The Matter With Morris (24 page)

“He was beautiful.” She said she had looked at his photo in the other room, before, when she was alone. “That’s him beside you, laughing, right?”

Morris nodded.

“You’re too hard on yourself, Morris.”

“Am I?” He smiled. Then he said that Martin had been a very good poker player. One of the best, and he’d been well on his way to becoming a pro, but Morris had been against this. What a life, making money off others’ losses. Where was the contribution to society? “And after he died,
what did I do? I sat up late at night watching poker on TV. These are strange people with strange tics, and they appear to have little education and a whole different speech pattern. Their language mystifies me, and the fact that they make millions. Martin might have been one of them. I would take that now. I would give up everything to have him sitting at a poker table in Las Vegas or Monte Carlo, stealing from others.”

“It’s not stealing, Morris. See? You judge. You’re judging me right now.”

“I’m not.”

“You think I’m dumb. Just a dairy farmer’s simple wife. Why are you talking to me then? What do you see? What do you want?”

And before he could conjure up an answer that would have been wholly inadequate, Ursula’s phone rang and she picked it up and looked at it and answered. “Sweetie,” she said. She listened, her mouth open slightly, and then she said, “Mommy’s fine. Listen, I was helped by this man. My car broke down and this nice man picked me up and now I’m safe and warm and I’ll be home soon. All right?”

She was quiet and then she said, “Morris.” She made a noise in her throat and then said, “Honey, listen. Okay. Here.” She held out the phone to Morris. “It’s my son. He wants to talk to you.”

Morris shook his head.

“Please,” she said. “It’s Wilhelm. He’s eight. Please.” She pushed the phone at him, and she stood and walked over to the window and picked up the gun off the sill.

Morris held the phone. He heard breathing and static, and after a long wait he said, “Hello?”

“Are you the man?” the boy said. His voice was high and asthmatic.

“My name is Morris.”

“How old are you?” the boy asked.

Morris gave his age.

“What’s your house number?”

Morris looked around. “I live in a condominium, Wilhelm. Number thirty-six.”

“Eighty-seven,” the boy said, without hesitating. Then he said, “My brother died. His name was Harley. He was a soldier.”

“Yes, I know, Wilhelm. Ursula told me.”

“My mother?”

“Yes, your mother.” Ursula was opening her purse. She put the gun inside and set the purse down.

Wilhelm said, “My mother’s sad. But my father will take care of her. He’s strong and brave.”

“Listen, Wilhelm, here’s your mother,” Morris said, and he handed the phone back to Ursula, who took it and said, after a brief silence, “I know, it’s a wonderful thing. Absolutely. Okay, yes, soon. I love you.” She tilted her head and went, “Hmm-hmm. I know,” and then said, “Bye.” She snapped the phone shut, looked at Morris, and said, “Thank you.”

Morris was standing when she hung up, staring at Ursula. “What was he talking about?” he asked.

“He likes numbers, he adds them in his head very quickly.”

“No, not that. About his brother being dead, and his father keeping him safe. That’s not normal, Ursula. For his age.” Morris had been seeing darkly, peering into a room in which there was little light, and in the room people were shuffling back and forth, and now suddenly the light had been turned on and he was seeing too clearly and he did not like what he saw because he too was in that room. What despotic notions we have. How can I know the other when I do not even know myself?

Ursula lifted her chin, more serious now. “He’s really mature, Morris. I can tell him things I wouldn’t tell Cal.”

“He’s a child. He should be riding a bike. Playing video games. His mind is worried.”

And now Ursula was hostile, though her face remained calm. It was her voice that rasped and grated. “I know how to raise my child, so don’t tell me what Wilhelm needs. You’ve never met him.”

Placating now, softer, Morris admitted that she was right. He’d never met the boy. But he sounded so serious, he said, so full of shrill anxiety. “You should go home to him,” Morris said.

Ursula’s face flattened. “You’re chasing me away? You want me to go now, to drive eight hours in the dark? Is that right?”

“Tomorrow. You’ll go back to him tomorrow. There’s nothing I can do for you, Ursula. I have nothing more to give you. I used to have this long speech about America as the bull in the pasture, the last to be slaughtered, the killer of my son, but you didn’t come here to be lectured, and I’ve been trying
to stop talking.” Morris stopped. He was tired now. The light in the room was once again dim, the shadows were moving sluggishly. He’d lost his vision.

