Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (8 page)

But now footsteps (her mother’s!) were quickly coming up the stairs. She grabbed up her hairbrush and began to take quick
swipes at her hair, she was always so afraid her mother was going to accuse her of something.

“What have you been doing up here all of this time? Everyone else is downstairs having tea …”

Claire’s heart was beating wildly, she was so intensely aware of the light but illicit weight of the photograph in her left pocket. “I’ve just been looking at the photo albums. Pictures of Maxie and me when we were in high school. I just can’t seem to stop looking at them.”

“But how strange.”

“You find it strange?”

“Yes, I do.”

“But why?”

“Because it’s only the past.”

Max was the one who offered to drive her to the Saskatoon airport on Sunday afternoon. Another desolate afternoon of prairie wind, perfect sun. They talked about their mother, her theatrical refusal to be consoled. They talked about their father too, a little. They’d always called him Dad, or sometimes (in Claire’s case) Papa. Their mother they had always called Mother. Wouldn’t
that
tell a stranger something? Wouldn’t that even tell a stranger everything?

Beyond the windshield the plains passed by them slowly, endlessly. Max hung an arm out his window. “Good old Prairies …” he said. Then he glanced over at Claire, raised his eyebrows at her. “Hypnotic, right?”

They laughed. “Right,” said Claire, for she too found it next to impossible to stop watching the fields repeating themselves over and over. She wanted never to come back. The plains, the vast distances, all of it filled her with too much emotion. She worked her feet out of her pumps and drew them up on the car seat so that she could sit mermaid-style next to Max to say in a lighter voice, “Do people still call Saskatoon the Paris of the West?”

“Still! Did they
ever
?”

“They did sometimes when I was in high school.”

“Meanwhile, back here in the Parisian hinterland …” said Max.

Claire smiled over at him with affection. “What do you think Mother will do now?”

“Get married again.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Don’t you?”

“Wouldn’t any intelligent man be able to see through her?”

“Dad didn’t.”

True, but it seemed to Claire that Max was a little bit sad, with a sadness that must have settled into him months (or years, even) before their father’s death. She had to control a desire to ask him if everything was all right. To ask: “Are you happy?” But she couldn’t allow herself to ask it because it was a question she could not bear to be asked herself. And above all she could not bear to be asked it by the wrong person (by which she meant a kind person, a person like Max).

It was real night by the time the plane began its descent into Ottawa, and the city’s fields of lights tilted to the left, to the right. Claire was gathering up her belongings, pulling the zipper across her flight bag, when she at last understood: she would never see her father again. She wanted not to get off the plane then, she wanted to fly back, she wished that on the way to the airport she had asked Max to drive her to the churchyard where their father lay buried so that she could at least have sat with him for ten minutes or so. This, she saw, would always be her regret, that she didn’t go alone to his grave and try to be heard by him. Her throat hurt her and she had to turn her head away from the man sitting next to her to hold an arm over her eyes so that her seatmate (if he bothered to look) would decide that she was just trying to catch a few last stolen moments of sleep.

As the plane taxied to a stop at the back of the terminal and people were sleepily standing to tip their luggage down from the storage compartments, a male elbow dug into one of her breasts, and this unexpected contact with softness so startled its owner that he turned to cast a frightened glance back at her. “Hey, sorry,” he said. “Listen, I’m really, really sorry.”

“That’s all right, no problem. Really.” But lately she too had been saying she was sorry too much. She said “Sorry” when people bumped into her or stepped on her toes; sometimes she even said “Sorry” in a sickeningly pleading little voice to herself. Sometimes she even wrote
PLEASE NOTE
on little cards she taped to the fridge, as if she felt she had to be eternally polite to the whole world, even to herself. Which was not at all like writing
PLEASE REMEMBER, YOU IDIOT, TO BUY TOOTHPASTE AND ONIONS
, and then harshly underlining the
PLEASE
at least three times in irony and fury. She was not a Catholic, but
walking into the terminal it occurred to her that she would have made a marvellous Catholic: weren’t Catholics more or less honour-bound to apologize to each other and to God every other minute?

Waiting for her taxi, she analyzed her psychoanalysis with Dr. Gleidman. The first two years they had devoted to talking about her mother. The third year they had devoted to talking about books. She would bring novels to Gleidman and he would read them and after he’d read them they would have their own little Great Books discussion group. But one day toward the end of Year Three he’d tossed the envelope with her cheque in it onto his desk, and during the session that followed, his interpretation of her dreams was innovative in a way that had seemed engineered to make her appear infantile. When the hour was up, she sank down in the elevator to the lobby and because she was crying she didn’t at first understand that it was raining out in the world. She was walking along Somerset Street when someone hurrying just behind her snapped open an umbrella and a male voice blew down to her: “Let me protect you.” She’d glanced up to see that its owner looked to be nine or ten years younger than she was — twenty-five, twenty-six — but there was also something of the favourite uncle about him. “But why are you crying?” (Smiling down at her peeringly.) “I’ve just come from seeing my psychiatrist.” At this he had smiled an even more entertained smile: “Then I think what I’m going to prescribe for you is a new psychiatrist.” Which had signalled the beginning of the end for Dr. Gleidman. The stranger with the umbrella had, after all, only expressed what she had begun to be convinced of herself. But she hadn’t been willing to warn Gleidman she was leaving, she had instead made arrangements
to give him the slip. At a time when she’d known he was in consultation with one of his other patients, she had tiptoed into his waiting room with a note that said thanks for everything and that she wouldn’t be back. And along with the note a book of travel essays wrapped up in pink metallic paper with a pattern of silver forest fires burning on it.

