Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (31 page)

But it’s a damp windy day and as she drives, the old happy highway feelings come back to her. She wonders if Declan ever drives along these same country roads. Whenever a car approaches her and it’s black, she sits up straight behind the wheel and tries to make her face look alert and appealing. But each time the car blasts past her, its driver isn’t even remotely like Declan, and so she tells herself to please just drive, don’t even think of him, and besides, her right arm is aching and when
she gives it a rest by driving with her left hand she thinks of the boy in
First Love
peering around a street corner to see his father’s mistress sitting in the big window of her little wooden house, the window as large as a stage for a puppet show, the boy’s father, out on the Moscow street, pleading with her, then in frustration or longing bringing his whip with great force down on her shapely white arm, branding her, making her his forever. Then the mistress kissing the cut and passionately sucking it while the boy’s father storms the steps up to her door, she at this same moment swiftly leaving her window to run into his arms. And then what the boy sees in his father’s face afterwards: so much pity and tenderness.

But a very odd sort of grove now appears just ahead. In a great field there are four long stands of trees defining the four sides of a vast square. And at the nearest corner where the trees meet (or where they should have met) there’s an opening, a breath. It’s an absence that could be anything: spiritual, ominous, prescient, bleak. It’s an absence that is, more than anything, presence.

After she’s delivered the insulin, she drives back to the city on the same narrow highway, but she can’t find her trees. They must have already appeared — since she’s now coming from the opposite direction — as a boundary line of trees at the edge of an ordinary field, and she would have had to be checking constantly in her rear-view mirror to see their heartbreaking oddity.

A
seagull flies overhead and a rosy light turns the tip of one of its wings pink and Claire can’t get over how beautiful it is. The pink of the wing deepens, waves of burning gold threads define its ripple of feathers. Which is when she understands something terrible: it’s not a rosy light from the sun, the gull is on fire. But then it’s gone, it has flown over the roof and she wakes from her dream in the act of trying to decipher it. What can it mean? Gull for guile? Or gull for no guile? Or gull for gullible. Unless it means the bird has flown and you better get used to it.

While she’s over at the stove, stirring her porridge, the phone rings.

It’s Libi. Who never begins a call with “How are you?” or “Do you have time to talk?” or even “Hello”; her questions are instead tossed out of nowhere, but this morning she says “I wrote to you last week, but now I have news of fresh disasters.” And only then does she go on to say “Did you hear that Herr Doktor is living out west?”

“I haven’t heard anything,” says Claire. “So how do you know he moved out west?”

“Because Emma, the daughter of my friend Jane, is living with him!” cries Libi and, really, it’s a cry that’s more like a wail.

Claire has to sit down.

“He moved out to the West Coast, to Chilliwack, five or six months ago, and he’s from some little town in Ontario. Jane thought it was called Rottersee but when I said are you sure it isn’t Ottersee she said yes, that could be it.”

Claire speaks in the flat and unimpressed voice of someone who so dislikes what she’s hearing that she’s not able to sound anything but distrustful. “And his name is Declan Farrell.”

“
Yes
.”

“And so has he left his wife then?”

“He got separated from his first wife and now he’s living with someone else.”

“But I thought you said he was living with this Emma person —”

“No, no,” says Libi, “Emma is living with
him
. With him and this new woman. Emma was smashed up in a motorcycle accident four or five months ago and after every doctor she saw had given up on her, Declan saved her life, he got her walking again.”

All Claire’s old admiring feelings have come flooding back to her, all her admiration for the noble medical act. But she only says, “I don’t understand how so much could have happened. In such a short time.” And he’s left his wife! This is the thing that astounds her most, not the fact that he is now living so far away. Although the great distance certainly astounds her too. Like a child, she has been imagining him living in the same house with the same wife and the same children and the
same car and the same garden. But all she can think of to say is “I suppose the new woman is young —”

“Early thirties, I think. But Emma says that although she’s a terrific cook and very bright she’s also just incredibly plain.”

Claire wants to know how she means that.

“You know. Plain. Stocky. Hair that somebody cut after fitting a bowl over her head.”

“What does she do?”

“She’s a professor, I think. Emma told me what of, but now I can’t remember. Slavic languages, possibly. Or maybe some kind of higher math.”

“Do you by any chance know her name?”

As a matter of fact, Libi says, she does. “Her name is Kris. And the reason I know this is because Emma is always going on and on about her. Kris this, Kris that.”

“But how can so much happen in a person’s life in such a short time?”

“Don’t you want to know how much has happened in
my
life in such a short time?”

After too long a moment, Claire says, “Yes, I do.”

But then Libi will only say, “Nothing ever happens, why do I even ask you to ask?”

After she has hung up the phone, Claire wonders what it meant, really, when the daughter of Libi’s friend said that Declan’s new woman was plain. For some reason she keeps imagining her as squat and shining and voluptuously hefty. A woman who must know how to grip a man’s legs with her own fat little legs when they are in bed on a wanton Sunday afternoon of wild wind and rain. But she keeps seeing another version of her too:
hair cut brutally short and half-shaved high up in the back, her face wearing a squashed and shrewd although unanimated look.

The next afternoon the white of a letter gleams behind the eyelet petals cut into her brass mailbox. She warns herself that it will only be a bill from the phone company or her dentist, but it’s been addressed by hand with no return address in a script that’s scientific and small and somehow familiar to her. Once she’s let herself into the apartment she slices the envelope open with a paring knife.

“Dear Claire,” the letter heart-stoppingly begins, “Why haven’t you written?” But when she quickly turns the page over to see that it’s a letter from Libi, her disappointment is so acute it feels like betrayal.

