Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (17 page)

The sound of barking brought Claire to her kitchen window the following evening. She drew back one of her curtains to see Dirk van der Meer down on the floodlit driveway urging his two excited dogs into the back of his car, then remembered
that Judy had told her they were all going to go off to Mexico for the last two weeks of January, and so tonight must be the night of their flight, she thought, they must be boarding the dogs at a kennel. And they were sweet old dogs, really, the van der Meer dogs; sometimes at night when she could hear Judy or Lynnie calling them home she would smile, thinking of the kinds of names dog owners would give to their dogs. To own two dogs and name them after a French philosopher and an English food, say, and then to have to go to your doorway every night and call out — as her neighbours two houses up the street were obliged to call out — “Here, Voltaire! Here, Muffin!” would, she thought, be like shouting out over the neighbourhood night after night the same tired joke. The van der Meer dogs had been named after a discredited politician and an herb (Boris, Sassafras), names that seemed curiously appropriate to them once you got to know them, but she couldn’t honestly say she would miss their barking, she was too much looking forward to the pleasure of having the whole house to herself.

While she was sitting at her desk the next night, making notes for her essay on
Insight and Responsibility
for her psychology class, she heard a click like the click of giant chopsticks at the back of the house. She hurried to the back window to look out, and saw that one end of the park had been frozen into a rink that had already attracted nine or ten skaters. She was so cheered up by all this nearby life and commotion that she stayed for nearly half an hour at the cold window, mesmerized by the way the skaters’ blades hissed when they braked and also by the way the ringleader skaters snaked the puck down the ice with their sticks as they were breaking away
from the dreamy others, now drifting in psychic convoys behind them. There was even a father with a toddler at the far end of the rink — the father swinging in a protective half-circle around his small boy while a whole flotilla of bigger and rougher boys went gliding by.

On Tuesday night, as she was coming down her street, she could see how hugely dark the van der Meer house was in the winter moonlight and she let herself with more alertness than usual into the downstairs hallway in her part of the house. She felt watched, old fears from childhood. But as she was unlocking her own door she could hear the phone starting to ring and she ran to it in gratitude as if whoever was calling would have to be bringing her only wonderful news.

It turned out to be someone from her past, although more from Steff’s past than hers, a former secretary of Steff’s named Elaine Chevaldayoff, and when she said “Oh hi, Elaine, how have you been?” Elaine took the question seriously, telling her that she’d had cancer and that she’d had to have six operations and chemotherapy and cobalt and how her hair had fallen out and how she had to wear a wig. At Elaine’s mention of the wig, Claire was able to recall her face and along with her face her straight shiny brown hair. But now Elaine was telling her that the doctors had cut slits in the soles of her feet and shoved tubes up them and then shot dye up the tubes until they were finally able to locate the cancer in some lymph nodes in the back of her stomach. She described each of her six operations, how long they took, how long she was in hospital. Claire wanted to ask her what made her suspect she had it, but Elaine was already asking her if Steff got married again.

“He’s living with someone, but they’re not married, at least not yet. And in fact they can’t be, because we’re not even divorced yet.”

“I heard that he was,” said Elaine.

Two nights later Claire was startled awake by a knocking on the downstairs front door. She turned on her light and picked up her watch to see that it was nearly three, then pulled on her robe and hurried downstairs to turn on the overhead light in her kitchen. She let herself out of her apartment then, looking anxiously to both left and right on the landing, then proceeded much more slowly down the dark second stairway, step by peering step, until she could see that the man who was standing motionless on the other side of the window glass was a stranger; a bare-headed man in a raincoat standing in a way that looked formally humble (a professional man, then: detective, cop). Her heart thumping killingly as she squinted down at him, one hand shading her eyes, the other clutching together the tops of her lapels, she at last reached the street floor. But although her visitor couldn’t possibly have seen her, he must somehow have sensed that he was being watched, because he was already hurrying to stand under the nearest tree. And so what now? But she already knew what now: she should flush him off the property with light, but as she was feeling her way with her free hand for the panel of lights she saw him unzip his pants and then urinate against the trunk of the tree in the cold night — he’s only a drunk then, she thought, and she felt so weak with relief that she wanted to both laugh and cry at the craziness of it all — but then she heard a noise like a firecracker
going off at the back of the house. No, the sound was coming down from upstairs. The man under the tree was a decoy then, a distraction while the real work — robbery; robbery or worse — was going on at the back of the house. But, no, it was definitely coming down from above. She ran back up the two flights of stairs to her bedroom, then looked through her window to see two men in black caps and black windbreakers skating at high speed while taking renegade slapshots at the slats walling the rink. Gracefully fierce and black against the pale ice, they were skating with their black dogs — the skaters fleeing the dogs, the dogs racing the skaters: it was a scene that seemed spookily medieval, sinister, the scene and the late hour, but at the same time the skaters were making her feel protected (they were dog owners, after all) and so they made her feel she could call out to them if the man under the tree (or his accomplice) — if he now was even anyone to worry about any more, being drunk — tried to break into the house, but when she ran down the stairs to check on him again, it was to discover that he’d gone. Besides, the men down on the rink were hardly to be trusted, making so much noise while in the houses all around them people were doing their best to stay asleep.

