Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (13 page)

But she had to go, she had to get up and pull the back of her skirt away from the backs of her thighs, she was feeling so weakened by it all, the fields of buzzing beauty, and drugged by the flower smells. She was also itchy from where great convoys of ants had passed over her thighs, on their way to somewhere else, an itch that made her gather herself together to lunge through the daisies and fireweed on her way downhill to the car.

Damp was still blooming like dark grasses up the sides of the barns as she was driving back to the city. Landscape after rain, the far hills a mild blue. The ramps leading up to the barns were drawbridges over moats of wet grasses and the ravines all had new little fjords in them too, from the rain. Not a breath of wind anywhere, the water reflective, European, historical, still.

U
rgently whimpering to herself, Claire plundered pants pockets, jacket pockets, then plunged down the stairs to the kitchen — she was by this time already ten minutes late — fiercely swinging her shoulder bag, then unzipping it to violently shake and rattle its contents out onto the tiles. As she was squatting to sort through all the plastic cards and receipts, breathing hard, enraged with herself, the phone rang, and when she picked it up to hear Steff sing into the receiver “Hullo, hullo!” she said, “Oh.” And not in a kind voice. “Listen, Steff, I need to use the phone right this moment,” she told him, “to call for a taxi —”

“A taxi!” said Steff, in a voice that sounded astounded and social, as if a taxi were not a taxi at all, but some marvellously exotic and extinct creature. A prehistoric bird, perhaps, with a stone beak and stone wings.

“Yes!” cried Claire, doing a desperate little jig to get him to say goodbye. “And so could you call me back? But not now! Later! This evening!”

On the way out into the country in the cab she wondered if she would end up telling Declan the story of the taxi. The grown-up thing, she decided, would be not to tell. She looked out at the green fields in the rain and thought of all Steff’s efforts to be charming and of the way they seemed always to somehow sadly misfire. Even the affair he’d had when they were still married had been short-lived, banal.

The one thing she missed about him was ironing his shirts. Pressing the fine cotton of his shirts — poplin, batiste — had filled her with joy. It was the rhythmic nosing of the iron into armpits and up to collars, the peppery smell of the hot cotton as she stood ironing in the hot summer sun. And in the winter too, breathing in the smell of poplin and perspiration rising up in the steam while watching the snow densely falling in its stately evening way beyond the tall windows, “Sisters of Mercy” playing on the tape recorder and the little surge she would feel in her heart whenever she heard it, the little surge she would feel as she stood shoving the iron back and forth and then neatly back again, soothingly but firmly pressing the hot cotton as if the act of ironing could earn her her escape and perhaps even happiness.

But when she got to Ottersee, she did give in and tell Declan about the taxi. And when she did, he didn’t ask, as Dr. Gleidman would (Freudianly) have felt obliged to ask, “But
vhy
do you think you lost your driver’s licence?” He instead looked at first startled, and then (on reflection) really quite touched and pleased.

There was a busy signal each time she tried calling Lakeside Taxi after her session, and so she had to remain perched on the edge
of the chair behind Declan’s desk to keep on trying. Which was how she came to hear the descent of the next client. Someone on steel crutches: the staggered, war-veteran sound of a careful series of aimed-for spaces being metallically captured. A claim being staked out again and again, the ring of steel on stone.

To her surprise the invalid turned out to be not an old man or a veteran of foreign wars, but a girl of fifteen or sixteen, a lolling spastic girl who was being helped by a remarkably glamorous fair-haired girl who was a year or two older. But who had done this terrible thing to this spastic girl? Who’d had the spite to hire for her the world’s (or at least this town’s) prettiest possible caretaker? Unless the blonde — with fate’s physiological sadism — was actually and cruelly her sister.

But now Declan, who’d gone up to the kitchen to fetch one of his notebooks, was coming down the stairs to see the handicapped girl while Claire, still sitting behind his desk, was calling the cab company again.

The fair girl, whose plump breasts were supported by the slings of her blue and white gingham halter and whose fat little hips had a smug look, brimmed up at him flirtily, and it seemed to Claire that in a more dignified way Declan was flirting right back at her, the air between them was so charged and amused, the formal questions being asked allowing both asker and answerer to ask and answer quite different questions with their eyes.

So this handicapped girl was their helpless witness, then. Their perfect excuse to meet and flirt. But now someone at Lakeside Taxi had picked up the phone and, after giving him the address, Claire was told someone would be there right away, and so she had to pull on her jacket and escape up the stone stairs into the surprisingly calm and grey afternoon.

By the time she got home the day was sunny again and was throwing windy rectangles of light to tremble on the far wall of the kitchen: a blurred blowing pattern of new little leaves — minnowy shadows that in the late-afternoon light seemed to speak of the afterlife. Unpacking the groceries, she thought of Steff again. She pictured a scene in which she stepped into the kitchen to answer the phone and discovered one whole wall was on fire, heard herself crying “Steff! We have an emergency here! It’s a fire! And so could you get off the phone right away please? So I can call the fire department?” Then his madly chatty reply: “A fire! Is it a big one? It must really be rather pretty …” He must be lonely, she thought as she was on her way up the stairs to the top of the house.

Up in her room, she had a fear of too easily finding her driver’s licence. She lifted up magazines, books, then went to her closet and felt inside at least twelve pairs of pockets. She knelt on one side of her bed and peeked under it, then stood up next to her bedside table and picked up a teacup. Then the saucer. And there it was, lying in wait to reproach her for her criminal extravagance, her only consolation being that nobody else would ever need to know this, it could be yet one more secret shame.

T
he following Thursday Declan told her to make a face. She felt wary, she was so convinced that a trick must lurk in this particular assignment, but then she thought, Oh why be vain? After all, he’s only trying to teach me to be less so, and she screwed up her face so tightly that he laughed.