A
s they are on their way down the dark aisle to sit in the front row, Claire spots a single seat up near the back and turns to whisper to Judy and Lynnie that she’s going to take it, she might have to leave early. She should, too: she has to finish an essay for school. And so she excuses her way past a man who smells of beer to sit up at the back with all the popcorn eaters and lovers.

The movie — it’s already starting: grey domes serene behind fog or smog — seems to be some sort of political romance, and everyone in it is photogenic and on the side of bravery and freedom and they are all artistic as well — some inane romantic
idea
of the artistic (they all have studios, there is a war) — and they are also all just so unsubtle and uncomplex, although of course they pretend to be deeply subtle and deeply complex, and they are lucky too, or if they are unlucky, then they are unlucky on a grand romantic scale, and after forty minutes have gone by she goes down to the front row to Judy and Lynnie and dips down beside them in the flickering light and so is able to see how young they’ve become, two young girls half floating,
half sleeping at the bottom of the sea, their skirts and sleeveless blouses bleached by the movie, the movie’s headlights shining down into their eyes, dazing them. And when she lowers her voice to whisper, “Jude, I have to go now,” Judy gazes up at her with an almost frightened blankness, the gaze of a child asking only to be allowed to return to her dream. “So I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?” Judy whispers yes, her eyes still held by the movie, and then Claire tries to make herself very bent and small, walking back up the aisle in the deep movie dark, convinced that she must be looking as if she’s just had abdominal surgery or stolen something.

Dizzy from the stale popcorn and carpet smell, she steps out into the warmer (and much lighter) night to discover that her loneliness is waiting for her in the mild grey evening. Loneliness, or the longing to see Declan again. But then that’s what the movies, even the bad movies — or especially the bad movies — have the power to make you ask yourself: “Where is my life?”

The phone rings just after she lets herself into her apartment, and when she runs to it, it’s Libi again, crying out in a bewildered voice, “Do you know what Declan Farrell told Emma to do? After she got her divorce from her awful husband? He told her to make a quilt out of cut-up pieces of her wedding dress and then when she was finished stitching it all together the man who was right for her would come riding into her life.”

When Claire doesn’t respond, Libi asks in a watchful voice, “So is that the sort of person your Declan Farrell is? Does he think like that? In terms of
myth
?”

Claire tries to picture a quilt made out of a wedding dress, squares and petals in shining white satin and chopped-up
slivers of beaded taffeta and lace. An aerial view of a boudoir landscape: a virgin crop of white beads on white satin. She thinks of witch doctors, rain dancers. “He wasn’t like that when
I
knew him …”

“And here’s another thing Jane told me. There was a woman — someone twenty, twenty-one, someone Emma’s age — who was working with Declan when she was first staying at his place, a sort of apprentice, and this apprentice-woman told Emma that once when she was alone with Declan he kissed her.”

Claire looks out the window at the spring night, not wanting to know more. But she also can’t stand not knowing more and so she has to ask, dry-voiced: “What kind of kiss?”

“A kiss is a kiss is a kiss,” says Libi. But then she says, “Oh come on Vornoff, let’s not kid ourselves here, it was a real kiss, why else would she bother to tell Emma about it?”

It’s not possible to sleep. She doesn’t even feel human. Or else she feels too human. She’s all nerve and electricity, like one of the winter telephone wires of her childhood, strung along the highway with their strummed and irritating nerve song in the brutal (although often sunny) coldness. She wishes that Libi hadn’t told her about the kiss.

Three hours later she’s still awake. She can’t seem to stop trying to picture the young assistant Declan so unwisely and allegedly kissed. But instead of being in Chilliwack they’re at the house out in Ottersee, in the big churchy room where she so long ago checked out the books in his library. She imagines herself as his new woman, the quick-witted and stocky but voluptuously plain second wife; she’s walking barefoot from the
big ferny kitchen and on through the small cramped room with the bay window and the very tall wall rug and, swift but still innocent, into the room where the sorcerer is kissing his young apprentice. And when she at last sleeps she dreams she’s sitting in Christ Church Cathedral, but instead of being in Ottawa, it’s in North Battleford and she’s waiting to see Declan. Where the hymn books should be, there are bright magazines:
Vogue, Mirabella, New Woman
. She’s apprehensive and impatient as she keeps flicking pages, but toward morning she wakes up to the sound of real pages being turned, and is frightened for a moment, thinking someone must have broken into the apartment. But then she relaxes: it’s not a literary intruder going through her books and magazines, it’s only the wind turning the pages of the newspaper she forgot to bring up from the back garden. Looking for something.

People are hurrying home from work, pushing past one another. A worried, heavily breathing man runs by Claire, running in the neat way men run when they’re wearing a suit, his jacket’s blunt tails divided, a hand in his right pocket, then as she’s turning off Sunnyside onto Bank, she meets a woman in a white raincoat carrying a bouquet of freckled tiger lilies. She has a sense of the ordered and elegant house this woman is hurrying home to, her ungrubby life. I should buy flowers too, she thinks, try to live my life with more gracious hope, and she is all at once overcome by a longing for colour, posters and flowers and views saturated with colour: blues that are Mediterranean or cobalt or deep pinks with wells of red flaring up, small fires
flickering up the insides of the bells of the flowers. But it’s a cold and mistily raining evening for May, and the plastic pails standing in rows out under Habib’s wet awnings are stocked with green tulips that haven’t begun to open out yet, their green beaks so tightly closed they have a blind look, as if they’ve been uprooted from the gardens of aliens.