Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (32 page)

A little after seven Judy comes over to ask her if she wants to go to the movies again, and ten minutes later they are already on their way in the hazily cool spring evening, rain over, and now that she’s actually out, away from the apartment, Claire feels all at once bathed in the particular pleasure of going out to a movie. To go out with a woman friend is also wonderfully pleasant, nothing to worry about except will the movie be a good movie, nothing to look at but the chartreuse haze on the willows and aspens growing on the embankment down by the river, or the way, when Judy shifts gears, the peacock eyes of her green shawl are revealed, a spilled family of blank-eyed blue moons falling through the shawl’s shifty glitter.

In the movie the husband, an American senator who loves his wife, is tempted to have an affair with his stunning although somewhat neurasthenic assistant. The wife tries to woo him back by making love to him and then huskily whispering in a tumbled, flushed moment, “You have exactly five minutes to do something wonderful to my body.…”

Claire can’t focus on the movie at all after this. Is it some kind of joke then? A joke everyone knows? Or did Declan see this movie and then decide to try a variation of this line out on her? Either way, she finds his lack of originality painful. It seems sleazy and sad, unless she can come up with a new way to think about it. Still, his having borrowed the idea from a
movie is better than his having picked it up from a joke. She sits hunched down in the dark and listens to Judy laugh at something the senator has just said to his adoring assistant. Whatever it was she missed it and doesn’t even care that she missed it. The air from the air-conditioner is also freezing her feet in her flimsy sandals and one of her breasts aches. She thinks of Declan carefully weighing her left breast, her right breast, trying to decide if her breasts were pregnant breasts.

“Have you ever heard that before?” she asks Judy as they are crossing the parking lot to go back to the van. She’s walking with her cold hands shoved into the clasp of her armpits. “That you-have-exactly-five-minutes-to-do-something-wonderful-to-my-body? I mean, is it in the public domain or something?”

Judy turns to smile at her, then smiles up at the night sky as if it’s her lover. “God! If it isn’t, it should be!”

They drive home along the canal, its hundreds of lights in dark water, but now the beauty of the night has been contaminated for Claire, there isn’t a street here that she hasn’t walked along thinking her unrealistic and foolish thoughts, and as they are swinging along Echo Drive she turns to Judy to say, “I’m thinking of moving away from this city.”

“When did you come to this decision?”

“A little while ago, actually. I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

“Claire, if you don’t mind my saying so, this sounds completely deranged. Do you even know where you’re going?”

She doesn’t. But she says in a voice meant to prove that she does, “Toronto. After all, where else can you move to, in this country? If you want to find a job.”

“Do you even know anyone there?”

“My brother Felix is there.”

“You’ll never find an apartment like the one you have with
us
. Not ever.”

She knows it. She knows it, and she loves the apartment. She loves
them
too, God knows, and she really does feel a deep regret at the thought of leaving her back garden and the way the afternoon light falls on her bedroom walls (mikado yellow) and her upstairs and downstairs and her view out over the garden to the beautiful park.

“Not in Toronto, you won’t. And not at that rent.”

But Claire is remembering a visit she made to Toronto with Steff, the year before they broke up: the way people walked so incredibly fast there, the smell of the lake in the air.

When they get back to the house, they sit silent in the van until Judy says “So are you giving me notice then? Is that what this is all about?”

Claire says there are things she has to do first. She has to talk to Felix, she has to find a job there.

When she phones Felix the next night, he confirms Judy’s story about the rents being sky-high. “And the vacancy rate is practically less than zero. But here’s the scoop …”

This is so like Felix that she has to smile. Her youngest and most cheerfully conspiratorial brother, he’s always saying things like here’s the lowdown, here’s the scoop, but he actually does know of a place near High Park, it just so happens, and it’s about to be vacated by the best friend of Lola, a friend of his. “So first you should talk to her. Her name is Becca, and she’s going off to teach at an über-posh boys’ school in Nairobi for
a year, but winning Becca over is only the first step. The real challenge, and this challenge, I warn you, is going to be fucking mythic, is to win over the demon landlady, an apparently ghastly little creature everyone calls Dotty Dot, although I seem to recall that her real name is Dot Simone.”

T
he courtship of the demon landlady begins in earnest in the early weeks of a tropical June. Claire has by this time become telephone friends with Becca. Like military strategists, they’ve plotted the timing of Becca’s giving her notice to Dot Simone, but Dot Simone has not yet been willing to reveal to Claire that Becca’s apartment will be free in September. Instead she shrieks at Claire, telling her that her tenants are quiet business people, people with cars and jobs in banks, telling her she might be “better off” in one of the apartment complexes closer to downtown, telling her that if she doesn’t have a car she won’t want to be living “way out here in the west end.” But Claire persists, says she would love the west end, says she is a quiet person herself, and finally Dot Simone relents and gives her a date at the end of June. “But get here before the sun goes down so you can see what the place looks like in daylight.” And then, almost as an afterthought: “What sort of job do you have here?”

“I’ll be working with a group of doctors in an allergy clinic on College Street, west of Bathurst.”

“So you’re a nurse then.”

“Yes.” And to distract her from even the thought of asking for proof of her credentials, Claire quickly tells her she’ll be taking the train from Ottawa in the early afternoon of the following Sunday and that she’ll be arriving in Toronto a bit after five.

“Get here before the light goes,” Dot tells her. “I don’t show apartments after eight o’clock.”

Somewhere outside Kingston the train stops in the middle of a field of mustard flowers, then for an endless time it simply sits, waiting.

Eventually a porter makes a noisy entrance with the trolley of drinks. “One of the passengers two cars down had a heart attack. Now what we’re doing is waiting for the ambulance people to come.”

