Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (37 page)

While more wine is being poured, there’s talk of renovations, gardens, talk that moves Claire to picture a house with red clay tiles on its floor. Red tiles and a door opening out into a garden. Small dark oil paintings hanging low above fragrant arrangements of flowers. Blowsy peonies. And vistas, long views, the pure air of the morning.

When she goes over to the buffet she finds herself standing next to Mitchell Kinkaid. He appears not to have seen her yet, but when he bumps into her as they are both serving themselves from the same quiche he gives her a boozy, quick kiss next to an eye, his skin warm from wine or the sun.

Last spring after his divorce went through, he tells her, he married his second wife. “A woman with two kids of her own.”
Claire looks back at his table to see a slim fair woman standing to serve two children lemonade. Testy and elegant, she seems to be the kind not to stand for any nonsense.

Claire then remembers to praise the house. “It’s lovely, Mitchell.” Which it is, really. Although she’s afraid it’s walking on tricky ground, praising it.

“Thanks. It’s pleasant enough. Of course we were just doing what the man wanted, that was our job here: this is the house that Jack built.”

After Mitchell goes back to his table, Claire talks to a woman named Evelyn da Gamba, one of the violinists who played in the wedding quartet at the cathedral. They are moving side by side down the length of the long buffet, heaping their plates with smoked salmon and a banana salad, when Evelyn shakes out her right arm. “I’ve been having some trouble with my playing arm, but the therapist who could really help me with it left his wife last year, then moved out to the West Coast.”

But now Jack Tenniswood has all at once appeared between the two women and is naming and diagnosing the delicacies for them. “My dear friends, you really must try
this
— it’s mushroom risotto made from wild mushrooms picked on the banks of the Miramichi. And
this
is a spinach souffle quiche. And
here
we have bits of goat cheese on shiitake mushrooms, we’ve gone a bit ethnic here in honour of the groom.…”

And so the two women help themselves to a little of everything until he moves on to another group of guests.

“For a while I even thought he might be coming back this way, but now I know for sure that he won’t be, because four or five months ago he shot himself.”

“If his name was Declan Farrell, I was for a time a patient of his …”

Evelyn peers at her, over her risotto. “And you did know that he shot himself …”

“Yes.”

His death, Evelyn says, caused a lot of controversy in these parts. “Even though he didn’t live around here any more …” But she and her husband (the cellist) found him only dedicated, helpful. “On the other hand, for some people it was a real Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation: a friend of mine who knew him extremely well, and who also knew his children extremely well, told me that as a father he was also just terribly demanding. The children confided in her, so this wasn’t just hearsay. And according to her, the boy in particular was in a deep depression …” She takes a mouthful from a deep baked meat dish, then says, “You’ve got to try this, I swear it’s prehistoric meatloaf, they’ve put some kind of weird and amazing combination of stuff in it, onions and prunes and apples and rum …”

Claire breaks into it with a serving spoon and it crumbles greyly while an ancient meaty odour rises up from it. She still has such a clear memory of the little girl coming down to the car, and such a clear memory too of her apple breath as she gave her directions to Newbliss, but now she has to pay attention to Evelyn again because Evelyn is bringing her even more news: how her friend told her that there were layers and layers and layers to Declan, and that if you went down deep enough you found something — “the word she used was ‘maniacal’ — I don’t know if that rings a bell with you …”

It rings a bell, being the word Claire has most often wanted not to think when she’s had unhappy thoughts about Declan.
She also doesn’t want to remember the way she used to dream of meeting him again some day, and the way, when they met, or re-met, they would fall in love, real true love out in the world, years after their sad farewell at the Institute, two wiser people, now that time — in its wisdom or unwisdom — would have turned them into legitimate strangers. But now Evelyn is narrowing her eyes to seriously tell her, “You should talk to this person, if you ever come back here. But then Declan Farrell was an extraordinarily beautiful man, wasn’t he? And we do tend to more easily forgive the beautiful people —”

How elitist obsession is. Even now, Claire wants to be the only one who was perceptive enough to have been aware of his beauty. It makes her feel how corrupt adoration is, how it doesn’t change a thing. But after a moment of doubt, and knowing it will make it less true if she says it, she makes a confession: “I was, in a way, quite in love with him …”

“Were you?” Evelyn studies her with a bright, almost cold curiosity. “Oh well, don’t despise yourself for it, you were merely one among many …”

Exactly.

“So,” says Evelyn. “And how’s life in dear old Toronto? Any good men at all down there?”

“The only men who ever ask me to go out with them are men with allergies.”

And Evelyn smiles at her as if she has just said something hilariously clever.

But now it’s time for the concert, and Evelyn (in jewelled sandals and a short brown tunic that exposes her bare arms and sunburned knees to even more sun) is playing the violin while her long-bearded husband sits beside her and saws at his cello,
the two of them seated with a comically prim formality under a chestnut tree, the clear tumbling sound of the music liquidly trickling while the words “maniacal, maniacal, maniacal” can’t seem to stop playing themselves over and under Claire’s thoughts. Maniacal, manacle, miracle, monomania, love, tenderness, unearned tenderness, ruin.

