Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (19 page)

W
hen the lights came up again, the two actors, by now wearing bathing trunks, were gazing out over a beach that was apparently to be played by the audience. They were talking about women, the pale actor pointing at the spot in the dark that was Claire to say “
There
.” And as Claire tightly crossed one plump thigh over the other, the taller actor turned to say in an awe-struck voice, “
Oh
, yeah.” To which the first actor wistfully said, “My sweet goodness.” A ripple of laughter moved across the audience then as the taller actor said, “Uh-huh,” and then the first actor said, “What a sensitive young lady,” and the laughter surged down the rows of chairs in the mercifully small auditorium.

By the time they were moving on to admire other spots in the dark, Claire could feel that the nearly bald man who was sitting next to her was shifting his position in wary sympathy for her. He seemed young to be nearly bald, and as they were pulling on their coats at the end of the play he asked her how it had felt, to be singled out like that.

For a moment all she could think of as a response was “Seduced and abandoned,” which also happened to be the title of the movie she’d seen at her local repertory house two weeks ago. “Praised and accused,” she said, doing up the buttons on her long winter coat. “Adored and offended.”

“No one wants to be called sensitive any more.”

“And no one,” said Claire, “wants to be called a lady.” Then she said that at first she’d been afraid they were ad libbing. “And that they’d picked me out earlier in the evening and decided I was the one it might be fun to humiliate —”

He squinted down at her. “But it was definitely scripted. You could see the way they had practised choreographing it. First spot in the dark: lower left. Second spot in the dark: upper left. Third spot in the dark: upper right —”

They were by this time walking past backdrops for other plays: parks and farmyard panoramas painted with the cartoon innocence and spectacular clouds of a children’s book, the whole place smelling so strongly of paint and dust that it was an extreme relief to step out into the cold evening air. It was even a relief to hear the crunch of snow underfoot.

The following Friday evening, Claire, her head aching, stood at her kitchen sink, hulling strawberries. She hulled them until her fingers turned red, then she waggled them under the faucet. I’m Lady Macbeth, she said. But these particular berries were too hard, white-knuckled at their tips. She poked them in a circle around the cake’s white field of whipped cream. She wished she had something more inventive to add. Mint leaves.
Or tiny blue basil flowers. But the anemic berries would have to do. Besides, she was going to be late, she would have to run.

In the foggily mild evening she walked up the dark steps of the verandah of her hosts — both architects who were old friends of Steff’s — and, once inside, made her way through all the shouting and laughter toward the kitchen. In the long dining room, illuminated mauve glass mushrooms were hanging low over rows of salads, green bowls of tzatziki, black bowls of wild rice. It was scarily crowded, she couldn’t see anyone she knew, and the noise level was making her feel solitary, ill-equipped for the evening. She set her cake on a counter next to a surgically gleaming sink in the vacant and glamorously utilitarian kitchen, then went up the stairs to take off her coat.

In the bedroom, what looked like a hundred women’s coats were heaped on the low bed; she could smell the expensive and sweetly peppery aroma of perfumed fur, perfumed fake fur.

She was on her way over to the mirror when she heard someone else come in. It even turned out to be someone she slightly knew, Maggie someone, who’d worked with Steff when he was still at the National Capital Commission. She was dressed in a long brown skirt and a slouchy brown jacket, expensive, mannishly elegant, and after she’d inspected herself in the mirror, testing the bounce in her hair, she turned at the door to look back over a shoulder and narrow her eyes at Claire: “You really
do
know how to do the best for yourself, don’t you?”

Then she was gone.

Claire wanted to run down the stairs after her to say: “Just tell me this, Maggie: why is it that you … are the way that you are?” But as retribution this did seem to be just a bit on the
lacklustre side. As she was walking down the stairs herself, though, she remembered that Steff had once said in a scornful voice, “Oh well, you know Maggie, she’s not exactly one of our brighter lights,” and this was a comfort to her.

