The Matter With Morris

by David Bergen

  “Why are you doing this?” he said. “I know you’re desperate to explain Martin’s death, and that the simplest way to do this is to have me take the blame, but I wasn’t there, I didn’t pull the trigger. I did not kill him.”

  “I’m not saying that. You’re putting words in my mouth, Morris, just as you put words in other people’s mouths. Why haven’t you ever written a column where you told the reader that your son didn’t die during a battle, or from an improvised explosive device, but that he was shot by one of his own men? You claim to speak the truth and yet no one knows that you, the pacifist, pushed him to sign up, and that, horror of horrors, he was killed by one of his friends. But no, you’d rather talk about roadside bombs and snipers and the heat and the sand and pretend that he died a hero, or was at least shot by the enemy and can be made into a hero. You’ve never admitted that he was killed by friendly fire. Others had to announce this. Why are you so afraid of telling people?”

  There were sparrows sitting on the feeder that hung from the lilac bush. Morris had been out earlier that morning, refilling the feeder, and he had felt, at that moment, a small sense of victory, both in himself and in the world at large, but now Lucille was ruining things. He said, his voice strained, “And what would that help? What could I possibly gain by this? I would only be hurting Tyler, a boy I’ve spoken to, as you know, and a boy you refuse to talk to. You sound so certain, as if you’re the only one who knows the truth. I’m tired of laying out my life, and yours, and Martin’s, before a bestial crowd that gorges on the personal. It’s vulgar and it’s wrong.”

  Lucille said, “I’ve thought about this a long time, and we’ve already discussed it, so it won’t come as a surprise, but I want to live apart from you for a while. I’m quite willing to move out, to find an apartment, or I can stay here. You choose. I think that Libby would like to live with me, I’ve discussed it with her, but of course you would see her as much as you like. She loves you. She’s devastated by this, but she’s strong and she’ll survive.”

  Morris was astonished. “You talked to Libby about this before talking to me?”

  “We’ve discussed this, Morris. For half a year we’ve talked about it. This should not be a surprise.”

  “It is a surprise. I’m flabbergasted. You’re so rigid. You are a miser, a collector. You give just enough to make sure that you get something more in return. Libby said that she wants to live with you?”

  Lucille nodded. “She’s not rejecting you, Morris.” She reached out to hold his hand but he pulled away. “It’s a trial,” she said. “There’s nothing permanent in this.”

  “I’ve heard that before. Exactly what your best friend Margo said to her husband Timothy and now she’s happily ensconced in a condo by the river, entertaining young men with big dicks.”

  “Morris, this isn’t about sex.”

  “I’ll go,” he said. “You can take care of this place.” He waved a hand at the house, aware of the falling-down soffits, the peeling paint, the many unfinished projects that he’d been meaning to get to. What had been a novelty so many years ago, a house that needed a new kitchen, had now become a burden. The year before, a squirrel had made a nest in the eaves; it could be heard scampering along the gutters, storing up nuts and leaves and acorns for the winter. Morris had set a live trap, gently placing peanuts on the tripwire, and when he caught the poor thing, he drove it over to Omand’s Creek and released it into the wild. Only to have it return. Morris swore that the squirrel made it back to the house before he did. And so he reset the trap and caught the same squirrel, stupid animal. He phoned Poulin’s Pest Control and was told that a squirrel had a homing instinct of up to three miles. “Take it across the river,” the woman told him. And so he did, dumping the squirrel into the unsuspecting laps of the folks on the other side of the Red River. And it worked. A house was a haven for crows and mice and ants and chipmunks. Come one, come all, thought Morris. He’d often suggested to Lucille that they should move into a condominium, where there was no need to shovel snow, to repair plaster, to redo the roof, or to make immigrants of squirrels. “We can just sit back and drink and talk and make love,” he’d announced. But she’d balked at the idea of small closets and no garden. Where would she put her perennials? And so they had stayed on, and the house had continued to collapse around them.

  “You’re angry,” Lucille said. “You know that I’m afraid of your anger.”

  “You, of all people, should be willing to work at this.”

  “Me, of all people. I’m not perfect, Morris, I don’t have the answers.”

