The Sad Truth About Happiness Read online

  Not so long ago, even as late as when I was a child, serious illnesses were not freely spoken of. Cancer in particular operated as furtively in society as it does in the body, under the surface. I have always thought that this was courtesy run amuck, misplaced, exaggerated manners, but it might just as likely have been fear and a healthy sense of respect for an implacable enemy, especially when remedies were fewer and more insidious. I wonder what people felt then at a diagnosis of cancer? Not shame, I think, but something close to it, an appalled, shocked silence over how strictly we are at the mercy of messy, ungovernable biology after all, despite our claim to lives of thoughtfulness and order.

  These days, cancer is acknowledged, although its terror has not ebbed. It seems to be everywhere. I saw over the course of a few weeks a patient who wrote sonnets about her cancer on scraps of paper that she kept crammed into her purse. She would pull them out and read them, or open her notebook and start a new one.

  “Sonnets turn somewhere in the middle,” she told me, when I asked about her poems. “From the specific to the general; from the facts to the ideas or theory behind the facts. It’s the same kind of turn, don’t you think, that cancer can take, when the cells either retreat or prevail. Your life can shrink or expand, just like that, between one day and the next.”

  My patients with cancer are foreigners sojourning in the uncharted territory of ill health and forced to acquire its ungainly, unsought vocabulary, in the same way that when we travel to a strange country we must learn the necessary local words of daily life. Cancer’s vocabulary comprises what strike me as the most austere, sere words our language contains. Ducts. Nodes. Blood counts. Biopsy. Surgery. Chemotherapy. Radiotherapy. Metastasis. This is the language that connects the patients I see to their doctors, nurses, and physiotherapists, and to other people who are living or dying with cancer. Cancer makes us expert in the many ways that our fascinating, underappreciated, beautiful, unreliable bodies can go awry.

  I provide the kind of comfort we are permitted to provide. That is, I cannot say the words every woman longs to hear: “Everything will be all right.” Because everything may not be all right. Seeing me may be an early stage of getting used to a new state of things being not at all all right. I have seen how people at a loss look to anyone around them for clues about how they should act, how they should carry on, manage, until they can work out how to be. I can’t, am not permitted to offer reassurance, so what I do is carry myself in a carefully calibrated way, in the manner of someone who is coping well and bravely despite a personal sorrow, almost as an example of what might be possible. This requires a cautious, measured response to people and their concerns. But, when I look at the films that develop in the clever machines I operate, and see that there may well be cancer, and when the woman is young, with perhaps a child or two playing in the waiting room, or if she has already lost one breast, or if she is old or alone or without resources, then I long to bring my forehead down to hers, to press our brows together, like a promise, like a mother, and whisper to her, “Oh, how I wish I could lift this from you.”

  Front Door

  The nights after I took Rebecca’s quiz, I slept badly. I felt unsettled, as if the clockwork of my body had unwound or subtly slipped out of gear. Something I had taken for granted seemed to have been shaken loose or shattered.

  On Friday night, I stayed up late with Rebecca, worrying over the questionnaire. On Saturday morning I got up early to climb Grouse Mountain with Luba. Saturday evening, I became caught up in a book of short stories by Frederick Busch and didn’t put it down until I had finished the last story, well after one o’clock. After I turned off my light, my thoughts began to wander without purpose in the gray, yawning space that expanded like foam between my closed eyes and my brain. It took a long time, well over an hour, before I fell into a kind of busy half-sleep, too turbulent and disturbed to be restful. Chaotic fragments of dreams, colorful and shifting like the glass fragments in a kaleidoscope, resolved after a while into a vision of Rome, where I had gone once to visit Lucy and had become deliciously lost in the labyrinthine streets of the historical central city.

