Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (10 page)

But he was already pacing around her. He looked into her eyes. “Your pupils are fairly dilated.”

“They’re always dilated. It’s because I’m nearsighted.”

“You see nearsightedness as a cause. I see it as an effect.”

“What is the cause, then?”

“When you were a little girl, something made you open your eyes much too wide. You tried to see everything all at once and you ended up seeing not very much. My guess is that you let people push you around.”

He paced around her some more, speculating and frowning. She felt like a horse or a slave on the block, his gaze was so shrewd and total.

“You would believe almost anything anyone told you,” he told her.

She wanted to say to him “As a matter of fact I have very fierce opinions,” but instead she decided to smile at him to say, “I’ll believe anything. I even believe
you
as you’re telling me this.”

He didn’t smile back. “Also, you keep your knees locked.”

“Oh, do I? Why do I do that?”

“Fear,” he answered, in a light voice.

“Of what?”

“Somebody was always at you when you were small, wouldn’t let you be.” And he knelt to her knees to unlock them. Then he looked up at her: “That’s right. Cry.”

She tried to wipe her eyes with the backs of her hands.

“But do you cry right? Do you cry with your body? Or are you just crying up in your head?”

“I cry as quietly as I can, usually.”

“Well yes,” he said in a professionally serious and gratified voice. “That’s what I see when I look at your body. A tremendous stillness. You’ve stilled your body so much. It’s as if your body is saying, ‘I’ll be quiet, I’ll be good, I won’t have temper tantrums, I’ll work hard, I’ll study hard and I’ll think, think, think.’ You must get very, very tired of being so good all the time.”

Whereupon she was overwhelmed by such an ashamed pity for her falsely good self that it was a moment before she was able to answer him. But when she could she said, “I do.”

W
hen Claire came down into the room with the great tree on the wall the following Thursday afternoon, Declan was waiting for her. He even allowed her to babble on for a bit, but he didn’t really want her to talk, he wanted her to breathe, and to breathe properly. That was her job here.

A tedious session of grounding and breathing exercises followed, then there was the work of breaking up the tension in her lower back and legs.

The next appointment, for acupuncture, was in town, at the Institute. In one of the rooms at the back of the clinic she studied a bruise on her left thigh as she waited for Declan. She had always bruised easily, but before leaving home she’d circled the bruise’s mauve thumbprint with a ballpoint pen and drawn a furious little face inside it, and above the face a cartoon balloon containing the words
THIS BRUTALITY MUST CEASE IMMEDIATELY!

But he wasn’t alone. Another voice was coming down the hall along with his voice, and the owner of this other voice turned out to be a short bearded man in a lab coat. Hearing their voices
and then seeing them come in together, she felt ashamed. With this other doctor to witness it, her little joke would seem flirty and tacky. She kept the words on her thigh covered with the pressure of her left hand as Declan introduced the younger doctor to her. “Claire, this is Gus Gustavsen. I was just wondering if it would be okay with you if Gus had a little look at your eczema.”

She looked up at the younger doctor. He had kind eyes, the eyes of a respectful medical sightseer. But she wanted him to go. She wanted them both to go. She decided to try for bravado. “I am not a leopard,” she said to Declan. “And so I don’t show off my spots. And I am not a leper either.” The younger doctor looked startled, but Declan only said, “That’s okay, Claire,” then told her that he’d be back with her in a minute or two. At this, the two men stepped out of the room to talk together in low voices out in the hallway.

She couldn’t stop thinking what it would be like when he came back in to see her again. She was afraid he would dislike her for putting him on the spot about her spots, she was afraid he would dislike her for being so childish and rude to him in front of the visitor doctor. But the eyes of the younger doctor had been so expressive that she’d had a disloyal moment of wondering what it would be like if
he
were her doctor. She might prefer him, with his compassionate eyes. He might be more the sort of person she could talk to. He also might not be so heavily into the calisthenics of therapy, which were so boring, really, at least to her; with him it might be more a matter of talking about dreams and having useful conversations about what was going on in her life. That is what I would really prefer, she thought, to discuss the particulars of my life. But at the same time she couldn’t help but be convinced that the body therapists
were really spookily right in some ways — one of the tellers at her bank on Sparks Street had been beaten as a child, she was sure of it, she could tell by watching her walk over to the filing cabinets at the back of the bank, she had such a drifting, tail-between-her-legs dog’s walk that it gave her a whipped look — and it was true about anger being stored high up in shoulders too, there were angry shoulders everywhere, at least in Ottawa, you could see anger in shoulders at least as often as you could see it in eyes, and yet this kind of therapy still seemed too simple, too much beside the point of whatever was wrong with her, and if she really and truly felt that what she was doing with him wasn’t going to work shouldn’t she just get out of it now, before it was too late, and also, if this was really the case, wouldn’t it make sense to tell him today, wouldn’t today be the right time and place? Out in the country he was too solitary to allow her to leave him. He was too alone and lonely out in the country, he was a sad host trapped among all the Ottersee trees and flowers, the scent of new-mown hay carried on the warm wind from the meadows that circled the town.

