The Matter With Morris

by David Bergen

  “He likes to eavesdrop,” Morris said, but sweet Collette did not know that word. “To listen without being noticed,” he added.

  “In secret,” Collette said, and she nodded. “What is this, ‘Amour Nocturne’?” she asked, plucking a cassette from the stack. Samuel took the cassette and placed it back on the shelf.

  Morris grinned and said that that particular tape was a collection of recordings with the sounds of different animals having sex. “A bit strange, but that’s you, isn’t it, Sammy?”

  Samuel said that it was science research. Someday he might write an article on it.

  “Why French?” Collette asked.

  “Our mother can’t read French,” Morris said. “Or perhaps it’s because the French are very sensual.”

  Collette laughed and Samuel turned red.

  Morris saw that she was fascinated by Samuel. She said that he was like a scientist. Maybe a mad one. “Fou. Complètement,” she said. “It is like you are watching the world through a very strong lens. Do you know what I mean? Your heart?” She reached out and touched Samuel’s chest. “Ahh, there it is. Ton âme.”

  Morris came to know this word, and he came to know Collette. She lived on the top floor of a three-storey house that belonged to her sponsoring family. She occupied a single room with sloping ceilings. There was a single bed against the far wall, beneath the window, and opposite there was a small kitchen with a sink and stove and fridge and a table with two red chairs. She pursued Morris. She was new to the city, she had very few friends, and she wanted a Canadian lover. She told Morris this. She said that though Samuel might have been preferable, Morris was more available. She smiled in her dreamy disarming way. She said, past her small teeth, “I have a frisson of guilt. You are quicker than your brother, though not brighter, and you can provide me with easy company.” He was hurt that she did not think he was bright, but this did not stop him. He went out of his way to find false ID in order to purchase cheap Italian wine and bring it over to her tiny apartment, where they sat on the floor, a candle burning between them, and talked. She said she knew that love and sex was a game for them. And she admitted that there was a corner of her heart that she reserved for Samuel alone, who did not play games.

  Morris, far too young and hungry, did not understand that after this experience with Collette he would always be attracted to women who were independent, women who were strong and slightly off-kilter. He played guitar for Collette and sang unremarkable versions of Dylan and Neil Young, and he told her stories of his childhood in the Congo, where the Schutts had been missionaries. Once, he brought her food that his mother had made, scalloped potatoes and cabbage rolls, food she had never tasted before, and they ate this together, huddled by the candle, drinking wine from coffee mugs and smoking the Gitanes that she had brought with her from France.

  She sometimes asked about Samuel, perhaps because she missed his strange presence, but also because Morris was a softer and kinder person when he spoke of Samuel. She said that he seemed to love his brother very much.

  “My father adores him,” Morris said. “And my mother. He doesn’t ask for anything but just seems to exist in a place that he has created for himself. When I was seven, and he was eight, he was very sick with rheumatic fever. He was going to die, I remember, and my father took a picture of him lying in bed. They propped him up with pillows and told him to smile, and they took a picture of him and then one of us together. If you were to look at the picture now—my father pulls it out sometimes and shows it to company—you would see that we are smiling. Only Samuel is the happiest, even though he is sick and almost dead. By the following week he was better.”

  Collette was leaning close to him as he spoke and when he was done she put out her cigarette and stood and took his hand and pulled him up towards her bed. She lay down and said, “Come.”

  The memory of this time was like the photograph of his nearly dead brother; both had curled and grown indistinct. What was still clear was Collette’s manner in bed, as if sex was like the trying on of another’s skin, as if it were a piece of clothing that might transform her. She took him and she folded into him and beat her soft wings and she called out. He heard the sound of the November wind pushing against the small window just above her bed.

