Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (23 page)

But this was all really just such a silly waste of time — all this play-acting — what was the use of it? She also had a longing to say to him, “I think you are a real amateur at being
me
 …”

Still she would have to try, and so (being her mother) she said, “All I want is to love people. To love people and be loved.”

“But I don’t
feel
loved by you, why is that?”

Very good, she thought, this answer (if I dared to give it)
would
be the answer I’d give to my mother. “You are so selfish, little Claire,” she said, squeezing her eyes into a squint of disapproval. “You are a selfish, selfish person.”

“All I want is to love people. To love people and be loved.”

“So what
is
this? Is it just some kind of game?”

“What do
you
think?”

I think I might be pregnant, she almost said, but instead she said, “I think I want to go back to being my mother.” Although really she didn’t.

“So do it, then.”

“Can I help it if I have a generous nature?” she cried. “
Can
I? I just can’t seem to be selfish no matter how hard I try. I’ve just been afflicted by too kind a heart, so be it.”

“But you don’t
act
generous, do you?”

“Who are you now?” she asked him. “Are you you? Or are you me?”

But by now he, too, seemed to have tired of the game because he stood up, held down a hand to her. “Stand up,” he told her, “and we’ll do some breathing exercises.”

On the way home a violent slam of leftover winter hit her windshield — a wind-driven spring snowstorm that periodically
snowed out the world and made her eyes and the bones in her wrists ache. In the end she’d completely forgotten to tell him that she might be pregnant, which astounded her, since the news of her possible pregnancy had been her reason for going back to see him in the first place.

T
he sun came through now and then and shone on the damp highway, and driving with the windows down, she could smell the wet trees everywhere: wet weeping willows and wet poplars, a whole grove of wet maple trees with their new little leaves, beautiful turncoat trees standing in formal green groves down here in the green and civilized heart of formal Ontario.

But the chilled row of pink tulips running the length of Declan’s verandah seemed to be warning her: We have our own lives. We have nothing to do with either you or the town.

She didn’t hear his footsteps come down the back stairs until she was already in the Room. And even then he didn’t come right in to see her. She could hear that he had a cold. She could hear him blow his nose with a short-tempered honk, then cough, then speak briefly, in too low a voice, to someone on the phone. A woman, she was sure of it. It was a conviction that made her feel depressed and crabby but at the same time too shy to be crabby.

The moment he came into the Room she stood, feeling white-faced, to tell him about Tony O’Bois and the pregnancy test.

He had wound a black scarf around his pale throat and pulled a hairy brown sweater on over his T-shirt, and everything about him suggested sick itch and fever. He said in a croaky, raw voice, “Get undressed. I can probably tell by examining your breasts.”

She unbuttoned her blouse and unwrapped her skirt, then stood in the cold May morning in nothing but her pink underpants while he felt her left breast. But then he had to stop to go into the open-mouthed cringe that comes just before sneezing. And when he did sneeze he blew his nose violently, then rammed his Kleenex into the back pocket of his jeans. He hoarsely said that he couldn’t tell for certain if she was pregnant. He cupped her right breast to thoughtfully weigh it, but while he was holding it his eyes were looking so sick and the cup of his hand felt so warm that she lightly touched his wrist with the tips of her fingers. “You don’t think you should be in bed?” and then frightened herself by pretending she’d said, “You don’t think
we
should be in bed?”

“I’m fine, don’t worry about
me
, okay?” But then he asked her if she would mind if he gave her a vaginal examination.

She was surprised, but she only said, “No, I’d be grateful.”

“I’ll just go upstairs then, to get a surgical glove.”