Once she was back in her bedroom again she went to her window, then stood looking down at the skaters with a kind of puzzled fury until twenty to four, when they at last skated off the rink and out over the bumpy ice that led to their car, the biggest black dog nosing the backs of their skate blades. But the smaller dog was wanting to linger behind to sniff out the message trail left by other dogs, and so didn’t leave until he was hailed by a sharp whistle, then he too ran off the white ice, the shadow of his own little legs running neatly beneath him.

A
t first the little blue pills were magic pills, bringing a deep perfect sleep without dreams, but on the fifth morning Claire woke to a merry-go-round of obsessive dark thoughts, the world turned fated. She had to keep watch over it. On the sixth morning she came to a shaky decision: she must give her tiny blue saviours up. She was afraid to throw them out in the garbage, she was already too addicted to the deep sleep they could give her and she could all too easily picture herself — already tonight at two in the morning — going down the icy back stairs in her nightgown and snowboots to root around among slickly freezing orange peels and deeply cold coffee grounds in her search for the vial, and so she flushed the little pills down the toilet, she was that afraid (and that certain) they would drive her mad. But the moment she saw them whirling away was a desperate moment, whirling with it a wobbling question: What if I can never fall asleep again?

The following night was the stormy night of St. Valentine’s Day, and the Tenniswoods were throwing a party. And although
she knew she should stay home to work on an essay for her psychology class, linking Gurdjieff’s enneagrams with
I Ching
hexagrams and the kabbalistic Tree of Life, how could she not go? She even wanted to, to escape from her essay. The guests were all to wear something red. But she had only one red dress and although she wished it could be more shiny and alluring (exposing, at her back, a nearly heart-shaped V of white skin) it was only a stiff brocade, a demurely ugly dress that she craned around to zip up as she was squeezing her feet into the pinch of her tall leather boots. She also slid on a ring, a gift from Steff, that had a dull red stone set in an oval of silver bubbles.

The downstairs rooms of the clinic were crowded with cold coats and laughter, but the food and most of the guests were upstairs in the main part of the house. She excused her way past the talk and guilty smiles of the smokers to go into one of the clinic’s examining rooms to tighten her bra straps and put on her (red) lipstick. She was tempted to pull her shawl off and stuff it into her shoulder bag, but she needed to somehow warm her cold arms. She dreaded having to go upstairs to meet people. She spoke to herself in the clinic mirror. Pull yourself together, for heaven’s sake.

But when she came up into the living room, she was immediately taken under the wing of Dr. Tenniswood, who wanted to introduce her to an architect whose name was Mitchell Kinkaid. “This is the genius who’s building us our new house.”

Claire had seen this man before, but she wasn’t able to quite recall where. He stood leaning against one of the tall bookcases and they talked for over an hour while she held, in one chilled hand, a glass of tonic water with a slice of lime
in it. He was wearing a wool scarf tucked into a V-necked sweater and now and then he gazed at her with a briefly surprised look, then turned sharply away from her to sneeze into his cupped hands. His wife (or the woman Claire took to be his wife) decided to leave the party early. Were they estranged? This woman said “Bye-bye, baby,” in a coldly wifely way, holding up her right hand and wiggling her fingers at him, but as she was walking past Claire she smiled a smile so sweetly eerie it was unearthly. This was the way an angel might smile. Or a psychotic person.

After she’d gone, Mitchell told Claire he could see that she was a really open person.

She was pleased, although she knew that it was not wise to be, because in her experience the people who told you you were open invariably ended up telling you you were hard. “I don’t think I’m so very open,” she said.

“What I mean is, I can see that you’re not a hard person.”

“I can be a tough person,” she said, trying to hide the fact that she felt vaguely offended.

“We’ve met before, I think.”

“I’ve been trying to remember where too. And now I do: it was at the Health Alternatives Bazaar. Last spring, out at Earlton.”

“Right. We sat on the grass listening to one of our local charlatans giving us instructions on how to breathe.”

“You thought he was a charlatan?”

“God, yes. The man was dog
matic
, and besides, all that breathing stuff is
ancient
news, it’s yoga stuff, even
I
know all that stuff, it’s incredibly old hat. The yoga way is the better way, believe me …”

Shouldn’t she somehow at least try to defend Declan Farrell? Say: Look, I happen to know this person, and he’s really just not like that at
all
. But she was silent.

From her window that night she could see a lone speed skater doing his side-stepping laps all around the perimeter of the rink. She pulled a ski sweater on over her nightgown and stood watching him while she brushed her hair, nearly hypnotized by the way his elegant speed skater’s stance — part sports fiend, part scholar — still left him free to skate with such grace. A mystery man striking off for far away even within the small confined space of the rink.

That night she slept only a few hours and when Mitchell phoned her at work on Thursday morning to ask her if he could come over to her place to give her a yoga lesson she said, That would be great, terrific. Because she was thinking: Yoga could be good, it might help me sleep.