Morgan's Passing (11 page)

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 he was her fiancé. He kissed her on the lips. It was only acting, but who knows: sometimes you act like a certain person long enough, you become that person. Wasn't it possible?

They started on tour in September. They left New York in the van with all their worldly goods piled on top, including Emily's and Leon's two fat suitcases and the fluted silver coffeepot that Aunt Mercer had sent for a wedding gift. They went first to Philadelphia, where Barry knew a boy whose uncle owned a bar. For three nights they played out their skits in front of an audience
that did not stop talking once, and they had to cull their ideas from Emily, whom they'd fed a few suggestions and planted on a barstool just in case. Then they moved on to Haightsville, south of Philadelphia. They thought they had a connection there, but that fell through, and they ended up in a tavern called the Bridle Club that was decorated to look like a stable. Emily had the impression that most of the customers were married to other people waiting at home. It was a middle-aged crowd—squat men in business suits, women with sprayed and gilded hair and dresses that looked one size too small. These people, too, talked among themselves throughout the skits, but they did offer a few ideas. A man wanted a scene in which a teenager announced to her parents that she was quitting school to become an exotic dancer. A woman proposed that a couple have a quarrel about the wife's attempts to introduce a few gourmet foods to her husband. Both of these suggestions, when they were made, caused a little ripple of amusement through the room, and the group turned them into fairly funny skits; but Emily kept imagining that they might be true. The man did have the seedy, desolate look of a failed father; the woman was so frantically gay that she could very well have just escaped from a stodgy husband. What the audience was doing was handing over its pain, Emily felt. Even the laughter seemed painful, issuing from these men with their red, bunchy faces and the women bearing up bravely beneath their towering burdens of hair. For the third skit, a man sitting with three other men proposed the following: a wife develops the notion that her husband, a purely social drinker who can take it or leave it and quit whenever he wants to, supposing he ever did want to, is in fact an alcoholic. “Pretend like this woman gets more and more out of line,” he said. “Pretend like she goes around watering the Jack Daniel's, calling up the doctor and the AA people. When he asks for a drink, she brings him ginger ale with a spoonful of McCormick's brandy extract stirred in. When he wants
to go out for a friendly night with his buddies, she says—”

“Please!” said Barry, holding up a hand. “Leave something for us!”

Then everyone laughed, except Emily.

They were appearing at the Bridle Club for three nights, but the second night Emily didn't go. She walked around town instead, until almost ten o'clock, looking into the darkened windows of Kresge and Lynne's Dress Shoppe and Knitter's World. Periodically, carloads of teenagers shot by, hooting at her, but Emily ignored them. She felt so much older than they were, she was surprised she wasn't invisible to them.

In the drugstore, which was the only place still open, she bought a zippered cosmetic kit for traveling, completely fitted with plastic jars and bottles and a tiny tube of Pepsodent. She and Leon were almost penniless at this point. They were having to sleep apart—Emily and the two other women at the Y, the men in the van. The last thing they could afford was a $4.98 cosmetic kit. Emily rushed back to her room, feeling guilty and pleased. She started rearranging her belongings—carefully pouring hand lotion into one of the bottles, fitting her silver hairbrush into a vinyl loop. But she really didn't wear much make-up; the zippered bag took more room than her few cosmetics had taken on their own. It was a mistake. She couldn't even get her money back; she'd used the bottles. She began to feel sick. She went through her suitcase throwing things out—her white school blouses, her jeans, every bit of underwear. (If she wore only leotards, she wouldn't need underwear.) When she was done, all that remained in her suitcase were two extra wrap skirts, two extra leotards, a nightgown, and the cosmetic bag. The small cardboard wastebasket next to her bed was overflowing with filmy, crumpled, shoddy non-essentials.

Their third appearance at the Bridle Club was canceled in favor of the owner's cousin's girlfriend, a torch singer. “I didn't know there still were such things,”
Leon told Emily. He looked depressed. He said he wasn't sure this experience was as valuable as he'd once believed. But Barry May, who was more or less the leader of the group, refused to give up. He wanted to try Baltimore, which was full of bars, he said. Besides, one of the other members, Victor Apple, had a mother living in Baltimore, and they ought to be able to get a free place to stay.

Emily knew as soon as they arrived that Baltimore would not work out. Although they drove miles and miles of it (Victor managed to get them lost), the city continued to strike her as narrow and confining: all those gloomy rowhouses, some no wider than a single room; those alleys choked with discarded tires and bottles and bedsprings; those useless-looking, hopeless men slumped on their stoops. But she took to Victor's mother immediately. Mrs. Apple was a tall, cheerful, striding woman with clipped gray hair and a leathery face. She owned a shop called Crafts Unlimited, as well as the building that housed it, and various craftsmen filled her apartments, some paying only token rent until they could get on their feet. She gave the acting group a third-floor apartment, unfurnished and shabby but clean. It was split by a dark hall, with a living room and a bedroom on one side and a kitchen and a second bedroom on the other side. At the end of the hall was an antique bathroom, against whose window, long ago, the adjoining building had been constructed. You could stand at that window and see nothing but a sheet of old, spongy bricks. For some reason Emily found this comforting. It was the only view she had felt sure of lately.

