Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (14 page)

“So go then.”

In the washroom, her urine came weakly out of her, hot as hot tea, and while she was tucking her T-shirt into her shorts she started to feel chilled again. It was the little pulse of natural daylight, high up on the wall. Along with the sound of the flush, it was giving her the shivers.

After she’d crossed the hallway to Declan again, she told him she had cystitis. “I have a fever.” She lifted his hand and held it flat to her forehead. “I’m burning.”

He let his hand rest there a moment, neutrally. “You’ll live.” But he was already looking watchfully into her eyes, hatching plans for her. Then he said that he wanted her to do some
pushing exercises. “Push at me,” he told her, and he danced a little dance in front of her in his holistic sandals, in some kind of therapist’s imitation of a taunt.

But she stayed self-conscious. She halfheartedly pushed at him while she could hear his children happily ordering each other about, up in the windy green garden.

“Come on now, you can do better than that.”

She did get better at it but it still felt artificial to her, seemed to grow out of the wish to be good, not assertive.

He told her to yell at the top of her lungs.

“I don’t know if I can do that.”

He wanted to know why not.

Because there was a danger she would only be doing it to be compliant. “What good can it possibly do me if I just stand here and acquiescently holler?”

He said that an uninhibited person would just seize on the act as a way of finding out what happens next. “And might discover that a good deal of tension and anger comes out.”

“An uninhibited person might really enjoy it.”

“He might. She might. Right.”

She opened her mouth and gave a thin yell.

He looked judgementally amused. “Is that your best offer?”

She tried again. Another self-conscious but higher-decibel bleat.

There was an answering yell high up in the garden. But it was a yell in context.

“Lie down,” he told her then, his voice a little kinder, and he hunkered down beside her and began to give her a lecture on bioenergetic theory, spoke of the localization within the self of a living universe, spoke of a charged field within the body;
squatting like a farmer at the edge of his crops, spoke — gazing out over
his
newly planted field, and beyond it, perhaps, to the memory of other fields, other bodies — of the body’s light, the body’s fire. He said that “streaming” was the fundamental function of protoplasm and that protoplasm under a microscope streamed and pulsated. He said they would be working toward tissue-states that were pulsing and rhythmic within her body, and that the more these feelings deepened, the more in contact she would be with herself and the world.

She felt moved by his words, even though she sensed that he was mainly quoting from some treatise on the body. She supposed this would have pleased him if he had known. Possibly he even did know. So far he had been able to pick up even very slight tremblings deep in her body, had seemed to psychically sense them. No, it was more than that. Even if she felt a trembling or excitement was very hidden, very inner, it was as if he could actually see it moving over her skin, a light wind over water.

At the first intersection coming back into town, a big man waiting for the light to change made her think of Steff. But something was wrong: a riding crop was held at ease in one black-gloved hand, but his other hand was holding a pistol on the top of his riding cap. It gave her a jolt, but then she saw that the gun wasn’t a gun after all, it was only his other black-gloved hand, its thumb stuck up. He looked flushed and fussy. And he wasn’t really all that much like Steff, after all — Steff was leaner and more handsome, and yet Steff did also have some of this man’s sour and imposing mid-life grandeur — and she remembered all the times they’d gone out for drives, but then detoured
down bumpy roads to visit building sites. Some of their worst fights had followed visits to building sites: Steff driving home in a wounded snit and once they got there extending his rage by accusing and cursing in Russian and banging about.

And she would always agree to go, that was the terrible thing, although she hated (and had always hated) touring building sites: all the climbing around among concrete blocks and scaffolding while breathing it all in: concrete dust, the creamy but chemical odour of new paint, the sacks of powdered cement slumping against walls like sacks of grey flour, all the possibilities for injury if one wasn’t vigilant. Then the tour. From one grey room to another. Future classrooms smelling of construction dust, but soon to smell of chalk dust, and with the lecturer (the chief engineer) already in them. She could still hear Steff’s voice, a soothing drone, describing the problems, the challenges, what he’d had to do to meet them, while she (like a good little dog) was following behind him and warning herself to pay close attention.
Don’t let your mind wander!
And yet there had even been small pleasures here and there — or at least that mix of pain and pleasure that could make her remember entire afternoons — because she could also so clearly recall looking through a wall that was all window (recently unpacked and dusty new glass) toward a melancholy but oddly comforting vista: a field of vivid green grass, the hills in the distance dead with the bushy greys and browns of an earlier spring.

Rain blew against her window as she sat up in bed that night, reading
A Writer’s Diary
, the part where Virginia Woolf had an
idea, while dressing, about how to make her war book: she could pretend it was articles editors had asked her to write (“Should women smoke; Short skirts; War etc …”), then there was a bit about windy rain battering, dogs barking, dark out, English night, while over here in windy and somehow too modern Canada it was a wild night too, the rain coming down even harder after she’d snapped out her light.

It didn’t stop until late the next afternoon, leaving behind it a mist she walked through while asking herself, Why can’t I be happier? What is the impediment? Apart from myself? Apart from all the mistakes that I’ve made? She walked past wrecked gardens that were petal-littered, everything rained down onto gravel, walked home down Sunnyside past children who were playing in cold little groups at the fronts of verandahs, passed by four little guys of nine or ten as she was walking along deep in thought on the subject of her life and what would she do with it (“What’ll it be then, madam?” “One rye and lithium.” “Right you are, madam, one rye and lithium coming right up …”) when one of the little boys experimentally sang out to her, “Hello,
bitch!
”

Although she knew that these words were no more unfriendly than the barks of an overexcited and even friendly little dog, she was too preoccupied to think of a clever reply and so she only hurried on by, speaking almost in a mutter to say, “Hello, bitch bitch …”

But even this small acknowledgement seemed to excite her tiny tormentor, she could hear him cry out to the others in a squeaky and thrilled voice, “Did you hear
that
? Did you hear what that lady said? I said hello bitch and
she
said hello bitch bitch, did you
hear
her?”