  Samuel, when he learned that Collette was Morris’s lover, never spoke of her again. She went away, back to Marseilles, and for a time she wrote Morris letters that arrived in thin airmail envelopes. Solid words written on fine blue paper. And then he learned that Collette was also writing Samuel and that these letters were much more intimate (he found and read them one winter afternoon; sinuous confidential letters that began “Mon Chéri” and ended with a declaration of affection, “amitié”), and whereas Collette talked to Morris about Samuel, she did not talk to Samuel about Morris. And he understood that the betrayal had been his alone, and that Collette believed this. She did not need to ask for forgiveness.

  Just before Idaho Falls he took an exit, and after an hour of driving, he discovered that he was heading north to Butte rather than west to Boise. He pulled over to the shoulder and studied the map, then continued and followed a small highway west into a town called Arco, where, close to the railway tracks, he stopped at a souvenir shop and talked to a Vietnam veteran who was selling bowls shaped from solid rock. The man was in a wheelchair. He was voluble and lonely, and without any prompting he said that he had lost his legs in Vietnam. He talked about wars both past and present. He showed Morris his Purple Heart. “I love my country. With all my heart. I’d give up my legs sixty times over for this place.” He wheeled out from behind his table and pushed up close to Morris. Looked up at him. “It’s a beautiful country. When you’re finished with Boise, go south to Arizona, the Grand Canyon. Gives you faith in God.”

  Just what he needed, Morris thought, a return to a faith he had lost so long ago. “I’m not an atheist,” he said.

  “Of course you aren’t.” Too enthusiastic, this suffering cripple. And in order to escape, Morris chose one of the bowls, the larger one with the blue lines. His brother might appreciate it. Outside, on the stoop of the shack, the sun beat off his head and made his eyes swim. Or perhaps he was tearing up. He had taken to crying lately, at the slightest hint of bathos, like his father used to do when he told stories to his children, gathering them around him, a sequester near the fire. Ancient stories, because those stories were the best. And the tears fell.

  Farther along, winding amongst hills that were bare except for the occasional horse or a pickup moving slowly along a road high above, he realized that he would never be able to compete with the patriotism of the man he had just seen. The mythmaking was so engrained, so lacking in contemplation. But perhaps I am missing something, he thought.

  His brother, on the other hand, had chosen this place, the United States of America, as his new home. And his brother was not given to irrational decisions. All his life, at college, in Egypt and then the Sudan and then Tanzania and back to North America, Samuel had, or so Morris thought, led a careful life. Perhaps he knew something that Morris did not.

  His brother lived in a large house in a gated community with a three-car garage and in the garage were two cars, a BMW and an Infiniti. And inside the perfectly clean house, when his brother was at work during the day, Morris roamed and snooped, dipping into Samuel’s dresser drawers, where he found a purple dildo and some lacy panties and a pair of handcuffs in a brown leather bag and a handgun, fully loaded. He took out the handgun and studied it and thought of Ursula and her gun, never spoken of. And why had he never spoken to Ursula about the gun? Had he been afraid? Lucille would have said yes, yes, he was afraid. She would have said that Morris preferred secrecy and deceit to full disclosure. Look at him now, snooping through Samuel’s drawers, experiencing the fragile eroticism of a peeping Tom. He put the gun back into the drawer. There was a television that filled one wall, and a den with a set of Robert Ludlum’s work, the Koran, the Bible, an Arabic-English dictionary, and a p
hoto of his brother in the Sudan, standing beside a tall black man with a marvellous smile. Samuel had always wanted to work for the CIA. Dorothy’s father had been a chief of station in the Congo many years earlier. This had benefitted Samuel. Perhaps he’d married Dorothy for this reason—to carry on the tradition of spying. As Morris stood in the middle of the house on an extremely hot day in late July, near noon, he realized that he was once again on the verge of tears. Where was the relevance? Imprudently, over the last month, he had been reading Cicero, one of the books he’d picked up from Dr. Karle’s library. Cicero’s daughter Tullia had died in childbirth and Cicero had fallen into a private mourning, against the wishes of his compatriots who wanted him to appear suitably sad but finally healed. But it was difficult to be healed. And from this sadness leapt great writing, and the line, Unless the mind is healed … there will be no end to our unhappiness. How so? wondered Morris. Would a clear and wise mind remove his grief and distress?

