by David Bergen
“Does Libby know?” Morris asked.
“Of course. I’m not hiding anything, Morris.”
Which meant that he was. And he wondered how much she knew about his life. If she was aware of his sexual exploits, or lack of them. If she understood that he had been quite impotent since she had left. That he required little blue pills ordered off the Internet and that he was desperately attempting to foolishly save a young girl called Leah, and that even he, Morris Schutt, could not be certain of his motives. Did Lucille know that he had, for a time, searched the Internet for sexual solace, skimming the flicker of images and stumbling across a site where women stripped for the camera? This was lawlessness; it was desire, his desire, and he surrendered to passion. What fun. A forty-three-year-old mother did a striptease, filmed by her husband, or perhaps by a camera on a tripod, while her seven-year-old daughter slept peacefully in the next room. And Morris, the voyeur, partook. Did Lucille know all of this? She had always been able to read him. In fact, she seemed to know what he was going to do, how he was going to act, what he had been thinking, even before he was aware of his own thoughts. And he had learned that she could be seduced by speech and beautiful words. Eros for her was imagination, poetry. Holding the phone tenderly, Morris said, “I love you, Lucille.”
“We know that, Morris. Tell me something new.”
“I’m considering getting hair implants.”
“Oh, don’t, that’s ridiculous. Besides, it doesn’t work, and if it does, you’ll look like you’ve planted a cornfield on your head. All those perfect rows.”
“It’s done randomly. The thing is, I have no grey hair.”
“There is nothing to verify that.”
“Is that why you left me?”
She laughed, somewhat affectionately, and then thanked him for the lovely velvet pants. “They were delivered,” she said. “I was surprised.”
“Why surprised?” Morris asked. “You know that I shop for you.”
“Yes, but not lately.”
“Do they fit?”
“I need a belt, and they’re slightly loose around the bum. But, I’ll wear them.”
Morris was pleased, and he said, as if his tongue had been loosed, that Eleanor had invited him to dinner on Friday. She and Jack were having friends in. “I’ve decided to become more social.”
Lucille was quiet, briefly, and then said, “I should warn you, Morris, I’ve been invited as well.”
“Really? Do you think there’s some mistake?”
“No. Eleanor knows that Harvey and I are no longer together, and she has this notion that you and I should be back together.”
“Does she?” Morris was pleased.
“You go, you need to see people. You’re too locked in. You spend your days reading and walking. Free time is a curse. It can make a person crazy.”
“I’m not mad. Not yet. We’ll both go. We’ll ask Eleanor to seat us beside each other, so that people don’t have to feel discomfort, and we’ll pretend we’re still friends and we’re happy. You can wear those pants I bought you.”
“I won’t pretend, Morris.”
“Of course. You don’t lie.”
“What I meant is that I won’t need to pretend.”
To avoid the direction the conversation was taking, Morris said that Lucille should phone the next day, early morning, to see if he answered. If he didn’t, that meant he’d probably been killed in his sleep by a home invader, specifically the man in the Mazda.
“It’s not like you to be this fearful, Morris.”
“I have his plate number. Can I give it to you?”
She laughed. “Why all this distress?” And she paused, and began to say something, but then stopped herself, and he knew it was a question about Ursula. It was the quick breath she took, the rising tone, and then the exhalation. How brave she was to stop herself. This was something she was working on: trying not to scour his life. After they said goodbye, he thought about what he’d learned lately, not much, and about what Lucille seemed to have learned. A lot. In the past, she would have ranted like a harridan. But now, she closed her mouth and let him stew in his own juices. And then that question, “Why all this distress?” The roots of distress were many and they were bitter. He had learned this reading Cicero. Envy is a form of distress, and so are rivalry, jealousy, pity, anxiety, grief, sorrow, weariness, mourning, worry, anguish, sadness, affliction, and despair. These must all be found and pulled out. Had he pulled out any? It was truly bewildering how tedious his growth was, how slow he was to understand. Perhaps envy was gone, and with it rivalry and jealousy. A neat little package of deadly sins discarded. Or had he merely become indifferent? I don’t believe so, thought Morris. Of course, he had felt jealousy the other night, watching Leah, but that had been abnormally misplaced—his thinking had run wild. There is opinion about the nature of envy, rivalry, and jealousy, and there is knowledge about the nature of these things. And I have moved beyond opinion and acquired some knowledge, haven’t I? I have understood that work, success, money—both the getting and spending of it—and accolades and fame are insubstantial. I have begun, thought Morris, to understand my empty self. And briefly, like a window opening onto the sun, he saw himself, and then the window closed. He would never reach the stage of decision. He was both bastard and ordinary, Socrates’ little bald-headed worker in bronze who has gotten some silver, or in Morris’s case, cash. In a fit of fear one night, Morris woke and dug through his safe and pulled out ten thousand dollars, pushed it into an envelope, and taped it to the back of his fridge. Irrational comfort.