Ursula shook her head. Her eyes were bright and angry. She said, “You’re so full of shit, Morris. You write me letters and you use your beautiful words to seduce me and then you’re surprised when I show up here. The stupid bull in the pasture, what does that mean? I want your heart, your feelings, but you won’t let me.” She cried, her face in her hands, and then she stopped and looked up at Morris and said, “Can I sleep in there?” She pointed at his room. He guided her to his bedroom, cleaned up some of the scattered clothes, put clean sheets on the futon, and then closed the bedroom door, leaving her inside. She had tried to say more, to explain herself, but he had shushed and told her to sleep. He sat in his brown leather chair and closed his eyes, thinking about how he had come to be the man he was. And he thought that contrary to what one would like to believe, there are no exceptions in morality.

An hour later, he went back into the bedroom. The light from the living room fell across the bed. Ursula slept on her side, still dressed, her left hand pressed beneath her cheek. He stood and waited. He called her name softly but she did not answer. He crouched, felt for her purse, opened it, and put a hand inside. He found the gun immediately, felt its hardness, and pulled it out and held it in his hand. So light. Then he stood, moved from the room, closed the door, and waited there, breathing heavily as if he’d just returned from a long journey. He took a key from his wallet, kneeled before his safe, opened the door, set the gun down on top of his money,
and closed the door. Then he sat again in his chair and looked at his safe, tightly sealed. This creeping like a thief into a lover’s house. Oh, Leah, what betrayal. For it had been her, sending that burglar, possibly her pimp, who had rummaged through Morris’s clothes, who certainly knew the combination, but could not find the key. Morris picked up the phone and dialled Leah’s number. The answering service cut in immediately and he left a message, saying that there had been one key in the sock drawer and another in the fridge, frozen into a cup of ice. If she wanted the money, why hadn’t she just asked? In fact, he had offered it to her. “Goodbye, Leah,” he said, and hung up.

What was left? He was a man who had run out of friends, lovers, and opinions. How was it that, at the age of fifty-one, he could not know himself? Opening
The Republic
the other day, almost in desperation, he had been alarmed at the number of dog-eared pages, the scribbles in the margins, the notes to himself. When had he done all of this? When had he found the time? Some of the notes were inexplicable, illegible. Some of the sentences he’d underlined no longer seemed important. But there was brilliance and knowledge. For instance, in Book II, Morris had circled a sentence heavily in pencil:
Isn’t it of the greatest importance that what has to do with war be well done?
Exactly. And Martin, like so many other young soldiers, had been an amateur. And Harley as well. They were chosen poorly. One should have stuck to dice and draughts, the other to being a cowherd. And then there was Tyler, who had not understood the tools of war, and had killed Martin. Who had failed here? The guardians, the leaders,
had failed. What fools we are. And this, from Book V:
Then is that city best governed which is most like a single human being? For example, when one of us wounds a finger, presumably the entire community—that community tying the body together with the soul in a single arrangement under the ruler within it—is aware of the fact, and all of it is in pain as a whole along with the afflicted part.
Did any other person in this city, in this country, feel the pain of Martin’s death? Morris thought not. What should be public had become private. And now, here tonight, he was alone, on his leather chair, suffering privately. And Ursula, alone in the next room, suffering as well. How then should he escape from the darkness into the light? And more to the point, did the right hand know what the left was doing?

His head dropped. He slept. And when he woke a grey light filtered through the thin curtains. He recalled that Ursula was sleeping in the next room. He stood and walked to the bedroom door and pushed it open softly. The bed was empty. Her suitcase was gone. She must have left as he slept, passed by his slouched figure and stepped out the door. She had left no note, no accusations, no thank you. She was simply gone.

A week passed. Silence and thought, and deficiency of thought, and then more thought. The phone rang but he did not answer it. He walked in the evenings, taking in the city and the people within the city. In the eyes of strangers he found resignation
and duty, and discovering this, he himself felt freer. No one is responsible for my nature, he thought. I alone must take possession of myself. I am a man who writes to airlines who have mistreated me and lost my luggage, to men who manufacture guns, to ex-lovers, to my bank manager, to the prime minister, and in my writing I cajole, rationalize, protest, and I apportion blame. I will stop harassing these people. Only Morris can care for Morris. Enough of this complaining, sighing, lamenting, and suffering. I have been, in the words of Socrates,
envious, faithless, unjust, friendless, impious,
a vessel of every vice, and on and on. And in conclusion, a tyrant. By scribbling my thoughts down and then sending them through the mail, I am most self-absorbed and self-centred. I want an audience, and I will have one; I have a place waiting for me on YouTube and Wikipedia. We are beasts
crawling between heaven and earth.
Happiness does not depend upon the exploitation of other human beings, or the exploitation of oneself. I will stop exploiting, I will remove myself from the rack of cruelty, I will no longer chase after pleasure simply for pleasure itself. Soul over body, reason over desire. This is not oppressive, it is imaginative. The poor you will always have with you. I have donned the garb of an aesthete and I have ridden into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey.

