Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (27 page)

Even beneath the denim she could feel how small and soft it was. It was as if they were both now incredibly young, pre-sexual, if children were ever young enough to be that. But she didn’t feel like a child either, she was too tired and too afraid. More afraid than a child would feel. He’s lost, she thought, and it seemed to her that she must take care not to hurt him, now that he had crawled so dangerously far out on a limb, far out into the weak little leaves at the end of a branch that dipped and sprang and then nearly swept him onto hard ground. And yet now that she had touched him down there —
down there, down there
— “down there” no longer a euphemism but turned into a drumbeat up in her head, she was convinced that she could feel his excitement, could feel he was too excited to show any physical evidence of it. His whole body seemed tense to her, in a state of held-in rigid tingle while it was waiting. But he was like a little boy waiting. There was a roaring inside her head. Think! But she couldn’t. Unless she was only thinking. But if she was only thinking, then thinking wasn’t at all able to help her. She thought, I have failed at everything. She moved her hand back up to his diaphragm and they politely remained that way, frozen into position while they watched her hand slightly rise and fall with his breathing until the final minutes had ticked by and they could at last make their awkward little arrangements to stand up.

And when they said goodbye they also said it awkwardly, pretending not to be awkward, and she felt weak and stunned walking up the stone steps into the light, as if she had not
understood his way of being close and so had given him a push that set him adrift onto a fast-moving body of water. She thought, he’s a passionate person, and even if what he did felt weird and loveless there could still be a kind of watchful love in it. Still, he hadn’t looked at her when he’d said what he said to her. If he had loved her, wouldn’t he have looked at her?

The little gypsy madonna was sitting in the open door of her Beetle again, just as before, but today she was dressed in faded and very brief frayed shorts that showed off a good tan and her thick-ankled legs. She had also cleverly knotted a flowered blouse into a midriff-blouse and was wearing a feather choker. The birthmark, mulberry-stained, was bleeding its lowest teardrops down into the flamingo-pink ruff of feathers. So openly drawn attention to in this way, the birthmark (or burn mark?) seemed more like a fashion statement than a handicap.

Claire felt humbled by the girl, by her youthful willingness to not mind having Declan see — for all this sex and exotica had to be for Declan — that she wasn’t at all afraid to look as if she’d made a big effort for him, and after a moment’s hesitation, she greeted the girl with the same hi as before, and the girl, just as before, man-voiced and young, answered, “Hi there.”

Driving home, she kept trying to remember a poem about love, something about the whole process being a lie, unless, crowned by excess, it broke its way forcefully through from something (she couldn’t remember what) to find something deeper — she thought the deeper thing might be a well — and then there was the part about Anthony and Cleopatra being right, something about their having shown the way, and then the lines she was sure of: “I love you or I do not live at all.” He
was only trying to crown it by excess, she finally but also with great and uneasy doubt decided, and although his doing it made him seem like a child, she was the one who was really a child and so wasn’t willing to help him do it.

S
he couldn’t sleep, not even after her nightly rituals: three aspirins, camomile tea made with three tea bags instead of two, a hot shower. But someone else was also awake, she could see another light burning when she went to her bedroom window to look out. Someone who was perhaps studying late behind an upstairs light across the street. And so her heart felt at least a little bit eased, it was such a consolation to know that she now had a companion in sleeplessness.

Dr. Tenniswood was overbooked the next afternoon, although when Claire got a call from Mr. Wilcox, an established malingerer, she promised to fit him in as well, mainly because she was feeling too exhausted to say no. The days when she used to worry that Dr. Tenniswood’s patients would abandon him seemed to be over. She used to sit at her desk early some mornings and think, what if you had a clinic and nobody came. What if, what if, what if. But now she was finding it hard to pay any attention to the patients at all. What she really
wanted to do was put on her dark glasses and go out for a walk along the canal. Go out for a walk and think.

