The Sad Truth About Happiness

by Anne Giardini

  Charles’s other houses were all rented out. They were older, more modest, scattered in different Vancouver neighborhoods. One day he took me to a small three-bedroom house on Barcklay Street in North Vancouver that he had recently bought.

  “The house I live in is a machine for living, in the same way that this splendid car is a machine for getting around,” he said as we drove over the bridge toward North Vancouver. “That’s what Le Corbusier says a house should be, rather than a labyrinth of furniture. These old houses attract clutter—engender it, in fact. All those nooks and crannies and mantels and cupboards just cry out to be filled with junk. Windowsills, mantels, wainscoting, baseboards, lintels—they get dirty, kicked, scuffed. They collect dust and fingerprints. And they’re unnecessary anyway in a properly built house. Le Corbusier thought we should have only necessities, the carefully selected equipment for life. Everything in a house should be useful, and demanding of us, or else we fall into dullness and lethargy.”

  I had not found Charles’s austere, hard-edged house appealing. It had too much of the architect about it, with few concessions made to the reasonable requirements of any family that might live there. There were many clever, self-conscious angles, but no comfortable cubbyholes or niches. There were not very many closets and few cupboards. What could be more basic to human need than a peg on which to hang one’s clothes at the end of the day, and a board, rough or smooth, on which to perch one’s plate and bowl and spoon and cup? The overlarge windows sacrificed privacy and comfort—for what? For the wonderful views, that glittered brilliantly, sharply, and enticingly out of reach. Only the eye can enjoy a view, I thought, staring out through one of the living room’s great expanses of thick glass. A view is at the wrong distance for the other senses—too far away to be caressed, too remote for its sounds or scent or taste to give pleasure. A scrim, a simulacrum, a mural or large canvas could provide as much.

  The house that Charles considered his home unsettled me; the scale of the different rooms seemed all wrong. The rooms intended for intimacy or privacy—the bathrooms and bedrooms—were vast, and the areas where people tend in most houses to congregate—the entryway, the kitchen—had been diminished, practically erased. And where was the hearth, the center, the focus point where the inhabitants were invited—compelled—to come together and be at ease?

  I went with Leo to a lecture at the university at which a Brazilian architect spoke about the origins of the house. The first homes, he said, were likely no more than a sheltered spot at which a fire could be started and kept alight with some reliability. An unsafe, uncertain place still, but possibly the only refuge of early people from weather, wild animals, and enemies. Society was formed around a fire. The people who were allowed to draw near the embers were by definition “us.” Those outside the fire’s range were “other.” The most intimate acts of these dwellers in caves and rough structures of branches, stones, and mud would have been performed near the fire. The hearth became, in this way, associated with a mother’s lap, with sexual embrace, with food, and worship and safety. The fire became the symbol of all our yearnings, the hearth that would hasten the traveler’s returning pace, the familiar warmth that we seek still when we enter a house.

  The small North Vancouver house that Charles took me to see sat in the middle of its narrow, deep lot on Barcklay Street. It was intended to serve the same function as Charles’s cantilevered concrete box—to provide a home, a place of shelter and safety—but in many ways it existed in opposition to, in defiance of, the sprawling Marine Drive house. The cramped rooms of the Barcklay Street house were intended for domestic clutter and familial repose and regard. The house had the same deep eaves and generous sills as my childhood home, and Charles confirmed that it had been built about the same time, around 1915, he thought. We kept bumping into each other in its many bottlenecks—the hallway on the main floor, the narrow steps up to the second, smaller storey, the tiny room between the kitchen and the back door, where, as if to prove Charles and Le Corbusier correct, old bottles and newspapers and rubbish had accumulated in unsteady drifts and piles.

  The previous owner, a widow, had died in hospital some months before after a long illness, and Charles had bought the house as it was, untidy and shabbily furnished. The widow’s only child, a son who worked in an insurance company’s head office in Toronto, had been anxious to avoid a trip back to the coast. The more personal effects—what an odd phrase, I thought, when Charles explained the arrangements to me, a Le Corbusier phrase—had been sorted out and sold. The upright piano, a dining room table, and four matching chairs had been packed and shipped to the faraway son by professional movers. Most of the furniture, the dishes, and the bedding remained behind and had been sold with the house.

  The place had been unlived-in for almost a year. The windows and floors were gritty and every surface was coated in dust. I felt an intense desire to look for soft rags, buckets, and cleaning fluids, for vinegar if nothing stronger was available, and start to restore a respectful gleam to the little house. It could never sparkle, it had gone past that point, but there was, I was certain, a patina under the dirt, a luster of loving use, familiarity, and casual wear. But Charles would not hear of it. He pressed his fingers against my lips. A team of workers had been hired to clean and repair the house, he told me. He promised, however, that he would bring me back one day to see it in its spruced-up state, before it was rented out.

