Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (34 page)

“Not often, but then I mostly pick up women.” He laughs. “That’s what I do. At night I pick up women … my shift is just about over anyway, I usually stop between six and seven.” And during the day he goes to school. His doctorate.

“What’s your field?”

“Linguistics.”

This brings a self-conscious end to the conversation until he decides to tell her it’s a city of educated cab drivers.

She smiles again, then looks out the window. How beautiful the early-morning lake is, off to their left and bright with its pre-breakfast glint and sparkle. She says in the dreamy voice of someone young enough to think of the future with pleasure, “I’m moving here. From Ottawa. My furniture is in a truck on its way here right at this moment.”

“Good, then,” the doctoral candidate briskly tells her. “Because in spite of much evidence to the contrary it’s really not such a terrible place.”

Once she’s inside the house where Felix lives, Claire walks stealthily up the carpeted stairs and across the cold red linoleum. The whole house is asleep, except for the cat. Does he remember her? He comes to her as she’s moving about the upstairs kitchen with small clinks and creaks, sniffs at her ankles.

She pours a little milk from three different cartons onto her corn flakes because she doesn’t know which of the cartons belongs to Felix, then she pours a quick stream from the last carton into a saucer for the cat before she carries her bowl of cereal into the parlour.

Felix has already made up the couch for her. How sweet this is, having a brother in this city who’s made up a bed for her. But her head is simply swimming from exhaustion, and the moment she’s finished her corn flakes she crawls between the sheets in her T-shirt and underpants to discover that her head won’t stop spinning, it’s on a collision course with the walls, she’ll never sleep, over and over again the walls keep coming straight for her.

Toronto is hard, hard and pitiless and endless, it just goes on and on. It makes Ottawa seem hilly and verdant and even little. A small city, Ottawa, as small as Ottawa once made Saskatoon seem, long ago. The thousands of people climbing up the subway stairways and being borne up on the escalators seem not only to be the displaced, but the displacers. New immigrants, true, thousands and even hundreds of thousands of them, but also the new generations. Every day Claire feels more disposable. And every day in this city she runs: from work to home, from the streetcar down subway steps to the eastbound train, from the eastbound train to the northbound train, from the northbound train to Wilson Station, from Wilson Station to the express bus out to York and her classes.

She lives to get home and make soup and tea. Once there, she lies back on the sofa with the phone and a plate of salted crackers beside her so she can have something to nibble on while she talks to Felix. She’s forever trying to dream up some pretext or other to put in a call to him, legitimate requests. It helps her so much to talk to him, to hear his honest brotherly voice. If he’s not in a rush to go back to his lab he even likes to give her advice. Sometimes they talk about life in Toronto and they both get very scathing. “And everyone seems so driven in this city,” she says to him from her sofa one Thursday evening, where she’s lying on her back with the phone lifted off the coffee table and propped up on her belly.

But on this particular evening Felix, instead of joining her in her nightly tirade, says, “I know things are sometimes hard for you here, Claire, but you’ve got to stop calling me so much, okay?”

Tears make their tiny trek from her eyes to her ears, as tears will. But she tries to keep her voice calm to apologize to him. “I know I do it too much.”

Walking downtown late one Saturday afternoon in September she sees surreal scenes: six pairs of black knee-socks and seven pairs of black leather gloves scattered about on a sidewalk in front of one of the big old bank mausoleums and just after this, a very long line of people high up in a row of tall lighted windows, pedalling hard toward the window glass on their long line of stationary bikes. At times like this, Toronto excites
her — it’s such a mad mix of the bad and the good: so much money, greed, architecture, lake light, so many lanes and enclaves that look as if they’ve been rescued from the nineteenth century, so many tiny lights in the trees. Or she walks through the theatre district with its nostalgic posters and its air of twinkling corruption and feels as lonely and lost as a tourist.

One mild grey Sunday afternoon in October she sits out on her tiny balcony and writes a letter to Tony O’Bois, a thank-you letter that feels a little falsely upbeat even as she’s writing it, she’s so eager to make her new life here appear to be happier (and certainly more exciting) than it really is. She gives short shrift to her job at the allergy clinic, but a good deal of attention to Dotty Dot who is, she writes, “a legendary snoop.” She also tells him about her plans to go to the Winter Garden Theatre to see
A Streetcar Named Desire
and her plans to visit the islands out in the harbour — it’s all
plans
— but by now the weeks of the golden fall are too quickly passing by bus windows, streetcar windows, and when she goes downtown on Saturday afternoons to visit bookstores she’s aware, like any unmoored person, of turning the pages of books for news of only one thing: her loneliness as it’s experienced by the character she would get to care about most. But at other times the nervy abundance of the city bathes her in happiness; she has a sense that she’s a traveller in a new world. Some of the places she’s heard about for years really surprise her though — Philosopher’s Walk, for instance; she used to imagine that taking a walk down Philosopher’s Walk would be like going for a windy walk inside an etching. But Philosopher’s Walk turns out to be much too Canadian for that, too open and
green and haphazard with even a row of spindly trees running along one side of it, like a row of trees on a boundary line far out in the country.

