The Sad Truth About Happiness Read online

  Rebecca cared about food, how it was prepared, how it looked, its textures and temperatures and flavors. I had never been too interested in what I ate, so long as it wasn’t terrible, burnt, overwhelming, or insufficient. Without Rebecca, I was clearly headed for the kind of single woman’s diet I live on now—lightly buttered toast, soft-boiled eggs, fruit, overripe from neglect by a day or two, sliced into bowls with plain yogurt, infrequent knuckle-sized servings of flavorless meat, dry toast and bitter coffee on the weekend mornings when the milk and butter run out. Rebecca bought goat cheeses soaked in olive oil, fat sausages of lamb and fennel, thinly sliced Parma ham, and crusty Portuguese buns from an Italian store on Victoria Street. She talked the owner of the grocery store around the corner from our apartment into putting the reddest peppers, the curliest lettuces, and the heaviest, sweetest melons aside for her. She convinced him, through the charm of her gravelly voice, the subtle gestures of her expressive hands, and the intimate incline of her neck, that the two of them alone in all the city truly appreciated the best.

  Rebecca had very low expectations of me as her audience. She didn’t expect me to be home on time so that she could take something foolishly complicated like a soufflé out of the oven at the exact right moment. She didn’t watch my expression carefully as I took the first bite, in order to gauge my reaction. She prepared good food, put it on the table, and then was ready to eat it, talking about other things. I took to work for my lunch whatever was left uneaten from dinner the night before, since Rebecca had a horror of leftovers. “That’s so yesterday,” she said to me once when she saw me cramming a plastic container with the remains of a dish of scalloped potatoes. She was only half joking. No matter how hard she had labored the day before to prepare the perfect soup or stew or salad, by the next day her interest had transferred to that day’s projects.

  I drink very seldom now—too dangerous, I think—but Rebecca poured out wine every evening when we sat down to eat. The heavy glasses shone in our hands like incandescent fruit or oversized synthetic jewels, and the wine started our conversation and kept it running along. Rebecca liked to hear about my safe, stable childhood—the more mundane details filled her with wonder—and she traded her day’s events for mine.

  What Rebecca was doing all day, while I was pressing women’s breasts flat and x-raying them to check for the embryonic seeds that might blossom into tumors, was designing quizzes and questionnaires for periodicals, the kind of tests that are common in women’s magazines: “Is He Right for You?” “Test Your Shopping Smarts.” “Are You Well Read?” “How High Is Your Self-Esteem?” She did her research on the Internet, and at our local library or the central branch over on Georgia Street.

  Although at a glance her tests looked like the most frivolous kind of filler, the sort of nonsense that is intended only to pad the space between makeup advertisements and weightier articles, Rebecca always treated her subjects seriously. Even for lighter topics—“Rate Your Sense of Humor” or “Are You Cat-Crazy or Dog-Devoted?”—she always explained exactly what the test results represented, and suggested what could or should be done with them. For example, at the end of a quiz testing fitness awareness, she would recommend websites and books that promoted health. For a questionnaire on love affairs, she emphasized the need for people whose relationships tested as abusive to steel themselves to bring things to an end, and told them where they could find help if they couldn’t break away on their own. She received fan mail from readers every day, many of whom told her that one or another of her quizzes had stirred them to make significant changes in their lives. Some of them wrote to seek her advice on their own particular situation, and Rebecca always responded, not with further advice but with a list of resources: therapists, specialists, or the better kind of self-help book. What she enjoyed, she told me, far more then advising the bewildered, was the mathematical and architectural precision of designing an intelligent, balanced test, one that would expose an unexpected pattern, or bring unexamined truths to the surface.

  Rebecca produced roughly one quiz a week, which didn’t seem like a lot of work to me at first, since in my job I sometimes saw as many as twenty patients in a day, but over a few months I began to see the challenges of her unusual job. In addition to designing the questions and determining the range of possible answers and the right weighting for all of them, Rebecca had to come up with and pitch the ideas, consult with editors and make any changes they insisted on, and send out invoices and collect payment. All I had to do was turn up at work, carry out a series of more or less routine procedures, prepare my reports, and collect my paycheck every two weeks. I had good benefits—disability, life insurance, and extended health—and eventually I would be able to retire and collect a pension. Rebecca sometimes earned as much as four or five thousand dollars for a single test, but she had to put aside enough money for her taxes and retirement plan, and, as she had told me during our twenty-minute interview, she was saving for the down payment on a house.

  Rebecca had her life planned along strictly defined routes and timetables. She wanted to share the Beach Avenue apartment with me for two more years, and then buy a small house in one of the settled neighborhoods east of Main Street. She would then have a child, with a husband if one appeared, or by adoption, from Russia or China or South America. She intended to have her house paid off before she was fifty, and to resist any temptation to ever buy a larger house or move to a different neighborhood. She liked the thought that the first house she bought would be the only one she would ever own, and would be the one she would die in. She wanted her child to grow up in one place. Rebecca had been the fifth child of an army sergeant and a licensed practical nurse, and had lived with her family in a succession of bungalows and town houses. She had gone to nine schools in five provinces and another near the Black Forest in Germany.

