by David Bergen
Morris said that he had.
“Do you think she would talk to me? Would I be able to call her? Shilo is not far from where you live. I imagine sometimes that you and Mrs. Schutt would come to see me, so that I could look you both in the face and ask for forgiveness. I’d like you to see who I am.”
The boy was smarter than Morris had imagined. This made sense: meet your enemy, let him observe your humanity. “I don’t know, Tyler. I should tell you that she’s still angry.”
“I understand. I would be angry at me. Mr. Schutt, I’m sorry, but I don’t know what to do. I know I’m being selfish, this is what my own mother said. You know what she said? She said, ‘I wouldn’t want to meet the man who shot my son, even if it was an accident.’ But I’m asking anyway.”
“Tyler, you have to understand that Lucille won’t talk to you about Martin.”
Silence. Then, “I won’t make excuses. I have none to make. I just want to say sorry.”
“Listen, she might not talk to you, but you could talk to her. You could try writing a letter.”
“I don’t know. I’m not good at writing.”
“It doesn’t have to be perfect, Tyler. In fact, if it’s rough but honest, it will be more authentic.” What was he doing? What function was he playing here? He was immediately sorry. He said, “Maybe you’ll just have to accept silence, Tyler. People can’t be manipulated.”
“You think so?”
Morris was suddenly tired. He cut Tyler off and said that he had to go. He could hear the disappointment in the boy’s voice, but he ignored it and hung up, aware that he was breathing heavily and that his chest was weighted down.
Two months later, just after he moved into his condominium, he received a letter from Tyler that had arrived at his former house and been delivered to him by Libby. In it, Tyler explained that he’d tried and tried to write a letter to Mrs. Schutt, but the words just came out wrong. He wrote that he sounded like a two-year-old. Then he asked if Morris could help him. “You’re a journalist,” he said. “A writer. Maybe you could help me write the letter to Mrs. Schutt. Think about this, okay?”
Morris tucked Tyler’s note into his briefcase and for several months he ignored it, until one day, while sitting at his desk in his condo and rummaging about looking for something, he came across the letter once again. He reread it. Put it away. Picked it up again.
The following day, in the morning, he sat down and wrote the letter to his wife. It was not easy. His own ego kept getting in the way. And his own pain. Finally, frustrated after several attempts, he gave in to Tyler’s thoughts and told Mrs. Schutt how her son had been killed. Then he wrote:
I can’t imagine your sadness, Mrs. Schutt. I can only imagine that you must hate me. That you must hate the fact that I am walking around on this earth and your son is not. And you must hate me for killing your son. I am sorry. That’s all I can say. I am sorry. I know that you might not accept my apology, and I understand. But I can’t do anything about that. All I can do is ask. I am asking for your forgiveness, Mrs. Schutt. I can’t bring your son back, I can’t fix my mistakes, I can only say I am sorry, and please forgive me.
Sincerely,
Tyler Goodhand
When Morris sat down to write the letter, he had not known what effect it would have on him. As he was writing, he began to cry. Surprised, he paused and thought, Why these tears? And then, Be wary of the man who cries. After he had completed a draft, he was sorely broken. What is the point? he thought. What am I trying to do?
He imagined a conversation with Dr. G.
“What is the function of this project?” Dr. G would ask, his tone lifting upwards on “project.”
“To save the boy. To save Lucille.”
“And who are you, Jesus Christ, that you think you can save everybody?” Poking his finger into Morris’s heart. “And Lucille wouldn’t be furious if she knew?”
“She doesn’t have to know. I’m not going to tell her.”
“Your motives are questionable, Morris. I suspect that deep down you know this.”
The frowsy grey halo, the farting dog at his feet, the DSM IV tome behind him, the painting of the horse on the wall—was this the wizened man who knew him better than he knew himself?
