Read Online The Matter With Morris by David Bergen - Free Book Online

Minneapolis to hold a strange woman in a hotel room on the nineteenth floor of the Hilton. That took very little courage. There was no courage in success either. He had editors clamouring for his columns, he had the ear of the reader, he was known, and he was rich; he carried in his wallet a sheaf of one-hundred-dollar bills that totalled in the thousands. His father had always been poor. Morris would not be poor. Nor did he wish to succumb to the danger of the fool who sees his own image in everything. Moderation in everything, except moderation. His father had been excessively religious, excessively devout, and excessive in introspection. Wanting to be a writer, he had instead chosen to be a minister of the soul, a minister of justice, a minister of spiritual health, Christ’s own emissary finally crucified by his own sense of inadequacy. The world would not listen. It was Morris who became the writer, as if calling out to his father, “Look at me, Dad. I can do what you could not.” The trick, the neat trick of it, was exactly this: His father was a father because Morriswas the son. There was the other son, of course, Samuel the elder, who had received all of their father’s attention. He had become the missionary, was pious, and unlike Morris with his verbal juggling, he didn’t lay his family out on the public altar. Still, there must have been tenderness for the prodigal son in his father’s heart. You love most that which you do not comprehend, or that which is taken from you, or denied you. He had an image of his father at a family gathering, standing in the corner, drinking dark coffee, a mixture of petulance and pride. A man too stringent, too intelligent for the clowns in his wife’s family. Harshness has its merits. The sharpness, the incisive thought, all of Blake memorized, all of the Old Testament tucked away in his heart, and then much lost to senility, that horrid monster.
    In the morning, Ursula’s cellphone rang and rang, and then stopped. And rang again. She climbed from the bed and scrambled for her purse and found the phone. She flipped it open and said, “Hey, sweetie.” Her voice was husky, full of sleep.
    Morris, when he’d finally felt tired in the middle of the night, had chosen to climb into the other bed beside Ursula’s, knowing that his own room would feel too blank. He was awake now, peering at Ursula who sat on the edge of her bed, her legs bare. She’d taken off her clothes at some point during the night and she was wearing black underwear and a black spaghetti-strap top. Her knees were round. Her shouldersas well. Her fingernails were long and painted apple red, and they glowed against the black of the phone. She saw Morris watching her, and she rose and wrapped herself in a sheet from her bed and went into the bathroom and closed the door, and all he heard was her muffled voice. He stood and went to her purse and opened it. Looking inside, he thought, Morris, Morris, and then he saw the gun and he put the purse down and sat quickly and stared at himself in the mirror. It was comical, he thought, snooping through her purse as if he could find there some secret key to Ursula Frank. The toilet flushed and she came back into the room. She had put on a bathrobe and knotted it double at the waist. She was no longer on the phone and she carried it in one hand and with the other she tossed the sheet back onto the bed. She stood, confused, it seemed, by the intimacy and the domesticity of the room.
    She lifted her chin. “You slept in your clothes.”
    Morris regarded himself. He got up and went into the bathroom and sat down to pee. When he came out, she had dressed and started the coffee maker and she stood by the window.
    “It’s Sunday,” she said. “People are going to church.”
    He did not approach her. Instead, he sat and put on his shoes and tied them and thought this thought: Everyone is scuttling into temples. Then he stood and said he would be going down to his