Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (18 page)

“Could I come tonight after supper?”

But it couldn’t be tonight, tonight was the night for Dr. Tenniswood’s diabetes clinic.

And so they settled on Tuesday night. “But my wife knows much more about yoga than I do. And so maybe she should be the one to teach you, maybe I should bring her with me.”

“If you like.”

It snowed on Tuesday evening, a snow that by seven seemed on the point of turning into rain, and when Claire looked out of one of her front windows to see if she could see Mitchell come walking (with or without wife) down her
street — he was by now half an hour late — she saw a man in a black parka standing down on the white lawn. She watched him bring a tube of lipstick up to his lips, then apply it with two bold male strokes, and it was only then that she understood that it wasn’t lipstick, it was Chap Stick. Was this Mitchell? But it would have to be Mitchell; the man in the parka was now turning to squint up at her windows, causing her to quickly step back. A little ashamed to have been seen (but did he really see her?) she went to check her face in the mirror.

When he got to her door, she told him to bring his boots into her apartment so they could get dry.

“We’ll also be needing a blanket.”

She told him she had an old camping blanket somewhere upstairs. But as she was walking along the upstairs hallway, she could hear him walking along the downstairs hallway to her kitchen. She could hear where his feet stopped. Coming down with the blanket, she met him on his way back into the living room.

“This is very rude of me,” he told her, “but I’ve been reading your appointment calendar.” Looking hugely pleased with himself. Looking for other men’s names, she supposed.

“And what did you find on it?”

“That you go belly-dancing.”

“Oh, that was a terrible experience. I was so uncoordinated. I only went to one class.”

“Who was the teacher?”

“I forget her name, this was over a year ago. Some glamorous blonde shrew, very impatient.”

But he didn’t seem to be listening. He was crouching to spread the blanket out on the floor. “And who is Declan?”

Would he remember that this was the name of the man he’d called a charlatan? She didn’t think so, and so she felt it would be safe to say “A friend.”

“I want you to lie down on your back.”

She stepped out of her shoes and onto the blanket. She hadn’t changed her clothes when she got home and was afraid she might be smelling a little too sour and female. Or at the very least of a medical scent from the disinfectant at work. “You don’t want to have a beer or something?” she asked him. “Before we get started?”

“Let’s just do the exercises first. And then after we’re finished you can make us a pot of tea.”

When he had her placed on the blanket he began pacing around her. “Relax. Let your legs go limp. Close your eyes.” He paced some more. “This is called the corpse position and it’s very relaxing.”

She smiled up at him, but kept her eyes open. On the sofa she spotted what looked like a peddler’s bundle. “What’s that?” she asked him.

He opened it. It was his yoga pants, tied up in a T-shirt.

She asked him if he wanted to change. “The bathroom’s at the top of the stairs.”

He sprinted up the stairs, but he didn’t go into the bathroom. She could hear his feet running instead into her bedroom. She thought of the shirts and unwashed panties she’d thrown onto her bed, and the bed not made either, and then she did close her eyes.

When he came down again she could feel him easing himself onto the blanket beside her, could feel him place a hand on her belly. Then she could hear him whisper, “Now I’m going to teach you how to breathe.”

After the yoga lesson, they sat across from one another at the kitchen table to drink their tea. Snow fell beyond the windows as Mitchell talked with the speed and desperation of a man who feared he might be thrown out at any minute. But whenever Claire had something to say he responded vivaciously. An odd word for a man, she thought, but the right one. In fact there was an over-vivacity in him that suggested some fundamental lack of attention. Finally she said, “Mitchell, listen, I’m going to have to ask you to go. I’m dead, and I’m going to have to get up early tomorrow morning.”

At the door, his kiss grazed her cheek and she didn’t offer more of her face to him than that. He ran from her then, down into the mild wet night.

Three days later she called him. She said her name, then had to say it two times before he would even acknowledge that he knew her. And yet when she invited him to lunch the next afternoon he accepted quickly enough. She told him that she could get an hour off from work and he said he could do the same. Then she told him that she’d been thinking about the other night and that she was probably too elusive. But then she found him too intrusive, she said, so it wasn’t a simple thing.

“Too
what?
”

“Too intrusive.”

“And you were too
what
?”

“Too elusive.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well.” He yawned. “You know how it is.” He yawned again. “C’est la vie,” he said.

After she had put down the phone she felt her face go hot, and wished she hadn’t called him.

Walking down the steps to the fish store she could see the fishmonger in the cold hallway leading to the back of the shop, unpacking his crates of fish and crushed ice. Maybe she should buy something a little exotic, like shark steaks. But was shark truly a delicacy? She tried to recall what she knew about the dietary habits of the shark. Wasn’t the whole point that they didn’t have any? Didn’t they eat anything unlucky enough to go floating by? Men, mercurochrome, rubber boots, tubes of toothpaste? She decided to play it safe and buy smoked trout or smoked salmon.

A man’s voice called out to her from behind a glass tank of mottled brown lobsters: “You should be happy today!”

She tried to see him, whoever he was. “Why should I be happy?”

“You wanted a lobster, right? Well, today I got you a whole tankful of lobsters!”

“I think you must be confusing me with someone else,” she told him, still trying to see where he was. She was also trying to look pensively pleased. But she was secretly feeling the dying fall she always felt whenever she reminded anyone of someone else.

The owner of the voice now appeared behind the main counter, and he was just a boy, really, a part-timer. He weighed the smoked trout for her, wrapped it up in butcher-shop paper. As she was on her way out of the store she glanced down at the glass display case to see an octopus laid out on a black plastic platter. Slippery and feminine and faceless and grey, its armless and slippery grey body came to an end in a nightclubby swishy skirt of pearl-buttoned tentacles. How thrillingly alien and un-dead (although deflated) it looked, a flapper in a shimmery grey flapper dress, a flapper with her inks among all the glum fishes.