  September is when the days begin to close in, like a collection of nested gold and orange and red Chinese folded paper boxes, each one a size smaller than the last. The sun has been getting up later and going down earlier since its glory days in June, when, this far north, it rules many more hours than it sleeps. By September, the dawn is sluggish, reluctant, slow-moving and dusk bites impatiently into the end of the day. Rebecca had begun to serve dinner by candlelight. It was too early in the autumn for the firefly glimmer of the candle flame against the approaching twilight, but the candles softened the edges of the evening shadows that reached through the window and crept across the meal laid out on Rebecca’s grandmother’s table.

  “Did you work on your quiz on longevity today?” I asked her over dinner one late September evening.

  Rebecca put down her fork and leaned toward me across the table, cradling her glass in her hands. She was always happy to talk about her work.

  “Yes, but it’s not about longevity exactly. It’s actually a test for how long you are going to live, which might be long or short, depending. If you fill it out completely honestly, it will give you the date that you’re going to die.”

  “Do you mean that you can predict to the year or month how long someone is going to live?”

  “To the exact day, in fact. I find that accuracy in the result helps inspire faith in the process. People who take this kind of quiz aren’t looking for general guidance. They feel—and I’ve come to understand this—that once they’ve invested a half-hour into finding a pencil, carefully answering all the questions, and working out their score, they are entitled to a precisely calibrated response. It would have made you doubtful of the discerning powers of your teacher if, after you took an exam in school, you were told that you did all right or pretty well. You needed to know that you had scored 84 out of 100 in order to be sure that your work was thoroughly evaluated. And you wanted to be able to measure yourself against your last result and against the 82 percent someone else scored. That’s why I have to provide a precise date of death. Of course, the dates are only conjecture until the person dies. But I really do think my test is accurate, give or take, an
d allowing for outlying cases.” She took a sip from her glass, then swirled the remaining wine around and around, starting up a small, glittering vortex. She was clearly excited and pleased by her day’s work.

  “What about random causes, like crossing the street and getting hit by a bus?” I still didn’t know Rebecca well enough to judge whether to take her entirely seriously.

  “Good question,” Rebecca said. She swallowed the last shimmering drops of her wine and set down the empty glass. Her hands began to sketch through the air in a professorial manner.

  “I’ve tried to draw out any predilection for risky behaviors, like being absentminded or refusing to use condoms or playing hazardous sports or taking illegal drugs. My thesis is that the kind of person who does these things is also more likely to forget to pay attention to the traffic, or to take a chance dashing across the street or using a dirty needle.”

  “What if the person taking the quiz is in denial?”

  “I probe for careless behaviors by asking how many traffic accidents the person has been involved in, whether they talk on a cell phone while they drive, whether they would accept a pill from a stranger at a party, that kind of thing.”

  “Where did you come out?” Rebecca always takes her own tests. She ended things with her last boyfriend, a successful stockbroker named Garry, a few days after he earned a highish score on a quiz she designed called “Is He Trouble?”

  “I am going to die on February 1, 2050. Of course, it’s only a theory until then. Unless I die earlier, in which case at least I’ll be spared the embarrassment of knowing I was wrong.”

  “You’re kidding me. No test can be that exact.”

  Rebecca shrugged, smiling. She rotated her empty wine glass on its circular foot. “This one is.”

  “What if I took it?”

  “Do you really want to know?” Rebecca asked. She had just reached to pick up her fork. She put it down again, reached to refill her glass, and took a slow, deliberative sip. “Not everyone does, you know.”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. You’re not serious. Is this a joke? Is this one going to run on April Fools’ Day?”

  “It’s not meant to be a joke, but you are free to take it seriously or not, just as you like. Come on. We can do you right now before dessert. It won’t hurt to leave it for another few minutes in the fridge to make sure it’s completely set. Don’t worry! You’re healthy. You look both ways before crossing and then you check again. From the sound of it you never had a boyfriend who even remotely qualified as real trouble. You return your library books on time. You don’t smoke. Your parents are both alive and well. You’ll probably live until you’re a hundred. I should make you my executor, since you’ll likely survive me by twenty years. I smoked all through high school, and tore the filters off too.”

  Rebecca went to her closet office and came back with her laptop computer, which she placed on the table beside her plate. She opened it, pressed a few keys, and waited until, with a series of chittering noises followed by a gleam and a hum, it flickered into life. I watched as she scrolled through her files and selected the one she wanted. After a few moments more, the screen changed from its provisional shade of deep blue to a glowing, radiant, hard-working opal. Rebecca paused for a few seconds, and then directed seventy-five questions at me in quick succession. “Just say the first thing that enters your mind,” she prompted me if I hesitated, her standard reminder whenever I took one of her quizzes.

  The last question she asked was, “Are you happy right now?” I hesitated, thinking about love, and how deeply and rawly I longed for its syrup and sting, the steady heat of someone’s thighs alongside mine in bed, and then answered, truthfully, recklessly, “Not completely.”

