Excessive Joy Injures the Heart Read Online Free Page B

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 hersweater 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 …”
    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