But when she drove down to Ottersee to see Declan the following Thursday he was openly cool to her, and after they had gone through their grounding and breathing exercises for the afternoon he told her he wanted her to walk in a particular way.

As he was doing a quick demonstration for her, she tried walking behind him, a dancer trying to duplicate the movements of an obsessed choreographer.

He broke from their circle, then walked backwards to watch her. “
No
,” he moaned in a low voice that seemed to carry within it a contemptuous whimper. “You haven’t got it right! I’ll have to show you again, so watch more closely this time.” And then his voice dropped to become almost inaudible — it was like a child’s voice, she thought, when a child wants to say something obscene or cruel — and in this new and young and tauntingly tiny voice he said, “You’ll never get men to look at you on the street if you walk like that.” She knew exactly the kind of voice it was being said in too, it was the kind of voice that said: This is supposed to sound as if you are not meant to hear it, but you really
are
meant to hear it, you are meant to hear it more than you’ve ever been meant to hear anything in your whole goddamn
life
.

Wounded, her first impulse was, as always, not to show it. But then she spotted a small refinement she’d missed on his first demonstration and so tried to incorporate it into the next walkaround she did for him.

With another careening whimper he cried, “No! Not like
that!
Like
this!
”

She couldn’t see the difference. She tried again, feeling lost, an imbecile, she was so convinced that he’d already decided she was pathetic and droopy, too dumb to learn the tango.

“Christ,” he said, and his voice was again the new and soft and terrible voice, “I can’t see why you can’t
get
this, it really isn’t that difficult at
all
.”

She kept trying and trying and still not getting it. It was like being an out-of-work dancer and working out with a deranged dance master. It was like dancing in hell.

But finally, after casting a bleak look at her, he said in a spitefully weary voice, “Oh what the hell, let’s do something else,” and he told her to lie face down on the mat.

Thank God, at least now she would be able to relax for a bit, and so she let her belly sink into the mat, then rested her head sideways on her peacefully folded arms. She even began to breathe deep down in her abdomen to impress him. Herr Doktor, Herr Enemy, she thought, recalling a walk she’d taken with Libi to Strathcona Park and how they’d stretched out on the sun-warmed silk linings of their black raincoats and read aloud to each other from
Ariel
. But now Declan was straddling her, just above her hips, pinning her torso to the floor between the quick vice of his knees, and so she began to moan a little, trying to shrug him off. But he seemed not to hear, or had decided to pretend not to, for he was now digging his left thumb into a painful point at the back of her neck and holding her head down while using his right hand to keep it turned sideways and clamped to the carpet. Tears came to her eyes as she tried to lift her head, but he shoved it back down again. It was like drowning or being smothered except that there was also the pain. She saw how the grey canvas cushion was beginning to
get wet with the tears that were now running like clear sap from her eyes and nose. By this time she could also hear herself wailing, a high keening wail, but even as she was wailing she was aware of trying to keep her wails within the bounds of good taste. A terrible sort of partnership even began to be established between them — her cries weaving in and out among his shortened breaths, which were almost immediately the explosive piston breaths of someone who was using all of his strength to fiercely hold something down, and while this unbearable pressing down was happening she was more and more feeling untethered — buoyed up, almost — by curious floating moments of feeling nothing at all, and it was at the end of one of these floating moments — for she was now in pain once again — that she realized that there hadn’t been any other cars parked beside the house when she’d swept up the driveway just after three. We are all alone here, she thought, and yet to be afraid because of this seemed foolish, dangerous even, terror would make her even more his quarry. And so terror made her grab for common sense: it was a test, he was testing her to see how hard she would scream, she had only to scream with her whole heart to get him to stop, and so she let out a great (but still somehow tremulous) howl, and as she did so she sucked in a sickening whiff of dust from the carpet, the Room by now swimming all around her, swimming and whirling — her watch-face, the cushions — the pain was making them bob, the pain was turning the grey carpet into a river, but just at the point when she seemed to have reached a high meadow of pure pain and was about to black out, he rolled off her and told her she was now free to sit up.