Dr. G, when Morris was still seeing him, had posed a question one day. “Wouldn’t it be interesting,” he said, “if there could be many Morris Schutts, and you would all live different lives. And at the end, just before you died, you gathered together, flew in from different parts of the world, met in a gentlemen’s club perhaps, and there put forth an argument as to which of you had had the best life. The aesthete, though poor, would argue that beauty had augmented his life; the fornicator would extol bodily pleasure; the millionaire would maintain that money had not only extended his life, it had made him happy; the bum would say that he had never worried about the getting and keeping of currency, and so he was the freest; the Morris who had committed murder and spent years in prison would say that because he had fallen so far, he was most aware of grace; the religious Morris would claim that his treasures were laid up in heaven; the faithful Morris, the good husband and father, would claim that he had lived authentically and passed on the passion for the best life to his children. And so on. In the end, though, what you would all be claiming is that the beneficial is fair and the harmful is ugly. But, Morris, what is beneficial and what is harmful? You have only one life. You must choose.”
At the men’s group on Thursday, Mervine said that he had had dinner with his wife on the weekend and then they had had sex in the car after, and when he had dropped his wife off at her apartment, he had asked her if she would move back in with him, and she had said no, she was very happy on her own. “I felt betrayed,” Mervine said. “Used.”
Ezra harrumphed and said that he should be happy. “You got lucky.”
“I don’t think so,” Mervine said. “For a moment, I was happy because Christa put something good into my pocket. But then she stole it back. That’s not lucky.”
“You want everything.” This was Doug, the wise leader. “Maybe you should be content with going out for dinner with Christa, having car sex, and dropping her off at her apartment. Maybe that’s all she can give you right now.”
“That’s not enough.”
“Of course it isn’t. But what are you going to do about it?” Doug turned to the rest of the group and asked what they thought.
The group was split. Half thought Mervine should never see Christa again, the others believed that he should be happy with what he was getting. And hope for more the next time.
Morris offered his opinion—hope for more—and then settled
into a reverie. He was bored with these men. They were so incredibly average. Always the same questions about wives and fathers and potency and money and wayward children. Pain, erotic necessities, the domestic. Never an elevated idea offered. Never, “I just finished reading Plotinus and I’m wondering about this, et cetera.” No quest, no curiosity about thinking or how to think or how to think about thinking. No poetry, no analysis. Just basic gossip and shit and vacuous blather. And the saddest thing? The saddest thing was that he, Morris Schutt, was just like them. Average. And he didn’t want to be average. Doug, early in September at one of the first meetings, had talked about the individual, and how, for all the complaints about the plight one might find oneself in, most people wouldn’t change places with another even if begged or paid. “Most of us are, healthily, in love with ourselves. This is necessary.” True, very true, Morris thought, though he couldn’t imagine why some of these poor men wouldn’t want to be him. He was fit, somewhat popular, not bad looking, had money, drove a Jaguar, slept with escorts, had free time, was intelligent, read and sort of understood Tillich, possessed an okay jump shot, and with the aid of several ancient guides such as Plato, he was slowly crawling up out of the cave. On the other hand, when he looked at the men around him in the group, he wanted nothing to do with their lives. Doug, the egalitarian leader? No, too old and boring. Mervine? Too pitiful, too painful to consider. Peter, the Filipino who lived with seventeen other family members? No, too servile, too simple. Ezra, the fallen Jew? No, though there was something attractive about the tribal camaraderie. Morris had been raised a Mennonite stoic in a tribe that wasn’t a tribe at all, but more a failed cult whose main sources of entertainment were music, wordplay, and suffering. He had shucked that off quite quickly. And so on. If he would be forced to choose under the pressure of torture, he would surrender to the possibility of something beyond this room, into the realm of film. He would be Jason Bourne, and he would marry Mia from Pulp Fiction, and they would live in humid bliss on a small island off the coast of Cambodia.
