Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (30 page)

His recorded voice sounded tired. She waited for a few moments before she called back. Did he sound sad? She set the phone in its cradle and went down to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of wine, then went back up to her bedroom to call him again. And again tried to diagnose the depth of the exhaustion or loneliness in his voice, but the recording wouldn’t ever give her quite enough time. She dialled again, listened again. After three more calls she went down to the kitchen, but while she was making a salad, the phone rang. She ran to it, almost in terror. She couldn’t believe it could be anyone but Declan, reached telepathically through her strong bond with his recorded voice on the Institute phone. But it was only a wrong number.

That night she began a new letter to him with the words, “I always felt you had the kind of intelligence that would make a woman want to be honest with you in a way that would matter more (or at least matter differently) than honesty with a woman friend.” But then she decided that writing this might be a mistake, he might think her disloyal to other women. Or a sycophant. And so she tore the letter up and got out a new sheet of paper, this time beginning with her need to see him again. But did the word “need” sound too hysterical? She was sure that it did, and so she crumpled up this letter, too, to make another fresh start. But
this
letter, although it began very much more cheerfully, was all too soon growing longer and longer,
compounding itself, compounding banalities, compounding pleading, and so before turning out her light she tore the paper into pale-blue bits that looked up at her from her desk, tiny torn blue faces.

P
rogress (even great progress) has been made since the new year. And now that it’s spring, Claire no longer goes for walks in the direction of the Institute, now she takes her evening walks down by the river, and on one of these evenings as she’s cresting a small hill a streetlight in the hollow below her begins to fade, then die. It blooms into weak life once again just before it fails utterly, casting the most scooped-out part of the path into darkness.

She’s on the point of turning back, but then decides to go on through the dimness to the more illuminated parkette adjacent to Bank Street. But she’s not quite halfway there when she remembers that Dirk van der Meer once warned her to never walk down by the river at night, and at this same moment there’s the crack and rustle of someone making his way through the trees. She begins to run, sending small avalanches of pebbles in spurts ahead of her, then feels herself literally fly through the air to land on a sharp jut of rock. She cries out, the pain in her left knee is so extreme, but when she tries to stagger up, she
discovers that her right arm (the one she flung out in an attempt to break her fall) has turned itself into the arm of a rag doll. It’s only because there’s a small maple tree nearby that she is able, with her good arm, to pull one of its lower branches toward her and use its swingy support to draw herself up. Behind her, in the dark woods, there’s another rustle, but it’s so busily delicate that she now decides it’s a bird or some small forest animal going about its nightly business among the trees, and at last, hopping along with the help of a walking stick made out of a fallen branch and darting a look behind her every other breath, she reaches a gas station where the man at the counter calls her a cab.

Once she’s back home again she uses her left hand to do everything: run a glass of water, swallow three aspirins, ease herself with exquisite caution down onto her bed. By this time her left ankle has begun to swell, but the ache in it is bearable; now it’s her useless arm that’s turned painful — in fact the intensity of the pain surprises her since in the beginning it only felt limp and moderately sore. But now she has trouble moving it at all, and so she just tries to let it rest beside her while she waits for the pills to do their magic. But they don’t dull the pain, and a bit before dawn she pulls the phone to her with her good hand and pokes the numbers for a cab. It’s easy to get ready to go out again, she’s still dressed, and once more she hop-walks, this time down the stairs to the street.

The early-morning air is cool, effervescent as she crosses the lawn while the taxi, its lights dimmed, cruises down the street to her like a lover. She opens the cab’s front door with her left hand and slides clumsily side-saddle in beside the driver so he can reach over to close her door for her.

The sleeve of his jacket, as he reaches across her, smells of fish and cigarettes. And something else, splinters or wood chips, something outdoorsy.

“I can’t bend my arm, so I’ve probably broken it.”

He gives a quick snort. “If you’d broken it, I think you’d for damned sure know it.”

She does know it, but she can’t be bothered to argue with him as they take off through a dawn that isn’t quite morning. As they cross Billings Bridge the heavens are a grey and starless expanse of pre-dawn sky, raised an inch or two (like a window blind) above a band of burning red over the black huddles of trees in the river park.

An ambulance whines past them as they swing into the hospital parking lot.

“Looks like you’ve been pre-empted.” (This in an unpleasantly satisfied voice, a voice designed for use in addressing a malingerer.) “And so it looks like you’ll be having yourself a nice little wait.”

The gurneys are being run out to the ambulance as Claire pushes her way in through the Emergency doors. And it
does
turn out to be a long wait. An X-ray technician doesn’t come for her until over two hours later and when she asks him about the accident he says, “Two dead, three in critical condition …”

After the film is developed an exhausted intern comes to show it to her. “It’s definitely broken and it’s going to hurt a bit more than an ordinary break because it’s so close to the funny bone.” He smiles down at her. “Just one of God’s little jokes,” he tells her, “to break your arm so close to the funny bone.”

From a bright silver pail, the cast man lifts up several long gauze strips saturated in freezing wet plaster, then winds the
heavy damp bands around and around Claire’s useless arm. The wet gauze is so cold she’s afraid it will give her rheumatism. She pictures the plaster stored in a dark holding tank, deep under cold ground. “You couldn’t warm it up just a bit?”

“Your body heat will warm it.”

The doctor on call (an intensely blue-eyed woman with a sharp nose and chilly fingers) writes her a prescription for codeine. “Just for the first few days. Because of its location, the break will be particularly painful, but the good news is that it’s an unusually
clean
break —”

The pain, a deep ache that intensifies at times to an almost insupportable pain, is much worse and lasts longer than she would ever have believed possible. She begins stockpiling her codeine tablets so she can use them at night, she finds it so hard to sleep through the pain and also to sleep (as she must) on her back. She also has to type with one hand and get the patients to help her when she tries to wrap the blood-pressure cuff around patient (and impatient) arms. Although she has also become something of a star at the clinic, with her broken wing. One guy, a flirty amputee from Arnprior, even teases her and asks her if he can write his phone number on her sling.

