Too Much Happiness Part 3

The first thing you had to wonder was whether her whole body had been transformed in the same way.

"How amazing," said Joyce, as neutrally as possible.

"Well, I don't know how amazing it is, but it would have cost a pile of money if I'd had to pay for it," Edie said. "That's what I was into at one time. What I'm showing it to you for is that some people would object to it. Like supposing I got hot in the shed and had to work in my shirt."

"Not us," said Joyce, and looked at Jon. He shrugged.

She asked Edie if she would like a cup of coffee.

"No, thank you." Edie was putting her shirt back on. "A lot of people at AA, they just seem like they live on coffee. What I say to them, I say, Why are you changing one bad habit for another?"

"Extraordinary," Joyce said later. "You feel that no matter what you said she might give you a lecture. I didn't dare inquire about the virgin birth."

Jon said, "She's strong. That's the main thing. I took a look at her arms."

When Jon says "strong" he means just what the word used to mean. He means she could carry a beam.

While Jon works he listens to CBC Radio. Music, but also news, commentaries, phone-ins. He sometimes reports Edie's opinions on what they have listened to.

Edie does not believe in evolution.

(There had been a phone-in program in which some people objected to what was being taught in the schools.) Why not?

"Well, it's because in those Bible countries," Jon said, and then he switched into his firm monotonous Edie voice, "in those Bible countries they have a lot of monkeys and the monkeys were always swinging down from the trees and that's how people got the idea that monkeys just swung down and turned into people."

"But in the first place-" said Joyce.

"Never mind. Don't even try. Don't you know the first rule about arguing with Edie? Never mind and shut up."

Edie also believed that big medical companies knew the cure for cancer, but they had a bargain with doctors to keep the information quiet because of the money they and the doctors made.

When "Ode to Joy" was played on the radio she had Jon shut it off because it was so awful, like a funeral.

Also, she thought Jon and Joyce-well, really Joyce-should not leave wine bottles with wine in them right out in sight on the kitchen table.

"That's her business?" said Joyce.

"Apparently she thinks so."

"When does she get to examine our kitchen table?"

"She has to go through to the toilet. She can't be expected to p.i.s.s in the bush."

"I really don't see what business-"

"And sometimes she comes in and makes a couple of sandwiches for us-"

"So? It's my kitchen. Ours."

"It's just that she feels so threatened by the booze. She's still pretty fragile. It's a thing you and I can't understand."

Threatened. Booze. Fragile.

What words were these for Jon to use?

She should have understood, and at that moment, even if he himself was nowhere close to knowing. He was falling in love.

Falling. That suggests some time span, a slipping under. But you can think of it as a speeding up, a moment or a second when you fall. Now Jon is not in love with Edie. Tick. Now he is. No way this could be seen as probable or possible, unless you think of a blow between the eyes, a sudden calamity. The stroke of fate that leaves a man a cripple, the wicked joke that turns clear eyes into blind stones.

Joyce set about convincing him that he was mistaken. He had so little experience of women. None, except for her. They had always thought that experimenting with various partners was childish, adultery was messy and destructive. Now she wondered, Should he have played around more?

And he had spent the dark winter months shut up in his workshop, exposed to the confident emanations of Edie. It was comparable to getting sick from bad ventilation.

Edie would drive him crazy, if he went ahead and took her seriously.

"I've thought of that," he said. "Maybe she already has."

Joyce said that was stupid adolescent talk, making himself out to be dumbstruck, helpless.

"What do you think you are, some knight of the Round Table? Somebody slipped you a potion?"

Then she said she was sorry. The only thing to do, she said, was to take this up as a shared program. Valley of the shadow. To be seen someday as a mere glitch in the course of their marriage.

"We will ride this out," she said.

Jon looked at her distantly, even kindly.

"There is no 'we,'" he said.

How could this have happened? Joyce asks it of Jon and of herself and then of others. A heavy-striding heavy-witted carpenter's apprentice in baggy pants and flannel shirts and-as long as the winter lasted-a dull thick sweater flecked with sawdust. A mind that plods inexorably from one cliche or foolishness to the next and proclaims every step of the journey to be the law of the land. Such a person has eclipsed Joyce with her long legs and slim waist and long silky braid of dark hair. Her wit and her music and the second-highest IQ.

