The Sad Truth About Happiness

by Anne Giardini

  The woman’s voice was high and very clear and had a warble in it, like cold milk pouring out into a tin cup, or a small, resonant ringing bell, and her head sat as gracefully on its upholstered chin and neck as if she were sitting for a portrait. She lowered her hymnbook when she wasn’t singing, but she always kept her eyes on the page, and the round curve of her cheek and arched brow swept upward and down again as the book was raised and lowered, and her neck dipped and rose like the neck of a water bird. When she was about to sing again, she would moisten her upper lip with her tongue, draw in her breath, and raise up her book. Her neck and chin trembled when she sang the higher and more sustained notes.

  The sun had long set, and the Annunciation window was drained of color, its partitioned sections empty of light, like a page from a children’s coloring book before the lines have been filled in. The members of the choir sang together neatly and lucidly, a well-rehearsed flock. I kept my eyes on the soprano throughout the service, feeling a little obsessive, a little mad, but mostly unconcerned. This fixation was surely temporary, another new symptom of the person I seemed to be becoming, or was perhaps an unexpected side effect of a cumulative lack of sleep or too much coffee. It would pass or change into something else, if I waited a while.

  I have always been interested in the shifting gaits and gestures of the people around me, enchanted by the often unnoted gracefulness with which they make their way through their days, although I have usually tried to resist staring since I have never wanted to risk seeming rude or overcurious. My greatest temptation, since I was a child, has been to stare for too long at people who interest me, and I have often thought that one of the sacrifices of becoming an adult is giving up the freedom to indulge a good hard stare from time to time. This is doubtless part of my fascination with books, the ability to look intently at the characters in them for as long as I like, unbounded by the conventions of social etiquette. My two sisters, on the other hand, feel little compunction about sizing someone else up, slowly, deliberately, so in some ways the sensation of my eyes locking on the broad, round, calm face of the soprano was a familiar one from years of observing my sisters observing others. I fell, that one evening, into a fixed, appraising gaze on the soprano’s face like an expert, like a person tumbling down a flight of stairs, like a star slipping loose from its bearings in the sky, like the tumbler pigeon that tumbles heart-stoppingly backward, beak over claws, while still in flight.

  Although they looked unchanged in the mirror, my eyes had been hot and dry for days; they felt like they had been rolled in sand and set back in their sockets, or like rough stones forced into a setting meant for polished jewels. Sometimes, toward the end of the day, simply opening and closing my eyes made me feel as if they were operated by means of rusty levers that badly needed oil. I stared at the singer’s face that night, and my eyes and busy mind felt cool, rested, bathed in balm. For the first time in weeks, I could feel a sensation as simple as rest seep into the bones of my skull.

  After that night at St. James, the soothing image of the singer’s face would sometimes appear on the scratchy insides of my eyelids, like the afterimage from the flash of a camera or the impossible image on the Shroud of Turin, but glowing like the face of a saint in a Russian icon, with a radiant golden halo against a night-black background. Her image never failed to ease my eyes and I began to summon up her face as a substitute for rest. I went to the evensong service another two or three times, but the soprano seemed to have joined the choir for that one night only.

  I had a constant sense of changing, or being taken over, in ways that felt even deeper than when I had become an adolescent and acquired an entirely new body over the course of a year or two. As a teenager, I had never felt that the changes went beyond breasts and skin and hair and the new, rounding layer of fat beneath my skin. These changes felt much more profound. Did this second transformation happen to everyone in his or her early thirties, I wondered. Did everyone become someone else altogether in midlife? And, if so, why did no one speak of it? Why was this metamorphosis not discussed or even hinted at in the books I read?

  I gave up trying to sleep until close to midnight. Several evenings every week, after dinner, I would leave Rebecca trolling the Internet for facts for her next proposal and drive to Linden Avenue, where Ryan was working on the house that he and my sister Lucy would be living in after their wedding, and I would work with him for a few hours. Ryan always had his favorite music playing very loud—Rachmaninov, Handel, Chopin—on a portable CD player that he carried with him from room to room as he worked.

