The Matter With Morris (5 page)

He sat back and said that it was true that he had followed her. He said that he had been intrigued by her use of the word “ineffable,” and now he was even more interested because she had said “happenstance.” “Not a lot of people I know use those two words within such a short span of time. Most don’t even know what they mean. I wasn’t looking at your legs, I was trying to see what you were reading.”

She held up her small book. It was by someone called Norman O. Brown.

“I don’t know that,” he said.

That didn’t seem to surprise her.

He held out his hand. “Morris Schutt.”

She offered her hand, still gloved in yellow, and he felt the softness of the leather and the firmness of her grasp. “Lucille Black.”

“You’re a doctor.”

“Becoming.”

“May I ask a question?” Morris said. “Off the record.” She gave a small shrug.

“During the course of the conversation with that man, the accused, when you were suturing him, did he in fact confess?”

“To what?” “To the murder.”

“Like I said, he confessed to no guilt.”

“That doesn’t make him not guilty.”

“You’re absolutely right.” She smiled briefly and spoke no more of it. This strange affect, of presenting herself as a model of clarity and yet not being completely transparent, would perplex Morris throughout their marriage, though it would not displease him.

She was attractive but not beautiful; her mouth was too wide and she didn’t have the uniformity in her face that would have made her regal. She was quite tall and her legs were long and she walked through the world as if she were alone, as if she might always be alone. This independence would remain a problem in their relationship, beginning with the classic courtship. It turned out that Morris had to woo her. She would open the door slightly, and then close it. For a year, he took her to plays and movies and out for dinner and bought her flowers. Whenever they wandered through a shop and she pointed out something that pleased her, he would return the next day and buy it for her and either have it delivered to her or present it as a gift when he next saw her. She didn’t seem overly thrilled by his offerings, but neither did she rebuff him. He was besotted. He couldn’t wait to sit across from her and take her in. He held her hand as they walked. He finally kissed her after a dinner where they had both had too much to drink. She sighed and put her arms around his neck and she lingered and breathed in his ear. When he said that he wanted no one else, that he was absolutely in love with her, she said, “Of course you are.”

He waited for her to say that she loved him, but she didn’t. They played tennis. In the summer they met at the courts near the river, and in winter they played indoors at the expensive club she belonged to. Her father, a lawyer who had more money than Morris had ever imagined possible, paid for her membership. She was a tough-minded player who hated to lose, and she rarely did. Morris was an average player, more athletic than skilled. He was happy to have her win, happy to hear her chirping on the other side of the net, calling out the score, advising him to follow through on his backhand.

Tennis ultimately was the path to her heart. When she played, she was loose, suddenly in a world that did not require moral strength, and this made her more affectionate. One time, when she hit a passing shot to his forehand and scored a point, she called out, “Oh, Morris, I love you.”

They married in the fall of 1980. Her father was quite ill and she wanted to marry before he died, even though Mr. Black had never truly appreciated Morris. He’d been judged harshly, thrown up against an impossible template. All Morris had had as a mentor was his own father, a Mennonite pastor who, when he met Lucille, couldn’t believe that she would stoop to spend time with his own son. And neither could Mr. Black. But Lucille was wilful and sure. She had just graduated from medical school, and would move on to psychiatry, and so Morris would continue working as a journalist while she finished her studies. Morris was ecstatic. He was also looking forward to sex with Lucille. Though they had done everything from oral sex to sleeping naked together through the night, there had been no penetration because Lucille insisted
that that was for the marriage bed. All of her friends were having sex; in fact, Morris felt that everyone in the world was having sex except him. He accused Lucille of hypocrisy, of wanting to live in a world of knights and princesses, where honour was rampant. She said, “Exactly. What better choice is there?” And she kissed him hungrily.

“Freedom” and “commitment”—these were Lucille’s words and she asked Morris to accept them as well. She said that there could not be one without the other. “I’m freely choosing you,” she said. “And this will bind us. After we are married, I will not go to anyone else. I will not leave you for another. Until death divides us.” Morris had loved these words, the deep and abiding agreement, the commitment.

