Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (15 page)

The crying, after blocking her nose, was now clearing her nose, and she could again smell the freshly cut lawn on the breeze blowing in through the open window. She wondered if Declan had cut it himself this morning before her arrival. Getting out of the car she had seen his children and the biologist’s children running in a circle all around the deep garden. “Green rain!” they had shrieked. “A green rain is falling!” And they had flung handfuls of grass up into the air and then had thrown themselves down on their backs so that the grass-rain could drift down into their open mouths.

“Even the people who think they are having a full sexual life usually aren’t,” Declan said. “They aren’t having anything like the powerful feelings they could be having if we didn’t live in a performance culture.” And then he said that the culture’s emphasis on sex was a compensation because true sexuality was missing from the rest of life, and that if a person was living out of his true sexual feeling, then all of life was foreplay, and at this she again thought of his children, lying so blissfully flat on their backs up in the garden.

He was by this time massaging her right shoulder with one hand and she was feeling so grateful to him that she wished she could turn to the hand he was supporting himself with and dip down to it and kiss it. She didn’t quite dare to do this but she did rub her cheek and hair, cat-like, against it. And when he said, “Only one percent of the population has a truly vital sex life,” she didn’t feel even the slightest temptation to smile at so unresearchable a statistic.

Then it was time for the session to be over. She sat up to pull on her skirt while he went into the outer room. But while she was still buttoning up her shirt he came back to say, “I want you to write me a letter.”

“A letter?” She gazed up at him, puzzled. “What sort of letter?”

“Any sort of letter. It doesn’t have to be long.”

Driving back to the city, she remembered the morning interview with the graphologist. She imagined Declan hearing it too, a cool breeze with the smell of cut grass in it blowing in through the big Ottersee kitchen, the bitter earth smell of strong coffee.

She thought only of him, and missed him, and wondered what it would be like to live with him in a nearly wordless and passionate collusion. But collusion wasn’t the right word. She meant bond, bond was the right word, or she meant a connection so psychic and sexually deep that words not only would not be required, they would ruin things, words would lead to
attacks of integrity, words would mean there could be no future for them, ever.

After she’d had her shower she pulled on her most slippery nightgown and went down to her bookcase to find a book that was sexually dear to her because of a single phrase in it (“He was bite-kissing her”). She wanted to see the words blaze up at her, the words were an explosion and it was a relief to know that they could explode again and again, it was even sexy to take her time going back up the stairs, to climb back up to the top of the house carrying the book. But when she saw herself in her bedroom mirror she decided she was looking too studious to make love to herself: she was, after all, still wearing her glasses, and so she took them off as she lay down on her bed and opened the book to the necessary line, felt its heat while at the same time she was longing for a man’s hands to roll her over and shove down her panties. It was a longing that made her feel the need to shove a cushion up tight between her thighs, above all a cushion with a hard seam on it, although all she had the energy to do was roll over to snap out her light and reach for her pillow. But her pillow was too soft, it wasn’t manly enough, she wanted a hard manly cushion. Still, the thought of turning on her light again and running down to the sofa to fetch a cushion exhausted her, it was also too exhausting to play all of the parts at once (the man, the woman, the director, the girl who had to run downstairs for the props) no matter how much she wanted the bliss of the busy final moments of arousal. And since Declan was also on her mind — he was always on her mind because she was never not thinking of him — the sexy feelings began to go, to leave
her, a kind of shy respect for him was already doing its principled dark work of censoring the absolute thrill of sex, her feelings for him kept on keeping him out of bounds. Her gratitude and her tender respect for him kept on being too much at war with what was most babyish and wild and squirmy about it, the whole greedy grab and throb of sex.

The morning she was to drive out to see him again, she sat on her sofa in the room overlooking the muddy back garden and wrote on a clean sheet of foolscap:

She sat in the morning sunlight and read the letter aloud, then tore a clean sheet of paper off the tablet of foolscap and wrote it more neatly over again. As she did so, she was aware that she was making her
ys
and
gs
very loopy.

Somewhere below Claire a door slammed. She quickly sat up. But it was only the children next door, in and out.

