The Sad Truth About Happiness Page 10

  The appeal of a secretary at the law firm where I used to work was more obvious. She was a remarkably beautiful woman, with smooth dark skin that looked plumped out from the inside, black hair that she wore loose in long curls, like dark spilling water, and wide, shadowy eyes that always made me think of ancient portraits of Egyptian nobility. She had the abundance of a rain forest. I had sometimes tried to imagine what it would have been like to be her at twelve, or thirteen, when her body first began to take on the shape of a violin and move with a new pendular heft, her hair thickened into vinelike tendrils, her lips filled out into red petals, and her eyes became as dark and glossy as fresh black figs. I didn’t have to imagine the effect she had on men, because she trailed manifestations of lust and adoration wherever she went in the office—longing glances, approaches both furtive and overt, and declarations of love made to the walls or ceilings. She was serenely unaffected by any of this. She had a boyfriend who was studying refrigeration technology at night school, and was of average appearance—facts I had learned from my vantage point at the reception desk. Her devotion to this ordinary boy somehow rendered her immune to the approaches of others. She was completely levelheaded, unaltered by what her body might have put her through. This made her all the more desirable to the men who tried to catch her attention, I think. They may have thought that she had somewhere a mechanism, a toggle, that they could somehow switch on if they could only discover the trick, or that there might be some enticement or persuasion that could open her eyes to other possibilities and make her, perhaps, someone else entirely.

  Living Room

  “Nothing wrong with you at all,” my doctor concluded at the end of what seemed to me to be a perfunctory, even cursory five-minute examination the following week. “All of your tests are well within the normal range. There’s certainly no neurological impairment that I can see. The only change from your last checkup is that you’ve lost about five pounds, which is probably healthy. You’re still within the right weight for your height and build. To be on the safe side, we’ll send you down to the lab for some extra blood work. If we find anything unusual, I’ll let you know.”

  “But I am still not sleeping,” I said, conscious of a slight shrill edge in my complaint, which I strove to dampen. I was reluctant to leave without some kind of diagnosis, if not a cure, but did not want to appear too anxious and risk being diagnosed with hypochondria or neurosis or with some other manifestation of exaggerated self-importance or lack of self-regard.

  “Maybe you just need less sleep than the rest of us. It’s common to need less sleep as we age.”

  “I’m only thirty-two!”

  “These things vary widely.”

  “What about the tingling in my feet and hands? I can’t focus. I feel heavy all the time. I’m more forgetful.”

  “Are you anxious? Depressed? Have your eating habits changed?”

  “No. Just the sleeping.”

  “Well, this next set of blood tests will rule out anything serious. And I don’t see any of the symptoms of multiple sclerosis, for example. We’ll keep an eye on you. But my present diagnosis is that you are a healthy woman who is able to get by on less sleep. Enjoy it. Take a night class.”

  “Maybe not a night class,” Rebecca suggested over dinner that evening. “But there are those public lectures out at the university every Saturday night. They are good, usually. Why don’t we go to the one this weekend?”

  “What’s it about?”

  “It would spoil it if we knew in advance. The thing is to go on a Saturday night without knowing, with the faith that, whatever it is, it will be interesting.”

  “Faith.”

  “Yes, faith. Weren’t you listening? You have that dreamy look again.”

  “It’s the not sleeping.”

  “My cousin’s going as well.”

  “Going where?”

  “To the lecture next Saturday. He suggested I come along.”

  “He won’t mind if I go as well?”

  “No, in fact I’ve been meaning to have you meet him.”

  “Is that what this is about, having me meet your cousin?”

  “No. Although come to think of it, you might like him.”

  “Oh, Rebecca. Don’t do this to me.”

  “I’m not doing anything. And you’ll like him. He’s a sweetie.”

  On Saturday morning, Luba and I saw Mike and his friend Al/Brad/Stan as soon as we walked into the café at the top of Grouse Mountain.

  “Oh, no,” I groaned into Luba’s ear.

  “Let me handle this,” said Luba firmly, stepping forward to the table where the two men were sitting.