After coffee and dessert, louder and more percussive music, younger music, blasts from speakers mounted high up in the foliage, and it’s dark now, or nearly, already there are vines of lights trembling in the breeze, they’re dangling down from where they’ve been flung like twinkling stockings to hang from the railings of the upstairs balconies, and the bride and groom are still moving in and out among the dwindling islands of wedding guests, being kissed, thanking.

But now there’s dance music and Claire sits at one of the empty tables watching Mitchell dance with his sternly elegant wife. As he’s dancing, the taller of his new little daughters is hanging onto the backs of his shoulders. He tries to hitch her up, get her to ride piggy-back, but she’s too big for it, her legs in her white stockings are too long to lock themselves around his waist and so they simply hang down, swaying slightly at his back, as if she’s swaying to say, “Your time is running out darling Mother and Stepfather dear, soon the hour of puberty will be here …” and at last he’s obliged to give up and turn from his wife to dance with his new daughter. Whereupon his wife turns to dance with the little boy, a fastidious, serious child who looks to be about seven. But because they are a family and the only ones dancing there’s also something quite sad about the spectacle, as if it’s time for the music to turn foreboding and tinny.

But it doesn’t, it only gets better to dance to, so much better that it sends Mitchell over to Claire to ask her to dance, and so they do a slow jive, or a parody of a slow jive — is there a difference? — while she feels just tired enough and just drunk enough to dance well. And as they are dancing, leaning coolly away from each other’s stylized grip, then prowling around each other for the rhythmic kill, it occurs to her that the guest room she’ll be sleeping in tonight is a room whose dimensions Mitchell, perched up on a high architect’s stool, once drew on a big blank sheet of white paper.

Three hours later, up in her corner of the sheet of white paper, she snaps out the light, hoping to at least doze until the early morning train, then lies in the dark, thinking of Declan. Was he bizarrely intuitive or a doctrinaire hoodlum? But there is no answer, and at last she sleeps, dreaming or half-dreaming a kind of geometrical vision that’s a galaxy of half-erased equations and triangles sparkling through the cloudy slate of a night, the fragments left behind after the mathematical windstorm of plunges and hard dents made by a stick of chalk, the purged sensation that comes from having leapfrogged across a blackboard to the perfect solution.

Hot sunlight is pouring onto laps as the train swings close to the lake, and Claire reaches into her shoulder bag for an orange and then sits in the sleepy heat eating it while the slowing-down clacks are already announcing the uninflected granite light of Union Station, everyone already at work by now. Then she’s on her way north from Union Station to St. George and west from
St. George to her home station, where she climbs up into a city wind sifting through the morning’s debris and gritty litter.

But the morning, just in time for her emergence out into it, is contaminated by a toxic taxi rattling by. Holding her breath, she hurries to the row of cabs across the street, then slams herself into the lead cab to take in great restorative gulps of the stale nicotine air.

“Where to?” asks a voice with a Scots accent.

She gives him her address, then tells him that she’s just arrived in the city from Ottawa on the early morning train.

“So what’s the big attraction in Ottawa?”

“A wedding. In a swank part of town. Up in Rockcliffe.”

“Up where the toffs live?”

“Yes.”

“So how was it?”

“It was fine. The bride was too young though.” She looks out the window at the green of High Park. “Only twenty,” she says. “But then that’s the age I was when I got married too.”

In the rear-view mirror, she can see his eyes glancing back to catch the look in her eyes.

“And it didn’t work out is what you are saying.”

“No, it didn’t.”

“Take me: I’m twenty-nine and still free as a bird.”

She smiles and looks out at the birds in High Park. Are you free, birds? The morning streets skip past them, under the trees. “The wedding was sort of complicated though. I heard upsetting news about some people I used to know.”

“Departed friend?”

How can he know this? How can he know that although she’s used the plural, she means the singular?

How small her apartment feels, with its boxed-in sunlight, after even this quick trip away from it, but the clean morning sun is already illuminating the clear glass jug of dried grasses while a burning blue square mosaic of rug absorbs the hot light. As she walks into the kitchen she breathes in a scoured but still somehow sour odour. Something she was thinking about coming back on the train: that somewhere she’s read that the line between wanting everything and wanting nothing is a very fine line.

And then at the clinic what’s left of the morning passes by her in overheard scraps of conversation that, when she dozes off for a second or two, turn disembodied, ringing. Each time she dozes, then wakes, she makes herself stand and pretend to look animated.

It rains after lunch, but stops just before three, and by the time she comes out onto College Street the air is sickly fragrant with its city mix of car exhaust and blossoms. Although there’s still just enough sweetness in the day to make her decide not to wait for a streetcar, and so she instead walks to the subway station on Bathurst in the cool spring sunshine.

She turns onto one of the local small streets, a street of trees whose sidewalks are matted with what the rain has rained down: spinning tree propellers from the maple trees, thousands of them, rained onto the pavement like tiny footprints. Then it’s down the steps to the train, and on the train west the usual: hope, guarded hope, no hope, fatigue (a lot of this), a blouse that’s almost transparent on a brown arm (a kind of stencilled membrane), a short dress whose pattern is repeating rows of stick figures on terracotta chiffon.

At her own station she pushes through the turnstile to come out into an even sunnier afternoon. Again she decides to walk, it’s not far in the warm day.