Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (21 page)

M
emories of Tony O’Bois made Claire want to smooth sheets and the blue Swedish tablecloth out to the edge of the bed, the table. She also wanted to get her ears pierced, and so on a mild Saturday afternoon in late March she did, sitting perched up on a dunce’s stool at Dash of Sass while a cosmetician in a lab coat used an implement that looked like a staple gun to make holes in her earlobes, then screwed stainless-steel studs into them. And very soon after this she became the owner of a pair of elaborate Mexican silver earrings that she dropped into one of her raincoat pockets every morning as she was leaving for work. She hooked them into her ears as she was walking along Wilbrod Street, this small morning ritual making her feel like a femme fatale. As good in its way as smoking a fierce cigarette on a fast morning walk out into the day.

The following week a blue-skied postcard arrived from Saskatoon: Helmut was flying to Ottawa in two weeks to oversee a horse sale out in Manotick. He would stay, he wrote, at the
Lord Elgin. News that filled Claire with extreme relief, she so hated having people stay overnight. Above all her family.

Torrents of red poppies were rushing down a dark hillside on the end wall of the gallery, and Claire — peering at them while feeling fat-breasted and pregnant (but could she be? all she knew for certain was that she was two weeks overdue) — had to remind herself to smile and mingle. To her left, fields of orange poppies filled the top half of a green canvas called
Poppy River
. And red poppies blowing under a black sky had been painted on a small black rectangle of shellacked wood. There were also studies of bluets and cowslips, and fields of fireweed, and on one of the really huge canvases a scratchy mauve haze of thistles was swinging in the wake of a tractor toddling over a far hill.

The painter, Dorothea Hickey, was still surrounded by fans at the east end of the gallery. Claire had known her since childhood. But she must be in her early seventies by now. Not that she looked it, being impish and ageless in black heels and black nylons and a slim Black Watch plaid suit with a beret. She had come to her own exhibition in the company of her newly married (and younger) sister, a stately cadaver in glimmering shantung who looked much more ravaged by age than Dorothea did and who was also filled with a trembling pride in her doddering bridegroom. How much more I would prefer, thought Claire, to grow old as Dorothea has grown old, and it was at this appropriate moment that she looked up to see Steff.

He was walking across the gallery toward her, smiling one of his uncertain small smiles. When he got closer he bowed to
her, kissed her hand. Impersonating a German diplomat, perhaps. Or an icy Swede. He even clicked his heels together. “Madame Vornova.” Then he stood holding her hand, making her feel the physiological oddness of standing with her hand in his while she was possibly carrying another man’s child. It was almost as if he had been turned into the baby’s father (if there actually
was
a baby) by the rights awarded him by proximity and history. She was even lulled by his holding her hand until it occurred to her that holding hands with him was the very last thing in the world she wanted to do, and so she wormed her hand out of his to ask, “And so how are
you
?” But he had already turned away from her to say hello to Dorothea, who had rushed over to tilt her face up at him like a child.

After she got off the bus, Claire walked deep into Rockcliffe Village, past every kind of architectural jewel and aberration, not quite sure of the way. She passed stone urns with pink geraniums in them, women in tennis dresses coming out of grand houses, the green of their lawns turned to sparkle by sprinklers. But the new Tenniswood house, when she got to it, didn’t look like a house designed by an architect, having been built in the style of a traditional hacienda — poor Mitchell, he would have wanted to do something less folkloric — then it occurred to her that Mitchell would be here, in fact, he would have to be, and she wondered what she could possibly say about it when she was speaking to him. She tried to spot him beyond the trees walling the side garden off to the west of the house, but all she could see, through a screen of new leaves, were ten or fifteen people who had the casual look of
neighbours, including a number of women and small children, all of them sunburned and in bird-of-paradise greens and blues. As she turned in at the gate, Zuzi — baby-blue jeans, shiny tropical midriff blouse (yellow grasses against a black sheen) — came out through the front door looking amused, as if surprised to find herself living in Rockcliffe, of all places, then she was saying in her bored voice, “Oh hi, Claire, have you come to check out our new abode?” and Claire was following her out to the kitchen to get herself a drink of water.

Trays of pink punch in champagne glasses were waiting on a large tiled counter in the vast Spanish kitchen. Zuzi said, “I better get this stuff passed around,” then she was gone, carrying one of the trays down the back steps in her platform sandals, leaving Claire to sip her drink and plot ways to steer clear of Mitchell.

But coming down the steps of the back verandah she caught a glimpse of him (in a formal dark suit and silver tie) standing out on the lawn talking to Dr. and Mrs. Tenniswood, and so she changed direction and made her way up two sets of stairs to make a tour of the bedrooms. She visited a small upstairs den, then turned to enter a bedroom that looked out over the back garden, a sunken and peaceful room, its walls a handsome matte red. As she went down its three shallow steps she was met by the most gigantic bed she had ever seen, it was really two queen-sized beds shoved together and covered with three or four stitched-together antique white cotton bedspreads with a phantom pattern of white wreaths woven into them. And on the wall above the bed, a painting of a village common dominated by a very large leafy tree. The sky was the kind of sky that almost always appeared in paintings of this primitive sort,
an inversion of skies out in the world: where it was cloudless, it was not blue, but white, and high up where it was curdled and cloudy, it was not white, but blue.

