The Matter With Morris by David Bergen Page A

don’t know. I’ve stopped seeing Dr. G. He was an older man who was trying to make me see more clearly, but this scared me and so I walked away. He said, before I left, ‘You seem to need someone to tell you that you have done the right thing, Morris. That you are a good boy. Why is that? And when we choose, there are various opinions of that choice. Yours, your wife ‘s, your children’s, Martin’s. Martin chose to go to war because, you believe, in a moment of anger, you told him to go. And then you could not stop him. He died, and nowyou must come to terms with how you loved him. You cannot forgive yourself.’
    “But I thought that he had misunderstood. I wasn’t talking about forgiveness. I was only interested in making myself disappear. I had already disappeared, I think. I am still doing that. I don’t have any friends. I live alone. I have poor relations with my daughters. I sleep with escorts. I have a woman I write to in Minnesota, not far from Minneapolis. Her name is Ursula. She is close to my age, and if I were sensible, when I next see her, I would fall down into her arms. What is there to lose? I ask you that, what is there to lose?”
    He stopped talking. Leah had fallen asleep and she breathed peacefully. Her hands, still lying on her stomach, moved up and down with her breathing. Morris sat up and Leah stirred, but she did not wake. He stood and pulled the top blanket over her bare legs and her torso. She turned on her side and pulled her legs up towards her chest. Descended into a deeper sleep. Morris sat on the chair and watched her as he drank the last of the champagne.
    Two days later, on a Monday, Morris cancelled his credit cards, threw out his BlackBerry, disconnected the Internet hookup, packed away his television, and terminated his newspaper and magazine subscriptions. He went to his bank and closed his corporate account and asked for everything in cash, American one-hundred-dollar bills. He called Jonathan, his financial adviser, and told him he would be cashing in allhis mutual funds, RRSPs, and any GICs that weren’t locked in. As well, he wanted to put a stop payment on all three of his life insurance plans. “Three,” he said in astonished conclusion. “Who do I think I am?”
    “This is pure foolishness,” Jonathan said. “The fact is, Morris, your stocks have finally started to show some progress. This is no time to sell.”
    “For you people, there is never a good time to sell,” Morris said. “There’s only a good time to buy, and that appears to be whenever, however, whatever. Well, I’m selling everything now and my money’s going under the mattress. I’ll maybe purchase a few gold bricks as well.”
    “Have you found someone else?” Jonathan said. “Because if you have, we can just do a signed transfer. I won’t be hurt. I’ll be disappointed, but not hurt.”
    Morris laughed. “I’m not sleeping with another financial adviser. The fact is, I’m tired of slick operators. I’m paring down, going back to nature.”
    “If you go ahead with this, your taxes will be huge this year. And besides, anything attached to Lucille you can’t touch. You know that, don’t you? There is no safety in cash. It just disappears.”
    “Don’t worry about me, Jonathan. If I’m mad, I’m mad, but at least I’m happily mad. Cash whatever’s solely mine. Lucille can have the rest.”
    “You’re jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, Morris. This isn’t like you.”
    “Let me jump.”
    “What about Libby and Meredith and your grandson? Iwould suggest putting some money into a trust fund for them. You could set it up in a reasonable way, so that funds could be withdrawn in increments.”
    Morris agreed. Like King Lear dividing up his kingdom. When everything was cashed and counted, Morris had three hundred and thirty-three thousand dollars, really a paltry amount for a man his age. He knew that Ezra from the men’s group had close to two million in surety,