The Sad Truth About Happiness Read online

  The most serious climbers can get to the top of the mountain in half the time it takes us to complete the ascent. One man who passed us that morning was carrying an eight-kilogram weight in each hand. He was breathing hard and steadily, his eyes focused on some goal far beyond the top of the trail. A woman of forty or so, thin and taut as a predator, sprinted past our deliberate feet as if she had negotiated an exemption from the laws of gravity. A somewhat younger man followed her, his thinning hair matted close to his head in the saturated air. His muddy calves looked as though they were fashioned from sinew; they made me think of the knotted strips of hide that dogs are given to worry at. Sweat trickled along channels that ran from his temples to the hinges of his jaw, and drops fell behind him as he climbed, punctuating each stride.

  Every week we see people like these, who wear their bodies like machinery. Luba and I are manifestly soft, unchallenging, and human in comparison, uncompetitive with each other and with the hikers who pass us on the climb. We strive to keep up a steady pace, even on the discouraging third quarter when it seems that no progress has been made, that the trees will never part, the end of the path never appear, but we take our time, talking as we go, catching up on the week just past.

  By the time we reached the top of the mountain that morning we were dripping from effort and from the drifting mist that threatened to condense at any moment into a frank shower of rain. We refilled our water bottles with tepid water at a tap in the washroom and then bought coffee at the café. I told Luba about Rebecca’s quiz while we sat with our hands wrapped around our mugs, drawing the heat from the pottery into our bones. One of my calf muscles trembled and jerked under the table, adjusting crankily to the contrast between the hard climb and this sudden, warm respite in the humid restaurant.

  “I probably shouldn’t bother exercising at all,” I said, stirring two measures of sugar into my cup, “since I won’t live long enough to reap the benefits. I should lie in bed and eat chocolates and read books instead.”

  “You’ve kept it up this long, so you might as well try to die in good shape,” Luba answered. Her tongue darted forward to test the temperature of her cup, and then she took a shallow sip of coffee. “You’re going to want to look good in your coffin.”

  “Rebecca and I stayed up until midnight trying to work it out. But we couldn’t get the date to change by more than a few days either way. The only answer that made a significant difference was the last one.”

  “What was the question?”

  “The question was ‘Are you happy?’ ”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said ‘Not completely.’ I mean, I am happy overall, but I could be happier. ‘Yes’ would mean I was completely happy, wouldn’t it? Is anyone completely happy?”

  “What happens if you change your answer to yes?”

  “That’s the strange thing. If I say yes, then the date I’m supposed to die jumps all the way to 2063. I’ll be ninety-six then. Ancient. Certainly past looking good in my coffin, no matter how many times we force ourselves up this mountain.”

  “How long you’re supposed to live depends on whether you are happy right now? How much sense does that make?”

  “Not much, I guess. Rebecca couldn’t explain it.”

  “Couldn’t or wouldn’t? Is this some passive-aggressive thing? Maybe she’s trying to get you upset over nothing.”

  “I don’t think so. She’s not like that. And I could tell that she was as bothered as I was. Maybe more. She kept saying that her test wasn’t designed to have that kind of result.”

  “Why don’t you change your answer to yes? You seem happy to me.”

  “She said that I have to be completely honest.”

  “What happens if, by some chance, between now and the end of December, you become happy?”

  “I asked her the same thing. But she wasn’t sure. She was still working on it when I went to bed. And she was asleep when I went out this morning.”

  “Look. Rebecca may mean well, but she’s not a doctor and she hasn’t got a crystal ball. These quizzes are meant to be entertainment, a diversion, something to while away the time at the hairdresser’s. This is the kind of thing that sells magazines. That’s all. It’s a joke, not something you take seriously. You look healthy to me, and you’re happy enough. Anyway, like you said, who is perfectly happy? Maybe there’s no such thing. In fact, I’m certain perfect happiness doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion, meant to sell toothpaste and beer and tennis bracelets.”

