The Matter With Morris (10 page)

Morris stopped talking.

Leah said, “I never heard him say one word against you. It was only good things. If anything, he talked too much about you.”

“What do you mean?”

“It could be tiring. My dad this, and my dad that. He thought you were brilliant.”

“That’s not the Martin I knew.”

Leah reached for his hand and held it again, and let go. “Poor Mr. Schutt.”

“You’re mocking me.”

“Yes. You feel so sorry for yourself. And you’re scared. Like if you had sex with me right now, tonight, it would be the worst thing in the world.”

“Well, that’s true, it would be wrong. Because I know you, and because you knew Martin. I have a very narrow
view of myself. As a young man, I used to chant, ‘Morris must make money.’ I saw money as a way of saving myself. In fact, I have over a thousand dollars in my wallet. Right here, back pocket. And this makes me happy. But even with the fat wallet and everything it can buy, you for instance, I am still the young boy who peeks through a keyhole watching the world at work. In another time, another era, I would be the dirty old man at the peep show. The one eye of yearning, the narrow glimpse. And so I plod along, aware that others might wag their fingers at me. Outside opinion. It weighs me down. Are you enjoying this?”

“You’re funny, Mr. Schutt. I don’t have a clue what you’re saying, but I love the way you talk.”

“I was just thinking that about you. How your voice slips down my ear canal.”

She chuckled. “See? Like that. You say strange things.”

He was silent. He wondered what kind of underwear she was wearing, if any. Desire was a tricky thing. His words were a form of seduction, of opening her up. “The grass was lovely, wasn’t it,” he said, and she agreed, “Hmmm,” and she placed both her hands on her stomach and said, “You’re what, forty-five?”

He laughed. “Fifty-one. Why?”

“I add up the ages of the men I see.”

“Where are you?”

“Nine seven three.”

“Nine hundred and—?”

“Correct.”

“Jesus.” This was sobering. “Including me?”

“No, not you.”

“So, I’m special.”

“Yes.”

“I saw a doctor after Martin died. I went to his office and I told him about myself. I was trying to understand my terrible sadness, and no matter how much I talked about Martin, I couldn’t retrieve him. He was gone. And this wise man, a Dr. G, listened to me talk and talk about wanting to make myself disappear. If Martin no longer existed, then I also wanted to disappear, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to walk away from my family and life, and so I thought I should perhaps kill myself. But I am useless, even at death. Pathetic. If I am both a romantic and a moralist, it is the romantic in me that is in love with love and with death. And he said that love is death. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. He said that to want to disappear is better than just dying, isn’t it? A mystery is more interesting than a suicide. He said that as a columnist I stuck my fingers in my own shit and held it up for the world to see. Not that the reader necessarily saw the shit, but that I perceived it as shit. Perhaps Dr. G was right. I don’t know. I’ve stopped seeing Dr. G. He was an older man who was trying to make me see more clearly, but this scared me and so I walked away. He said, before I left, ‘You seem to need someone to tell you that you have done the right thing, Morris. That you are a good boy. Why is that? And when we choose, there are various opinions of that choice. Yours, your wife ‘s, your children’s, Martin’s. Martin chose to go to war because, you believe, in a moment of anger, you told him to go. And then you could not stop him. He died, and now
you must come to terms with how you loved him. You cannot forgive yourself.’

“But I thought that he had misunderstood. I wasn’t talking about forgiveness. I was only interested in making myself disappear. I had already disappeared, I think. I am still doing that. I don’t have any friends. I live alone. I have poor relations with my daughters. I sleep with escorts. I have a woman I write to in Minnesota, not far from Minneapolis. Her name is Ursula. She is close to my age, and if I were sensible, when I next see her, I would fall down into her arms. What is there to lose? I ask you that, what is there to lose?”

He stopped talking. Leah had fallen asleep and she breathed peacefully. Her hands, still lying on her stomach, moved up and down with her breathing. Morris sat up and Leah stirred, but she did not wake. He stood and pulled the top blanket over her bare legs and her torso. She turned on her side and pulled her legs up towards her chest. Descended into a deeper sleep. Morris sat on the chair and watched her as he drank the last of the champagne.

