by David Bergen
Why of course—didn’t every man? And yet, what were his motives? Especially now with Leah, who had become his unattainable ideal. This was not unique. Petrarch had Laura, Novalis had thirteen-year-old Sophie, and Kierkegaard at twenty-four fell for fourteen-year-old Regine. Phaedria used to wait in a barbershop for his zither player: If only she, if she would only, would that she might only soon, soon come back. The subjunctive was the grammatical form fullest of longing. Perhaps all of life hinged on those two words, if only. Take his father, who in the autumn of his life could not even name his own son, let alone his desire and lust. His father should have been more active, should have had more women and not settled for the perfect breasts of his wife, who was now dead; had fallen over in church one day, crumpled into the pew from a heart attack. Or maybe it wasn’t about action at all. It might simply be the capacity to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time, and understand that there were emotions connected to the thoughts.
If only I had been a better father, thought Morris.
Opportunity wasted. Though action could still be taken. There was Libby, and Meredith, and little sweet-breathed Jake. And there was knowledge to be gained.
Over a year and a half ago, at the end of winter, Morris’s much-loved professor from his university days, a Dr. Karle, died of pancreatic cancer. Morris had not known that Dr. Karle was sick and so his death had come as a shock. He had seen Karle six months earlier, on the street, riding a bicycle that was too small for his six-and-a-half-foot frame. Morris had been in his Jaguar, idling at a stoplight, when Karle had ridden by, pedalling painfully, and Morris had felt in that moment a sense of embarrassment, though he could not know for sure if it was for himself or for the professor. Morris did not go to the funeral. He disliked funerals, not because he was afraid of death but because, as he preferred to say, he didn’t want to waste his time on contemplating mortality and singing dirgelike hymns. And of course, Martin had died just a month before Dr. Karle. Still, in the weeks following, Morris had been sorry about his decision not to be present at the funeral. He heard through acquaintances that the service had been inimitable, that the message, given by a former student of Karle’s, had asked the question, “What is the best life?” The speaker had then held up Karle’s life and thoughts and teachings like a mirror to that question, the same question that Dr. Karle had posed at the beginning of Morris’s first class. Morris had long ago forgotten the answer, and he had decided not to attend the funeral. At the time when he was drowning in his own sorrow, the answer had been thrown his way like a lifeline and he had missed it.
One evening, not long after Karle’s death, Morris climbed up to his attic through the small hole in the ceiling, into the crowded space where mice played amongst the asbestos insulation, pure poison, as he had discovered long after he had allowed his own children to romp in the vermicular fibres, playing hide-and-seek. A poisonous sandbox. Perhaps Martin as a child had been affected by the asbestos and this is what had driven him to the brink. Perhaps all soldiers, like journalists and politicians, had some chemical imbalance, some toxin inside them. Morris had rummaged through dusty boxes and plastic garbage bags that evening, a flashlight clamped between his teeth, looking for his notes and books from that one class that he had taken so long ago, but all he found were children’s clothes and old photos, one of his father as a baby in Russia. On the knee of his own father, who was dressed in the uniform of a medical officer in the Russian army. Morris pushed the photo into his pocket. He climbed down from the attic and discovered that Lucille, in one of her hell-bent cleaning sprees, had thrown out all the books and his course papers. He was devastated. Unmoored. He needed to know the answer to the biggest question. He was the age that Socrates claimed to be the pinnacle of openness and learning and wisdom.