  I walked in my dream in streets that became narrower and narrower, until the walls of the buildings were no more than a shoulder-width apart. I pushed through a narrow opening between two red walls that gave way as I pressed against them, like flesh, and found myself in a cavernous library. I wandered along miles of echoing shelves, in search of someone to direct me through the thickets of books to something I could not name but wanted urgently. When I was upon it, whatever it was, the library dissolved into a series of damp, echoing rooms like the changing rooms at the swimming pool I used to go to. All night long I roamed these humid, tiled rooms, which expanded into a never-ending sequence of corridors. I moved from room to room, fully dressed, ankle-deep in warm, chlorinated water. The dream was so vivid that when I woke up, I was amazed to find my feet dry and hot under the blankets.

  On Monday morning, one of the other technicians stopped me as I passed by in the staff cafeteria. I was carrying a cup of coffee back to my office before my first appointment.

  “You look a bit pale, Maggie,” he said. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “Yes, I’m fine. I’ve had a few late nights. But I have a relatively quiet week ahead, so I’ll be able to catch up. I’m OK, really.”

  Later in the day, one of the radiologists paused after reviewing a report with me. He scrutinized my face. “You look different today. More relaxed. You must be getting used to the pace around here. Relentless, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, no. I like it here. Sorry, if I seem slow. I just need a good night’s sleep.”

  When I had seen my final patient and written up the last set of notes, I made my way through the glass doors at the front of the hospital and out onto Burrard. The day had been unseasonably warm and close. Stray clouds cluttered the skies. They hung heavy and low, compressing the air and straining light and energy from the sun. I felt weighed down by humidity and fatigue. I had eaten a slice of toast at the apartment that morning, but I had drunk far too many cups of coffee during the day and I couldn’t remember what I had had to eat for lunch. There had been a few crises and no time for breaks.

  I turned right instead of left after reaching the bottom of the steps at the front of the hospital, electing the longer route home. I was hoping to catch the fresh winds that often sweep into downtown from off the water a few blocks to the north. The area of Vancouver between the hospital and the apartment is densely inhabited, but the streets are straight and wide and clean, the sidewalks broad, the traffic orderly, and the pedestrians few, so the overall effect is of a city that is overbuilt and underpeopled. Vancouver is frequently sluiced clean by rain, and although its crisp edges are often masked in fog and the gray gloom that collects under the thick clouds, there is nothing to suggest secrets or intrigue or introspection. This is a plain, frank city, displaying no more complexity or difficulty than a well-oiled simple engine. Most of the people I walked past looked like me: fit, employed, purposeful, and, if not acutely conscious of their good fortune, at least aware that things could be very much worse.

  A church occupies much of the first block north of the hospital. On a whim, I broke my stride halfway along this block, and turned up the wide, worn stone stairs leading up to the church. Its massive doors were closed. I had a moment of certainty that they would be locked, but one of them yielded to a strong pull. I went through and stepped inside. The interior of the stone building was cooler and dimmer than I had expected and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust. There was an odd smell, unthreatening but strange, like the awkward embrace of an almost stranger, an elderly uncle, perhaps, who smells of mothballs and stale aftershave and breath freshener. The church had a musty odor made up of old carpet, wet stone, damp wool, ancient dust, and elderly hymn books. The calm, cool semidarkness was a strong contrast to the hectic activity of the hospital and the warm air outside. For a moment I felt the floor pitch underneat
h my feet, while patches of color, dark and light, swam in front of my eyes. I wiped my palms against my hips and then brought my hands close together at a spot just beneath my breasts. I blinked twice to clear my gaze, stepped forward, and began to look around.

  I had been in places of worship rarely—for weddings, baptisms, a few funerals, and as a tourist in Italy when I went to visit Lucy. Our parents had purposefully raised my sisters and me in no religion at all, and none of us had ever taken the least interest in it. I had a vague sense that I was allowed—perhaps even expected—to look around and take note of the church’s architectural elements, which were listed and described in brochures stacked on a table near the door that I had come through. But I felt that my rights as a nonbeliever were subject to strict if unwritten limits—that I had, for example, no right to sit in a pew or reach for a moment of peace or transcendence or oneness with God, or whatever it is that churchgoers strive for.

