Morgan's Passing (8 page)

Brindle pushed her plate away and set her elbows on the table. She said, “Well, I don't know if … When I talk about him, it sounds so simple, doesn't it? But see, even back in kindergarten he would sometimes act silly and sometimes bore me, and yet other times I was crazy about him, and when we grew up it got worse. Sometimes I liked him and sometimes I didn't like him, and sometimes I didn't even think of him. And sometimes he didn't like me, I knew it; we knew each other so well. It never occurred to me it would be that way with
anyone
. I mean, he was my only experience. You understand what I'm trying to say?”

Plainly, Coquette didn't understand a word. She was growing restless, glancing toward the plate of Oreos on
the sideboard. But Brindle didn't see that. “What I did,” she said, “was marry an older man. Man who lived next door to Mother's old house, downtown. It was a terrible mistake. He was the jealous type, possessive, always fearing I would leave him. He never gave me any money, only charge accounts and then this teeny bit of cash for the groceries every week. For seven years I charged our food at the gourmet sections of department stores—tiny cans of ham and pure-white asparagus spears and artichoke bottoms and hearts of palm, all so I could save back some of the grocery money. I would charge a dozen skeins of yarn and then return them one by one to the Knitter's Refund counter for cash. I subscribed to every cents-off, money-back offer that came along. At the end of seven years I said, ‘All right, Horace, I've saved up five thousand dollars of my own. I'm leaving.' And I left.”

“She had to save five thousand dollars,” Morgan told the ceiling, “to catch a city bus from her house to my house. Three and a half miles—four at the most.”

“I felt I'd been challenged,” Brindle said.

“And it's not as if I hadn't offered to help her out, all along.”

“I felt I wanted to show him, ‘See there? You can't overcome me so easily; I've got more spirit than you think,' ” Brindle said.

Morgan wondered if supplies of spirit were rationed. Did each person only get so much, which couldn't be replenished once it was used up? For in the four years since leaving her husband she'd stayed plopped on Morgan's third floor, seldom dressing in anything but her faded lavender bathrobe. To this day, she'd never mentioned finding a job or an apartment of her own. And when her husband died of a stroke, not six months after she'd left, she hardly seemed to care one way or the other. “Oh, well,” was all she'd said, “I suppose this saves me a trip to Nero.”

“Don't you mean Reno?” Morgan had asked.

“Whatever,” she said.

The only time she showed any spirit, in fact, was when she was telling this story. Her eyes grew triangular; her skin had a stretched look. “I haven't had an easy time of it, you see,” she said. “It all worked out so badly. And Robert Roberts, well, I hear he went and married a Gaithersburg girl. I just turn my back on him for a second and off he goes and gets married. Isn't that something? Not that I hold him to blame. I know I did it to myself. I've ruined my life, all on my own, and it's far too late to change it. I just set all the switches and did all the steering and headed straight toward ruin.”

Ruin
echoed off the high, sculptured ceiling. Bonny brought the cookies from the sideboard; the girls took two and three apiece as the plate went past. Morgan let his chair tip suddenly forward. He studied Brindle with a curious, alert expression on his face, but she didn't seem to notice.

6

N
ow he and Bonny were returning from a movie. They slogged down the glassy black pavement toward the bus stop. It was a misty, damp night, warmer than it had been all day. Neon signs blurred into rainbows, and the taillights of cars, sliding off into the fog, seemed to contract and then vanish. Bonny had her arm linked through Morgan's. She wore a wrinkled raincoat she had owned since he first met her, and crepe-soled shoes that made a luff-luffing sound. “Maybe tomorrow,” she said, “you could get the car put back together.”

“Yes, maybe,” said Morgan absently.

“We've been riding buses all week.”

Morgan was thinking about the movie. It hadn't seemed very believable to him. Everyone had been so sure of what everyone else was going to do. The hero, who was some kind of double agent, had laid all these elaborate plans that depended on some other, unknowing person appearing in a certain place or making a certain decision, and the other person always obliged. Sentries looked away at crucial moments. High officials went to dinner just when they usually went to dinner. Didn't B ever happen instead of A, in these people's lives? Morgan plodded steadily, frowning at his feet. From out of nowhere the memory came to him of the hero's manicured, well-tended hands expertly assembling a rifle from random parts smuggled through in a leather briefcase.

They reached the bus stop; they halted and peered down the street. “Watch it take all night,” Bonny said good-naturedly. She removed her pleated plastic rain-scarf and shook the droplets from it.

“Bonny,” Morgan said, “why don't I own a corduroy jacket?”

“You do,” she told him.

“I do?”

“You have that black one with the suede lapels.”

“Oh, that,” he said.

“What's wrong with it?”

“I'd prefer to have rust,” he said.

