Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (35 page)

“They all are,” says Lopakhin with a smile. “All the pretty little seam
stress
es.”

“And this actor at some point in his career got a role in
The Cherry Orchard
, although I don’t even think he played Lopakhin. But after that, no matter what play he was rehearsing, whenever he wanted something to eat he would come to the door of his wife’s sewing room and bleat like Lopakhin.”

Lopakhin bleats three loony
baaaaas
, but now Libi and Avi have turned around and are walking back toward them. “We’ve changed our minds. We’re going to go the Boulevard Café on Harbord Street.” And so they are off again, this time leading Lopakhin and Claire in the opposite direction. As they walk and talk, Claire begins to understand that what she’s dreading most is that Lopakhin will ask her what sort of work she does here. Is there any way she can truthfully answer this question without making what she does sound deadly dull and even pathetic? She sees herself at work: raising little hives on arms by scratching them with allergens. As if swarms of orderly bees have stung the skin into perfect little rows of telltale bumps.

But now the moment is actually here, Lopakhin is actually asking her what sort of work she has come to Toronto to do.

“Environmental testing,” she tells him. Which is, after all, more or less the truth. But at this same moment she slips and loses her footing. Lopakhin holds out his hand to her, and so they end up walking hand in hand as they follow Avi and Libi. Soon, though — in fact almost immediately — Claire has the feeling they both want to stop holding hands but that neither of them wants to be the one to do it first, particularly in view of the fact that neither of them apparently wants to be the one who doesn’t do it first. By the time they reach the Boulevard Café (where Libi and Avi are waiting for them as if they’ve been waiting forever) their hands are slippery from the sweat of being held in one another’s lacklustre grip. But here at last they can let go, to climb single file up the stairs, and once they’ve found themselves a table Libi and Avi talk about a nephew of Libi’s who was once a lover of Avi’s. This must be what they were
talking about during the intermission. Libi then talks about flying east, last Friday night, to go to her high-school reunion in Guelph. “And it was awful. Awful beyond words.”

Avi says, “Tell us about it anyway.”

Lopakhin then tells them that three summers ago when he had to drive out to Vancouver he heard an interview with a writer whose name he didn’t catch and this writer was talking about going home for his high-school reunion. “And one of the things he said was that everyone was exactly the same. The class beauty was still the class beauty. She was hideous, of course, but she was still the class beauty.”

They all roar with laughter at this, Claire warmly glancing over at Lopakhin because even if the story isn’t his, he’s been amused enough by it to remember it for so long, and when he offers her a cigarette, she accepts it, telling him how much she used to love being a smoker, and how hard she found it to give it up. “Not the nicotine, but the hand gestures. I just really miss the whole choreography of it.”

Lopakhin’s quick eyes glint at her. What is he thinking? Who knows? He’s an actor. He says that that’s the whole dilemma in life, isn’t it, the choice between choreography and dying.

Avi then tells them what he says is a famous story: the poet Anne Sexton liked to give her readings in a red satin dress with little red buttons all down the front, partly unbuttoned (halfway up, halfway down) and as she was reading she would kick out a leg with such force that the dress would keep undoing its buttons. He impersonates her taking little kicks out at the side of the table, then he does her ghoulishly mannish voice croaking “Little girl, my stringbean, my lovely woman …”

Lopakhin then speaks of a reading that a poet friend of his once gave, telling Libi and Claire that she wore a dress that “only went up over one of her shoulders. And her hair fell over the opposite eye” — he shakes his hair over his opposite eye — “and before she started to read she stared at the audience for at least ten seconds.” Then he lowers his voice to mimic her saying “I hate sex.”

Claire asks Lopakhin if
that
made all the men in the audience sit up and take notice.

And Lopakhin sleepily smiles at her to say, “Darling, they were riveted.”