"I'll tell you what I think it was," says Joyce. This is later on, when the days have lengthened and the dandles of swamp lilies flame in the ditches. When she went to teach music wearing tinted gla.s.ses to hide eyes that were swollen from weeping and drinking, and instead of driving home after work drove to Willingdon Park where she hoped Jon would come looking for her, fearing suicide. (He did that, but only once.) "I think it was that she'd been on the streets," she said. "Prost.i.tutes get themselves tattooed for business reasons, and men are aroused by that sort of thing. I don't mean the tattoos-well that too, of course, they're aroused by that too-I mean the fact of having been for sale. All that availability and experience. And now reformed. It's your f.u.c.king Mary Magdalene, that's what it is. And he's such an infant s.e.xually, it all makes you sick."

She has friends now to whom she can talk like this. They all have stories. Some of them she knew before, but not as she knows them now. They confide and drink and laugh till they cry. They say they can't believe it. Men. What they do. It's so sick and stupid. You can't believe it.

That's why it's true.

In the midst of this talk Joyce feels all right. Really all right. She says that she is actually having moments in which she feels grateful to Jon, because she feels more alive now than ever before. It is terrible but wonderful. A new beginning. Naked truth. Naked life.

But when she woke up at three or four in the morning she wondered where she was. Not in their house anymore. Edie was in that house now. Edie and her child and Jon. This was a switch that Joyce herself had favored, thinking it might bring Jon to his senses. She moved to an apartment in town. It belonged to a teacher who was on a sabbatical. She woke in the night with the vibrating pink lights of the restaurant sign across the street flashing through her window, illuminating the other teacher's Mexican doodads. Pots of cacti, dangling cat's eyes, blankets with stripes the color of dried blood. All that drunken insight, that exhilaration, cast out of her like vomit. Aside from that, she was not hungover. She could wallow in lakes of alcohol, it seemed, and wake up dry as cardboard, flattened.

Her life gone. A commonplace calamity.

The truth was that she was still drunk, though feeling dead sober. She was in danger of getting into her car and driving out to the house. Not of driving into a ditch, because her driving at such times became very slow and sedate, but of parking in the yard outside the dark windows and crying out to Jon that they simply must stop this.

Stop this. This is not right. Tell her to go away.

Remember we slept in the field and woke up and the cows were munching all around us and we hadn't known they were there the night before. Remember washing in the ice-cold creek. We were picking mushrooms up on Vancouver Island and flying back to Ontario and selling them to pay for the trip when your mother was sick and we thought she was dying. And we said, What a joke, we're not even druggies, we're on an errand of filial piety.

The sun came up and the Mexican colors began to blare at her in their enhanced hideousness, and after a while she got up and washed and slashed her cheeks with rouge and drank coffee that she made strong as mud and put on some of her new clothes. She had bought new flimsy tops and fluttering skirts and earrings decked with rainbow feathers. She went out to teach music in the schools, looking like a Gypsy dancer or a c.o.c.ktail waitress. She laughed at everything and flirted with everybody. With the man who cooked her breakfast in the diner downstairs and the boy who put gas in her car and the clerk who sold her stamps in the post office. She had some idea that Jon would hear about how pretty she looked, how s.e.xy and happy, how she was simply bowling over all the men. As soon as she went out of the apartment she was on a stage, and Jon was the essential, if secondhand, spectator. Although Jon had never been taken in by showy looks or flirty behavior, had never thought that was what made her attractive. When they travelled they had often made do with a common wardrobe. Heavy socks, jeans, dark shirts, Windbreakers.

Another change.

Even with the youngest or the dullest children she taught, her tone had become caressing, full of mischievous laughter, her encouragement irresistible. She was preparing her pupils for the recital held at the conclusion of the school year. She had not previously been enthusiastic about this evening of public performance-she had felt that it interfered with the progress of those students who had ability, it shoved them into a situation they were not ready for. All that effort and tension could only create false values. But this year she was throwing herself into every aspect of the show. The program, the lighting, the introductions, and of course the performances. This ought to be fun, she proclaimed. Fun for the students, fun for the audience.

Of course she counted on Jon's being there. Edie's daughter was one of the performers, so Edie would have to be there. Jon would have to accompany Edie.

Jon and Edie's first appearance as a couple before the town. Their declaration. They could not avoid it. Such switches as theirs were not unheard of, particularly among the people who lived south of town. But they were not exactly commonplace. The fact that rearrangements were not scandalous didn't mean they didn't get attention. There was a necessary period of interest before things settled down and people got used to the new alliance. As they did, and the newly aligned partners would be seen chatting with, or at least saying h.e.l.lo to, the castoffs in the grocery store.