And then, several months later, a sale of Dr. Karle’s books was held in the small chapel at the university. Morris was one of the first to arrive and he scooped up academic journals, novels, books on philosophy, history, the social sciences, pamphlets, textbooks, and first editions. Surprising himself with his own hunger, he went home, stacked the collection against the wall in his study, and over the next while he methodically sorted through his acquisitions. He discovered that Dr. Karle had been a lover of marginalia. His handwriting was clear and clean and even his references were written, for himself, in the perfect style of the Modern Language Association. Semicolons and commas all in place. For some reason, this greatly impressed Morris. It meant that the man was serious, that he cared. Morris had brought home Adorno, Buber, The Republic, Barth, and Tillich. Karle had, in Tillich’s The Courage to Be, with its broken spine and its pages falling out and its minutest marginalia, noted a section on non-being, something that Morris sensed should be pertinent for him. After all, wasn’t he struggling with exactly that? Parmenides sacrificed his own life trying to get rid of non-being; Augustine used the concept to point a finger at human sin—this was entirely familiar to Morris: Boehme, the mad mystic, said that everything is rooted in a Yes and a No. And Hegel’s dialectic? Ha, of course, shouted Tillich. And so on, and so on, from Heidegger’s das Nichts nichtet to Sartre’s le néant; everyone was on the bandwagon now, except for Morris, the non-philosopher. If he were wiser and were to write a treatise, and if he knew what he was talking about, he would call the treatise “Non-being According to the Gospel of Martin.” But Morris knew nothing now. He knew only anxiety. And fear, which he willed away. And craving, which smothered the fear and anxiety and choked briefly the inevitability of his approaching death. Read Berdyaev, he noted.
In one of those fall classes so long ago, Karle had addressed the students affectionately, had spoken of mimesis as a necessity in art, and then announced that if he succeeded in this class, the students would leave knowing how to die. “Fear of violent death,” he said, “is a bourgeois idea put upon you from the day you are born.” Morris recalled that there had been a very pretty girl named Natasha Khan in the front row who had full lips and wide wet eyes, and who, when Karle made this statement, had lifted her thin arm and asked if he was trying to scare them. Morris remembered Natasha because he had tried to ask her out and been refused. What a head of hair she’d had. If he recalled correctly, her parents came from Aleppo. She was Muslim in the days when that meant very little to the Western world, though it must have meant something to her because she knew that Morris was Christian in the broadest sense; had even alluded to it in her refusal. Professor Karle had not regarded her question as impertinent. He said, “I didn’t say you were going to die today. Or tomorrow, for that matter. In fact, Miss Khan, you’ll most likely grow to be eighty-five, have seven grandchildren, perhaps marry several times, and travel the world. Men might flock to you. You will be loved. But what you may never figure out is the problem of death.” He held a piece of chalk in the air, arm poised. “And that’s where I come in.”
Morris wondered where Miss Khan was today. If she had married. If she was in fact still alive, and if men had indeed flocked to her. Or had she learned to die well and then done so? He did not know what dying well looked like. Perhaps it was simply on the back end of the continuum of living well, though everyone, even the animal in its pen, was tumbling down the river towards non-being. Was there a “best way” to die, a more graceful manner than not to cut away from this earth? Heraclitus, suffering from edema, treated himself with a liniment of cow manure and then baked himself in the sun. He died the next day and was buried in the marketplace. This was not graceful. This was not “dying peacefully in his sleep.” All beings going and remaining not at all. What a perplexing mystery was the world. Mysteries, Morris had discovered in his reading over the last months, that could not be solved. But books, particularly the old books, specifically Plato’s Republic, allowed him to see with the unarmed eye. This had not made him a better person, not yet. Questions flitted about his brain, and sometimes, on the verge of grasping an answer, he felt a moment of contentment. I am on the earth for no reason other than to be Morris S
chutt. He could not rid himself of the goals he had set so long ago: to be rich, to be famous, to live well. This had been, in his mind, the good life. He had been mistaken. Goodness was a matter of habit. It required practice, just as being an excellent basketball player required practice. You see, he thought, I am still envious and wrathful and I pay women to have sex with me, but at least I am beginning to think about what is reasonable and unreasonable. The fact that he liked his brand-new steel safe was unreasonable, but it gave him pleasure nonetheless. And as far as Leah was concerned, he was pleased that he hadn’t slept with her. This was very reasonable, and so in these two cases he was batting fifty—fifty. Courage and moderation.