  I knew how to prep and paint a wall from years of helping my father. Ryan taught me how to patch plaster and miter baseboards and crown moldings. Usually, we worked alone on different projects in separate rooms. Sometimes, he called me to provide an extra set of hands or eyes on whatever project he was working on. We passed judgment together over tiny rectangles of color, choosing sage green over butter yellow for the living room, cinnamon red over Stuart gold for the dining room, periwinkle instead of honey for the baby’s room. Ryan chose slabs of synthetic stone that looked like Carrara marble for the kitchen counters, and tiles the color of burnt sand for the kitchen floor, although I tried to talk him into something more forgiving, cork or oak laminate, or vinyl.

  “Doesn’t it bother you that Lucy doesn’t mind what your house is going to look like?” I asked Ryan one night when we were packing up. He was carefully arranging the paintbrushes to soak overnight in a pickle jar filled with water.

  “Lucy trusts me,” he answered. “We agreed that this is how we’ll do it. I’ll get the house ready and she’ll have the baby. I know that she will be happy here, over time, but I also know that it will take her a while to get used to it. One thing at a time seems to be easier for her.”

  Ryan often played opera music while we worked. By the end of November, I knew “Nessun Dorma” and “La Donna E Mobile” by heart. Ryan would sing along with the CDs, in his loud, cracked tenor, in Italian or in English.

  Nessun dorma! No one sleeps!

  Nessun dorma! No one sleeps!

  Tu pure, o Principessa, Even you, oh princess,

  Nella tua fredda stanza guardi le stelle, In your cold room, looking at the stars,

  Che tremano d’amore e di speranza! That tremble with love and with hope!

  Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me, But my mystery is locked within me,

  Il nome mio nessun saprà! No one will ever know my name!

  No, no, sulla tua bocca lo dirò . . . No, no, on your mouth I will say it . . .

  La donna è mobile Womankind is flighty

  qual piuma al vento, Like a feather in the wind

  muta d’accento e di pensiero. She changes her tune and her mind.

  Sempre un’amabile Always a kind

  leggiadro viso, And pretty face

  in pianto o in riso Whether she is crying or laughing

  è mensognero. She is deceitful.

  La donna è mobile Womankind is flighty

  qual piuma al vento Like a feather in the wind

  muta d’accento e di pensiero. She changes her tune and her mind.

  The face of the singer from the choir sometimes surfaced from the paint pots when I stirred them, or hung suspended in the orange depths of my morning tea. Most often, she appeared in mirrors as I passed by them. Now and then, her face floated in front of my eyes in myriad tiny images, like Andy Warhol paintings or the multiple vision of spiders. But she never appeared in my dreams, which were becoming less frequent. The few hours I slept were dark and formless. There no longer seemed to be time or space in my rare hours of sleep for the luxury and nonsense of dreams.

  On the cusp of December, the winter rains arrived in force. The elements are at their most active in Vancouver in the wintertime. The winds bluster and keen, bullying nervous clouds across churning skies. Torrents of rain pound onto the streets and pavements. The water gathers into great puddles, then surges back and forth, as though in search of a s
ewer grate not yet completely choked by sodden leaves. The waterlogged earth squelches underfoot. Umbrellas sway and clatter overhead, their ribs knocking and jostling against other passing umbrellas. When the umbrellas are taken down, they are shaken firmly in the same brisk, convulsive way that a dog let in from the yard shakes itself just inside the door. The tiny droplets that are flung in every direction are immediately taken up into the air and then into the greedy, incontinent clouds, which release the moisture, transformed into water again, in search of new lawns and heads and feet and umbrellas to soak.

  It was now too wet and dark to go out in Charles’s boat. Instead, when he picked me up from work, we would drive to some small bar, where I would have a glass of wine with him. He insisted on selecting different vintages for me to try and would never allow me to pay the bill when it arrived. Charles treated me with the kind of old-world respect that I associated with the movies. He always walked on the traffic side of the sidewalk, held my elbow when we crossed the street, insisted on providing tickets to the theater, and art shows, and gave me many small presents of flowers and CDs and books. When we parted at my apartment door, he would press my hands in his two long bony hands and tell me how much he had enjoyed whatever we had come from doing.