She waited until she could hear his footsteps reach the top of the back stairs, then she quickly walked over to the mirror and tensely massaged her hair to give it more body, sniffed her armpits. And once she’d heard the creak of his footsteps on the ceiling above her fade away to creak their way up an even more
distant stairway she quickly peeled off her underpants, neatly stepping from foot to foot, but then was afraid to do anything more for herself because he’d be coming back down any minute and she was feeling too shaky to allow him to see that she’d been making preparations. He’d never done anything medical at all for her, not before today, not even the time she drove down to see him with a strep throat and a fever of nearly a hundred and two. No, it wasn’t
that
high, but it
was
over a hundred. And not the time she had cystitis either. He had turned totally against orthodox medicine and no longer practised it. He even despised it. And again she thought of how sick his eyes had looked, almost tearful with fever. She folded her underpants into a pink square and darted them in between her folded-up black blouse and pale cotton skirt, then eased herself down on one of the therapy mats and told herself to get calm. She wished that she’d rubbed apricot lotion into the insides of her thighs after taking her shower. But she did know one thing: in a more relaxed situation a person would have to smile — the scene was such a far cry from a scene in one of Dr. Tenniswood’s examining rooms: the jacked-up cold steel stirrups for the shivery patient, then the snapping out of a sheet like a disinfected tablecloth — but now the creaks were starting up in the ceiling again and footsteps were beginning to make their descent down the back stairway. For a panicked moment she considered grabbing something to cover herself with, but there was nothing, not unless she wanted to hug her own blouse and skirt to her.

When Declan came back into the room and closed the door behind him she could see how pale he still was. It was a paleness that seemed to her to be a nervy paleness and also seemed to be connected in some way to quick-wittedness. But now he
was dropping to his knees and starting to untie the ties of a beige linen napkin-like packet. He has a cold, she told herself, that’s why he seems a bit shaky. But she also wondered if she wasn’t telling herself this in order not to risk thinking things she was too nervous to think in his presence. She imagined driving home and thinking them then. She imagined telling herself, This is normal, normal, normal. She would tell herself it was normal so she could tell herself it wasn’t. It wasn’t normal and so it must mean he loved her.

But now he was only telling her to take a deep breath. “And don’t hitch your hips back — that’s what most women do when they’re being examined vaginally. Move them toward me instead …”

She shimmied down the mat and as she opened her legs she felt shy, as if her shyness might save her from everything. She could hear the adjusting snap of the latex glove on his wrist, then felt she could dovetail the snap to the way his voice seemed to be losing its way. The way it is when you are being entered in love, she thought. But then she became afraid that he would know she was thinking this, as if his hand coming inside her body would allow him to know her thoughts. She could also see that his eyes had a listening look, the look of a man trying to diagnose what his fingers were feeling. She felt no pain, she only felt as if (in her body) she could hold her breath forever. Wanting to somehow console him, she allowed one of her hands to rest close to his free hand, a small curve of fingers whose fingertips just barely touched him between his first finger and thumb. She thought: He has broken every rule to help me. Out of gratitude to him she even found herself feeling the need to relieve them a little of their joined shyness and so she
spoke to him in a small formal voice: “I think my uterus might be prolapsed just a bit?”

“No, no,” he reassured her. “Everything’s fine.” He sat back on his heels. “You’re not pregnant.” And as he pulled off the glove it seemed to her that his eyes were filled with feeling for her.

At the end of the session (after they had finished their breathing exercises for the day) they sat side by side, just as they always did, panting in unison like two winded athletes. This morning they were even in their usual spot, their backs supported by the panelled wall that faced the room’s one tiny high window. “About that person I went to bed with,” she then managed to say to him, “he was fine, really, he was really a good person, but I just didn’t have any sexual feeling at all for him.” But was this really true? She was rubbing a thumb up and down the leather T-strap of one of her sandals trying to think of how to say what she wanted to say next. “Do you know what I was thinking, the whole time I was with him?”

After a nearly alarmed look at her he asked her what.

