Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (22 page)

“But wasn’t that painful?”

“Floyd is a farmer, he’s accustomed to pain.”

“But didn’t anyone notice the way his looks were changing?”

“It happened so gradually. And he never travelled. Day in and day out he saw the same people, the same people saw him …”

“And so then what?”

“And so then he had to be operated on by a neurosurgeon, no time to waste. The tumour was behind one of his eyes — his left eye, I seem to remember — and so they had to take the eye out and put it in salt water or something, whatever they do with eyes when they take them out, then they had to scoop out the tumour and spray in the disinfectant or whatever they spray in behind an eye, and then stuff the damn thing back in again.”

Claire was silent, he had her attention.

“But here’s where it starts to get even weirder. After only three days they send him home — you must know how they are, they need the bed — and then on Monday or Tuesday of the following week Donnie drops by to see how the old guy is doing …”

Claire could so easily see it: Donnie McArdle coming into the dim house, that decent sweet guy.

“… and finds him out cold on the kitchen floor. So then it’s back to neurosurgery again, back to taking out the godforsaken eye again, because this time there’s a massive infection in behind it, and this time they can’t put it back in again, not right away, the area’s too inflamed, and so they stuff some kind of plastic sheeting into his eye socket until the damn thing heals up …”

It was as if one of the great city-stomping monster men of their childhood comic books had come to terrible life. It
seemed almost in bad taste, after this, to talk about anything normal. But they did. And after they’d finished their soup Claire served Helmut buttered baby spears of asparagus and fried sausages and new little Prince Edward Island potatoes browned in the sausage fat. She hadn’t had time to make anything special, there was only the dash on her way home to pick up the kind of food she knew he would like, and in fact he did seem to like it, having eaten up his sausages as if they were marvellous, she in the meantime getting up from the table to go and get more things to bring back to him: a dill and cucumber salad, pickle relish, a bowl of black olives, a pot of black tea. Between mouthfuls of everything he talked to her about his problems with back pain, asked her if she could tell him how to cure it.

She gave him her brutal prescription: no tomatoes, no potatoes, no eggplant, no red peppers. “All members of the nightshade family,” she told him. “Also no salt, no fat, no milk, no cream, no sugar. Now that I know you’ve got back pain, I know I shouldn’t have fed you what I just fed you.”

But he wouldn’t allow her to take the dessert back to the kitchen. “I’ll reform my diet tomorrow.” And after they’d spooned up the last of their strawberries and cream (Claire giving in to temptation too, and spooning up the strawberry-flavoured slope of sugar gone sweetly grey from the cream) she turned to him. “Want to go out for a quick spin before you have to go?”

They went down the main stairs to the car. Cool spring evening, smoky and breezy. “Let me drive!”

He tossed the keys over to her. “So when did you learn how to drive?”

She slid in behind the wheel. “Not that long ago. And then whenever I needed a car I’d just rent one. I used to rent one sometimes to drive out to see someone in Ottersee, a little town about an hour from here.”

It felt good to be driving a car again. “And I can’t even begin to tell you what a high it was, driving down that highway …” She could feel him studying her as she was speeding up — “To see this person,” she said.

And when he said, “And so do you still see … this person?” she thought how kind he was, engaging her as he was in a sweet bit of brotherly teasing. Of course if she were to say “This person was my therapist,” he would in all likelihood stop his teasing at once and even be a little offended that she’d led him on. She would be like a child boasting to her parents about a make-believe friend who lived at the bottom of their garden. She said, “No, I don’t.” And then: “I think I’ll just drive you up to Brown’s Inlet, it’s so lovely up there.”

“You didn’t find it hellishly expensive? Renting a car?”

“No!” she cried out in a wrenched voice. “It’s much
much
cheaper than
owning
a car, believe me.” But then she spoke more quietly, lethally. “Do you know who’s always most concerned about my extravagance? People with not just one car, but two cars! People with three cars! It just makes me wild —”

“Okay, okay,
okay
,” said Helmut. “Calm
down
, for Christ’s sake, I’m sorry I asked.” He looked out his window to speak in a lower voice to the night. “
Damn
sorry,” he said.

