by Anne Tyler
“Oh, yes, we have it in leather,” said Mrs. Meredith, dabbing her nose with a handkerchief.
“Maybe Leon ought to take Russian literature,” Emily said. “We read plays too, you know.”
“Let him pass something in his own damn language first,” his father said.
“Oh, well, this is in English.”
“How would that help?” Mr. Meredith asked. “I believe his native tongue is Outer Mongolian.”
Meanwhile Leon was standing at the window with his back to them. Emily felt touched by his tousled hair and his despairing posture, but at the same time she couldn’t help wondering how he’d got them into this. His parents weren’t really the type to make scenes. Mr. Meredith was a solid, business-like man; Mrs. Meredith was so stately and self-controlled that it was remarkable she’d foreseen the need to bring a handkerchief. Yet every week something went wrong. Leon had this way of plunging into battle unexpectedly. He was quicker to go to battle than anyone she knew. It seemed he’d make a mental leap that Emily couldn’t follow, landing smack in the middle of rage when just one second before he’d been perfectly level and reasonable. He flung his parents’ words back at them. He pounded his fist into his palm. It was all too high-keyed, Emily thought. She turned to Mrs. Meredith again. “Right now we’re on Anna Karenina,” she said.
“All that stuff is Communist anyhow,” said Mr. Meredith.
“Is … what?”
“Sure, this tractor-farming, workers-unite bit, killing off the Tsar and Anastasia …”
“Well, I’m not … I believe that came a little later.”
“What is it, you’re one of these college leftists?”
“No, but I don’t think Tolstoy lived that long.”
“Of course he did,” Mr. Meredith said. “Where do you think your friend Lenin would be if he didn’t have Tolstoy?”
“Lenin?”
“Do you deny it? Look, my girl,” Mr. Meredith said. He leaned earnestly toward her, lacing his fingers together. (He must sit this way at the bank, Emily thought, explaining to some farmer why he couldn’t have a loan on his tobacco crop.) “The minute Lenin got his foot in the door, first person he called on was Tolstoy. Tolstoy this, Tolstoy that … Any time they wanted any propaganda written, ‘Ask Tolstoy,’ he’d say. ‘Ask Leo.’ Why, sure! They didn’t tell you that in school?”
“But … I thought Tolstoy died in nineteen …”
“Forty,” said Mr. Meredith.
“Forty?”
“I was in my senior year in college.”
“Oh.”
“And Stalin!” said Mr. Meredith. “Listen, there was a combination. Tolstoy and Stalin.”
Leon turned suddenly from the window and left the room. They heard him going up the stairs to the sleeping quarters. Emily and Mrs. Meredith looked at each other.
“If you want my personal opinion,” Mr. Meredith said, “Tolstoy was a bit of a thorn in Stalin’s side. See, he couldn’t unseat Tolstoy, the guy was sort of well known by then, but at the same time he was too old-line. You knew he was pretty well off, of course. Owned a large piece of land.”
“That’s true, he did,” Emily said.
“You can see it must have been a little awkward.”
“Well, yes …”
“ ‘The fact is,’ Stalin says to his henchmen, ‘he’s an old guy. I mean, he’s just a doddering old guy with a large piece of land.’ ”
Emily nodded, her mouth slightly open.
Leon came pounding down the stairs. He entered the parlor with a dictionary open in his hands. “Tolstoy Lev,” he read out, “1828-1910.”
There was a silence.
“Born in eighteen twenty-eight, died in nineteen—”
“All right,” said Mr. Meredith. “But where is this getting us? Don’t try to change the subject, Leon. We were talking about your grades. Your sloppy grades and this damn-fool acting business.”
“I’m serious about my acting,” Leon said.
“Serious! About play-acting?”
“You can’t make me give it up; I’m twenty-one years old. I know my rights.”
“Don’t tell me what I can or cannot do,” said Mr. Meredith. “If you refuse, I warn you, Leon: I’m withdrawing you from school. I’m not paying next year’s tuition.”
“Oh, Burt!” Mrs. Meredith said. “You wouldn’t do that! He’d be drafted!”
“Army’s the best thing that could happen to that boy,” Mr. Meredith said.
“You can’t!”
“Oh, can’t I?”
He turned to Leon. “I’m driving home with you today,” he said, “unless I have your signed and notarized statement that you will drop all extracurricular activities—plays, girlfriends …”
He flapped a pink, tight-skinned hand in Emily’s direction.
“Not a chance,” said Leon.
“Start packing, then.”
“Burt!” Mrs. Meredith cried.