  “Are you happy, Luba?”

  Before she could answer, two men, one dark, one fair, both dressed from collar to boots in Gore-Tex in vivid primary colors, red, yellow, and blue, and both with the somewhat unkempt and dissolute look of men who were in their mid-forties and between marriages, asked if they could sit at our table with their coffees and their paper plates, which held the café’s giant, iced cinnamon buns, as substantial as steaks. The only empty tables were outside in what was now an icy, drenching rain. Luba looked at me, implying that the decision was mine, and that she knew what it would be but was hoping I would display a sterner resolve than usual. I glanced back a message that we could hardly say no in the circumstances, and that, if she wanted them to go, she would have to be the one to tell them. So the two men sat down, and we went along with what they seemed to assume to be the implied arrangement—that in return for agreeing to share our four round feet of laminated tabletop, we would allow them to entertain us. After a few of the gondolas that ferry people up and down the mountain had come and gone, Luba said that she had an appointment to keep, and one of the two men—Mike, the fair-haired one more in need of a shave—asked for her telephone number. She gave him her number at work, and they said how much they had enjoyed meeting us, and Mike, looking at Luba, said that it would be great to get together again.

  Luba and I caught the next gondola and rode down the mountain in a crush of tourists who had been ferried up the mountain on an earlier car. The tourists’ brightly colored T-shirts and synthetic jackets reminded me of a flock of exotic birds. The morning was not yet half over. We plunged down through a scrim of rain and clouds that hugged the near hip of the mountain just in time to see the mist over the city begin to dissipate and drift out toward the ocean, so that we fell down and along the mountain slope into an expanding and brightening view of downtown, the inlet, and Lions Gate Bridge.

  The city unfolded from the fog like a shiny present tumbling out of plain wrappings. In the filtered light, the bridge looked freshly made, like a child’s new toy, and it was ribboned with gleaming streams of rain-glossed traffic. Cars streaked toward and away from the city, their headlights yellow and rich and dim, like old gold, against the gray concrete. Around me, the cameras of the visitors clicked and whirred with sharp ticks and snaps, like the clacking of beaks. The tourists craned and dipped and turned their necks, and their plastic coats rustled like stiff plumage. Their voices were audible, in the manner of people in public places who feel confident that they cannot be understood or that it doesn’t matter who overhears since they are unlikely ever to meet the listeners again. They pointed and chattered and seemed to me to be—at least for the short duration of the descent to the parking lot, where their tour bus no doubt awaited warm and rumbling—perfectly, entirely happy.

  On the drive home in Luba’s steamy car, we talked about her parents, who were in their late sixties, aging badly, and had recently been forced to live apart. Her father’s Parkinson’s disease had compelled a move to a care facility in Vancouver. Her mother wasn’t managing well on her own and had decided to leave the second-storey apartment they had shared for over thirty years above the dry cleaning business that they operated when Luba and her sister Rachel were growing up. Luba’s mother was looking for a smaller, more manageable apartment where she could be nearer to her husband. It seemed impossible to house them together, since, although their wants were identical, their levels of need were so different. Luba was at a loss how to help them. There
seemed no place they could be together and happy, and there was little Luba could do apart from helping her mother plan the move and drive her to visits with her father.

  Rebecca had gone out by the time I got home, so there was no competition for the apartment’s only shower. I stripped off my muddy clothes, let them fall in an untidy pile on the bathroom floor, and turned the water on full, as close to scalding as I could bear. I stood for a long time in the surging hot water, waiting for the pressure and heat to drive the chill of the rain and the climb’s tight pain from my muscles, and thinking about happiness and unhappiness. Several times during our discussion the night before, Rebecca had pointed out in her completely earnest way that I would add sixty years to my life span if only I were happy instead of unhappy, and, in the mountain coffee shop that morning, Luba had been urging the same solution on me.