But when the door opened again, he came over and sat down beside her and began to rub her shoulders through the flowered back of her blouse while he told her about a recent weekend he’d spent on an island on Georgian Bay where for three days he had lived on nothing but roots and berries. His thumb kept hypnotically rubbing her back as he talked while she kept feeling that he was leading up to something, something he’d be wanting her to do, some ritual or boring exercise in grounding or breathing. But no: he went on to speak about white-water rafting, which he said was one of his great passions. They did not speak of the spots of eczema beneath the flowers of her blouse, or
of her refusal to let Gus Gustavsen see them. He made a half-handcuff with his thumb and fingers and moved it up and down her right arm as he talked to her, an absent-minded caress that made her feel like a horse who’d just run a good race and so had earned a reward from her trainer. And because of all the little consolations of being touched by him, she had a moment of doubt before beginning to say what she’d planned to say. But then she made herself say it: “I appreciate all you’ve done for me so far, but I don’t know if I’m really a good candidate for this kind of therapy.” And then, like a vendor in a street market displaying her wares, she laid her objections out, one by one, before him. “Things aren’t all that clear-cut, I don’t think. Out in the world. In a way what we’ve been doing — the exercises, I mean — seems like a lie we might tell ourselves for our own comfort, a pleasant little story about how much we’ve changed, but it just seems too —” and here she was wanting to say “simple-minded,” but didn’t quite dare to, and so she only said “athletic.” Then she said what she’d been wanting to say: “I think I’m more the sort of person who needs to just sit and talk to someone …”

“But that could be exactly your problem. You intellectualize too much.” This statement made them both sit quietly for a moment and gaze down in unison, as if his words were the embers of a sensible fire. “Do you know what would really do you good?” he asked her — he had gone back to rubbing her back again — “It would really do you good to live in absolute silence for three days. And not talk to anyone. And don’t read anything either. Not even the newspaper. Don’t concern yourself with what’s going on in the world at all for three days. Just go for long walks and be alone with your thoughts.”

Even though his prescription had a certain appeal — it sounded Buddhist, it had that heartless and cagey Eastern purity — she still felt it was a prescription much better suited to people whose lives were utterly different from her own. Civil servants who partied too hard and vacationed in Vegas or raced around in their sports cars with their car stereos turned up. Or military men who were loud but morose alcoholics. But she was a person who already spent all of her free time alone with her thoughts. She was a person who spent her whole
life
going for walks. But now he was running his hands down both of her arms in tandem, a gesture with which a parent might send a child bravely out into the world. “I want you to give yourself over to the process more.”

He went out of the room to get his tray of needles then, and when he came back again she was still sitting up. She framed the bruise and its cartoon balloon with the sideways cup of her hand so he could read it.

He smiled down at it, then said something about women bruising more easily than men, something about women and collagen.

She stretched out on her belly to wait for the needles, then lay listening to the music and waiting for them to do what they must do. And after he’d removed them, they talked for a few minutes. She buttoned up her shirt as she stood listening, and as she was drawing the strap of her Moroccan bag up on a shoulder she said, “I’ll try to try harder.” But his tenderness puzzled her, and when it was time for her to go he puzzled her even more by saying “Goodbye, love.”

A
week later it turned hot, but there was still a leftover damp ache in the air from the morning’s earlier rain as Claire sat with her friend Libi in Libi’s kitchen. Libi yawned a fierce little yawn with a fist held tight up beside each breast, then went over to the sink to fill up a kettle. The backs of her legs were pink with a sick flush of sunburn, and she was wearing one of her bright Mexican cotton skirts, this one a harsh red. It gave off the raw stinging new-crayon smell of cheap cotton. “I fell asleep out on one of the lawn chairs after I came back from the dentist’s, that’s why I’m burnt to this incredible crisp.” She must have rubbed baby oil into her legs too, Claire could smell the sweet babyish seep of it, coming from the thick white-banded grey woollen socks she was wearing with her heavy sandals.

Libi poured tea into a flowered cup for Claire and coffee into a brown coffee mug for herself, but her eyes became baleful as she studied her friend. “And you’re quite sure that this Farrell person isn’t a quack …”

Claire was sure he was not. “He’s really an incredibly dedicated person, Lib.”

Libi was getting the cheese from the refrigerator when Claire asked her if men ever said things to her.

“Things?”

“Yes,” said Claire, feeling doomed, the way she’d felt at twelve when she was unwisely asking her mother questions about sex. “Do they say things to you when you’re out on the street?”

“No, they don’t. Do they say things to
you
?”

“Sometimes they do.”

Libi was by now gazing at her with the doubtful, measuring look that a woman will give to another woman when she suspects her of having delusions of grandeur about her looks. “Be explicit. Flattering things? Unflattering things?”

“It all depends on your point of view,” said Claire. She sliced herself a thin slice of the pale cheese that Libi had set out on a pink china plate. “These things are either all insults or all praise,” she said, trying to sound dispassionate. The words that Libi might say to her (no, she would never say them, but she would think them) flew at her, smacked her in the heart.
Tart, slut
. She wished that she could attach Libi’s puzzled expression to Libi, to Libi’s history, instead of to some moral or esthetic deficiency in herself. “ ‘Hello, Fat Tits,’ is one thing,” she said. “ ‘Oh, baby’ is another.” On two different occasions recently, men had also made flatteringly quick little sexual grunts as if they were lifting heavy objects just as they were passing close by her, but she wasn’t able to tell Libi this, Libi would be too revolted. “ ‘Hubba, hubba,’ and ‘Oh, baby, let’s fuck’ are two others.” She had to stop, or Libi would decide she
was totally vulgar. Shy and vulgar and stubborn and really pathetically naïve to be impressed by this kind of male attention. To defend herself, or at least to pretend to put it all into perspective, she said, “It’s all pretty predictable.”

Libi was looking either sad or disapproving. “I don’t look at men,” she said. “And men don’t look at me.”

“But you’re the beautiful one.”

She didn’t dispute this, she only said, “But I don’t look open.”

“And you think that I do?”

Libi studied her for a long moment. “Yes, you do,” she decided. “But you also stare at people too much. This is why men say things to you on the street: you give them the eye.”