When he sent the draft to Tyler, telling him that he could remove whatever words did not feel right, he maintained a perfunctory and cold tone, perhaps hoping that Tyler would conclude that this was done out of duress, and that Tyler should not think that they were suddenly equals. And then he added that he had left Lucille and was living on his own now. And he told him to send the letter to the same address he had used for the other letter. That’s where Lucille lives, he wrote, and in doing so he understood that this virtuous act might not be quite as virtuous from Lucille’s perspective. So be it, he thought. So be it.
On a Tuesday in late October, a day after he had sent letters to the prime minister, Colt Canada, and Ursula (he imagined the envelopes hurtling through the air), Morris polished his shoes and dressed in his Hugo Boss suit and he put on a tie and drove over to the Fort Garry Hotel where he parked his Jaguar in a wide corner spot, far from fender benders and dangerous others. As he walked inside he thought of Ursula, whom he had rejected, and he suffered a moment of regret. He took a seat in the lounge, close to the piano player, and ordered a Macallan on ice. Only the best for Mr. Schutt. It was eleven o’clock and the lounge was half full: several couples, a group of six boisterous men, a single woman at the bar talking with the bartender. No sign of Leah. He felt foolish, as if he were scouring her life, though he wasn’t; he imagined himself as her protector. He did not expect her to show up in this lounge; he believed that she would go straight to the man’s room, and so he was delighted, surprised, and dismayed when she came in. There she was, on the arm of a tall black man, very well built, whom Morris recognized as a football player that he’d seen on TV, back when Morris had a TV and watched the occasional game. They were a stunning couple full of sexual energy. Morris ducked his head as Leah glanced his way, but she did not see him, in fact, even if she’d looked right at him, he sensed that she would not have seen him. Her vision was clouded by lust. She was wearing a short black dress and high heels and she had a small black-beaded purse that she put down on the table. She sat in profile, so that Morris could see her mouth moving and the bluntness of her nose and the fineness of her jaw. She drank red wine while the football player pulled on a beer. Of course. When a plate of appetizers arrived, egg rolls with a dipping sauce, Leah leaned forward and raised an egg roll and bit delicately, talking all the while, laughing, ducking her head, and offering her hand to the big meaty palm of the young man. A running back with the first name Willy. Morris remembered now. Willy had poor hands, tended to fumble, played intermittently, and was often injured. Be careful, thought Morris, of the man who cannot do his job properly. She had lied to him; she ate with whomever, before fucking and after. He willed her to notice him, to be startled and alarmed. Perhaps he should go over and get Willy’s autograph. But before he could act, the lovers stood and Leah took Willy’s hand, and as they turned, Leah looked right at Morris and then turned away, and she was gone, swept out the door like a football in the arms of wee Willy. Morris ordered another double Scotch and he sat and waited, then he ordered a chicken burger and salad, and while he ate that he saw himself as one of Dante’s characters, at the edge of the cornice that makes a belt around the hill, his head wobbling, his eyelids sewn shut with thread spun from iron.
Several years earlier, at the height of whatever recognition he had acquired as a columnist, flush with the victories of coddled fame, he had received a letter from an angry woman, one of his readers, who had called him a vicious misogynist. The woman’s reasoning was thus: usually, in his columns, he described women by the clothes they wore, by the size of their breasts, preferably small, and by their tall black boots or their high heels, preferably designer stilettos. “Where are the brains of these women?” this writer asked. “Where is
the large woman in Birkenstocks who knows how to talk and think and love? For you, Morris Schutt, she doesn’t exist.”
“Where indeed,” Lucille said when Morris read her the letter. “So you agree?” Morris cried, aghast. “I’m a vicious misogynist?” Lucille had called him ridiculous, he wasn’t a misogynist, she would know that from living with him. Still, he did have his fetishes, didn’t he? “Don’t we all?” he asked, and she said that no, we didn’t all, that was pure rationalization on his part.