  “What does happiness mean?” I had asked them both. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It’s what you think it means,” Rebecca had insisted. “Only you can know. No one else. You have to give me the truthful answer to the question for you.”

  “That’s impossible. Happiness is more complicated than that. You’re asking for an absolute answer to a question that has no absolutes. It’s not like happiness is a switch that can only be set to on or off. Anyway, I am not unhappy. Just not, overall, completely happy.”

  “So the right answer is the one you gave first. It usually is. If you are really not happy, you can’t change your answer simply to get the date you want.”

  “Then take that question out. It’s killing me off before my time.”

  “It’s not the question that’s killing you. It’s the answer.”

  I thought of Luba, who had told me more than once that she could never be completely happy again. Would Rebecca’s quiz kill her off as well?

  The heat and pounding water worried at thoughts and emotions that seemed to have been lurking just beneath the surface of my skin, waiting to be awakened. The water fell on my skin like liquid sandpaper. It battered and abraded my body, which felt soft and vulnerable under the water’s sting, exposed, like a snail extracted from its tough protective shell. The spray felt invasive, like needles intent on piercing my skin, or a scraping tool worrying at old paint. A storm surged and roared in my ears. Steam churned and massed in gray clouds. The closed shower stall felt clammy and close, and I struggled to catch my breath. Hot, damp air filled my throat and blurred my vision. My chest felt tight, my throat raw. At the point that I thought that I could bear it no longer and reached to turn off the taps, I felt the pounding water tease a hollow, cold sensation from somewhere deep inside me, from the marrow inside my bones perhaps, or some hidden spot in my smooth, twisting viscera.

  I felt an icy slide, like the long, sick shock you suffer when you cut your finger deeply or blurt out words that should not even have been thought and cannot now be taken back. A shuddering chill rose in a wintry slither to the surface of my burning skin, like an ice snake, like the dank, blind, grubbing, invading roots of bindweed burrowing upward through stony soil or some specter in a horror movie slipping free from the grave. I shuddered as I felt something mocking and lonely and cold tear away from me. For the smallest moment, my perspective abruptly shifted. I felt for that instant as though I were hovering at the top of the shower looking down into the narrow steamy stall. I saw myself: small, wet, burning cold in the swirling heat, hair slicked back, my skin mottled and rough. Crystals of sharp, stinging salt burned in my eyes. I ran my hands over my breasts and thighs and torso. My skin felt hot, tight, almost electric. After several minutes longer, I could feel a few heated tears escape. They were lost immediately in the swirling steam, and trickled away in the streaming water. My tears brought no sense of release or relief. Their flight felt like the lightest, coldest touch of a departing lover.

  I felt then as if I had plunged into a place in the world that I hadn’t known existed. A place of utter abandonment, of loss, insignificance, failure, sorrow. My body felt as though it was opening up in the steam and intensifying heat like a hard-edged shell being prised apart. I raised my hands to my face and felt the coursing water strike my fingertips and stream along the sharp bones at the back of my hands. The water fell to the drain after tracing a retreating caress around the islands and crevasses of my shivering body. I felt solitary, absurd, hollow, hopeless—swept by a longing for something that I could not name or picture. It felt like the deepest, most intense thirst I had ever known.

  Front Steps

  I had spent all of my life worrying about the happiness of one or the other of my two sisters, Janet and Lucy. This felt to me like a responsibility if not a vocation, although one more or less willingly assumed. It had always been, in any event, one of the few absolutely clear purposes in my life. The crises my sisters experienced or created were more numerous and significant than mine, and I felt an obligation to do what I could to preserve and restore their so readily lost equilibrium.

