Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (5 page)

The wind blew her up Dr. Breit’s red brick walk in the rain. But the house startled her, it looked so abandoned, closed up for the season. But what season? It wasn’t even winter. White
blinds were pulled all the way down in all of its windows. Had the man with the sexually wistful voice forgotten all about her? She found the thought unbearable. To be forgotten by a therapist! She also found mail wedged between the two doors, another bad sign — two airmail letters from England, a rained-on copy of a magazine called
Motorcycle News
— and after ringing the bell, dipped her knees to pick up the letters and so was nearly toppled sideways into the hallway when the door was pulled back to let her come in.

She stood to present the man who’d opened the door to her with his damp correspondence.

But he didn’t at all look as she had imagined he would look. He instead looked almost pathologically indolent. He even looked as if he had spent his entire life up till now doing nothing more arduous than lapping up the contents of giant saucers of cream.

He also looked familiar.

But he seemed to be concluding that she looked familiar as well. “I have a feeling we’ve met.” He relieved her of her soaked raincoat, fitted it neatly into a cramped closet that gave off a faint odour of straw hats, abandoned rubber. “I do know that I know you from somewhere …”

She followed him down a long hallway hung with ornate wall-rugs that had round little mirrors the size of dental mirrors stitched into them. But the rest of his house was extremely cold and smelled unpleasantly of newly stripped and polyurethaned floors, new paint. He led her into a room with a pale-pink futon on the floor. There were also several large pale paisley cushions scattered about. In terracottas, pale pinks. He offered her coffee, then took off for a darker part of the
house to prepare it, calling out to her to find herself a chair, make herself right at home.

But there were no chairs there.

“Cream?” he called out to her.

From his giant saucer?

“Just black, thanks!”

He came back into the freezing room bearing a black lacquer tray with two grey pottery mugs on it, set it down on the floor, then settled himself down behind it. She followed his example and sat down across from him. Out in the kitchen he’d remembered where they had met — at a party at the home of an architect friend of Steff’s.

“Yes,” she said. “I remember that too.” She had the feeling she would find him easy to talk to. It was the kind of morning it was too, so windy and dark, a morning made for revelations and gossip.

She asked him what she would wear for their sessions.

“A bathing suit,” he told her. “Or shorts and a top. The sort of thing you’d wear for a gym class. Or anything, really, that won’t restrict your freedom of movement.” He took a little sip of his coffee. “You do look most awfully well, I must say. Much better than you looked the last time I saw you. You’ve lost weight, I think.”

“A bit.” She could feel a reluctance in his eyes to take leave of her breasts, and she was all at once aware of beginning to feel a little uneasy in his presence, even though she didn’t feel he was all that attracted to her, not really. She decided she should establish the fact that she was still looking around, that she hadn’t had time to make up her mind yet. But instead she found
herself telling him about her meeting with Declan Farrell. She told him that Declan Farrell had said she was living too much up in her head.

He gave her body a rather prolonged diagnostic look, then gave her his conclusion: “
That’s
a bit glib.”

This should have pleased her but did not. She apparently did not want to hear Declan Farrell being called glib, even though she was the one who had arranged for him to be called it. She felt a childish desire to say: He didn’t say a word against you, you shouldn’t say a word against him. But now he was only asking her what sorts of things made her angry.

All she wanted was to learn how to sleep. But would it be accurate to say that not having learned it made her angry? She didn’t know. If she really thought about it there was hardly anything that didn’t make her angry. It was just that being asked to list her angers made her forget what they were.

But had
he
fallen asleep? The sight of his closed eyes filled her with a dread close to terror. Caught in the grip of it, she quickly came up with ways to excuse his nodding off. The moment he flinched awake, embarrassed, she was primed to cry out, “Don’t apologize! Please! The rain always makes me feel incredibly sleepy too. And it’s so dark out!”

Sleepily, a man drugged by the rain, he half-opened an eye. “So what about you, then? Where do you fit into the hierarchy of your family of origin? Not the baby, I take it?”

