by David Bergen
He did not see Ursula as a prize. She was a tragic figure, like him, and when, in the stillness of her hotel room, she took his head in her hands and said, “You’re a beautiful man,” he was astonished that anyone could say these words. They had first met in the restaurant, shaken hands, and Ursula looked him up and down and said, “You’re taller than I imagined.”
“And you,” Morris said, “you’re not blonde.”
She said that her parents were dark haired, even though they were Dutch. “Were you hoping for someone blonde?”
This startled Morris. He found it forward and accusing, as if she were sensing something about him that he himself did not yet know. But as the evening progressed he discovered that she was also clear-headed and guileless. They both spoke of their sons, but Ursula was more vocal, more willing to reveal herself. In fact, at some point Morris felt that her son was sitting near them.
“My friends are tired of me,” she said. “All I do is talk about Harley. Even my husband’s tired of me.”
“My wife and I had nothing left to say to each other,” Morris said, and immediately he was sorry. He had not meant to say anything about Lucille and here he was, talking about her again. He wanted her to be gone. What a feast she would make of this. If he could be brave enough to enter her lair, the office on the fifteenth floor of that glass building, where her corner windows gave south onto the river and west to the Great West Life edifice, and beyond that the spire of the Westminster United Church whose bells pealed merrily out of key every lunch hour, announcing death and more death and then death again and finally life—if he could slip past her door and have her inspect his heart and soul, she would happily point out what was on his back. A big lie, a load for the beast. She wouldn’t help him get rid of the burden. She would just point it out and say, “There you are, there it is.” She wouldn’t even say that it was a burden. She would cunningly let him discover it for himself. It wasn’t her burden after all, it was his. He was the one who slept with it, who walked around the city with it, unaware, though all and sundry could see the malformed bundle; he was like the man who has suffered polio as a child and now must stoop his way through to death. The burden was many things: his tremendous pride, his fear, his love of sex and high-heeled shoes, his envy and rage, his shame.
He pushed away these thoughts and watched Ursula’s mouth as she spoke and imagined kissing her.
She said, “My husband, Cal, he’s always believed in the army. It’s how he grew up. And it’s how he raised our son. But now he’s angry. The government’s failed him and he’s angry. He has guns.” She shrugged, almost imperceptibly.
“What do you mean?”
“He’s always had a gun, but now he has a whole sack-ful. One day he goes to Cabella’s and he buys a hunting rifle and then the following week he buys another, an automatic. He has six in total, with ammunition and cases. He spends his evenings cleaning the guns and breaking them down. He shows Wilhelm the guns. They work together and Cal talks to Wilhelm about velocity and wind and distance. I don’t think an eleven-year-old needs to know about this, and I tell Cal, but he won’t listen to me anymore. He used to play music in the barn, milking the cows. But nowadays there’s no music, just the sound of the milking machine and the bucket bunters knocking pails of feed around. Everything’s changed since Harley died.”
Morris said, “My father was a pacifist. He passed this idea on to me and I accepted it, and then I tried to pass it on to my son, Martin, who because he needed something to push against, I suppose, laughed at me and joined the army. I’m not against taking care of myself, of protecting my own, but I cannot accept, as you people seem to, that billions need to be spent on a war machine.”
“Nobody’s a pacifist.” She smiled in the slightest way. He loved her voice.
She had one crooked eye tooth and Morris thought that this was very attractive. It made her seem more vulnerable. She excused herself and made her way to the bathroom at the far end of the lobby and he watched her cross the marble floor. She wore jeans and a light green short-sleeved sweater, and high black boots that made her legs appear longer than they were, and he saw her arms and her shoulder blades and her backside, and he wanted her. Imagination was the ultimate eroticism. It trumped reality.