H
is tray of needles in one hand, Declan led Claire into a formal grey room. Leaves from the lilac bushes in the Institute garden were brushing against the windows and when the wind moved roughly through them they set up a trembling of leaf-shadows on the glass that protected medical diplomas and a photograph of snow falling into a dark pond. Claire stretched herself out on the high table to wait for the miniature needles that looked even more frail than pins, and as she felt the prick, then the wiggled electric jolt of each needle, Declan named the part of the body it was meant to help. “Liver,” he said.

And a few moments later: “Heart.”

The touch of his fingers, resting lightly on her left arm, felt intelligent and kind. She looked up at him. “But why all this trouble with my skin? Why all the spots?”

“Weakness in the lungs.”

She was trying to remember what the little Chinese doctor had said about the lungs. Excessive something injured them, but she couldn’t remember what. “What injures them?”

After a slight pause he said, “Grief.”

But now he was leaving her. He looked back over a shoulder at her when he got to the door. “Do you want the lights high or low?”

“Low.”

“Do you want music?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

He pressed a button and a Vivaldi concerto bubbled — percolated, almost — into the dim windy room.

When he came back with his tray again, to take out the needles, he said, “And so what’s been happening with you, Claire? Since we last saw one another?”

She told him about her visit with Alan Breit. “And so then after that I made a definite decision to come back and see you.”

He had nothing to say to this, he even seemed a little humble and shy.

But then she hadn’t called right away because there was a death in her family.

“Who died?”

“My father.” And although she hadn’t at all expected to, she turned her face away from him and began to cry. A painful crying without tears that was really a series of breathless little squeaks. And as she cried, Declan stood with a hand on one of her shoulders, in his astringently formal way giving her comfort.

The following week when she saw him again he worked at the knotted muscles in her aching back, tight little nuts of enduring pain, each little nut representing some despicable emotion. Like what? Like bitter indignation. Lying on her belly on the
treatment table, she winged her arms back to undo her bra hooks so that he could make his way farther down her back. Her breasts plumply pancaked beneath her, she almost dozed off, safe in her conviction of how absolutely correct it all was, Declan’s clinical fingers moving methodically down each side of the spine of her sore back, colonizing her resentments.

On her way back to work after her appointment she even surprised herself by experiencing euphoria. And no pain. She floated across Bank Street with its exhaust fumes, mixed in as they were with the hazily fragrant air of the spring afternoon.

T
here was a train to Ottersee but it was an evening train. It left Ottawa at five and reached Ottersee two hours later. And the return train didn’t come back through the town until midnight. With the bus it was the same story but at the opposite end of the day: the only bus reached the town before breakfast, then left again twenty minutes later, not to return until the following morning.

Claire signed up for classes with a driving school even though she didn’t own a car. She planned to rent one, one day a week, when the time came. And so this became her social life, all through the weirdly hot nights of early May, a driving lesson three evenings a week with a man named Gordon Stahl, evenings that in her fantasies would turn into marvellous drives through leafy Rockcliffe or confident sweeps up the cliff road that ran past the Shinto shrine lookout on the way to the Rockeries. But the night of her first lesson, Gordon drove her to an old airfield on the outskirts of the city. She tried not to glance down at
the triangle of air that he was making narrower and then less narrow by the nervous wince of his thighs, and when they got to their teaching tarmac and he quickly got out of the car to wade through the weedy grasses around to her side — he, the instructor, had parked too close to the field! — she obediently slid over under the wheel. For the first few minutes of her lesson she felt stiff, apprehensive, but soon she was as drunk with shaky happiness as a toddler learning to dance. And when she was at last permitted to drive out on real streets — and even though she wasn’t ever able to entirely lose her fear that she would make a wrong turn and kill someone — she also began to be bewitched by the sedate feeling of power, and bewitched, too, by the heady mix of spring and twilight, and by the terrific feel, on the homeward drive, of the warm night wind on her skin.

The night of her fourth lesson, Gordon came to pick her up in a car with a stick shift, having decided to devote the evening to teaching her how to shift gears. Following his directions, she turned off Eastbourne Avenue and drove up the slope of a cul-de-sac where seven or eight boys were out in the twilight playing street hockey.

Gordon placed his hand firmly over hers on the stick shift. “Good,” he said, “now shift into low.”

She shifted into low and flooded the engine.

“Turn off the ignition, then turn it on again, then back the car down the hill, we’re going to keep doing this until you get it right.”

She did it again, aware of the boys watching her, waiting for her to make another mistake. But this time, shifting gears halfway up the hill, she was successful.