  On the drive back to the city we talked about the passionate love that houses inspired. Many of my friends were on the hunt for a house to replace the apartments and condos and unsatisfactory arrangements of their twenties. Those few that had managed to pull together a down payment and take out a mortgage seemed as enamored of their real estate as they were of their firstborn children. Like Ryan, they scraped and sanded, repainted, repaired, and renovated. The kind of effort, I sometimes thought, that had been expended on spiritual or personal improvement in simpler times, was now diligently applied to kitchens and basements, as if property values were a manifestation of, or even a replacement for, personal values.

  Charles denied any particular affection for any of his houses, even his own. He insisted that he had bought them because they had been bargains in one way or another at the time, and that he kept them for their income and against the practical certainty that they would rise in value, as a hedge against inflation. He insisted that emotion had no part in his decisions.

  “They are good investments, that’s all,” he said. “Not something to get sentimental about.”

  “But you continue to collect them. You take excessively good care of them. You lay them up like treasure,” I pointed out. I told him what the Brazilian lecturer had said on Saturday night at the university, that houses are an extension of our bodies. “I think he was quoting the great Le Corbusier, too,” I couldn’t resist adding.

  We fell silent for a few blocks.

  “There may be something to what you say,” he said, at last, as we pulled up in front of my building. “There is a clipping in one of my files—a quote from a Spanish writer, Vicente Verdú. What he said was that houses exist between reality and desire, between body and dream, between what is possible and what remains to be longed for.” Charles reached for my hand in the darkness and squeezed it. “Something like you,” I thought I heard him say, but another car roared past and overlaid his words with senseless noise.

  I was still not sleeping. I would fall asleep at midnight or shortly afterward, then start fully awake at four or five. I thought that it might help me to sleep if I got more exercise, so I began to get out of bed as soon as I woke up and go jogging through the downtown streets. There were always enough people about that I felt safe. Other joggers raised their hands in an odd salute of solidarity as they passed by. There were early risers on the sidewalks in quest of coffee. In the parks I saw practitioners of tai chi swooping and ducking like cranes. Night workers drove along the roads, returning home, and morning workers started up their engines as they set
out for the day. I liked to watch the city shake itself awake each morning from its short, dark night’s sleep. I saw lumbering tanklike street cleaners sluicing down the gritty streets, men pitching fat stacks of newspapers and magazines from idling flatbed trucks onto the sidewalks in front of news agents and placing sheaves of fresh papers into news boxes. There were vans and trucks of all sizes delivering bread, soft drinks, fruits, vegetables, and flowers to corner stores and hotels.

  These morning runs reminded me of a book I had owned as a child, one that was brightly illustrated and with few words. It was called something like The City at Dawn and showed the busy, industrious, law-abiding people of a large generic city preparing the streets and stores and businesses against the awakening of the sleeping children of the city, like unacknowledged but eminently contented stagehands preparing for the arrival of the chorus line.

  I took different routes every day. One morning, I had just turned around to begin my run back toward home when I noticed a dozen or so people arriving alone or in pairs for a morning service at St. James Cathedral. I slowed when I came up to where they were clustered.

  “Would anyone mind if I came in dressed like this?” I directed my question to a woman who was rushing up the front stairs of the church. She looked about fifty, and was suitably dressed for a church service in a red pleated skirt, a gray wool coat, and flat black pumps.

  “You wouldn’t be the first,” she answered cheerfully, holding the door open for me. “We get one or two runners like yourself most days. People like to stay fit these days. I never saw the point in it myself, as you can probably tell.” She laid one hand lightly on her rounded waist. “Come on in. The service is short, only a half-hour, and there’s coffee afterward if you have time to stay.”

  Despite the obvious sincerity of the invitation, I felt self-conscious in my running shoes, jogging pants, and old T-shirt that was on its second day without a wash. I sat in the back of the church for the service, which was even shorter than advertised, only about twenty minutes. I resisted the scent of coffee drifting up from somewhere downstairs, and remained behind in the church after the others had left, relieved that no one had pressed me to join them. I walked around the perimeter to inspect the windows. On the right-hand side, halfway along the wall, was the window the man in black had mentioned, the other Annunciation.

  He was right. This window showed a very different Mary. Her ivory hands lay in her sky-blue lap, palms curled upward, and she was bathed in a glowing light that shone from a bird flying from the upper left-hand corner of the window. This bird was larger, more fanciful, and less dovelike than in the other church. He had brilliantly colored trailing tail feathers, like a bird of paradise. Mary’s face, which wore an expression of utter peace and acceptance, even joy, glowed in the shaft of light that emanated from the breast of the soaring bird, like the moon reflecting the light of the sun. I was pleased to see, barely visible under her pink dress, the toes of two tiny perfect red slippers, making her a cousin to the Mary in the window of the other church.

  I studied her face more carefully. Although she looked calm and accepting, her expression was intelligent, determined. Her eyes were wide open, not demurely closed, and her jaw and chin were set at an uncompromising angle. She looked beautiful, strong, resolved. I liked her immensely more than the apprehensive Mary I had seen in the first Annunciation. I glanced behind me, half expecting to see a tall man in black with whom I could share my thoughts, but of course he wasn’t there.