One dark morning in early November as she’s on her way to work, Claire pulls a pale-blue envelope out of her mailbox. An airmail envelope with French stamps. When she tears it open she finds a letter with a postcard folded inside it, and on this postcard a photograph of a street of houses walling a canal or river in a city called Ljubljana (a city that looks too beautiful to be on this earth) and on its back the words, “This place is like Prague, but without the tourists. And seems — incredibly — to be far removed from the carnage to the south. Will write a real letter from Belgium … Love, Tony.” Then the letter from Belgium, dated two weeks later (October 24) and beginning in Brussels: “Skipped the lace museum and the beer museum; even skipped Rembrandt and Rubens and Franz Hals and Breughel at the Musée de l’Art Ancien. And why? Because I’ve just decided to squeeze in a quick trip to Paris …” Which is where the postscript comes from, dated two days later: “Didn’t actually do much once I got here but visit
Montmartre and the bookstalls along the Left Bank, and then yesterday spent an hour or two in the cold but sunny Luxembourg Gardens …” He also writes that he might be coming to Toronto for a week, “late in the spring, in early June, to a conference of historians. I’ll call you …”

It’s nearly sunrise when Claire finishes her essay for her Woolf course. No point in going back to bed, and so she takes the elevator down to the street and goes for a walk down Marmaduke Street, the small houses and their narrow gardens still held in mist and sleep, then continues on to High Park. She has a headache that makes her head feel zingy but clear in an insane sort of way. She walks carefully, taking deep breaths and trying to calm herself. By the time she gets to the park there are delivery trucks out on the streets, upright white vans out of children’s books, the odd small dark car beetling south. She climbs the path to the Lodge, passes the cairn where its architect’s grave is. Ten minutes later — she’s by now on her way down again — there are joggers and people on early morning walks with their dogs. She even sees — and it’s a startling sight against the great yellow lawn of the park — a man walking a baby polar bear on a leash. How can this be? On the way home she tells herself she must have been hallucinating. Either that or it was an abnormal dog.

T
here’s a mosque farther along, high walls precede and also partly conceal it, and there’s no snow anywhere, the winter’s snow has already been and gone, it’s already March, the mosque and the barren parks and the bright cold days have all turned this part of the city into a city like Tehran, somewhere Eastern and foreign, but Claire’s feet are still freezing in her low little boots. She wants to hurry home so she can make a start on her essay on Lord Byron. She even makes notes for it first thing when she gets back to her apartment, from the chair she sinks into, still in her cold boots.

After her supper she sits on her sofa and opens her English Poets anthology to the Byron chapter and reads from a letter Lord B wrote to Lady B: “You don’t like my ‘restless’ doctrines …,” then underlines the words “I can’t bear to see you look unhappy.” She makes notes until nearly midnight, then on her way to her bathroom looks out the dark windows and sees that it has begun to snow heavily. But this is completely insane, it’s supposed to be spring.

A snowy night breeze also blows in to meet her as she hurries (still wet from her shower) down the hallway to her room, the curtains are belled by it, but on her way to get her robe she’s jolted by a deep thud against the far wall and when she hurries over to her window to look down she sees a man in an anorak aiming a snowball straight for her window. As she winds herself into one of her grey denim curtains she also sees that he doesn’t have the power to make the snowball fly high; it rises toward her in a majestic great arc, then drops in a straight drop to fall out of sight. For a moment she even imagines that he must be someone she knows, perhaps even one of her neighbours from the apartment upstairs, but no, he’s a stranger, she can sense his embarrassment from the way he shrugs, then holds out his arms in a way that seems to sing up to her, “So I’m a bad boy! So
sue
me!” Wrapped in her ungainly sari of grey denim, she stands at her window (trying to loom up) until he turns to trudge away into the snowy darkness.

The next morning she’s in her kitchen scooping jam out of a jar and enjoying the foggy Sunday feel of the day (fog after snow) when her phone rings.

“Listen,” says Libi. “I have something to tell you …”

“What is it?”

“Declan Farrell is dead.”

Claire sets down the jam jar, then holds onto the rim of the counter while she pulls a chair toward her from the next room and as she sinks down on it she whispers, “But how can that be?”

