Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (3 page)

S
aturday morning was cold and grey with the taint of the weekend on it: the yells and commotion of the neighbourhood children playing down on the street, and after Claire had sat at the breakfast table going over her notes she pulled on her jacket and ran down into the day. There was such a musky, grassy smell in the air, such a smell of swamp in the city, that she wished she could go for a bike ride on one of the bicycle paths instead of biking to the university for her exam on the nineteenth-century novel. But as she was unlocking her bike she saw that its front tire had a flat and so she had to walk fast through the little park behind her street, then hurry across the football field to Bronson and the campus.

The first question on the exam was a “discuss” question: “What did Tolstoy mean by Anna Karenina’s suicide? Discuss in either psychological, philosophical, theological or societal terms.” There were also several questions about the novels of Flaubert, Gogol, and the Brontës. Claire wrote quickly, somehow
contriving to give the answers she’d planned to give, even though she hadn’t been asked the right questions.

When she got home she wrote out her rent cheque, then went down the stairs to knock on the van der Meers’ door.

Judy van der Meer opened it. Her face had such a scrubbed look that Claire wondered if she’d been crying.

“Come in for a coffee.”

The interior of the van der Meer house was always profoundly relieving to Claire; it was so much more untidy even than her own untidy apartment. Everything in it looked so chewed and awry, as if only dogs lived in the kitchen, in the parlour. And of course there were actual dogs too, dogs who wallowed all the places dogs like to wallow, turning the whole house into a kind of musty lair lined with silver and white dog hair.

Out in the kitchen, Judy filled a pink mug with coffee and slid it across the table to Claire.

Claire sipped at it, but found it too cool and bitter. “So how are things?”

“Dirk came home last night.”

“How’s that been, then?”

“It’s been difficult for Lynnie. He wasn’t home for ten minutes before they had one of their really awful major fights. But for
me
” — and it was at this point that Claire understood that her scrubbed look was not coming from tears but from her looking so pink and guilty, sexually consoled — “it hasn’t been difficult at
all
, really —” But she couldn’t say more because someone was now coming down the stairs.

Claire hiked her chair closer to the table, pushed up the sleeves of her sweater. Dirk was magnetic, although the night she’d first met him he’d seemed a bit greenish and mean. But now she could hear an excited scuffling as well, then the sound of the front door being opened to let the scuffles out, then human steps were coming toward the kitchen, and now here he was, his bare feet in thongs, and above the thongs nothing at all but a pair of tired grey shorts. She wondered if he’d been sleeping, he was looking so drugged and flushed, but at the same time he seemed to be giving off a kind of decayed sexual heat. He even seemed a bit bashful as he planed back his hair to aim a sleepy smile her way. But his eyes were holding their real sexual challenge out to Judy. “Gossiping?” he asked them.

Severe muscle cramps in her legs jolted Claire awake the following sunny Monday morning. She couldn’t even walk as far as the shower until she’d massaged them for four or five minutes with Tiger Balm, the whole time crying out in surprised pain while she kept trying to remember what Dr. Tenniswood prescribed for his patients with muscle cramps. Was it quinine? But wasn’t quinine what doctors gave to patients with malaria? It did make sense though, that there would be muscle cramps with malaria, that the body would perspire so much it would lose salt, and that this salt loss could lead to leg cramps — wasn’t salt loss the reason athletes got leg cramps? especially runners? — but where in the world would she ever find quinine? She didn’t want to ask Dr. Tenniswood for a prescription, she wanted him to think she was at all times coolly in control of her life, but
then it occurred to her that tonic water had quinine in it, and so after a hot shower she opened an old bottle of tonic water that had been shoved to the back of her fridge and poured herself a stale glassful of it to drink with her scrambled eggs and toast. Magnesium, she needed that too, she’d read somewhere that magnesium was supposed to be good for leg and foot cramps, and when she had to get up twice the following night to take hot showers and drink even more tonic water, she tried to decide what would be best to do: try to get Declan Farrell to give her an earlier appointment, or — and this would be so much more convenient — stop in for a reflexology treatment at the Muscle Therapy Clinic she passed every morning on her way to work.

Gary Ekstrand, the reflexologist, was rangy but dyspeptic, and as he was beginning to work on her feet he told her that he was a Mormon who’d grown up in the foothills of Alberta.

“A Mormon preacher?”

“An elder in the Mormon church, yes.”

“And so did you roam the foothills trying to convert people?”

Could eyes be both canny and puzzled? His were. “All Mormon men,” he told her, “bring the ministry where it is needed when they are young …”

She felt a little ashamed of herself for trying to tease him. He was not a man, she saw, who could take pleasure in being teased. And so she told him that she was a Westerner too and, like him, had grown up out in the hinterland. Mormon boys had sometimes come through St. Walburg and stayed the night with her parents. Or at least stayed for dinner.

Ekstrand frowned at this but didn’t respond to it; he instead kept breaking up what he called “the crystals.” As he pressed his thumb higher up, making a bracelet of dents all around each of her ankles, deeper dents up her legs, the pain was at times extraordinary, electric. “You have inflammation, I can feel it, a layer of it above your muscles.”

“I think it’s just in the legs though —”

He rubbed a small steel ball back and forth along the instep of each of her feet. “It’s everywhere. Everywhere that I’ve felt so far. If I’m to do you any good, I’ll need to see you at least twice a week.”

“I could probably come after work on Monday afternoon.”

