The Matter With Morris (22 page)

Mervine said that he had never known someone like Morris’s father, who must have had some crazy faith.

“He was mad, certainly. A tyrant. If Sam or I did not like the food at dinner, it would still be waiting on our plates in the morning. Nothing would be wasted. Sam sometimes woke up in the middle of the night and finished my food for me, to save me from myself, from my father’s wrath.”

Morris reflected on how wrath itself was passed from generation to generation. Grandfather Schutt, visiting one Christmas, had offered Morris a raspberry-shaped candy from his coat pocket. Pulled it from a cellophane bag and handed it to Morris. And later, Morris had stolen three more candies from the pocket of the coat that had been placed in the closet, and in the process of stealing a fourth, Grandfather Schutt had caught him and taken Morris into the bathroom and pulled down his pants and strapped him with his beautiful leather belt. Grandfather Schutt, dressed in his dark suit and dark blue tie, his pants loose because of the weapon in his hand, spanking Morris’s six-year-old bare bum. What surprise and shame. For what? A little candy? And the wrath was passed on, generation to generation, and so it landed on
Morris’s head, and Morris, in a moment of unthinking passion, had spanked his own son off to war.

Mervine was talking, saying that Christa had loved the letter he’d sent her. Had especially loved the care he’d taken with the presentation. A little sprinkle of perfume. And where had he learned to write like that? She never knew.

“So it worked,” Morris said.

“The moon thing. She loved that. She said it made her all soft. She said she wanted to play with my little button nipples.”

“Didn’t I tell you?”

“I was wondering, Morris, if you could write another one, telling her that I’m lonely and that I’m sleeping outside in a tent.”

“Now, you want pity?”

“I want her to know my sadness.”

“The point, Mervine, is not to talk about your own anguish, but to reflect everything back onto her. You love her because she is this and this. You want her back because she is the only key that fits into your lock. Be poetic. Borrow a Shakespearean sonnet and use it as your own. Talk about her as if she were still twenty, hark back to a memory that you know will stir her. Try to recall the first time you held her, describe that, and then tell her you still feel that way. I can’t be your Cyrano.”

Mervine had no idea who Cyrano was and so Morris explained. “And, in the end, the girl receiving the letters has fallen unwittingly in love with the writer of the letters,” he concluded.

Mervine laughed, barely, with some consternation, imagining perhaps that Christa would be Morris’s lover. They parted at midnight, beneath a cold half-moon, Mervine back towards his tent, and Morris into his car, driving over the bridge, across the muddy polluted river, past abandoned buildings and the cold storage where carcasses of sheep and pigs and cows hung from giant hooks.

He knew, of course, that he’d been talking about himself, that he should be the one writing to Lucille. He knew how to win her heart. And if he were to dredge up any moment that would soften her, it would be Morris at the age of twenty-three, having just recently met Lucille, tearing across the city by cab to buy a second-hand bicycle for fifty dollars, a wish that she had uttered nonchalantly one day, about an object that she would absolutely love. Wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing his nose and whispering that what she’d always wanted was a baby-blue woman’s bike with a black saddle and a wicker basket, just a dream, “Morris, oh, wouldn’t I look beautiful?” Her father, a rich man, could have bought her twenty-five of those bikes. But he hadn’t. And there Morris was, having laid the fifty in an old woman’s lap, wheeling the undersized bike out onto the street, pedalling madly and absurdly back across the city, his tall frame swamping the little bike, like Professor Karle, he thought, exactly, and he’d arrived at her place breathless, before Lucille returned from her shift at the hospital, and he’d washed and cleaned the bicycle, strung ribbons across it, and when Lucille came home and saw it, she wept. Why, he was still not sure. Joy perhaps. Or gratitude. She called him
“a beautiful dear man.” Her lover. Though he hadn’t been yet, and he wondered now, passing down Main Street past the late nightclubs where long lines of young people huddled hopefully in the cold, how it was that he had chosen not to sleep with Ursula Frank. He was a coward. Or too chivalrous. Or too cautious. The bicycle story was, in any case, the anecdote that would turn Lucille’s head. She would smile as she remembered, and then she would tell him that he had been such a gentle, attentive man. And what had happened? Well, she had left him for a manipulator, a fixer, a materialist who stuck his small hands into people’s chest cavities. But the good doctor saved people’s lives, didn’t he? And of what use was Morris Schutt, educated amateur, to the world? Of no use, pitiful prick.

