Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (28 page)

When she got to the car-rental place and turned in the keys, the men behind the counter looked stunned by her too. After she’d turned away from them she could feel their joined gaze on the backs of her legs as she was walking through the open
doorway and down again into the last of the hot sunlight. Then she could hear two sets of footsteps come down the stairs behind her and when she looked back at the rental lot from the first intersection, she saw that the two men were carefully examining her car; one of them crouched down by a front tire, the other one inside it, hunched in an ominously listening way at the steering wheel. They think I wrecked it, she thought.

Children she met on the walk home stared openly at her too, but the adults she encountered, after the most furtive glances in her direction, looked away, their city eyes lit by circumspect city fear.

She needed to buy something to eat, but she didn’t want to go into Habib’s, she didn’t want to be kindly observed, she couldn’t bear it, and so she walked up the hill to the convenience store on the corner and in less than a minute she was breathing in the sweetish smell of darkly freckled bananas and old glassy candies wrapped in twists of antique cellophane. She wanted to buy a grapefruit, but the grapefruits were all dented and soft. She’d never once dared to buy anything canned here, fearing the ill effects from cans containing spaghetti and beans canned decades ago. The old Chinese woman who owned the store was behind the counter, and Claire, feeling shaky but also famished, bought a can of sardines from her, picturing tarnished silver fishes packed in ancient oil as she wondered how many years they had been lying pressed in their tin in this dim little store.

Then at last home, where Dirk van der Meer, in his grey shorts, was raking the leaves from the grass on the front lawn. When he saw her he smiled. “Hey!”

“Hey,” she said in a small reedy voice, reaching into her bag for her dark glasses. Which she now could find with no trouble
at all, and so she put them on just in time to stumble into the deeper dark of the house.

Up in the safety of her own apartment, she lay in the stale dimness and let herself cry. She felt as if she could cry forever and never dry out. But then she recalled her mother, years and years ago, dressed in her pale pink satin dressing gown and carrying on shamelessly. Quilted silver satin lapels, her hair cut in a duck-tail — a varnished yellow on top, a chevron of dark hair beneath — her body writhing and bouncing around on the bed like a crazed little pony while she’d moaned at them, “I’m a terrible mother, I’ve failed miserably, you are all so terribly
spoiled
,” Claire and her brothers cooing back at her in their frightened, appeasing voices, “No, no, darling Mummie, you’re a good mother, you really are,” then reaching out to take quick little pats at her, as if they’d feared she would give off a shock like the shock that came from the electric fences the farmers would put up to keep the cows in. I’d better watch myself, she decided, I’d better watch my step. But she lay on her bed and cried until the outside darkness turned the dim bedroom even darker, and sometimes, in spite of all the deadness coming from the loss of Declan and the loss of the world through Declan, there were moments when her tears seemed to spring from some hot spring of pure health as she cried bitterly, almost sweetly, with the worst pain in her throat.

The next morning she called the receptionist at the Institute and made an appointment to see Declan the following Monday in town. And she wouldn’t stay talking things over with him either, she would just go in and pay the receptionist
in advance for the hour and then when they were alone she would make her announcement that she was leaving and then she would leave.

But on her way to the phone she detoured into her bedroom and unzipped her plastic storage bag and stood breathing in its unpleasant ether and taffeta smell for a minute or two, trying to decide what she would wear for the final visit.

Getting ready for her appointment three days later and even knowing that everything was over and must be over between them forever from now on, she still carefully dressed herself in her beige drawstring blouse, sheer as chiffon, a miniature sampler of tiny x’s stitched across its bodice, then pulled on her black pantyhose and her most narrow black skirt.

At the Institute the receptionist told her to go to the corner room at the back, the one whose windows looked out onto the park. It was the room she’d been shown into the day she first came to see Declan. Which seemed like yet another sign from fate or the beyond that she must leave him. But an ill tingle in her heart still seemed to be telling her that she was not yet convinced. All she could think was, How will we be with one another? She did know one thing: he would not make the sort of mistake that Steff, wanting forgiveness, would make: smiling a little boy’s sheepish or jokey smile. He would know better than to do that, would know that it was not a situation that could be made light of, would know that to play their parts, a kind of convalescent dignity would be required. It also occurred to her that she must not be sitting, she should be standing. She should be standing and pretending to look out the window.
And so she did look out, both seeing and not seeing the Institute park. She remembered his arm barring the way after he had hurt her, she remembered his voice, she remembered what he had said with it. What she could not remember (because at the time she could not bear to look) was his face. She thought, I can’t remember what he looks like! But then his face, or the memory of his face, appeared before her and she saw (or remembered) his gallant impersonal sadness and the way it could turn him into someone she would feel she could absolutely rely on. Although not until the moment he stopped being sad for the sake of an idea or the world. But at this same moment she heard his voice out in the hallway, speaking to the receptionist.

So soon!

And her heart began to race as the capacity for thinking any thought at all left her.

He came into the room then and closed the door carefully behind him. She could see how drained he was looking, as if he hadn’t slept at all since the afternoon she’d walked up the steps and out into the day. But his hair was shiny and soft — he must have just washed it — and he was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, open at the throat, and whatever his thoughts were, he looked like a man who was doing his best not to think them.