But Leon said, “Gladly. I’ll be gone by nightfall. Not home, though—not now or ever again.”
“See what you’ve done?” Mrs. Meredith asked her husband.
Leon walked out of the room. Through the parlor’s front windows (small-paned, with rippling glass) Emily saw his angular figure repeatedly dislocating itself, jarring apart and drawing back together as he strode across the quadrangle. She was left with Leon’s parents, who seemed slapped into silence. She had the feeling that she was one of them, that she would spend the rest of her days in heavily draped parlors—a little dry stick of a person. “Excuse me,” she said, rising. She crossed the room, stepped out the door, and closed it gently behind her. Then she started running after Leon.
She found him at the fountain in front of the library, idly throwing pebbles into the water. When she came up beside him, out of breath, and touched his arm, he wouldn’t even glance at her. In the sunlight his face had a warm olive glow that she found beautiful. His eyes, which were long and heavy-lidded, seemed full of plots. She believed she would never again know anyone so decisive. Even his physical outline seemed to stand out more sharply than other people’s. “Leon?” she said. “What will you do?”
“I’ll go to New York,” he said, as if he’d been planning this for months.
She had always dreamed of seeing New York. She tightened her hand on his arm. But he didn’t invite her along.
To escape his parents, in case they came hunting him, they walked to a dark little Italian restaurant near the campus. Leon went on talking about New York: he might get something in summer stock, he said, or, with luck, a bit part Off-Broadway. Always he said “I,” not “we.” She began to despair. She wished she could find some flaw in his face, which seemed to give off a light of its own in the gloom of the restaurant. “Do me a favor,” he told her. “Go to my room and pack my things, just a few necessities. I’m worried Mom and Dad will be waiting for me there.”
“All right,” she said.
“And bring my checkbook from the top dresser drawer. I’m going to need that money.”
“Leon, I have eighty-seven dollars.”
“Keep it.”
“It’s left over from the spending money Aunt Mercer gave me. I won’t have any use for it.”
“Will you please stop fussing?” Then he said, “Sorry.”
“That’s all right.”
They walked back to campus, and while he waited beside the fountain, she went to his dorm. His parents weren’t in the parlor. The two armchairs they had sat in were empty; the upholstery sighed as it rose by degrees, erasing the dents they had left.
She climbed the stairs to the sleeping quarters, where she’d rarely been before. Girls were allowed here, but they didn’t often come; there was something uncouth about the place. A couple of boys were tossing a soft-ball in the corridor. They paused grudgingly as she edged by, and the instant she had passed, she heard the slap of the ball again just behind her. She knocked at the door of 241. Leon’s roommate said, “Yeah.”
“
It’s Emily Cathcart. Can I come in and get some things for Leon?”
“Sure.”
He was seated at his desk, tilted back, apparently doing nothing but shooting paper clips with a rubber band. (How would she ever love another boy after Leon left?) The paper clips kept hitting a bulletin board and then pinging into the metal wastebasket underneath it.
“I’ll need to find his suitcase,” Emily said.
“Under that bed.”
She dragged it out. It was covered with dust.
“Meredith leaving us?” he asked.
“He’s going to New York. Don’t tell his parents.”
“New York, eh?” said the roommate, without much interest.
From the closet by Leon’s bed Emily started taking the clothes she’d seen him wear most often—white shirts, khaki trousers, a corduroy jacket she knew he was fond of. Everything smelled of him, starchy and clean. She was pleased by the length of his trousers, in which she herself would be lost.
“You going with him?” the roommate said.
“I don’t think he wants me to.”
Another paper clip snapped against the bulletin board.
“I would if he asked me, but he hasn’t,” Emily said.
“Oh, well, you’ve got exams coming up. Got to get your A’s and A-pluses.”
“I’d go without a thought,” she said.
“The man wants to travel light, I guess.”
“Is this his bureau?”
He nodded and let his chair thud forward. “You don’t think your picture’d be on my bureau,” he said. “No offense, of course.”
She glanced at the picture—her Christmas present to Leon. It stood behind an alarm clock, still in the deckle-edged cardboard folder supplied by the studio. The person it showed only faintly resembled her, she hoped. Emily hated being made to feel conscious of her physical appearance. She walked around most of the time peering out of the eye holes of her body without giving it much thought, and she found it an unpleasant shock to be pressed onto a piano bench with her head held at an unnatural angle, forced to reflect upon her too light skin and her pale lashes that had a way of disappearing in photographs. “Smile,” the photographer had told her. “This is not a firing squad, you know.” She had given a quick, nervous smile and felt how artificially her lips stretched across her teeth. When the man ducked behind his camera, she’d wiped the smile off instantly. Her face emerged sober and peering, netted by worry, the mouth slightly pursed like her spinster aunt’s.