  I went home, showered and changed quickly. Since I was running too late to have breakfast at home, on my way to work I stopped at a new coffee shop that had recently opened up on a corner close to the hospital. There was a line but it was moving quickly, and I was still hopeful that I would make it to work with a few minutes to spare so that I could organize my work area.

  A woman of about my own age was behind the counter showing a young man—a boy, really—how to make the drinks. He had the bad skin and poor posture of late adolescence. His massive yawns threatened to tear apart his face while he struggled to focus his blurry attention on her instructions.

  “These cups are for dairy, and these are for nondairy drinks. Got that?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So, if someone orders a soy milk latte, which cups would you use.”

  “Um, I’m not sure.”

  “Listen. These cups are for dairy. These are for nondairy. Now, which ones would you use for soy milk?”

  “Can you just tell me one thing?”

  “Sure, what?”

  “What does ‘dairy’ mean?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No. Like, I’ve heard it before. I just never knew what it meant.”

  “Hang on. Don’t go anywhere.”

  The woman looked up at me, although there were several people in front of me in the queue.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Oh, I can wait. Those people are ahead of me.”

  “That’s OK. I’m just about to open a new till here and you can start the new line.”

  I asked her for a small coffee and an apple muffin.

  “Here they are,” the woman said, presenting them to me across the counter with a small ceremonial gesture, her palms upward, outstretched. “They’re on the house. I’m sorry you had to wait. Training.” She grimaced backward toward the teenager who had knitted his fingers together and was beginning to crack his sizable red knuckles methodically.

  I wondered, as I walked the rest of the way to work, how it was that I seemed to have become the kind of woman who has three men contending for her time, who is invited to jump queues, to whom compliments are given and favors extended. I glanced at my reflection in the blurry, chipped mirror in the washroom down the corridor from my office. The mirror returned my steady gaze. I looked composed and oddly filled, spilling over with something—secrets or knowledge or certainty, perhaps, although I could not imagine they were. I lifted my hand and touched the cold, flat face in the mirror. The expression didn’t change. I dropped my hand, put on my white coat, and walked down the corridor to greet my first patient.

  I began to stop at St. James a morning or two every week, timing my runs for the start of the services. I found that the regular, repetitive rhythms of the prayers and songs served as a replacement for sleep, and the color and sound and sensations of the old ceremonies were not unlike the richer kind of dream. I had no sensation of the presence of God, and I didn’t join in the prayers or the singing. I would sit quietly in one of the pews at the back and observe the individual elements that came together in what I supposed was meant by the word worship. A bringing together of like-minded, peaceful people. Melody. Entreaties. Contemplation. Hope. When I walked outside afterward, I felt an odd mix of competing sensations—empty and full, calm and excited, not unlike drinking a cup of hot, strong, bitter coffee right after a glass of icy-cold, sweet wine.

  Pantry

  Rebecca had refused to let me retake her quiz. She overhauled it extensively and then sent it in directly to the magazine that had commissioned it. It was a week overdue by the time she was done, and she almost never even came close to missing a deadline. She was now working on a test on workplace safety commissioned by a magazine called Canadian HR Manager. Aside from consulting my doctor, who continued to assure me that I was among the healthiest of his patients, my only other precaution was to go to a lawyer recommended by Leo. I asked her to prepare a simple will for me in which I left everything I owned—which wasn’t much, a few possessions, my savings, a tiny pension, my books—to my nieces and nephews. I decided too, in an admittedly superstitious way, to take comfort in the fact that the fortune that Rebecca’s test had laid out for me was subject to influence; it foretold a direction from which it was within my power to deviate, rather than a firmly fixed destiny.

  One evening toward the end of November, Rebecca went back to her desk to work after dinner and I walked in the rain to the church. I had seen an announcement posted for
Evensong service that night. The choir was there when I arrived, thirty or so strong, easily outnumbering the dozen people in the pews. A woman in the choir caught my attention when she sang a solo soprano passage, and I rested my gaze on her face for the rest of the song, which was sweet and medieval-sounding, likely a Christmas carol of some sort.

  Salve virgo virginum

  Salve sancta parens

  Concepisti dominum

  Virgo labe carrens

  Salve virgo virginum

  Salve sancta parens

  I felt a sensation like the click of a switch in the instant before a room is flooded with light. When the anthem ended, I was surprised to find it difficult to shift my gaze away from the woman’s face. I was transfixed. I felt an overwhelming sense, like an undulation or a wave, of great peace. I felt like someone whose eyes have come to rest on the front steps of her home at the end of a long and difficult journey.

  The woman in the choir had a broad, oval face, with very smooth white skin, high cheekbones, a round mouth with full lips, and an odd band of white flesh under her chin. This extra roll beneath her jaw made her face look as if she had been prepared by a particularly unstinting baker. The woman’s hair was fine and black; it dipped down in the center of her forehead, then fanned backward like wings behind her head, where it was caught up in a clip. She looked as though she were made of some substance that was simultaneously white and black and rosy red, like the porcelain head—was it called bisque?—of a doll my mother had in a cupboard at home that had been her mother’s before her.