The Matter With Morris Read Online Free Page A

and moved to America, a country that was very different from the one she was raised in. “I never planned to be a farmer’s wife,” she wrote, “but here I am, in the middle of a life that I chose when I was too young to know better. I always imagined I would have a career of my own, use my education.” She apologized; she hated whiners. She said that her husband Cal had closed himself off after Harley’s death, and if she didn’t have Morris to talk to, she would be alone in the world. He echoed these words and, in a moment of brilliant betrayal, said that he felt closer to her than he did to his own wife. This did not surprise or frighten Ursula. She agreed. They spoke of longing and loss and they spoke of sex. He said that ever since Martin died he had become more interested in sex, as if death had dredged up some hidden desire inside of him, as if this was his way of overthrowing his own demise. He said that his wife found his feelings contrary and frightening. She claimed that he was in denial and that sex was masking his grief. It wasn’t normal to want to have sex when you were broken-hearted. “It is what it is,” he wrote. “I refuse to be conquered by despair.”
    Ursula wrote back and asked him what he looked like, and then she described herself, but she did it in a circumspect manner, so that if Morris had been asked to make a sketchof Ursula Frank, he would have been hard pressed to do so. She said that she was not Jewish. “Funny question.” Then she had given her height, five foot eight, and she said that her arms were muscular and that her bum was too big, but the other facts she offered were odd: the size of her feet, the difficulty in maintaining her nails, the mole below her right eye, a trait she had passed on to Harley. She liked to shop for fine clothes. Cal thought she spent too much money on shoes; she had no place to wear them. Morris was excited. He wrote that he loved women’s shoes. He shopped for his wife, bought her boots and outfits of all sorts. He liked the feel of women’s clothing. He liked to pass through a shop and press the cloth between his fingers. “Do you think this fey?” he asked. She responded and said that she had looked up the word “fey” in the dictionary and it meant “fated to die.” What did he mean? He wrote back that he had meant “affected,” as in, some gay men are affected. “Do you think that this behaviour is too effeminate?” She said that she did not like to think of him as gay or effeminate. That worried her. She had imagined that he was quite masculine, that he seemed strong, both physically and morally. She said that she felt guilty because she had not told Cal about her letters to him. She asked if he had told Lucille. She knew Lucille’s name, she knew what Lucille did for a living, and she was intimidated by her education and status. He wrote back and said that Lucille did not know about the letters, that this was a private affair and none of Lucille’s business. “It’s not like you and I are having sex,” he wrote. “We haven’t even faced each other, nor do we truly know what the otherperson looks like, so why should we feel guilty for something that is non-existent?” She said that she disagreed. Their relationship was very real. She wrote: “I think of you often. I imagine changing this correspondence to e-mail so that you could send me a photograph of yourself. And then I think, No, this is better. I like the mystery, the sense of the unknown. So often the physical gets in the way, don’t you think?” She said that her favourite cow, Meera, had taken sick and so had to be slaughtered. He asked if all the cows had names, and she said, “Yes, this is why it’s so hard when they die.” She got up with Cal at four thirty every morning to milk. They milked again at five p.m. “The cows don’t go away,” she said.
    For several months they continued this correspondence and often the letters crossed paths in the mail.