Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (2 page)

O
ut-of-control birdsong and the cries of children down on the street were the first sounds Claire heard the next morning. She went over to her window to look out and saw that it was a rinsed, perfect morning. But it was also looking quite cold — brilliantly sunny and cold — and so she pulled on a heavy sweater for a trip out to the store.

She unlocked her bike in the clear leafless light, a night-glisten of ice bordering the edges of the puddles, biked out to Habib’s. But as she was coasting back down her hill, she saw that the children who’d been playing on the sidewalk when she’d gone out to Bank Street were now squatting in a circle on the lawn close to the van der Meer front door.

She chained her bike to a tree, then walked up the path to her own narrow entrance, stopping for a moment to call over to them. “Is it a dead bird?”

Two of them stood up to call back in proud unison, “It’s a
mouse
!”

She let herself quickly into the house before they could show it to her.

She was half undressed when her doorbell buzzed and so she grabbed up the sweater she’d just pulled off and pulled it on again on her way down the stairs. She was afraid it was the children, wanting to show her their mouse in its match-box coffin, having mistaken the smile she’d so unwisely smiled for curiosity about the small rodent corpse. A woman without children, she felt tender toward children, but she was definitely squeamish about the joy they so often appeared to feel about any small bird or animal that happened to be dead. She was never the undertaker for the bird or mouse funerals of her own childhood, she was always the priest or the florist.

And so she opened the door cautiously — braced to smile, not recoil — to discover that there was, after all, nobody there. “But I’m
sure
there was somebody
here
,” she cried out in a stagy voice, aiming to please. She stepped out into the day to take a turn in the spotlight of sunlight and was rewarded by the sound of laughter from behind the hedge and one of the trees. Now that they’d witnessed her being tricked it should be enough for them, and so she quickly let herself back into the house and again ran up to her apartment.

The doorbell buzzed again almost immediately, nine or ten long flirty buzzes. The five little mourners. But she had to ignore them.

By the time she turned onto Wilbrod Street it was only ten minutes before Dr. Tenniswood’s first appointment for the day
and so she was startled to see him out at the front of his house, his back to her while he was forcing a gardening fork into the lawn next to the flower beds, then grunting at the placentas of roots whose pebbles of dirt he was shaking out as he wrestled bits of decaying tree trunk from his garden. He was wearing his grey flannels and a grey tweed jacket and he was looking so unusually massive, even out here in the diminishing sunshine, that he made her think of the part of southern Europe called the Massif Central. But by now she was close enough to see that this morning his necktie had a marine motif: florid white conch shells, their slit-like apertures rosily flaring with pink.

She had just stopped to say hello when the front door clicked open and Zuzi Tenniswood, looking sleep-drugged and sour in a plaid halter and wrinkled pale shorts, came down the steps, her open palm held out as if testing the sunny morning for rain. With moody delicacy she stepped across a narrow strip of dewed lawn to her father. “Car keys,” she said.

Dr. Tenniswood drew off his gardening gloves to fish a ring of keys out of a pocket. “Say hello to Claire.”

The girl did not throw Claire even so much as a glance. She was seventeen, but a very young seventeen. She looked elsewhere to say “Hello to Claire.”

Claire said hello, but immediately clenched a cold hand inside a pocket. The first summer she had worked for Dr. Tenniswood, eight summers ago, Zuzi had made a morning ritual of coming into the office to borrow one of the stethoscopes so she could check the heartbeats of a whole family of rubber dolls.

But now Dr. Tenniswood was smiling at Claire in helpless apology. “And so how’s our timetable for today, Claire? Have we got a full house?”

They were scheduled for a morning of baby visits, and once it had begun, Claire held the babies to a shoulder, one hand capping their wobbling and warm little heads while Dr. Tenniswood crept up behind them with his injections of vaccine. There were days at work when she felt like an accomplice.

By eleven already the sun had gone, leaving behind it a blowy morning, the trees bowing down in a rainy warm wind. Weather to go out for a walk in, but Claire couldn’t, she had already been invited out for lunch by Lisa Pitt, the friend from her British novel class who’d been the one to recommend the doctors at the Institute to her for her bouts of insomnia.