But this was not the role Joyce saw herself playing, watched by Jon and Edie-well, really by Jon-on the evening of the recital.

What did she see? G.o.d knows. She did not, in any sane moment, think of impressing Jon so favorably that he would come to his senses when she appeared to take the applause of the audience at the end of the show. She did not think his heart would break for his folly, once he saw her happy and glamorous and in command rather than moping and suicidal. But something not far off from that-something she couldn't define but couldn't stop herself hoping for.

It was the best recital ever. Everybody said so. They said there was more verve. More gaiety, yet more intensity. The children costumed in harmony with the music they performed. Their faces made up so they did not seem so scared and sacrificial.

When Joyce came out at the end she wore a long black silk skirt that shone with silver as she moved. Also silver bangles and glitter in her loose hair. Some whistles mingled with the applause.

Jon and Edie were not in the audience.

II.

Joyce and Matt are giving a party at their house in North Vancouver. This is to celebrate Matt's sixty-fifth birthday. Matt is a neuropsychologist who is also a good amateur violinist. That is how he met Joyce, now a professional cellist and his third wife.

"Look at all the people here," Joyce keeps saying. "It's positively a life story."

She is a lean eager-looking woman with a mop of pewter-colored hair and a slight stoop which may come from coddling her large instrument, or simply from the habit of being an obliging listener and a ready talker.

There are Matt's colleagues, of course, from the college; the ones he considers his personal friends. He is a generous but outspoken man so it stands to reason not all colleagues fall into that category. There is his first wife, Sally, accompanied by her caregiver. Sally's brain was damaged when she was in a car accident at the age of twenty-nine, so it is unlikely that she knows who Matt is, or who her three grown sons are, or that this is the house she lived in as a young wife. But her pleasant manners are intact, and she is delighted to meet people, even if she has met them already, fifteen minutes before. Her caregiver is a tidy little Scotswoman who explains often that she is not used to big noisy parties like this and that she doesn't drink while on duty.

Matt's second wife, Doris, lived with him for less than a year, though she was married to him for three. She is here with her much younger partner, Louise, and their baby daughter, whom Louise bore a few months ago. Doris has stayed friends with Matt and especially with Matt and Sally's youngest son, Tommy, who was small enough to be in her care when she was married to his father. Matt's two older sons are present with their children and the children's mothers, though one of the mothers is no longer married to that father. He is accompanied by his current partner and her son, who has got into a fight with one of the bloodline children over turns on the swing.

Tommy has brought along for the first time his lover named Jay, who has not yet said anything. Tommy has said to Joyce that Jay is not used to families.

"I feel for him," says Joyce. "There was actually a time when I wasn't either." She is laughing-she has hardly stopped laughing as she explains the status of the official and outlying members of what Matt calls the clan. She herself has no children, though she does have an ex-husband, Jon, who lives up the coast in a mill town that has fallen on evil days. She invited him to come down for the party, but he could not come. His third wife's grandchild was being christened on that day. Of course Joyce had invited the wife too-her name is Charlene and she runs a bakeshop. She had written the nice note about the christening, causing Joyce to say to Matt that she can't believe Jon could have got religion.

"I do wish they could have come," she says, explaining all this to a neighbor. (Neighbors have been invited, so there won't be any fuss about the noise.) "Then I could have had my share in the complications. There was a second wife, but I have no idea where she has got to and I don't believe he has either."

There is lots of food that Matt and Joyce have made and that people have brought, and lots of wine and children's fruit punch and a real punch that Matt has concocted for the occasion-in honor of the good old days, he says, when people really knew how to drink. He says he would have made it in a scrubbed-out garbage can, the way they did then, but nowadays everybody would be too squeamish to drink that. Most of the young adults leave it alone, anyway.

The grounds are large. There is croquet, if people want to play, and the disputed swing from Matt's own childhood that he got out of the garage. Most of the children have seen only park swings and plastic play units in the backyard. Matt is surely one of the last people in Vancouver to have a childhood swing handy and to be living in the house he grew up in, a house on Windsor Road on the slope of Grouse Mountain on what used to be the edge of the forest. Now houses keep climbing above it, most of them castle affairs with ma.s.sive garages. One of these days this place will have to go, Matt says. The taxes are monstrous. It will have to go, and a couple of hideosities will replace it.

