Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (12 page)

But instead of their beginning with the usual breathing exercises, he surprised her by sitting down next to her on one of the mats and asking about her week, about her work, about her not sleeping and was it beginning to get better, and only then did he tell her to stand up. But when she stood he began to step-dance around her, taunting her. “You like this, don’t you?” Taking quick little licks with his hand at her shoulder, one breast, her face. “Sure you do. Why shouldn’t you like it? I’m just being
friendly
. Come on, Clairsie, Clairsie, push me away if you don’t like it. Come on, push me away, little Clairsie.” And at this he began to lightly, maddeningly slap at her. “You can’t, can you?”

She seized his wrists, swung his hands out of the range of her face. But in two seconds he was right back pawing at her
again, hardly shackled at all by her hands, now locked like oarlocks around his two wrists. She then turned herself into a swimmer in a swimming hole, hanging her whole weight on two limbs of a tree, trying to drag his arms down. A swimmer who breathlessly warned him, “I’m going to do it to you, then you’ll see how awful it is,” but when she let go of his wrists, he at once dropped his arms to his sides.

“Okay, do it.”

But almost right away she cheated, touched his face much more slowly than he had touched hers, was much more tender, exploratory.

He closed his eyes. “It’s not awful,” he said. “I like it.”

A Sikh family sat waiting to see Dr. Tenniswood, the husband in a brown suit and brown turban, his wife in balloony white trousers, her long tunic patterned with gold coins cast onto a miniature gold plaid woven into gold silk. Their little boy (who was four, Claire thought, three or four) played near them with exquisite tact, whispering to himself, carefully busy. A gravely immaculate old man who had a disfiguring skin condition that bubbled like black asphalt from his left ear to the left side of his neck sat watching him. But the patient who’d arrived before all the others was an irritable woman whose right arm and right foot were both in plaster casts so heavily autographed they were hazy with names and friendly insults and exclamation points. She warned her two children to “be good,” then hobbled in to see Dr. Tenniswood on her crutches. The little girl (in a pink
pinafore) hitched herself up onto one of the chairs, then sat crossing and uncrossing her ankles in white knee socks and little pink canvas shoes as she impatiently flipped the pages of
People
and
Newsweek
in a spoiled-princess sort of way while the little boy (a bit older, probably seven, six or seven) wandered around restless, at unhappy loose ends.

Claire got a pad of lined paper and a pencil out of a desk drawer and brought them over to him. He was looking trussed, in his slightly too small railway-engineer’s overalls, his face flushed, although he too was by now sitting up in a chair.

“Write me a story.”

He looked up at her and didn’t answer, but accepted the pad and pencil, then squirmed a little in his chair, trying to get settled.

As she made phone calls from her desk, Claire occasionally glanced over to see him looking out the window, but at last she saw him begin, with childish deliberation, to write.

She had just finished trying to pacify Mr. Singh (testy from the long wait) when the little boy came around the doorway of her cubicle to show her his story.

“Ah
-hah
. And so is this for me?”

He nodded, speechless with excitement.

“Well this is very kind of you.”

He was waiting to show it to her.

“And so what’s it called then?”

“War and Peace.”

“What a wonderful title. Did you think of it yourself?”

But he was already beginning to read in a high little voice: “Write, write. Erase, erase. War is starting. Pencils are attacking
erasers. When war is finished, peace starts. The pencil sargent and the eraser sargent meet. They make a team. The pencils write and the erasers erase the mistakes.”

“This is a really terrific story.”

He stayed standing beside her with his head bowed. But he was really quite pleased, she thought.

“And so could I take this home with me then?”

“Yes.”

“Write your name on it for me,” she told him while she was picturing herself saying to someone, “Today, at the doctor’s office where I work, I met the author of
War and Peace
. A really great guy, although extremely short.”

He printed
DAFYDD
in the lower right corner.

He must be Welsh. Unless he was so young that he just automatically spelled his name with too many consonants. Although a little boy who could almost spell “sergeant” couldn’t possibly have any trouble spelling his own name.

