The Matter With Morris

by David Bergen

  DAVID

  BERGEN

  The Matter with Morris

  A NOVEL

  Dedication

  To Larry

  Parce que c’est toi, parce que c’est moi.

  Epigraph

  “Oh, for a change of heart,

  a change of heart—a true change of heart!”

  SAUL BELLOW, HERZOG

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Acknowledgements

  P.S. Ideas, interviews & features

  About the author

  About the book

  Read on

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Morris Schutt, aged fifty-one, was a syndicated journalist, well liked and read by many, who wrote a weekly column in which he described the life of a fifty-one-year-old man who drove a Jaguar, was married to a psychiatrist, played pickup basketball, showed a fondness for Jewish novelists, suffered mildly from tinnitus, had sex once or twice a week depending on how much wine he and his wife drank, and who cared for his mother, a hypochondriac and a borderline narcoleptic. There was a son as well, who had just turned twenty and who coloured his mother’s hair every six weeks. He was a gentle, slothful boy. He had tried university, disliked it, and dropped out. He played online poker. He smoked too much weed. There was some concern that he might be dealing, though there were worse things than selling dope—like accosting old women and stealing their purses, or having sex with animals. Morris longed for the true and the beautiful and the good in his column, and though he could not be certain, he anticipated that we are saved by hope. Readers responded with hopeful thoughts. They appreciated Morris’s wry take on the world, his sardonic skepticism, his “straight shooting,” his seeming annulment of the private, and his family’s apparent openness. As is the case with most columnists, readers believed that because Morris wrote in the first person, the life he described was his own. They identified with the domestic dramas, the small failures, the financial burdens, and the difficulties of family relationships. Men especially recognized themselves and wrote to Morris as if he were a friend. As is also the case with columnists, Morris did little to dissuade anyone. As a journalist, he knew the fine line that existed between truth and fiction and he felt he was adept at walking that tightrope. Sometimes, however, he was brought up short by his apparent honesty, by his capacity to appear to be revealing the truth when all he was doing was offering the shell of himself. But he understood that he worked in a temporal, modern world, and if he had doubts or took the time to reflect on the thinness of his thoughts, it did not take long for him to push these doubts aside and then to sit down and write another column.

  And then Morris’s son joined the army as an infantryman, passed through training in Wainwright, Alberta, and within a year and a half he was deployed to Afghanistan. And he died. And everything changed in Morris’s life. His wife let her hair go grey and she stopped having sex with Morris. She confessed that at night, when she knew that her two daughters and her grandson were safely sleeping, she imagined a dark place she might run to, but there was no place far enough, there was no corner dark enough. And Morris, who had always cunningly told the world about his private life, began to lose his grasp of himself. The madness trickled into his columns, and in one of the last pieces he wrote in the late summer of 2007, he borrowed overtly from the seventeenth-century mystic Jacob Boehme, and he descended into the second-person voice, alienating many of his readers.

  You are like a fugitive. The hardness is fixed and you are on a turning wheel, one part of you striving upwards, the other striving downwards, and you are full of both desire and will. So the wheel spins and has no destination and there then results the greatest disquietude, comparable to a furious madness, from which results a terrible anguish. You wish to bend time, to pass through it. Of course. You desperately wish to regain your son. Absolutely. You desire him, you want to experience your own reflection, and so you grasp, you lay out crafty plans, you manoeuvre and beg. Yet, to no avail, because your son is dead. The wheel turns and you have no destination where to arrive.

  His agent, Robert, a rational man with a sharp chin and a distrust of anything contemplative, phoned Morris and said that his columns had become too wistful and he told him to retool them. “Everyone’s threatening dismissal. Everyone. You’re killing your cash cow here, Morris.”

  “I write what I write,” Morris said. He said that he was not a word processor, that he could not just mass-produce essays on demand. “You have no sense of art.”

  “Your own life has seeped too much into these columns,” Robert said. He liked to string together words like “seeped” and “too much.” He smelled a loss of income and he was panicking.

  “This is a first for you,” Morris said. “All this time I’ve stolen from my own life, and not happily, I should say. I’ve sold myself to the highest bidder, to readers who are fond of human interest and self-reference and biography. Given them the aging mother who is based on my father, the remote spouse, the son who dyes his mother’s hair, the pot smoking, the fumbled sexuality, the American brother who is a duplicate of my own brother, Samuel, and my grandchild whom I’m not allowed to see. And finally I offered up my dead son, hoping it would bring some peace. All of this, and now you complain about seepage? You are a philistine and you are, contrary to your highfalutin sense of yourself, astonishingly middle class.”

  “Before.” Robert paused and then sighed, and Morris imagined him leaning forward as if to convey a secret. “Listen. Before, when you first began writing this column, you were generous. Of course you excavated your own life, but you did it circumspectly, with a kind of mockery. You nailed the truth in a lighthearted manner. Lately, you’ve become too serious. Bleak. Nobody wants to read about unhappiness. What the fuck is all this mysticism?”

  “The reader doesn’t mind.”