Joyce cannot think of her life with Matt happening anywhere else. There's always so much going on here. People coming and going and leaving things behind and picking them up later (including children). Matt's string quartet in the study on Sunday afternoons, the Unitarian Fellowship meeting in the living room on Sunday evenings, Green Party strategy being planned in the kitchen. The play-reading group emoting in the front of the house while somebody spills out the details of real-life drama in the kitchen (Joyce's presence required in both locations). Matt and some faculty colleague hammering out strategy in the study with the door closed.

She often remarks that she and Matt are seldom alone together except in bed.

"And then he'll be reading something important."

While she is reading something unimportant.

Never mind. There is some large conviviality and appet.i.te he carries with him that she may need. Even at the college-where he is involved with graduate students, collaborators, possible enemies, and detractors-he seems to move in a barely managed whirlwind. All this once seemed to her so comforting. And probably it still would, if she had time to look at it from outside. She would probably envy herself, from outside. People may envy her, or at least admire her-thinking she matched him so well, with all her friends and duties and activities and of course her own career as well. You would never look at her now and think that when she had first come down to Vancouver she was so lonely that she had agreed to go out with the boy from the dry cleaner who was a decade too young for her. And then he had stood her up.

Now she is walking across the gra.s.s with a shawl over her arm for old Mrs. Fowler, the mother of Doris the second wife and late-blooming lesbian. Mrs. Fowler can't sit in the sun, but she gets shivers in the shade. And in the other hand she carries a gla.s.s of freshly made lemonade for Mrs. Gowan, the on-duty companion of Sally. Mrs. Gowan has found the children's punch too sweet. She does not allow Sally to have anything to drink-she might spill it on her pretty dress or throw it at somebody in a fit of playfulness. Sally does not seem to mind the deprivation.

On the journey across the lawn Joyce skirts a group of young people sitting in a circle. Tommy and his new friend and other friends she has often seen in the house and others she does not believe she has ever seen at all.

She hears Tommy say, "No, I am not Isadora Duncan."

They all laugh.

She realizes that they must be playing that difficult and sn.o.bby game that was popular years ago. What was it called? She thinks the name started with a B B. She would have thought they were too anti-elitist nowadays for any such pastime.

Buxtehude. She has said it out loud.

"You're playing Buxtehude."

"You got the B B right anyway," says Tommy, laughing at her so that the others can laugh. right anyway," says Tommy, laughing at her so that the others can laugh.

"See," he says. "My belle mere belle mere, she ain't so dumb. But she's a musician. Wasn't Buxtahoody a musician?"

"Buxtehude walked fifty miles to hear Bach play the organ," says Joyce in a mild huff. "Yes. A musician."

Tommy says, "Hot d.a.m.n."

A girl in the circle gets up, and Tommy calls to her.

"Hey Christie. Christie. Aren't you playing anymore?"

"I'll be back. I'm just going to hide in the bushes with my filthy cigarette."

This girl is wearing a short frilly black dress that makes you think of a piece of lingerie or a nightie, and a severe but low-necked little black jacket. Wispy pale hair, evasive pale face, invisible eyebrows. Joyce has taken an instant dislike to her. The sort of girl, she thinks, whose mission in life is to make people feel uncomfortable. Tagging along-Joyce thinks she must have tagged along-to a party at the home of people she doesn't know but feels a right to despise. Because of their easy (shallow?) cheer and their bourgeois hospitality. (Do people say "bourgeois" anymore?) It's not as if a guest couldn't smoke anywhere she wants to. There aren't any of those fussy little signs around, even in the house. Joyce feels a lot of her cheer drained away.

"Tommy," she says abruptly. "Tommy, would you mind taking this shawl to Grandma Fowler? Apparently she's feeling chilly. And the lemonade is for Mrs. Gowan. You know. The person with your mother."

No harm in reminding him of certain relationships and responsibilities.

Tommy is quickly and gracefully on his feet.

"Botticelli," he says, relieving her of the shawl and the gla.s.s.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to spoil your game."

"We're no good anyway," says a boy she knows. Justin. "We're not as smart as you guys used to be."

"Used to be is right," says Joyce. At a loss, for a moment, as to what to do or where to go next.

They are washing the dishes in the kitchen. Joyce and Tommy and the new friend, Jay. The party is over. People have departed with hugs and kisses and hearty cries, some bearing platters of food that Joyce has no room for in the refrigerator. Wilted salads and cream tarts and devilled eggs have been thrown out. Few of the devilled eggs were eaten anyway. Old-fashioned. Too much cholesterol.

"Too bad, they were a lot of work. They probably reminded people of church suppers," says Joyce, tipping a platterful into the garbage.