Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (20 page)

But the bistro, when they got to it, was closed up for the night. There were people huddled inside it though, eating and drinking under the low reddish lights. It was like peering into a stage version of an extremely cosy hell. “The owner’s family,” said Tony. “And the cooks.” The owner’s family and the cooks shrugged apologetically as they waved from the darkly glowing interior, then Tony invited Claire to come back to his place to help him finish off a bottle of Algerian wine.

The wine might be helpful, it might even kill the infection, and so she said yes.

On their way across town it started to rain. Claire looked out at the little houses with their single dark evergreen trees
standing on small hills of dry grass in a sinking sea of old snow. It was windy and wet by the time they pulled in beside a tall house, its bricks already darkened by what was becoming a dense rain. In the wallpapered warm hallway, she unzipped her boots, then carried them in one hand as she followed Tony up a carpeted staircase.

While he was out in the kitchen she arranged herself sideways on his cold leather sofa with her stockinged feet tucked neatly beneath her. On the wall across from her were rubbings from tombstones, Inuit prints. The hardwood floors shone. She thought, He’s a better housekeeper than I am. She helped herself to an apple from a hill of apples that had been tumbled into a grooved pewter bowl, then ate it in experimental bits, her stomach was still feeling so rocky.

When he came back into the living room they spoke of landlords, insomnia, music, and his psychiatrist, a Freudian from Glasgow.

She then told him that she had just recently stopped seeing someone who worked with the body. “Psychodrama,” she said. “Breath work. Primal scream. A spooky gym class for only one student.”

He sat down beside her.

“But my feelings for the therapist were very conflicted.”

“In what way?”

She drew up her knees to clasp them, even though this made her skirt slide back to the tops of her thighs. She felt like a girl at summer camp, her pale hefty legs hugged to her while she sang the praises of a boy she adored. But a rising wave of nausea forced her to slowly let her feet down to rest flat on the floor. Her arms felt damp in their crevices, her head ached. She tried
to breathe slowly, evenly. “He was so moody, but at the same time he was just so incredibly helpful and decent. He was also enigmatic and magnetic and sporadically vile …”

Tony’s eyes were looking amused, observant. He took another small sip of his wine, then gave her a swift look. “So. Were you in love with this guy?”

Claire’s eyes started to fill, she had to turn her face quickly away from him.

“Hey,” he said kindly, stroking back her damp hair. He poured her a second glass of wine. He rested a hand on her shoulder while he was pouring it and she could smell the wine in his skin.

“Nothing bad happened,” she said. “Nothing unethical. I was just getting more and more attached to him and so I made myself leave him. There was quite a lot of touching, though, but then that’s the kind of therapy it
was
. A lot of pushing and shoving and embracing and howling …”

He smiled, but he was also looking a bit puzzled.

And so she said that she supposed Freud was right, really: the therapist shouldn’t touch the patient, ever. “Not even to shake hands. Because it muddies everything …”

“I suppose it would.”

Her face was feeling flushed. “And so I left him,” she said. “He also gave me acupuncture treatments,” she told him, thinking how inconsequential it must sound to be adding this.

“A more delicate form of torture,” he said. “Unless it was
less
delicate.”

At the beginning of the last acupuncture treatment Declan had given her, he’d poked her skin with the tiny needles that so seldom caused pain, then he’d thrown something ticklish over
her back that had felt as light as gossamer or a spider’s web. But before leaving her he’d turned the knob of a dial somewhere off to her right and the spider’s web had electrically metamorphosed into a giant hairnet of tiny dancing shocks. Still, the effect had been more pleasant than not.

When they’d finished the wine they went out to Tony’s kitchen, passing by a master bedroom whose wide bed was under a grey bedspread patterned with black triangles, and got themselves cold drinks of water, and again Claire felt almost faint, but when they came back to the sofa again and Tony stretched his arm along its rim she felt she would be able to quell her uneasy stomach, if only out of a social terror of throwing up. But then Tony was saying that they needed food and music, and he got up to go over to his tape deck and put on a tape that he’d made of songs he’d liked on other tapes. “Everything from Bach fugues and Schoenberg to country and jazz,” he told her as he was on his way back to the kitchen.

Over the music Claire could hear dishes being washed, taps being turned on and off, the opening and closing of cupboard doors, and she again felt queasy, but she also thought if she ate a salted cracker it might help to settle her stomach.