  “But he does. He’s complaining. The letters! Numbers are way down. You’re frightening people. Christ, you’re frightening me. Take a leave. Sort things out. Better than losing the column completely. You need this column. You need the money. It’ll carry you through to old age. Find a good person to talk to, and when you’re ready to come back, your column will still be here. But take some time.”

  Morris closed his eyes, then opened them. “I’ve been thinking that I could just drop out of sight and there could be a note from the editor saying that I have cancer, or that I died quickly, without warning. Perhaps an aneurism.”

  “Jesus, Morris. You don’t want to kill yourself. I’ll handle it. It will be done tastefully. Keep writing the columns for yourself and at some point you will pass through this.” His tone was wry. He had read Morris’s piece written in the second-person voice and hadn’t liked it and now he was mimicking him. But gently. He said, “How’s Lucille? You talk to her?”

  “We talk. Though not lately. She’s seeing someone else.”

  “You should find someone else.”

  “I have. Ursula.”

  “She’s married, Mo. To a dairy farmer. You had her once in a hotel room in Minneapolis. That’s not a relationship. She’s Dutch, for God’s sake. What is it, you like guttural noises?”

  “We didn’t have sex. We talked.” Morris was sorry that he had ever told Robert about Ursula. He had confessed it in a moment of weakness, or perhaps he had wanted to appear potent.

  “You feed each other poison. This isn’t good. Stop throwing bottles into the sea and think about your column. Your gravy train.”

  “I’m tired of talking abou
t myself. I get nothing back. Anyway, Robert, the column’s your gravy train.”

  “That’s true, that’s true. I don’t mind admitting it. But I worry about you. I talked to Lucille myself yesterday.”

  “Don’t. She’s not part of this.”

  “She worries about you. She feels guilty.”

  “I can’t be responsible for her guilt. Anyway, you’re my agent, Robert, not my therapist. My private life is none of your concern—not Lucille, not my children, and certainly not Martin.”

  “Well, you did offer him up to the public. You wrote about him and you talked about him and you laid him out on a platter. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but you use people in your column.”

  “You think so? This is sobering. Listen, I’m going to hang up and go smoke something illicit. Okay, Robert? I’m hanging up now.” And he did, though there was a squawk from the other end, Robert trying to convince him of something, but he throttled the noise and laid down the phone. He leaned forward and removed his glasses. He was feeling old. His knees were sore. He’d played a game of noon-hour basketball yesterday at the Jewish centre, a collection of young men who were terrifically quick and a few older men like himself who had to measure their output, and who then later in the steam room complained about sex: too much, not enough, too quick, sometimes aborted. The men were Jewish, they made fun of themselves, they took the world and held it and studied it. They were both generous and hard. Morris wanted to be Jewish. He imagined that this might have made him a more interesting person; more spontaneous, passionate and complicated, though Lucille had already called him complicated in the extreme. (She said that his desire to be Jewish was a secret wish for tenderness and affection. “You’re isolated, Morris. You think that love is over there somewhere, close to the menorah. But maybe it’s right in front of your Russian Mennonite nose.”) She might be right, Morris thought, but she didn’t have to be so smug.

  After a dinner of poached pickerel and wild rice, he made himself an espresso and drank it in one shot. Then he rolled a joint and smoked it on his third-floor balcony overlooking the street below. It was warm for September and in the sky to the west dark clouds were piling up. There were girls in tight jeans and sleeveless tops strolling along the sidewalk. Some had boys on their arms, some had big purses, and many had both. The boys were immature; they seemed coltish and awkward and were always half a step behind the girls. On the corner there was a patio bar that was filling up with mostly young people, though there was an older couple, perhaps in their late forties, who had found a distant table. They were drinking red wine and the woman was smoking and leaning towards the man, touching his arm and then stroking his face. Morris experienced an ache in his chest and stepped inside his condo. He sat down at his computer and began a column that was truncated and elliptical and was lifted from Petrarch.

  You will stand safely on the shore, watching others being shipwrecked and hearing their cries in silence. The spectacle will indeed arouse your pity; but your own safety, compared with others’ danger, will arouse just as much pleasure. That is why I am sure you will eventually get rid of all your sadness. Just so. But then you will think, What if I am not safe on shore? What if I am in the midst of the wreck? And you will have to reckon with yourself.

