Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (16 page)

From Florida Claire wrote letters home. She described the beach (how white it was) and the long ant-like line of promenaders slowly moving in nineteenth-century fashion up and down the shoreline in their overcoats. “The wind,” she wrote, “blows in from the Gulf of Mexico and is bitterly cold. There are a few shell collectors, no swimmers, a few joggers wearing gloves.”

The best part of her day was the night. She took a walk on the cold sand every day at sunset. She seldom met anyone, and when she did, it was almost always a solitary soul like herself. If the dark figure came toward her at a walk, her heart went on alert and her arm pressed her shoulder bag tight to her side, but if the dark figure came toward her at a run, her heart and arm didn’t respond at all. All a thief would have to do, she thought, is jog. When the sky was completely dark and all the little hotels along the beach had turned on their lights, she hurried back to her room. She heated up small dinners on the hot plate in her tiny kitchen, and after she’d made herself a cup of tea she would take a long bath, then sit propped up on one of the big beds to read. She kept the door to the balcony open so she could hear the waves coming in on the beach. Her third night it rained, and she stood out on the balcony with her winter coat tied on over her nightgown and watched the rain falling into the garbage pit and the parking lot and the ocean.

The next morning was almost warm, was almost a real Florida morning, and she decided the time had come to give up being a recluse and go down to the main floor for breakfast. She could hear the sounds of cutlery and breakfasting voices as she walked along the downstairs hallway, then entered a dining room with a long view of the cold beach. The buffet offered every kind of Florida plenitude (huge platters of sliced fruits and giant vats of eggs benedict and jugs of orange and pink juices and great basins of muffins) but the room was so crowded that she ended up having to share a table with an elderly man whose prominent eyes greeted her morosely and a young woman who must have received a similar welcome, she smiled up at her with such quick gratitude. So there they were: three polite strangers at the same table, hyperaware of their table manners while bemoaning the erratic weather and the fact that the books in the hotel library were all old romances from fifty years ago. But as he was leaving their table, the elderly man offered to lend a few books to Claire. She said, with a kind of polite dread, “Thanks, that would be marvellous.”

One of the books turned out to be a dull espionage novel, the other a book on herbs that she sat out in the sun and read for part of the afternoon. For nervousness it advised red sage and skullcap. It said that one great cause of nervousness was novel-reading. She had to smile as she looked out at the late afternoon glare of the cold Atlantic. Why did all these people who worked with the body feel such a hatred for words? Because they did. Words were their enemies, unless they were words that could be used to force people to believe what
they
believed.

A little after five a wind came up, and when she went for her nightly walk along the beach, she felt an ache in her right
shoulder. She kept her left hand in her pocket to protect it from the wind because she was getting a fungal infection in one of her fingers, something she must have picked up at work before she left Canada. It didn’t bother her. All she had to do was remember to keep it dry.

The next morning, down in the hotel smoke shop, she stood looking at magazines next to a young woman, then noticed that she was standing beside the girl she’d shared a table with in the dining room. They got into a conversation about magazines, about how addicting they were. At least, they agreed, they could be addicting for the first ten minutes or so. “Last year I was still reading the teen magazines,” the girl told Claire, “but when I turned nineteen I made a resolution to switch over to
Cosmo
.”

“A lot of advice about sex in
Cosmo
,” said Claire, smiling over at her.

“I
know
,” the girl responded in an eager declarative voice, flat with the vowels of the American Midwest. “In every issue a new position! I mean, I’m just not all that flexible …”

They shared a small laugh over that.

Later in the morning the temperature dropped again, and just after lunchtime the wind began to blow great flings of cold rain at the windows. By late afternoon the rain had stopped, but the day had turned so much colder that Claire decided to go home. But could she just do that? She thought of going home before her week was up, the shame of it. But it was what she wanted, and so she sat down on her bed to phone Air Canada’s toll-free number in wherever it was — she thought it was in Miami — and to her amazement was able to get a flight out of Tampa for just before midnight. She went down to the lobby and said to one of the clerks at the front desk, “I’m
checking out tonight, I can’t stand the cold,” and the clerk said to her, “I don’t blame you.” And then to her great surprise he even gave her a refund for the three days that she would no longer be a resident of the hotel. All the way back to her room she thought, That was easy, that was easy.