While she was taking her time serving herself at the long table under the glass mushrooms — to extend a moment in which she actually had something to do, and while she was also looking for her cake (was it too pathetic? it hadn’t been set out yet) — a voice just behind her said, “My sweet goodness,” and she turned to see the man who’d sat next to her the night she’d gone to see
Sexual Perversity in Chicago
. “If it isn’t the sensitive young lady,” he said, and they laughed.

“Try this,” she said, pointing with her spoon at the bowl of wild rice, and he did, and after they’d both helped themselves to a little of everything they made their way toward the fire. Walking down the shallow steps to the living room they sank through waves of jokes, waves of laughter, women glancing coolly back at them over backless dresses, while a barefoot man in jeans who was wearing a black T-shirt under his tuxedo jacket was mimicking a politician he’d heard being interviewed on a talk show, a Montrealer who’d wanted to assure the interviewer that he wasn’t Satan but who’d kept pronouncing Satan as Satin as he’d shouted into the microphone, “I am not Satin! I am not Satin!” At this same moment, a woman who was at the centre of a group of women over by the back windows was (as if in explication) moaning in a laughing, protesting voice, “No, no, he’s an absolute monster!”

When they got to the fireplace there was talk about someone who’d married a woman some of the people there seemed to
know, and a man sitting on the sofa was saying, “Don Greenlee was her first husband —”

Which led a woman who was sitting lower down on a hassock to cry up at him, “Which makes you wonder about
his
judgement …”

“Yes. But he did try to drown her …”

“Then all is forgiven.”

Claire’s companion made space for her on the opposite sofa. “I’m Tony O’Bois, by the way.” And he picked up the nearest bottle of wine so that she could see the label, raised his eyebrows at her.

“Thanks, Tonio, yes.”

“Actually it’s Tony. The o doesn’t go at the back end of the Tony, it goes at the front end of the Bois. Half-Irish, half-French.” But he was, he told her, actually British. “An army brat who grew up north of Birmingham. I was actually born in London, though, at the London Fever Hospital …”

“But wouldn’t a hospital that called itself the London Fever Hospital be only for infectious diseases?”

“I think my mother was admitted with a fever and then while she was there she just happened to give birth to me.” He was by this time giving off a jaunty sexual glint — making him seem much less of an uncle than he’d seemed to be the night of the play — and after he’d loosened his tie, he told her he was teaching history out at Carleton.

She told him that she was out at Carleton too. “But just in the evenings. Taking English courses. So I can teach.” Although what she’d really like to be was a bibliotherapist. “Isn’t that what they’re called? Therapists who treat their
clients by suggesting that they read certain chosen novels or stories or poems?” Walking along a street past a glisten of ice caught in morning sunlight — but this was years ago — she’d glimpsed a copy of Plath’s
Ariel
, its cover the deep blue of a placemat, lying on the back seat of a car with a child’s rattle placed next to it like a bulbous pink spoon. “What I really want is to force my opinions on people. You could take a poem by Wordsworth — ‘Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known,’ say — and you could tell your patient to take two doses of it at bedtime.”

“And call me in the morning …” said Tony O’Bois. “Anyway, when you do get to be a teacher you’ll be able to force people to read things. At least in theory. You’ll be able to say ‘Before your exam take three doses of this sonnet: “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways.” ’ Which, by the way, is the only sonnet I can remember from high-school English.”

She asked him who had written it.

“Wordsworth,” he said.

This made them laugh, although Tony O’Bois swore it was true.

Sometimes, Claire told him, she got almost frantic, trying to match the person to the book when she was riding the bus on her way to work, and she described the absolute silly anguish of sitting next to a stranger who was holding a book so that she couldn’t quite see its title. And then there was the way all this seemed somehow to be connected to her compulsion to give the right person the right book.

“Or connected to feeling left out of the sexual secrets that might have been in the books your parents were reading when you were a child. Wouldn’t Freud have said that?”

