The Sad Truth About Happiness Page 9

  “And you see yourself going to live there among them?” I asked.

  “Well, not exactly among them. I’m too old to go without my creature comforts. Not that I’m old, I’m forty-five, still a spring chicken. But there’s a resort not far from there, no more than a couple of hours by jeep. Kind of a Club Med kind of thing, but more exclusive. You can get a condo there, right on the links. I’ve already bought one through a company I’ve incorporated in Barbados. This company—I own a large chunk of it—runs tours to the old tribe. Sort of a New Age ecotourist kind of thing. People are looking for this kind of integrated, holistic experience. It’s very healing to be around so much joy. Redemptive, even. There are condo time-shares available, in case you girls are ever interested. Here’s my card.”

  “Maybe I should book a trip,” I commented, unable to keep a dry edge out of my voice. “It’s been suggested to me recently that I need to up the happiness quotient in my life.”

  “Exactly!” Mike enthused. “We all do. Happiness is what we all need. Now. Today. The pursuit of happiness was good enough for our ancestors. They had, after all, low expectations. If they lived to fifty, they were doing good. Times have changed. We want more. We work hard—we deserve more! What people expect these days is happiness without the pursuit of. Off the shelf, so to speak. Ready-made.”

  “Prefab happiness,” Luba suggested.

  “Like a suit off the rack,” I added.

  “Great! Yes, exactly. You girls do get it. Any man who can deliver up happiness to order, like a pizza, that man will be richer than Gates. You should think about the time-share thing. A good investment, look at it that way.”

  “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry,” Luba said to me as soon as we left the bar. We had explained to Mike that no, we couldn’t join him for dinner, that we had a previous engagement. “A dinner party. A women-only thing,” Luba had told him. “You know how it is.” Mike was jovial in our rejection, and had elected to stay at the bar by himself. “You never know,” he said, winking broadly at us and looking pointedly at a nearby table at which four twenty-something women were sitting. “Life is full of surprises.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I told her. “His parents, on the other hand. They have some explaining to do.”

  Hall

  I went through another week of sleeping no more than five or six hours a night. I would go to bed at a reasonable hour, between ten and eleven o’clock, and read for a few minutes until my thoughts began to loosen and flicker and the type on the pages began to slip out of focus. Slowly, carefully, I would set aside my book and reach to turn off the light. No matter how much care I took not to jar loose the first seeds of sleep, with their tentative random roots, darkness catalyzed my mind into life and the space behind my closed eyelids would begin to seethe and ferment with scraps of ideas and unfocused images.

  The busy, crawling sensation reminded me of the time when I was very small, perhaps five or six, and I told my doubting mother that I could hear busy, buzzing noises inside the fireplace in the living room. She laughed and said that what I was hearing was my own breath and blood rushing inside my head and echoing in the empty chimney when I placed my ear next to the fireplace—the same noise, she explained, that you hear when you hold a glass or shell up to your ear. (I remember my passing shock at learning in this chance way that the noise inside a shell was not the sea at all, as grown-ups always pretended, and as I had more than half-believed.) But I was insistent. I tried to explain that it sounded to me like hundreds of long-clawed restless rats were living in our chimney, where they scurried and bustled without cease.

  After a day or two, my mother finally gave in to my pestering and agreed to come and listen. She followed me to the fireplace, went down on one knee, and bent to listen. The exaggerated curve of her body and the smile on her face as she tipped her head were proof that she was only humoring me. (Children are experts at reading body language, since their understanding of the spoken word is still imperfect.) I saw her pose and the cant of her head change when she too heard the noise. She frowned, and then went to the phone and called in an exterminator, who came that afternoon and injected a smoky chemical into the flue. Afterward he extracted in pieces a large papery structure, a wasp’s nest. A good thing we hadn’t lit a fire, he told my mother, or we would have set fire to the chimney, and possibly the roof besides.

  For days afterward, displaced wasps swarmed dazed around the outside of our house until they found another home in a neighbor’s hedge at the end of the block. He was badly stung two weeks later when his hedge clippers sliced into their new nest. For months afterward, I felt keenly my mother’s guilt, and mine, for having failed to let him know that our wasps had taken up residence there. Our culpability felt to me to be exactly equal—I hadn’t known that hedges were clipped, and my mother hadn’t known that our evicted wasps had moved into the neighbor’s hedge.

  I felt that I needed a similar extraction from my active nighttime head. It felt like the year I was in grade 1, when I came home from school each day with my head stocked with new information of all kinds, information that I felt I had to tamp down firmly in the hours before I went to bed so that it would adhere and still leave room for the next delivery at nine o’clock the next day. The busy, overfull sensation of something new inside my head, something startling or intriguing or mysterious or wonderful, the effervescence of fact and information percolating inside my head, catalyzing a brew of thoughts and ideas. Now, all night, whether I was awake or asleep or on the slippery riverbanks of the in-between, my brain seethed with thoughts and scenes, teased by the blunt root ends of emotions and caressed by the soft, tendril fronds of half-remembered sensations.

