by David Bergen
Lucille didn’t seem concerned that he might suffer a stroke. She could be so remote and dismissive. She said, “Libby’s worried about you as well. She thinks that you’re cutting yourself off, not just from the world, but specifically from her.”
“No, no. Never. I’ll talk to her. She can come live here. I’ve always said that my door is open.”
“Except you have one bedroom, Morris. Why would you rent a one-bedroom condo, knowing that your daughter might want to live with you?”
“She can take the bedroom, I’ll move the futon into the living room.”
“Relax, she’s staying in the house here. It’s just that your thinking is all messed up. You say one thing and then behave another way.” She paused and then said, “You sure you’re okay? Do you want to meet for coffee or lunch?”
“We could,” he said, though he didn’t want to. He would end up telling her about Leah, it would just happen. It was like that with Lucille, she pulled things out of him, even the deepest darkest secrets. What scorn she would heap on him if she knew that he hired escorts. “What a dire confused life you lead, Morris,” she would say. “You walk down the street, morally straight-backed, and all the while you keep whores in your closet.” No doubt she would say “whore.” Let us be absolutely frank here.
Lucille spoke again. “Are you still there, Morris?”
He shook himself out of this useless reverie and said, “Yes, I’m here.” He said that the following week was busy, and then on the weekend he might go to the zoo with Jake, Meredith was more willing to let him spend time with Jake these days, and perhaps the week after that they could meet.
She agreed, and then she said that he should call her, anytime he wanted. Okay?
“Yes, I will. Thanks, Lucille.”
And, in spite of all of this, he loved her still. It was good that she didn’t take him too seriously. Just as his own mother had always tempered his father’s melancholy, looking for the joke in life, remaining upbeat. It must have been exhausting, he thought now, maintaining constant happiness. Perhaps this is why she had died young. All that striving for joy had simply tired her heart out. Morris, in one of his sessions with Dr. G, had talked about his mother, had wondered in fact if he had married his mother when he’d chosen Lucille. “They’re somewhat similar,” he said. “Lucille bakes brown bread like my mother did, uses the same recipe, and, like my mother, she has weekly appointments with a chiropractor, and she cajoles me when I’m down, just as my mother humoured my father. Like my mother, Lucille runs from darkness. Or she used to.” And then he’d talked about the habit his mother had, when she prayed, of offering God a litany of events and moments in her life, and then suddenly pausing and saying, “But then, you know all about this.” Morris had laughed and Dr. G smiled, and Morris pointed his finger at the ceiling and repeated, “But then, you know all about this.” He said that his mother had a wryness, as if she were winking at God, at the world, at her own husband. “Maybe she wasn’t fond enough of me,” he said.
“So this is the problem,” Dr. G said. “Your mother didn’t love you well enough. And now Lucille hasn’t loved you hard enough. You want to apportion blame, rather than look seriously at yourself.”
“I’m looking at myself,” Morris said. “It’s just not very pretty. I’d be way more content if I didn’t always have to take myself with me wherever I go. I’m walking around in a fog, with my hands out, feeling blindly. I stand outside of the action, watching, all alone. I am alone.”
A long silence that Morris refused to break. Finally, Dr. G asked, “You were eighteen when your mother died?”
“Yes.”
“So, you were abandoned.”
“Not intentionally.”
“But you felt as if you were.”
Morris shrugged. Looked out the window at the steeple of the church nearby. In this same building, just a few floors below, was the office of his endodontist, Jewish, and just down the street was his ENT surgeon, Jewish as well, who had performed two stapedectomies on Morris. And then there was Dr. Lange, who cared if he could still get it up. What an amazing and tender tribe of caregivers he had.
“Did you cry?” Dr. G asked.
“When?”
“When your mother died.”
“I can’t remember. I don’t think so. I don’t cry easily. Samuel wept like a baby.”
“Your brother?”
“You know he’s my brother. Why would you ask that? Did you have a memory lapse? Listen, there’s not a lot to keep track of here, and if you’re trying to point a finger at me, or poke me in some way, it won’t work.”
Dr. G had picked up his yellow notepad and was writing.
“Did I say something important?” Morris asked. “Or are you making a grocery list?”
Dr. G looked up.
“Your father was what, in his early fifties?”
“I guess. About that.”
Dr. G waited.
Morris nodded finally, and then chuckled.
Dr. G said, “Can you picture him hiring escorts?”
“It wasn’t that easy back then. But no, of course not. Though he did go out with a woman from his church, briefly, after my mother died. Her name was Katya. Of Russian stock. Samuel and I thought it would have been good for him to marry her, but he kept holding up my mother as a template,and no other woman came close. Thirty-three years without sex. Poor man.”
“You have a very narrow view of the world, Morris.”
“I do? How old are you, Dr. G? Do you still have sex?”