The following evening, a Friday, Morris dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt and a dark blue cardigan and polished his wingtip shoes, and he drove over to Eleanor and Jack’s house, which was on the Crescent, a smaller low-slung house flanked by mansions. He parked his car on the street, reached over to the passenger’s seat for the box of butter tarts that he’d picked up at the German bakery, and the bottle of
frizzante,
and as he did so he looked out the passenger window towards the house where the dinner party was to take place. Through the picture window Morris saw Eleanor moving about, shifting empty chairs around the dining room table. She was talking to someone outside of his vision. He paused. Put the bottle
and tarts back onto the seat and felt a sharp pain in his chest. His breathing was shallow and he imagined for a moment that he was having a heart attack. He would die here in his Jaguar, and later that night, after dinner, Lucille would step outside, see his car, and find him, head thrown back against the leather seat in the ignominy of death. “Breathe,” he whispered to himself, and he closed his eyes. He may have slept, because when he opened his eyes again he saw through the picture window that everyone was now seated; five people and an empty chair beside Lucille. The pain in Morris’s chest had abated slightly. Perhaps he had eaten too hastily at lunch, though he realized that he hadn’t really eaten at all, only a little leftover sushi from a takeout dinner earlier that week. Perhaps the fish had been off. He should have thrown out the sushi instead of saving it. He placed a palm against his chest. Lucille kept turning to look at the front door, as if expecting him to appear at any moment. She would be telling everyone that he’d thrown out his cellphone, adopted the life of a Luddite, and so there was no way of making contact. He felt sorry for her. He climbed out of the car and shut the door softly. A cold wind blew up the street, scattering leaves across his feet. He walked up the driveway and then stepped out onto the middle of the lawn. It was dark. He stood on the grass and looked in on the scene of the dining room. The hosts, Eleanor and Jack, had invited Lucille and Morris, as well as another couple Morris was familiar with, Patrice and Suzanne. Patrice worked for the UN in Paris. He had married Suzanne, a local woman who was Jewish, and he himself had converted to Judaism almost right away. He had done what Morris had
sometimes wished to be brave enough to do—find a tribe that could envelop him.

Eight months ago, before Lucille had left Morris, the two of them had come to this house and sat at that exact table, with these same people, except back then another couple had also been present, a film director named Darko and his lover Maria. That evening had turned into a disaster that centred on an argument that had begun just after dessert. Patrice, heart so soft and useless, had brought up torture and then used the word “Gitmo” and Morris had said, “Don’t say ‘Gitmo.’ It trivializes, like ‘9/11.’ It diminishes everything that our soldiers are fighting for.” Lucille, sitting beside him, said his name, but he had not paid heed. Patrice had earlier been talking about Afghanistan and the breaking of international laws and the futility of the conflict, and most of the group had agreed. Except for Lucille. And Eleanor, who was gauging the conversation and Morris’s reaction; she kept glancing at him. And then Morris had gotten started and he was not to be stopped. He said that Patrice had no idea what sacrifice meant. How many French soldiers had died in Afghanistan? And how many Canadians? And where did he get off saying that the protection of land and schools and hospitals for the local Afghani people was pointless? And whose children were dying? All along, Morris had been aware of the film director’s lover. He’d been aware upon arriving that Maria was too beautiful to pay attention to, and he imagined that in arguing drunkenly like this with Patrice that he was trying to impress her. Or perhaps to repulse her. If he made himself unattractive, then she would dislike him and there would be no reason to even fantasize about her. He
should not have come here. But he had, and now he needed to finish what had been started. He tilted forward to pour more wine into his glass. He felt giddily out of control, yet he knew that he was standing on very solid ground and that the moral indignation of Patrice could not withstand his own virtuous stance. After all, Morris’s son had died as a soldier. Morris lifted his glass and drank, and as he did so he raised his free hand, and then lowering his glass he looked at Darko rather than Patrice and he said, “Let me tell you about a boy named Tyler.” And as he said this, he saw Darko’s dark eyes, and he wondered how it was that this man had acquired such a beautiful woman and such a laughable name. He was short and had a pockmarked face and his upper lip was chubbier than the lower, and he didn’t seem very intelligent, at least from what Morris had perceived throughout the evening, but then what was intelligence truly, an ability to hold one’s own at a dinner party? But of these things, Morris was certain: the man had power and he had money. He knew that what he was about to do was quite wrong, and Lucille, beside him, had placed her hand on his thigh and was whispering, “Don’t, Morris,” but he charged on, perhaps because he wanted to imagine Maria, later that evening, raising her sharp small face in astonishment and sucking in a deep breath of pity for Morris Schutt. He said, “Tyler Goodhand joined the Canadian Forces and was sent to Afghanistan in February 2006, and while on one of his first patrols his gun went off accidentally and he killed one of his fellow soldiers. Every day, Tyler relives this incident, and every day, he wishes to go back to Afghanistan and fight the Taliban. Tyler is twenty years old now. He will never forgive
himself. But Tyler, rightly or wrongly, wants to act. Because, as he told me, if we don’t act, then what are we doing?”