One afternoon when she’s been walking along breathing through her mouth and so hasn’t noticed until it’s too late that she’s been inhaling a cloud of exhaust fumes, she passes by the source of it: an idling white car parked outside the open door of her neighbourhood fruit store. Its toxic vapour blows in over the banks of plums and baby tomatoes while she’s paying the cashier for her gassed bananas. She wants to hold her breath forever, not breathe the fumes in, and so claps the tail of her scarf to her nose before plunging out into the brighter light, at the same time raising her free hand to the offending car as if to stop it in traffic, then making a furiously erasing gesture while glaring at the driver over the blown silk purdah of her leaf-printed scarf. But the woman in the white car only stares at her in such hostile wonder that she decides to stop and tap on her window. This leads the sourly glamorous one to slip over to her with an expression of imperious doubt, then to roll her window minimally down for her.

How very afraid of the world the rich are, thinks Claire as she bows down to the narrow aperture to make her small speech on behalf of the air. “I’m just wondering if you would mind not running your car engine? If you’re going to be parked outside this store?”

Can a person hoot in utter silence? The sports car owner seems to; laced up to the tops of her thighs in exquisite suede boots, she looks stupid and silky and vain and mean as she leans fluidly over to roll up her window. The engine, meanwhile, keeps running. But then she apparently decides to speak
after all, her eyes have such a brimmed look, she must have thought a thought she considers wonderfully witty, and so she rolls her window down again, just a crack: “Honey, why don’t you just go fuck yourself?”

And Claire walks home despising her, her liquidity. But doesn’t liquidity have to do with silks? Or is it money? And even though she also knows she shouldn’t take refuge in something as trifling as private anger, she does take refuge; she takes refuge in railing against the way, from century to century, the wrong people prosper.

It starts raining lightly the next afternoon just after lunch — a tonelessly grey city rain, miserable, listless — and not long after she’s left the clinic for the day, she walks west on College as far as Little Italy, planning to buy flowers because Felix has at last agreed to come over for supper. She stops at a flower stall, attracted by the petalled blazes of yellow — what are they? forsythia? but isn’t forsythia more of a spring thing? — then changes her mind and decides on a bouquet of chilled white snowdrops being bobbed by the rain. She’s asking the shivering Korean boy who mans the stall how much they are, when she happens to glance up and see Declan, in a tan raincoat and already five people away from her, five people beyond her and walking fast, and by now she’s already hurrying after him, but why would he have come back east again? And if she does manage to catch up with him, will their conversation only be awkward? If he asks her how she is, she’s afraid her eyes will humiliate her by filling up with tears, she’s so afraid she won’t be able to give a good account of herself, and in a panic she tries to remember the
ways she has done well here. That she’s been going to school (but for only two courses), that she has a job (but it’s a very dull job) and yet even this unimpressive and very short list seems to be a list that must belong to some more impressive woman’s life. Or it’s a list for an exam, of only two rules, but she keeps forgetting what they are. She follows him down one block, down the next. If he turns around, she’ll hide behind her umbrella. But the need to see him again is after all overpowering, and so she only walks faster, her heart out of control, and is soon just behind his right elbow. At this same moment the traffic light changes, and he decides to cross the street to the right instead of straight ahead. And of course he’s not Declan at all, he’s not even his double, he’s a short-nosed man with a self-important look, and even — on this rainy dark day — dark glasses, his appearance one of the harsh tricks of hope and the city.

So. She has been spared pain. And possibly great pain. She should be grateful. Now life can go back to being ordinary again. But for the next few hours it’s not ordinary at all, it’s unendurable.

L
ate on the following Saturday afternoon here Claire is again, more or less restored to the world and hurrying down into the subway station at Dundas West, then riding the train east, racing across the high bridge over the wide cloud-shadowed valley bordering the Greek part of the city, past Donlands, past Greenwood, then at last up the steps into the hot afternoon and a part of the city a bit north of the Beaches where she’s going to meet Libi who’s flown to Toronto to stay with a cousin of hers on Coleridge Avenue.

The two women embrace lightly, then sit and drink beer out in the back garden with the cousin, a harsh-faced legal secretary who wears a fine gold chain around one ankle and an armful of noisy, insistent bracelets. But at last they are able to get away and walk along the leafy streets to Woodbine station, then they are fleeing west back to the city to take the escalator up into the hot October sunshine. Libi seems to have brought summer back to the city, she smells so of suntan oil. Her hair even looks as if she’s combed it with suntan oil. And her clothes
are summery too: a green midriff blouse and a dark voile skirt with thumbprints of tobacco and leaf-green on it.

Claire says, “For tonight I’ve got us tickets for a Chekhov play at Hart House.
The Cherry Orchard
. It’s a student production, but I’ve read reviews of it that said it was good.”

The production of the play
is
good, as it turns out, and as the curtain falls for the final time Libi and Claire are invited out for a drink by the man who’s been sitting to Libi’s left and who rushes, at play’s end, to help her into her jacket. Claire foresees a drab end to the evening, but as they come out into the night they can see that the performers are mingling with the audience outside on the steps, and then Libi’s new friend calls out to the actor who played Lopakhin, and after introductions and a bit of cheerful but awkward talk about the play, Libi and Claire set off with Lopakhin and the admirer (Avi) for a bar somewhere on Bloor, detouring along Philosopher’s Walk, a warm wind ruffling the leaves, the lawns of the campus falling steeply away into the dimness to their right. Avi and Libi are walking along quickly, and so Claire and Lopakhin are soon left behind, Claire telling Lopakhin that she once lived next door to a seamstress who worked at the National Arts Centre. “And this seamstress was married to an actor.”