Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (4 page)

Ekstrand cast a bleak look back at her over a shoulder. “A cab?”

“I have to get to my local food store before it closes at seven.”

“The appointment we made was to last a full hour.”

“I’m sorry, but I really do have to go.”

“But we still have work to do, we’ve only just begun …”

She dug into her money belt, read out a number so sternly that he dialled it while she was trying not to look at her face in the mirror, she was sure it would be too much the face of a worried clown, her eyes round and alarmed, her nose shiny and red in the upset white dab of her face, her hair peaked up into greased tufts, how easy it is to lose everything, she thought, but he was letting her go, she could hear his footsteps coming up close behind her as she was walking up the stairs. Then he was following her to the front door, she could hear his voice say, “Call me tomorrow to let me know what times you’ll be free to see me next week …”

She said yes without looking back, feeling unsteady as she was walking down the porch steps and out to the cab thinking how feeble and destroyed she must look, but the driver didn’t seem to notice, and in fact didn’t glance back even once at her greased and spiked hair, he was a Westerner and lamenting his move to the godforsaken East, and after he’d let her out on the corner of Hopewell and Bank she walked back to Habib’s but he was already closed, then she walked to the convenience store up at the top of the hill.

And then the next morning she didn’t even want to call Ekstrand to say she wouldn’t be coming back — there was no law that said she had to — she wanted to forget all about him, her early-morning dreams had been populated by soundproof rooms and heavy cold doors, the whole careless family life on Daly Avenue going on up above her — she even walked to work by a different route, not wanting to run into him — but when she got home at six, the message light on her phone was flashing and when she punched in her code she heard a click on the line. The following night while she was shaking a bouquet of parsley under cold water she could hear the phone ringing. This time it was a sweet-voiced child, and when she said to her, “Who
is
this?” the child said, “Sorry, I must have the wrong number.” There were two more clicks the next night, and the following morning, just as she was leaving for work, there was another call. She picked it up to hear the voice of the child from the call yesterday: “Is Dorothy there?” This seemed to her to be the worst thing of all, Ekstrand using his children to make his calls to her, she could feel the wary weight of his listening on another phone, and at the end of the evening when she came out of the shower to see that the red light was again flashing she punched in her code to hear his voice stiffly say, “Hey Claire, I’m just calling to confirm our appointment for tomorrow. I have you written down for 5:10, please give me a call if there’s anything that’s going to stop this from happening …” She took the phone off the hook overnight, and even slept well, and the next morning she left a message for him with his receptionist to let him know she was going through financial difficulties and wouldn’t be able to come back.

That night when she got home the red light was already flashing and then Ekstrand’s voice came into the room again, this time sounding rehearsed, emotional: “Sorry to hear your decision. I was planning to give you a free treatment today since I kept you overtime last time and it was probably hard on your budget. Hopefully we can resolve this somehow. I was looking forward to seeing your progress …” a long pause here, and when he spoke again he sounded almost as if he’d been crying “… and seeing your growth.” Then, after another pause: “It’s not the money that matters, it’s the interest in you that I was concerned about. Seeing the changes. Hopefully I didn’t do anything that displeased you” — here his voice sounded desperate but prissy, breathless again — “and hopefully we can get you going again and finish what we got started. So. Give me a call back please, Claire.… Bye for now.”

While she was drinking her breakfast tea the next morning, the phone rang again. She stood alerted, let it go to the tape. Another click. But that night when she got home there was no red light flashing to warn her that she had not yet been forgotten.

T
he wind was wild off and on all the following weekend. It came in great gusts. Swooping in to push at the storm door of the kitchen, it made the glass in its windows squeak. But after lunch the day turned into a bright and unusually hot Saturday afternoon for May, and a little after two, Claire took a bus out to Earlton, then walked toward the field of white tents just beyond the east end of the town. She could see a long line of cars parked at the edge of a sunlit irrigation ditch and on the far side of a wooden bridge, arched as a bridge in China, she could see Declan Farrell standing talking to two men wearing cameras slung over their shoulders. There was something bashful about him as he stood and talked to these men, something boyish and eager to please. An eager boy trying to impress, with a shy boyish bravado, two man-of-the-world fathers.

She cut off to the left to steer clear of his little group, then detoured over to the Acupuncture Tent where a tiny Chinese doctor had rolled a chart down from a bit of temporary
scaffolding and was using a bamboo stick to tap at acupuncture points on an enlarged and densely numbered human ear. The little doctor was dressed in black cotton trousers and a white cotton jacket that gave him the look of one of the waiters at the Ho Ho Café, and he was speaking so poetically that she was seduced to the point where her mind, caught up in the beauty of the words, was too often tempted to wander. He quoted something (or someone) called the Nei Jing. He said, “The Nei Jing say, ‘Man possesses four seas and twelve meridians, which are like rivers that flow into the sea.’ ” And then he named, as if they were soups on a menu, the four seas:

Then he was speaking of the pulse again, quoting some ancient Oriental authority on the body: “On a spring day the pulse is floating, like a fish swimming on the waves; on a summer day it is superficial, in the skin —”

At this point Claire noticed one of the men she had seen talking to Declan Farrell taking the pulse of the woman beside him and smiling down at her. But where was Declan Farrell? She looked all around her but couldn’t see him, and she again tried to pay attention to the words of the Chinese doctor as he was saying, “On an autumn day it is below the skin, like an insect creeping into its winter shelter; on a winter day it is in the bone, hidden like an insect asleep for the winter …” And
while he was listing the Seven Emotions — anger, anxiety, concentration, joy, grief, fear, and fright — and was saying, “Excessive anger injures the liver, excessive anxiety injures the lungs, excessive concentration injures the spleen, excessive joy injures the heart …” words bobbed around in her head, words like
field
and
force field
, and she wondered if he was meaning a kind of scattering of the heart energy, Oriental medicine being so obsessed with contraction and scatter. And it was at this same moment that she looked up to see Declan Farrell standing three people to the left of one of the men with the cameras, beside him a petitely gleaming girl of a woman, her brown bell of hair shining in the Earlton sunlight.

