Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (24 page)

Judy led the way down the corridor to two giant chrome doors, and as the two women pushed their way in, coming shy and white into the splashy bedlam of the pool area, the steam-bath warmth of the chlorinated air moved toward them, across the sloshed tiles, in that great booming hall of hygiene. The place was an aquatic madhouse: yells and shrieks and gasps and splashes and small children swimming and coughing — their foreshortened splashes like coughs, their coughs throttled short splashes.

Judy’s back was freckled, powerful. She looked like a crack swimmer in her channel swimmer’s black suit. She dropped her towel and took off for the pool, aimed cleanly in.

Claire crept down the ladder to make the water’s acquaintance much more slowly, then let herself sink backwards into the chair of the water — the chair that was never quite there — then swam in scooping and awkward lunges on her back, up to the pool’s deep end.

Judy popped up beside her, disappeared, popped up again on the pool’s far side, then yelled over to her about the marvellous water.

“Yeah, it’s great!” Claire called back to her, and the phrase “great with child” came to her. Oh, she thought, I should smile at myself, that here I am, feeling pregnant at last, and on the night of the day I’ve been medically assured that I’m not, and what do I feel pregnant
from?
From the look on Declan’s face. From Declan’s finger. Wouldn’t anyone who could read her thoughts decide that she’d have to be either deluded or crazy or pathetic? But she didn’t feel she was any of these things; these were only states of mind her conscious mind was trying to bully her into feeling. As she grasped the railings of the swimming-pool ladder and came breathlessly up out of the water she felt far from such states of mind, she felt loved, she felt cherished. Then she walked out to the end of the lowest diving board and with a deep bow fell into the pool and forgot everything, she was only aware of a heavenly extra fullness in her breasts and hips as she sank, then swam, then sank into the lower layers of floodlit chemical water.

Back in the locker room again, pulling off the wet swimsuit and the lace skin of her wet panties and feeling hormonal and
happily pudgy and above all tremendously free with nothing on under her skirt, she recalled a woman she’d briefly known years ago, a woman who’d had an affair with her psychiatrist, a woman who’d seemed, of all the women she had known in her life, the most sunken-eyed and lost. She recalled this woman sitting on the beach at Mooney’s Bay on a dull September Sunday, obsessively smoking while talking ad nauseam of her psychiatrist lover. A dull-eyed woman in a white-flecked grey sweatshirt and white-flecked grey slacks and wine-coloured socks and heavy Birkenstock sandals. But why think of her? Why not think of the photo of the woman who had fallen in love with Judy’s psychiatrist brother? The afternoon Judy had shown her this photo, her eyes had been lit by disapproval as she’d said she considered her brother somewhat unethical, stooping to fall for a patient. “Selfish, basically,” was Judy’s diagnosis, made while pouring Claire a fresh cup of coffee.

“But is it really?” Claire had cried up at her. “I mean, isn’t that what passion
is
? Having the generosity to be selfish?”

Judy had raised an eyebrow at her through the steam. “We’ll just have to pretend we didn’t hear that,” she had said.

It wasn’t until she was lying back in her bath and thinking of
Anna Karenina
(above all thinking of Kitty looking at Levin with her frightened caressing eyes) that she swished the washcloth between her thighs and saw a cloud of red rising like red dust up through the clear water.

But she couldn’t stop seeing Declan, it would be unkind (and perhaps even immoral) to stop seeing him just because she now
had physiological proof that she wasn’t pregnant, she must see him at least three or four more times, as a patient she owed him that,
then
she would leave him. And in fact when he came into the Room the next time she drove down to Ottersee it seemed to her that they were even a little more stern with each other than usual, that they were both primed to cry out “Nothing happened!” They seemed to be tired too, or they were using what they were pretending was exhaustion as an excuse to touch each other more often. Certain things could go on, but they must not be acknowledged. A careful but secretly tender formality seemed to be what they were in need of, and it was in order to counteract it a little that Claire, toward the end of the session — they were lying on the exercise mats by this time, breathing in unison — smiled at him disbelievingly when he told her that he could read any number of childhood events in her body.

“But it’s true, you
can
read certain very specific historical events in a person’s body,” he insisted, and he hitched himself up on his side and cupped a hand around the calf of her nearest bent leg and then allowed his hand to travel slowly down to her heel. “Words are so ambiguous,” he said, and she had the impression that his voice was coming out much more emotionally than he had intended it to.

She ran a hand up the back of his bare arm to his elbow, then beyond his elbow, up under the sleeve of his shirt. She felt gifted in touching him. And for a minute or two, with her hand resting on his bare shoulder, high up under his shirt, they were quiet together, listening to the footsteps of his wife creaking back and forth in the kitchen over their heads.

But after a few more moments had passed, he sat up. “I can hear that my wife is making the tea, and so I’m afraid we’ll have
to stop here for today.” And it seemed to Claire that although he was struggling to keep his voice neutral, he wasn’t able to purge it of real regret.

All the way back to the city, she drove the car with the bizarre automatic precision of a woman in a dream, not at all knowing when she passed other drivers or when she was passed by them. She was in a state of grace, if love was grace. She felt tender toward all lovers and was convinced that lovers all over the world must recognize one another on sight, across the boundaries of language and race and gender and caste and class. She recalled herself at twenty-four, twenty-five, and remembered how she would sometimes be judgemental about certain love affairs, love affairs between people who were sleeping with people they weren’t married to, or sleeping with people who were of the same sex, or sleeping with people who were much older or much younger than the people they were with, but now none of that mattered to her, now all she could think was how beside the point the marital status of the lovers was, or the gender, all she could think was that there was some boundary of risk or tenderness you crossed if you were a lover and once you had crossed it there was nothing else in the world that could possibly matter.