She didn’t pack the photo. And when she got back to Leon at the fountain, she was lugging not only his suitcase but hers as well.
“I don’t care what you say,” she told him. She started calling this at some distance from him, she was so anxious to get it said. She was puffing and tottering between the two suitcases. “I’m coming with you. You can’t leave me here!”
“Emily?”
“I think we ought to get married. Living in sin would be inconvenient,” she said, “but if that’s what you prefer, then I’d do that too. And if you tell me not to come, I’ll come anyway. You don’t own New York! So save your breath. I’ll ride on the bus one seat behind you. I’ll tell the taxi driver, ‘Follow that cab!’ I’ll tell the hotel clerk, ‘Give me the room next to his room, please.’ ”
Leon laughed. She saw she’d won him. She set down the suitcases and stood facing him, not smiling herself. In fact, what she’d won him with was a deliberate, calculated spunkiness that she really did not possess, and she was alarmed to find him so easily taken in. Or maybe he wasn’t taken in at all, but knew that this was what the audience expected: that when some girl chases you down with her suitcase and behaves outrageously, you’re to laugh and throw your hands up and surrender. Laughter was not his best expression. She had never seen him look so disjointed, so uneven. There was something asymmetrical about his face. “Emily,” he said, “what am I going to do with you?”
“I don’t know,” she told him.
Already she was beginning to worry about that herself.
By evening they were on a Greyhound bus to New York City. By the next afternoon they were settled (it felt more like camping out) in a furnished room with a sink in one corner and a toilet down the hall. They were married Thursday, which was as soon as the law permitted. She’d seen more ceremony, Emily thought, when she got her driver’s license. Marriage didn’t cause as much of a jolt in her life as she’d expected.
Emily found a job as a waitress in a Polish restaurant. Leon—just for the moment—cleaned a theatre after shows. In the early evenings he hung out at various coffee-houses listening to actors and poets give readings. He took Emily along, whenever she didn’t have to work. “Aren’t they terrible?” he would ask her. “I can do better than that.” Emily thought so too. Once they heard a monologue that was so inept that she and Leon got up and walked out, and the actor stopped halfway through a line to say, “Hey, you! Don’t forget to leave some money in the cup.” Emily would have done it—she’d do anything to avoid a scene—but Leon got angry. She felt him draw in his breath; he seemed to grow bigger. By now she knew how far his anger could take him. She lifted her hand to form the shape of his elbow, but she didn’t actually touch him. You should never touch Leon when his temper was up. Then he let go of his breath again and allowed her to lead him away, with the actor still shouting after them.
It turned into a very hot summer, full of rainstorms and muggy black clouds. The heat in their room was like something alive. And they were continually on the brink of having no money whatsoever. Emily had never realized how much money mattered. She felt she had to breathe shallowly, conserve her energy, walk in a held-in, unobtrusive way as she sidled between people who were richer. She and Leon began to fight about how to spend what they did have. He was more extravagant—wasteful, she said. He said she was stingy.
In July, Emily had a scare and thought she might be pregnant. She felt trapped and horrified; she didn’t dare tell Leon. So when she found she wasn’t pregnant after all, she couldn’t share her relief with him, either. She kept that experience in her mind. She kept examining it, trying to make sense of it. What kind of marriage was it if you couldn’t tell your husband a thing like that? But he would have flown into a rage, and then sunk in on himself like over-risen bread. It was her idea, marrying, he’d say; and she was the one always harping on what they couldn’t afford. She pictured the scene so clearly that she almost believed it had happened. She held it against him. Her eyes filled with tears sometimes as she recalled how badly he’d behaved. But he hadn’t! He had never been given a chance (he would say)! She went on blaming him anyhow. She visited a family-planning clinic and she told them that her husband would kill her if she ever got pregnant. Of course she meant it figuratively, but she could tell from the way the social worker looked at her that in this neighborhood you couldn’t always be sure of that. The social worker glanced at Emily’s arms and asked her if she had any other problems. Emily wanted to talk about her separateness, about how she’d kept her pregnancy scare a secret from her own husband, but she knew that wasn’t a serious enough problem. In this neighborhood, women were getting murdered. (She felt how frivolous she must seem to the social worker; she was wearing her leotard and wrap skirt from Modern Dance I.) Women were getting mugged in this neighborhood, or beaten up by their husbands. Emily’s husband would never lay a finger on her. She was certain of that. She rested in a circle of immunity, she felt.
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?
