The Matter With Morris by David Bergen Read Free Book Online

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 cowboyboots 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