Morris paused and looked up at the ceiling. He wondered if he was going to cry. He said, “I love Tyler. He might be completely deluded, but he is sincere and honest and he isn’t afraid to ask for forgiveness and I love him.” Morris pushed away from the table, excused himself, and went to the bathroom. He sat on the toilet and fell asleep, until Lucille’s hesitant knock woke him.

That evening, eight months earlier, had not ended so badly. He had returned to the dinner table and Patrice had apologized. And Morris had apologized in turn for his self-abandonment. “I do not want to seem a victim,” he had said, “though that is exactly what I’m doing.” He drank an espresso that Eleanor had handed him, and by the end of the evening there had been a semblance of forgiveness and perhaps even forced joviality.

And tonight, here was almost the same situation, as if Eleanor had conveniently forgotten the fiasco of the last dinner. Only this time Morris was out on the lawn, looking in, and Darko and Maria were absent, perhaps making a film in Rio, perhaps no longer together. But Patrice was present once again, his mouth moving, pontificating. And Suzanne lifting her head, white teeth shining, and no doubt talking about the cruise they were taking up the British Columbia coast to Alaska. Lucille speaking then, looking at the hostess, exclaiming about
the delicious halibut.
A light came on at the neighbouring house and a man stepped out on the verandah. Morris slipped behind a tree. The bark of a dog, a voice calling, “Angel,” and suddenly
Morris was cornered by the tiniest ball of fury, yapping shrilly, snapping at his ankles, and then the dog lunged and bit deep into the Achilles tendon of his right ankle. Morris swung his leg out violently and the little ball of fury flew sideways, hit the tree, and yelped. The neighbour, in a panicky voice called out, “Angel, Angel,” and stepped through the hedge, onto the driveway, and found Morris with his back up against the bark of a rotten elm, holding his foot. An old man, dressed in pyjama bottoms and a dark blue overcoat. A sparse halo of white hair. Slippers. A plastic bag clutched in his left hand. “Who are you?” the old man asked. Angel continued to bark and yelp and whimper. A light came on above Eleanor and Jack’s porch and Eleanor pushed her face out into the cold. “Harry?” she called.

“There’s a man out here,” the old man said. “A peeping Tom. Call the police, Eleanor. Angel’s got him cornered. She’s wounded him.”

Eleanor stepped down onto the grass and approached the tree, moving carefully on high heels. When she saw Morris she said, “Is that you, Morris? What are you doing? We’ve been waiting for you. Did you knock?”

“Hi, Eleanor. Yes, I did. No, actually, I was about to, and then realized I’d forgotten my wine and was heading back to the car when this man’s mad dog attacked me.”

“She didn’t,” Harry said. “That man was skulking.” He stooped to pick up Angel and, holding her to his chest, he said, “Atta girl, good girl, there’s a girl. Good job.”

“I wasn’t skulking,” Morris said. He pointed at the window, beyond which Lucille stood, peering out into the
darkness. “That’s my wife in there. Eleanor is my friend. We ‘re about to have a convivial dinner and your sweet little Angel bit me.”

“He bit you?” Eleanor asked.

“Punctured my Achilles,” Morris said. He would sue this man, and he’d have the nasty bitch put down.

“Nonsense,” Harry said. “Angel doesn’t bite. Look at her.” He held her up for inspection and then drew her back under his chin and turned to Eleanor. “He was hiding behind the tree.”