Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (9 page)

They hooted and cheered.

“Good,” said Gordon briskly. “Now we’ll do parallel parking.”

“Here?”
Plaintively scandalized. “Of course here. Why
not
here?”

As if they’d overheard him, the hockey boys were now mockingly orchestrating her every move while she was trying to park, using their hockey sticks as batons, but after several attempts Gordon pronounced himself satisfied and gave her his permission to turn down the hill and start out for home.

On their way across town another crowd of boys all at once appeared on her left, cruising up close to her left elbow, as she was driving along Wellington Street. “Step on the
gas
, you dumb slut!” one of them — a polite-looking boy in a short-sleeved grey shirt — yelled to her over the rockabilly music they’d turned way up high, while one of the other boys yelled, “Where’s the
fire
, baby?” She was jolted, even though she knew there was no point in being hurt. Besides, it was really only a kind of flirting, so much of what happened in cars or between drivers was really a kind of flirting anyway, even the things that weren’t, Gordon Stahl instructively capping her hand with his hand when she was learning to shift gears, in a way that made her imagine his hand capping one of her knees or cupping a breast, the real truth of the matter being that these boys not only didn’t ruffle her unduly, they even made her want to smile, she was just so happy to be learning to drive.

The morning she was to take her driving test was a chilly clear morning violent with birdsong. She hurried over to the front
windows to watch for Gordon, and while she was holding her turned-up wrist pressed to a breast to fasten her watch, she looked down to see him, his windbreaker hooked over his shoulder, crossing the van der Meer lawn to ring the lower doorbell.

He spoke soothingly to her as she drove, going over the questions the examiner would be most likely to ask. But the beauty of the morning was making her even more tense than a rainy or grey morning would have done. She was also feeling hypoglycemic, as if the bright light might make her faint, and every time she braked for an intersection, especially near the canal, there was a cool morning sweetness in the air along with all the delirious bird-tumult. But now the Pretoria Bridge was already swinging into view, the spooky musical-comedy bridge, its miniature grey feudal castles guarding its stone walls, the brilliant light turning it into a picture in a surreal children’s book. She could also feel Gordon watching her and wished that he wouldn’t, then she could hear his voice say, “What will you do with the licence once you get it?”

“Rent a car so I can drive out into the country once a week.”

When he didn’t respond she felt she ought to elaborate. “On a sort of medical project.”

“Doing what?”

“It’s a bit hush-hush at the moment.”

“Hush-hush.” This seemed to amuse him.

But then (so soon!) she heard him say, “Wonder of wonders, we’re in luck. This boy can be a bit iffy, but he’s not
half
as bad as some I could name —”

So here he was then, her examiner, a sour man holding a clipboard. He looked precise, he looked fastidious, he looked like a man it would not be easy to fool.

After she’d brought the car to a careful stop, she queasily listened to the two men talk about the weather, then she could feel Gordon climbing into the back seat to sit directly behind her. All the way through her ordeal she was going to be able to feel his breath on the back of her neck, urging her to do well.

The examiner, on the other hand, leaned back at his ease, but spoke in such a low voice that she had to squint to hear him. “Turn right, then turn left …”

She drove slowly out into the paranormal sunlight, then under the trees.

I
n the small park behind the van der Meers’ house there were the smells of uncollected garbage, the sour smell of blossoming chokecherry trees. And every blossoming tree and bush against an inhuman blue sky. It was the morning of Claire’s first trip out to Ottersee, a clear morning the second week of June. Declan had told her that his place out in the country was a former Anglican rectory and that he’d be sharing it for the summer with the family of a biologist friend of his. He’d told her they made quite a tribe. Two husbands and two wives and nine children.

At the car-rental hut she was given the keys to a blue car, but just after she’d ducked into it and breathed in a nauseating whiff of its upholstery with the hot morning sun on it she was gripped by stage fright. It was her first time alone in a car and her problem was serious: she couldn’t remember how to proceed. She looked toward the office to check if the two rental men were watching her (they were) then with quick guilt she played for time by pretending to primp in the rear-view mirror.
The one with the dry little moustache doesn’t like me, she thought. Unless he really
does
, maybe that’s why he looked so grim when he shoved me the keys. But then everything did flood back to her and she was able to swing with an almost delirious verve out into the post-breakfast traffic.

For a long time after this, as she changed gears, as she signalled, as she changed lanes, as she played with the radio (changing stations), as she flew through more open country, she felt weak with cleverness and relief, and when she finally pulled over onto a marshy shoulder of the highway to study her map, the sound of the forest’s front line of breeze-rattled poplars moved up her body the way she imagined the sound of applause would move up the willowy limbs of a sexually shuffling dancer. How could she have forgotten that this amazing world existed? With its balmy country air and its busy northern leaves and all of its forest-parts so shiveringly rustling? She felt an absolute longing to come and live out here, to come out here and live in the breezy free country.

Declan’s rectory was on the far side of Ottersee, on the road to New Dublin. Claire drove past an auto-body shop with a billboard mounted up on its roof, then past an ice-cream van, then past the town’s two gas stations, facing each other across the highway like the gates to a mansion, then past a scattering of low houses painted in dead pinks, pale greens. Small-town bungalows on their careful small lawns.

But now here it was, off to her left and a little remote from the life of the town, up on a knoll at the end of a very long driveway, a handsome old fieldstone house with a fanlight over its wide white front door. And in the field next to it there was
even a black-faced white sheep standing under a tree as if it had been permanently tethered there.