At lunch Mitchell presented her with a bottle of wine before pulling off his coat. It was a cheap one, she noticed — during the winter with Al, the only man she’d gone out with since it was all over with Steff, she’d become an expert on wines — and after they’d finished eating their trout and avocado salad (the sun was by this time shining down on the backyard’s small hill of snow while she was running hot water on their flowery plates) Mitchell told her that the last woman he was involved with turned out to be a very hard woman.

This news made Claire decide then and there that the woman must be a decent woman; anyone other people called hard was in all likelihood someone decent.

“I was first attracted to
you
,” said Mitchell, “because of your eyes. Your pupils are so dilated. And there’s a lot of new evidence out now that people with dilated pupils are incredibly open people.”

“My pupils are always dilated. It’s because I’m nearsighted.”

“No more nearsighted than I am. And look at mine.”

She peered at them. They were skeptical pinpoints. She lifted off his glasses, tried them on. They were incredibly strong: his face swam before her, amoebic, pale. Only his hair was the same, a bushy gold sphinx shape. She whispered, “You look sort of distorted.”

“I
am
distorted,” he assured her, speaking low. He was standing close to her and they were both smiling. She didn’t want him to kiss her. All she could do was massage his arms as he stood with his hands on her hips. And say, “I like you, Mitchell.” It sounded tepid, even to her, but it was the best she could do.

He said, “I’ll drive you back to work,” and they pulled on their coats, then went down the stairs and out into the glare.

He had a great raft of a car, battered, heirloom of an earlier decade. The door on his side didn’t work, and so he had to go in on her side and hitch himself over to the steering wheel. They drove in silence through the winter stillness of the southern part of the city. As they were passing the icy streets that ran down to the lake, Mitchell reached over to take her hand. But when they got into heavier traffic she withdrew it, then was afraid she’d hurt his feelings and so made a big show of pulling on her mittens.

At the next intersection he started to talk about his wife (Liz) and about Liz’s sister who he said was a bitch. In what way, she wanted to know, and he told her some of the things this sister had done to Liz. What about some of the things
you’ve
done to Liz, she was tempted to ask him, but then considered that this would seem — under the circumstances — to be
a curious question. Instead she asked him, “Do you think
I’m
a bitch?”

He was cleverly, judiciously slow to answer. Yes, all in all, he did rather think she had the potential to be a very difficult and demanding woman.

They drove on in silence after this, until they turned onto Wilbrod Street. But as she was getting out of his car he smiled over at her. “Listen, Signora Vornova, I’ll call you …”

She touched his hand, an appeaser again, but then she said, “No, Mitchell. Thanks. But please don’t call me.”

As she was running up the steps to the clinic she could hear the careening sprint and whine of his tires on the bare parts of the cold street.

She felt quelled, at least a little bit quelled, and when Dr. Tenniswood came into the examining room where she was taking the blood pressure of an anorexic aerobics instructor and asked her if she had any plans for the evening she said no, thinking he might have a pair of free theatre tickets to give away. But what he was wanting to know was could she stay after work to type up the notes for a speech he had to deliver at a medical conference in Cleveland at the beginning of March.

Once she was alone — the patients gone, no noise coming down from upstairs — she sat and typed at her desk under the illumination of only one lamp. The warren of dim rooms behind her, with their smell of sterilized towels and denatured alcohol, made her type furiously, she was so hungry for fresh air. And Dr. Tenniswood’s handwriting was ill-looking too, its clots and reckless clumps of letters unravelling downhill on page after page. But although he was a Luddite (and proud of it, not being the one who had to type up the monthly bills), he
had made one very small concession to the great wired world: he’d bought a second-hand typewriter that had a line of memory behind a clear bar of plastic. Still, in her hurry, she kept jamming the keys and after she’d been whimpering and cursing to herself for almost an hour, she heard a noise upstairs (but weren’t the Tenniswoods all out for dinner somewhere?) then decided it was only the joists of the house contracting in the falling temperature, but then — perhaps because she was working under a single light and this lonely light was turning the office into a stage-set — she began to picture scenes of terrifying drama: Mitchell Kinkaid throwing open the door and striding into the clinic to tell her he’d been sitting parked in his car the whole afternoon watching everyone leave Dr. Tenniswood’s office — “Everyone but
you
, Claire …,” or a gunman kicking in the door and yelling that he’d shoot the place up if she wouldn’t give him drugs, and it was at this same moment that one of her fingers hit a wrong key and the typewriter began to type by itself. She stared at it in stunned wonder as it typed onto the page:
WHAT IS YOUR NAME
?
Oh
, she felt like wailing,
What will happen now?
When she obeyed, typing
CLAIRE
VORNOFF
, the machine galloped off on its own once again, this time to type
WELL, CLAIRE VORNOFF, LET ME SHOW YOU
 … And this time, although still alarmed, she thought, What?
What
are you going to show me? She was even sitting with her raised hands backed up in spooked reverence, like a poor girl in a fairy tale, as if she expected a prince to rise up, then neatly climb right up out of the machine. Or he could turn out to be no bigger than a caterpillar, a reclining miniature prince leaning back against the steel stems holding up their fan of inked letters that were like intricate numerical flowers. But what the
typewriter was now typing, after its
LET ME SHOW YOU
, were the words
A FEW OF MY SPECIAL FEATURES
, and as it began to type a long list of the office chores it had been programmed to do, Claire sat alone in the dim office, feeling as if she’d had an amazing future predicted for her by a ouija board. Or as if she’d been given the perfect solution to a problem after throwing down the sticks for the
I Ching
. She was still feeling chosen as she ran through the smoky cool of early evening on her race to reach Habib’s before seven.