Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (11 page)

On the following Thursday afternoon, Declan told Claire that he wanted her to bite down hard on a plastic shampoo bottle.

She stared down at the bottle, a flask with a dull gold label on it. “No,” she said. “I don’t want to do that.”

The moody glance he gave her surprised her, it was so virulent with impatience. “We can’t do
anything
with you, can we,” he moaned (or almost moaned) and then he alarmed her even more by picking up the shampoo flask and pelting it against the basement’s far wall. But it was only a flexible clear plastic flask, after all, and when it bounced back and landed with comic precision at the toes of Declan’s sandals, Claire — caught in the grip of a fearful nervousness — laughed, then stood and continued to laugh silently and desperately into her cupped hands, trying to stifle herself.

Her laughter enraged him. He said that of all the people he saw she was the one who was most difficult to work with. He said that she challenged him on every little thing. He said he was getting sick and tired of having his time wasted by someone who wasn’t willing to do the work required.

She seized his wrists: “Now you listen to
me
, I have something to say to you.”

He surprised her by becoming immediately calm. “Say it, then.”

“You can’t just order me to do things that are totally bizarre without giving me any good reason why I should do them.”

“If I explain, you’ll have time to prepare. An explanation won’t ever give you what I’m willing to give you …”

“And what would that be?”

“The chance to think on your feet.”

But the next time she drove down to Ottersee to see him — after a week of brooding — she was ready to do battle. She ran down the steps to the dungeon, then sat down on one of the exercise mats in her black jersey and a wraparound skirt — bamboo shoots against a background of black-eyed mauve ovals — her hair tightly tied back with a hazy blue scarf.

When he came into the room — but she was by now beginning to think of it as the Room — he looked surprised to see that she hadn’t changed into her shorts for the session.

“I have some things I want to say to you,” she told him, and she warningly stood.

“Go right ahead.” He met her gaze evenly, directly, but he stayed standing too.

“I’m not convinced we can work together any more.”

“Why is that?”

“I don’t think you even want to work with me.”

He looked shocked at this, but she was certain it was only a bogus shock. He’s like an actor, she thought, and not even a very good actor. And then he was asking her (still in the false voice) when he had ever said such a thing.

“The last time I drove down here.”

He raised his eyebrows at her.

“You implied it.”

He hitched himself up on the treatment table and gazed at her mockingly. Like a triumphant husband. A triumphant and amused and husbandly look. And, like a husband, he made a conductor’s gesture that was a kind of perversion of encouragement. “
How
did I imply it? Go ahead — enlighten me.”

“You said of all the people you work with I’m the most difficult. You said, ‘We can’t do anything with you, can we?’ You threw the shampoo bottle at the wall.”

“I don’t own that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t own saying it.”

“Do you mean you didn’t say it?”

“I don’t own it, no.”

“You mean you didn’t say it.”

“I don’t own it.”

It was like a dialogue from some insane (and inane) version of the Theatre of the Absurd. She could imagine two clownish vaudeville actors having just such a mad repetitive conversation. She could imagine one of them turning out the ludicrous boats of his shoes and strumming his trouser braces with his thumbs. She could hear his cracked voice nasally
croaking, “Well, if ya won’t
own
it, will ya
rent
it?” She said, “Do you know what I think?”

No answer.

“I think you’re ashamed that you said what you said. I think you’re trying to browbeat —”

He held up a hand. “
Brow
beat you?” He looked diverted. “With
what
? My
silence
?”

“Yes, exactly,” she said. “With your silence. I think you’re perfectly willing to encourage me to have doubts about my own perception of reality if that’s what’s required to save your own skin.” She folded her arms tightly up under her breasts and regarded him coldly, then looked away. She wished she had a decent window to gaze out of while she stood with her back turned toward him. As it was, she had to make do with the too-high and too-small panel of dirt-freckled glass that only showed, like an illustration in a science text, a rim of green grass above a taller cross-section of damp silt and gravel. What a sad and self-conscious joke this whole mad little world was, in any case. The little dramas and melodramas. And these self-righteous words she was using. And yet to
not
use them — to give up, to give
in
— did seem to her to be an act of the purest cowardice. But at the same time the part of her that could (however briefly) see things clearly, was thinking, Yes he’s an enchanter, he’s the real thing in his way, and also (like any bully) he has no use for the past. And so I can never, ever know where I stand with him. But she was already deciding that the time had at last come for her to put a stop to all that. “I don’t believe I can work with a liar,” she said.

He said nothing.

Things had gone much farther than she had imagined he would permit them to go.

“And so I’m leaving.” Her voice broke, mid-sentence, like an adolescent boy’s. Again her words sounded theatrical, unreal.

“So leave then.”

She gathered up her shoulder bag, her sunglasses, her shaggy poncho. But at the door she hesitated. “I just wish I didn’t think you were glad to see me go.”

And when he replied in a drained but surprised voice, “I’m not glad to see you go,” she knew she hadn’t been entirely honest with herself and again she felt swamped by a sense of herself as melodramatic, unreal. But she only said in a sad voice, “Goodbye then.”

He didn’t answer.

She closed the door carefully behind herself, then walked up the steps and out into the cold sunlight. She walked through the back garden. The biologist’s children were helping the Farrell children make a tent out of rag rugs and old blankets, and at the far end of the pool the two oiled wives were sitting smoking in their tiny kerchief bikinis. One was a tense little blonde, the other was the woman who’d come with Declan to the Earlton bazaar. The fair one was scratching at something on her ankle, and even glancing at them from a distance Claire got the feeling that the conversation between them was stilted and polite, too polite for them to join forces against a third woman and scoff.