  One night, we went to a party to mark the opening of an art exhibit on south Granville Street, a pre-opening event, I understood, for serious investors and close friends of the artist. I bought an expensive emerald wool suit from a small shop downtown (where my only previous purchase had been a silk scarf that I had later found did not go with anything else I owned, nor likely ever would, although I kept it wrapped in tissue in my middle drawer against the possible day).

  The paintings at the gallery were colossal, powerful, and gleaming. They were made up of rectangles of jewel-like colors bleeding at their edges into backgrounds of iridescent metallic gray. The pictures seemed to throb with force. I stepped into the main room, in my new suit, and with my hair pulled back in a pewter hair clasp, and wearing the bronze pumps I had borrowed from Rebecca. I felt as if I might have stepped out of one of these paintings. I could feel the warm darts of Charles’s pleasure in the small of my back, his prideful attentiveness. He was, I understood, the kind of man who liked the woman he was with to fit into her surroundings, whether at his house, on his boat, beside him on the beach, in a small, familiar Italian restaurant, or at an event like this. I felt for the first time in my life like one of those women whose beauty is of the kind that can escape outside her skin and into her surroundings, like the spreading colors from brilliant tissue paper used in a collage.

  My Saturday evenings with Leo ended at the door of my building with our hands meeting in a clasp that was closer to a handshake than an embrace, and a kiss on the cheek that placed us in the uncharted territory beyond friendship but not far outside its borders. One night we ran into friends of his when we were leaving a café on Dunbar, a married couple who lived nearby, giddy at being out for a movie without their very young children, and, for that brief slice of time while we stood talking under a green-and-white-striped awning that sheltered the four of us from a light drizzle, in the blurred, jade-shaded pool of light from the coffee shop windows, Leo put his arm around my shoulders and drew me close to him. Under his suit jacket—he had forgotten a coat—he was shivering. With my free arm, I rubbed the small of his back. It felt warm and solid and excessively thick with muscle. The sensation reminded me of the flank of a horse I had ridden for a few weeks at a summer camp when I was fourteen.

  Angus’s kisses were far more frankly sexual. He held my hand when we walked together, his thumb caressing the soft triangle of flesh between my thumb and forefinger. When we parted, he would push back my hair from my neck and face and press his lips to my brow and mouth with an intensity that reminded me of my relationship with Geoffrey.

  I sometimes wondered at how different these three relationships were from others I had been in and, in particular, how different from my most recent short affair. Thomas had come to the door of the apartment I was living in then, over on 12th Avenue, to canvass for a left-wing party. Rain was pouring down outside, and his shoes and tweed jacket and unironed yellow cotton shirt were soaked. He smelled of wet wool and was wearing the hopeful, drooping, damp, unnamable mien of a dog left out in the rain. I invited him in and poured him a cup of tea from a pot I had just made. We talked about politics while his shoes rested upside-down over one of the hot-air registers. I felt crazed with longing for him to stop talking and take me to bed, but he gathered up his pamphlets and put on his shoes and left after an hour or so, when the rain stopped and a watery, pale, half-rainbow appeared in the late gray afternoon sky.

  When Thomas had gone, I could not settle or rest, imagining him naked in my bed. He had the compact build and square hands of a laborer, and a face the rich color of clouds in shadow, like one of those ripely sensuous boys in a Caravaggio painting. He was not at all the kind of man I had ever been attracted to; he was gentler, softer, less assertively masculine, with fine dark hair, skin the color of early evening and the texture of upholstered silk, full lips, and, I learned later, a dusky penis enfolded in a monkish cowl of skin. A loud party in an apartment building across the alley began in the early evening and continued all night. The beam of a broken streetlight flickered into my bedroom like a searchlight. At about three o’clock, a desperate, lustful tomcat began to wail in the alley. I felt as though everything in the universe was colluding to mock and thwart and frustrate me.