But this wasn’t possible, he was at another clinic on Mondays. “But listen, I’m mobile in the evenings, I could drop by at your place.”

“Oh no,” she said. But this sounded too unfriendly and so she decided to say, “It’s much too untidy.”

“Then you could come to my place. Which is a madhouse, of course, with three daughters …”

This was so proudly said that she felt reassured. And so, late on Friday afternoon, she found herself hurrying along suppertime Daly Avenue, then up the walk to a bonnet-roofed house with a pebbled foundation and a bike chained to a concrete hitching post. She rang the bell and almost at once Ekstrand (looking showered and fresh in a brilliant white shirt) came to open the door. She followed him through an askew living room and a cluttered kitchen. But where were the three daughters? There was no sign of them, there was only the faint sound of music drifting down from upstairs. “My treatment room is down here …,” he was telling her, then it was down a dim set
of stairs into the disarray of a basement, past vinyl sofas with slits and abrasions, past old paint cans and wrecked machines, beaded curtains leading into a room with a high hard bed, almost a royal bed, almost Egyptian, the cover tucked around it smelling of ancient damp, at its head a hard pillow covered with a stiff pillowslip that was a dirty gold taffeta, behind it a poster with a picture of two feet turned away from each other, each foot a kind of Europe of the foot, like those cross-sections of beef cattle that used to hang on a wall of her schoolroom — the organs turned into maps that were always in the same three colours: caramel, clear red, and tan — but now he was handing her a maroon nylon hospital gown and she was asking him if she could change in the washroom, he said it was to her left, but there was a piercing grit under her feet as she walked, a kind of painful glitter, what could it be, she called back over a shoulder to ask how much she should take off, then heard his voice: “Just whatever you’re comfortable with! But the more the better! The better to work with you …!”

God, she should have eaten something, even if only a banana, her blood sugar was too low, this must be why she was feeling so dizzy, the washroom was awful too, like a toilet in a bus depot. Then she was back in the room again, carrying her clothes with her, and after she’d hung them over the back of a chair and climbed up onto the hard bed Ekstrand said, “Hopefully you’ll be feeling a lot better real soon,” then he was rubbing what smelled like a blend of lavender oil and lanolin into her hair and she remembered that lavender was a sedative or at the very least a relaxant and she warned herself to keep alert, but now she could already feel him drawing her hair up into oiled peaks, then she could feel his hands moving down
the length of her back while his voice was asking her if she had any friends at all here, people she could talk to if they got into emotional material that was too “heavy,” and she said, “Yes, a few.” But now she was beginning to feel drowsy, her thoughts came and went, disconnected, she wondered if she should buy carrots on the way home, but not from the health-food store because half the time the health-food-store carrots tasted as if they’d been peed on, there must be mice down with all the sacks of rice and nuts in the basement, but then she had to remind herself that she too was down in a basement, and no one (not Dr. Tenniswood, not her best friend Libi, not anyone) knew she was here, and where
were
the three daughters, did they even exist, then she was half-dreaming again, thinking of Mormons and were they still polygamous, at least were they polygamous when they lived far out in back country, and she thought of the Hutterites too, the stories she’d heard about young Hutterite men going into bars in Saskatoon and picking out good-looking college boys and offering them money to come out to their farms and have sex with their women, all with the aim of bringing variety to the Hutterite gene pool. But now Ekstrand’s voice was dropping to an experimental low sing-song, the voice of someone reading out of a textbook: “You are a precious person. You are precious to me …,” and so this was not going to be a person she could trust, but she must take care not to let him know it, just let him finish the treatment and let her not seem to be distrustful, the minute it was over she’d look at her watch, say she’d have to run. No, that carefree little word wouldn’t sound carefree, not under the circumstances, it would be so much better to say, “Look, I should be on my way …” But now she could hear his sing-song voice
swinging out with more words, his voice sounding hypnotized, even more false: “I have a wonderful wife … she’s a wonderful mother and a wonderful cook and wonderful at playing the piano and a wonderful housekeeper …” and to her continued silence he finally said, “Well, not down
here
, of course, this is
my
territory …” then there was more massaging and as he was moving lower down he was asking her how long she was married, and now his voice was sounding voyeuristic and cold, but still she responded (as if under oath): “A long time. I got married when I was twenty and the marriage lasted fifteen years,” while at the same time she was wondering why she always felt obliged to tell people the truth, why couldn’t she just lie a little? What would of course be useful would be to know why he was asking, still he’d been helpful to her, at least so far, her leg cramps were better, but now something else must be happening, she felt his hands stop, heard him say in the stagy, eyelash-batting voice of an adult addressing a very young child, “Did I hear a knock?
Did
I?”, then there was a whiff of cold air, the sound of clicking beads being parted, then lazily swinging to click back, then a barrage of intense whispering (Ekstrand’s and a child’s), then Ekstrand’s voice was coming back again to tell her, “What all that was about is that one of my daughters is planting some tulips in the back garden …” and so there
were
daughters then, or at least there was one daughter, or was this a little boy, then there was the muffled ringing of a phone — a muted sting of sound — at first Ekstrand ignored it, but it kept ringing until with a grunt he squatted to rummage through a pile of old sweaters and beach towels to fish it out, this distraction allowing her to seize the few moments he was occupied to dizzily sit up and haul on her
sweater and trousers, then as he was setting down the phone she slid down from the table and quickly said “I have to go now, I need to call a cab …”