Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (29 page)

She waited half an hour, rehearsing her little speech with care, going over it again and again.

At eight-thirty she understood that she was getting cold and she pulled on a pair of socks and then strapped on her sandals again, snagging her dry fingers on the socks’ dryness. She felt unattractive and knew she was breathing in an obsessed way, with a child’s adenoidal and desperate harshness.

At nine o’clock she tried Ottersee again, but Declan still wasn’t at home. At nine-fifteen she went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea and when she brought the cup back into her bedroom she felt chilled again and so took out her African robe and tied it on fiercely.

At ten o’clock she tried calling him again. This time she was prepared for the machine and left a more elaborate message: There are still things to be resolved and so I need another appointment. And so could you call me back please, it’s really important.

At ten-fifteen she went out to the kitchen to heat up a can of oxtail soup, then she went back to her room and sat down
by the phone with her steaming hot mug of it. But the phone didn’t ring.

Just before midnight she went to bed, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. Too many memories came to her: the time she drove with Steff to visit an old college friend of his in Montreal, and how Steff, shaking the ice cubes around in his glass of Scotch, stared out the window to announce to the clear afternoon air: “I just don’t find Claire all that attractive any more.” Which had led his old school friend to study his own drink in speechless misery — poking the ice cubes around and around with a melancholy thumb — and then when they’d at last been ready to say goodbye the friend had stood at his door with his arm around her waist, he’d so much wanted to console her, if he could, for having such a husband. His hand holding her briefly clasped to his side could even have held her only yesterday, she could still so much feel the tender impression his fingers had left on that side of her body. But even memories of kindness (or especially memories of kindness) could make her pillow wet. She kept bunching it up, trying to find a puff of it that wasn’t damp, and every time she took in a deep breath she breathed in the smell of rubber from the hot water bottle she’d bought last week at Tamblyns — an unpleasant smell, almost a sour-paint smell, almost fecal.

At work the next day she thought only of calling Declan, she lived to get home and go straight to the phone. And this time she would leave a cooler message, no more imploring, imploring would only make him feel a saddened contempt for her. But her fear was that it would be the same despairing waiting all over again, he wouldn’t call her back.

The patients were all in their own little worlds too, a polite galaxy, when a young woman and a small boy came in from the windy world of the street. Still holding hands with the child, this woman came over to Claire’s desk. She was wearing a mini-dress made out of a harsh and wiry raspberry brocade and her legs were as heavy as an athlete’s legs, but there was something about her mouth that was rodenty, elderly.

And yet she sparkled.

When Claire gave her a questionnaire to fill out, she noticed that the child was gazing up at her with a bright and fascinated look that also had childish dismay in it. At least until he asked her, “Why are
you
crying?”

She looked down at him, startled. “But I’m not crying,” she told him.

“Hugo!” his mother sternly whispered down to him. “Go hang up your coat.” While all around them the people who had too quickly looked up were now too quickly looking down again.

Claire smiled at the child as he was being plunked down to sit — his little legs pointing straight out — on one of the chairs that lined the far wall of the waiting room. She wanted to go over to him and kneel beside him to whisper, “Don’t be sad, Hugo. And don’t even be puzzled. You’re a very intelligent little boy because you understood that I was crying even though there was no actual evidence of tears …” But now the front door was opening again, and Zuzi Tenniswood was coming in. She had a friend in tow and she smiled at Claire, not really seeing her. “There’s a
Vogue
magazine in here that we want to steal, okay with you, Claire?”

Someone who was more cheerfully on the ball than Claire felt she would ever be again might have said something to make
these girls laugh. Something abusive and friendly, something like “Lay even one finger on those magazines and you will be shot,” but Claire wasn’t on the ball, not at all, not at all, and so she only said, “Sure, go ahead, Zuzi. Feel free.”

The next night was again nearly sleepless and so, except for a drugged hour or two, was the following night. When she did sleep, she had terrible dreams: public-toilet dreams, a bad smell in the air. A dream about a frightening noise, a kind of scrabbling on the window-screen down in her kitchen while she was turning to say to someone “Now the sky is poisonous …” In one of her dreams she was living with Steff again. In her dream she sat down at a desk to write in a notebook: “Feel a compulsive need to check everything: ocean, rocks, etc.” She also had a fever dream in which she was being driven very fast up and down little hills by her mother, but when she looked toward the front of the car, there was no one in the driver’s seat.

She began to be afraid that Declan would go away for the weekend, leaving her to spend her whole two free days calling and calling him, and so she broke her promise to herself and called him on Friday night just past eleven.

But this time a real voice answered, a woman’s voice, the voice of his wife. And how human she sounded, this envied woman. In her Ottawa Valley drawl that sounded so southern, she said, “Declan isn’t here right now, but when he gets in I’ll ask him to call you.”

Claire thanked her and then sat beside the phone, feeling so faint she was afraid she might have to throw up. Her heart lopsidedly galloped. How strange life was, nothing ever worked out the way you imagined it would, and to prove it, here was this envied woman being sensibly kind to her, she was actually
relying on her for her kindness. She planed her damp hands down the front of her robe, breathing, not-breathing, waiting, all African-drum heartbeat.

At twenty past eleven, the phone rang, and when Declan said her name, and in spite of the fact that she was immediately weeping, she cried out in a broken voice, “Why didn’t you call me? I’ve been trying to reach you for the last three days.”

He hadn’t had time to pick up his messages.