Her room was on the nineteenth floor and, like his, it had a deep-orange rug and off-white curtains and two double beds and double mirrors so that everything, when you entered, was doubled once again. Her window faced onto Marquette Avenue and from that height one could see across to the structure of Westminster Presbyterian. She stood by the window and he was behind her. A foot of space separated them. He said, “There are churches everywhere.” And then he asked if she went to church, and she said that she did. She and her husband attended the First Congregational Church in Alexandria, where they lived, but she had grown up Dutch Reformed. She felt safe in a church, she said. He asked if that was all. Did she just feel safe, or did she believe in something more?
In the restaurant, earlier, she had said, “Come to my room,” and then she looked at him and held his gaze until he looked away, at the approaching waitress, and he’d been aware that she was more honest than he was. After the waitress had given them the bill and he’d paid, she said, “I’m not thinking that we have to have sex, but I’m not against it. Since Harley died, I’ve stopped waiting for the world to come and get me. I spent so many years putting my toe into the water to test it and then stepping back. I never really jumped. Now, I’m ready to jump. You don’t have to jump. That’s your decision. But I don’t have time to get to know you, to play the flirting game. I like you, I like how your mind works. I know this because I’ve read your columns and your letters, and now, talking to you, I can see that you’re a man I can trust.” She paused.
“What about your husband?” he said.
She said that Cal didn’t have to know. In fact, these days Cal might not even care, he was so taken with revenge.
“Is he dangerous? All those guns.”
She laughed. “He doesn’t even know who you are.”
“You’ve never talked about me?”
“I have. I talk about your columns.” She said that this wasn’t like her. Usually she was up front and she’d tell Cal what she was feeling, but these days he wasn’t willing to hear her talk about her feelings. She said that she had told Cal that she needed a weekend alone. She simpered slightly and moved her shoulders. “So, here I am.” She asked if he had told his wife that he was coming down to Minneapolis.
He said that he was living alone. She didn’t need to know.
“You’re honest.”
“Mostly.”
“You wanna have sex with me?” “It’s not that simple.”
“Sure it is. Do you want to have sex with me?”
“Yes, I do. But there’s too much turmoil in my life, and sex with you would just make for more turmoil. We’ll go up to your room and we’ll take off our clothes and lie down together and press our bodies against each other and I’ll enter inside you, which is the most intimate thing one can do with another person, and then tomorrow I’ll drive home to Canada and you’ll go back to your farm and your son and husband. And I will think of you, and I will think of you some more, and that is one kind of turmoil, and another is you thinking of me and wondering if I will return, wondering if I love you or if I have simply disappeared.”
She laughed. “‘Enter inside you’—who talks like that? Anyways, I don’t mind. You think I’m being used by you, but I might be the one doing the using.” She said the last I pointedly.
“There’s that as well.” Then he said that Lucille had always felt that marriage was for life, that when they had said “till death do us part,” it actually meant something, but now he had begun to understand that the death in this case was not Lucille’s or his own, but their son’s. “This is not profound, but it is true.” He placed the bill on the table and stood and held out his hand to her.
“Smell me,” she said. She was at t
he window, looking down onto the street below. She had taken off her boots and thrown them in haste across the room and they lay stranded by the wall and the foot of the bed. She pressed her palms against the windowpane. The curtains were open and it was darker in the room than it was outside where the city lights were just beginning to glow. Over the last while, when he had found himself in a hotel room with a woman who was a stranger, a woman he paid for, there had always been a wall between him and the woman, and usually it took great effort for him to climb over that wall. With Ursula, there was no barrier.
He approached her and leaned forward, barely an inch from the back of her neck, and breathed in.
“All of me,” she whispered, and she turned to face him, her arms in the air.
He smelled under one arm and then the other. He smelled the sweater that covered her bra and her breasts. He circled her and smelled the small of her back, and then her rump. Still, he did not touch her, not with his nose, or his tongue, or any part of himself. His hands hovered as he smelled her hips and then her thighs and finally her calves and feet. He was on his hands and knees now, aware of the texture of the rug, and he thought, Look at you, Morris Schutt. He took deep breaths. He had an image of the computer keyboard in his condo and of the “enter” key; one tap with the baby finger on his right hand. He had an erection.