But this was the way it always was between her and Helmut. They began well enough, but they could not keep up their good behaviour for long. And yet Helmut was the brother who’d saved her life the time they were caught in a blizzard and she’d
fallen down so often that she’d finally just decided to sleep in the snow for five minutes or so, her other brothers (even Max) having long since disappeared in the storm. Helmut was the one who’d trudged back for her, pulled her up, shouted at her to keep her awake, then bullied her all the long way back home. But she had saved his life once too (or tried to) when she was six years old and therefore young enough to be deluded into believing she was a hero. An older boy named Buddy had started teasing Helmut at school, calling him names: Hellie and Hell-Cat and Hell-Nut and Nazi, and she, a whirling mittened little fatty in a red snowsuit, had flung herself at him, her fists pounding again and again into his soft bully’s belly, and when he’d fallen down on his back on the frozen field next to the school she’d straddled him and then continued to flail and hit at him while all the other students from his grade-eight class had stood in a laughing circle around them. All through the early years of her childhood the memory of this episode had filled her with great pride in her own power and bravery; it wasn’t until she was thirteen or fourteen that it finally dawned on her that she’d been crazed enough and fat enough for everyone (even bullies) to come to the conclusion that she was hilarious.

But now they were driving around perfect little Brown’s Inlet, and Helmut was asking her to park at the end of it because it was so pretty. “That’s the great thing about the East,” he told her. “You’ve got scenery down here.” And so they sat and looked out over the water while Helmut inhaled the view and Claire thought about Floyd McArdle. But how lucky they’d been, the people in her family, considering the things that happened to some people. Select visitations by Grimm’s fairy tales made to certain chosen unfortunates in the modern world.

Then it was time for her to drive back to her place so that Helmut could go off to the horse farm in Manotick.

“By the way,” she asked him as she was getting out of the car, “how’s Max?”

“Max is fine. Why wouldn’t he be?”

“And Mother?”

“Mother is Mother,” Helmut darkly said.

And then just before he drove off, he got out as well, to give her a loose hug goodbye, then he pushed her glasses back up to the bridge of her nose. “Just because you’re a college girl now you don’t have to go around looking like an absent-minded professor …”

She batted his hand away. “What are you trying to
do?
Don’t
do
that …”

But he must have been wanting to make amends, because after he’d slammed himself in, he reached out and touched one of her feathery green earrings. “Christ, that’s pretty.” Then he was off, sweeping up the hill in his rented car, turning at the corner, gone.

She walked up back up the stairs, let herself into her apartment. It felt lonely and cool with Helmut no longer in it, although she was also feeling an edgy relief at being alone once again. Was he buying a horse? Or selling a horse? She pictured a black horse waiting for him on a green field, she pictured him driving toward it. She also thought of poor Floyd, his monstrous affliction. Until today, the most cruel medical statistic she knew was that the symptoms of multiple sclerosis were often preceded by a day of absolute euphoria. A day of supreme happiness, then physiology’s black-hearted comeuppance, the rug pulled out from under the body. Her eyes ached. She
splashed her face with cold water, then poured herself a glass of cranberry juice. Her refrigerator, so old that it sometimes mewed like a kitten, this time decided to creak like a saddle.