  Thomas and I did have a sexual relationship, one that began and ended quickly, but it was never as intense as that first night of longing had led me to expect. Thomas was comfortable in his loosely fitted skin and hand-to-mouth, romantic, harmless, no doubt useful life. He shared a house with six or seven ever-shifting roommates, took on good works for little or no pay, lived in clothes that appeared somehow when he needed them and that all looked alike, in shades of blue and black and plum, and slept on the floor of his chaotic room in a jumble of blankets and clothes. “Oh, a nest,” I exclaimed when I first saw it. Sleeping with Thomas was like having an affair with a badger. Even his penis was molelike: blind and kind and thrusting. There seemed to be no harm in him whatsoever.

  This episode ended completely by unspoken agreement, without rancor or injured feelings, after a month or two, when its purpose had been served. I was never clear about what either of us wanted out of it, but I got it, and I am confident that Thomas did too.

  That brief whatever it was left me, I think, more conscious of the beauty of men than I had ever been before. The way their hair springs forth jaunty and true from their brows and in an abundant halo around their penises. The mass of shifting muscles in their upper arms, even, surprisingly, in the arms of accountants and bank managers and teachers. The solid ridge of muscle and flesh that separates torso from waist. The stiff swing of their legs in the sockets of their square-cut hips. The tender, attenuated tension strung into their long thighs. The wiry, shifting sinews of their buttocks. The dense, low fur on legs and chest and stomach. Why, I have wondered often, is so much attention paid to the obvious and often contrived beauty of women’s uncomplicated curves and fine, downy skin, when men have at least their fifty percent share of splendor and perfection?

  But I felt little sexual attraction for Charles or Leo or Angus. I felt as though the passionate side of me had closed over, like a healed wound or a sealed vessel. I didn’t long for physical contact with anyone at all. I felt as if I had been freed somehow from needs that are ungovernable and frequently unanswerable.

  Kitchen

  Rebecca was negotiating with a publisher who had asked her to provide a dozen quizzes for a self-help book on marriage. (“How Well Do You Know Him?” “Should You Elope or Splurge on a Big Event?” “Are Your Fights Destructive or Constructive?”) My sisters were busy (Janet) or preoccupied (Lucy). Luba had decided to risk going out with a coworker, a man about whom she had told me little, although noteworthy among the few facts she
had mentioned was that he had been stalked by each of the three women he had most recently been involved with, including one, an assistant producer, who had run his garden hose from the exhaust of his car, which she had first started with a key she had stolen from him, into the nearly closed window of her car in the driveway at his house. The woman’s intentions were uncertain, however, since she had done this in the morning, a few minutes before the hour that he usually came out to drive to work, and the hose had not been taped or secured at either end so that the hazardous molecules of carbon monoxide spilled uselessly into the air. A coy and thinly dramatic gesture, like trying to freeze to death by lying in your own bed with the window open, or taking two dozen children’s aspirin, or wading into a lake with a pocketful of pebbles.

  When we discussed this woman, Luba had admitted to me that she felt that she too had the potential to be a harasser, but she was certain that this man would never rouse her to such a level of passion. She claimed that they didn’t even date, really, just met with colleagues for meals or drinks after work, and then went to his place or hers for unconstrained sex.

  One Sunday afternoon, I stopped by my parents’ house while running errands. From outside, the house had the air of being occupied—several rooms were lighted and a rake and a shovel lay near the front flowerbed as though they were expected to be taken up again soon—but no one answered my three increasingly resonant thumps on the door with its horseshoe-shaped knocker. Finally, I unlocked the door with my own key and stepped into the narrow hall. I could see and hear from the front hall the not entirely unfamiliar scene of Lucy in tears at the kitchen table. Mother was sitting across from her, pouring tea into two clear glass mugs and pulling tissues from a box and handing them to Lucy. Lucy accepted each tissue in turn, wiped her eyes or blew her nose, then tossed it into a pile beside her elbow. Some of the tissues had fallen off the table and were starting to form an untidy pile on the floor. Lucy is not the kind of person who uses anything even remotely disposable more than once.