“Shot himself. Yesterday at lunchtime.”

How quickly words turn everything into something that’s always been true, once they’ve been spoken. Because she has always known this. She accepts it because she has always
known it. It’s also the very last thing she would have believed, if anyone had ever predicted this for him. He’s had the last word then, he’s made everything be over.

She has to stand again. “But why would he do that?”

“A former woman patient of his in the village he was living in, near Chilliwack, went to the police, wanting to charge him, but the police decided not to, there wasn’t enough evidence. But then some other woman out there apparently charged him. That’s all I know. I don’t know the details …”

Claire has to take a sip of water or she won’t be able to speak. “But where did he shoot himself?”

“In the study of his house. Oh, you mean where on his body. The mouth. Apparently only romantic fools shoot themselves in the temple.”

She really did mean where in his house. She can’t imagine a bullet going anywhere into his body. His body is still his body and still warm and still absolutely present to her. But if it was lunchtime out in Chilliwack, what time would it have been in Toronto? It must have been three, and she recalls the way yesterday at three she was wandering around her apartment so puzzlingly at loose ends, her head aching as she was barely able to zip up her boots and set out to get her hair cut. In one of those moments a life (a life she knew, or thought she knew) came to an end. So he’s killed himself then. What a cruel thing, to do that. He is all at once not attractive at all to her, being dead. The dead are the dead. But now a pain begins to burn behind her eyes and she wants to cry out, Oh my darling friend, have you really been that alone? Separated from him by time (and by thousands of miles), she’s grown accustomed to feeling free of him, but now that he’s dead he seems to have come near. “The thing was,”
she says (still in the dry voice), “he was such a romantic about change. He believed he could change people utterly. But you can’t. People are who they are. He thought he could make himself unassailable, and then when he found out he couldn’t …”

“Life caught up with him,” says Libi, not unkindly. “It accrued.”

I’ve always believed that I seduced and abandoned
him
, thinks Claire after she’s said goodbye to Libi, but this isn’t entirely true either, she has just as often believed the absolute opposite.

She also can’t seem to stop thinking: He who lives by the body dies by the body. But that’s totally mad, doesn’t everyone die by the body? At the same time she keeps having thoughts that are so guilty they make her feel that he must still be alive, and if not still on this earth then hovering somewhere close above it, looking down on her, noting how much she even feels he deserved the end that he came to. At these times she tries to defend him against herself, and so decides that his miraculous attentiveness was so extraordinary that it must have made him long now and then to take refuge in a kind of brutal detachment. Her gratitude to him used to stay the strong thing, it would stay so profound that even his unkindness would seem to have sprung out of kindness. His death has always been out there, she thinks, an event that has always already happened, all it was requiring was for someone, and — life being life — the most improbable someone (someone who never approved of him, someone who didn’t even know him) to bring me the news of it.

Since hearing of Declan’s death she has thought of nothing but him; this is really the first moment in which she’s stopped to
wonder if any other subject will ever be large enough to engage her attention. She picks up a book, tries to read, goes through the motions of reading, but almost at once finds herself thinking of him again and wondering if he’ll be cremated, and if he’s cremated will his ashes be flown east to be cast over the lawn out at Ottersee. Or will his new woman carry them, hugged in an urn, up one of the coastal highways to scatter them to the winds over higher ground? And she recalls a picnic supper at the edge of a graveyard years ago and how after she’d packed the leftovers away in the picnic basket, she went for a walk with Steff among the graves and almost at once they’d come (as if led to it) to a small flat stone shoved at a slant into the green lawn of the dead. A kind of footstone. But a footstone that had her own initials carved into it. She had stared down at it, transfixed, convinced that she was not long for this life. Even now, years after that walk among the graves, she can all too clearly see the carved letters in the long-ago stone: C.V. And how ironic, really, that she (who has done so little with her life) should have initials that also stand for
curriculum vitae
. Soon she will be forty. She must do something with her life. Because people die.