Two days later, on a Monday, Morris cancelled his credit cards, threw out his BlackBerry, disconnected the Internet hookup, packed away his television, and terminated his newspaper and magazine subscriptions. He went to his bank and closed his corporate account and asked for everything in cash, American one-hundred-dollar bills. He called Jonathan, his financial adviser, and told him he would be cashing in all
his mutual funds, RRSPs, and any GICs that weren’t locked in. As well, he wanted to put a stop payment on all three of his life insurance plans. “Three,” he said in astonished conclusion. “Who do I think I am?”

“This is pure foolishness,” Jonathan said. “The fact is, Morris, your stocks have finally started to show some progress. This is no time to sell.”

“For you people, there is never a good time to sell,” Morris said. “There’s only a good time to buy, and that appears to be whenever, however, whatever. Well, I’m selling everything now and my money’s going under the mattress. I’ll maybe purchase a few gold bricks as well.”

“Have you found someone else?” Jonathan said. “Because if you have, we can just do a signed transfer. I won’t be hurt. I’ll be disappointed, but not hurt.”

Morris laughed. “I’m not sleeping with another financial adviser. The fact is, I’m tired of slick operators. I’m paring down, going back to nature.”

“If you go ahead with this, your taxes will be huge this year. And besides, anything attached to Lucille you can’t touch. You know that, don’t you? There is no safety in cash. It just disappears.”

“Don’t worry about me, Jonathan. If I’m mad, I’m mad, but at least I’m happily mad. Cash whatever’s solely mine. Lucille can have the rest.”

“You’re jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, Morris. This isn’t like you.”

“Let me jump.”

“What about Libby and Meredith and your grandson? I
would suggest putting some money into a trust fund for them. You could set it up in a reasonable way, so that funds could be withdrawn in increments.”

Morris agreed. Like King Lear dividing up his kingdom. When everything was cashed and counted, Morris had three hundred and thirty-three thousand dollars, really a paltry amount for a man his age. He knew that Ezra from the men’s group had close to two million in surety, and that even Mervine, a lowly worker, was more secure. Morris calculated that if he lived to the age of eighty, which seemed interminable, and made not a cent more in his life, which would not happen because he had royalty cheques due from his columns, he could allow himself $11,482.76 per year, or thirty-one dollars a day to live on. Not at all possible, but this didn’t worry him. If the birds of the air are cared for, why should he, Morris Schutt, be worried? He stored his money in the large safe that he had bought at Staples for two hundred and fifty dollars (shaving eight days off his life), and in order to move the safe up to his condominium, he rented a pickup (two days) and purchased a dolly (three days) at Home Depot. It took him an hour to roll the safe off the back of the pickup and up to his condominium. He squeezed it through the door and placed it in the living room next to his bookshelf, forming a tidy dialectic of learning and lucre. He kept one key for the safe in his freezer, another he hid in his sock drawer, and the third key he slipped into his wallet. The combination for the safe was the year of his birth, 1956. Finally, because it was both mythical and symbolic, he took fifteen thousand dollars and laid it under his futon.

He sat in one of his leather chairs and drank Scotch and felt the burden of the riches in the room. He imagined that he could hear the money moving, but it was the sound of his own breathing. He had dressed in his dark suit and slipped on a tie, and he had eaten lightly, a sandwich of pumpernickel with two slices of Swiss cheese, butter, mayonnaise, and lettuce. He ate standing up, looking out the front window towards the street below. It had been raining. The lights of passing cars. Wipers moved. A woman crossed the street, holding an umbrella, and then the wind took the umbrella and folded it upwards and the woman stopped, harried, and tried to bend the umbrella back into shape but failed. By the time she had reached the shelter of a nearby building, her hair was wet and her light blue jacket had turned dark from the rain. Morris wanted to help her. He wanted to climb down the stairs with a towel in his hand and offer it to the woman. He thought this thought and then let it go. The woman was wearing boots and her legs appeared to be bare in that space between skirt and boot, and he thought of Leah at that moment, who had removed her shoes and padded about the hotel room as if they had known each other a very long time. And so easily she had fallen asleep. When she woke she sat up and said that she was sorry, it was unprofessional to sleep. He said that he didn’t like the word “professional,” it was crass, and then he gave her three hundred dollars as a tip, money that she tried to refuse but eventually took and folded into her purse. He said that he had been thinking, and if it was okay, sometime soon he would like to take her for coffee, or they might go out for a meal, but only as friends.