After today, she thought, I won’t bother to come back.

As for
his
face, it had gone pale, unhappy. He made her think of a boy who was so bitterly bored that he wanted to hurt something. He said, “How old are you anyway? Fifty?”

She stared at him, astounded. The one thing about her looks that she was sure of was that she looked young for her age. Perhaps even too young. “I’m thirty-seven.”

He came over to her and placed his hands on her hips to guide her through a series of steps, showing her how to put her full weight (and trust) into one foot, the other foot, then he asked her to hang her hands on his shoulders as he steered her around the room. It was almost like dancing, it was so formally warm and measured, it was like dancing in a room filled with
sunshine in a Russian novel set out in the country. She wanted not to be hurt, or at the very least to pretend not to be hurt. And, besides, wasn’t it to his credit that he seemed always to know when he had gone just a little too far? Or was it yet another black mark against him? Surprising herself, although not all that much, really, and in a way that depressed her, she spoke in the social voice of a woman politely dancing with a man she’s just met: “I like your amulet, where did you get it?”

“My wife gave it to me.” The way he said “wife,” it didn’t rhyme with “knife,” he drew it out much too adoringly, tenderly; it had too much of a voluptuous rise and fall in it.

“I thought it might be from Arizona, it looks so Navajo.”

“You’re right. It
is
from Arizona. But it’s not Navajo, it’s Hopi.” And then (dance over) he went out into the next room to get his appointment book.

Left behind to draw on her corduroy trousers and pull an elastic band around the frizzed plume of her hair, Claire wondered what was wrong with her. And why were her feelings always taking leaps to land in opposite corners? Because what she now felt for Declan was tenderness, she even felt that in saying the word “wife” so caressingly he was trying to make her jealous and that his wanting to make her jealous must mean that he cared for her, so that when he came back into the Room it seemed it was the most natural thing in the world for her to smile at him with her most radiant smile.

He looked surprised. “You look so lovely right now. So feminine, really.”

That night in bed she picked up a book and read from where it fell open: “God has his merciful, if daft, devices.” But
when she slept she dreamed that she was in Dr. Tenniswood’s drug pantry, pouring pills into medicine glasses no bigger than liqueur glasses, their measurement levels marked in glass braille. She’d made a terrible mistake, but was hoping that if she could be very quiet and quick, no one would notice. Declan was in the dream too, hurrying by, while Dr. Tenniswood’s hallway was flooded with panic and too bright a light.

On the following Thursday (a green car this time) she drove out to Ottersee with a bottle of cranberry juice rolling around on the car seat beside her. She hadn’t had cystitis for months and wondered what had brought it on this time. Not sex anyway, unless it was sex with herself. Her thighs felt fat and sticky in the hot car as she reached out to steady the bottle, then lifted her hand to her forehead. It felt unhealthily warm. She pulled the car over onto the side of the highway and climbed out, then after a quick walk up a path’s speckled shade had to fight her way into a thicket of fir trees to painfully relieve herself. She squatted down beside some leaves that looked like poison ivy, they were so shiny and three-leafed, like leaves in a fable, while her hot and sick-smelling urine made the pee-beaded leaves bob wildly. What did women in the Middle Ages do when they had cystitis? They went to see herbalists. Or they went to see homeopathic doctors. But no, homeopaths didn’t come along until the eighteenth century. Or was it the nineteenth? So they went to consult alchemists then. Magicians who could turn fever into dew and dew into gold. After she’d crept back into the car she
leaned back against the seat with her eyes closed for a few minutes, collecting herself, then sat up to drink down what was left in the bottle.

On the stoop of an old schoolhouse attached to the gas station she pulled in beside half an hour later, two men were playing a game of cards in the mild country sunshine. As she got out of the car, the more handsome one glanced over at her with an unimpressed weariness, but the other one — a small man who’d tucked his sun-faded purple shirt into his jeans — had the sort of observant, shy presence a woman could fall for. He was also the one who got up to fetch the key to the washroom, and when he handed it to her he looked into her eyes with such a watchful sexual seriousness that she felt, at least for a moment, utterly in love with him.

But she could feel the two of them watching her from behind as she was crossing the tarmac to the whitewashed station, and their inspection gave her that awful watched-woman sensation, a rumpled, skirt-crinkled-up-in-the-back, jiggly-buttocked feeling, paired with the localized splinter of stinging discomfort in her urethra. The wind was hot. Wind for a fever. At the side of the building, she pushed open the paint-stuck door to the Rest Room and saw that one of the toilets had flooded. Someone had dropped paper towels all over the floor to soak up the wet, then thrown wet armloads of them into a waste-basket that looked like a lacquered pink basketball net. Chills overtook her as she was washing her hands. Was it an insane thing, driving so far out into the country when she was feeling so shaky? Maybe it was insane, maybe it was even illegal. There were moments when she felt almost delirious and odd thoughts
came to her. Maybe it was the fever, but while she was combing her hair she felt frightened.

Declan was wearing a grey T-shirt with his jeans, along with a new amulet, this one tied with a tight leather thong around his throat. They stood talking for a moment while Claire unbuttoned her jacket, slid her feet out of her sandals. She didn’t know too many men who wore amulets; the world had been taken over by boys who wore little Thai hoops in one ear. This amulet looked like quartz and there was a vein of rust in its white part and a cloudy bloom of rust in its clear glassy tip. It matched the small stain of rust in the iris of one of his grey eyes.

He told her he wanted her to yell as loud as she could.

She tried — a self-conscious shriek, almost comic — but neither of them laughed. But then she stopped. “I find it hard to yell when I need to go to the washroom.”