Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [96]
“He thinks I’m narrow-minded,” Emily said.
Morgan sneezed again.
“He thinks I’m rigid, but he’s the one. He never tries out for plays now, and that gospel-troupe man is still after us but Leon won’t even talk to him. I’m getting claustrophobic. I can’t drive after dark any more because the space is too small—you know, the lighted space the car travels in. I think I must be going crazy from irritation, just from little petty nameless irritations. Then he says that I’m the one who’s narrow.”
Morgan shook a cigarette from an unfamiliar green pack. “See? We’d better elope,” he said.
“Do you think you ought to be smoking?”
“Oh, these are all right. They’re menthol.”
He lit up and started coughing. He stumbled to his feet, as if reaching for more air, and wandered around the office, coughing and thumping his chest. Between gasps, he said, “Emily, you know I’m always here for you.”
“You want some Robitussin, Morgan?”
He shook his head, gave a final cough, and settled on his desk top. Medicine bottles clinked all around him. Emily wheeled her chair back slightly to allow him more room. His socks, she saw, were translucent black silk, and he wore pointy black patent-leather slippers that reminded her of Fred Astaire. He was sitting on her coat, rumpling it, but she decided not to point that out.
“I know you must find me laughable,” he told her.
“Oh, well, I wouldn’t say laughable, really—”
“But I’m serious,” he said. “Let’s stop fooling, Emily. I love you.”
He slid off his desk, disentangling himself with difficulty from her coat, which had somehow twisted itself around one of his legs. Emily stood up. (What did he have in mind?) He was, after all, a grown man, real, lean-bodied. The hunger with which he drew on his cigarette caused her to step behind her chair. But he went on past her. He was only pacing. He walked to the railing, looked over the darkened store below him, and walked back.
“Of course,” he said, “I don’t intend any harm to your marriage. I admire your marriage very much. I mean, in a sense, I love Leon as well, and Gina; the unit as a whole, in fact … Who is it I love? But you, Emily …”
He flicked his ashes onto the floor. “I am fifty-one years old,” he said. “You’re what, twenty-nine or thirty. I could easily be your father. What a joke, eh? I must look ridiculous.”
Instead he looked sad and kind, and also exhausted. Emily took a step in his direction. He circled her, musing. “I think of you as an illness,” he said. “Something recurrent, like malaria. I push the thought of you down, you see. Whole weeks go by … I imagine that I’m somehow deeper when I manage to overcome it. I feel stronger and wiser. I take some pleasure, then, in doing what I’m supposed to do. I carry the garbage out; I arrive at work on time …”
She touched his arm. He dodged her and went on pacing, head lowered, puffing clouds of smoke.
“I persuade myself,” he said, “that there is some virtue in the trivial, the commonplace. Ha! What a notion. I think of those things on TV, those man-in-the-street things where the ordinary triumphs. They stop some ordinary person and ask if he can sing a song, recite a poem … they stop a motorcycle gang. I’ve seen this! Black-leather motorcycle gang and ask, ‘Can you sing all the words to “Some Enchanted Evening”?’ And up these fellows start, dead serious, trying hard—I mean, fellows you would never expect had heard of ‘Some Enchanted Evening.’ They stand there with their arms around each other, switchblades poking out of their pockets, brass knuckles in their blue jeans, earnestly, sweetly singing …”
He’d forgotten all about her. He was off on this track of his own, tearing back and forth across his office. Emily sat down on the couch and looked around her. There was a bulletin board on the wall above the filing cabinet, and it was covered with clippings and miscellaneous objects. An Adlai Stevenson button, a frowsy red feather, a snapshot of a bride, a blue silk rose … She imagined Morgan rushing in with them, the spoils of some mysterious, private war, and tacking them up, and chortling,