Once the babies were immunized, Claire, sitting at her desk, went travelling. She went to a lake, went swimming, then she was hoisting herself up onto the soothing heave and bob of a float pontooned on old barrels while a man came swimming darkly toward her in bright sunlight, his head a dunked and gleaming helmet of wet hair, the hot sun making her want to slightly part her warm thighs, then he was heaving himself up onto the rocking float with such a panting scatter of droplets that she’d be wanting to tell him that he must have swallowed at least half the lake. Other times she was lying belly down on a float (and it was even the same float) but this time she was peacefully alone and reading book after book, inhaling the smell of wet swimsuit while doing a crash course in the inner life. Wanting to educate herself in the sunlight.

But at last the morning was winding down, and by
twelve-thirty there was only one more patient, a schoolgirl carefully hanging a shining black plastic raincoat up on a peg out in the hallway.

Nervous in her school uniform she came over to Claire’s window, and in a voice low with apprehension told her her name — Amanda — and that she had skipped two periods. And because she was still so young, and also because she was so clearly a student (and in all likelihood a student at the convent school over on Friel Street) Claire for just a moment understood her to mean that she’d skipped two periods at school — math, history — not, or at least not immediately, thinking of blood. A school smell even floated down to her at her desk: a mix of cigarettes and chalk and Trident gum and the bruised-leather smell of the girl’s school satchel.

Claire sent her down the hallway to one of the examining rooms, then made a quick phone call about a changed appointment before going down to talk to her. But when she came into the room she could see that the girl was on the point of crying. She sat down beside her. “How many weeks has it been then?”

“About seven, I think.” (A very small whisper.)

But how brave she was, this fat-thighed little Amanda, to stop in at an unknown doctor’s clinic on her way home for lunch, to climb the unknown steps up to the clinic carrying her school bag. She had chosen Dr. Tenniswood over the kind nun (if there
was
a kind nun) in the convent infirmary; she had chosen him over her parents (but of course) and over the priest at confession (but of course times ten). “Everything’s going to be all right, Amanda. A lot of girls your age come into this office with exactly this problem. And we’re always
able to help them …” But was this really true? Pregnant girls did come in, but only now and then. “And what about sleeping? Are you able to sleep?”

Amanda could not look up, but she did shake her head.

“It could still be a false alarm,” said Claire. But she doubted it. “I’m not all that sure the doctor will be able to see you today though, it might have to be tomorrow, I’m just going to go have a quick word with him now.”

Dr. Tenniswood was in his office, pulling on his jacket, he had to run off to a medical meeting.

“Jack, there’s a fifteen-year-old girl in Room Three who’s afraid she might be pregnant.”

“You’ll have to get her to come back tomorrow then, Claire, I can’t see her now. I’ll examine her tomorrow and we can talk then about a referral.” His dull grey hair stood up; it was dully healthy and woolly. A whitening woolly grey crop: he would never go bald. But he was looking short of breath, distracted, he was patting his jacket pockets, missing something.

“What,” she said, like a wife. “Reading glasses? Memo pad?”

“Memo pad.” And he raised a foot onto his chair, then plucked back the crease of his pant leg because one of his shoelaces was undone.

She sifted through the papers on his desk until she found the memo pad, then fitted it into his shirt pocket while he was breathily tying his shoe.

Two summers ago she’d started calling him Jack, but behind his back she still always called him Dr. Tenniswood, a name that made her think of the names of the characters in
Decline and Fall
. On the days when there were only two or three patients waiting to see him she could usually get a laugh the times she
jutted out a hip to ask in an arch voice, “Dr. Tenniswood, anyone?” But she had to go back to see Amanda again. “She’s also not sleeping, Jack.”

“Get her a Valium then. But only one, and only half a milligram, just for tonight.”