“Yes,” said Claire. “I’m sure he would.” She was ashamed that she hadn’t thought of this herself. But now Tony O’Bois was watching her, over his drink. There was a moment of quiet, then a familiar voice made her turn to see Janine Mills, who four or five years ago had been one of her closest friends, and who was now listening, in her stoop-shouldered, disapproving way, to a woman in a dress patterned with weedy flowers. Why had they decided to stop being friends? But she already knew why: Janine was a person who could not tolerate listening to other people’s complaints. Claire recalled a farewell note she had once planned to write to her: “You gave me so much advice! But you mustn’t reproach yourself. (And I know you won’t) …” She also remembered complaining to her because Dr. Tenniswood had, over a question about a lab report, treated her unfairly. She remembered the impatient way Janine had listened, then the way she had rushed to defend Dr. Tenniswood — a man she had never met! — even going so far as to tell her that Dr. Tenniswood was a terribly busy man and that she should make at least some effort to get over being so thin-skinned and always imagining things. But wasn’t the first requirement in a friend that she have the tact to scoff at your enemies?

And now she could see that she too had been spotted, and so she stood, feeling false and doomed, to excuse herself to Tony O’Bois and walk over to say hello to Janine. The two women talked until Janine’s husband at last came to the rescue, and after they’d gone off, Claire looked for Tony, but he was by this time sitting next to the fireplace and talking to Maggie.

She detoured into the kitchen to check on the whereabouts of her cake and saw that a few kind souls had helped themselves
to three or four slices of it. Her poor fallen little cake. Just for tonight it was her humiliated child. But she should be getting home, she had a fever.

On her way back upstairs again she felt dizzy, and up in the bedroom she quickly pulled on her coat. And then as she was coming down the stairs she could see Tony O’Bois talking to a bearded man and a woman in a fringed black dress who’d hung their arms around each other’s waists like schoolgirls. She didn’t think he was looking her way as she was saying goodbye to their hosts, and so she stood pretending to read the titles of the books on the top shelf of a bookcase just off to his left. She held onto a nearby chair to steady herself. She didn’t want to walk alone out to the bus, not along so many dimly illuminated and slushy streets. But at last he appeared to have noticed her, she heard him excuse himself to the lovers, then he came over to stand beside her. “Listen, I’m about to leave too, let me give you a lift home.”

But on their way down the steps to his car he asked her if she would care to go out for a drink.

She was still feeling shaky, but she didn’t want the evening to be over yet either. “Or could we go for a walk? It’s so mild.”

“Sure. How about a walk on the beach?”

“Isn’t it still winter?”

“It feels like spring.”

As they swung past the university on their way out to the beach at Mooney’s Bay, he told her about all the in-fighting in the history department and about all the trials of applying for tenure-track, but his words — although alarming — were, after all, only the familiar words of everyday speech: back-biting, nefarious, nepotism, incestuous, internecine, cloak and dagger.

But at Mooney’s Bay they were quiet and sat looking out
over the cold river. There was still snow on the beach. And there weren’t any joggers running their dogs along the wet sand close to the water. No joggers, no dogs, no gulls, no moon. But there was a nearly warm wind. Claire rolled down her window to breathe more of it in, but after a few minutes the breeze made the air inside the car get too cold and so they got out to walk through the warmer air down to the river.

When Tony spoke of his wife, a lecturer in the history department at the University of Victoria, Claire was surprised. She had thought of him as a balding young bachelor. “Twice a year I fly out to Victoria to see her, and twice a year she flies back here to see me …” They began to walk along the tideline, kicking at little stones as they talked, and after they’d walked to the far end of the beach and then back almost as far as the other end to get to Tony’s car, Tony looked at his watch, holding his wrist up close to his eyes in the dim river light. “We still
could
go out somewhere for a drink, we could go to a little bistro I know that’s close to the National Gallery …”