The Matter With Morris by David Bergen Page A

eroticism. It trumped reality.
    Her room was on the nineteenth floor and, like his, it had a deep-orange rug and off-white curtains and two double beds and double mirrors so that everything, when you entered, was doubled once again. Her window faced onto Marquette Avenue and from that height one could see across to the structure of Westminster Presbyterian. She stood by the window and he was behind her. A foot of space separated them. He said, “There are churches everywhere.” And then he asked if she went to church, and she said that she did. She and her husband attended the First Congregational Church in Alexandria, where they lived, but she had grown up Dutch Reformed. She felt safe in a church, she said. He asked if that was all. Did she just feel safe, or did she believe in something more?
    In the restaurant, earlier, she had said, “Come to my room,” and then she looked at him and held his gaze until he looked away, at the approaching waitress, and he’d been aware that she was more honest than he was. After the waitress hadgiven them the bill and he’d paid, she said, “I’m not thinking that we have to have sex, but I’m not against it. Since Harley died, I’ve stopped waiting for the world to come and get me. I spent so many years putting my toe into the water to test it and then stepping back. I never really jumped. Now, I’m ready to jump. You don’t have to jump. That’s your decision. But I don’t have time to get to know you, to play the flirting game. I like you, I like how your mind works. I know this because I’ve read your columns and your letters, and now, talking to you, I can see that you’re a man I can trust.” She paused.
    “What about your husband?” he said.
    She said that Cal didn’t have to know. In fact, these days Cal might not even care, he was so taken with revenge.
    “Is he dangerous? All those guns.”
    She laughed. “He doesn’t even know who you are.”
    “You’ve never talked about me?”
    “I have. I talk about your columns.” She said that this wasn’t like her. Usually she was up front and she’d tell Cal what she was feeling, but these days he wasn’t willing to hear her talk about her feelings. She said that she had told Cal that she needed a weekend alone. She simpered slightly and moved her shoulders. “So, here I am.” She asked if he had told his wife that he was coming down to Minneapolis.
    He said that he was living alone. She didn’t need to know.
    “You’re honest.”
    “Mostly.”
    “You wanna have sex with me?” “It’s not that simple.”
    “Sure it is. Do you want to have sex with me?”
    “Yes, I do. But there’s too much turmoil in my life, and sex with you would just make for more turmoil. We’ll go up to your room and we’ll take off our clothes and lie down together and press our bodies against each other and I’ll enter inside you, which is the most intimate thing one can do with another person, and then tomorrow I’ll drive home to Canada and you’ll go back to your farm and your son and husband. And I will think of you, and I will think of you some more, and that is one kind of turmoil, and another is you thinking of me and wondering if I will return, wondering if I love you or if I have simply disappeared.”
    She laughed. “‘Enter inside you’—who talks like that? Anyways, I don’t mind. You think I’m being used by you, but I might be the one doing the using.” She said the last I pointedly.
    “There’s that as well.” Then he said that Lucille had always felt that marriage was for life, that when they had said “till death do us part,” it actually meant something, but now he had begun to understand that the death in this case was not Lucille’s or his own, but their son’s. “This is not profound, but it is true.” He placed the bill on the table and stood and held out his hand to her.
    “Smell me,” she said. She was at the window, looking down onto the street below. She had taken off her