But now death, indeed, had divided them. As he packed his books into boxes and his clothes into suitcases in the last days of his marriage, he thought about the emotions of that earlier time: of the wedding night during which he had been naive and hasty and Lucille had been very tender, and how, finally, as they made love once again in the early morning, a window had opened onto his heart and he had experienced pure gratitude to finally be lying beside his wife; and of coming home happily from his office to their tiny apartment, to find Lucille sitting on the bed in her tank top and pyjamas, notes spread around her as she researched medical cases. Adoration. Pride of possession and certainty.

It would be Dr. G, years later, who would challenge Morris on his belief in certainty, stating dryly, “There is none, Morris. There is no certainty.”

At the men’s group on Thursday night, Mervine was the first to speak. “I’ve had diarrhea. Been about five days now and the doctor says maybe a virus and asks if I’ve travelled lately, and then he recommends Imodium, which can really bung you up, I hear. But the point is, the point is this, and there is a point beyond me having the shits, the point is that all this might be due to anxiety. My daughter moved in with her mother. She warned me, said, ‘Dad, I love you, you know that, I truly love you, but I need to be with Mom for a bit’—you know, the girl thing—and I said, ‘No problem, sweetie, you do that, I’ll be fine.’ And so she left, and I wander around the house and end up sitting in my tent that I’ve set up in the backyard, listening to some country station, because, because it feels safer. In the fucking tent.”

Mervine was one of seven men in the men’s group, eight if you counted the leader, Doug. Morris was sitting beside Mervine, whom he liked best of all the men there. Mervine was a runt of a man with a pockmarked face and dark blue jeans and cowboy boots who was a shipper-receiver for a trucking company. He was an epileptic. In one of the earlier sessions, he’d told the group the story of his first seizure. He was seventeen and it was three a.m. and he was waiting in a parking lot with a group of boys who were about to be picked up to go catch turkeys. He’d been eating licorice and laughing and suddenly he felt himself go shit-faced and a light descended and when he woke up he was in the hospital. Fellows told him later that he’d landed on his back on the asphalt and his cowboy
boots were clacking like jackhammers and he was foaming at the mouth. Only other time it happened was when he was
shtupping
a woman who wasn’t his wife. Not a good scene, though he wasn’t conscious for most of it. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I don’t expect to go all shit-faced in this group.”

Morris asked if he was Jewish.

“Not at all.”

“He’s about as Jewish as a sow’s ear,” said Don, a burly man who claimed to be a financial adviser. He smiled. “Damn right,” Mervine said.

“It’s just that he said he was
shtupping,
” Morris said, and they moved on, as the group was wont to do, jumping here and there, their discussions not particularly linear, not always profound, rarely incisive, but usually worthwhile.

Mac, who was the oldest and who always asked a lot of questions without revealing much about himself, wondered how it was that Mervine ended up in his tent. What did he find comforting there?

“Well, it’s clean and small and I roll down the flap so’s I can see the sky and the stars at night, and sometimes I pull up a chair and survey my lawn and there’s the smell of grass clippings and I build a little fire and there’s nothing there to remind me of my wife, who I hate, or my daughter, who I love. I don’t sleep in the house anymore.” He looked around sheepishly, as if this were something he’d had no intention of speaking about. “Aww, man.” He looked down at his cowboy boots.

Morris talked about his hands. He knew that, initially, none of the other men had wanted him in the group because
he was a columnist and the group was afraid that he would use the confessions and conversations for his own gossip. “Nothing leaves this room,” Doug had said. “No one takes what is said here and moves it outside. That understood? It’s about the energy. If you take what is said here and bring it home to your wife, or your lover, or your brother, or someone else, then the energy gets sucked out of this space. I can’t know what you’re doing, but it’ll be felt. Believe me, you will affect the group.” He was talking to everyone, but he was preaching to Morris, who waved and said that he had enough fodder already. “I’ve got my own life,” he said, and he grimaced.