  He was on the verge of begging, and he hated it. He looked up quickly. “Is there someone else?”

  “No. God, no. No one.”

  “Who’s going to buy your clothes?”

  She reached for his hand again and this time he allowed her to hold it. “We’re not dead, Morris. If you want to buy me a skirt or a sweater, I’d love it.”

  “Who’s going to watch you put it on and take it off? That’s my dominion.”

  She smiled sadly and squeezed his hand.

  And then, too quickly, within several months, she found someone else. Maybe she’d been searching on the Internet, slyly beckoning lovers to join her. And she ended up with the heart surgeon who, Lucille said, held her safely in his arms. If there was any comfort to be found, it came from Morris’s perception that he himself was stronger, more resilient than Lucille, that he was capable of grieving alone.

  Morris had left the letter from Ursula lying on the kitchen table, opened and face up, a few days later. He had never intended to leave it there, though Lucille would have found something premeditated in the act, as if he had wanted to hurt her. The letter was meandering, a detailed description of calving a cow and then a brief account of a shopping trip to Minneapolis, dinner out with Cal, the purchase of new flatware, a haircut, and a bikini wax. When Lucille flashed the letter and threw it at Morris, he feigned astonishment, as if it had dropped from the sky, and then he said, “Oh this,” and then he used the word “innocuous.”

  “Innocuous? What are you saying, Morris? She’s talking about a bikini wax. Who is she?”

  “She’s one of my readers.”

  “And you send each other billets-doux? What century are you living in, Morris? What does she look like?” “I don’t know. I’ve never met her.” “You’ve never met her.” “That’s right.”

  Lucille paused, calculating. When she did this she bit her upper lip, and this annoyed Morris because it made her look childish and wanting. “You have no clue if she’s fat or short or ugly or old?”

  “She’s five eight. That’s what I know.”

  “How old?”

  “Fifty. Forty-five.”

  “Which one?”

  “Forty-five.”

  “Oh, Morris, have you gone stupid? I see this kind of behaviour too much not to recognize it. And I always thought that you and I were somehow above all that. Now who’s the stupid one?”

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “You write her letters. She writes you back. How many times?” Her hands were beginning to wave in the air, her face had become slightly pinched.

  “A few.”

  “I want to see them. How long has this been going on?”

  Morris looked away. He sighed and said, “Half a year.”

  Lucille dropped her hands into her lap and folded them, and as she did this, she closed her eyes. She looked quite old at that moment and Morris had to turn away so as not to be too pleased with how ugly she appeared, which would be another level of deception. Absurdly, he was happy that she had told him that she was leaving him before she found out about Ursula. And yet he was not happy to discover that she could in fact be surprised; it made her appear unguarded, and this saddened him. Her eyes came open. She was raging again. “You—you spend the last six months talking to a strange woman, and yet you can’t say a word to me? We don’t talk anymore, Morris. Haven’t you noticed? I certainly noticed.
I always thought it was all my fault, but now I find out you’re telling secrets to a strange woman who’s not so strange that she can’t tell you she just had a bikini wax. You want me to get a wax? I’d be glad to.” She began to cry.

  Morris reached for her. “I never asked her to get a wax.”

  “You prick.” She pushed him away. “Who is she?”

  “She’s from Minnesota. She lost her son in Iraq, and when she read my piece on Martin, she wrote me about her dead boy. That’s all.”

  Lucille had wiped her face, her cheeks and her eyes, which suddenly brightened with rage. “You talked to her about Martin? You told her about me, about our life, our children, our sadness? It wasn’t enough that you told the world, but then you had to go and tell this woman you say you barely know. What were you thinking?”

  “It’s not important, Lucille. You’re important.” Was this the truth? he wondered.

  She pointed her finger at him. “I never lied to you, Morris. I gave everything back to you. I tried to talk, I wanted to find a way back to you, I wanted to cry with you, to hold you, to talk about Martin, but instead you were talking to her. All your energy was going down there.” She waved her hand south. She looked up, astounded. “You’ve slept with her?”

  “No, no. I told you, we’ve never met.”