After the acupuncturist had finished his talk and the numbered pink ear was rolled up, a daffily hopeful-looking man in a paper party hat climbed up on a tree stump to announce a talk on bioenergetic theory by Dr. Declan Farrell, and as he was speaking, people began to move in the direction of a grove of trees at the western end of the field. But by the time they’d all arrived and were milling about under the beech trees, Declan Farrell seemed in doubt about where he would stand. He stood in the shade of the tallest of the trees, but then walked out into the bright sunlight in the middle of the clearing. People began to drop their jackets and sweaters and then to sit down on them on the hard ground. But now Declan was changing his mind again and seemed so indecisive that people began to get up, wander off. Claire heard a sunburned man whose sunhat looked like a pith helmet call out to two girls who were walking by, “When the hell is this show going to get off the ground?” and she worried that Declan Farrell would be left without an audience, that he would be left with no one,
that he would be publicly obliged to stand talking to only two or three people (she being one of the two or three) and she couldn’t bear it for him, the prospect of any kind of public shame, as she dropped her jacket on the ground and sat down next to the man in the pith helmet. Who then cynically smiled at her to say, “So who is this guy anyway?”

“He’s a medical doctor, but he’s given all of that up.”

“So is he a Reichian or what?”

“I think he might be a little bit Reichian,” she said, not planning to let on that she actually knew him.

“An orgasm a day keeps the doctor away?”

She smiled.

The man in the pith helmet took his pith helmet off, and turned to Claire. “My name is Mitchell.”

“Claire,” said Claire. Then after the slightly disorienting silence that so often follows the exchange of names she said, “The way he sees it, every single important emotional event that happens to a person is laid down in the body.”

Mitchell said he knew the type. He fitted his sun helmet back on again, using a primping hand at the front and another at the back to get the right tilt for parody. “Za body iss a clue,” he said. “And iss also a map and a history book …” But Claire’s eyes were on Declan Farrell again, who at last seemed to have found himself a spot that would do, under the largest of the trees. By now only two other people were sitting waiting. Still, he seemed calm as he stood in apparent comfort to begin his introduction. And within three minutes he had an audience. Where had they come from? Up out of the ground? They had come from all over, he was the Pied Piper of Earlton, there really is something almost shamanistic about him, thought
Claire, mesmerized, as she sat watching him move in the windy and shady light, demonstrating certain useful techniques to help people breathe better, teaching people how to let their feet feel true contact with the ground.

When his talk was over, a group of women admirers gathered with tight love around him. Many of them were in their late forties, early fifties — vibrant older women who seemed affectionate toward him, jokingly maternal. They spoke easily with him as if they knew him well. It was his birthday, they were taking turns hugging him and calling him the birthday boy, but then there was a little tremor in the group as people turned to look eastward to watch nine or ten women come walking toward them across the parched open field. And the woman at the head of this procession, picking her delicate way over twigs and stubble, was the woman who had come to the fair with Declan Farrell.

Who was now calling out to her, “Hello, love!”

She came up to him for an embrace, and as the group around him parted to make way for her, she said in a voice that was either babyish or Southern, “I walked all the way over here in my
bare
feet.” And the circle of older women, bright-bloused and bright-eyed, all smiled down at her with a terrible predatory affection.

A
t the Institute the following Monday afternoon, Claire spoke to Declan Farrell about her tendency to become “just a little bit obsessive.”

“Just a little bit obsessive,” he said, and she could hear that his voice had a smile in it. And so she quickly corrected herself: “I
know
, you can’t say just a little bit, can you? About obsession? It’s always a whole lot more than just a little bit …”

“But a tendency to become obsessive is something we can definitely work on by doing work with the body.”

“What I’ve been thinking though” — she was speaking quickly, in an apprehensive rush, as she was taking her leave of him — “is that if I’m going to be getting into something fairly long-term here, then I should probably look around for a bit, decide what sort of treatment I really want to pursue …”

Did he mind? Hard to tell. But he gave her a name: Dr. Alan Breit.

She called Alan Breit the following morning to see if he could give her an appointment on her next day off. His voice
was intelligent, British, and (in the manner of the best British voices) sexually wistful. He said, “I could fit you in, I think, on Thursday morning …”

Just before midnight on Wednesday night it started to rain, and the sound of it moving over the roof made Claire feel less alone as she drank a cup of camomile tea (strong, with two tea bags in it) before turning off her light. Then she lay in the dark listening to the multiplying ticks of the rain, the tiny ticks on the leaves, until she at last fell asleep, dreaming that she couldn’t sleep, but finally understanding that she must have slept, at least for a bit, because a sound of banging startled her awake sometime toward morning. She sat up, then decided it was nothing, only the wind slamming a door shut somewhere farther down the street. The rain was by now heavier too: dense, sedative. She got up to pee and on her way back to bed remembered a dream she’d been having about Steff. He was telling her that he’d been diagnosed with a disease called antimacassar and he needed her to come with him to a Special Treatment clinic over in Sandy Hill so he could get an injection. Words bobbed in her head — injection, erection, little games of the unconscious — but once she’d crawled back into bed the rain almost instantly put her to sleep again.