But it was so strange to think of any sex happening in here. It was like being a child again and trying to imagine sex between her parents. She tried to picture herself sharing a room like this room with a husband. Breathing the same air. She was not at all convinced she would like it. Living alone had become an addiction. And imagine being permanently tied to someone. Someone like Jack. Imagine him getting sick, or even only being Dr. Tenniswoodishly boring, it would be a kind of endless genteel hell. But how did people manage to live their lives in this way? Without leaving a mark?

She went over to the windows and looked down on the guests, all the while thinking that when it came right down to it what she really wanted was to live in peace, to not have to bother with love, to be left alone. And yet when she tried to imagine a future in which she hardly thought of love at all any more it appeared to stretch out before her, endless and dumbstruck, a future afflicted by the sunny and melancholy taint of the eternal.

When she came back down into the garden, she wondered if she would have to sit at the same table as Mitchell, but she ended up seated with strangers who all the way through the cucumber soup talked about city politics.

A grey-haired woman in a grey velvet suit with a touch of white blouse at her throat then began to talk in a guttural voice about robbery. Which was when it turned out that all the guests except Claire had something in common: all of their houses had been broken into during the last year.

“In safe little Ottawa.” This from an amused woman with sad but bright eyes.

But the man sitting next to her said that Ottawa really
had
been a safe city for him. “Everyone on our street’s been robbed at least once since last summer, but we’ve got off scot-free every time, at least since last April when, I have to confess, our computer was stolen —” and at this, his tall, eager wife aimed her smile democratically all around the table: “We have a system. And it’s just two little doorbells mounted beside our front door. The bottom one has our own names printed under it. But the name that’s printed under the top bell is Corporal L.C. McWilliam,
RCMP.”

The amused woman asked, “So is the cop your landlord? Or are you the cop’s?”

“The corporal doesn’t actually exist,” the wife told her. “But we’ve been thinking of giving him a promotion.”

“For his many long years of faithful service,” said the husband. “Make him a staff sergeant.”

And then while people were still standing out on the cold lawn drinking their coffee, Claire had to squeeze past a laughing crowd of men grouped at the bottom of the stairs. She tried to make herself inconspicuous, just one of a phalanx of women in pale dresses, some of them with coats and men’s jackets caped over their chilled shoulders, but Mitchell’s glance passed over her, looking rehearsed, even though his eyes were so brimming with laughter at something one of the other men had just said that it was impossible to tell if there was resentment in them. Then, and this too seemed rehearsed, he looked quickly away.

On Monday morning it was warmer again and the wind smelled of wood-rot. Claire ran down the stairs to pick up the morning paper. Her worry that she might be pregnant was making her feel so queasy that she decided to drop off a bottle of her urine at the pharmacy down by the Byward Market on her way to work. The one thing she did not want to do was take it to her neighbourhood pharmacy. She knew the pharmacist there and so had no wish to have him know any of the misleading details of her essentially innocent life.

W
hen everything was turned down to simmer, Claire went up to her room to change into a clean shirt, but before she’d even finished doing up her buttons, the doorbell buzzed down below. Helmut then, already here; on her way down to the lower level she detoured into her kitchen to feel for her feather earrings in a teacup on the shelf next to the stove. She hooked them into her ears as she was running down to the street door to let him in, and once they’d climbed the stairs to her apartment, Helmut dug a bottle of red wine out of his briefcase, along with a bag of red grapes, then sat at the kitchen table in his grey raincoat, eating the grapes and talking to her as she diced green peppers and long-tailed green onions. Dapper but breathless, he kept watching her stir the soup as he was spitting seeds into the cup of his right hand. He said he liked her earrings. “You really go in for those dangling claws and feathers, don’t you, kid?”

Yes she did, but how could he know this? But as the herby green soup was swelling up, she remembered a pair of feathery clip-ons she’d owned when she was in high school.

Helmut pulled off his raincoat, but then he sneezed. “I think I must have picked up some kind of bug on the flight east.”

Claire went up to her room to fetch him a sweater.

A muffled voice addressed her from deep within the cave of grey wool: “You pour yourself some of that wine now.” But once Helmut’s flushed face had emerged and he was sitting at the table spooning up his soup he talked about illness and money. The bad news was that five people from his graduation class were already dead. “Three from cancer, two from bad hearts. And remember Floyd McArdle? Donald McArdle’s father?”

Claire brought a basket of bread over to the table. “What happened to him?”

“He’s been through hell is what’s happened to him. I could give you all the gory details — and I
do
mean gory — but first I need to know: are you squeamish?”

“I work for the ghoulish Dr. Tenniswood, remember? I’m utterly heartless.”

“So here we go then, here’s the story of poor Floyd: Floyd had to go into hospital for routine surgery. Rotorblading or rottweilling or whatever it is they do to old guys when they have trouble with their prostates, but his own doctor was called out of town, and so another doc had to come in to take the case history. And this new doc took one look at our Floyd, then told him he had macro-something, can’t remember what exactly, just that it’s caused by a tumour on the pituitary gland, and the reason he knew this was that Floyd’s head was like a monster man’s head, his bones were so overgrown. Jaw bone, nose bone, forehead bone, everything. Even his shoulders and hands had grown so much that they were like a giant’s shoulders, a giant’s hands …”