The Matter With Morris by David Bergen

a coward coasting throughlife, and he called me middle class and boring and a liar. I told him he had to leave, go find his own apartment, or he could join the army. I was not serious, of course, but within a month he had signed up. He came home gloating. Showed me his uniform, wore his green beret around the house, throwing everything back at me. I’m a pacifist, you see. I was raised one, I’m still one, I will always be one. Martin understood my weaknesses. And he knew how to hurt me. The strange thing is, after he joined the army, he changed. He became clearer and kinder and he tried to respect me, but I didn’t go along with it. I didn’t believe he could alter his personality so quickly. But now, after, when it is too late, I see that he did change.”
    Morris stopped talking.
    Leah said, “I never heard him say one word against you. It was only good things. If anything, he talked too much about you.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “It could be tiring. My dad this, and my dad that. He thought you were brilliant.”
    “That’s not the Martin I knew.”
    Leah reached for his hand and held it again, and let go. “Poor Mr. Schutt.”
    “You’re mocking me.”
    “Yes. You feel so sorry for yourself. And you’re scared. Like if you had sex with me right now, tonight, it would be the worst thing in the world.”
    “Well, that’s true, it would be wrong. Because I know you, and because you knew Martin. I have a very narrowview of myself. As a young man, I used to chant, ‘Morris must make money.’ I saw money as a way of saving myself. In fact, I have over a thousand dollars in my wallet. Right here, back pocket. And this makes me happy. But even with the fat wallet and everything it can buy, you for instance, I am still the young boy who peeks through a keyhole watching the world at work. In another time, another era, I would be the dirty old man at the peep show. The one eye of yearning, the narrow glimpse. And so I plod along, aware that others might wag their fingers at me. Outside opinion. It weighs me down. Are you enjoying this?”
    “You’re funny, Mr. Schutt. I don’t have a clue what you’re saying, but I love the way you talk.”
    “I was just thinking that about you. How your voice slips down my ear canal.”
    She chuckled. “See? Like that. You say strange things.”
    He was silent. He wondered what kind of underwear she was wearing, if any. Desire was a tricky thing. His words were a form of seduction, of opening her up. “The grass was lovely, wasn’t it,” he said, and she agreed, “Hmmm,” and she placed both her hands on her stomach and said, “You’re what, forty-five?”
    He laughed. “Fifty-one. Why?”
    “I add up the ages of the men I see.”
    “Where are you?”
    “Nine seven three.”
    “Nine hundred and—?”
    “Correct.”
    “Jesus.” This was sobering. “Including me?”
    “No, not you.”
    “So, I’m special.”
    “Yes.”
    “I saw a doctor after Martin died. I went to his office and I told him about myself. I was trying to understand my terrible sadness, and no matter how much I talked about Martin, I couldn’t retrieve him. He was gone. And this wise man, a Dr. G, listened to me talk and talk about wanting to make myself disappear. If Martin no longer existed, then I also wanted to disappear, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to walk away from my family and life, and so I thought I should perhaps kill myself. But I am useless, even at death. Pathetic. If I am both a romantic and a moralist, it is the romantic in me that is in love with love and with death. And he said that love is death. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. He said that to want to disappear is better than just dying, isn’t it? A mystery is more interesting than a suicide. He said that as a columnist I stuck my fingers in my own shit and held it up for the world to see. Not that the reader necessarily saw the shit, but that I perceived it as shit. Perhaps Dr. G was right. I