The Matter With Morris by David Bergen Read Free Book Online Page B

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.”
    Was this true? Later, driving home, Morris imagined himself thirty years older and lying in a hospital bed, mind gone, asking some nurse-in-training to play with him. There must be some way to circumvent the subconscious, he thought. Some valve that could be turned on and off, at will, in order to release his longing. He was too clamped, too much like his father that way, seeking the narrow road and then stumbling on the thorny roots at the side of the path.
    Back in late June, just west of Paynesville on the I-94 a few hours out of Minneapolis, on his way to meet Ursula, he had seen a billboard with a picture of a marine and thewords “Devoted to a life of courage” and a Web address, “marines.com,” and he’d been suddenly aware of the unfamiliarity of the country he’d just entered and he felt lost. Several months earlier, riding the bus one day to his downtown office where he sometimes wrote his columns, he had been rereading Anna Karenina, deep into the lives of Anna and Levin and Vronsky, and he’d lifted his head to see if his stop was near, and when he couldn’t situate his place in the world, nausea hit him, then vertigo, and his head swam. The sense of not knowing himself had been so strong that he thought he might throw up. Upon seeing the billboard on the I-94 he had experienced that powerful feeling once again, the dislocation and the foreignness. In this strange world called America, courage was held up under a certain convoluted light.
    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