Because The Republic had formed the foundation of Karle’s course, it was to this particular book that Morris keenly went now, seeking out the professor’s marginalia, rereading each of the ten books carefully, as if the secret to living well might be found there, though he also understood that the secret was available only to the spirited and careful reader. The theme was justice, the form was dialogues. He had a sudden thought that Plato might be trying to teach him how to talk: to Lucille, to his daughters, to his friends. But this was undemanding thinking, too simple. Karle had written in small print on the title page: “‘Socratic restoration: the feeding of the body and the senses is replaced by the feeding of the mind.’ Leo Strauss, The City and Man.” The feeding of the mind: this was Morris’s intent, but oh, it was difficult. There were times, while reading late at night, when he closed the book and said aloud to himself, “Morris, you’re a stupid fucked-up man.” At times he felt as if he was looking for definitions, a blueprint, and he wasn’t finding it and he would never find it. Insight was allusive, like trying to catch a fish with your bare hands.
His thoughts unruly, he stepped outside again and began to walk, but this time away from Corydon and his neighbourhood. Up Wellington Crescent, past the houses of the wealthy, past the lot where a very rich man used to live. The man now dead, his house torn down to be replaced by some ugly behemoth of stone, his empire run by his sons. Morris had been fond of him. The man liked to play his clarinet in bars, he smoked in public, and he didn’t care about appearances. Too many people cared these days. Morris cared. He had taken to wearing Crest Whitestrips in the evenings, until one day his teeth began to ache and he had to quit. He always checked himself in the full-length mirror that hung on his bedroom door before he went out; made sure that he was clean shaven, that his shirt was ironed, that his pant cuffs were dirt-free and straight. He did not want to appear soiled. Fine clothes could hide a turbulent soul. The first time he hired an escort, not long after he had left Lucille, he had dressed in his Hugo Boss suit and worn a dark shirt and a subtle pink tie. The tie was a signal that he could be soft, that he was not a typical creature. She called herself Rita and he’d found her, too easily he thought at the time, in the Yellow Pages. When she asked if he wanted to take off his clothes, he’d done so carefully, with his back to her, and then slipped under the goose-down quilt. He’d thought: Morris, you are a cliché and a failure. And then he’d thought: No one needs to know about this. He’d foolishly told Rita that he was a sociologist and that this was for research. He was writing a book. She asked if she was the subject or the object. The wordplay had surprised him and the surprise must have shown on his face, because Rita said, “You think I’m dumb, don’t you?” That night and into the next day his tinnitus was elevated and prolonged. He wondered if there was some connection to Rita, to guilt, to exercise. He wrote this down in his Moleskine in the form of a question to be posed to his ENT doctor. “Does casual sex heighten tinnitus?”
The second time he met an escort it had been easier, less embarrassing, but only because he had smoked up beforehand. The tinnitus recurred with a fury, but he found that Advil helped, and so the squeal of bats faded and became the distant pounding of surf, the faint crackle of a radio signal breaking up. He was discovering that guilt could be chipped away; the blight on his conscience had lessened with the second woman. But now that secret life was gone, finished. There would be no more. Disappointment and Leah had cured him. She needed to quit too, to stop seeing strange men, men who were greedier than him, men less inclined towards kindness.
By now he was up towards the park, then around the park until his heels were sore. He sat on a bench and watched the leaves fall from the trees as two boys threw a football, swearing at each other and laughing. The light was pale, almost yellow, and there was the smell of burning leaves. A soft warm wind. The boys’ voices had already slid into adulthood, so deep for such youthful faces, and he recalled Martin at that age, when they would play basketball together at the Jewish centre. Once a week they went there and had a game of one-on-one, a fierce tussle on the hardwood. He was heavier than Martin and used his weight inside, pushing his son around, depending upon garbage shots to keep the score close. But Martin was so quick and in such better shape that the final result was usually lopsided. Still, he felt real pride in his son, revelling in the snap of the mesh as Martin dunked it and whooped with glee. One Saturday afternoon, as they were finishing a game, Morris slid sideways on defence and he heard the pop of his ankle as it turned, and he fell to the floor. He groaned and held his leg as Martin stood over him, asking, “You okay, Dad?” He remembered the moment not so much for the pain of the injury as for the look in Martin’s eyes as he bent towards him, surprised that his own father could appear so helpless as he lay on the gym floor. Where had his power gone? And then Martin had picked him up and Morris, placing his right arm over his son’s shoulders, had felt Martin’s youth, the texture of his muscles through his thin shirt. What a beautiful strong boy, such solid material. And thinking of this now as he sat on the bench, he reflected that we are made of matter and that matter can be destroyed, will be destroyed, as his son was destroyed. All of us are marching towards non-matter, only some of us arrive there sooner than we should. What is crucial, he thought, is to understand how he could still grasp and hold on to the essence of his life, those around him, those who mattered, both dead and alive. And it was Martin, at that moment, who mattered most.