  That fall I was most concerned about Lucy, who was pregnant with the baby who would turn out to be Philip, and who had just become engaged to Ryan. For the first time I could think of, my sister Janet was sailing smoothly along under a kind of mantle of serenity. Janet had been married for five years to John, and they had Claudia and Thomas, the twins, who were four, and sweet, fat Marie, who had been born that spring. Janet had given up her part-time job at John’s bookstore a few weeks before Marie’s birth and now spent her days ferrying the children in her white Volvo between home and the park or to the swimming pool where the twins were enrolled in Aquatot lessons. She kept placid baby Marie in a pouch on her stomach whenever Marie wasn’t asleep or riding in her car seat. Janet had always been fast-moving and tense, and quick with her immutable decisions. Since she could first talk she had had a staccato way with words—sharp, pointed, relentless, critical. But now she seemed to be consciously absorbing some portion of Marie’s calm. She had a slower walk these days in her perfect shoes, her camber altered by the weight and bounce of the baby suspended below her throat, and her gaze was newly moderated by some subtle, hidden shifting of the uncompromising elements of her anxious nature.

  Lucy had recently returned to the city after several years away. She had been living in Rome, in a tiny apartment on the fifth floor of an ancient building on Via dei Pettinari in the labyrinthine crux of the old city, not far from the square where Giordano Bruno had been burned as a heretic four hundred years ago and where his statue still stands as a warning to others.

  Lucy had first gone to Florence for a year, to study art history, but had immediately become involved with Corrado, an artist she met there, and dropped out of her courses and moved with him to Rome. I knew only a few things about Corrado. As evidenced by the photos Lucy sent us—they showed Lucy dressed in a filmy skirt and low-cut blouse clinging to his back on an immense motorcycle—he was intensely, extravagantly beautiful. He worked in oil paints slathered thickly onto his canvases with putty knives and trowels. He then slashed the canvases with razor blades and mended them roughly with heavy, waxed sailor’s thread pushed through the canvases with a sailor’s palm. Lucy had one of his paintings, and I found it savage and disturbing. Another thing I knew about Corrado was the way he pronounced my sister’s name. She echoed his voice for me on the telephone. “Lu-chi-ah! Ah, ti voglio bene, Lu-chi-ah!”

  Soon after the move to Rome, however, the bello Corrado took up with one of his models, a long-limbed young man from Palermo with skin, Lucy reported, the color of burnt oatmeal and a dark head of fat, oiled curls. Corrado ended things with Lucy quite abruptly and cruelly. She bought a ticket home, but the day before she meant to leave, a friend she had moved in with temporarily, a freelance journalist, suggested that she apply for a position that had come open at the Roman bureau of an American television station. Gleaming with the brittle brilliance of the newly jilted, she dazzled the three men who interviewed her, and was hired immediately.

  Lucy’s job in Rome was to organize de
tails for the journalists, their tickets, money, and documents and telephone and e-mail connections, before they went on assignments. At the end of the first month of her new job, as she drove her moped back to the office after an errand at the bank, Lucy was mugged by a skinny, nervy man, who, the police told her later, had been waiting in a lane outside the bank watching for her or someone like her, alone and with lots of money. He sprang on her as she kicked the motorbike off its stand and started forward, slashing out at her with an X-acto knife. She had two thousand U.S. dollars in cash concealed under her leather jacket in a zippered pouch slung on a webbed strap around her waist. The man was nervous, or perhaps haste marred his aim. The slick blade of his knife sliced through her jacket and the waistband of her jeans and only shallowly into the soft flesh of her waist. Lucy felt her rich, dark blood begin to ooze out of the wound before she felt any pain. She shrieked, threw a weak punch at her attacker’s face, and then kicked out at him hard with one booted foot. The man fell to the ground; Lucy’s lucky kick had caught him directly in his groin. He curled into a ball, loudly lamenting, and was captured instantly by four passing Italian youths, who joyfully threw themselves onto him and held him fast, one each to a limb, while a nearby shopkeeper who had been pulled from his store by the clamor dialed the police on a cell phone belonging to one of the four heroes. Several police officers arrived within a short while and took the man away, the X-acto knife encased in a plastic bag for evidence.