Because she had just washed her own hair, it even seemed to her it was quite possible that they’d both been shampooing their hair at the same time last night, both of them thinking of this moment when they would see one another again. It made her feel that they must understand one another. She even had to remind herself that she was afraid of him. Because she didn’t
feel afraid. She only felt an almost unbearable pity for both of them. It was only to break the awkward silence between them that she finally said she didn’t think they could go on the way they were going.

He didn’t deny it. He only stared down at her left hand, at rest on the treatment table.

She looked down at his hand then too, holding hard on to the rim of the table, so close to her own hand, and it did not seem like a hand that had hurt her. It looked like a beautiful and honest hand. A hand that knew (with all its heart) what tenderness was. It was only with the greatest effort that she was able to make herself say, “So I think I really will have to go this time.”

As she said this she was sure she could feel his whole body listening. She had to remind herself that he had been trained to listen and so was able to listen with the humility of one who has learned how to listen. He was listening too much to say one single word to her.

So that she felt she had to be the one to say, “And not ever come back.”

There was a long silence which he broke at last with a question that proved he hadn’t yet lost his ability to surprise her. “And so we part friends then?”

She couldn’t even look up at him when she said yes.

He held out his hand then, not as if he wanted to help her up from the table, but as if he wanted to shake hands with her.

And then they did shake hands. Of all the curious ways they had touched each other this seemed to her the oddest.

Then it was time for her to go.

He quickly went to stand in the narrow doorway. Did he want her to embrace him? If she did give in and do that she knew she would never leave him.

But as she brushed by him, it seemed to her that his eyes were painfully moist and that he wanted her to go quickly.

And so she walked straight through the Institute and out into the still afternoon and she didn’t look back.

W
alking down the steps from the Institute, she’d been lightheaded with grief, and by the time she was walking in the cool fall air she was feeling the amazed and sickly effervescent euphoria of someone who’s survived the funeral of someone deeply loved: I’m breathing, I’m alive, I’ll never see Declan again.

She’d planned to stop off at the Sunshine Trading Company but when she got to where it was (or where it was supposed to be) it was no longer there. And so she walked back up Bank Street to the health food store near Gilmour.

As she stepped into Herb and Spice, a voice called out to her from down at the back by the grain bins, a voice belonging to a man she vaguely knew. Tom Lunman, his name was, he was a skiing pal of Steff’s. He held up a small steel trowel to salute her. “How you been keeping?”

“Pas mal.”

“Pas mal, pas terrific?”

She gazed at him keenly, but he appeared merely to be making polite conversation. “C’est ça.”

But after this it seemed to her that he was gearing his shopping to her shopping, and that he was matching her, kefir for tahini, rice bread for spelt bread, millet for millet. They then ended up together in the line for the cash.

Out in the street he offered her a lift.

“Wonderful. I’ve moved, though. Down to Ottawa South.”

He said Ottawa South was perfect, he’d been planning to go out to the school of engineering at Carleton anyway, he could just drop her off down there and then nip over to Bronson.

She couldn’t think of one single topic for conversation as they were getting into his car, but it was all right, he was talkative enough for the two of them, he was already telling her about a recent trip to Lunenburg and about a squash tournament he’d taken part in, in Wolfville, but when they reached her street he sat and stared straight ahead, all energy drained from him.

“Thanks so much, this was really great.”

He roused himself then, to turn and stare at her with an awkward, almost ill-tempered hunger. “Do you ski?”

She gazed with a kind of dread at the green slopes of the lawns on her little street. What month was this?

“Not right now, of course,” he reassured her. “But soon.” His self-conscious laugh was almost a cackle. “When the snow flies.”

She said no, she was too much of a coward.

“Coward?”

“Don’t want to break my little bones.”

“Do you swim?”

“No.”

“Do you dance?”

“Not in public.”

She could see his eyes watching her eyes, trying to figure her out. She could see him trying mightily to smile. He said, “In private, then.”

She shook her head, smoothed her hand down her skirt while she could feel him looking toward some melancholy horizon of his own. But I’m trying so hard, she couldn’t very well say to him, I’m trying so hard not to hurt you, can’t you see that? I don’t want to say no to you, please don’t make me. And so she said that she’d been really incredibly busy at work lately.

Again he stared at her. Then at last giving up on her, he let himself out of the car, came quickly around to open her door, stood while she gathered her provisions together. She stumbled out, flushed, ill-equipped for his disdain but ready for it. If suffering his disdain was what it would take to set her free.

“Well goodbye, then,” he said, and with surprising energy he walked around to his own side again, let himself with swift heaviness in, turned on the ignition.

Through the car window, another surprise: he made his mouth pucker up into a kiss.

It threw her. But as she was walking up the sidewalk to her door, she decided it wasn’t a kiss after all, he was saying something to her, he was telling her to loosen up.

Words from somewhere — but she couldn’t remember where — words that were like a deranged chant in a children’s game of hopscotch kept repeating themselves in her head: Once you have seen God (hop, hop) what is the remedy (hop, skip) what is
the remedy (hop, hop) what is the remedy (hop, skip). She thought of how nearly insane this chant was (like any chant) and finally the only way she could stop it was to put in a call to Ottersee. But Declan wasn’t taking his calls, his answering machine was on. And so she sat on her bed, her hands clamped between her warm thighs, waiting for him to pick up his messages and call her back. Her feet were chilled in red sandals that had the cracked-lacquer look of cracked nail polish, and she was fighting crying and knew she would lose control of her voice completely when she heard him say her name.