The boys who had been playing football were gone, had floated away like the coloured leaves that tumbled from the trees. The light had grown duller; grey clouds were moving in. These roiling thoughts were not happy, they were more than full of despair. Dr. G had encouraged him to draw happy thoughts, using the verb as if Morris were an artist who could conjure bucolic scenes. It made sense though, that word “draw,” and Morris liked to apply it in a different manner, as if he were drawing from the well of experience. And yet, it so often happened that as he tried to draw happiness he felt himself “withdraw.” Words were difficult. Like the argument they’d had one session about the language of sex. “To have sex, or to make love,” Dr. G had asked. “Which do you do?” Morris had said that making love was a happier and healthier way of living, but perhaps he did not practise it. “I would like to though.”
Dr. G said, “In order to make love you need to work outside of yourself, to lay your hands on the other person and let go, though not totally of course, because if you lose yourself completely, then you are only making half-love.” And he smiled.
Then Morris told Dr. G that his first experience with sex, the first time he’d made love, was when he’d slept with his brother’s girlfriend. And so he told Dr. G the story, but later, he’d been slightly sorry. How was it that the man pulled these confessions from him?
Sitting there on the bench, the odd leaf falling onto his head and shoulders, Morris thought again of his brother. Three months earlier, in late July when the crops were ripening in the fields, Morris had driven out to visit Samuel in Boise. A twenty-two-hour road trip down into North Dakota and then west through Montana and into Idaho. The landscape had shifted from moonlike rocks to rolling hills and wheat fields and then to the irrigated, bright green crop circles of Idaho. Too much time to think as he drove. Thoughts of the past, of childhood, of the teenage years wit
h Samuel, of how he had, in his sixteenth year, stolen Samuel’s girlfriend, Collette. Swooped down like those big birds, cranes, that Ursula had spoken of, and pulled Collette from the murky river. Without a bit of guilt at the time. Samuel had studied French that year and his tutor was Collette, an exchange student from Marseilles. She wore miniskirts and bright stockings and high boots, and Morris, after he had successfully wooed her, had affectionately taken to calling her Barbarella. Samuel had never been concerned with beauty other than, say, the beauty of the Bescherelle and its cold hard logic of verbs and their conjugations. Beauty, in the erotic sense, seemed to escape Samuel. And so when Collette showed an interest in Samuel, pronouncing his name in a drawn-out manner, the lilting effeminate ending surprised him, and then when she asked him if they couldn’t maybe meet after school, he had been so bewildered that he had asked if his brother Morris could come along. Samuel loved Morris, confided in him, admired him, and so it made sense to include him. And this was how Morris met Collette.
On that day the three of them went to a small café near the school. Collette sat on a leather banquette across from the two brothers and talked to them in a mixture of French and English. She had short dark hair and she wore some sort of black tam or a beret and her head was too small for her body. Morris remembered her fingernails, which she bit furiously. Then they walked back to the Schutt house and sat in Samuel’s room, which was always neat and precisely organized; books were stored alphabetically by author, magazines were stacked with the most recent on top, and underwear was folded into drawers next to freshly ironed shirts. Collette, touching the spines of Samuel’s books, discovered various labelled cassette recordings. “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” she asked. Morris grinned and explained that his brother had always been hard of hearing, he wore hearing aids (“Oui, oui, I noticed,” Collette said), and he had, ever since he was a child, kept a record of various conversations.