  “But when we were having sex, you were thinking about her. You were. I could feel it. I remember now. You had gone away.”

  “That’s not true, Lucille. Ask me if that’s true. Don’t tell me what you think is true.”

  She nodded slowly. “You love her, don’t you. And I mean that in the biggest way. Even if you haven’t met her, you love her for what she writes, for how she talks to you, for the secrets she tells you. You whisper secrets to each other, and how can I compete with that? Should I write you letters, Morris? Is there something secret about me that would still interest you? Or am I just like one of those animals she milks. A cow. Is that how you see me? Do you see me?”

  Morris shook his head throughout this entire speech, until she was finished, and then he said, “I do see you, Lucille. I see you.”

  Her eyes were clear and hard. She said, “I’m so glad Libby’s going to live with me. And I’m so glad that I already told you that I was leaving you. If I hadn’t, if I had found out about this affair and then left you, I’d be even more ashamed.”

  “It’s not an affair.”

  She laughed. “Yes. It is. And you called me a miser.”

  They had sex that night. They had talked throughout the evening and late into the night. At dinner, Libby had been aware of a tension, but then, she had become accustomed to this since Martin’s death. She ate quickly and excused herself. Morris watched her carry her plate to the kitchen and he felt sorry for her. Lucille asked again if she could see the letters, and Morris said that they were private.

  “No, they are secret,” Lucille hissed. “That’s different than private. Private is moral and honourable. A secret withheld from your wife is treachery.”

  How quick and good she was with her words. He couldn’t keep up, never had been able to argue adequately, except in hindsight.

  “I can’t betray Ursula,” he said.

  “You ass.”

  She left the room. He could hear her banging around in the kitchen as he sat cold and culpable in the living room.

  That night, in bed, her voice whispered, “What does she give you that I don’t? Is she stealing your heart?” It was a hot spring day, very humid, and the fan turned slowly above them. Lucille wore a thin T-shirt and no underwear and Morris was naked. Even though they were leaving each other, they still slept in the same bed. Neither of them disagreed with this. They lay under a sheet. Morris again told her that he had not met Ursula and so nothing about this was real. He thought, but didn’t say, that it was like doing card tricks without the cards. “She talks. I talk. There is no heart involved,” he said.

  “Talk to me,” she said. “I need you to talk.”

  He lay there, words falling abstractly through his brain, and he opened his mouth but now nothing came out. He thought some more. Opened his mouth again. Nothing. Finally, he said, “She’s a voice, that’s all. And an ear. I throw a ball at the wall and the ball bounces back. Something solid out there.”

  Lucille began to cry, deep sad sobs dredged up from her belly, and he held her head as she wept.

  She sat up suddenly and began to pummel his chest. “You set Martin up. Did nothing to stop him. You let him run off to a filthy country to shoot a gun at men who have a different God. And you don’t even believe in God.”

  She turned away from him and fell asleep quickly. She had always been adept at that. In the middle of the night she woke him and said, “Hold me.” He did this, and she kissed him and he kissed her back. So familiar she was, so easy. He knew her shape, what pleased her. At some point she climbed on top of him and put him inside her. She called out and pushed her face against his shoulder. Then she slid away and lowered her head and wet the pillow with her tears.

  When he had told his psychiatrist, Dr. G, that he was corresponding with a woman who was a dairy farmer, Dr. G asked, “Is she dangerous?”

  Morris chuckled. “How could she be dangerous? She’s sad. She’s broken up over the death of her son. She needs someone to talk to.”

  “And Lucille? She knows about this?”

  “There’s nothing to say. I don’t even know what Ursula looks like, smells like, how she walks, how big her breasts are.”

  “Why are you talking about her breasts?”

  “She’s a woman. She has breasts.”

  “Perhaps she’s had a double mastectomy. You haven’t seen her.”

  “Well, and perhaps she’s a seventy-year-old male.”

  “Okay.”

  “She’s forty-five. She has no reason to lie.” Dr. G was short and balding with grey tufts of hair over his ears. He wore corduroy pants. A docile Weimaraner lay at his feet. He was Jewish. Morris was pleased that his psychiatrist was Jewish, though non-practising. It made him feel somehow closer to Freud, a source of healing.