Dr. G did not speak. He simply looked at Morris and Morris looked back at him, until Morris sighed and said that his father had been very good at denying himself pleasure. “He was terribly strong, to the point of foolishness. He made such a big deal of carnality that it became a mountain that he was constantly climbing. Eventually, he ran out of oxygen. Just petered out. Hah. Listen, I’ve told you pretty much everything about myself, and about Lucille, and about Martin and my daughters, to the point where I must be boring you. I might as well just say, ‘But you know all about this.’“ Morris smiled, suddenly pleased with himself. Though he was sad, and he wasn’t sure why. He said that he’d cried when Martin died. “So I can cry. But what’s the point? It doesn’t make me feel any better. And it doesn’t make me think any more clearly. I lead a slavish life, and so I try to elevate myself a little, through reading or reflection, but then I tumble again, and I slowly climb back up the same mountain my father created, and I too suck for oxygen. And if I find relief in the arms of a woman who will make my wallet slightly thinner by the morning, so be it. Cash has bought less important things. I’d rather bury myself in the arms of that woman than fork over two thousand for a leather couch. Don’t lecture me about morality, Dr. G. Don’t tell me I have a narrow view of the world. How the hell is that supposed to cure me?”
Morris, troubled by his thoughts, showered, and once calmer, dressed and went down into the street and over to Second Cup. He picked up the newspaper, began to read a front-page article about a soldier who had been killed in Afghanistan, and he folded the paper and set it aside. Two young women with babies in strollers sat across from him. They were talking about breastfeeding and cracked nipples. He listened half-heartedly and then finished his coffee and stepped outside and walked up the street to a consignment boutique where he bought Leah a pair of pale blue high-heeled shoes, Dolce & Gabbana. He knew her size. The night in the hotel he had picked up one of her shoes as she slept, and he had smelled it, even touched his tongue to the smooth inner sole, and in doing so he had noted the number seven. The Dolce & Gabbana shoes had hardly been worn, probably previously owned by a wealthy woman, one of many who frequented this shop, and who had probably bought them on a whim during a trip to New York and then used them once or twice. And then, perhaps because he felt guilt, or perhaps out of pure generosity, he bought Lucille a pair of purple velvet pants whose cloth was wonderful to touch. They were size eight, exactly right, and the legs were
long enough, and for a moment, as he was paying, he imagined delivering them himself and asking her to try them on as he watched. They had done this together many times before, in their earlier and happier life, before children and later, as the children grew up. Lucille, who could be harsh in public, softened immensely in the bedroom. The fact is that they’d both loved sex, and Morris knew that one of the best ways to get into Lucille’s pants was to buy her pants. Morris would giddily shop, purchasing skirts that were too short (“Morris, do you think I am twenty?”), and coloured tights, and boots with narrow heels, and lacy underwear that whether Lucille liked them or not she had to keep, and thin camisoles through which her nipples were silhouetted, and earrings and bracelets, and one time a perfume that was subtly citrus smelling, like lemongrass, and she said, “Don’t buy me perfume, Morris, I don’t wear scents,” but he explained it was for him, that she was to spray it between her legs when she was horny, their secret signal. And even today, whenever he cooked Thai, or he passed by the mound of lemons in Safeway, he was instantly aroused.
He had to admit that she was always generous, that she willingly tried on the array of outfits he bought, as if she knew and accepted that it was his own pleasure he was satisfying, as if he were dressing her up and making her into another, but not in fact another, because when he lustily and hastily removed the new clothes, she was still Lucille. And in her eagerness she became grateful, as if she had willed it, though nothing can be willed, and the clothing, the jewellery, the wishful look in Morris’s eyes, made her appreciative, and they would tumble onto the bed, the brand new acquisitions crumpled beneath them. The thing about Lucille was that she had a ferocious imagination but it was stored away in a vault and it sometimes took Morris days or weeks to unlock that vault because the harder he worked, the more her stubbornness grew. Once, after a particularly long battle that finally ended with his head between her legs, he paused and sighed and looked up at her and said, “Is this worth it?”
Lucille had always gratified him, even as she bested him in an argument. She was intellectually fierce and intensely curious. “Morris,” she liked to say, “we need to talk about our talking.” She claimed, as she should, that he needed to have the words to say it. She would have made an excellent priest, though not being Catholic, he could not be sure whether the words uttered in a confessional were true words or if they were made up. Lucille did not pander to untruths, which was why she disliked Morris selling himself as a columnist. Poor Lucille, married for so long to a materialist.
And so, half aroused by these random thoughts and the smell and texture of the shoes and velvet pants, Morris walked home with a would-be lover in each hand, and he called FedEx and arranged a delivery of a package to Leah’s address and then to Lucille’s. It was like having two wives, though he was sleeping with neither. When a credit-card number was requested, he realized that he had cancelled all of his cards. He asked that if in this cashless contemporary world, he could pay the driver in hard currency. Would that work? The voice on the other end, a sweet child-man, said without a trace of disdain that the total would be seventeen dollars and thirty-three cents and it could be paid in cash, though exact change was required. The driver would pick up both parcels the next working day. Monday. Thank you.
