Excessive Joy Injures the Heart

FICTION

Women and Children (1973, reissued as
Our Lady of All the Distances, 1991)
If Only We Could Drive Like This Forever (1988)
Let Me Be the One (1996)
Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (2000)

POETRY

Fortress of Chairs (1992)
The Long Cold Green Evenings of Spring (1997)

ANTHOLOGIES

A Room at the Heart of Things (1998)

B
ecause the storekeeper is wearing his white butcher’s coat he makes her think of a movie she went to with her husband once — back in their married days — a movie in which a butcher (who was also a psychopath) courted a beautiful woman with fresh cuts of meat. He would appear outside the little schoolhouse where the woman was giving lessons to her students, the newly sawed leg of some animal wrapped up in pink butcher paper, a florist’s twist where its hoof would have been. The memory of the shock she’d felt when what she had taken to be a bouquet of flowers appeared, in the camera’s close-up, to be a crude bouquet of blood-red leg of lamb or cow, makes her almost jump when Habib bows to present her with a bouquet of actual flowers.

“Thanks, Habib, but what’s the occasion?”

“Spring is the occasion. And to celebrate this rare Canadian phenomenon we are making a small presentation of flowers. But only to our very best customers.”

“In other words to all your customers.”

“Yes” Habib tells her. “All.”

Speared and furled in their greenish glass jug, the irises have a churchy but phallic look. She places the jug on the windowsill above the kitchen sink, then carries the tulips, in a clear glass pillar, to the room whose sofa looks out over the muddy back garden. But before she was awarded the flowers she was perched on another sofa — the sofa at the Fowler Institute — waiting to see which of the Institute’s four doctors would turn out to be her doctor. The doctors at the Institute were medical doctors who no longer practised medicine. In fact the friend who’d recommended the Institute to her had referred to her own Institute doctor as a psychoanalyst who was also a gymnast. It was clear that these doctors weren’t the sort of doctors who would attire themselves in the white lab coats of butchers or shopkeepers, they were the sort of doctors who attired themselves in the jeans and checked shirts of farm boys. One of them had come out of a consultation room to look for a chart. He was wearing a midnight-blue corduroy jacket along with his jeans. She had hoped he wouldn’t turn out to be her doctor. He was attractive, certainly, but there was something really quite sad about his shoulders. He had also seemed to be somewhat shy. While he was sliding a chart into a wall of charts he had coughed briefly and she had imagined his skin: warm with fever.

When he’d said “I wouldn’t dream of it,” she had secretly studied him, uneasy and puzzled, from where she was lying on
the treatment table, one arm bent under her head. With his long sideburns and his long-waisted blue corduroy jacket he’d made her think of a doctor from another century. But his voice came out of the modern world and was modernly hoarse. Well, naturally; he had a cold. She’d smiled up at him. “Why wouldn’t you dream of it?” (She’d half-thought he would say “Because you are too intelligent.”)

“Because you are living too much up in your head.”

“I’m too skeptical to be hypnotized?”

The smile in his eyes gave her full marks for naïveté if she was naïve enough to suppose that he (or anyone) would be so naïve as to label her skeptical. “Skeptical is the
last
thing you are. But we’ll have to talk more about this the next time I see you. Which won’t be as soon as I would like” — not being in sight of a calendar, he raised a bare wrist to mimic a quick, preoccupied glance at a watch — “because I’m very booked up at the moment. I think what we’ll have to do right now is set up a few weekly appointments for you three or four weeks from now, after I’ve moved to my place out in the country.”

Again she uneasily studied him. But this time she was sure her uneasiness was tipping over into skepticism. The sad thing was, he didn’t see it. “I’ve had quite a lot of therapy already …”

There was a silence.

“Psychoanalysis,” she said.

“That was for your head. This will be for your body.”

“What about the insomnia?” She was at last driven to ask. It was why she had come to see him. “In the meantime, I mean?”

“I’ll set up a few quick appointments for you here in town — for acupuncture treatments — and I’ll also teach you a few breathing techniques that might be helpful.”