Later that night, sitting by the fire in Mervine’s backyard, roasting Smokies and drinking beer, Morris told Mervine his thoughts and Mervine laughed and said, “So, Uma Thurman?”
“No, no. Understand that I grew up poor. When I was young, we lived in a parsonage in a small Saskatchewan town. We had no running water, we shat in an outhouse, and we bathed, all of us, in the same water in a tin tub. I had dreams of owning a horse. We killed chickens outside and they squawked and ran headless through the snow, leaving bloody trails, and then we dipped them in hot water and plucked them. Mice ran across the hardwood floor at night. I slept with my brother and borrowed his heat. To escape this Siberia-like landscape we went to the Congo. I still remember sitting in the airport as a young boy, with no plane tickets, waiting for a good Samaritan to come along and offer us passage to Africa. For three days we sat and ate raw wieners and carrots while my father engaged other passengers and told them our story. On the third day, miracle of miracles, a woman travelling to Ecuador listened to my father’s speech, then bowed her head in prayer with him, walked over to the ticket counter, and bought us all round-trip tickets to the Congo. She was the daughter of an oil tycoon from Texas. She was a Baptist. She wanted to play a role in saving the poor people who lived in the heart of darkness. Even at that age, I suffered tremendous embarrassment for our poverty, our need for other people’s goodwill. I don’t want to sleep with Uma Thurman. I want to be the man who doesn’t need others, who is independently wealthy, the man who has everything. Jason Bourne is indestructible, and Uma happens to be the goddess he has acquired. Do you think for a moment that Uma has ever taken a shit in an outhouse?”
It was a cold night. There would be frost on the grass in the morning and Mervine, stepping out of his tent, would leave footprints on the grass. What madness to live this way. Morris squirted ketchup onto a bun and laid a Smokie onto the bed. He chewed slowly, huddling closer to the fire.
Mervine said that he had never known someone like Morris’s father, who must have had some crazy faith.
“He was mad, certainly. A tyrant. If Sam or I did not like the food at dinner, it would still be waiting on our plates in the morning. Nothing would be wasted. Sam sometimes woke up in the middle of the night and finished my food for me, to save me from myself, from my father’s wrath.”
Morris reflected on how wrath itself was passed from generation to generation. Grandfather Schutt, visiting one Christmas, had offered Morris a raspberry-shaped candy from his coat pocket. Pulled it from a cellophane bag and handed it to Morris. And later, Morris had stolen three more candies from the pocket of the coat that had been placed in the closet, and in the process of stealing a fourth, Grandfather Schutt had caught him and taken Morris into the bathroom and pulled down his pants and strapped him with his beautiful leather belt. Grandfather Schutt, dressed in his dark suit and dark blue tie, his pants loose because of the weapon in his hand, spanking Morris’s six-year-old bare bum. What surprise and shame. For what? A little candy? And the wrath was passed on, generation to generation, and so it landed on Morris’s head, and Morris, in a moment of unthinking passion, had spanked his own son off to war.
Mervine was talking, saying that Christa had loved the letter he’d sent her. Had especially loved the care he’d taken with the presentation. A little sprinkle of perfume. And where had he learned to write like that? She never knew.
“So it worked,” Morris said.
“The moon thing. She loved that. She said it made her all soft. She said she wanted to play with my little button nipples.”
“Didn’t I tell you?”
“I was wondering, Morris, if you could write another one, telling her that I’m lonely and that I’m sleeping outside in a tent.”
“Now, you want pity?”
“I want her to know my sadness.”
“The point, Mervine, is not to talk about your own anguish, but to reflect everything back onto her. You love her because she is this and this. You want her back because she is the only key that fits into your lock. Be poetic. Borrow a Shakespearean sonnet and use it as your own. Talk about her as if she were still twenty, hark back to a memory that you know will stir her. Try to recall the first time you held her, describe that, and then tell her you still feel that way. I can’t be your Cyrano.”
Mervine had no idea who Cyrano was and so Morris explained. “And, in the end, the girl receiving the letters has fallen unwittingly in love with the writer of the letters,” he concluded.
