The Matter With Morris by David Bergen Page B

boots and thrown them in haste across the room and they lay stranded by the wall and the foot of the bed. She pressed her palms againstthe windowpane. The curtains were open and it was darker in the room than it was outside where the city lights were just beginning to glow. Over the last while, when he had found himself in a hotel room with a woman who was a stranger, a woman he paid for, there had always been a wall between him and the woman, and usually it took great effort for him to climb over that wall. With Ursula, there was no barrier.
    He approached her and leaned forward, barely an inch from the back of her neck, and breathed in.
    “All of me,” she whispered, and she turned to face him, her arms in the air.
    He smelled under one arm and then the other. He smelled the sweater that covered her bra and her breasts. He circled her and smelled the small of her back, and then her rump. Still, he did not touch her, not with his nose, or his tongue, or any part of himself. His hands hovered as he smelled her hips and then her thighs and finally her calves and feet. He was on his hands and knees now, aware of the texture of the rug, and he thought, Look at you, Morris Schutt. He took deep breaths. He had an image of the computer keyboard in his condo and of the “enter” key; one tap with the baby finger on his right hand. He had an erection.
    He stood and faced her. He smelled her cheeks, her ears, behind her ears, her mouth, and her neck again. She held up her hands, palms facing him with her fingers slightly spread, and he smelled first the heels of her hands, and then her wrists and her fingers and between her fingers. He stepped back and she began to cry.
    Sadness had overwhelmed their desire. He stood before her and watched the tears fall, and he took her in his arms and held her as she wept. Then he led her to the bed and told her to lie down. She did this, and he took the blanket at the end of the bed and covered her and then lay down beside her until she slept. The light slipped from the room and he too fell asleep, and when he woke it was dark and his arms still held her. He rose and stood by the window that looked out towards the towers of the church in the distance. The movement of traffic below. A few human figures darkly walking. The history of the universe is the history of a man. To see everything in the light of the soul, to see those dark figures down there as souls, to understand that every human, every flower, every created thing, is divine. To understand that the Absolute is not the father, that the father begins to exist only when he produces the son. Take his own father, a man who used to write songs, and then, strumming his acoustic guitar, he would offer the songs to whoever would listen. And he wrote poetry with a clip-clop metre and a simple rhyme. He was a man who secretly yearned to be published. A man who observed his son become a journalist, a semi-famous columnist, and judged him for it. “Your sentences are fine but they are empty. Trite. There is more to the world than sex and irony and making fun. You have an audience. Talk to them about goodness.” By “goodness” he meant the salvation of lost souls, the conveying of Truth. The poetry his father wrote was simple; it lacked polish and insight; it wasdeliberate, the opposite of what Morris wrote. His father’s sermons were deliberate. His goal was salvation. It was criminal to dance around the edges of truth when at any minute death might come knocking; for you, for the parishioner in the pew, for the young person who is seeking answers. It took courage to be literal. Which, to Morris’s mind, was nonsense. His father had been a purveyor of solace and selfishness; like all good preachers, he had promoted the fear of death and then promised freedom. Morris did not know courage, but he knew what it wasn’t. It wasn’t the erasure of death. It wasn’t some middle-class idea of a pain-free life. It wasn’t running down to