  “Hi, Mike,” she said, putting her hand on his shoulder. “And . . . I’m so sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

  “Angus. Angus Singer.”

  “Well, good to see you again. Bye!” said Luba, tugging me toward a table that was still empty on the other side of the room.

  “See,” she said. “It is better to face up to that which you fear. Evasion only works in the short term. Direct confrontation lasts forever.”

  “Excuse me.” Angus had trailed us to our table.

  “It’s Maggie, isn’t it?” Angus continued. He reached out a hand toward me.

  “Yes. Maggie Selgrin. We met the other week.” I took his hand and shook it, ensuring that there was no responsive pressure in my grasp.

  “I remember. And I understand that Mike got together with both of you since then. He’s an old friend, you understand. He’s been having a hard time since his wife left him. I know he’s a bit of a jerk. I try not to hold it too much against him. We’ve known each other since we were in grade school.”

  “Admirable loyalty,” said Luba, sipping from her cup of coffee.

  “Well, the point is, I thought maybe you, Maggie, might want to come on the climb with me some time. Maybe next week?”

  “I can’t, but thanks for asking. I always come with Luba.”

  “I won’t be here next week, remember?” Luba reminded me, after Angus had retreated to his table. “I’m going to the broadcasting conference in Halifax. Why not go with him? He’s kind of cute. What harm can it do? It’s a public place. So long as he dumps Mike, of course.”

  “Luba! I just won’t come next week. Or I’ll find someone else to go with.”

  “You can’t necessarily judge people by who their friends are. I stuck with you through the Geoffrey days, remember?”

  On his way out of the café with Mike, who smiled at us cheerfully, rubbed his hands together, and emitted a broad wink, Angus stopped by our table again and handed me his card.

  “In case you change your mind,” he said. He switched on a smile that creased his face appealingly. A trick, I thought, that he could not be entirely unconscious of.

  The lecture that night was called “Dreaming Technology” and was delivered by a visiting scholar from the National University of Singapore.

  “Is it possible,” Dr. Tse asked an attentive audience of about two hundred, “to consistently design machines that will operate better, more reliably, more faithfully, if you will? I put it to you that the answer is yes, and that the means to do this is not only to make machines that are smarter, faster, more responsive, or even more exactly manufactured or calibrated, although these are all important. My topic tonight is dreaming technology, and my dream is one of a world in which our technology is contented if it operates well, joyful if it exceeds your expectations. Can you imagine a machine that wants, with every fiber of its circuitry, to make you, its owner and operator, happy? Close your eyes. Go on, just try it. Can you picture such a world? Think of owning a refrigerator that wants nothing more than to supply your family with wholesome, chilled foods to eat. A car that experiences a measurable ping of electronic pleasure if it gets you home by the shortest route, safely and on time. A cheerful printer that spits out each sharp, bright printed page with glee. A calculator that loves to . . . but perhaps we are now taking things too far. We are tal
king about happiness in the microchip brain and the nervelike interconnections of a machine, the ability to be glad. Love is perhaps a leap—a quantum leap—beyond mere happiness. Love requires a heart, and I don’t think we’ll see a machine with a feeling heart in our lifetime. Perhaps our children or grandchildren will have such machines in their world.”

  “What did you think?” Rebecca’s cousin Leo asked me as the three of us were walking back to his car, which we had left in a student parking lot remote from the auditorium. Three days’ heavy rain had, miraculously, come to an end during the evening. The clouds were dispersing, and a crescent moon gleamed now and then, slim and hazy, almost coyly, as if through a veil, in the deep, black sky. The pavement was dark and wet, and every now and then the moon’s demure image trembled underfoot.

  “I liked the part about the potential to conscript medical devices that truly want to help to find a cure for AIDS and cancer,” I answered slowly. “But even though his hypothesis seemed sound when he was going through it step by step, it’s impossible when you add it all together. It comes across as wishful thinking to me, more fiction than science. Almost as if, simply by wanting something so much, we can make it happen.”