She looked over at him. She seemed about to speak, but then she must have changed her mind.

A bus lumbered into view, its windows lit with golden lights—an entire civilization, Morgan imagined, cruising through space. It stopped with a wheeze and let them climb on. For such a late hour, it seemed unusually crowded. There were no double seats left. Bonny settled beside a woman in a nurse's uniform, and instead of finding someplace else Morgan stood rocking
above her in the aisle. “I'd like a nice rust jacket with the elbows worn,” he told her.

“Well,” she said dryly, “you'd have to wear down your own elbows, I expect.”

“I don't know; I might find something in a secondhand store.”

“Morgan, can't you stay out of secondhand stores? Some of those people have
died
, the owners of those things you buy.”

“That's no reason to let a perfectly good piece of clothing go to waste.”

Bonny wiped the rain off her face with a balled-up Kleenex from her pocket.

“Also,” Morgan said, “I'd like a pair of khaki trousers and a really old, soft, clean white shirt.”

She replaced the Kleenex in her pocket. She jolted along with the bus in silence for a moment, looking straight ahead of her. Then she said, “Who is it this time?”

“Who is what?”

“Who is it that wears those clothes?”

“No one!” he said. “What do you mean?”

“You think I'm blind? You think I haven't been through this a hundred times before?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

Bonny shrugged and turned her gaze out the window.

They were near their own neighborhood now. Lamps glowed over the entranceways of brick houses and apartment buildings. A man in a hat was walking his beagle. A boy cupped a match and lit a girl's cigarette. In the seat behind Bonny, two women in fur coats were having a conversation. “I guess you heard the news by now,” one of them told the other. “Angle's husband died.”

“Died?” asked the other.

“Just up and died.”

“How'd it happen?”

“Well, he finished shaving and he put on a little aftershave
and he came back into the bedroom and went to sit on the bed—”

“But what was it? His heart?”

“Well, I'm
telling
you, Libby …”

Morgan began to have an uncomfortable thought. He became convinced that his hand, which gripped the seat in plain view of these two women, was so repulsive to them that they were babbling utter nonsense just to keep from thinking about it. He imagined that he could see through their eyes; he saw exactly how his hand appeared to them—its knuckly fingers, wiry black hairs, sawdust ingrained around the nails. He saw his whole person, in fact. What a toad he was! A hat and a beard, on legs. His eyes felt huge and hot and heavy, set in a baroque arrangement of dark pouches. “He reached for his socks,” the first woman said desperately, “and commenced to unroll them. One sock was rolled inside the other, don't you know …” She was looking away from Morgan; she was avoiding the sight of his hand. He let go of the seat and buried both fists in his armpits. For the rest of the trip he rode unsupported, lurching violently whenever the bus stopped.

And when they reached home, where the girls were doing their lessons on the dining-room table and Brindle was laying out her Tarot cards in the kitchen, Morgan went straight up the stairs to bed. “I thought you'd like some coffee,” Bonny said. She called after him, “Morgan? Don't you want a cup of coffee?”

“No, I guess not tonight,” he said. “Thank you, dear,” and he continued up the stairs. He went to his room, undressed to his thermal underwear, and lit a cigarette from the pack on the bureau. For the first time all day, he was bare-headed. In the mirror his forehead looked lined and vulnerable. He noticed a strand of white in his beard. White hair! “Christ,” he said. Then he bent forward and looked more closely. Maybe, he thought, he could pass himself off as one of those miracles from the Soviet Union—a hundred and ten, hundred and twenty, still scaling mountains with his herd
of goats. He brightened. He could cross the country on a lecture tour. At every whistle stop he'd take off his shirt and show his black-pelted chest. Reporters would ask him his secret. “Yogurt und cigarettes, comrades,” he cackled to the mirror. He took a couple of prancing steps, showing off. “Never anodder sing but yogurt und Rossian cigarettes.”

Feeling more cheerful, he went to the closet for his cardboard file box, which he placed on the bed. He drew intently on his Camel as he padded around, getting arranged: turning on the electric blanket, propping up his pillow, finding an ashtray. He climbed into bed and set the ashtray in his lap. There was a little coughing fit to be seen through first. He scattered ashes down his undershirt. He pinched a speck of tobacco from his tongue. “Ah, comrades,” he wheezed. He opened the file box, took out the first sheet of paper, and settled back to read it.

He lowered the sheet of paper and gazed at the black windowpanes. Miles away from here, he imagined, the windows on Crosswell Street were blinking out, first the left one, then the right one. The baby would stir in her sleep. Leon's hand would drop from the light switch and he would cross the cold floor to their pallet. Then all daytime sounds would stop; there would only be the sifting breaths of sleepers, motionless and dreamless on their threadbare sheets.

Morgan turned his light off too, and settled down for the night.

1969

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