“I feel there are still things to be resolved. I feel I need another appointment.”

But he was completely booked up for the next two weeks. “If not longer.”

She tried not to plead. “After that, then.”

“After that, my wife and I are going off to Scotland for six weeks.”

“May I write to you then?”

A long pause. Then (in either a sad or a dead voice): “If you like.”

L
ate at night, before she turned off her light, Claire would read, sitting propped up in her bed. She would read hungrily, starved for words, starved for help with her feelings. And then would be surprised by how often there would be real help for her. One night she read in a novel that moved her: “He could explain if she would listen. Explaining was a way of getting close to somebody you had hurt; as if in hurting them you were giving them a reason to love you.” There was also the familiar (but more than ever true) “Romance has no part of it, the business of love is cruelty …”

In the mornings she sat on the side of her bed in her nightgown, trying to psych herself up for the descent to her neatly stale kitchen, squinting too hard because the bright light hurt her heart. It was hard, too, not to recall that only a few weeks ago she’d been incredibly happy to get up in the mornings and blissfully stand trying to decide on a shirt and skirt for the day (if it was an Ottersee day), happy to hurry out into the
mornings whose faint hint of melancholy (the melancholy of perfection) had only made her happiness happier.

She began to go for walks in the direction of the Institute. At first these walks took place while Declan was still away in Scotland, but after the six-week period was up, she only walked in the direction of the Institute on the days she knew he would not be in town. She would go as far as the park behind the Institute, but never beyond it — she did not, after all, want to see herself as an obsessive — and as she walked she would pass men with dogs on tight leashes and mothers holding the reins to haltered children made fat by puffy parkas, and sometimes, too, she would walk back and forth in that little citified wood waiting for the lights in the Institute to come on, waiting for the dog owners and the mothers and the babies to go home. Waiting and worse than waiting: pathetically lurking. How sad life is, she would think as she made her secretive way among the grey trunks of the trees, how sad for other people too, how filled with disappointment, how difficult to bear, just look at all the unhappy faces, then at last she would hurry home, not wanting to encounter anyone, either friend or stranger. Above all, not a stranger. A stranger, any stranger, would need to take only one look into her eyes to know everything.

In the evenings, she worked on her letter. A letter that was both conciliatory and accusing, but also a letter that was contaminated by a kind of sickening pleading. And by two opposite kinds of longing: the longing for things to go back to where they were, and the longing for justice. She longed for Declan to explain himself to her in a way that could allow her to forgive him.

At bedtimes she brewed herself a powerful sedative tea made from the twigs of a tree that grew in the Amazon rainforest. She
stopped measuring it out in tablespoons too — no, it wasn’t twigs, it was the shavings of some tropical tree-bark that smelled as spicy and dusty as a wood full of cinnamon trees — and began to dump handfuls of it into her tea mug. Night after night she drank her spicy but bitter tea, at least until the night she found herself sitting on the floor of her clothes closet, pawing among her shoes and sandals and crying in panic because she was under the impression that the movers would be arriving at sunrise and she hadn’t even started to pack yet.

She was also often dizzy; the room with its pale curtains would spin and dip around her when she sat up on the side of her bed in the mornings, and when she went down to the kitchen she would feel too sick to eat. And yet eating, in the end, would seem to be the one cure for her condition. She didn’t mention any of this to Dr. Tenniswood or call Dr. Hardy for an appointment, her symptoms felt too private. Instead — during the periods when she was feeling more stable — she would read through the index lists at the back of her holistic-therapy and doctor books.

The bad things it could be a symptom of frightened her. A disturbance of the middle ear, high blood pressure, any number of diseases that were either neurologically macabre or terminal. Unless it was simply that her diet was too alkaline. In a book on Vermont folk medicine she read that dizziness was a common symptom for people living in the state of Vermont, it was because of the high alkalinity of the soil there. Vermont was even
called
the Land of Dizziness. The cure was apple-cider vinegar, two teaspoons in a glass of water with each meal.

She tried it, and there were days when she even felt better. She also felt better if she could get out for a walk in the wind
or in the clear morning air. She noticed, too, that the spinning and dipping sensations bothered her much less at work, which made her wonder if at work she didn’t get dizzy because she was afraid to get dizzy. The book also said that depression and exhaustion could change the acid-alkaline balance of the blood and urine, that there could be a psychological component to dizziness. And that sometimes the best cure for too much alkalinity was to take a hot bath or go skiing. Or go out for a walk. She went to the hallway closet to look for her rubber boots, then turned them upside-down and shook each one of them out before she poked her bare feet into them, a precaution she’d also learned from a book: a girl in a novel she’d read last summer aimed a bare foot into a rubber boot and felt the plump barrier of a warm little mouse asleep in the toe of it.

In the Rideau River there were long dying shoals of ice, sharks of ice asleep under the cold dark river water, and everywhere in the parks there was frozen mud-crunch and bracken. But the March afternoons were as cold as the afternoons of November, and on one of these afternoons on her way home from work, Claire walked too far down the path that ran along one side of the park behind the Institute and got so close to it she could hear footsteps running fast down the front steps, then the gulp of a car door slamming shut. She fled back the way she had come then, her heart wild even long after she’d reached her own street.

Her whole apartment, as she let herself into it, smelled of hardening lemons. She opened a window, then went up to her bedroom and sat down on her bed in her cold coat. She picked up the phone, then dialled the number of Declan’s extension at the Institute, a number she still knew by heart.