Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (36 page)

But what made him decide to bring his life to an end? Weeks of not being able to sleep might have led up to it, but she also pictures one of his children coming home crying from school at lunchtime (one of his daughters) after being taunted about her father’s lost reputation. He would not have been able to bear it, it’s the one thing she’s absolutely sure of about him, he would not have been able to bear being the cause of pain to his children. But would he even have known about their pain? He was living at the other end of the country from his children. But what
was he thinking, this is what she can’t seem to stop longing to know, what was he thinking during the final hours of his life? And at this, as if to answer all questions at last, he comes to the doorway of the Room, and she feels drugged by sunlight, by the smell of mowed lawn, although not too drugged to hear him say, “But it all comes from the same place, good and bad, can’t you see that? It all owes its power to nothing more harmful than my scandalous willingness to be misunderstood.”

I
t’s snowing again, but how can it, it’s already April, then it rains non-stop for six days, day after day of dense rain followed by an early spring chill, the streets at last laid bare, the industrial air hazy with smoky spring evenings.

On one of these cold evenings a moving van pulls into the driveway five storeys below Claire’s bedroom window and within a few minutes the new tenants, who look like college boys — she’s not sure how many, but there are at least five — begin to walk back and forth over the hardwood floors above her ceiling in the hob-nailed workboots students so love to wear. Bumps and crashes come next. Chairs and sofas being shoved across floors. But the final and worst assault is the music, pounding so relentlessly down that her little apartment is horribly transformed into a washing machine that agitates her heart with drumbeat, not water. She runs up to the apartment above her and knocks on the door, and although the student who answers it dismisses her with the sullen fury of his gaze, the sound (at least overnight) is turned almost bearably low.

But the next morning the volume has been turned back up again, and to an even more relentless pounding than before. New boots have arrived. Fascist boots. And so it’s up the stairs again to talk to a new guy who’s coldly handsome and openly combative. This time the sound is turned down only slightly, but now, as if to take revenge on her, there are new torments: bottles (beer bottles?) bounced on the floor and the sound of boots being stamped vengefully hard on the floor above her kitchen, and even what sound like the thumps of people spitefully jumping from chairs down onto the part of the floor that’s over her bedroom, a trick to make her afraid to come back up and complain to them ever again.

When she goes down the stairs to speak to Dot Simone, Dot (dainty, in her tin-soldier way) only looks terrified and tells her that she refuses to involve herself in arguments between tenants. And so it’s back up to her own place again where she grabs her jacket out of her coat closet, locks her door, races two steps at a time up the stairs to the music, pounds furiously hard on the door with both fists and then, suddenly frightened herself, runs all the way down to the lobby and out into a night whose cold wind she fiercely walks against, crying with rage because she made the move to this city. And on the basis of what? A bitter whim! When there was really no need for her to move anywhere at all.

Two young men are getting out of a pickup truck just west of the main entrance of her tower when she comes back from her walk. They both have such a young male glow, such an exuberant strut as they come walking in fast tandem toward her across the parking lot.

The taller one, who’s wearing a wine scarf tossed over a shoulder, holds the door open for her and then presses the bell of the painfully shy science student who lives on her floor. And when he speaks into the intercom she hears him say: “Let us in, man, we’re hookers …”

The boy with blue hair then takes his turn: “This is Satan, and I’m coming to get you —”

After a stunned social silence, the disembodied voice of the science student comes out of the wall. “Oh,” it says. “So,” it says. “Do you guys want to come up?”

“Yeah, man, buzz us in.”

The boys grin at Claire as they rise together in the elevator. They make her think of her brothers and, by extension, of all jokey young men, and so make her (however briefly) forgive the beer drinkers who live up above her and who’ve made her life an eternal torment.

The next morning as she’s pulling on her jacket she hears a scuffle out in the hallway. Once it’s quiet again she opens her door to peek out. The corridor is deserted, but an envelope, as square and white as an envelope containing a wedding invitation, has been left on her doormat. She takes it inside before she tears it open. A note is loosely written in red ink on the lined piece of paper she pulls out: “Will you please stop bothering us. We have to live our life. Thank you and go to hell.”

But one square white envelope turns out to be the forerunner of another: an actual wedding invitation appears in her mailbox the next afternoon.

B
eneath her windblown veil, the bride’s bowed head is capped by a bonnet planted with dozens of rows of miniature pearls. She looks as if she is trying not to be aware of the communal gaze of the wedding guests, standing out on the Tenniswood sundeck in the May sunshine and gazing down on her as the photographer arranges her near the big maple tree at the bottom of the garden. They are watching him kneel on the grass to fuss with the heavily embroidered long satin skirt that in some lights is greyly silver and in brighter lights white, and they are still watching as he rises and begins to walk backwards with his cameras, making large and irritable beckoning gestures with both hands and calling out to the bridegroom to move a little closer in behind his new bride.

The bridegroom (whose name is Junzo) quickly comes forward and obediently kisses the nape of Zuzi’s neck, and as he does so, she inclines her head demurely.

But the photographer, still unhappy, calls out, “Closer!”

And so Junzo brings his straight arms stiffly forward and locks his hands in a V in the folds at the front of the long beaded dress, then bends his knees slightly and tilts his pelvis close in behind his new wife. Now what he most resembles is a golf instructor trying to teach a woman in a wedding gown how to play golf. But there is no golf club. And so the pose (even if only on demand) seems exquisitely sexual.