Morris shook aside these thoughts, stood and paid the bill in cash. Laid a hundred-dollar bill down on the table and walked out. Why did he do this? Whom was he impressing? Did he think that the waiter would write a letter to the editor of the local paper and say, “Morris Schutt left me a sixty-dollar tip the other night. He is a generous man, absolutely aware of the plight of waiters and waitresses. He should be congratulated.” What did he want? He realized that if this mad behaviour continued, he would be out of money within the year and he’d have to find work. Perhaps he could work as a speech writer for the prime minister. He should have suggested that in his letter, said: “I notice that you could use a new speech writer as your current one makes you sound staid and formal. Loosen up, sir. Words are delightful, they are meant to please. Use them wisely, see them as currency. Imagine that each word is worth one hundred dollars, sir, and if you spend them wisely, rather than throwing them about like chicken feed for the clucking masses, then you will be amazed at the results.”
Or, thought Morris, I could drive a limousine, move rich people like cattle from here to there, listen to them as I drive, eavesdrop on their silliness, their gossip and flirting. I could introduce myself as Morris the Driver, let them either recognize me as the fallen writer, the vicious misogynist, or not. Probably not. You are not as great as you imagine; and not nearly as intelligent. He had hoped, in the last month, that he was gaining knowledge. But his reading was making him more ignorant, or at least making him more aware of his ignorance. Reading The Republic several nights earlier, he had tried to understand what the noble lie was, and not quite getting it, because certainly it was more layered and nuanced than American politicians talking about the “unknown unknowns,” or Canadian politicians nobly lying to the electorate in order to make the public’s life better, he had padded off to the cyber café and Googled “noble lie” and had come up with all kinds of ignorant claptrap, lowly plebes offering analysis that made no sense. Everyone was suddenly an authority on Plato. The Internet was democracy and democracy was failing. And so, reflecting on his own ignorance and the ignorance of others, his wallet slightly emptier, visions of ministerial speech writing in his head and Leah coupling with her football player on the king-size mattress of the hotel room, his Jaguar in the parking lot of the hotel, Morris walked drunkenly and legally home.
The following evening, around supper time, he took note of a car parked on the street outside his condominium, with a small man wearing sunglasses sitting inside. It was nearly dark and the sunglasses were unnecessary, but Morris knew that there were men who liked to hide their eyes in that manner, and this must be one of those men. He noticed the Mazda because it had been there, along with the man, two hours earlier when Morris had gone out to retrieve his car from the hotel. The man was still there, late in the evening, when Morris stood on his balcony in the cool evening, drinking a glass of Primitivo and smoking a cigar. In the morning, the car was gone. Morris spent the day writing a column meant for no one but himself, a circumspect inquiry into where he came from, his roots, inspired by the photograph he’d found in the attic months earlier, of his grandfather regal in the medic’s uniform of the Russian army. It was as if by reversing time and stepping back towards the apocryphal stories of his grandfather, he could understand better the plight of twenty-first-century Morris Schutt. Grandfather Schutt, from the family Schütt, possibly of Swiss descendants, some of whom ended up in Alsace-Lorraine, was a farmer from the steppes. A scanty existence. Every spring, before planting, the grain to be used for seed was soaked in formaldehyde, to make it hardier. This particular spring, Grandfather Schutt soaked it too long. He planted it anyway, not expecting anything to grow. It so happened that a drought fell upon the land, and where every other farmer’s crop was ruined, Grandfather Schutt’s grew because it was tardy growing in the first place, and when a slight rain finally fell, Grandfather Schutt’s farm was one of the few to produce wheat. A famine ensued, people were poor and hungry, and one day in autumn a soldier showed up at the farm, asking for a little wheat. He’d heard that the Schutt farm had grain. Grandfather Schutt gave him a sack of wheat and told him there was no need to pay. A year later, when Grandfather Schutt was conscripted into the army, he went to sign up with a heavy heart. He stood in line for a day, and when it was finally his turn, he approached the soldier behind the small wooden desk. The soldier studied him and said that he recognized him. Wasn’t he the man who a year earlier had given him a sack of wheat? Indeed, he was. And the soldier told Grandfather Schutt to turn on his heel and return home. “Your generosity has been rewarded,” he said.