A week later, at the hospital, when the cast man is out of the room for a few minutes, Claire goes over to his work list and sees her own birth date. He’s got the correct day, but the year is wrong. Then she sees that the name next to her birth date isn’t even her own name, it’s a man’s name: Irwin Thorson. Her own name is below Irwin Thorson’s name, then there’s the
day of her birth again, this time along with the correct year. Irwin Thorson, she sees, also broke his arm last Friday night. She finds this astounding, and while she’s waiting for the cast man to come back she sits thinking about something she once read — was it a poem? it might have been a poem — something about someone (or everyone?) meditating on the extravagance of having a separate fate, and after the cast man has come back and cut off her cast to fit her out with a new sling, she sets out in search of her star-crossed twin.

A scruffy little man who’s clearly been scratched and cut in a fight is sitting crouched in the anteroom off the X-ray room. Claire wonders if he’s high on some blissful combination of a recreational drug and morphine because when she asks him if his birthday is on June the twenty-sixth, he smiles a curiously happy smile: “Yay-us …”

“And did you break your arm last Friday night?”

“Yay-us …”

“I really find that just so incredibly strange,” she tells him. “That we were born on the same day and we broke our arms on the same day and we’ve come back on the same day to get our casts taken off.”

Yay-us, it
is
strange. But his bright little eyes tell her that he has seen things a thousand times stranger. Then the nurse from the cast room comes down the hall to tell him he can go home now.

After the nurse has gone off again, Claire watches her doppelgänger roll his green hospital gown into a loose bolt of cloth, then shove it up into the armpit of the arm that’s been broken. He uses his good hand to tuck the gown’s leftover sleeves into
his sling, and as a final debonair touch he grins at her, then capes his windbreaker protectively over the whole arrangement before he takes off down the hallway.

So there goes her twin, more or less to the tune of “There Goes My Heart.” Her handsome and toothless and tricky thief of a twin. But couldn’t there be astrologically mitigating circumstances? Their different years of birth as well as different rising signs? And all the other planets aligned in different (or even opposing) skies of the horoscope? Besides, this thief was a charmer who makes her remember the boy at the fish store confusing her with someone who was another kind of double. But if she should meet herself would she know herself? She tries to imagine it. She tries to imagine seeing herself come walking toward her along Bank Street. She would be herself, but she would also (is
this
fair?) be her mother. It would make her want to run.

That night as she walks along the grassy rim of the lake, worry about the future makes her feel stuffed up in her sinuses. It would only take one unexpected expense (probably dental) to make the whole wobbling house of cards come toppling down. She sits on a park bench and pictures herself seated in a bright and bleak kitchen. But instead of Steff standing at the sink and preaching to her about her deficiencies as a housewife, she’s married to Declan and he’s standing at the sink and preaching to her about the body and it’s all very dreary. But something dead is being bobbed on the water: a dead gull, or part of a gull. She watches it being washed to the edge of the shoreline in the grey, evening-warm wavelets, the whole lake softly grey by this time — both water and evening sky grey
with the lakeside, fog-grey of twilight — and only then does she see that the gull’s head and body have been completely eaten away and what is being lifted a little on each incoming wave are its wings and its bone-cage, the bone-cage so white and washed clean it looks as synthetic as the bird people use when they play badminton.

She stands for a long time thinking about how beautiful its wings are, and how sad life is, and as if to confirm this, later in the evening she smells an odour of exhaust fumes contaminating the mist in the van der Meer back garden. She doesn’t close the windows, thinking it will soon dissipate, drift past, but at the same time she has a vision of the whole world filling up with toxic fumes until the air everywhere smells like an underground parking garage. And besides, the evil air is still lingering, and so, like a woman fearing a rainstorm, she at last runs from room to room trying to force down the windows with only one hand.

Although she’s never been good at sports, that night she dreams that she’s playing tennis on a red clay court, running and whacking the ball with such a brilliant ferocity that when she wakes up she feels how much more genuine her dream rage was than the orderly fury she used to pretend to feel when Declan would urge her to punch at a plump cushion he was holding in front of his genitals as he step-danced around her. It also seems to have something to do with her arm having been broken and then immobilized for so long. The rage has been building up with the mobility as if it’s a future power she can count on.

A few weeks after her arm has healed again, Dr. Tenniswood tells her that while he’s seeing patients for counselling on Friday afternoon he wants her to take his car and drive out to the village of Hoyt with a carton of syringes and a two-month supply of insulin for an old patient of his. “She lives all alone out there, and there’s no pharmacy nearby that will make a delivery.”

Claire gets out the road map, but discovers that Hoyt is well southwest of Ottersee — a disappointment — and so she’ll have to turn off the highway at least forty minutes before she gets to Declan’s town.

When she slides into Dr. Tenniswood’s car and turns on the radio it’s tuned to a station that plays classical music. But she decides she can’t tolerate the show’s announcer, a man who seems to her to be an archivist of his own voice. It occurs to her that this might be a clever thing to say at a party. But she no longer goes to parties. What she instead does is in fact exactly what Declan once told her she must do: she stays home alone. (Alone with her thoughts, alone with her body.) She’s even become the sort of recluse who does nothing more original than sit and stare into space. Stare into space and think. What is the difference between grief and thought? There have been times when she’s been convinced there is no difference.