Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (26 page)

W
hile Declan was away in China, a terrible excitement took possession of Claire, and one windy evening when she was walking in the park with Judy, she told her that she was once again unable to sleep.

“You speak as if not being able to sleep is some kind of crime.”

“Isn’t it a crime not to be able to admit to myself what’s causing it?”

“But who can say? It could be anything.”

“Or I’m a manic depressive.”

“It could be an electrolyte imbalance, it could be demineralization, it could be a hundred things. You should go to see a naturopath. There are these two brothers who are simply totally amazing. Walter and Wallace. But Walter is the best. Walter is the one I went to.”

“I think I’ve already heard of these two legendary brothers,” said Claire.

The house where Mr. Spaulding was “camping out” was a white cottage wi/th green shutters and a tiny walled garden. The garden had a gate with a latch, and there were teepees of dark wood slats already protecting the rose bushes against the future cold winds of winter.

Claire pressed the bell and the door was immediately opened by an almost bald man who led her into a narrow polished hallway. In fact, everything in it seemed to have been oiled, even Mr. Spaulding’s head and the leaves of the rubber plants she could glimpse in his parlour were looking oiled, but the house was also smelling, bizarrely but pleasantly, like a field of hay.

“Come in here and find yourself a chair. I’ll be with you in five minutes.”

So she went into the first room to the left of the hallway and sat down in a big brown velvet chair and tried to read the titles on the spines of the books. There were also baskets everywhere. They were grouped on tables and lined up on the tops of the low bookcases. They were hung on the walls like the shields of not-very-warlike tribesmen.

When Mr. Spaulding came back to see her again, he sat on the ottoman directly across from her and intently gazed for a few moments into her face. “You have a heart murmur,” he told her.

“How can you tell that?”

“From your nose. There’s a cleft at the bottom of it.”

“I thought you used the eyes for diagnosis.”

“The eyes too. Let’s have a look at them.”

She took off her dark glasses and Mr. Spaulding fitted over his head what appeared to be a sort of belt with thick rectangular lenses in it. He then held up a little wand of light and leaned forward to shine it into her left eye, into her right eye,
then he made several notes. “There’s weakness in the kidneys and the liver and the heart,” he finally told her. “Also, your lymph glands are backing up. In fact, you’re on your way to having what is known in iridology as a lymphatic rosary.”

What else could be left? “What can we do about all of that?”

“We’re going to have to detoxify you.” He made more little notes for her on three slips of blue paper, telling her what to eat and in what proportions, showing her which foods were yin and which foods were yang, and telling her that she would have to give up dairy products entirely.

After he’d finished looking into her eyes he told her to follow him to the parlour. Here they sat across from one another at a polished table while Mr. Spaulding kept using a pinched-together finger and thumb to precisely draw two or three strands of what remained of his hair back behind his left ear. Then he asked her a few questions and made even more notes.

Balding Spaulding, she secretly dubbed him as he was giving her a tiny paper cup to spit her saliva into, then he also handed her a bottle for her “other contribution.” The washroom was upstairs, he told her, first door on her left.

When she came back down with her paper cup and her bottle, Mr. Spaulding carried them into the sunroom off the parlour, then sat with his back to her at a card table cluttered with glass jars.

But after a while she heard him go over to a sink and wash everything away. Then she heard him sit down again. One of his knees was jiggling, she could feel the vibrations, and in tandem with its jiggling she became aware of the beating of her heart.

At last he came back into the parlour again. He sat down at the gleaming table and transferred the test numbers onto a
sheet of yellow paper. When he had finished his calculations he looked up at her. It was the look she’d been waiting for. The knife. “You’re in rough shape, girl.”

“In what way?” she asked him.

“First of all, your body salts are so high I can’t measure them. Forty is the highest number for body salts and yours are higher than that. Your body is too acid. It’s also throwing off one hundred times more dead cells than it should, and that, translated, means it’s dying faster than it’s rebuilding itself …”

She stared at him. But wasn’t everyone’s body dying faster than it was rebuilding itself? Wasn’t that life, and the story of life? That the body died?

But Mr. Spaulding had more bad news to deliver and no time to waste. “The big thing to worry about is your uric acid reading. It puts you smack in the middle of the zone for a major heart attack. You could drop dead at any minute, it’s that bad.”

There was a silence until she said, “I hope that hearing all this isn’t going to make things worse. For my heart. If it’s in the shape you say it’s in.”

“I believe it’s best to tell the truth. And, besides, there’s some good news. There are no cancer cells anywhere in your body. So! Think positively!”

As she was pulling on her jacket, he told her not to be too depressed by so much bad news. “It’s the times we live in,” he told her. “The
times
are the pathogen.” He also spoke of the many lives he had saved. People with cancer. People with neurological diseases. He had also effected more everyday cures. He had, he told her, cured a baby’s colic with bottles of catnip tea. “I’m also pleased to see that you are wearing natural-fibre clothes. That’s good.” But as they were saying goodbye at his
door he told her she had a butterfly-shaped rash on her face. “I noticed it the moment I saw you standing out there on the doorstep. The mark of the wolf,” he said. “Lupus erythematosus. An often fatal disease. So you be sure to keep out of the sun now, until we can know more.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of it.”

“The body turns on itself and attacks its own tissues. It can go for any organ. Even the heart.”

