An alternative is to invest the inanimate objects surrounding Eddie and Miriam with lives - or at least feelings of their own. The saltshaker, for example.

You can describe a saltshaker in innumerable ways. If you give it a personality that reflects Eddie's feelings in the conversation, you can allow the saltshaker to comment on the nature of his emotional state, his honesty, his elusiveness, or the sadness that led him to misuse his wife's savings. It's a matter of detail and emotional color.

So you dwell for a moment on the actual color of the object. You give it whatever color you think necessary to reflect the mood of Eddie's feelings. You describe the color in variegated ways, influenced by the light or the sound of the rain outside or the reflections on the saltshaker's surface from the dahlias in the vase next to it - the shadows or maybe the direct, maddening sunlight that surrounds them and sends their light onto the curve of the shaker on the table. The salt itself, the way it sounds when it passes from the shaker, barely listenable, wounding to the cut surface of Eddie's heart or purposefully damaging, he hopes, to Miriam's foolish expectations of him.

Is the saltshaker on its side, salt spilled across the stained tablecloth? Is it empty? How does that emptiness somehow fill Eddie's heart?

Do its contents provide a life-giving, innocent celebration to Miriam herself, the small detail that heralds her final, sought-after freedom from Eddie? Does the salt provide the applause that electrifies her understanding that she is a woman finally on her own, finally in possession of her own feelings? Or will she miss Eddie, seeing him now, the way he made love to her so feelingly, the smile he gave her so often, as scattered in the white inconsequence of the few grains of salt on the empty plate?

The selection you have of such objects is of course endless. You have the whole world to choose from, and every possible combination of details from the world, every one of them waiting in your imagination. Everything you put into a scene that is intended to anchor it in some sort of "reality" can be used to shape that reality, color it, give it emotions, give it life, and give it meaning.