  Rebecca glanced at me coolly, appraisingly. “I’ll put down ‘No,’ ” she said.

  Immediately, she began tallying up my scores in a separate program. I started a second glass of wine while I watched her add the numbers together once and then a second time. Her lips pushed forward and she blinked rapidly as she worked.

  “Well?” I asked when she had finally stopped pressing keys.

  Rebecca was peering into the computer screen as if studied contemplation of the electronic text would disclose an underlying and essential message.

  “When’s it going to be?” I prompted. “When am I going to shuffle off this mortal coil? What are mortal coils, anyway? They sound rather intestinal, don’t they? Or mattressy. How do you shuffle them off?”

  Rebecca took a deep draw from her glass of wine. “OK,” she announced. She bounced one fingernail against her front teeth. “There’s some sort of problem here. I thought I had everything weighted properly, but the test must still have a few bugs in it.”

  “What? Am I going to live until I’m 110? My savings won’t last that long.” I stood up, crossed to her side of the table, and craned around her bent neck to see what was written on the screen. Rebecca hunched forward as if she meant to block my gaze, but then she sat back in her chair and crossed her arms on her chest.

  “What does 22-12-99 mean? Does that mean December 22? That’s two weeks before my birthday. I’m going to get cheated out of my last birthday.”

  Rebecca nodded thoughtfully. She gazed again at her computer screen, and at the rows of numbers and letters in neat ranks above the number 22-12-99.

  “And 99—what century are we talking about? I don’t seriously expect to live to 132. Or 232?”

  Rebecca still didn’t answer.

  You can’t mean this December 22?”

  Rebecca leaned forward, stabbed at the keyboard, and then pressed Enter again. She peered into the flickering screen. In the glassy glow, her nose cast a dark triangle of shadow that masked her eyes. I couldn’t read her expression.

  “I am sure there’s something wrong here,” she said. “In the weightings. Or maybe I’ve made a mistake in the math. We’ll have to go through this thing question by question until I figure it out.”

  “You think I’m going to die in three months?” Rebecca didn’t answer. I drained off the rest of my glass and felt the wine’s cold golden slide all the way down to my stomach.

  Pathway

  The next day was Saturday. The alarm rang stridently and early, pulling me too soon from an unusually intense, deep, and saturated sleep. At first, in the dim light of early morning, my dresser, desk, and chair looked formless and strangely still, like living creatures that had been moving about moments before and had frozen in the instant before I opened my eyes. It took a moment before it came to me that this sensation of shaggy, indistinct, rushed stillness had arisen in contrast to my abruptly shattered dream, one that seemed to have been packed full of jagged shards of bright, rapidly shifting colors. The furniture, corners, and edges of my room took a few moments to assume their solid daytime shapes.

  A snaking eddy of cold air met my feet when I lowered them to the floor. I could hear the dark, wet winds of autumn pushing against my bedroom windows, and felt in the air the pressure and weight of the night’s bad weather. I shivered abundantly for an instant, and then put on black hiking shorts, a white T-shirt, my navy blue fleece jacket, thick wool socks, and my old hiking boots. I filled a water bottle, fumbled a Luna bar out of a box in the kitchen, and was downstairs in the lobby a few minutes later when my friend Luba’s tomato red Volvo swung into the driveway and pulled to a stop at the building’s front door. After a mostly silent twenty-minute drive, we were at the small break in the margin of thick, green forest that marks the start of the rough rock, plank, and split-log path that runs to the peak of Grouse Mountain. We stamped our feet and swung our arms in the damp chill, exchanged a few words of encouragement, took pulls from our water bottles, then started together to climb past the trees that cling to the mountainside.

  The trail to the top of the mountain isn’t long, less than three kilometers, but it is steep, more like ascending a ladder than hiking. No matter how many times I do this climb, by the time I am halfway up the mountain my legs ar
e burning and the muscles of my chest are struggling to pull enough oxygen into my lungs so that I can keep on going. The point of the ascent is the exercise—the pull on the long muscles of the thighs and the clenching and unknotting of calves and buttocks, the muscles that are never used in the city—rather than the scenery, and finishing, rather than enjoying, the climb. In any case, the dense, sodden limbs and branches of the crowded rain forest seldom thin or part to allow for a view, and rampant, luxuriant shrubs and scrub and ferns and trees threaten from every side to overwhelm the trail. There are few places to step aside from the path and look around to gain a sense of scale or perspective.

  The air tastes and smells as green and damp as the forest floor—a loamy, oxygenated taste of peat and standing water and rot, overlaid with ozone. The ground underfoot, where it can be felt through the tree roots, the slippery moss-covered boulders, and the steep, slick wooden steps decomposing in the still, damp air, is moccasin-soft, with the sinking, saturated, cool resilience of sphagnum, spongy with silent history. The rich and abundant appearance of the topsoil is misleading, however. In fact the earth is thin and acidic, and large sheets of the loosely tethered ground beneath our feet are always at risk of slipping off the mountainside in a tumble of rock, dirt, trees, underbrush, trail, and hikers.