Like a household elf, he left behind him miraculously mended electrical cords, smooth-gliding windows, drip-less faucets, and toilet tanks hung with clever arrangements of coat-hanger wire to keep the water from running. "It must be wonderful," Emily told Bonny, "to have him with you all the time, fixing things," but Bonny just looked blank and said, "Who, Morgan?" Well, Bonny had her mind on other matters. She was helping one of her daughters through a difficult pregnancy. The baby was due in February but kept threatening to arrive now, in early November; the daughter had come home to lie flat on her back for the next three months. It was all Bonny could talk about. "When she sits up just a little, to straighten a pillow," she said, "I have this picture of the baby falling, just tumbling out of her like a penny out of a piggy-bank, you know? I say, 'Lizzie, honey, lie down this instant, please.' It's turning around my view of things. I used to think of pregnancy as getting something ready, growing something to finish it; now all I think of is holding something back that is going to come regardless. And Morgan! Well, you know Morgan. Always off somewhere, he really has no comprehension… At night he comes home and reads her stories from the operas. He's taken up an interest in the opera, has he told you? Such a crazy man… 'Don Giovanni encounters a statue and invites it home to supper,' he reads. 'Sounds like something you would do,* I tell him. He reads on, I believe he thinks that Liz is still a child, in need of bedtime stories; or maybe he just likes an excuse to read them himself-but for day-to-day things' For bringing trays to her and emptying bedpans!" 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 Lament. 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, or terminations of marriage, at least, and my mother is aging and her memory isn't what it ought to be… but somehow it's as if this were all a story, just something that happened to somebody else. It's as if I'm watching from outside, mildly curious, thinking, So this is what kind of life it is, eh? You would suppose it wasn't really mine. You would suppose I'd planned on having other chances- second and third tries, the best two out of three. I can't seem to take it all seriously."
"Well, I for one have work to do," Leon said, rising.
But Emily told Morgan, "I know what you mean." I — wish I knew, was what she should have said, His manners were atrocious (she often thought); he smoked too much and suffered from a chronic cough that would surely be the death of him, ate too many sweets (and exposed a garble of black fillings whenever he opened his mouth), scattered ashes down his front, chewed his cuticles, picked his teeth, meddled with his beard, fidgeted, paced, scratched his stomach, hummed distractingly whenever it was someone else's turn to speak; he was not a temperate person. He wore rich men's hand-me-downs, stained and crumpled and poorly kept, and over them an olive-drab, bunchy nylon parka, its hood trimmed with something matted that might be monkey fur. He smelled permanently of stale tobacco. When he wore glasses, they were so fingerprinted and greasy you couldn't read his eyes. He was excitable and unpredictable, sometimes nearly manic, and while it was kind of him to manage their affairs the fact was that he could often become… well, presumptuous was the word-pushy, managerial, bending the Merediths to his conception of them, which was not remotely rooted in reality, taking too much for granted, assuming what he should not have assumed. He talked too much and too erratically, or grew stuffy and bored them with lengthy accounts of human-interest items from the paper, grandchildren's clever remarks, and Consumer Reports ratings; while at moments when he should have been sociable-when the Merediths had other guests, at their Halloween party, for instance- he would as likely as not clam up completely and stand around in some corner with his hands jammed deep in his pockets and a glum expression on his face. And his parties! Well, the less said, the better. Combining garbage men with philosophy professors, seating small children next to priests with hearing aids…