  I began at what the brochure called the narthex, and walked slowly up the long aisle on the east side of the church, then across the front of the church near the altar, and back down the west aisle. I looked most closely at the windows, through which the sunlight strained, filtered and brilliantly colored, and the ceiling, which the booklet informed me was barrel-vaulted, and was the largest of its kind west of Winnipeg.

  I stopped in front of the last stained glass window and tipped my head back to take it in. It was constructed in pinks and gold, yellow and reds, and it showed a seated woman with a pale yellow face. She was wearing a blue robe over her pink dress. The hood of the robe obscured her hair, but not her expression, which was one of refusal. She held one yellow hand up, palm forward. She seemed to be trying to ward off a broken stream of light that streamed in a pattern of streaks and dashes, like a kind of code, from the pulsing red heart of a dove that was flying toward the woman through a mullioned window made of gold and yellow panes that appeared at the top left-hand corner of the window—a window in a window.

  The broken line of white light went straight through the woman’s raised hand and entered her right ear, which could just be seen under a fold of her blue hood. The dove was trailing pale blue and gold ribbons and he thrust his scarlet heart before him like a badge pinned to his ash-colored breast. The woman’s other hand held a lily, tall, white, yellow, and green. A weighty book lay open on her blue-and-pink lap. Behind her was another window, through which could be seen a stone wall encircling a garden. An iron gate set into the stone wall was closed shut. The woman’s minute, slippered feet peeked out from under her blue gown; they glowed red, like jewels lit from within.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” I was startled by a voice quite close behind me.

  I turned and made out a shadowy figure dressed in black and patterned over with shifting green spots, afterimages of the red panels in the window.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. I noticed your interest in that particular window. It’s always been my favorite.” The speaker was a man, deep-voiced and tall; his words spilled down from above my head.

  “It’s Mary, isn’t it? She looks terrified.”

  “Well, wouldn’t you be? She can’t have been more than fourteen years old. And she’s just been told she’s going to have God’s baby. What a responsibility.”

  “You get the idea that she would rather go on reading her book, that she didn’t welcome being interrupted.”

  “Do you see how cleverly the picture is put together? How her face glows in the light that appears to be coming through the small window at the top? The guys who did this knew what they were doing. They were a pair of brothers, fresh from Italy, not ten words of English or a dollar between them when they arrived. Salvatore and Aurelio Gualtieri. They did a few of the windows over in St. James Cathedral too. They were Catholic, of course, but they went wherever the work was. They even did a Masonic lodge over on East Hastings. Good thing too. Most of their work in Italy was destroyed in World War II. Virtually all that is left from a lifetime of work is here in this city.”

  “Are they famous?”

  “No, not at all. They were my great-uncles. Their father and his father and who knows how many of their fathers before that were members of a glass guild back in Italy. Not that there were many Italian stained glassworkers. The big centers were in Belgium, France, and England. The brothers had to go all the way to Brussels to get their training. But they brought what they learned back to Italy, and traveled from church to church. A lot of repair work. Some original work. They carried on doing what they knew after they arrived in Canada. The windows weren’t enough to pay their way, of course. This isn’t Europe. There aren’t cathedrals on every street corner, and there were no shattered windows from the war to repair. So they worked full-time over at the hospital, one in the kitchen, the other as a janitor.”

  The man fell silent and we stood looking at the window. I could see now that it contained hundreds of pieces of glass, some as small as my thumb. An enormous amount of work.

  “I’d better get going,” I said. “I just stopped in on my way shopping.” I took care not to mention that I worked at the hospital or that I was within walking distance of home. “Thank you for telling me about the window. Your uncles did a wonderful job.”

  “Go see their Annunciation at St. James, if you haven’t already. You might like Mary’s expression there better.”

  I smiled and nodded. I could just make out the white streak of the smile he gave me in return, and the dark thicket of his hair, as I brushed past him—he didn’t step aside—and made my way out of the church. I had a glancing impression of a very tall man, handsome in an old-fashioned way, like the father in a 1960s sitcom, square-jawed, good and reliable, earnestly straightforward. Not the kind of man likely to lie in wait for stray women in a downtown church in the late afternoon. I wondered about him as I walked home, until it occurred to me that of course he must be the priest or minister or deacon—I wasn’t certain of the nomenclature of the clergy. He had seemed too articulate to be the church custodian, although that was possible too, of course. I had been rude, it occurred to me, not to ask. But if he had been a minister, I might have been expected to call him by his proper title when I left. Brother? Father? Reverend? Sir?

