The Matter With Morris (13 page)

He had to admit that she was always generous, that she willingly tried on the array of outfits he bought, as if she knew and accepted that it was his own pleasure he was satisfying, as if he were dressing her up and making her into another, but not in fact another, because when he lustily and hastily removed the new clothes, she was still Lucille. And in her eagerness she became grateful, as if she had willed it, though nothing can be willed, and the clothing, the jewellery, the wishful look in Morris’s eyes, made her appreciative, and they would tumble onto the bed, the brand new acquisitions crumpled beneath them. The thing about Lucille was that she had a ferocious imagination but it was stored away in a vault and it sometimes took Morris days or weeks to unlock that vault because the harder he worked, the more her stubbornness grew. Once, after a particularly long battle that finally ended with his head
between her legs, he paused and sighed and looked up at her and said, “Is this worth it?”

Lucille had always gratified him, even as she bested him in an argument. She was intellectually fierce and intensely curious. “Morris,” she liked to say, “we need to talk about our talking.” She claimed, as she should, that he needed to have the words to say it. She would have made an excellent priest, though not being Catholic, he could not be sure whether the words uttered in a confessional were true words or if they were made up. Lucille did not pander to untruths, which was why she disliked Morris selling himself as a columnist. Poor Lucille, married for so long to a materialist.

And so, half aroused by these random thoughts and the smell and texture of the shoes and velvet pants, Morris walked home with a would-be lover in each hand, and he called FedEx and arranged a delivery of a package to Leah’s address and then to Lucille’s. It was like having two wives, though he was sleeping with neither. When a credit-card number was requested, he realized that he had cancelled all of his cards. He asked that if in this cashless contemporary world, he could pay the driver in hard currency. Would that work? The voice on the other end, a sweet child-man, said without a trace of disdain that the total would be seventeen dollars and thirty-three cents and it could be paid in cash, though exact change was required. The driver would pick up both parcels the next working day. Monday. Thank you.

One of Morris’s much-loved novels was
Herzog
by Saul Bellow. He had read it as a young man and then returned to it recently and been amazed at Moses Herzog’s capacious soul. Here was a man going mad who suffered and joked and wallowed, and in the midst of his madness he wrote unsent letters full of playful and searing intellect to people both dead and alive.

Well, thought Morris, I am not Herzog. I am not a freethinker, I am not out of my mind, and I am not particularly intelligent, but like Herzog, I am a survivor. I will persist. I will keep thinking and I will keep acting. And so he sat down and wrote a column in which he addressed the prime minister.

Dear Sir,

I noticed in a recent press release that Canada has agreed to donate twenty-five hundred surplus C7 rifles to the Afghan National Army, along with training and ammunition. Surplus? Are we so liberal that we have rifles lying around in drawers and sacks that we can donate them willy-nilly to our friends? Who are our friends, sir? And will those friends proceed carefully with these twenty-five hundred rifles? I am familiar with this type of rifle. Sir, all political action is aimed either at preservation or at change. The war we are fighting in Afghanistan is futile. It will not bring change, save change to the families whose dear boys are dying. Do you have knowledge, sir, or is it merely opinion? How do you elevate your poor self? I understand empire and I understand that your opinion echoes the empire south of us, and if I am sad,
it is for my own loss, for the horrible change in my life. That change happened when my son, who was a warrior for our country, died in Afghanistan. He was shot by a C7A1 assault rifle, manufactured by Colt Canada.

You call yourself a Christian, Mr. Prime Minister, but what kind of a Christian are you? Do you see the mote in your own eye? I have no mote. Not anymore. It was removed the day my son died. I am no longer a Christian, yet I understand Christ’s teachings. Do you? I envy you your son’s health and vigour. And with envy comes wrath, as you must know. And so my rage provokes me. Can you imagine why? I think not. I think that you might read this as the mutterings of a madman. If indeed you read this.

No one would read it. His was a voice crying in the wilderness. A less than minor prophet, like Haggai, who in the Bible gets two chapters and the line,
he who earns, earns wages to put into a purse with holes.
Morris knew this purse. In a recent dream, one of those elusive I-am-dreaming dreams, Morris was caught on a busy freeway in a tiny Toyota and he needed to cross to the other side because he had discovered that he was going in the wrong direction. Finally seeing a break in the traffic, he reversed, and just as he crossed the meridian, he fell asleep, his foot slipping from the clutch, but before falling asleep, he saw a Greyhound bus bearing down on him, and though he saw the bus and knew it was going to hit him, only at the last moment did he pull himself up through the layers of sleep.

His life had become like that dream: he was descending through levels of consciousness into a blessed oblivion, without any thought of the future, only to suddenly become aware again of the tumbling of his present existence, and up he rose once more, ready to devote himself to a life of care and duty and misery, to a life of putting his wages
into a purse with holes.
The one and only time in his recent memory that he had descended and rested without action or thought was the moment when he had been lying naked on a hotel bed and Carla, the woman he was paying, a forty-year-old with red hair, had done as he requested and kissed him from head to toe. But that too had passed. It passed as soon as he thought to himself, This woman is loving me by touching her lips to my frail flesh. The unconscious becomes desire, desire moves one to act, action leads to thought, and in that moment, bliss evaporates.

Morris was never breastfed. He had learned this when his daughter Meredith was just born and his father, visiting the little family in the hospital and watching Lucille struggle with the child at her breast, had announced, completely out of character, that Morris’s mother had not breastfed any of her children. Lucille, perhaps still swooning from drugs, had said that then she must have had the most gorgeous tits in the world. Grandpa Schutt’s mouth had tightened and he cleared his throat and quickly changed the subject.

Only later in life, when Morris took the time to reflect, did he think that a baby at the mother’s breast is experiencing bliss, that this was the one time in the voyage from cradle to grave that no thought was required. And he had missed out.
This might be the cause of much of his anguish and delirium. “What drivel,” Lucille would say. But then she was trapped by her own shadow. “We’re all alone in the ocean, Morris,” she had whispered over the phone late one night. “Only you haven’t figured that out yet.” Then on another occasion, perversely proud that he had been tempted and remained a faithful husband, she had waved her hands furiously and cried, “Nonsense.” They were still together and he had returned from a conference in Paris, a symposium of bacchanalian proportions during which he had
almost
slept with a columnist from England, until the columnist began to talk non-stop of the book she was writing on pet food and how she had four dogs, an Alsatian and three mongrels that she slept with, and at that point Morris, perhaps because he didn’t want to be just another animal in her bed, or perhaps because he had an image of many distressing repercussions, excused himself and went up to his hotel room. When he told Lucille later about the lure of lust and then his moral rectitude, she had said, “Don’t be foolish, Morris. You’ve always wanted a tit in every port.”

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.”