  That night, sitting on the back patio in the dry heat, Morris drank gin and tonic as Samuel held a sweating glass of ice water. At some point the conversation turned to Martin, an inevitable and painful topic. Morris said that it had been a year and a half now and that there was no escaping the sadness because it just clung to one, you see, like a burr under a spaniel’s collar. They had had a spaniel as boys, so the allusion was simple and effective. Samuel had shot the dog after it was hit by a car and lay whimpering in a ditch. He’d walked up to it, pulled back the bolt on the .22, put in a shell, reset the bolt, said, “Poor girl,” and shot the dog. Morris mentioned this, but Samuel would have no truck with nostalgia.

  “Lucille told me that she is worried,” Samuel said. “That like this now, talking about a dead dog rather than Martin, you are distracting yourself and everyone else.”

  “Not facing it then, eh?” Morris drank and the ice cubes slipped up the glass and banged his teeth. “I am though. In bigger ways than Lucille understands. She’s the one who’s distracted. She’s fucking a heart surgeon.”

  Samuel had never sworn in public in his life, not that Morris knew, and so there was a great pleasure in pricking his ears.

  “Things were rough long before you separated. You told me this.”

  “Significance?” Morris asked.

  “She’s been lonely.”

  “And I’m not?”

  “She thought you might be. Were, in fact. She said that. Are you lonely?”

  “No. Are you? We are more alike than one might hope, aren’t we, Samuel? Both of our marriages finished. Both of us living alone. Good thing Dad is unaware. He’d be very disappointed.” He leaned forward and asked, “How’s the spying world?”

  “I should never have told you that. Ever.”

  “Listen, Samuel. I have one friend, maybe two, and we don’t talk about you. And I’ve never mentioned you in my columns. Would you like me to? Perhaps a little story about my brother who tortures infidels?”

  “I teach Arabic,” Samuel said.

  “Do you agree with the methods?” Morris asked.

  “Which?”

  “Come on, Samuel. The torture. Your people are breaking all kinds of laws.”

  “Not at all.”

  “You’re serious. So, if the regime asked you to interrogate a prisoner, you would?”

  Samuel appeared to be thinking. The air conditioner hummed on the other side of the house. Samuel said, “If a man throws rocks through your windows night after night, wouldn’t you try to stop him?”

  “Well, I might ask why my windows? What have I done? I might even walk out into the street and try to talk to him.”

  “You’re naive, Morris. He’d smash a rock over your head.”

  “He might, that’s true. But I wouldn’t know that until I stepped out onto the street and faced him. The most dangerous thing is to not know your enemy, especially as the enemy is usually yourself, or your own fear. I’ve always wondered when your thinking changed. We grew up with the same parents, we were taught the same things.”

  “Maybe it’s you that’s changed.”

  “Dad always taught us to be peaceful.”

  “But I am. He also taught us other things that you’ve rejected. So, who’s changed?”

  Morris said, “What happens is that ideas flip with each generation. Children need to push against the values of their parents. Look at Martin. Going to war after everything I taught him.” He pointed at Samuel. “If you’d had a child, let’s say a girl, she might be your opposite.”

  “Maybe, but I doubt that. I would have raised her in a clear way.”

  Morris chuckled sadly. “And I didn’t raise Martin in a clear way?”

  “Maybe not,” Samuel said with a soft voice.

  He took a sip and shuddered and said, “You don’t know what it’s like to be a parent. Suddenly you’re a father and then you learn as you go. Maybe I failed, but it wasn’t because I didn’t try.”

  “I never said you failed,” Samuel said. “Your daughters are beautiful.”

  “I wish sometimes I had your certainty. Not very often, because I’m not a big believer in certainty, but there are times when I wish for that. It must be nice to be right.” And then, perhaps because he was on his third drink, or perhaps because Samuel had angered him, he talked about Collette. He asked Samuel if he had ever heard from Collette after she left Winnipeg to go back to Marseilles. “She taught you French,” he said. “Clean words, dirty words. How to order food. The weather. Il fait frais ce matin. Where the hat was. Le chapeau est sur la table. All useful things, weren’t they, Samuel?”

