Excessive Joy Injures the Heart Read Online Free

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, butthen 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 setof 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