was wearing a furry Russian hat, now that the weather had turned. It sat on his head like a bear cub. He leaned across the table to Leon and told him, “Often I fall into despair. You may find that funny. I seem to be one of those people whose gloominess is comical. But to me it’s very serious. I think, in ten thousand years, what will all this amount to? Our planet will have vanished by then. What’s the point? I think, and I board the wrong bus. But when I’m happy, it’s for no clearer reason. I imagine that I’m being very witty, I have everyone on my side, but probably that’s not the case at all.”
Leon let out his breath and watched the waitress refilling their cups.
“Oh, I’m annoying you,” Morgan said.
“No, you’re not,” Emily told him.
“Somehow, it appears I am. Leon? Am I annoying you?”
“Not at all,” Leon said grimly.
“I tend to think,” Morgan said, “that nothing real has ever happened to me, but when I look back I see that I’m wrong. My father died, I married, my wife and I raised seven human beings. My daughters had the usual number of accidents and tragedies; they grew up and married and gave birth, and some divorced. My sister has undergone two divorces,