But she wasn’t, at that moment, able to sit up.

“Are you all right?”

The Room was still a limping merry-go-round, its mats and cushions doing their slow-motion dip and spin all around her. She raised herself up on one arm and drew the back of her free hand up over her damp forehead. “I don’t know.”

He ran a hand down one of her arms, then said in a more strained voice than she had ever before heard him use, “You could have fought me, you could have tried to buck me off. You could have
kicked
.”

She didn’t answer. She was still feeling odd, a bit dizzy.

He stood, then held out both of his hands to her, pulled her up. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

Again she didn’t answer, she had to get to her skirt, pull it up over her shorts. She held on to the back of a chair for a moment although the Room had by now come to a standstill. Really she didn’t feel anything at all, she only felt incredibly tired, too tired to look down at her fingers feeling for the slots for her buttons.

But when she was ready to make her way out of the Room, he barred the doorway with his right arm. Like a boyfriend, she thought. Like a boy.
I will not let thee go except thou bless me
. “Before you go,” he said in a low voice that now seemed to be filled with feeling for her, “tell me you’re okay.”

“I’m okay.” But her voice was a new voice that she had never used before, the voice of a woman taking (with a great and detached medical calm) her own pulse, and then he — but with reluctance, she felt — let her pass.

“So I’ll see you next week, then,” she heard his voice say as she was walking toward the stairs to outside.

Without looking back she answered yes.

Going up the stone stairs into the sunlight, she warned herself to compose her face to meet the critical gaze of the caravan girl sitting in the open doorway of her Beetle, but as she was stepping out into the day she could see only the long strips of stubble fields lying in the heat haze of the buzzing afternoon light.

So he had no one coming, then. There were only the two of us here. Although the children were now at the bottom of the garden, running at the windy edge of her attention like bright little flags. She got into the car and drove it carefully down the laneway as if she had to listen and feel her way over every bump and hollow. But when she got out to the highway she had to sit for several moments, unable to decide which way she should turn. But once she had remembered and turned and then was out in the flow of traffic the world ordered itself: highway, direction, fields, the city. Her neck hurt her and her back was on fire, but the ache in her arms and eyes was the worst. And where were her sunglasses? She reached down into her shoulder bag and felt her way among loose peanuts and pens and tubes of lipstick, but she couldn’t find them. She could barely see, the glare of the day was so bright, but she nevertheless drove on, squinting and now and then even whimpering a little while the car kept drifting toward the highway’s soft shoulder. The only way she could bring it back on course once again was to think of the pavement as an asphalt conveyor belt, bearing her home. A summer’s heat was also draining all the life out of the fall afternoon. It was as hot and sad as an afternoon in high summer, the white undersides of the aspen leaves
blown back by the wind. She thought it must be the wind that was making her think of the trees as runners, their goal their obsession, not a person. She felt a dull envy of them; of them and of everyone with the good luck to be unlike herself and, lulled by them, she must have dropped off for a moment because her heart was startled by a flung scatter of pebbles against metal — in her dream, someone was throwing stones against her bedroom window — but then she understood that it was only the car’s tires hitting a belt of loose gravel and then someone was saying “If you get my drift …” as in the startled drift of the car sideways she was again jolted awake. But a few miles later she must have briefly dropped off again because she was all at once on water, on a canal, and the long moan of a tugboat was warning her away from another boat — a cry of green racing by her, outraged, its passing lights flashing.

At the first traffic light coming back into town she was more awake and all at once aware that she was being watched by someone in the green car stopped next to hers. She turned to see a sharp-nosed and sunburned fair man gazing over at her in dumbfounded wonder. But when he saw her see him, he looked quickly away. And then she did the same, as if the sight of his embarrassment had caused her to feel an unbearable discomfort. She was afraid to crane up to look at herself in the rear-view mirror after this, she was too afraid of the emotional disarray she would find there, too convinced that her face would look disassembled, hardly human.