“All I could think of was coming back to you and saying, ‘Okay, so I did it, so I went to bed with someone, and all I ever learned from it is that you are the one.’ ” Now that she’d at last come out with it, her heart began to beat like something that had lived its whole life in terror and she understood that what she was feeling most was a fear that he would feel the need to subject her to some kind of ethical humiliation, that he would feel it was his duty to make a fatherly little speech to her about how her feelings were understandable “under the circumstances,” the implication being that it was exactly this flaw in them that must always prevent his taking them seriously.

But instead there was a moment of almost unendurable quiet. And when he at last spoke he said that feelings like these didn’t exist in a vacuum. “If one person is feeling them, you can be sure the other person is feeling them too.”

She looked down at her hands. She was overwhelmed by a longing to say to him, thanks for treating me like a human being, thanks for not being a coward, but she couldn’t speak.

But on the way home she was in torment. Because she already knew: any personal relationship between a patient and a therapist was doomed beyond doomed, everyone knew that. If only they could meet again, for the first time, in some other place. But they couldn’t. Not in this life. They already
had
met for the first time, there couldn’t be a
second
first time. But then two minutes later she was telling herself that people were more important than the theories that people had invented about people. And that love was love. At the same time she was sure there were those who would think (and say!) “
So
? He’s a doctor! He examined you because you were afraid you might be pregnant! It meant
nothing
!” But she wasn’t one of those people who could be convinced that something was nothing, she wasn’t even one of those people who could be convinced that nothing was nothing, she would always think there was something, and so by the time she was coming into the city again she knew she would have to leave him, and for real this time, knowing she wouldn’t ever go back. And she would have to leave now, while there was still time to make an escape. She also knew that she couldn’t bear to, and so it was to appease the part of herself that saw danger ahead that she made a vow to herself: if her
period started before midnight tonight she would take it as a sign and give all idea of him up. But even as she was making this promise to herself she knew it was a ruse — a ruse, a false vow — it had to be, because she was already so certain that her body would see to it that she wouldn’t have to honour it.

She was thinking of Declan’s smile: of the way it carried within it an even more amused smile than the smile he was smiling (or his eyes were smiling). By now her undressing for him seemed to have acquired a more sensual depth as well, as if she really hadn’t been all that awkward after all, as if she’d even been almost statuesque and warm-breasted, more like an artist’s model than a patient, but at this point she was startled out of her reverie by Judy’s voice calling up from downstairs to ask her if she wanted to go for a swim. And she called back down to her, “Sure, great!”

But then she wasn’t able to find her swimsuit in its usual drawer, among her silk scarves and sun-halters, although when she ran down to tell Judy she wouldn’t be able to go after all, Judy told her that her daughter had just got back from the pool at her school and that since Claire had a similar build, Lynnie’s suit might just fit her.

“But won’t she mind?” (And won’t
I
mind?)

“She won’t mind.”

And so Claire carried the borrowed swimsuit, still damp from the younger woman’s body, wound tightly up in the twist of her towel. But walking to the pool house in the cold spring night she was already regretting that she’d agreed to the swim. If she couldn’t be with Declan, then the next best thing was to
be by herself and thinking of him. Other people were only an impediment to thinking.

Swimming pools made her feel anxious at the best of times. For some mad reason they always made her fear an injury. Something to do with the winter. All those loud fifteen-year-old boys emboldened by the sound of their own yelling, all of them bouncing their powerful feet up and down on the ends of the diving boards and making them thrum. They always made her fear she would be hit by something. Some winter thing. A hockey puck or a too-hard snowball. She would always feel braced to duck something.

In the pool house she considered waiting until Judy had safely closed herself away in one of the stalls, her plan being to rinse the crotch of Lynnie’s bathing suit under hot water while she was pretending to wash her hands, but she instead decided to keep her panties on underneath it. She walked down to the most distant stall and pulled on the damp borrowed suit: the quick cold nudge of a dog’s nose hauled up between her legs, her lace panties a warm barrier against the cold shock of where it would shock her most, then the hitched-up bite of each damp flowered strap.