He stood and faced her. He smelled her cheeks, her ears, behind her ears, her mouth, and her neck again. She held up her hands, palms facing him with her fingers slightly spread, and he smelled first the heels of her hands, and then her wrists and her fingers and between her fingers. He stepped back and she began to cry.
Sadness had overwhelmed their desire. He stood before her and watched the tears fall, and he took her in his arms and held her as she wept. Then he led her to the bed and told her to lie down. She did this, and he took the blanket at the end of the bed and covered her and then lay down beside her until she slept. The light slipped from the room and he too fell asleep, and when he woke it was dark and his arms still held her. He rose and stood by the window that looked out towards the towers of the church in the distance. The movement of traffic below. A few human figures darkly walking. The history of the universe is the history of a man. To see everything in the light of the soul, to see those dark figures down there as souls, to understand that every human, every flower, every created thing, is divine. To understand that the Absolute is not the father, that the father begins to exist only when he produces the son. Take his own father, a man who used to write songs, and then, strumming his acoustic guitar, he would offer the songs to whoever would listen. And he wrote poetry with a clip-clop metre and a simple rhyme. He was a man who secretly yearned to be published. A man who observed his son become a journalist, a semi-famous columnist, and judged him for it. “Your sentences are fine but they are empty. Trite. There is more to the world than sex and irony and making fun. You have an audience. Talk to them about goodness.” By “goodness” he meant the salvation of lost souls, the conveying of Truth. The poetry his father wrote was simple; it lacked polish and insight; it was deliberate, the opposite of what Morris wrote. His father’s sermons were deliberate. His goal was salvation. It was criminal to dance around the edges of truth when at any minute death might come knocking; for you, for the parishioner in the pew, for the young person who is seeking answers. It took courage to be literal. Which, to Morris’s mind, was nonsense. His father had been a purveyor of solace and selfishness; like all good preachers, he had promoted the fear of death and then promised freedom. Morris did not know courage, but he knew what it wasn’t. It wasn’t the erasure of death. It wasn’t some middle-class idea of a pain-free life. It wasn’t running down to Minneapolis to hold a strange woman in a hotel room on the nineteenth floor of the Hilton. That took very little courage. There was no courage in success either. He had editors clamouring for his columns, he had the ear of the reader, he was known, and he was rich; he carried in his wallet a sheaf of one-hundred-dollar bills that totalled in the thousands. His father had always been poor. Morris would not be poor. Nor did he wish to succumb to the danger of the fool who sees his own image in everything. Moderation in everything, except moderation. His father had been excessively religious, excessively devout, and excessive in introspection. Wanting to be a writer, he had instead chosen to be a minister of the soul, a minister of justice, a minister of spiritual health, Christ’s own emissary finally crucified by his own sense of inadequacy. The world would not listen. It was Morris who became the writer, as if calling out to his father, “Look at me, Dad. I can do what you could not.” The trick, the neat trick of it, was exactly this: His father was a father because Morris was the son. There was the other son, of course, Samuel the elder, who had received all of their father’s attention. He had become the missionary, was pious, and unlike Morris with his verbal juggling, he didn’t lay his family out on the public altar. Still, there must have been tenderness for the prodigal son in his father’s heart. You love most that which you do not comprehend, or that which is taken from you, or denied you. He had an image of his father at a family gathering, standing in the corner, drinking dark coffee, a mixture of petulance and pride. A man too stringent, too intelligent for the clowns in his wife’s family. Harshness has its merits. The sharpness, the incisive thought, all of Blake memorized, all of the Old Testament tucked away in his heart, and then much lost to senility, that horrid monster.