“Can I use the word ‘friend’?” he asked.

“Of course you can, Mr. Schutt. We ‘re friends.” And she had written her cell number on a piece of paper and handed it to him. The paper was still in his wallet. It held her small handwriting with her number, her name, and an
x
and
o.
A kiss and a hug. Something sweetly innocent there.

More innocent than Ursula, whose letter he had just received the day before. She had agreed that they should meet on the last Saturday of October, and then she had asked him if he was depressed. Something in the letter, in his words, had made her think that he might be feeling low. She said that she wanted to eat Chinese when they met. She said, “I’ll try to be more fun. I want to face you.” Then, as he had, she signed off with the word “love.” Morris wondered if Cal would be protective and jealous if he knew of these letters. Not that there was anything to be jealous of. Morris was aware that he felt little emotion, that his thoughts were steely and cold and that they flitted helter-skelter. He wondered if he perhaps wasn’t afraid of seeing Ursula again. She represented
amor
and death. When they wrote “love” at the end of their letters, what were they saying? Were they asking for more, moving beyond the formal into the erotic? Love was serious. Kisses and hugs were frivolous. And Leah, who was so young, should not be taking off her clothes in front of old men. He must save her.

In an effort to arrest this kind of thinking he read Adorno, almost immediately dozing off and then waking with a start, a trickle of saliva slipping from the side of his mouth. He continued reading and stumbled upon a paragraph
that was striking. He reread the paragraph and at once phoned Lucille, who was not home, or perhaps she refused to answer. Undeterred, he left her a message. “Lucille. Were you aware that Freud was hostile to both mind and pleasure and that transference has now replaced erotic self-abandonment? This is important to speculate and reflect on. Also, incidentally, the only way you can now reach me is at this number. Or, by dropping by and knocking on the door.
Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.
Even to the destitute. See you.”

He hung up and left his hand resting on the receiver, as if he were finding human contact there beyond his own physical warmth. He thought about Ursula and Cal spreading the ashes down by the stream. He wondered why he had allowed Lucille to keep Martin’s ashes. They had been unable to decide on a suitable and worthy place to spread the ashes and so now the boy sat in a little wooden box on Lucille’s mantel. He thought about a “mantle,” which was a shroud and a responsibility, a function. Take up your mantle. And what was Morris Schutt’s mantle? What responsibility did he have in this world? To care for his children. Absolutely. And he had failed. But he could still compensate. Take my own flesh and blood, he thought:
he died, he returneth to dust, the dust is earth,
of earth we make clay, and of that clay we create a sculpture. He knew a sculptor. He picked up the phone and called Lucille again. And again she refused to answer, so he left her a second message. He said that he had had a brilliant idea. Did she remember Ivan the sculptor, their old friend? “Wouldn’t
it make sense to have him create a sculpture, and in the clay used for the sculpture, he could mix Martin’s ashes. This was better than throwing him to the wind. Or burying him. Or letting him sit shrouded on the mantel, which is the last place he would want to be. Think about this. Okay, Lucille?”

“Why are you whipping yourself so?” This is what Lucille would ask him when she finally returned his call. Her voice would sound perplexed, worried. She would pity him. He thought, suddenly and with horror, that it would be Libby who would pick up the messages, and he did not want that. She would not understand her father. Fathers were supposed to be strong and stalwart, and here he was, muttering about Freud and ashes and sculptures. This was not good.

He poured himself another Scotch, and using his phone like a lifeline, he called Mervine, who answered quickly, as if he had been waiting for someone, anyone, to call. He asked Mervine if he was in his tent. “I can hear rain. Aren’t you wet?”

When Mervine said sheepishly that he was, Morris told him to get out of there immediately. “This worries me, Mervine. I see danger in this behaviour.”

“I just got here. I ate my supper inside and then decided to come out here. I got a bit wet running across the lawn.”