In the shower she shampooed her hair for the trip home, but she could only shampoo it with one hand, she had to keep her infected hand dry, and so she held her left arm raised high, a great dictator or an imposter saviour blessing the multitudes.

But after she’d packed her lightweight clothes and was leaving her room, she heard — from one of the rooms close by — the untethered cry of a woman crying out in love, a cry that was so lonely and grateful and surprised that it stilled her, made her feel that everything she’d ever done up till this moment was just nothing, compared to so ardent an aloneness.

S
nowflakes bobbed in the cold air and now and then even flew crazily upwards, dead sparks from the storm. They were like the dark spots that dance in front of the eyes during a time of exhaustion. But by ten in the morning the sky outside Dr. Tenniswood’s windows was so windy and white it had turned the day dim as twilight. Turned it into a lamp morning. Claire made her way through the warren of rooms on the ground floor of the clinic, clicking on lamps, then spent the morning typing letters and setting up appointments.

At noon, she went up to Dr. Tenniswood’s apartment to water the plants, then wandered from room to room, looking at things. She went into the den to take a look at the zebra rug she coveted, paid a visit to the bedrooms. She examined the photographs and cosmetics on the dressers, opened a few drawers, then went on to the brighter family room where a lectern with an open atlas on it was standing over by a window, an atlas that all at once seemed to her to be a little gift from the world: an open book in whose pages she could look for (or at
least locate) Declan in Venezuela. She went over to it and turned its pages until she found South America. She was feeling the pleasurable humiliation of a woman who falls in love with a map because a man she adores is a tiny black dot on it. Except in this case there were two tiny black dots: man and wife. She pictured Declan walking hand in hand with his wife on the hot white sands of Venezuela. Or in ankle-deep turquoise water, veined by the underwater optical effects of tropical light.

Last stop was the little bathroom off the master bedroom. The more utilitarian furnishings — toilet, sink, lion-pawed tub — were far away at its other end, almost as distant as stage props. But they made her feel watched as she sprayed on sweet mists from five different bottles of cologne.

Night after night while Declan was away in Venezuela, she dreamed of babies. She was happy in these dreams, swimming with the babies in deep but very clear green water. But one night she dreamed she was wearing a red headscarf tied back like a gypsy scarf. She was feeling attractive in it, but when she got home from downtown (where she’d been swanning around, utterly full of herself) she felt something bulky sticking out and then shook out the scarf to discover a whole nest of sanitary napkins in it, still unused (thank God for the fastidious unconscious), but it was a strange dream for her to dream the night she’d decided to announce to Declan that she would be leaving therapy, for a while in any case, since she seemed to be making the process her life. She could also tell him (but probably wouldn’t) that she couldn’t even go to a movie without wondering what he would think of it, or live through a weekend
without obsessively wondering how he was spending his. But she also seemed to be angry with him. The fact of the matter was, his kind of therapy was beginning to depress her: the correct way to stand, the correct way to breathe, the correct way to be like everyone else. It’s really Nazi, she thought.

On Monday morning the secretary from the Institute phoned to ask her if she would be willing to switch her next acupuncture appointment from Wednesday noon to early Friday afternoon and she agreed to the change, but when Friday dawned it was such a sleety dark morning it made her feel utterly sorry for herself for having been born a Canadian. After lunch she took a cab to the Institute through lightly falling snow, then climbed steps so slick with snow-powdered ice that she had to hold on to the railing. What bad luck to fall. And what an irony it would be too, to slip and break an arm or a leg or fall backwards and crack open her skull on the Institute doorstep on the very day she was coming to tell Declan that she’d decided to leave him. And above all to fall because the altered date of her appointment had converted itself into an unlucky number in the lottery of Canadian weather.