When she got out of the car at the foot of the front steps she did a quick count of the bathing suits spread out to dry on the formal swell of green lawn below the verandah. There were two women’s, both bikinis: one red, one white. Two men’s: one red, one grey and patterned with slim silver fishes. Nine children’s: three for boys, six for girls. But she was already late. She quickly walked up the steps, preparing her face to meet Declan or one of the wives, rang the bell.

But there was no sound and no one came.

She tried the bell again.

Another wait.

She decided to knock.

Then to knock more loudly.

Once more, with feeling.

But when still no one came she let herself in, stepping cautiously into a hallway that smelled like the vestry of a very old church. To her right there was a large room with a low sofa and chairs and there were also several tall old oak doors (all closed) leading off to the other rooms. She wondered which door led to Declan’s office. She closed the outside door firmly behind herself, then stood, expecting a receptionist or Declan to come out. But there was only a deep spring-morning quiet. Barefoot, her sandals swinging from one hand, she walked carefully into the big room and sat down on the sofa. The coffee table was a square of glass resting on a bed of chrome tubing. There were stacks of magazines on it, but she was much more curious about the books, in a tall built-in bookcase behind leaded glass panels.
After a moment’s hesitation, she got up and went over to it and soundlessly opened one of its doors, then stood reading the titles:
The Function of the Orgasm, The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
. There was also a green and black paperback titled
Sexuality, Self and Survival
, a slim little book whose title was set against a background of outsized neon-green blades of grass and a black post-nuclear sky. She carried it back to the sofa with her, then leafed quickly through it, promising herself she would ask Declan if she could borrow it, but not till some future time when she wasn’t feeling so anxious.

But where
was
he? And was this even the right house? The right town? Only one thing was certain, the books were the right books. But now a new fear presented itself: he would open one of these doors to discover her with this particular book in her hands. A mad worry, but apparently a real one, to judge from the way she’d gone so shaky and damp. She slipped back to the bookcase, not making a sound, and fitted the green and black book into its slot. She was also aware of the fact that she was by now very much more anxious than curious; she had, after all, made the trip out here with a certain elation and hope, and to find no one here was not only weird, it was a bizarre disappointment. And so she stood, wondering for a moment which door to try, then went over to the nearest door and knocked, and when there was no response, pulled it open.

A long table suitable for one of the grand halls of Versailles was crammed into a small sunlit box of a room with a bay window, and the chairs were tall-backed and ornately carved from a dark foreign wood. So much pomp, and way out here in the country. But it was a cheerful pomp, the only dark note in the room a floor-to-ceiling wall rug, its red eye glowing out
of a field of black yarn. She edged past it warily, its primeval eye watching her to see what she planned to do next.

What she did next was open the door to what she guessed must be the kitchen. And
it
turned out to be more spacious, human-looking. A woman’s puckered navy-blue bathing suit was hanging over the back of a chair, and in the tall windows, spring-like sprays of ferns were hanging in hazy fountains of green. There was also the damp ginger fragrance of cakes stored in tins, the sensible smell of banana loaf. A cuckoo clock, carved to look rickety, ticked its folksy and woody tick. She opened a door to the left of the stove and found a sun porch with nothing at all in it except a billiard table. It was a room that made her want to hurry back to the room with the books again. To the sofa, to dig around in her bag for her appointment card.

She ran barefoot back to the library. But when she pulled her appointment card out of her shoulder bag she saw that she hadn’t made a mistake about the date. She decided to slip outside to take another look around, but as she was hurrying toward the front door it was pulled open from the other side and there stood Declan. “I’ve been waiting for you down in the basement. That’s where I see my clients.”

He spun around, and so she was left to kick her feet into her sandals and humbly clatter after him down the broad steps from the verandah.

As she followed him down the little path that ran along the front of the house she saw an arrow-sign saying
OFFICE IN BASEMENT
. It made her feel foolish. She had been too busy checking out the number and gender of bathing suits to spot it.

Declan quickly rounded the corner and when she caught up with him he was opening a tall door in a brown-shingled porch
that could have doubled as a guardhouse. More steps followed, old stone ones, and she was momentarily gripped by a far-fetched childish terror — into the dungeon, into the dungeon — but the room they came down into was reassuring: a whitewashed grotto converted into a doctor’s office with a corkboard and a mammoth oak desk and behind the desk a large gloomy-skied old oil painting of a tree with most of its pale yellow leaves blown down to the ground. But how predictable, she thought with anxious contempt, for he was still making her feel terribly uneasy.

He looked down at his watch. “We don’t have much time. My next client will be here at eleven-thirty.” And he led her into a room that had only one very small and very high window. “Did you bring any clothes to work in?”

She said no, she didn’t know she was supposed to. “Should I have brought a bathing suit?”

“Working in your underclothes is okay. If they’re comfortable enough.”

But then the phone rang and while he was talking in the other room she unbuttoned her blouse and stepped out of her skirt. She also quickly took stock of the room. One brown canvas director’s chair and one unpainted kitchen chair, and down on the grey carpet two bleached cotton mats that looked like Japanese meditation or prayer mats. This will be like being at a gym, she thought, but at the same time like being at church and at the doctor’s.

As Declan came back into the room he was already sizing her up in his clinical way and so the moment wasn’t really all that awkward after all. Whatever awkwardness there was as she was standing before him in her white cotton camisole and her
sensible white cotton underpants came from the fact that even only partial disrobing always made her so unhappily aware of the intensity of the feelings she had for her body: pure love and pure hate. She hated her legs most — in black nylons and high heels they were more or less passable, but exposed and naked they looked like little girl legs, too thin below the knees and too plump-thighed above them, as if her body, once it had gotten down to her knees, had forgotten how to be a woman.