  He did not write, as he always did, “This is the truth,” which had been the four words with which he had ended every column. This particular piece was unfinished, and in any case, the claim to truth was fraudulent. He’d known this from the beginning, when he had first typed those closing words, but some greater force had guided him. Everyone—his readers, his editors, those who wrote letters back to him—all of them liked that he announced the truth. Only his family rebuked him. Lucille had said that he was exploiting those who loved him. She no longer wanted to be fodder for his writing. He’d argued that if he did not use what was in front of him, the clay of his own life, then he would have nothing to say. “Use your imagination,” Lucille said. She had an office on the fifteenth floor of a downtown corporate building and she would come home and tell Morris about her patients. Though these people remained nameless, they were very real. There was the man who couldn’t have sex unless he was wearing a red dress. The woman who kept changing her identity, using the phone book to discover new names. The adolescent boy who tried to kill his father as he slept. And there were those, ordinary people like him, who were overwhelmed by staying alive. They were addicted to the material, to commerce, to the comfort of stuff. The world was mad. He had used Lucille’s stories, the people she worked with, as a taking-off point for much of his earlier writing. Very much disguised, these people had entered his column. And then there came the day—he can still remember the tiny quiver of recognition—when he began to use his own life, and though he suspected he was betraying his family, he saw himself harnessed to some great fated and unguided wagon. The astounding fact was that his readership grew. People were hungry for the personal and the private. He offered himself up as if he were both Abraham and Isaac, and he laid himself out on the altar and took up the knife as if to slay himself. And how he had succeeded.

  Morris stepped back out onto his balcony and surveyed the street and the patio of the restaurant. The couple he had seen earlier must have just left, because their table was cluttered with dishes and napkins and the edge of the bill fluttered in the breeze. He examined the sidewalk, looking for them. He imagined that they would be heading home, that dinner and wine would be a prelude to a shot of liqueur or a glass of Scotch, which would lead to slow kissing and a removal of clothing and the sex that had been on their minds all evening. A couple of years ago he used to live like that. Now, he augmented his life with novels, occasional truncated sexual escapades, butter tarts, Petrarch, and long evening walks that led him into the depths of a city where two muddy rivers met, where the homeless slept under bridges, and where cars slipped silently by, their occupants vague shadows. There were times, as he came upon another pedestrian, that he willed eye contact, and when this happened the connection was brief, a quick glance and then a turning away. Perhaps he was too forceful, his head too large; perhaps he appeared as just another derelict in a silent city. He found that as he walked his anxiety was released. Past the wide grounds surrounding the legislative building, the late-night coffee shops, stopping at the corner store where an elderly Korean woman in a pale yellow shift read from her Bible, and on down into the guts of the city where young people swam in and out of nightclubs and drunks gathered outside the Occidental Hotel, parrying, sharing cigarettes and ribald stories.

  Not long after Martin died, Morris, in a painful and irrational attempt to justify his son’s death, had begun to stop people on the street and ask them, “Are you free?” It was not a casual question; in fact, it was a hard-found query, full of irony. Using the convoluted logic of politicians and generals, Morris reasoned thus: (1) Freedom is everything. (2) We are in danger of losing our freedom. (3) Our freedom must be defended. (4) We must seek young men to defend that freedom. (5) The young men will die doing so. (6) But they will preserve our liberty. (7) Therefore, we are free. And so Morris began to ask the question “Are you free?” which did not go well, because people misunderstood, thinking that they were being asked if they had a moment to talk, or as one young man said, backing up, “Get lost, fag.” And then Morris began to ask, “Do you have freedom?” and this too was difficult, but it was both general and personal enough to make people think. Or so he thought. “Sir, sir, do you have a minute?” he asked a man in a suit carrying a briefcase near the Trizec Building at the corner of Portage and Main, certainly a banker or a lawyer, and when the man paused and Morris asked the question, the man shook his flat head and he moved on. Morris looked down at himself as if to understand whether he looked like a panhandler, or appeared to be mad. He was wearing jeans and a dark jacket. He had shaved, though he might have looked a little grey around the jaw. He attempted to talk to several more people, two women and an older man, but they too snubbed him, although the m
an, bald and with rheumy eyes, did say that he would be free when he won the lottery. Morris discovered that an answer, any answer, was more possible if he approached those working as the slaves of modern society: waitresses, bank tellers, the barista at Second Cup, taxi drivers. He also learned to couch the question in less obvious ways, as an offhand curiosity, or as part of a random survey. A few people patronized him but most thought him foolish. He was astounded by the indignation, the lack of thought. Of the two people who talked to him at length, one was a drunk standing outside the Sherbrook Inn, the other was a young man on a bicycle to whom Morris offered one hundred dollars to answer one question. The young man refused the money with a smile. He was a Christian, he said. And then he proceeded, over the next half-hour, to try to convert Morris.

  Lucille, when she discovered what he was doing, said that of course no one, absolutely no one, would answer that kind of question, especially when it was asked by some stranger on a city bus. “People are just trying to make it through the day. They don’t want to be accosted,” she said.

  “But it was Martin, and boys like Martin, who made it easier for those people to make it through the day. Martin died so that Ian, our neighbour, could buy a new Lexus every spring. So that your cousin Annalena could send her daughter to Juilliard. So that Libby can be free to choose what colour of iPod she wants.”

  “Or so that,” Lucille said, “as a girl, Libby can choose whether or not to suffer circumcision. Or to be educated.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ, come on. It was the Muslims who saved Plato’s writing from the Christian fanatics.”

  “You’re sad and angry, Morris, and you’re taking it out on complete strangers.” She said she worried about him.

  And still she worries, Morris thought. He sighed, went inside, picked up the phone, and dialled home. Libby picked up.