  “And if you can make a machine that feels happy doing good, how do you know that you won’t end up with a machine that is just as happy doing bad? Remember Hal, in the movie 2001?” said Rebecca.

  “I think Hal was the good guy. Wasn’t the point of the movie that the humans were bad?” Leo asked.

  “I’m sorry that they ran out of time before I had a chance to ask my question,” said Rebecca. “I wanted to contradict his point about not being able to envision a machine with a heart. They made the first mechanical heart back in the 1970s, didn’t they? A mechanical heart is a machine that’s all heart.”

  “If love were merely a matter of having a heart, wouldn’t we all be lovable?” I asked.

  “I have no doubt that we all are,” said Rebecca.

  Leo smiled at me over the top of Rebecca’s head, a smile that floated in the air just above the part in the middle of her hair.

  Leo was about thirty, a year or two younger than Rebecca and I. He worked at a small law firm downtown and had come directly from work to pick us up, so he was still wearing his suit and a belted trench coat, both of which sat on him very badly, as if he bought his clothes with his eyes shut, didn’t own an iron, and got dressed in the dark. He had sloping shoulders, short legs, a long torso, and a head that was too large for his body and topped with raggedly cut, reddish-blond hair. It seemed to me just possible that he cut his hair himself. He was only a little taller than Rebecca. Leo struck me as the kind of astute man who had taken stock of himself in the mirror one day early on and had sensibly decided to develop his intellectual abilities and a warm personality instead of expending energy on his appearance. He reminded me of a medium-sized golden-furred mammal, a marmot perhaps, with a round body, a rudimentary neck, and an absurd but likable face. I didn’t like to think about what he might look like without his rumpled clothes on, although it was impossible to keep from contemplating that he might be round and golden and furry all over. Naked, he might be comfortable and cozy, like a stuffed animal, but far from romantically appealing. Rebecca told me that he had broken up with his girlfriend, an aerobics instructor, a few months earlier.

  “What kind of man dates an aerobics teacher?” I asked her.

  “Aren’t you being a little judgmental?”

  “Come on, Rebecca. Smart women don’t teach calisthenics for a living.”

  “I don’t think they call it that anymore. And I never met her, so I can’t defend her. But Leo’s an intelligent man and I refuse to believe that he was dating a bimbo. Anyway, they broke up. Maybe she was a mistake he had to make on the way to finding his heart’s desire.”

  “Here’s the car,” Leo said. “Why don’t we stop for a glass of wine or a beer before I drop you back at your place?”

  When Leo was walking us to our apartment door an hour and a half later, he craned over Rebecca’s head again and said, addressing only me, “Would you like to go to the lecture next Saturday?”

  “That would be wonderful,” answered Rebecca.

  “And you, too, of course,” Leo emended.

  “I was accepting on Maggie’s behalf,” answered Rebecca. “Of course she’ll come. If she has a conflicting engagement, I’ll make sure she breaks it.”

  “I am perfectly happy to accept for myself,” I said, the polite thing to say, the right thing, although I was already certain that Leo was the kind of man I would like for a friend, nothing more. It was impossible to imagine kissing him without a shudder of aversion that was so small, so intense, that there was something revoltingly agreeable about the sensation.

  Dining Room

  “Lucy, don’t you think it’s time to talk about what we’re going to do about this wedding?”

  Rebecca and I had invited Lucy over to the apartment for Sunday dinner and a video.

  “No. It’s not. What video did you pick?”

  “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

  “Very funny, Rebecca.”

  “The Runaway Bride.”

  “Maggie! I’m not running away, am I?”

  “But, Lucy. It’s time to get serious. What are you going to do?”

  “Let’s watch the video and we’ll talk about it some other time, OK?”

  “Bad news, Lucy,” said Rebecca. She rose to her feet and began to clear away the plates. “There isn’t any video and I’m going out. Not quite sure what’s up. Something about planning your wedding. Janet should be here any minute. In fact, there’s the door. That’s probably her now. I’ll let her in.”

  “Janet! What the hell are you doing here? Maggie, I’m going to kill you.”