Zuzi must think so as well because she turns her face sharply away from him. But then she appears to have second thoughts and swivels within his embrace and throws her arms around his bowed neck to lock him into a very long and showoffy kiss. The guests, smiling, turn toward the house, but Claire decides to stay behind for a bit, out here in the warm sunshine. She leans on the railing and watches the younger woman begin her slow promenade down the long lawn, and as she watches her she thinks of her own wedding, held at the wrong time of year, and of how sacrificed and anxious to please she had felt: the skin above her chest itchy from her wedding gown’s insets of spidery but coarse bridal lace.

She really does not want to go into Dr. Tenniswood’s noisy and shaded hacienda and do the right thing and mingle.
Go
, she tells herself. But for another two or three minutes she stays where she is, watching the photographer arrange and rearrange the bride and groom to his liking, then she sees Zuzi hold out a hand to Junzo, and now they are beginning to walk fast away from the photographer, but at the end of the garden they turn in slow unison to face him once again. But while she continues to stand looking down on them a little gust of warm wind
lifts Zuzi’s veil to turn her bride’s bonnet into a helmet of pearl bullets.

Ottawa must be Canada’s Shangri-La, thinks Claire as she climbs the stairs past two watchful but glowing Ottawa women wearing dull gold Egyptian bracelets pushed high up on their darkly freckled arms. And Toronto is Illness City! But when she steps into the powder room it’s to discover that another wedding guest is also in here, seated at a low table and drawing on a pink lipstick while staring at her own heavy and humourless face in the glass.

To her surprise, Claire knows this woman’s shrewdly mournful eyes and her marvellously shining and healthy pelt of dark hair. “Della Dwyer,” she says to her.

But the woman turns from the mirror to stare at her with such disapproval that she feels obliged to say, “You’re not Della Dwyer?”

“Della Greer,” the woman (now looking heavily pained) manages to say to her.

Is this a different person then? Someone who shares with Della Dwyer a first name and the same lustrous hair and lugubrious features? “But you used to be Della Dwyer?”

“Della Greer.”

And then she remembers, she did hear this name once, and she wants to say to her, “Look, it was a mistake made out of innocence, not out of any kind of reactionary dogma.” The fact that she’s kept Steff’s name has never meant she wants to go back to him. She simply prefers Vornoff, as a name, to Ulrich.
But when she says “I’m Claire Vornoff,” Della Greer coldly replies “I know,” then stands to draw the narrow strap of her beaded and tiny black evening bag over a shoulder that looks as if an eagle has recently flown in to perch on it but then right away decided to fly off again, leaving behind the imprint of its talons in black sequins. And without giving Claire so much as a sideways glance, Della Greer and her shining black hair make a grand exit.

Which makes Claire decide to stay up here a few minutes longer, she so much needs to collect herself after having been made to feel wrong. She goes into the washroom, a room that smells of its new plastic shower curtain, ferns incised on clear ice, and the curtain’s plastic smell seems to be the smell of loneliness, a smell that comes from hiding, being judged. She looks at herself in the mirror and sees a face belonging to someone that someone has given a quick push to, a face bobbing in a lake of cold water.

In the powder room she looks at the world through a window that opens out into the sad and warm afternoon, and feels even more alone, a tiny woman trapped alone inside a corsage, the smell of the powder room is so synthetic but at the same time holds within it such a fresh floral scent. But has she changed at all, she wonders. And just look at what a small ration of contempt it takes for her self-confidence to flap right out the window.

Halfway down, the stairway changes direction, passes by a tall window that looks down onto an aisle of green lawn. So this is Ottawa then, the real true Ottawa, hard-hearted paradise. Long ago she must have done something to offend the vengeful D.D. (or D.G.), but, if so, she’s not at all able to recall
what it was. She supposes she might even need her coldness, something to hate, ever since last night on the ride into town, she’s been in love with Ottawa again, its inlets and the sun on all its big and little bodies of water, its long views of blue hills. All she needs now is to find someone who’ll do her the service of saying to her, “Della Greer? God, pay no attention to that woman, she’s totally deranged.”

And now here D.G. even is, at the foot of the stairs, talking to a stooped fair man who has a melancholy and unreliable look. An academic, surely. While D.G. herself now only looks serious, earnest, a judiciously matronly woman with nothing at all to indicate her coldness but her sequined talons and the black sandy glitter of her evening bag as Claire swiftly slips past her. Unnoticed, unscathed.

There’s music when she comes out into the world again to get into the reception line — music, high anxiety, shrill laughter, sunshine — then she’s next, but Zuzi does all the work for her, hugging her with a squeal and then turning to say to Junzo, “This is Claire, my very most favourite person from my childhood. Remember how I was always coming into the office to pester you, Claire? For these teeny-weeny bitty little baby band-aids for my dolls?”

“Those poor little dolls of yours, Zuzi. You were forever mutilating them.”

The wedding dinner is served on long tables out on the lawn. The air smells of cut grass and mayonnaise and salads already beginning to die in the sun. The plump librarian on
Claire’s left has just returned to Canada after five years in Kenya. Claire tells her that early in her marriage she and her husband let out a room to a graduate student from Nairobi. “Wachira. A Kikuyu.” While Wachira was living with them she couldn’t hurry naked down to the shower in the mornings, and after he left Canada to fly back to Nairobi, she and Steff had only one week of privacy before her mother invited herself for what turned out to be a difficult visit. The night she’d flown back to Saskatoon the house began to breathe again, was theirs again, and in honour of her mother’s departure Claire had washed her hair in the shower, turbaned it in a luxurious black towel, her sunburned arms turned into long flushed gloves of hot skin. She’d felt like a nude debutante (a nude debutante from a country where the women were sensationally graceful: Liberia, Namibia) luring Steff into Wachira’s room to have sex first on Wachira’s bed, then on their own bed.