They shared a small laugh over that, at least until he made the decision to speculate. “If there were three children, you were the middle one. If there were five children, you were still the middle one. If there were four children you were the second
oldest one. You were the mediator, you were the guilty one.”

“The third child of seven.” Then, not to be too much the mediator, the guilty one, she asked him how much his fee would be.

A pale man, he seemed to grow paler. He said he thought he could give her a reduced rate.

She thanked him for his kindness, then asked him how, exactly, they would work together.

He glanced at her knees, then looked quickly away. He indicated the futon. “You’d lie here, on the futon …”

In my little bathing suit …

“… and I’d be working on breathing with you. Breaking up your energy blocks.…” He squeezed up a doughy fistful of flesh from his own belly. She imagined him breathily leaning over her, squeezing her breasts. She pictured herself being so alarmed that she wouldn’t be able to distinguish between what was lechery and what was therapeutic. What if she was too anxious to speak, too anxious even to ask him to turn the thermostat up?

Out in the chilled hallway, drawing on her damp raincoat, she worried that she’d feel obligated to see him again, now that he’d offered her a reduction in fee. She felt burdened by gratitude and, because of it, suspicious. Why didn’t he have any other patients waiting? Did he even
have
other patients? She told him she would have to call him to set up another appointment, her schedule was a little uncertain just now.

He said, “Fine.” Then he said it again, which meant that it wasn’t.

She would write to him, she would write and tell him no, but she felt terribly anxious while she was thinking this, they
were practically shoved up against each other in the narrow hallway. She was afraid to look into his eyes, she was too afraid she would find something desolate and even destroyed there.

But when she stepped out into the wind she felt wild with relief in the rainy morning. She walked and walked, too excited by relief to look for a bus. By the time she reached Echo Drive the rain had stopped and the wind was just blowing the fog around, and now and then there was a lone raindrop in it. But the wind in the treetops was surfy, huge, and there was also a small windstorm as she turned onto Hopewell, one of those yellow windstorms of late spring that make pollen rain down on the world to lie in a fleecy yellow snow on the hoods of cars, on pavements.

The Polish émigré who always made her think of a woodcutter came walking toward her on the pollen-slippery sidewalk as she was turning the corner to her own street, a man who was so extraordinarily handsome that nothing could undermine his eerie glamour, not even the fact that the sleeves of his navy coat were as short as a boy’s and looked as if they’d been dipped into a broth of splinters. Years of sun and wind had baked or blown age either to or from him so that he was either young and looked old, or old and looked young. He was also carrying his pink plastic radio high up on one shoulder. Could a smile be both mocking and consoling? His was. It made her wonder: Is he wise or is he a madman? His radio was (as always) tuned to a classical-music station, this time playing Handel. But she was always filled with fear whenever she saw him. Not of him personally, but of what he might stand for (her future).

“Dzien dobry,” he said.

She could already hear the phone up in her apartment ringing as she was pushing open the street door. She stormed the stairs to savagely unlock her own door, then pounced on the phone to cut it off mid-ring. But it only turned out to be her mother, calling from Saskatchewan. And so she braced herself for the inevitable question: “Do you have any new men in your life at the moment, darling?” (Yes, darling Mother, it just so happens that I’ve spent this very morning with a new man. We sat on the floor of his ice-cold front room and he’s incredibly fat, which is really not all that surprising when you consider that he lives on nothing but saucers of cream.) But this time there was no dutiful small talk, no preamble to “Your daddy had a fatal heart attack this morning just after breakfast, can you come home for the funeral?”

After she’d put down the phone, Claire stood beside it for a timeless small time. She felt shaken but calm, almost elated. And she even knew why: because her father was free now. But she had calls to make. To Dr. Tenniswood. To Megan Battle, her replacement. To Air Canada.