  “It appears you would like to have your cake and eat it too,” Dr. G said. And he smiled.

  Morris moved from the house that he’d lived in with Lucille for over twenty years into a newly renovated condominium on Corydon. He bought two leather chairs and a small kitchen table, a few utensils and a frying pan, some cutlery and plates, drove his library over in the back of his Jaguar. He kept only the books he valued greatly, and he arranged them alphabetically. Adorno, Babel, Bellow, Buber, Coetzee, DeLillo, et cetera, Kincaid, Kosinski, Lessing, McCarthy, Nabokov, Niebuhr, O’Connor, et cetera, Roth, Updike, et cetera. All necessary companions. For a bed, he purchased a solid futon that left him stiff and irritable in the morning. The antique bureau and the dining room set that he’d inherited from his parents were delivered by a moving company that he hired. His walls were bare and so he rented a number of paintings from the art gallery. Two watercolours he placed in the living room, the third, titled Bouquet, he hung above his bed. The quiet surprised him. He missed the sound of someone else puttering at the edges of his life. He found a few good choral CDs and played them throughout the day because the voices made him feel less lonely. One day in June, Lucille dropped off his mail, noting with disdain that there was a letter from the farmer’s wife. “But then, you’re free to do as you please now.”

  In his last letter, Morris talked about the failure of his marriage, Lucille’s reaction to the correspondence and his relationship with Ursula. He said: “She calls it a relationship. In fact, she says we ‘re having an affair. She likes to think she is right in most everything, but in this she might be wrong. How can you have an affair with someone you’ve never met? Please, tell me.”

  Her response was brief, hastily written. She asked him if he would meet her in Minneapolis the following weekend. “This must seem very cheeky and it probably won’t work,” she wrote, “but I believe you have to ask for what you wa
nt and then deal with the answer.” She was going to be in Minneapolis by herself for two days and she knew that it took only seven or eight hours to drive from where he lived, and she wanted to meet him. She wrote: “I can feel a real bond between us. You’ve been so honest, and I sense that you need someone to talk to, just as I need someone to talk to. We have our sons in common and I believe that we have much more in common. I’m being aggressive, I know that, and I’ll understand if you never write me again, but I think that it’s important that we see each other, look at each other. Writing letters says only so much, and in the end we have to talk face to face. Don’t you agree?”

  He read the letter twice and then put it aside. He picked it up again almost immediately and read it once more, looking for a trick in the writing, a possible deception, but he found only a pure candour that impressed and excited him. She had said nothing about Lucille and though this was disconcerting, he imagined she might be shading in the spaces. She would be loath to describe the obvious. He had not felt like this since he was much younger and falling in love with Lucille. The world was suddenly full and vibrant. He felt foolish and alive. He wrote back and said yes.

  Morris and Lucille met when she was twenty-four and in the midst of medical school. Morris already had an undergraduate degree and had just received a diploma in journalism from a small college in Vancouver. The world of instruction and training had replaced questions about formation of character, and though he still read hungrily, both for pleasure and learning, he was a practical man. He wanted to make money. After Morris graduated, he returned to the city he’d grown up in and found a job covering the law courts, a typically monotonous beat interrupted by moments of sensationalism and violence. The world he worked in was filled with commoners, losers, and madmen. He first saw Lucille when she was a witness at a murder trial. As a medical student that year, she had treated a man who had come into Emergency with knife wounds to the stomach. The man turned out to be the accused and she had, while suturing his wounds, engaged him in conversation. There was some suspicion on the part of the prosecution that a confession had leaked out and Lucille had been subpoenaed. In court, on the stand, she was collected and sharp. Her hair was swept up in an unfashionable chignon and she wore a dark blue dress and dark blue high heels, and Morris, from his seat in the courtroom, had first noticed the heels and then her hair. She was asked to describe the mood of the accused that day, the nature of his wounds, the nature of the man himself. She was asked if he had confessed to the murder. She said that there had been no admission of guilt. She did not suffer fools, and the prosecutor was a buffoon who pressed her, charged her, was aggressively suggestive. She never succumbed to his assault.