She wondered why he had said she wouldn’t be a good candidate for hypnosis. Didn’t this mean she wouldn’t be willing to give herself over to the experience utterly? Unless it meant the opposite: she would go into a trance and never come back.

When it was time for her to leave, he told her that he preferred to be called Declan, not Dr. Farrell, and he pulled a map of Ontario out of a drawer to show her where he lived from May till September, on the outskirts of a small town called Ottersee. He spread the map out on the treatment table and they looked down at it together.

So there it was: unwieldy Ontario. Antelope-coloured, immense as a continent.

“Ottersee,” she said, liking the sound of it. “And so are there a lot of otters out there?”

“No sea and no otters. Or at least not any more.”

“Is there a bus?”

“You don’t own a car?”

“No.”

“I think there might be a train.”

To her surprise, she discovered that she liked standing beside him. He all at once seemed like a genuine person, democratic and tactful. There was nothing lush or overly ripe about him, he was too reserved, too thoughtfully formal. But did she really want to travel so far out into the country? At the mercy of trains?

He was printing
CLAIRE VORNOFF
on a clean page in his notebook. “You’re Russian?”

“No, the Vornoff is from my husband. But we aren’t living together any more.” This was more information than he’d asked her for, and so she quickly said, “His great-grandparents came out here from Russia the year the
Titanic
went down.”

He smiled.

“But they weren’t on it.”

When he smiled again she told him that even if she did own a car she wouldn’t know how to drive it.

“Why is that?”

“I’m too much of a dreamer to ever drive a car …”

“So now you could learn.”

Yes. As long as I don’t kill someone, she thought.

But now he was asking her what kind of work she did.

She told him she was working for a doctor who practised family medicine. “Shrieking babies,” she told him. “Bulimia and glaucoma.” But she left out all those blank bits of the day in which for a minute or two she would daydream while waiting outside the examining room for patients to slip off belts, boots, earrings, stockings. Followed by the quick shy rustle of the paper gown, then a pause, then a sigh, then a tremulous voice calling out “Okay, nurse! I’m ready now!” She was not, however, a nurse. “What I do is more like being a hostess who knows how to take blood pressures and measure and weigh people.” After she got married she was offered a job working as a receptionist for a gynecologist friend of her husband’s. “And it just sort of went on from there.” But what did she dream of, waiting for Dr. Tenniswood’s patients to pull on their paper gowns? Only the usual: love, sex, tenderness, and the day she would prove to everyone who’d ever shown disdain for her that she was amazing. “But I’m hoping to better my lot in future. I’m working my way toward a degree so I can teach.”

“Good,” he said.

When she stepped out into the late afternoon, the day was cooler and clearer. A windblown jet trail was even hanging like
a length of white fringe in the sky. But was that really true? That she was living too much up in her head? At twenty, on her honeymoon with Stefan in Europe, she had sat barefoot one cold May morning in Paris, shy and sex-obsessed and pretending to be demure as she’d begun to read Turgenev’s
First Love
while a shoemaker was tapping new soles onto her sandals. But now and then she’d glanced up to discover that he was looking over at her. He’d had an emotional face and this had made it nearly impossible for her to concentrate. She’d felt she was on display and so must try to look sensual and poised and pure of heart all at the same moment. When the sandals were at last ready and he was buckling them on for her she’d asked him how much she owed him. “Rien,” he’d said. And to her puzzled “But I must owe you something …,” he had only smiled, shaking his head. And then when she’d stood, drawing the broad strap of her canvas bag up over a shoulder, he had also stood, just a little too close to her, somehow letting her know that what he wanted was to hold her. Hold her or kiss her. Or — and this was what it turned out to be — hold the weight of young foreign breasts in his hands. They didn’t speak, and as he stood cupping her breasts his eyes filled. His tears seemed to her to be the sign that their weight was the right weight: a weight he remembered. It was over when he thanked her. Then she had dizzily stepped out into the bright light of the day feeling restored, feeling this is real life, this is my body.