She turned on them to speak to the boy who’d called out to her. “Honey, why don’t you just try to grow up?”

After a moment of stunned silence, they all followed behind her, dancing and chanting on their cold little stick legs: We don’t
want
to grow up! We don’t
want
to grow up! We don’t
want
to grow up!

She supposed she could tell them it was a universal lament.

“S
uck on the heel of my hand,” Declan said to Claire, and after a moment of fastidious resistance she did. It turned out to be a curiously clinical sensation, like sucking on a long cool breast shaped like the thigh of a chicken.

Then he wanted her to jut her chin out. “Doing this will help you to have orgasms.”

She jutted her chin out. It was true, it did make her feel more sexy. But then she remembered something: “But I already do have them.”

“When?”

“All the time,” she said.

When he looked doubtful, she said, “With my husband.” Then added a postscript: “When we were together.” But it made her feel ashamed, that he should feel the need to say such a thing to her — that he should know her so little! — and ashamed too, because of the stern way he had asked “
When?
” She wanted to say to him, You assume too much, you presume
too much, you shouldn’t go around acting as if everyone in the whole world (except you, of course) is, where sex is concerned, in need of instruction.

Her argument with him continued on the way home in the car. She mimicked his voice sharply asking “
When?
” But she made it sound even more aloof and moronic.
Idiot
, she harshly whispered.
Idiot, idiot, idiot
. I have them with myself too, she should have told him, and she saw herself pulling on her jacket and leaving him behind as she tossed a few leftover words over a shoulder: “
When
I feel like it.”

Tiny black berries fell from the trees onto the streets, but once they’d been walked on they didn’t even look like berries, they looked like squished pellets of roof tar, and now that it was twilight the leaves on the trees were black too, sharp little black leaves against a colourless sky. Claire took one of the footpaths out to the canal to find a little more light. She wanted to walk for hours, walk and think, she wanted to walk and think about Declan. Not that she was in love with him. But when was he ever not in her thoughts?

Saturday was a windy wet day, drearily dripping, and when she walked through the wet bracken close to the river she met up with six or seven sodden couples, the women grim-faced, their silk bandannas tied in tight knots at their throats, while huffing behind them came their ill-looking husbands, although some of the women were paired up with men who had observant eyes that were filled with emotion, and behind them came more couples made up of tired, decent women, their coat
collars turned up, women whose men were either too sour or too grimacingly friendly. Or men who looked ruddy, merciless. She thought: I don’t want to be married again, ever. Although sometimes she dreamed of something like marriage. Like marriage but not marriage, a more emotional relationship. More intense, the two people more absolutely
for
one another.

But now, like a human embodiment of a cautionary tale, even more husbands and wives were climbing up from the river, and these final wives were wearing sectioned clear plastic rain bonnets while peering brightly out at her like inquisitive grasshoppers.

A handwriting analyst was being interviewed on the car radio as Claire drove down to Ottersee the following Thursday. He’d written a book — Strokes Something? she couldn’t quite catch it — and was telling the host that people who made long loops on their
y
s and
g
s were highly sexed people. Claire listened with interest — her own
y
s and
g
s were long and full — and off and on all the way through the session with Declan, she found herself thinking of the words of the graphologist. They stayed in her thoughts, a taunt, so that when she peeked at her watch and saw that they had only five minutes left, she dared herself to say: “I haven’t been to bed with anyone for over two years.”

Having got it out at last — and it seemed, now that it was out, to have been the thing she had always wanted to tell him most — she rolled away from him and hid her eyes with her fists. But at the same time she was feeling the absolute relief of
confession. She was in awe of it too, in awe of the way it still had its old power to make her wonder why she could never remember ahead of time how clear it could make her feel. It still had its old power to make her wonder why she lied to herself, and fought it, and tried to pretend that secrecy (ugly secrecy) was her friend.

Declan had in the meantime rolled in behind her, she could feel him, he’d placed his hands on her shoulders, a strong firm presence. And his hands stayed with her, bobbing with her noiseless spasms until she freed an arm, reached blindly out. “Could you hand me a Kleenex please?”

She could hear him walking fast on his knees over to the box of Kleenexes to yank out a handful of them, then she could hear the sound of his knees come shuffling back, could feel him passing the Kleenexes to her, over her shoulder. It seemed to her she could even feel admiration beaming warmly from him to her, through her back, and with this realization tears came. But at the same time she was feeling like an imposter, a fake, as if whatever she was crying about, this wasn’t it, this was a performance. A phrase came to her: the awful efficiency of obsession. She was sure it must mean the awfulness of turning a person into an object that was at least as well stocked as a well-appointed desk. Awful if for no other reason than the reason that in the end — life being life — it would lead to loss. Then what you were left with? You were left with yourself, the joke being that this might have been what you’d wanted all along: not to be bothered. But at the same time she was also thinking thoughts that were completely opposed to this, she was thinking she loved him. Just to be here with him, his whole body
breathing behind her, was paradise. But now he was speaking again, speaking low — there was, after all, no need for him to raise his voice — now he was telling her that the whole culture was deprived where sex was concerned, the whole culture was deprived of true emotion, this was why there was so much emphasis on how many times and how often and how many partners and how long since you’d had it and technique. “All that bullshit,” he said hoarsely, and his voice seemed to convey a kind of principled anguish, as if he, too, had not been to bed with anyone he loved for over two years.