And what, thought Morris, did one make of this? If he, Morris Schutt, had lived the clean and generous life of his grandfather, would his son Martin still be alive? Not so. Life was not theatre. Good deeds were not rewarded so easily. There was no grand arc of a story. Only novelists were inclined that way. A bus could hit Morris tomorrow when he stepped off the curb into the street. So be it. He deleted everything he had written and stood and stretched. He fried himself a hot Italian sausage and red bell peppers for dinner, crumbled some feta on top, sat alone at his small kitchen table, and ate slowly, ruminating, picturing himself as one of Ursula’s dairy cows. He felt the memory of her in his heart and loins. His world was not Grandfather Schutt’s. He was not a farmer of the steppes; he would never be recruited by the Communists. His existence here in 2007, almost one hundred years after his grandfather’s fateful decision to soak the seeds of grain too long, was founded on commerce and vanity. “Moral virtue” was dead. Grandeur and misère were old ideas. I will live to be a febrile and wild eighty-year-old, thought Morris. He finished eating, wiped his mouth, and felt heavy and slothful. Grandfather Schutt had been a fine dresser, wearing dark suits and ties when everyone else went around in coveralls. He dressed for dinner. Expected the food to be on the table when he entered the dining room and sat down. Expected the rest of his family, his wife and children, to dress well for dinner as well. The clothes made the man. Morris recalled the cut of Grandpa Schutt’s suit jacket, shoulder blades pressing against the smooth cloth. His polished shoes. The knotted tie. This habit had been handed down to him. In order to make himself feel better, he went into the bedroom and changed into a suit and tie. As he did this, he thought of the man who had been parked outside his condo and he was struck by an irrational fear. Perhaps a hit man had been hired to take him out. Some irate reader, a slighted ex-politician, a mafia lord, one of these types had paid to have him killed.
Morris picked up the phone and called Lucille, who was in the middle of cleaning up after dinner. Morris would not be deterred. He told her about his fears, listing the possible hit men, spies, or other dangerous types sitting outside his condo. Lucille laughed. “Are you that important, Morris? You still find yourself indispensable? Who has time to navigate your life?”
“What do you mean, ‘navigate’?”
“You sprinkled your column with gossip, self-righteousness, and personal attacks, and now you imagine that you are so important that someone is out there tracking you down. That’s delusional.” Lucille sounded tired, worn out. Her voice was etched with impatience. Morris said that he was sorry to have bothered her.
“Don’t, Morris. I’m sorry. Listen, today a woman came to my office, it was her first visit, and she told me about her husband who was a soldier in Afghanistan. Since his return he keeps a knife under his pillow, he is irrational, and she worries that he’ll kill her while she’s sleeping. I listened to her tell t
his story and my face went numb. I couldn’t help her. I had nothing to say.”
“Oh, Lucille. How about now, is your face still numb?”
“It’s better. Slightly. She surprised me, you see? The whole episode surprised me. It was like when Martin died. Do you remember?”
He did. In the aftermath, Lucille’s face and limbs had gone numb and so she had gone for tests, had an MRI, believing that she was suffering from late onset of MS. But the neurosurgeon had dismissed that diagnosis. The symptoms, affecting both sides of her body, had been too symmetrical, they did not match those of multiple sclerosis. It was stress related, the doctor had said. Morris asked now if she’d talked to Harvey about her symptoms. He wanted to say “Your doctor lover,” but he restrained himself.
“Oh, Morris, haven’t I told you? Harvey and I are stepping back. I’m not seeing him these days.”
“Really? This is news.” Deep inside, somewhere close to his heart and lungs, he felt an expansive sense of joy and relief. Schadenfreude perhaps. How lovely it was. He postured pity. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yes, I suppose it is news for you. But no, I don’t think that you’re sorry.” Lucille’s voice was resigned and fatigued.
Morris ignored her comment. “Since when?” he asked.
“A week, maybe longer. Yes, longer. Ten days.” “Hmm. Well. When we talked on Sunday this was already known.”
“To me, yes. And to Harvey.”
“It was mutual then?”
“No. This was my wish.”
How cunning she was, making it sound as if she were soft and full of craving: “my wish.” For Lucille, wishes always evolved into cold facts.