One of Morris’s much-loved novels was Herzog by Saul Bellow. He had read it as a young man and then returned to it recently and been amazed at Moses Herzog’s capacious soul. Here was a man going mad who suffered and joked and wallowed, and in the midst of his madness he wrote unsent letters full of playful and searing intellect to people both dead and alive.
Well, thought Morris, I am not Herzog. I am not a freethinker, I am not out of my mind, and I am not particularly intelligent, but like Herzog, I am a survivor. I will persist. I will keep thinking and I will keep acting. And so he sat down and wrote a column in which he addressed the prime minister.
Dear Sir,
I noticed in a recent press release that Canada has agreed to donate twenty-five hundred surplus C7 rifles to the Afghan National Army, along with training and ammunition. Surplus? Are we so liberal that we have rifles lying around in drawers and sacks that we can donate them willy-nilly to our friends? Who are our friends, sir? And will those friends proceed carefully with these twenty-five hundred rifles? I am familiar with this type of rifle. Sir, all political action is aimed either at preservation or at change. The war we are fighting in Afghanistan is futile. It will not bring change, save change to the families whose dear boys are dying. Do you have knowledge, sir, or is it merely opinion? How do you elevate your poor self? I understand empire and I understand that your opinion echoes the empire south of us, and if I am sad, it is for my own loss, for the horrible change in my life. That change happened when my son, who was a warrior for our country, died in Afghanistan. He was shot by a C7A1 assault rifle, manufactured by Colt Canada.
You call yourself a Christian, Mr. Prime Minister, but what kind of a Christian are you? Do you see the mote in your own eye? I have no mote. Not anymore. It was removed the day my son died. I am no longer a Christian, yet I understand Christ’s teachings. Do you? I envy you your son’s health and vigour. And with envy comes wrath, as you must know. And so my rage provokes me. Can you imagine why? I think not. I think that you might read this as the mutterings of a madman. If indeed you read this.
No one would read it. His was a voice crying in the wilderness. A less than minor prophet, like Haggai, who in the Bible gets two chapters and the line, he who earns, earns wages to put into a purse with holes. Morris knew this purse. In a recent dream, one of those elusive I-am-dreaming dreams, Morris was caught on a busy freeway in a tiny Toyota and he needed to cross to the other side because he had discovered that he was going in the wrong direction. Finally seeing a break in the traffic, he reversed, and just as he crossed the meridian, he fell asleep, his foot slipping from the clutch, but before falling asleep, he saw a Greyhound bus bearing down on him, and though he saw the bus and knew it was going to hit him, only at the last moment did he pull himself up through the layers of sleep.
His life had become like that dream: he was descending through levels of consciousness into a blessed oblivion, without any thought of the future, only to suddenly become aware again of the tumbling of his present existence, and up he rose once more, ready to devote himself to a life of care and duty and misery, to a life of putting his wages into a purse with holes. The one and only time in his recent memory that he had descended and rested without action or thought was the moment when he had been lying naked on a hotel bed and Carla, the woman he was paying, a forty-year-old with red hair, had done as he requested and kissed him from head to toe. But that too had passed. It passed as soon as he thought to himself, This woman is loving me by touching her lips to my frail flesh. The unconscious becomes desire, desire moves one to act, action leads to thought, and in that moment, bliss evaporates.
Morris was never breastfed. He had learned this when his daughter Meredith was just born and his father, visiting the little family in the hospital and watching Lucille struggle with the child at her breast, had announced, completely out of character, that Morris’s mother had not breastfed any of her children. Lucille, perhaps still swooning from drugs, had said that then she must have had the most gorgeous tits in the world. Grandpa Schutt’s mouth had tightened and he cleared his throat and quickly changed the subject.
Only later in life, when Morris took the time to reflect, did he think that a baby at the mother’s breast is experiencing bliss, that this was the one time in the voyage from cradle to grave that no thought was required. And he had missed out. This might be the cause of much of his anguish and delirium. “What drivel,” Lucille would say. But then she was trapped by her own shadow. “We’re all alone in the ocean, Morris,” she had whispered over the phone late one night. “Only you haven’t figured that out yet.” Then on another occasion, perversely proud that he had been tempted and remained a faithful husband, she had waved her hands furiously and cr
ied, “Nonsense.” They were still together and he had returned from a conference in Paris, a symposium of bacchanalian proportions during which he had almost slept with a columnist from England, until the columnist began to talk non-stop of the book she was writing on pet food and how she had four dogs, an Alsatian and three mongrels that she slept with, and at that point Morris, perhaps because he didn’t want to be just another animal in her bed, or perhaps because he had an image of many distressing repercussions, excused himself and went up to his hotel room. When he told Lucille later about the lure of lust and then his moral rectitude, she had said, “Don’t be foolish, Morris. You’ve always wanted a tit in every port.”