Morris said that the flaking of his hands must be coming from worry and stress. “They bleed in the morning,” he said. “I wake up thinking about Martin.” He had talked about this before, but he once again told them a version of his pain. This time it was about the day in February when the people from the Canadian Forces had arrived at the house to give him the news. “My wife was working and I think now that I should have waited till she came home. I wanted to know at that moment why these two men were standing in my foyer, though I did know actually. It was like I couldn’t wait to hear the bad news. ‘Tell me,’ I said, and they told me, and as soon as they told me, I was sorry they had spoken and I was sorry that I had not waited for Lucille, though how does one do that when the messenger is chomping at the bit? She was absolutely furious. And irrational. Sometimes I think that what destroyed our marriage wasn’t Martin’s death but me not waiting for her to come home to hear the news with me. She called it typical and selfish. I know that I’m selfish, but I don’t want to be typical.”

“Typical of what?” Ezra asked. He was sitting across from Morris and he was leaning forward, elbows on his knees. He was married to a beautiful woman who was a former model and he had potency issues. His wife was too gorgeous. His father had told him to marry a less beautiful woman, but he hadn’t listened and now he was in trouble. He didn’t trust her. Ezra said, “When are you going to get over this?”

“And when are you going to be alive again from the neck down?” Morris asked. He felt the rage located in his lower gut and in his crotch. He smiled. Ezra leaned back and shook his head and closed his eyes.

“Not fair,” Doug said. “Too personal. Listen, men, we know that we can’t use someone else’s vulnerability as ammunition. How are we going to trust each other?”

Bill spoke. He rarely spoke, and everyone listened more carefully now because this was such a rarity. He did not speak of potency or sex or a spurned lover, but he talked about his father, who was at the edge of death. He said the words “edge of death” and Morris tilted towards him, as if there were something curious and interesting that had landed in the centre of the group. Bill said that he had always disliked his father, for his anger, his demands, his velocity. He was like a bullet ricocheting around a room and now the bullet had fallen to the ground. “The doctors say he’s going to die within the week.”

Doug said that he was sorry. Peter, a Filipino man in his late thirties who lived with his extended family, all of them crammed into one house, placed his hand on top of Bill’s and left it there for three long seconds. Then he took it away.

“Thank you,” Bill said.

Ezra said that his father had died two years ago of a heart attack and left him with a business that was overloaded with debt. “He up and dies and leaves the bank banging at my door. He did it on purpose.”

“What do you mean?” Doug asked.

“It was like he wanted to be nearly bankrupt just before he died. So that I could suffer.”

Ezra was Jewish, but Morris wished that he wasn’t, because then he could hate him. He was a spoiled man-child who lacked the authenticity of those Jewish men Morris knew from the health club. There was no joking sanguinity, no self-mockery, only a deep-seated seriousness and a head full of negative numbers. Ezra knew nothing about the Pentateuch, or God, or Moses, or the King of the Jews, even though every Saturday he went to synagogue. Morris knew that he could easily beat Ezra at a quiz on the history of the Israelites. What kind of a Jew was that? He deserved to go bankrupt.

Morris said, “My father, who lives in a home for the disabled and the very old, is beginning to lose his mind. The other day he thought I was my brother Samuel and asked me to pray with him. And so I did, though I didn’t want to. Meanwhile, the man in the next bed is beating himself off. And there I am, praying with my father, who thinks I’m Samuel, and I’m more interested in how both my father and I are aware of Cornie masturbating in the next bed, but we don’t say anything. It’s distressing for everyone. And then I worry that my father will descend into anarchy, like Cornie, his neighbour. I wonder if my father ever lusted. I never saw it. He was always faithful,
never cheated on my mother, never told dirty jokes. I never even heard him swear.”

Mervine laughed. “Great story.”

Ezra fluttered his hands mockingly and said, “‘Descend into anarchy’—that’s just stupid. What does that mean?”

Bill chuckled and Peter, with suspicious eyes, just nodded.

“Lawlessness,” Morris said, looking at Ezra. “Chaos. Disorder. That better?”

“Great fucking story,” Mervine said.

Doug said, “I find it interesting that you imagine your father becoming like Cornie. He’s given you no reason to believe that. Perhaps you see yourself becoming Cornie. This isn’t about your father at all.”