It seemed to her now that adjusting to new places used up pieces of a person. Large chunks of her had been broken off and left behind in New York, in Philadelphia, in Haightsville—anyplace she had painstakingly set out her mother's silver-backed comb and brush on someone else's peeling bureau and contrived a pretense of familiarity with someone else's flaking walls and high, cracked ceiling. She followed Mrs. Apple
everywhere; she couldn't help herself. She dusted the carvings and the handmade furniture down in the shop and she learned how to work the cash register. She waited on customers during busy periods—not for pay, but for the sunny smell of new wood and freshly woven fabrics, and the brisk, offhand friendliness of Mrs. Apple.

Emily and Leon slept in the front bedroom, in two sleeping bags. Victor spread his tangle of blankets in a corner of the living room. Barry and Paula and Janice slept in the back bedroom, three across. (Emily had given up trying to figure that out.) In the daytime Barry went looking for jobs while the others stayed home and played cards. They no longer practiced their skits or even mentioned them; but sometimes, watching them play poker, Emily had the feeling that to these people everything was a skit. When they lost, they groaned and tore their hair. When they won, they leaped up, flinging their cards to the ceiling, and trumpeted, “Tataa!” and took a bow. Their vowels were broader than most people's, and they italicized so much. You had to talk like that yourself sometimes, just to be heard above the din. Emily found herself changing. She heard herself coming down hard on her words, drawing them out. She caught sight of herself in a mirror once, unexpectedly—her small, dry face as wan as a ghost's, but one arm flung out grandly as if she were standing cloaked and hatted in the center of some stage. She stopped in mid-sentence and folded up again.

The bars in Baltimore were not the kind to want plays going on. They were
drinking bars
, Barry said, and this was a drinking city. At one place he would have had to step over a flatout body, either unconscious or dead, in the doorway; but he hadn't seen much point, he said, in applying there. A week passed, and then two weeks. They were living on a cheap brand of water-packed tuna, and Mrs. Apple had stopped inviting them so frequently to supper. Their greasepaint box somehow fell apart. Tubes of ghastly pink flesh-tone, like fat sticks
of chalk, rolled into corners and stayed there, sending out their flowery old-lady smell. Janice and Paula stopped speaking to each other, and Janice moved her sleeping bag to the kitchen.

Then Barry found a job, but only for himself. A friend of a friend was putting on his own play. Emily wasn't there when he announced it. She'd been helping out at Crafts Unlimited. All she knew was that when she got back, there was Barry packing his knapsack. A swelling was rising on his lower lip, and Leon was gone. The others sat on the floor, watching Barry roll up his jeans with shaky hands. “That husband of yours is insane,” he told Emily. Even his voice shook.

Emily said, “What happened?” and the others all started talking at once. It wasn't Barry's fault, they said; you have to watch out for number one in this world; what did Leon expect? Emily never did sort out the particulars, but she grasped the main idea. She was surprised at how little it bothered her. There was something satisfying about the damage done to Barry's lip. The skin had split where the swelling was highest; she was reminded of an overripe plum. “Oh, well,” she said, “I suppose it's for the best.”

“Mark my words,” Barry told her, “you're living with a dangerous man. I don't know why you're not scared of him.”

“Oh, he would never harm
me,”
Emily said. She couldn't think why Barry was taking this so seriously. Didn't it often happen in these people's lives—drama, extravagant gestures? She removed some hairpins from her hair and pinned her braids higher on her head. The others watched her. She felt graceful and light-hearted.

Janice and Paula went back to New York; Janice planned to accept an old marriage proposal. “I just hope the offer's still open,” she said. Emily had no idea what Paula was going to do, and she didn't care, either. She was tired of living in a group. She got on fine with them, right to the end, and she said goodbye to them
politely enough, but underneath she felt chafed by every word they uttered.

That left Victor. Victor wasn't so bad. He was only seventeen, and he seemed even younger. He was a slight, stooped, timid boy with a frail tickle of a mustache that Emily longed to shave off. Once the others were gone, he moved his blankets to the rear bedroom. He showed up for meals looking shy and hopeful. It was a little like having a son, Emily thought.

By now they were completely out of money, so Emily started work as a paid assistant at Crafts Unlimited. Leon found a part-time job at Texaco, pumping gas. Victor just borrowed from Mrs. Apple. Mrs. Apple lent him the money, but gave out lectures with it. She wanted him to go back to school, or at least take the high-school-equivalency test. She threatened to send him to live with his father, whom Emily had always assumed to be dead. After these lectures Victor would slink around the apartment kicking baseboards. Emily commiserated with him, but she did think Mrs. Apple had a point. She couldn't understand how things had gone this far, even; everyone seemed to be living lives without shape, without backbone. “When you think of it,” she told Victor, “it's amazing your mother ever let you go to New York in the first place. Really, she's a very … surprising woman.”

“Sure, to you,” said Victor. “Other people's mothers always look so nice. Up close, they're strict and grabby and they don't have a sense of humor.”