She threw her poncho into the car, crawled in after it. The seat burned her hands and the world tilted. It occurred to her that she might be too dizzy to drive. She sat quietly for a moment while the delicately hesitant, changed-my-mind little
drops of perspiration explored different parts of her body. When she felt steadier, she turned on the ignition, then made her way bumpily down the laneway to the highway.

She drove through the ugly pink and green outskirts of Ottersee and then on through the shaded and more beautiful heart of the old part of town. Then briefly into sun again, the town hall square, a park, the Ottersee Library. He’s ordinary, she decided, ordinary and afraid his ordinary little secret will get out, that’s why he acts so temperamental and loony, I’m well rid of him, I should have figured all this out weeks ago, saved myself all the money I’ve squandered, and on the car rental too, but at the same time the thought of hurrying back to Ottawa when she could be sitting out here in the sun in the clear country air struck her as a really uninspired thing to do, she had hired the car for the day after all, and so she parked on a shaded side street and then walked into the library park, breathing in the cool morning air and carrying her shaggy poncho under her arm for company.

Last night’s violent rain had so battered the park’s orange and red tulips that at first sight she mistook them for poppies. But she must be mad, they
were
poppies, the tulip season had long since been and gone, it was already July, where had she been, by now all the earlier flowers were even drying out and there was a hot wind jogging the rose bushes that guarded the hooded front entrance to the library and the flower beds flanking the rose bushes were filled with hydrangeas, a name that had always made her think of an illness. Everything was smelling so sad and sweet drying out, everything except for the library’s diamond-paned windows whose frames were painted a new and oily dark green that smelled poisonous and sticky.
They gave the building the foreboding prettiness of a witch’s cottage and, realizing this, she all at once could not bear the place, and before she’d even so much as sat down on one of the green benches, she was off again, back to the car. And then found herself driving in the wrong direction. But it must be what I want, she thought. At least till the end of the hour. Get my money’s worth.

The two oiled wives were sitting exactly as they had been when last seen, down in the bright well of light in the little hollow to the west of the house and the pool. Out of the wind. One of them (the fair one) was even still massaging the front of her left ankle.

Claire ran down through the churchy cool of the stone stairwell to Declan’s office. There was no sign of him, but the door to the Room was still closed. She knocked on it lightly, then called to him to tell him that she would like to stay till the end of the hour.

“Come in, then.”

He was sitting exactly as he had been sitting when she’d left him, looking straight ahead, into his own thoughts.

She sat down beside him. His eyes looked as if he had been crying. How could that be? She covered his hand with her hand when he asked her what she was feeling.

She said, “I don’t want to leave you.”

F
ar below them down in the orchestra pit the insect musicians were tuning up: cricket chirps and the attenuated little tropical-bird cries of the violins that seemed so to cry out the news of life’s small excitements and sorrows. Their seats were high up in the balcony and so they had to climb up and up — vertigo country, and how like a precipice a theatre balcony was (don’t wear high heels, don’t lose your balance) — then the lights went completely down and they had to slink their way to their seats through a deeper darkness, squeezing past five or six pairs of irritated knees to the sexy lunge of the legendary nasal and achy music, a hidden voice already harshly crooning, “Oh the shark has pretty teeth, dear …”

During the intermission — their first chance to elbow their way out of their coats — Libi told Claire about the production of
The Seagull
she’d seen on her recent trip to New York. She’d also gone to the Botanical Gardens, where she was treated to a buffet in the Insectarium. She was reciting the menu — mealworm cake, Mexican locusts, ants in sugar, silkworm pupae in
pasta shells — when a small crowd of Elmwood girls in their green school tunics started to excuse their way past them, on their way out to the lobby for smokes.

Smokes and mirrors.

When the play was over they let the girls squeeze past them again, then made their way down to the pictures of playwrights: Shaw looking Shavian, Brecht looking like a brat and not very bright — but how could that be? — and once they were out in the night air they walked in a cool wind along Sussex until they found the café that always made Claire think of a café in Prague or in London. Its newspapers were even hanging sideways from grooved sticks, the way they did at the library.

Claire stirred her tea, set the tiny spoon in her saucer: “My mother called. Last night after supper. And when I told her I’d been taking driving lessons and could now actually drive a car, she laughed.”

“I’ll bet you didn’t tell her why you wanted to learn how to drive though, my friend —”

“No I didn’t. For the simple reason that I never tell her anything.”

“You’re not going to fall in love with him, are you?”

“Of course not. Why should you think that?”

“Your voice always sounds so hushed and unreal whenever you talk about him.”

“If only you could see how earnest and serious he is, you wouldn’t even ask.”

But Libi said that patients were forever falling in love with their therapists and that it was really just so boring and banal and in bad taste and predictable.

Claire stirred her tea again and said nothing. She wondered if Libi and Rolf were happy together. They are either utterly happy or utterly unhappy, she thought, but why is it always so impossible to tell which? “He’s humourless, Lib. It’s not easy to fall in love with a person who has no sense of humour.”

“You fell in love with Steff,” Libi said.

Claire went into the little washroom whose toilet always made her think of a hissing toilet on a boat, then changed into her shorts and a T-shirt before crossing the hallway to the Room for her session.

A few minutes later she could hear Declan coming down the back stairs.