  Samuel was watching Morris warily. “This is your grief talking.”

  “Yes, yes. And it is fresh every day.” And then he said that he was sorry. He had brought up Collette because he had been thinking about her on the drive down, and he’d come to see that he’d been selfish. He must have hurt Samuel. “I did. I was greedy and young and foolish and I wanted to fill both of my hands, and so, impetuously, I stole from you.” He faltered and waved a hand and said that he was trying to be clearer with himself.

  “There were three of us, Morris. I have to take some responsibility. And Collette, well, she chose too, didn’t she?”

  “She did. And it appears that her heart chose you. Her letters to you were warm and caring.”

  “You read them?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry for that as well.”

  “Stop beating yourself up, Morris. You live too much in the past.”

  “See? Look at you, your generosity, your forgiveness. I love you, Samuel.”

  Samuel seemed embarrassed. He was quiet for a moment, and then he talked about his first year in high school, how the boys had made fun of his hearing aids, called him “AM-FM,” and how, at lunch, he was chased around the school grounds and often came home with bruises and black eyes. “And then the next year you arrived in high school, and the first time Butch Gaartner tried to beat me up, you stepped in and kicked the shit out of him. The boys left me alone after that.”

  “I remember.”

  “You weren’t such a pacifist back then, were you.”

  “No, I wasn’t.” He felt a certain pride in that memory. He wished now that Samuel had told Martin this story. Before he ran off to war. Some meaning could have been made of it; Martin would have had reason to be proud of his father. Who needs guns when you have your fists, eh, Dad?

  “You’re too full, Morris. You stuff yourself with sadness. You have to learn to sit back and assess. I’m not dangerous. I’m just your brother, your own flesh and blood. The thing is, we don’t get to choose our brothers, do we.” And then he rose and said he was tired and he told him to lock the patio door when he came in. To make sure that the safety rod was in place as well.

  Morris waved in response. He sat and listened to the night noises. There were crickets, and cars, and once, faintly, the sound of a woman crying, which reminded him of Lucille when she cried. A lonesome sound, the noise of a sad woman.

  The light in th
e park had shifted from yellow to grey to the filtered shadows one might find in the corners of a poorly lit room. The afternoon had fled into the evening and all Morris had done was sit on a bench. He rose and walked quickly back towards his condo. As he entered the building he heard the sound of someone moaning and for a moment he imagined that he was still thinking of Lucille crying, and as he reached the third floor he knew it was Lucille—it was precisely her manner of weeping, a soft wail that descended into a hiccupping sniffle and then back up again—but then he saw the huddled figure at his door and he recognized his daughter Libby. She was sitting, leaning against his door, her legs pulled up and her face pressed against her knees, as if she were trying to compress herself, and when he said her name and she looked up, she burst out crying afresh. And then she stood and fell into his arms. “He left me, he left me,” she wailed and then, hiccupping, she pushed herself against him and what he heard was a jumble of crying and finally, “Oh, Daddy, my heart, I’m going to die.”

  Morris held her and said, “There, there,” while he thought, Of course it feels like you will die, that your heart will never survive. I have felt that too, but it’s not true. Then he said, “Come, sweetie, come inside,” and he opened the door and led her in and sat her down in the kitchen and ran her a glass of water and he said, “Breathe. Just breathe.” He waited and stroked her hands and her hair as she finished crying, and then, just when he thought she might be ready to talk, she began to cry again, and he said again, “Just breathe,” until finally she was ready to talk.

  She looked up at him with her blotched face and her red eyes. “This morning Shane told me.” She trembled, then continued. “He made me breakfast and after I ate he said that there was another woman and her name was Anne and that he loved her. Daddy, she’s fifty. He made me breakfast and let me eat it and then he said that he had fallen in love with a woman who’s almost Mom’s age. He called me unripe.”