As Tony was coming back to the coffee table carrying a tray of crackers and cheeses she smiled up at him to tell him that almost every song she’d ever loved seemed, by some miracle, to be on his tape. But by this time the room was turning surreal and it even seemed to spin just a little as he was sitting down beside her again.

“But which one was your
most
favourite?”

“Most favourite, most favourite …” she said, trying to make her voice sound musing, smiling. “But I have too many
favourites, especially some of the really old ones. ‘Mack the Knife,’ ‘Suspicious Minds,’ ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ …” When I die, she thought — well,
before
I die, actually — I must arrange to have “Bye Bye Blackbird” played at my funeral.

“How about ‘Come to Me, My Melancholy Baby’?”

When she smiled, he hitched himself over to her and more than ever smelling of being married (of perspiration and laundered denim and of the wine again), he began to rhythmically rub a thumb behind one of her ears. I must tell him, she thought — but what must she tell him? — she was feeling the urgent need to communicate some vital information to him, but the room — why was it so bright? — was making her feel an even more urgent need to clap a hand to her mouth, which she then had to do as she jumped up to run in the direction of what she prayed was the washroom and as she was running she could hear him running swiftly on sock feet behind her, could feel how he’d turned into a basketball player shadowing another player who was guarding the ball (her nausea), keeping it hunched up close to her, and when she dropped to her knees in front of the toilet bowl, then supported her arms on its cold rim, she could feel him ponytailing her hair back for her, then he was kneeling to one side of her to smooth the sweat back up into her hairline so he could support her forehead for her while she was, in between bouts of throwing up, weeping-laughing to cry “Sorry, sorry, sorry, it’s not
you
, it’s the
flu
 …”

“I know, I know,” he sang down to her as he walked her, hugged sideways to him, over to the sink where she bowed over a smaller and pinker porcelain bowl to rub toothpaste on her teeth with her fingers and rinse her mouth over and over, then he walked her on down the hallway to a shining spare room
where she let herself be helped to lie back on a narrow bed covered with an itchy blanket that was patterned with grey and blue stripes and smelled slightly of mould. He pulled a white waffle-weave blanket up over her, then sat down on the floor next to the bed, his head tilted back to rest against the prop of her nearest thigh. “The corner store doesn’t close until midnight, so maybe I should just nip down there and get you a bottle of ginger ale or something. Isn’t that supposed to be good?”

“Tonic water would be even better, if you can get some.”

Tonic water he already had in his fridge, and when he brought her a cold glass of it, she raised herself up on an elbow to drink it down in small sips. After she’d handed him the empty glass she could hear him set it down on the floor somewhere off to his left, then he sat down with his back to the bed again. She reached out to smooth back his thinning hair, which he seemed to like, but at some point he caught her hand and pulled it down in front of his face to nose level, then held it steady by holding its two outermost fingers milked down to a stop. Then he blew air at the middle of it. “Did you know that the Emperor Haile Selassie, instead of calling Mussolini ‘Il Duce,’ called him ‘My enema, the Douche?’ ”

She laughed weakly into her pillow. She felt like a child being entertained with bedtime jokes by her father.

“I just thought this might be an appropriate story to tell you under the circumstances …”

She smiled, feeling quite certain that even with his back to her he could tell she was smiling.

“Tell me about your husband,” he said.

“He really wasn’t so terrible. But at the same time he was. It’s hard to explain.”

“Just another guy who was sporadically vile?”

When she made a noise that was more like a reverse sniff of amusement than a laugh, he planted a small kiss in the middle of her palm. Then he said, “Are you divorced yet?”

“Not yet, but I hope to be quite soon.”

“And so now why don’t you tell me all about this psychodrama person.”

She was quiet for a moment, thinking, then said, “The thing was, he reminded me of a boy I knew the summer I was eight. I was eight and he was eight. His mother had an old dog who needed some kind of surgical attention, and the day of her appointment with my father, who was a vet, this boy (Ralphie) stayed and played with me the whole afternoon. We played Monopoly and charades and tag and baseball and croquet and whenever I’d sit down to rest for a minute he’d start shrieking ‘Play! Play! We may never see each other again!’ Just like the sorcerer in
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
screaming ‘Dance! Dance!’ ”

“It sounds pretty intense.”

“It was the most exhausting afternoon of my childhood.”

He stood up to stretch and turn off the light, then sat down on the side of the bed, next to her hip. “So what are the fashionistas in the department of English teaching their students these days?”