T
he weeks were now measured only from Thursday to Thursday, and this particular Thursday was windy, a little cooler, a heady taint of leaf decay in the air. Claire drove through a wide valley and the leaves of the world seemed to fly toward her windshield from every corner of it, the car a magnet, the day playful. She thought about nothing or she thought about Declan. She thought about how they had been these last few weeks, how high-minded and touchy. Extremely pleasurable in its way, to act like that, but only if it didn’t go on for too long. There was a point when you couldn’t do it any more, the game would be up. Up or over.

Being in love herself, she had begun to notice illicit love all around her. Even at her local library, where one of the youngest of the librarians, a sad-eyed but definitely glamorous blonde in her early twenties, was too casual by half when she briefly rested a very large ringed hand — why did pretty young women so often have such very large hands? — on the back of the most fatherly of the middle-aged librarians as he bent to a cupboard to look
for a book. And then the fatherly one, although he was careful to keep his expression neutral, really did look — at least in his body — too sweetly eased by her touch. And Claire could see it too, why the younger woman found him so attractive. He wore rimless glasses and he had dull hair, a dry moustache, but his arms looked strong, and below his warm eyes his smile was responsive.

She parked the car under the usual tree and ran down the stone steps to discover that the door to the Room was standing open and there was nobody around, but then sometimes on Thursdays she was the first person Declan saw. She ducked into the low-ceilinged little washroom and splashed her eyes with cold water.

When she came back out into the room with the desk she was struck by the fact that everything looked exactly as it had always looked. This was a puzzle when she herself felt so altered. But the potted plants were still hanging in their macrame slings and the pale-yellow leaves of the painting’s great tree still littered the ground. They made her think of someone saying that someone had thrown all of his cards on the table. They made her heart feel out of control in the deep country quiet.

She went over to the desk to look down at Declan’s appointment book. A spy’s trip she had made several times on earlier visits, and one that made her feel more like a child than anything else she could do when she was alone in this room. She read the names: Carol Schmidt, Terry Glass, Claire (a little hop of the heart here), Barbara, Sheila Leblanc, Gerry Meek, Alison Stackhouse, Elspeth Frewin, Brian Duchemin, Barbara Seidman. Which meant what? That the first Barbara was a Barbara he was closer to than he was close to Barbara Seidman? The suspicion
that he was closer to some of these people than he was to others made her feel more uncertain of her own hopes and boldness. Also, he was late. She was already ten minutes into her hour and there was no sound from upstairs.

She went back to the sofa and picked up a magazine from the low table and tried to leaf through it, but her jittery heart was only waiting for the sound of his step. The whole place seemed deserted, except for the cries of the children. She could hear their happy shrieks as they raced around the garden, and occasionally there was a glimpse of them too, or parts of them — their legs, their running feet, a half-view of a bridal party, the bride’s train a beach towel dragging by on the grass above the high window until she dropped her bouquet of daisies into the window well and one of the smaller boys hopped down in a squat to retrieve it.

Fifteen minutes had by now ticked by. Then another ten. And so where
was
he? The suspicion that he might have forgotten her appointment was eating away at her, and today of all days, when she had planned to come with so much of her feeling for him showing in her face. But then wasn’t this so often the way it was in life? At the very moment you decided to give in and be open, fate rapped you smartly over the knuckles for your hopes, and the next thing you knew you were ashamed of even having them and then you didn’t have them, they were gone, and then you almost hated the person you loved for not arriving, and then you did hate him, and then you felt a kind of double hatred because now you even hated him for making you hate him when all you ever really wanted to do was to love him.

But at long last, when there were only twenty minutes left before her hour was up, she heard a tentative creak on the floor
just above her, and then, quickly following this, the more orderly progression of creaks that would mean someone was walking down the back stairs. The door opened, and there stood Declan supporting himself against the door frame and looking puffy around the eyes, as if he’d been crying. “Claire, look, I’m sorry, I’m not feeling too good.” As he said this, she had the odd feeling that he wanted to welcome her into his sorrow. But he only stepped down the last step, then said in a shaken voice, “Come on in.”

She followed him watchfully into the Room, her shoulder bag hugged close to her side. He hadn’t forgotten her then. But what had happened? She felt afraid, almost, to hear. She dropped her bag onto the nearest chair, stepped out of her sandals. But as she was starting to unbutton her shirt he held up his hand. “No!” And then, more quietly: “No. Don’t take anything off. We’ll just do a few breathing exercises.” He sat down then, like someone who no longer trusts his legs to hold him up, and Claire, to keep him company, sat down as well. But as she sat, she understood something momentous: he was leaving his wife and so would very soon be free. She felt a careful tenderness, curiously mixed with dread.

There was a moment of profound quiet. Then he said that he had just been through a crisis of some kind, something he didn’t even begin to understand. “I was supposed to come down and see you and then I couldn’t. I started to cry and then I couldn’t stop.”

She lifted her hair over the back of her collar, held her damp hands pressed to the sides of her knees. There was another long silence. But they were accustomed to silences. It
must have been because he had spoken about his own life that this particular silence began to seem as unbearable as a social silence that two people might be made anxious by, out in the world. And then at last, as if he had expected some response from her but had now been forced to conclude that none was forthcoming, he told her that his wife had been wonderful to him. “I was lying on the living room rug and crying, and then my wife lay down on the rug with me and held me.”