But sitting in one of the Institute’s back rooms that had been invaded, on this particular Friday afternoon, by the dull and cold snowy light, all she could make herself say was “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to leave.” And then, quickly, to fill the silence: “I seem to be making this business of therapy my life.”

Declan was over at the window, pulling down the blind, but now he looked back at her over his shoulder. She could see that her announcement was not what he’d been expecting. But then he’d invested a lot in her, in time and hectoring, and now she would be going out into the world incomplete. She sensed that
it rankled. But then he seemed to rally. He even came over to sit beside her to tell her that he understood. “Life is after all also therapeutic,” he told her. But it seemed to her that he said it in a dull voice, out of duty.

She was feeling dull too, having made her announcement. She had expected it to give her a great shot of euphoria and it had not. Still, it would have been completely mad for her to change her mind after having with such difficulty at last made it up. And he had passed a test, since he was so clearly (if ambivalently) willing to let her go. Dr. Gleidman hadn’t been willing to let her go (even ambivalently) and so in the end she’d had to give him the slip.

“It may not be permanent,” she told him, although she was certain it would be. All she wanted was to walk out of this room and be free to live (however dully) her life.

He again told her that he understood. And then after what seemed to be a small argument with himself he said there was of course always more work to be done if and when she decided she wanted to come back and do it.

It was snowing again when she came down the steps into the afternoon, but the sky still had enough glare in it to hurt her eyes. She felt bereft, useless. The day had turned into a day with no meaning. She tried to remember the hard things, the times he had said unkind things to her, and when she remembered them she had certain regrets. She regretted that on certain occasions she hadn’t had the wit or the integrity or the bravado (or whatever it was) to say to him, “You wanted to hurt me so much that you were willing to have me think less of you. And so now I do. And so who’s sorry now?” But she could never bear
to hurt any man (at least any man she admired) if he had tender feelings for her; to hurt a man who had tender feelings for her seemed so cold-hearted that even the very idea of it made her feel physically ill and in an uneasy way even inhuman.

T
he next day was another sunless but glaring grey day and when Claire came down her street she saw that Lowell — the spring-water man — was parking his white truck in the van der Meer driveway. “I’ve bought myself a still!” he called out to her. “To make water, not whisky!” And when she got closer to him he told her that there was a distilled-water craze in this town. “I kept getting all these calls from people who wanted to know if I could deliver distilled water to them, and so I started asking, ‘Why does everyone want distilled water all of a sudden?’ And it turned out they’d all been to see these same two guys — two brothers, actually — who take samples of your spit and urine and then send them off to a big computer down in California and in a couple of weeks the computer people send back an equation that tells you everything about the state of your health.”

Claire got out her keys to unlock the street door. The two brothers sounded so much like two crafty brothers in a fable
that she wanted to laugh. “And then the two brothers put you on a regime of distilled water?”

“Yeah,” Lowell said, kicking the snow off his boots on the doorstep, then following her up the stairs to her landing. “There’s an ideal equation to aim for. One equation for Caucasians, one for Orientals. And then these two guys — Walter is the one I went to — detoxify your body with certain foods and minerals. They say they can even cure cancer this way.” Mounting the stairs behind her, he was sounding dangerously breathless. “The thing is, you have to drink an awful lot of water. Half, in ounces, of your body weight in pounds. For a big man it could come up to three quarts.”

They’d reached the landing by this time, but Lowell was still breathing heavily, holding the heavy carton of water bottles high up on a shoulder.

Claire quickly unlocked her door, then stood aside to allow him to precede her into her apartment. “I once saw a man who believed that people drink too
much
water,” she told him. “He saw the kidneys as an overworked sponge.”

“He must be macrobiotic. The macrobiotics could put me out of business,” said Lowell. And he lined up the bottles of spring water along one wall of her kitchen.