In the morning, Ursula’s cellphone rang and rang, and then stopped. And rang again. She climbed from the bed and scrambled for her purse and found the phone. She flipped it open and said, “Hey, sweetie.” Her voice was husky, full of sleep.
Morris, when he’d finally felt tired in the middle of the night, had chosen to climb into the other bed beside Ursula’s, knowing that his own room would feel too blank. He was awake now, peering at Ursula who sat on the edge of her bed, her legs bare. She’d taken off her clothes at some point during the night and she was wearing black underwear and a black spaghetti-strap top. Her knees were round. Her shoulders as well. Her fingernails were long and painted apple red, and they glowed against the black of the phone. She saw Morris watching her, and she rose and wrapped herself in a sheet from her bed and went into the bathroom and closed the door, and all he heard was her muffled voice. He stood and went to her purse and opened it. Looking inside, he thought, Morris, Morris, and then he saw the gun and he put the purse down and sat quickly and stared at himself in the mirror. It was comical, he thought, snooping through her purse as if he could find there some secret key to Ursula Frank. The toilet flushed and she came back into the room. She had put on a bathrobe and knotted it double at the waist. She was no longer on the phone and she carried it in one hand and with the other she tossed the sheet back onto the bed. She stood, confused, it seemed, by the intimacy and the domesticity of the room.
She lifted her chin. “You slept in your clothes.”
Morris regarded himself. He got up and went into the bathroom and sat down to pee. When he came out, she had dressed and started the coffee maker and she stood by the window.
“It’s Sunday,” she said. “People are going to church.”
He did not approach her. Instead, he sat and put on his shoes and tied them and thought this thought: Everyone is scuttling into temples. Then he stood and said he would be going down to his room.
“There’s coffee,” she said, turning to face him.
“I’m fine. I need to shower, brush my teeth. I’ll phone up later. Okay?”
“That was Wilhelm. He was throwing up. He wanted to know when I was coming home. Ever since Harley died, he does this when I go away. Makes himself sick so that I have to come home.”
“So, you’ll go?”
“Yes. Right away. I’m sorry.”
“Why? There’s no need. I should be the one apologizing.”
“Really? What happened last night?”
“Nothing. You went to sleep.”
“You were very sweet. Thank you.”
&
nbsp; He laughed. “Now that’s something new. ‘Sweet.’“ He felt great desire for her. He moved towards the door.
She watched him and then lifted a hand and said, “I’ll write you.”
He did not hear from her for several months. And when she finally wrote, in late September, he had just lost his column and the weather was turning. Her letter picked up where they’d left off, as if the span of time had not been great, as if she had stepped out of the room for a moment and then returned to pick up the conversation. She said that she had talked too much about Harley.
Morris, you kept asking questions and so I talked and talked like a real blabbermouth, and only later did I realize that you hadn’t really said anything about Martin. I feel that you were hiding something. Last Sunday, Cal and I finally spread Harley’s ashes down by the stream that runs behind the barn. Before we did this, we sat on lawn chairs and watched two whooping cranes fly in from the south, one behind the other, and coast silently along the path of the stream. They were maybe three inches from the water’s surface. The shadow of the first crane startled the fish in the stream and the second crane, following closely, caught those startled fish. The crane dipped his claws into the water, just like that, and scooped up the fish. The cranes did this three times in a row, and each time the second bird caught a fish. Cal said that the birds were like Cheney and Bush. Cheney’s the one who disturbs the life beneath the clean surface, and then Bush goes in for the kill. When Cal talks like this, I get scared. That day, there was a tiny wind blowing, and when we spread Harley’s ashes out over the water, after the birds had left, some of the ashes fell onto my boots and the ashes were still there in the morning and I didn’t want them to go away, so I wrapped the boots in Saran Wrap and laid them in the closet, up beside the strongbox where Cal keeps his important papers. Is that crazy? I want to see you again, even though Wilhelm hates me leaving. I can plan to be in Minneapolis whenever you’re free. Let me know.
