The Matter With Morris (12 page)

“My job?” One hand reached out and waved lightly, as if she were dismissing someone.

“Yes.”

“But I don’t want to.”

“What do you mean, you don’t want to?”

“You want to pay me to stop working. You
are
jealous.”

“No, no, Leah.”

“Maybe a little, Morris.” She smiled and pointed a finger at him. “You silly man. You can’t have me, so you want to stop other men from having me.”

Morris shook his head. “It’s not healthy what you’re doing. In fact, it’s dangerous.”

“You do it. With other women.”

“Yes. I did.”

“And you will again.”

“I doubt it.”

“You will. I know how men work.”

“No you don’t, Leah. You just know a certain kind of man. There are other men, wonderful men, who do not pay for sex. They have children, grandchildren, wives that they love. You just know a certain kind of man.”

“What were you going to show me?”

“It’s okay.”

“No, please, I want to see.”

Morris pointed at the safe against the wall. “I had this plan that I would tell you my idea about being your benefactor, and then we’d open my safe over there, and we’d sift through the money and talk about your future.”

“I’d love to see your money,” Leah said. “Show me.” She stood and walked to the safe and squatted. She asked over her shoulder for the number and he offered it easily, as a form of trust. As she twisted the dial, he reached for the key in his wallet and handed it to her. She opened the safe and began to remove the bundles of money, and as she did so, Morris stood above her and thought, This is my life.

“Wow,” Leah said. “How much?”

He told her and she said “wow” again and began to make towers with the bundles. “Touching money like this makes me dizzy,” Leah breathed.

“I used to feel light and happy, and my chest would swell,” Morris said. “But not anymore.”

She looked up at him. “You’ve given up?”

“Not at all. No. I’m taking stock.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t.” Then he said, “You should go.” She did not argue.

In the middle of the night Morris woke in a panic and he got up and went into his living room and opened his safe. Within the orange pool of light that fell onto the brownish bills, he haltingly counted his money. Perhaps she had stolen from him, pushed a bundle into her purse when he wasn’t watching. But it was all there. He experienced relief and heartache. What was wrong with him? What did he want? Perhaps he really wanted Leah but was too afraid to admit it. She had all but offered herself to him. Or she might have offered herself because she couldn’t have what she wanted. Human nature. For much of his life he had turned reason on its head and allowed passion to guide him. What was the rule? Reason first, then will, and lastly passion. If you live in that manner, you are a just man. But take Lucille, who lived that way, coldly, reasonably, and this sometimes made her extremely unattractive. She had no balance. She was
too
intelligent. He realized now that he had made a mistake in offering money to Leah, because his intentions had been misconstrued. She had not understood that he was a generous man and that the offer had been honest. She needed the money and he had extra. There had been no evil intended.

The next day Lucille phoned. She said, “Oh, so you deign to pick up the one phone left in your life? What are you thinking, Morris? Jonathan called to say that you cashed in all your investments. Are you planning on killing yourself, because if you are, I want to be warned. I can’t handle any more surprises.”

“I’m not going to kill myself, Lucille. I’m freer now than I have been for years.”

She laughed, and as she laughed he was hurt, because of course she was laughing at his folly. She said, “You sound very pleased with yourself.”

“I’m paring down. Life is going to be simpler. Dr. Lange says I have high blood pressure, and that I should reduce the stress in my life. I’m beating back the world.” Dr. Lange had, in fact, been concerned. He’d posed various questions, about his peeing, his sex life, his eating habits, whether or not he was getting exercise. Morris said that he walked to his office when the weather allowed it, and he still managed to get erections, no problem there, though he did take longer to ejaculate, especially when he wore a condom. Morris had admitted this softly, as if shame was hovering at the edge of the confession. “That’s normal for your age,” Dr. Lange said. “The plumbing gets weaker.” He picked up Morris’s chart and studied it, glasses tilted onto the bridge of his nose. Closed the chart and wondered why Morris used condoms. Hadn’t he had a vasectomy? Or was he seeing other women? Yes, Morris answered, since Lucille had left him he’d been playing the
field, and as soon as he said this he felt foolish. What an idiotic truism,
playing the field.
As if he was an athlete with tremendous prowess. Dr. Lange nodded and then he told Morris to buy a blood-pressure machine at the local drugstore, and to check his pressure three times a week. Morris had obeyed, except that he found himself trying to deceive the machine, sometimes taking his blood pressure four or five times until safer numbers came up. He found, as he wrapped his arm and pushed the button on the machine, that he was tense, anticipating the worst, and of course his pressure skyrocketed. “Breathe, Morris,” he told himself. “Take it easy.” He got the best results when he dozed off while testing himself. He was healthiest in a comatose state. What did that indicate?

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.