Another hour passes before there’s a surge toward the windows to look down on two ambulance attendants carrying a stretcher through the tall grasses flanking the train. Then another wait until the stretcher-bearers inch back again, carrying their cargo, a man whose face is partly hidden by an oxygen mask, but whose dome of bald head reveals an ashen tan.

The passengers all return to their seats, and then almost everyone coughs just a little, drily, from such close contact with misfortune. Claire tries not to keep checking her watch. If she
should lose the apartment! She’s convinced that Dot Simone is waiting for any misstep at all on her part to deny her the right to live within the walls of her kingdom.

In spite of the lake and the occasional breeze from the lake, Toronto is under the siege of high summer, and Claire, coming out of Union Station, walks into the hot breath of the city to hail a cab.

In the taxi she opens her window to let the warm wind blow back her hair and feels a tinge (no, more than a tinge) of excitement. The fast-moving bazaar of the city even makes her feel as if she’s auditioning for a new life instead of only going off to an audition for the horrendous Dot Simone.

At the house where Felix lives she can only stay long enough to drop off her overnight bag, then she has to be off once again, anxiously hurrying through the muggy twilight to Marmaduke Street.

“You’re
too late
!” Dot Simone’s voice shrieks at her over the intercom although it’s still only ten minutes to eight. “Somebody else has just been here to look at the apartment and she really loves it and so she’s going to take it!”

“Someone on the train had a heart attack!” Claire cries back, nearly weeping. “We had to sit out in the middle of a field for over two hours!”

But there is no reply.

What will happen now? Will the harridan even come down? Claire stands tucking her shirt into her tailored skirt and praying.

A tiny woman eventually arrives, parading like a tin soldier on the other side of the glass wall. A bony and powdered little
person, she’s heavily made up and wears her white hair swept up into an elaborate concoction. As for her slacks, they are prim and tailored (either navy blue or black, it’s hard to tell in the lobby’s weak light) and her top is green satin with a sprinkling of what looks like green sugar on the left shoulder. She looks haughty and vulgar. But after peering at Claire through the glass door she condescends to let her come in, and while they are waiting for the elevator she tells her she has another apartment on the floor above the apartment that’s just been taken. “And it’s a lovely apartment too.”

Claire has already decided that she’s willing to be shown anything at all inside this building. Rising up in the elevator she even says to her, “Oh, Dot — is it okay if I call you Dot? — I love your outfit — it’s really adorable.…”

And the terrible little woman wrinkles her little nose up at her sweetly and says in her terrible voice, “Everyone calls me Dot, dollie, and you’re right, isn’t this just the cutest?”

On the sixth floor Claire follows her into a small hot north-facing apartment with a brown shag rug on the floor. She pretends to judiciously look all around her. No, she really does look. God, if she should have to end up in this ugly box. Two giant and oppressive evergreen trees stand close to the bedroom window, adding to the room’s air of dark claustrophobia. “Dot,” she says. “Thanks so much for showing me this, it really has possibilities, but I don’t think it’ll do —”

Half an hour later — after Dot has taken her down to her office to fill in an application form (“Just in case that really lovely lady decides to change her mind”) and has introduced her to her almost poisonously alert adolescent son — “This is Claire, from Ottawa, she’s a nurse” — and Claire has laughed at the harsh jokes
the son has made about hospital closings and the fools at Queen’s Park — Dot shows her the apartment on the fifth floor. “No harm in just showing it to you, is there now?”

No harm at all.

After the grim forest up on the sixth floor, coming into Becca’s apartment is like coming out of a dark wood into a sunny Alpine meadow. Claire walks all around it, praising and praising it. “The tenant must be really sad,” she says to Dot Simone, “to have to give up such a terrific apartment.”

“Oh, she’s got other plans. She’s going to Africa.”

“What a long way to travel.”

“She’s a missionary, she told me.”

“Amazing,” says Claire.

But then Dot tells her that there are actually four people who are all in love with the apartment. A single man, a single woman, and a married couple. She will let Claire know her decision in the morning. “Call me in the morning just before seven, dollie — I’ll let you know then.”

“I can’t bear to lose it,” Claire tells Felix that night as they sit together in the upstairs leafy parlour of his house, drinking beer. “But I don’t know how to make sure I don’t —”

Felix cups a hand beside a hip pocket and waggles his fingers.

“Slip her a bribe? But how much should I offer her?”

“But would you really do that, Claire? It’s illegal.”

“I have to have a place to live!”

She spends a sleepless night on the couch in the parlour. At five to seven she pulls her coat on over her nightgown and goes out into the cool kitchen to put in a call to Dot Simone.
Who says to her, “You know what, dollie? I was sitting here with my husband and son last night, right here in my kitchen, and I said to them ‘I’ve got these four lovely people all wanting the same apartment, which one will I give it to?’ and do you know what my son did? My son spoke up and said ‘Give it to the nurse.’ ”

God bless the young.

H
er blouse, a pale-green shell made out of what she thinks might be shot silk, looks as if it’s been left out overnight in a frost. But now she can feel the force of the late summer’s bright chill burning down on it. There’s also a cold burning on the backs of her legs as she walks down her street. But when she lets herself into her apartment, it’s as warm as a honeycomb in the hot sunshine, there’s even a wasp buzzing all around it, and after she’s opened the kitchen window to let the crazed creature fly out, she carries a Pyrex bowl of cold cooked potatoes into the front room with her. She sits on the sofa and eats the potatoes with her fingers as she reads the morning paper, the way she so often does when there’s no one to see.