Mervine laughed, barely, with some consternation, imagining perhaps that Christa would be Morris’s lover. They parted at midnight, beneath a cold half-moon, Mervine back towards his tent, and Morris into his car, driving over the bridge, across the muddy polluted river, past abandoned buildings and the cold storage where carcasses of sheep and pigs and cows hung from giant hooks.
He knew, of course, that he’d been talking about himself, that he should be the one writing to Lucille. He knew how to win her heart. And if he were to dredge up any moment that would soften her, it would be Morris at the age of twenty-three, having just recently met Lucille, tearing across the city by cab to buy a second-hand bicycle for fifty dollars, a wish that she had uttered nonchalantly one day, about an object that she would absolutely love. Wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing his nose and whispering that what she’d always wanted was a baby-blue woman’s bike with a black saddle and a wicker basket, just a dream, “Morris, oh, wouldn’t I look beautiful?” Her father, a rich man, could have bought her twenty-five of those bikes. But he hadn’t. And there Morris was, having laid the fifty in an old woman’s lap, wheeling the undersized bike out onto the street, pedalling madly and absurdly back across the city, his tall frame swamping the little bike, like Professor Karle, he thought, exactly, and he’d arrived at her place breathless, before Lucille returned from her shift at the hospital, and he’d washed and cleaned the bicycle, strung ribbons across it, and when Lucille came home and saw it
, she wept. Why, he was still not sure. Joy perhaps. Or gratitude. She called him “a beautiful dear man.” Her lover. Though he hadn’t been yet, and he wondered now, passing down Main Street past the late nightclubs where long lines of young people huddled hopefully in the cold, how it was that he had chosen not to sleep with Ursula Frank. He was a coward. Or too chivalrous. Or too cautious. The bicycle story was, in any case, the anecdote that would turn Lucille’s head. She would smile as she remembered, and then she would tell him that he had been such a gentle, attentive man. And what had happened? Well, she had left him for a manipulator, a fixer, a materialist who stuck his small hands into people’s chest cavities. But the good doctor saved people’s lives, didn’t he? And of what use was Morris Schutt, educated amateur, to the world? Of no use, pitiful prick.
The following evening, a Friday, Morris dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt and a dark blue cardigan and polished his wingtip shoes, and he drove over to Eleanor and Jack’s house, which was on the Crescent, a smaller low-slung house flanked by mansions. He parked his car on the street, reached over to the passenger’s seat for the box of butter tarts that he’d picked up at the German bakery, and the bottle of frizzante, and as he did so he looked out the passenger window towards the house where the dinner party was to take place. Through the picture window Morris saw Eleanor moving about, shifting empty chairs around the dining room table. She was talking to someone outside of his vision. He paused. Put the bottle and tarts back onto the seat and felt a sharp pain in his chest. His breathing was shallow and he imagined for a moment that he was having a heart attack. He would die here in his Jaguar, and later that night, after dinner, Lucille would step outside, see his car, and find him, head thrown back against the leather seat in the ignominy of death. “Breathe,” he whispered to himself, and he closed his eyes. He may have slept, because when he opened his eyes again he saw through the picture window that everyone was now seated; five people and an empty chair beside Lucille. The pain in Morris’s chest had abated slightly. Perhaps he had eaten too hastily at lunch, though he realized that he hadn’t really eaten at all, only a little leftover sushi from a takeout dinner earlier that week. Perhaps the fish had been off. He should have thrown out the sushi instead of saving it. He placed a palm against his chest. Lucille kept turning to look at the front door, as if expecting him to appear at any moment. She would be telling everyone that he’d thrown out his cellphone, adopted the life of a Luddite, and so there was no way of making contact. He felt sorry for her. He climbed out of the car and shut the door softly. A cold wind blew up the street, scattering leaves across his feet. He walked up the driveway and then stepped out onto the middle of the lawn. It was dark. He stood on the grass and looked in on the scene of the dining room. The hosts, Eleanor and Jack, had invited Lucille and Morris, as well as another couple Morris was familiar with, Patrice and Suzanne. Patrice worked for the UN in Paris. He had married Suzanne, a local woman who was Jewish, and he himself had converted to Judaism almost right away. He had done what Morris had sometimes wished to be brave enough to do—find a tribe that could envelop him.