On compassionate grounds, she was given a late-afternoon flight to Saskatoon. She went into the kitchen and looked out the window. The rain had stopped, but towering dark clouds were slowly moving in again, it was such a drenched and windy green day. She made herself a thick potato and mayonnaise sandwich, then got a tin of Portuguese sardines out of a cupboard (so much pinker and more delicious than Canadian sardines) and carried it, along with a package of crackers and several packets of tea (camomile tea, Think-O
₂
tea) into her bedroom to be fitted into her flight bag along with her toothbrush and nightgown, then dug a pair of low-heeled black
pumps out of her closet. She wanted to travel in comfort, but when she shoved back her row of brown and burgundy corduroy trousers she decided it would be best to wear a black skirt that could also do for the funeral. She didn’t even own a black dress. All her clothes were the kind of clothes she could wear under a lab coat. She dropped three Valium pills into a bottle of magnesium oxide tablets (good to bring in case she got leg cramps) because there was absolutely no point in kidding herself: the nights she was in the magnetic range of her mother she would, without pills, find sleep to be totally out of the question.

A
lthough out in the world it was already spring, the plane flew into a mild sunny day in the winter, flew above clouds turned into a field of snow that looked as if cross-country skiers had endlessly criss-crossed it all one of those mild afternoons in late winter, the snow having already started to die. But at Winnipeg, where Claire changed planes, the day was hot and clear, and once she was airborne again she could look down on real fields, tiny rivers.

The plane landed in Saskatoon three hot hours before sundown and she walked fast across the tarmac with the other passengers, as if the city would fly away if they didn’t all race to catch up with it. Inside the terminal she went to look for a
StarPhoenix
, even though it was too soon for her father’s death to be in it. But she wanted it to be, she wanted him to be praised. Then into a taxi, the leisurely sweep into town. She looked and looked, to both left and right. She had forgotten that there was so much green in the city, that the trees could be so soft and green in the overheated twilight, that they could
speak so of memories in which — at nineteen — she had dreamed of the whole sweet life of the future.

One of her brothers had made a reservation for her at a downtown highrise on Fifth Avenue, in one of the tower’s hotel suites. Fifth Avenue: she had forgotten that. Small-town streets named after the streets of New York. There was even a Broadway. And the Broadway Bridge. How American the West was. In the East you would never find a street called Broadway, streets in the East were named after the kings and queens of England.

A turquoise glass canopy on four steel poles sheltered the brick path that led into the tower and there was a glass elevator on one side of it. As she was paying her driver, she could see it rise up, its lighted interior going up empty.

There was no desk, and no one to greet her, but over the phone her oldest brother had given her the code for the lock box in the lobby. She punched in the numbers to open the box, and the key for her hotel room fell onto the floor.

When she got off the elevator on
21
she went over to the windows to look down on the South Saskatchewan River and its Roman bridges. Didn’t Saskatoon have seven bridges? Just as Rome had seven hills? One cold November Sunday when she was seven or eight she had walked with her father along the embankment and looked out at the giant lily pads of glittering ice being borne swiftly by on the river. And the little red brick church was still down there too, on its green apron of lawn, although she had never before seen it from so great a height, its black steeple just high enough to still be in the sun. Below it the green park, its tallest trees tall enough to be in the last light. Everything seemed clearer, more memorable, because her
father had died. There was still sun on the highest hills beyond the embankment on the other side of the water.

But during the minute it took her to walk down the length of the corridor the day turned into night, and when she opened the door to her room on the opposite side of the hallway the view, through a wall of windows, was of a great city at night, a city that was so flat and far-flung that its lights seemed to stretch out forever across the Saskatchewan plain. And towering over that prairie world, the Sturdy Stone Building, a kind of monstrous Aztec Eiffel Tower dominating the miles and miles of bright lights. It was so out of scale that it made flat-topped Saskatoon look like a city in Mexico. Or a city in Arizona. Saskatoon-Phoenix.

The hotel suite must have recently been renovated, it was furnished with low glass tables and sofas upholstered in a new-looking cream fabric patterned with silver leaves. She went into the bedroom to find a wide double bed and, hanging above it, a print of a Victorian woman in a long white dress wading down a dim weedy field given life here and there by torn splotches of red meant to represent poppies. She took off her perspired-in jacket and hung it in the closet, then went out to the kitchen and opened her sardines and crackers. Once she had finished eating — it was, after all, two hours earlier here than it was at home — she again went out to the elevator and sank down to the city.