What’s all this? Morris thought. Are you suddenly a Christ figure? His son, three days before he died, had been talking to him on Skype, and at one point, perhaps because they were talking about a combination of things—chance, family, Thanksgiving—and perhaps because what was unsaid lay like a sleeping beast between them, it slipped out
that Martin had killed a man. In the swirling sand, one thousand miles from Jerusalem, his boy had taken someone’s life. What a strange event. Other children might call home to say that they had received a scholarship, or that they had found a new job, or that they were engaged to be married, but his son reveals that he killed someone. The flat jerky movements of Martin on the screen of Morris’s laptop. No ducking of the head as he admitted this, no blinking, just a cool meekness. But there was an edge to his voice. And in the next few minutes he became capricious, panicky. He opened a can of Coke and drank for a long time from it and finally put it down. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. You can’t understand.”

“Martin, listen. I worry about you. Have you talked to anyone? Do you want to tell me what happened?”

“We were on foot patrol and we came under fire. And so we returned fire.” He paused and drank from his Coke and then said, “It’s crazy, Dad. After, I felt so alive. So happy.” He looked away from the camera and back again.

“Happy’s good. I’m very happy to be looking at you. Talking to you.”

“I feel lucky, but the weirdest thing is that my luck is someone else’s bad luck. You know?”

“You
stay
lucky,” Morris said.

“Don’t tell Mom, all right?”

“If that’s what you want.” And then Morris told him to be good, to come home safely.

Martin said that he would come home. Thumbs up. No problem.

Several months after Martin died, Morris told Lucille about the conversation. He chose his words carefully, but this did not help. “This is wrong, wrong,” Lucille cried. “I didn’t birth him and raise him and feed him so that he could one day go out and kill other men.” And then she said, “Did he see me as feeble? That I could not handle the truth?”

“He loved you,” Morris said. “You were his mother.”

Morris had arranged to see Jake, to take him to the botanical gardens, and so on Thursday he picked him up. A harsh wind blew as they walked hand in hand across the parking lot. Jake talked and talked, and every sentence, every query, began with “Grandpa?” and always Morris answered, “Yes, Jake?” The solidity of the boy, his fresh smell, the innocence, impressed upon Morris the imperfection and brevity of his own existence. Make way for the young. Later, after looking at the birds and reading the signs beneath the trees, in English and Latin—Morris announcing ineptly words that he had never studied in school, never learned, and why not, why just the heavy German language?—he took Jake’s hand and bought him hot chocolate and they sat in a café and looked out at the park, where leaves blew across the open field. And in that field, walking his dog, was Dr. G. Morris leaned forward to verify this and saw that, indeed, it was the man he had loved so deeply. How strange to see him after all these months. He whispered his name and Jake looked up and asked, “What, Grandpa?” Dr. G had paused and was stooping
now to remove his dog’s shit from the ground. How mortal he looked, in his dark corduroys and his too-small hat, gathering up dog poop. Morris thought that if he and Jake made it out to the parking lot in time, they might cross paths with the good doctor. He could introduce his grandson, tell Dr. G that he was no longer tripping and stumbling, thank you very much. No, no, the simple fact that he was with Jake would communicate this. He told Jake that they would drink the chocolate in the car. Jake, perplexed, gulped a mouthful before leaving and burned his tongue. He gasped, and then cried and cried. Morris made him suck ice cubes, and he held and rocked him, looking out towards the field, now empty. He drove him home later and confessed to Meredith that he had been careless with a hot drink; Jake had burned himself. Meredith surprised him with her calm response. She invited him in and offered him tea and announced that she and Glen were getting married. At Christmas. Morris said, “Oh.” And then he said, “That’s wonderful, congratulations. We’ll be having a wedding.” How odd to suddenly understand that life carries on with its normalcy and regulation, that he was in fact not the centre of the world. And he held Meredith and he registered her heft and build and he thought, This is my daughter.