“Identity is a bourgeois illusion, a construct created by material objects and ideology.”

He laughed, then said he thought he might lie down for just a little bit too. “Keep you company for a while.”

She shifted herself over to make room for him, and once they were lying tightly side by side, one of his arms awkwardly supporting her head, he began to stroke her behind one of her
ears, then moved down to her mouth with little beckoning sideways caresses of his index finger, little caresses that felt both repetitive and tender — but then repetition
is
tenderness, she thought — which was when he turned to give her a quick kiss on the forehead. “To make you get better,” he whispered.

“Thank you,” she whispered back in a flirty little squeak, lulled by the furtive convenience of it all.

He stroked back her hair. “You have such beautiful hair, my darling Claire, how did it get to be so goddamn fair?”

It was from her fair German father. And her fair Danish mother. “Although my fair Danish mother is not at
all
fair emotionally. In fact, emotionally, she’s a Danish Hitler …”

“A Danish Hitler …” he said, and she could feel him smiling in the dark. “So which parent do
you
take after then?”

She swiftly turned to him, dragging the blanket with her, to bite his nearest earlobe, but he was too quick for her, hitching himself up over her to kiss her much more seriously on the mouth, and she felt a kind of triumph then, as she began to kiss him deeply back, she was all at once feeling so creamy and convalescent, willing, weak as a baby, although she did also feel that when she came up for air she should ask him if he wasn’t afraid of catching it from her. “Whatever it is?”

But he said no, he never got sick, and right after this they began to undo each other’s clothes while making drunken little whimpering noises of practical gratitude. But the whole time this was happening they both seemed to be feeling the need to console one another because they were both thinking of others, then she was afraid that her dampness wasn’t only from being aroused but also because she might have wet herself just a bit while she was throwing up. But now he was pushing down her
underpants with his thumbs and she was raising her hips to help him and this was like being a baby too, like being a baby getting her rubber pants pulled off her. But her breath. It must smell, at least slightly, of vomit. But he didn’t seem to mind.

Rain on the windshield at 2:20
A.M.
, the windshield wipers tock-tocking while she was gathering herself together to make the lunge across the wet lawn to her door.

“Except when I was throwing up,” she told him, “I had a marvellous evening,” and she gave him a quick kiss that collided with the corner of his mouth, a kiss meant to convey that she was a grown-up after all and so wasn’t going to create difficulties by expecting to see him again. “And the walk on the beach too,” she said. “It was amazing.”

He pulled her against one of his shoulders to speak into her hair. “Hey, it was just sexual perversity at Mooney’s Bay.” Then he ducked a little, to squint up, turned up her coat collar for her, gave her a kiss above an ear. “Which floor do you live on?”

“The upper. Well actually, it’s the two uppers, there’s a bit of space up under the gable, with just enough room up there for a bathroom and a bed …”

As she was climbing the stairs to her apartment she reproached herself because practically the last word she’d said to him was “bed.” What if he thought she was hinting that she was hoping to see him again? She went up the stairs to look at herself in the mirror over her bathroom sink. She slipped out of her coat and let it droop over the rim of the bathtub. She wanted to see if her low-cut taffeta suit still looked devastating but beguiling. Especially with no blouse underneath its fitted
jacket. But first she had to bare her teeth at her reflection to see if there were any little bits of food stuck between them. There weren’t, but it seemed to her that her face was looking too stiff, as if she hadn’t smiled enough. But it was also partly the flu. She thought of Tony’s hairiness and his kindness and their little island of fever and wine, but she was also feeling like a betrayer, as if she’d been unfaithful to Declan, this was perhaps why her face wasn’t looking as flushed or happy as she’d expected it to look, and to make herself feel better she recalled a photo that Judy had shown her, of a woman who’d been a patient of her brother, a psychiatrist in Kapuskasing, until the brother had ended her therapy so he could marry her. The photo was of a dignified woman in a mustard cotton shift, a skinny black braid hanging down over one skinny breast, a perfect silver necklet encircling her tall sunburned throat. There was something stern and even biblical about her as she stood holding something odd in one hand, what looked like a scroll or a diploma carved out of wood. But it was her face Claire had most studiously scrutinized, searching it for signs of a pathological vulnerability or madness. No such signs were apparent, and yet something about the photograph had made her feel sad, as if the woman, in marrying her therapist, had annexed herself to a wealthy landowner instead of cantering off to freedom on a pale horse, leaving behind her a great cloud of pale golden dust.