  After many nights, I began to recognize recurrent images that came to me in my short dreams. The steamy labyrinth of tiled rooms. A shop I would stumble on that had racks and racks laden with clothes in brilliant colors and flamboyant styles, all of them my size, all of them to be tried on. A trap door under Rebecca’s desk that led to secret passages and new rooms in the apartment, rooms that I had never been aware of. Watching a young man drive past me on a moped, with gilded plaster winged infants, putti, tucked under his arms, head forward, the wings and body and feet behind the crook of his arms. This last was something I had actually seen, on Via dei Pettinari in Rome, two blocks from Lucy’s apartment. The man was dressed in the white, soiled coverall of a manual laborer; he was undoubtedly working on the restoration of a nearby church or palazzo. In my dreams, though, the man on the moped wore a brown robe like a monk and had his face obscured by a dark hood, and the putti were squirming and kicking like babies.

  During the day, my tiredness became increasingly familiar, like a long, white, finely knit, all-enveloping, and constricting gown that had been sewn around me. When I moved, I felt as if I were awash in something heavier and more resistant than air, sweeter and more liquid and viscous than water. I stopped going to the swimming pool for my daily swims, since the warm water and aqueous motion seemed redundant; I was swimming all day long. Sometimes my hands and feet tingled and buzzed.

  I thought, too, that I might be becoming more forgetful. Once or twice, I forgot to bring my lunch to work. The dry cleaner had to call and leave a message to remind me about my gray suit, which I had left to be cleaned in September. I felt slower, languid, a little distracted, but lack of sleep had few other noticeably adverse effects on my customary reliable good health. In the mirror each morning, my face looked little different from usual—round, full, watchful. Perhaps a little paler, that was all. My skin remained smooth and clear. Notwithstanding the steady withdrawal of sleep, I felt increasingly calm and peaceful, as if I had taken one or two of Janet’s pills, which were still, of course, tucked away in their clear zippered bag at the bottom of my purse. I was certain that I would never need to take them, and I would have returned them to Janet, except that I didn’t want her to think that her gift had not been appreciated. She had meant it kindly, and I couldn’t bear to reject
one of her rare sympathetic gestures.

  I started waking earlier every day; at six, then five-thirty, and then a few minutes sooner every morning, until I was regularly entirely awake at four o’clock and unable to go back to sleep. One morning I got up, put on old jeans and a sweatshirt, and removed every speck of dust from the apartment except for the room where Rebecca slept. With a damp cloth, I polished the furniture with broad sweeps. Then I tied the cloth around the bristles of the broom and swept underneath my bed, teasing out the substantial, almost corporeal accumulations of hair and dust that had gathered in the previously undisturbed darkness. Clearly the efforts of the cleaner who came weekly didn’t extend to hidden places. Some of the feathery bundles were so large that I thought I might hear them bleat in protest at being brought to the light of day. I cleaned a film of sooty dust from the slatted air vent covers in my bedroom and in the living room and scrubbed the floor under the oven and refrigerator—other places in which the cleaner had not taken any interest. I even removed the back cover from the hard drive of my computer and squirted a jet from a can of compressed air (difluoroethane, according to the label) into the fan housing. Several short blasts dislodged a thick, feltlike coating of dust from the blades of a tiny fan. When I put away dust cloths, brooms, and rags, I had a clear sense that I had accomplished something meaningful, on however small a scale. I half-remembered a sentiment from a poem I had studied in university, although I could not recall the lines exactly.

  We are discarded oddments of creation.

  Minute in size and span against the skies.

  But take our measure from what we despise.

  And thus assure ourselves of God’s affection.

  Our fates lie in the stars, not in the ground.

  And we are great, complex, and nobly bound.

  My sense of achievement, even elation, shriveled, however, when I looked at my bedside clock and saw that I had used up little more than an hour. Obviously I couldn’t pursue dust every morning unless I became obsessive. I began to switch on my bedside light as soon as I woke up—an old pink-and-white milk glass lamp from my childhood, although I had replaced the pink ruffled shade with a plain one made of heavy linen—and read from one of the books I kept in a basket beside my bed. After a time, a couple of hours or more, the light would begin to seep in through the blinds, thinly at first, as if the slatted blinds were straining and reducing it, then more strongly—gray or pink or golden, depending on the impending weather.

  I read Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory, early one morning and came across a description of his hatred for the simple act of falling into sleep, his statement that “the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive.” I wondered then whether something similar to this aversion to the loss of awareness was what made my clever younger sister Lucy so reluctant to sleep as a child, and whether it had some relationship to the small but intense stab of panic that I felt when I startled awake each day.

  One dim October morning, I reached into the bookshelf for my old copy of The Bell Jar, and found the passage in which Sylvia Plath wrote of a girl who is moving toward madness and who ceases to sleep entirely.

  I hadn’t slept for twenty-one nights.

  I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people’s eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.