But at this point she glanced up to see that little Miss Pinafore was gazing over at her with a resentful, bleak look. A look that said, We are both women of course, but I am infinitely the superior woman, more sophisticated, more charming … Claire got a pencil and another pad of paper out of the paper drawer and brought them over to her, but when she asked her if she would like to write a story too, the child shook her head vehemently, then squeaked her skinny thighs over to one side of her chair and slid sideways off it to take her scowl and her perfect posture over to the window.

“W
e’re going to break up some of the energy blocks on your upper body,” Declan told Claire the following Thursday morning, tapping her left arm just below its short sleeve while she stepped out of sandals gone damp from the walk across the wet lawn to his house. “And so it would be best if you could just pull this off.”

Pulling her T-shirt over her head, she felt like a child being watched by a parent while awkwardly getting herself ready for bed. But at the same time she was feeling (in spite of her sexless navy-blue gym shorts) delicately sexual, offered.

Declan went over to the window. He folded his arms across his chest and watched her from there. “You’re locking your knees again, Claire. Try to let them relax. Then if you get broad-sided unexpectedly you won’t topple over.”

She tried to unclench her muscles, to let her feet make true contact with the cold floor.

He came back to her then and placed his hands on her hips. “Also, there’s a lot of holding and blocking in here,” he told
her, but his voice was sounding a little strained and formal in the cold Room.

They then did their usual tedious breathing and grounding exercises until Claire, at the end of the hour, asked him, “How do you see your own body then? Do you see yourself as having rewritten your own history, muscularly speaking?”

“Not yet.” And he began to walk around the Room for her, shyly instructive. In the dull rainy light his white T-shirt gleamed. A smell of damp garden blew in through the window. “You see how high I’m carrying my shoulders? All the anger I carry in them?”

But all the time he was moving around her in a circle and all the time his voice was pointing out blocks and flaws, it seemed to her that his body was beaming an entirely different message to her, a message completely at odds with his words, and in this message his body was crying,
Look at me, look at me, love me, love me
, at least until he came to a stop and the message became formal again. “But I’m afraid we’ll have to stop here for today.” And he went out to the reception room to get his appointment book.

She reached her cardigan down off the chair and stayed sitting on the mat while she pulled it on, then got up and went over to the full-length mirror to brush back her hair.

When he came back into the Room he stood watching her dart her shirt into her shorts. Then he sat down in his chair and flung a leg over one of the armrests while he held the open book in his lap. He looked into her eyes as if announcing to himself that he felt nothing at all for her, but then he surprised her by saying, “You look so lovely right now. So beautiful, really.”

She turned to the mirror to see. And then she could see it too, an alluring brief glimmer. “I hope it’s not just a fluke.”

And in an impatient voice he answered, “Of course not. It’s your real self. It’s the way you really
are
.”

As she was backing out of the Farrell driveway, she caught sight of a child sitting alone up on the front steps of the verandah, eating an apple. It was the first time she had seen one of the children of the ménage doing anything by herself. Declan’s brood and the biologist’s even bigger brood seemed always to be part of one of the grand military manoeuvres of childhood. They were the Charge of the Light Brigade, Ottersee Division, or they were the Babylonian hordes swarming back and forth over the Ottersee lawns in a flapping, conspiring pack. Now that she was at last seeing one of them alone, solitary — and there was no doubt in her mind that this particular child was Declan’s child — she felt a desire to see her more closely, to really look into her eyes, but she could think of no pretext for getting out of the car and walking up the lawn to talk to her. She was also afraid she might startle her, and to give herself time to think, she stopped the car and pretended to search for something in her money belt. It occurred to her that she might ask her the directions to somewhere. New Dublin or Newbliss. Children loved, above all things, to be asked for directions. You could make a child’s day by asking the child to give you directions. And so she rolled down the window and called up to her, “Can you tell me how long it would take me to drive from here to Newbliss?”