There was also Helmut’s news of the boys of St. Walburg to mull over, all those farm boys who’d done so well once they’d stepped out into the wide world of Saskatoon and the cities. They’d become plumbers, real-estate agents, fast-food entrepreneurs. And where was
she
? She was nowhere. She, who used to be a star among dunces. But Donnie McArdle was never a dunce, he was observant and belonged to that small clan of boys she’d considered passionately decent. One afternoon the spring she was twelve, she’d gone for a walk in the woods with Donnie and Helmut. They’d packed grape jelly sandwiches in wax paper and had sat down to eat them in a clearing a mile west of the McArdle farm. She could remember what clothes she was wearing, even — her slick and sour mauve nylon parka and her short dark tartan skirt, closed with a kilt pin stuck into a vertical fringe that looked like a fringe of dull green and black hair. And everywhere the smell of pine needles still damp from the rain. She had a memory of being paralysingly shy (this was her chief memory of herself in those days, the fierceness of her shyness) but half the time she was also in a secret fury because people acted as if they really believed that she was as she presented herself: a girl who was dull and desperately prim. But she didn’t think Donnie McArdle saw her that way, she was sure he saw through her as he saw through everyone, she was sure he understood that she was pretending to be less than she was in order not to be hated. But then Helmut had made some joke about her, she could no longer remember it, she could only remember pulling her tartan skirt tight over her knees and
saying, “Don’t do that,” while Donnie McArdle had sat on the slippy floor of pine needles looking as if he would die for her, he had so much seemed to want to be her true friend. Of course both of these memories — and this must be the explanation for why she’d remembered them — were utterly self-serving, presenting her younger self to her as (1) a hero, and (2) adored.

S
he was finding it hard to concentrate, but at last, after half an hour of doodling, Claire finally wrote:

She was writing “… graceful and enigmatic; disdaining speech rather than speechless, he is a figure of eerie glamour and power …” when the phone rang.

She picked it up to hear a professionally mournful voice ask, “Ms. Vornoff?”

“Yes,” she said, her own voice almost dead with distrustful caution.

“Your urine sample tested positive, Ms. Vornoff.”

She knew it. She knew it, but she couldn’t believe it. “But there still could be an element of doubt, couldn’t there?”

“If it had tested negative, that would be very possible,” the pharmacist told her. “False negatives are relatively common. False positives, on the other hand, are extremely rare.”

An India ink drawing of bodies blissfully falling upside-down from a fort’s ramparts was tacked to the wall above the table. Happy bodies with arrows stuck into their hearts. Would she get an abortion then? She would have to. She would hate to, but she would have to. She who more than once had been afraid that she would give in to an urge to just grab a baby out of its carriage and spirit it home, hide it under a leaf. But was she one of those women who could raise a baby without a father? She didn’t think so, the thought of being raised without her own father was too terrible to her. Still, the temptation to keep it would be very great, and a baby that looked like Tony could be sweet — a little bald baby like almost bald Tony — but now the pharmacist was speaking again and she disliked his voice, an irritating, self-satisfied falsetto. He was saying — unpleasantly, she felt — “Of course, you might take a sample of your urine to a
lab
. You might get an answer more to your liking from a
lab
.”

What would really save her time would be to set her little jar in with the test tubes and bottles to be picked up by the lab boy who came late every afternoon for the urine and blood samples in Dr. Tenniswood’s wire basket. But what she should really do was go back to see Declan again. She had, after all, a dilemma to bring to him. A dilemma that was both medical and moral.

But on Monday morning when she got to work and called the Institute to make an appointment with him, the receptionist told her that he’d already moved out to the country. “A bit earlier than usual this year.” And so she couldn’t give her an appointment until Thursday afternoon, out in Ottersee.

F
ootsteps were coming down the back stairs, and now here was Declan, looking pale in a pair of black chinos and a black shirt with green stripes, but his eyes were warm with a smile that he seemed to have carried down the stairs with him. Claire was feeling nervous and wanted to tell him why she’d come back to see him again, but he was hiding something behind his back and after giving her a brief glance of assessment he tossed it.

It flew at her — a flowered cushion — and when she caught it he said, “Be your mother.”

But wasn’t the whole point to
not
be her mother? “Do you mean be my mother as
I
see her? Or as she sees herself?”

“Just
be
her.”

“You want me to make her sanctimoniousness heartfelt —”

“Right,” he said. “After all, what’s more heartfelt than sanctimony?” And he dropped another cushion onto the floor across from her and sat down on it himself. “And I’ll be
you
—”