  I felt reassured by this, since it suggested that my sleeplessness might not after all mean that I was losing my mind. Instead of shadow, sleeping less was making me more keenly aware of the light. I felt conscious of it all the time, from every angle, in all its shades and durations, when and how it arrived and its exact gradations as it slipped away. In the late autumn this far north, the light falls aslant during the day and drains rapidly, like a cup overturned, as evening approaches. The days shed minutes and hours on their forced march toward the end of December, like a cylinder leaking at both ends. The day’s light is left distilled, weak, watered down as if to make it last through the winter, tinged an unnamable color somewhere between hope and despair, composed of equal parts gray, salmon, and beige.

  One day, a young girl stretched her hand out to me as I walked past her on my way to work. I had seen her often. She was regularly sprawled on this particular city corner and she seemed sometimes even to sleep there. I had on occasion placed a small amount of money into the plastic tub she kept on the sidewalk beside her folded legs, but she had never acknowledged me before. Usually she sat on her folded sleeping bag staring intently at the pavement, as though it were a television or computer screen, the source of the answers to whatever questions vexed her. She was about sixteen or seventeen, and very thin. She had thick, tangled red hair, like matted fleece or wet felt, more like the fur on an untended animal than hair on the head of someone’s daughter. Her face was long and narrow, with a heavy jaw and forehead, and her skin was mottled red over yellow, under a layer of gray dirt. She always wore the same thick black wool sweater, which was faded and pilled and stained, and heavy leather boots, cracked at the instep; one dirty toe with a blackened, ragged nail could be seen through one of the broken boots.

  I reached into my coat pocket and dropped a few coins into her outstretched fingers. The girl closed her hand around my gift, but she didn’t look up. Then, as I turned to walk away, she glanced into my face, quickly, then down again. I heard her mumble something as I stepped away. “Excuse me?” I asked. I stopped and turned toward her, at the same time sorting out the syllables that she had spoken into words. “You are a very spiritual person,” was what she had said. She had a low, husky voice with a ragged edge to it, which grated, but not unpleasantly, like a pumice stone.

  “Thank you,” I said, surprised, wondering if this was a new imprecatory gimmick, like the little handwritten “Tipping Is Good Karma” signs I had seen taped to bowls beside the cash register at coffee shops. “You are a spiritual person,” she repeated, and her enigmatic words overlapped with mine.

  “Thanks,” I said again. I hesitated for a moment. Perhaps she would explain herself. But the girl was again looking fixedly at the pavement. A snarled hank of her dirty hair had fallen over her eyes. She said nothing further, so I turned and continued on my way to work.

  I was, in my view, about the least spiritual person I knew. I had no religion and, despite my recent digression into the church beside the hospital where I worked, no religious or mystical impulses. I knew myself to be practical, sensible, reliable, a realist, with no longing for the ineffable, and little patience for the kind of questions that have no absolute answers. I couldn’t remember ever having seriously considered whether I had such a thing as a spirit or a soul. In fact, I was not sure what it was that people meant when they talked about these things. I had accepted that there are people commonly acknowledged to be spiritual without ever having considered what it was that made them that way. The Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, missionaries in South America, red-hatted bishops, nuns gliding leglessly in enveloping black habits. The kind of people who wore their faces folded neatly into an expression of kindness, who moved and spoke with a kind of purposeful peacefulness, a determined serenity. Surely such a manner of interacting with the vast, disappointing world was proof they had mastered their vices, sloughed off the sins of envy, greed, lust, willfulness, and the rest, and risen to a simpler, higher, purer level of existence.

  I knew that I was not such a person. In fact I couldn’t think of anyone I knew very well who I thought of as spiritual, aside from Luba, perhaps, who still occasionally went to services with her parents, and who had once described to me her idea of the soul as “the faintest fingerprint of God.” I had, on the other hand, known a few people who seemed to me to have something in their character or makeup that was larger than common, who had a greater capacity to love or be loved, or an expand
ed aptitude for happiness or for engendering happiness in others, the ability to make others around them feel valued, enlarged, beloved. One of my professors in university, Jean Ferguson, had this attribute—her classes were always oversubscribed—as had, to some degree, a former boyfriend of mine named Chris Tolnoy. A girl in junior high school, Samantha Livingston, had it too, and never lacked for friends as a result. I wondered, not for the first time, whether any of them had been aware that they had this power, or whether it was the kind of fragile skill, like the ability to suspend disbelief or to fall asleep at night, that could only be maintained if one didn’t think about it very hard or at all. I wondered too whether this gift was something that could be learned or taught or acquired by force of will or accident.

  There was a doctor at the hospital, a long, gangling man who looked like a country and western singer or someone who repaired farm equipment. Whoever he was near—patients, nurses, other doctors, orderlies, visitors—wanted something from him, some scrap of his attention, a touch, a smile, even simply to be in the same room with him. He appeared to be both conscious of and conscientious about what people expected of him, and it had occurred to me more than once that he was very brave to have become a doctor, a profession in which expectations are already very high and in which there are very few limits on what people might ask of you.