  My eyes adjusted slowly to the fading light as I walked home. For a block or two, when I blinked, images from the window were projected against the backs of my eyelids. Mary’s long, sallow, dismayed face. Her tiny, tidy slippers. The sharp silvery beak of the soaring bird.

  I had seen other Annunciations in art history books, and I remembered the story, although I couldn’t remember having seen one with a bird in it before. I remembered seeing angel messengers in other depictions of the Annunciation, beautiful, upright young creatures, neither man nor woman, with pageboy hair, and elaborate, furled wings, usually with one arm outstretched to reassure and greet the frightened girl. God’s angel—Gabriel?—has come to earth to announce to a very young Mary—Miriam—that she has been chosen to bear God’s son. Mary is horrified at first, but then yields. The locked garden represented her virginity. The white lily stands for her purity. I half-remembered reading somewhere that some theological group of men whose job it was to consider such things had decided that Mary got pregnant through her ear, literally by means of the word of God. But I had forgotten the meaning of the book she held, if I had ever known it. I would like to have known if she ever had the chance to finish it.

  Entryway

  Later that week, Luba received a telephone call from Mike, one of the two men who had shared our table at the mountaintop café. They agreed to meet after work on Friday, and Mike suggested she bring me along, since his friend might very likely come along too. I agreed to go, more as a favor to Luba than out of any interest in Mike’s friend, whose name both Luba and I had forgotten. Stan? Al? Cal? Frank? His name didn’t matter, since he failed to show up, which left me sitting awkwardly with Mike and Luba as they talked.

  Mike was in insurance, he told Luba, although h
e had a degree in anthropology. What he wanted to do was save up enough money to retire at fifty-five, a goal he was well on his way to fulfilling, thanks to tech stocks—which he was into heavily and he could recommend a few if we were interested—and return to a small island north of Samoa, where he had done fieldwork as an undergraduate, to live with “his” tribe, a small band who maintained a subsistence existence fishing and foraging for edible roots in the jungle.

  “I have always felt in sync with their ways,” he said, taking a large swallow from his second Granville Island Lager.

  “Their ways,” Luba repeated.

  “Exactly. They are a happy, carefree people. They are not attached to possessions, but to the earth, which they share in common. They enjoy each day. Their food. Their families. Of course, they don’t experience the same level of attachment that we do. Life is too precarious for that. They accept death as we would a common cold. Cycle of life. Rhythm of Mother Earth. That kind of thing. Should we order the nachos?”

  “How do you know they’re happy?” I couldn’t resist interjecting.

  “Oh, they are constantly singing, smiling, dancing, even at funerals. Especially at funerals. I was back a couple of years ago with my wife. My ex-wife. Terrible woman. Only out for one thing, money. A real piece of work, I tell you. They perform for tourists now. The tours, which I helped to organize, have had a wonderful effect. The opposite of what you might expect. Reenacting the old ways has preserved their way of life just as it was.”

  “Just as it was?” Luba echoed.

  “Exactly. Only more so. They have resurrected some of the old songs and dances. Well, their interpretation of the old dances. They weren’t recorded back then, unfortunately. I was supposed to be working on that when I was with them, but I ended up spending more time with the men learning about their hunting techniques. Male bonding kind of thing. Very profound. They used to hunt a large marsupial there, the kaba kaba. But it has, unfortunately, been hunted into extinction. I killed one myself in 1994. One of the last, in fact. And the language has been mostly lost, so they sing in English. It comes across well, actually. And they have different costumes these days. The old ones were too drab to appeal to the tourists. They’re more Polynesian now. And they do the lei thing, putting garlands of flowers around tourists’ necks. We bring them in from Hong Kong. Plastic, but you can’t tell from a distance. Tourists love that shit, eat it up.”