The child set down her book and her apple and came walking down over the mound of dry grass to the car. She was nine or ten, a grave little girl in cut-off jeans and a faded yellow T-shirt. She also had extraordinarily quiet and thoughtful grey
eyes. Declan’s eyes in the face of a child. “When you go on the bus it takes half an hour.”

Claire, who had never before looked so deeply into the face of a child, had to remind herself to look as if this news was of interest to her. Her gaze felt so fixed she was afraid the child would become frightened. She could smell her apple breath as the little girl told her she would have to turn left at the end of the lane, and as she listened she could barely hold back the desire to say to her: I believe I could love your father and I believe I could love you too. And still looking into her eyes — for she could hardly bear to withdraw her own eyes from the child’s eyes — she thanked her. Then she rolled up the window and drove off.

At the bottom of the driveway she turned left toward Newbliss (as if her lying request for instructions must be turned, with all possible speed, into the truth), then after five minutes turned left again, this time onto a side road flanked by green meadows and deep ditches, their weedy grasses still fogged by mist. She drove past a long field with a dark grove of trees at its crown, then decided to back up and park on the cow path that ran up the hill.

She got out of the car and walked up through the buzz of a field in full bloom, clumsily climbing through fireweed and Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod, feeling the hazy moisture seep into her skirt. Blurred islands of mauve and yellow flowers (asters and daisies) stretched out to the west as she climbed, along with the more scattered pink and white islands of clover. Caraway flowers were bumping and nudging at the dampening hem of her skirt too, as she was wading upward, and it struck her as strange that in all the times she’d sprinkled caraway seeds into the red cabbage dish she liked to make on foggy or snowy
winter nights, she’d never once thought of caraway seeds as coming from these yarrowy cottage-cheese flowers.

But the dark grove of evergreens and poplars turned out to be a disappointment, it was so itchy and resinous and sad, its granite-grey flanks of stone spotted with a mildew of scratchy blue rock-moss. She sat down on one of the damp but still moss-bristly slopes of stone, then opened her string bag with its block of hard cheese and a banana. But the cheese had a sweet sickish flavour of barnyard and grass: it was rich, but at the same time so dry she found it almost impossible to swallow. She quickly peeled the banana — by now so ripe it had been almost liquefied by the heat — and pushed it into her mouth with the cheese to discover that the mix was startlingly delicious, a bizarre delicacy that if mixed with brandy and cloves, say, might very well make — in a small way — a famous dessert. She kept the taste in her mouth, like a marvellous mouthful of wine, then after a few minutes gathered herself together and waded down through the fireweed toward the car until she found an almost dry patch where she could lie down in her spongy field of flowers.

She stretched out on the grass and thought of Declan. She wanted to hold a hand to his forehead. Almost clamped there. A firm pressure; diagnostic. Testing for fever. But a pressure that could somehow still him. Still him or help him. She wanted to cover that part of the forehead where the forehead met hair. And then stroke it back with a firm pressure, as if stroking back the fur on a dog’s halted forehead. She also wanted to take deep breaths of the clean country air, breathe in the largeness of the world, the sweep of this fragrant field while so many other lives were being lived in the city or in other countries, and she
thought of a story she’d read in the morning paper about a French aristocrat who, after he’d been shackled to the guillotine, looked up at his executioner to ask “Are you sure this thing is safe?” God, the bravery of it, to joke about death at the last possible moment before death, and she thought of love, too, different kinds of love, she thought of how certain members of the animal kingdom (the lovebird, the rat, and the dolphin, what a trio) fell in love in exactly the same way people fell in love. Unlike the chimp, who thought only of sex. Which made her recall a book she’d looked through once when she was over at Libi’s house, a book that was a compendium of responses to a sex questionnaire, and the woman who’d written about the moment of penetration and of how it always led to “a great and large feeling.” She wondered if she was also the one who’d ended her questionnaire with the words that when sex was over she always cried and felt a fierce tenderness.