Her poor little heart, it was beating terribly. “But what has the sun got to do with it?”

“The sun is a killer if you have lupus.” But then he told her that he wouldn’t know for certain if she had it until he’d sent the samples of her urine and saliva to a group of researchers who ran a big diagnostic computer in Los Angeles. “Down to my friends in California,” he said.

It was a cold evening for August and the eaves of the row houses up on the hill had been hit by a low golden fall light. Steff would be shocked to see that her winter hats and mittens were still out in the hall at the end of the summer. He’d always had a more housewifely sense of the seasons than she did, and when they were married he was forever after her to wash and put away the winter clothes early in March. Now that he was no longer living with her she didn’t do this, and so on the shelf above the coat rack there was still a hilly wool banquet for moths, along with a small hill of mismatched suede gloves and mittens.

The following Tuesday, when she got a call from the office of her own doctor, Dr. Hardy, telling her that she was two years overdue for her general check-up, Claire made an apologetic
appointment. She had lost all faith in orthodox medicine. She wasn’t sure she had all that much faith in holistic medicine either. But on Thursday afternoon she did go off to see Dr. Hardy, a woman who wore her white hair in a bun and who pinned silver sprays of heather to her flowered dresses. Dr. Hardy had very high young breasts for such an old woman; she was also fond of stuffing Claire’s pockets with grandmotherly little gifts: sample bottles of vitamins, tiny tubes of medicated shampoo.

Claire dreaded making the confession that would prove her lack of faith in Dr. Hardy, but by this time the computer in California had sent back its coded report and Mr. Spaulding had phoned her to translate it for her and she had new reason to feel fear on her own behalf: uric acid in the danger level, and she had, or was on her way to having, lupus erythematosus. But when she told Dr. Hardy about the computer in Los Angeles, Dr. Hardy said she could think of better uses for forty-five dollars than having her spit sent off to California. “We’ll run a few blood tests on you, for non-nuclear antibodies, but I very much doubt we’ll find anything.” She also spoke about medical fashions. “Tongues used to be what they looked at, but nobody looks at tongues any more.” Not that long ago, she told Claire, she was walking past a dress shop on Rideau Street when she happened to see an exact replica of a dress her mother made for her when she was in high school. The same voile, the same sleeves.

The last weekend in September was hotter than the hottest days of midsummer, and Claire, who’d worn her new jacket out to the market, kept it on while she sat in the shade of the
rowan tree in the back garden to read the Saturday papers.

But the slippery jacket was too hot, and so she pulled it off and laid it beside her, down on the dried and ill-looking lawn. Sunlight moved over its silky spots when the wind shifted in its jungly summer way through the leaves high up in the trees.

At five o’clock, when she climbed up into her hot apartment again, the light inside went too active and dark, after the brilliant sunlight. She fitted the jacket over the back of one of the kitchen chairs, then took an ice cube from the freezer, and as she was drawing it down her throat and arms, thoughts of Declan and the warm breeze blowing in through the open window made her feel light on her feet, happy. On her way into the front room, she stopped to look at her face in the hall mirror. There was no mark of the wolf, no mark of the butterfly. The butterfly had flown.

A
spot of sunlight might have moved over the leopard spots if any sun had been able to make its way down into so deep a room. As it was, the sun only burned green in the grass up near the top of the basement window, up in the high veld of the garden.

And now that they’d finished their hard work for the day and were lying on the mats, talking, Declan, who’d been lying on one side, resting his chin in a hand, rolled over on his back and raised an arm straight up to squint at his watch.

Claire studied his raised arm. She longed to reach up and touch it, draw her hand down the length of it. It was a strong arm, but pale. He always stayed pale, even at the end of summer he was pale.

She was startled to hear him say, “We have exactly five minutes left.” And then after a few moments of silence that felt oddly careful, “You have five minutes to touch me. Wherever you like. Anywhere on my body.”

His voice was so expressionless that she couldn’t tell if this was a therapeutic dare or something he really meant. It even seemed possible that, being intuitive, he’d picked up her longing to run a hand down his arm. But this wasn’t the way he had said it, she was convinced it was something he was daring her to do, it felt like a watchful test he was putting her through, a test rigged to make her look wrong and hysterically modest.

And so a silence that felt as if it planned to turn itself into a very long silence began to take root in the Room. There were five or six seconds, an allotment, in which she might have shown amazement — in which, as a patient, she might have said “Are you out of your
mind?
” — but almost at once this allotment ran out.

They lay in silence and more silence. She most certainly should have said something at once, now it was too late to speak out in surprise. Because if you were going to speak out in surprise, damn it, you couldn’t wait twenty-four seconds to do it. She laid a doubtful hand on his diaphragm, then watched, pretending to be mesmerized as it moved up and down with his breathing.

He was wearing a grey shirt and jeans and although these were the sort of clothes he always wore out in the country, they added to her feeling that he was not quite a doctor. Not a doctor in a suit who sat behind a desk. After a few more awful moments of doubt, she dared herself to move down toward his penis. Cock, she thought, although it was not a word she could say except when she was in bed. It also seemed to her that it would take more courage than she could ever possess to make her touch it. Whatever tender feelings she’d had for him were gone. She had no sexual feeling at all for him and was convinced that he had no
sexual feeling for her. But it’s what he thinks I don’t have the courage to do, she thought. And so at last she made her hand creep down to it and shyly cap it.