  “You’ll have to kill Janet as well. And Rebecca, too, while you’re at it.”

  “You promised to keep me out of it. Hi, Janet. They’re expecting you, I think. I’m off. I should be back by eleven-thirty or so, Maggie. Have fun.”

  “Lucy, look, I brought some pictures of. . . .”

  “I have no idea why you might possibly think that you have any right to be involved in this. What the hell do you know about weddings anyway? You and John eloped, for god’s sake.”

  “Yeah, but you and Ryan decided to have a wedding, remember? Priest. Church. Mass, too, for all I know.”

  “No. No mass.”

  “What are you going to wear?”

  “Mum said I could have her old dress.”

  “Her old wedding dress?”

  “Of course, her wedding dress. What other dress of hers would I ever be caught dead in?’

  “Where the hell is it? We used to play dress-up in it when we were girls, remember? Up in the box room?”

  “Mum gave away the dress-up stuff years ago. I’m sure the wedding dress went with it.”

  “Probably gone to orphans in Africa.”

  “She kept it. It’s at the house somewhere. Hung up. Or in a trunk.”

  “Full of moth holes, probably. And in tatters. We were pretty rough on it. Have you even looked at it?”

  “No, I haven’t seen it. I haven’t looked. She mentioned it one day, that’s all.”

  “It will have to be let out if we can even find it. A lot.”

  “How can it possibly fit you, Lucy? Think! You’ll be nine months pregnant by then. You aren’t being practical.”

  “Eight and a half months. I can get the dress altered. And I am being practical. I’m marrying Ryan, remember?”

  “Lucy, this isn’t the nineteenth century. Everyone likes Ryan. He’s great. But no one’s making you marry him. No one even expects you to. You have choices.”

  “No, I don’t. I burned my choices when I told Gian Luigi to vaffanculo and quit my job.”

  “They’d have you back. They loved you.”

  “Work or Gian Luigi?”

  “Gian Luigi’s in the past now, Lucy. You don’t need him. And you don’t ha
ve to marry Ryan, that’s for sure. You should do what you want to do.”

  “I want to marry Ryan. I’ve made my decision.”

  “You don’t seem happy about it.”

  “At this point, it’s not about happiness, it’s about doing the right thing.”

  “I’ve always thought that doing the right thing would make you happy.”

  “That’s because you’re naïve, idealistic, and romantic, Maggie.”

  “Leave Maggie alone. She hasn’t done anything wrong. You’re the dumb idiot who went and got herself pregnant.”

  “Who’s so dumb? Thomas and Claudia were pretty damn premature—seven months after your quickie Caribbean wedding. Who did you think you were fooling? Only anyone who can’t count. Maggie’s the only smart one in this family. So far she’s escaped the Selgrin daughters’ fate of having to marry whoever gets her knocked up.”

  “That’s because Maggie won’t let anyone get close enough to her to give her anything more intimate than a handshake. It was nearly eight months. The twins were premature. Lots of twins are. They were in incubators for three days before. . . .”

  “If you guys want a wedding, plan one for Maggie. Leave me out of it.”

  “Lucy, we just . . .”

  “Just piss off, that’s all I’m asking you to do. Piss off. How hard is that? If you can’t cope, why don’t you take one of your little pink pills.”

  “They’re not pink. And don’t you dare go barging out of here. Maggie and I have gone to a lot of trouble to—Shit. Wouldn’t you know it?”

  “Janet, if you could just sit down for a minute, we could—Janet!”

  “I’m going after her. She’ll listen to me.”

  “Why? She never has before.”

  “Don’t wait up.”

  “Damn.”

  I sat and waited to see if any of them would return, resisting a sudden craving to let my head fall forward on the table and to grind my forehead into the crumbs. After a few long minutes, I sighed and gave up. I finished clearing the table and loaded the dishwasher, dropping the dishes in heavily. I poured in too much soap, slammed the door shut, and switched the machine on, although it wasn’t full. The hum as the water warmed, and then the sloshing and whirring as the engine set to work were comforting. White noise.