She went over to her window to watch for Libi and was surprised to see her almost directly below her, hurrying across the van der Meer lawn to the lower door, her hair braided to one side in a fat brown braid with a bow of yarn tied around it.

And then almost right away she could hear her voice, already inside her apartment and calling up her stairs, “Get a move on, Vornoff! I have to pick Rolf up at four o’clock!”

When she got downstairs, Claire drew on her jacket and hit at her pockets for keys and money. Then she followed Libi down the hall stairway and out into the weak sunshine. Walking out to Libi’s car, they even bumped into each other.

“I had a nap,” said Claire. “After an afternoon nap all creatures are sad.”

Libi didn’t respond, and so she wondered if she’d even heard her. But she must have, because once they were on their way, Libi turned to speak to her in a voice whose coolness suggested a certain angry incubation: “Do you know what
I
wish? I wish you’d get over this obsession or whatever it is, that is what
I
wish.
That
is what’s sad.”

Claire said that lately she’d only been seeing Declan for acupuncture treatments, now that the summer was over and he was back in the city. She kept to herself the news that she missed the car trips into the green world of the country. “In a way I suppose I don’t even belong in this century,” she said to Libi. “I don’t even own a car. As you may have noticed.”

“Actually, I think you’re quite trendy. A woman of our time.”

“Thanks a lot, friend. How am I trendy?”

“All this chasing after cures.”

“But you know I can’t sleep. I don’t need to tell you about it all the time, do I?” And at this she had to turn her face abruptly away from Libi and pretend to look out the window. My sleeplessness is like love, she thought; it’s just never not on my mind. And yet she
had
slept. Had done the dangerous thing, had taken a nap, and was already trying not to dwell on the thought that because of this nap there would be no sleep tonight. She said in a low voice, “I’m also in pain, Lib.”

“Give up dreaming of Herr Doktor and run three miles a day and your pain will vanish, I guarantee it.”

“Do
you
run three miles a day?”

“I’m not in pain.”

After they’d finished their shopping they went for tea at one of the Byward Market cafés. While they were drinking it, Libi spoke of a fight she’d had with her daughter that morning after breakfast.

“What about?”

“She took a tube of lipstick out of my purse without asking for my permission and so I slapped her across the face.”

Claire stared at her in amazement, then looked down at her tea. If she had a daughter, she would be fair to her. She considered saying in a mocking voice, “And did the punishment fit the crime?” But then she decided not to, preferring the bitter safety of disapproving of her friend in silence.

Twenty minutes later, as they were driving down Elgin Street to Boushey’s to buy cheeses, Claire looked to her right as they approached the Institute and saw that Declan’s car was parked at the deep-shaded side of the Institute garden. Its
presence seemed to turn the street into a street in a movie, it so much gave it that air of false peace. She felt that the day was now worth something, because without at all expecting to, and with thanks to a friend who did her a favour without even knowing she was doing her a favour, she had seen Declan’s car.

T
he first snow came, and with it came a windfall: Steff sold the little house on Noel Street, then shared its profits with Claire. She decided to go to Florida for a week. She had never felt even the slightest desire to visit Florida, but Florida was the closest warm place. She planned to go the first week of the new year.

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, she went downtown to the Byward Market. It was a mild rainy day, and the air of Christmas carnage she’d looked forward to (the fragrance of torn tree-bark, the slashed sound of bells) was partly undone by the rain and by the fleet of black panel trucks parked at the mouth of the market and stocked with poinsettias and red roses. How unreal and even ugly the poinsettias were, they made her think of flowers cut out of red fabric for a tacky church bazaar, and why was she buying flowers in any case, she was leaving the winter behind her, but as she was standing in the Christmas rain trying to decide, she looked up to see that a woman buying flowers from the back of the next truck was watching her. This woman was wearing a glossy brown fur jacket and elegant black slacks
and shining black leather boots. But it was by her hair that Claire knew her: she was Declan’s wife. They smiled small reserved smiles at each other before they both turned away, each one devoting herself to the buying of flowers.