Not long after he’d hurried off to his meeting and Amanda had gone back to her school with a pill in a pocket, Lisa Pitt came up the steps in the company of a friend who’d just come back east after a week of skiing at Whistler. This friend seemed still to be smelling of sunlight and snow and lanolin; it was as if she’d rubbed lanolin into her skin and her frizzy fair hair and her heavy boots. Perhaps this was what gave her such a dreamy self-absorption, but there was something open and healthy about her too, as if every morning she drank down a tall glass of sunshine with her handful of vitamins. Claire (with a kind of wistful envy) pictured her life in the mountains: the sideways sprays of skidded snow, the falling showers of freezing sparkle. All that pleasure and clean light so far far away. But now here they all were, down here in the fogbound East, and the rain had stopped and so they walked together down Nicholas Street. The sun was even starting to come weakly through the rain-haze and as they were walking, the friend (Hartley Lear) didn’t converse, she extolled. She kept praising people and seemed to want to be praised for praising them. “Aren’t women
wonderful
!” she cried. “The way they move so many body parts as they walk!”

Claire glanced coolly over at her, then looked quickly away. But now they were already coming up to the intersection to stand behind a delicate young Chinese mother in a quilted silver jacket and slim black silk dress who was carrying her young daughter
held to her abdomen, the girl’s long legs straddling the mother’s narrow Oriental hips. “Isn’t she a
darling
?” Hartley Lear cried to Lisa Pitt and Claire, her voice insistent, unhappily sweet.

Lisa Pitt and Claire looked over at Hartley Lear in unison, their half-smiles cynically maternal, half-smiles that said, “Since we are women ourselves, we not only move so many body parts as we walk, we can also see through you …” Or so thought Claire, and so she also thought Lisa Pitt was thinking. But now Lisa Pitt was only asking her if the Institute doctors had been able to help her at all with her insomnia.

Claire was afraid that the more she talked about not sleeping, the more it would go on, and so she only said, “I don’t know yet, I’ve only been there for one appointment.”

“So who did you see?”

“Declan Farrell.”

But Hartley Lear was the one who said, “You were lucky then. Because that man is an artist, he’s just
so
intuitive.” She glanced sideways at Claire with a punitive, inhaling look. “Weren’t you in awe of him?”

“He seemed like a fine person,” said Claire. “But I still think I might want to look around a bit more, try to find out who I’d really like to see —”

The restaurant turned out to be unexpectedly posh: pink linen tablecloths on two tiers of tables at the bottom of an old brick house whose lower level was protected by a sort of greenhouse that looked like an igloo of glass. But the doors to the igloo’s glass tunnel had been thrown open to the street, allowing exhaust fumes to float in over the salads. Claire wanted to leave, go to another restaurant, but she didn’t want to fuss. And
by now Lisa Pitt and Hartley Lear were already fitting their jackets onto the backs of the chairs at a table in the far room, then they were all going down the shallow steps to the aspics and pasta salads and big bowls of hot food.

By the time they’d all got settled back at their table again the exhaust fumes had drifted away and it was possible to take in the much more elegant sights and smells of privilege: the cool smell of linen, the effervescent decay of the wine, the raked pats of cold butter. They talked about movies all through their calamari salads, then went back to the buffet for thin pancakes separated by a silt of chocolate paste that tasted as if it had been steeped overnight in vanilla and rum.

While they were drinking the last of their coffee, Lisa Pitt told Claire and Hartley Lear about an affair she’d with her yoga instructor and about how after it was over she’d contracted a urinary tract infection and had to wear a catheter inserted up inside her for two months and of how she had eventually gone — in a horrible depression — to see a Jungian analyst, who’d told her “But you must see what you’re doing: you’ve even arranged to pee standing up.” No sooner had this been said than she knew it to be utterly true: “A eureka experience!” She’d even hurried home from the doctor’s office to pull out the catheter and jump into the bath.

They all laughed at this story, even Hartley Lear, who also spoke of a eureka experience as they were all walking back to the clinic. It was an experience she’d had (and more than once) back in the days when she was a client of Declan Farrell’s. “He works only with cases that really intrigue him, and so if he agrees to work with you it’s an honour …”

But as they were saying goodbye she gazed at Claire for a long moment, her eyes diagnostic, coldly pensive. “Take care,” she said. “Take care and good luck.”

Back at work again for the afternoon rush of the usual maladies — fungal infections, broken bones, parasites, broken hearts — Claire couldn’t account for her wistfulness, unless it came from the morning of baby visits. Her arms were still carrying a memory of baby skin, the sweet ache of baby weight, her breasts were still so alive from the memory of baby mouths hungrily brushing back and forth over the front of her lab coat, trying to find a nipple among all her clinical buttons.