Claire's Head (24 page)

“I'm glad.” Although it was hard, just at this moment, to share his excitement about lab results. What Hannah di Castro had said about Rachel being unable to write might have explained why they'd had no e-mails but not why she hadn't called – and yet she was able to write a postcard, at least to Brad Arnarson. When had she travelled from Italy to Las Vegas? They exited the 427 on the long curved ramp that led down to the Gardiner Expressway, which would carry them east along the lakeshore into the city.

Claire was surrounded once again by Toronto, a city she knew in how many different ways, as map, as data, as home, a city that had always been central to the way she oriented herself in the world, so internalized as to be like the pathways of her brain, only now she felt cut off from it.

“I called Allison and left a message for her,” Stefan said.

“Thanks.”

“It's just a postcard. It doesn't mean she's there now.”

“Stef, I know that.”

Claire called Brad as soon as she got to the house, but he wasn't in and his cellphone appeared to be switched off. She told him to call whenever, however late, it didn't matter. It was not even 6 p.m. It felt like midnight. She was practically dancing from one foot to the other. If she was hungry, Stefan said, he could run up to Queen Street and pick up a couple of rotis. Claire nodded.

Stefan went out and Claire stayed home, unwilling to leave the telephone. She called Allison's house, but no one answered. She climbed the twenty-one stairs and, in the bedroom, made a stab at unpacking. The duvet was pulled up over their bed, the room tidy, apart from a plastic laundry basket of dirty clothes dropped between bed and closet door. The house had a slightly fusty, unfamiliar smell, which took Claire by surprise (did it always smell like this and she was only now recognizing it?). Her gaze travelled over details of the room, the baseboards, wrought-iron curtain railings, gauze curtains, the bed. She couldn't help noticing, with the clear-eyed vigour of one who has been away, the dust gathering on the top of baseboards and on windowsills, signs that in the past month neither she nor Stefan had had time to do much cleaning.

When Stefan returned, Claire hurried downstairs, pulled him into the backyard, away from the redolence of West Indian curry, and held out an arm to him to sniff, the only bit of Italy, she joked, that she'd brought back for him. The phone didn't ring. Neither of them commented on this. After dinner, she brought out the chocolate that she'd bought for him in Amsterdam and fed him a piece. When Stefan offered her one hesitantly, she ate it, whatever its dangers to her, for these hardly mattered when she was already on the verge of getting a headache. They made their way upstairs, not arm in arm, since the stairs were so narrow that they would have tripped to their deaths that way, but Stefan practically pushing Claire. Upstairs, he kicked the basket of laundry from the bedroom into his study. It was still light outside, not quite nine o'clock. Claire laid the phone on the floor beside the bed. Her head hurt more now,
the pain of travel and dislocation catching up to her. She yanked open her bedside drawer and stared at the pile of plastic bottles: her vile pharmacopoeia. In the doorway, Stefan stood watching as she swallowed her pills.

“Why is it essential that we have a child?” she asked him. He would make a good father, she knew that.

He leaned against the lintel, frowning. “As a sign of our love.”

“And our love doesn't go on without a child? What if I couldn't have a child, or we couldn't.”

“We don't know that yet.”

“But what if I couldn't, if I decided I couldn't.”

“You're just frightened.”

“What if it isn't simply a matter of fear, if it doesn't feel like the right thing.”

“Claire, why are we talking about this now?” He switched off the light. “Go to sleep.”

At 5 a.m. she was wide awake, as suddenly as a light bulb flicked on. She could not call Brad Arnarson at five. If there'd been any urgency in Rachel's message, any emergency – well, people didn't tend to send postcards in emergencies, did they? And yet now Claire was also most aware of being home, her body nested against Stefan's, heat rising from the small of his back, her fingers pressed to the swell of his ribs, seeking comfort, seeking the pulse of his heart beneath them. She was struggling to feel at home, aware of Stefan as someone utterly familiar and yet made briefly new by her absence, his brown hair flattened by the pillow, the pillow's whiteness accentuating the line of his nose,
the slender sculpting of the bones beneath the darkened skin around his closed eyes. He'd shaved. He must have done so at night, before coming to bed, after she'd fallen asleep. As she leaned gently over him, he murmured something that sounded like pickup (pick up?) but did not wake, not until, at five to six, eyes wide open, he rolled into Claire's arms.

It was a little after eight-thirty, just after Stefan dashed off to work on his bicycle, when Claire checked the phone and discovered there were messages waiting. Brad's voice: Hey, Claire, Stefan, are you there? Pick up if you're there. I'm at Rachel's. From Allison: Hey guys, it's me calling you back. Brad again: Okay, I know it's late and you're probably asleep. I'm at home now. Call me whenever. I've got something else Claire will want to see. I'll be at work tomorrow. He left a work number. His first message had been recorded – Claire checked – at 9:39 p.m. The second at 11:50 p.m. She turned the portable phone on its side. The ringer had been switched off. She'd picked up the phone from where she'd stowed it the night before, at her bedside. She settled back on her heels, on the floor, cradling the receiver. Then she called Brad Arnarson, first on his cell, which he didn't answer, then at work.

“Pure,” said a woman, her voice as soft and smooth as an emollient. The woman said Brad was already with a client.

“Tell him Claire called. Do you know when he'll be free?”

The woman clattered at a keyboard, before returning to pour a new syrup of sound into the telephone. “He's doing an hour-and-a-half, so maybe like a little after ten?”

Claire thanked her and hung up. She took the phone with her downstairs to the kitchen. She sat for a moment, the woman's melodizing voice – Pure, Pure? – ringing through her head. She stared at the phone, then switched the ringer back on. She called Pure back. This time she got shunted into a holding zone, through which another woman's similarly timbred voice led her, detailing the services that Pure offered, facials, manicures, pedicures, massages, wraps, scrubs, detoxifications, press two to make an appointment. Another spa. Brad Arnarson worked at some kind of spa, how bizarre. She'd never imagined it. Nor had she predicted how far searching for Rachel would lead her into the land of upscale beauty treatments.

Call three: a different woman picked up.

“How late is Brad Arnarson working today?”

“Until five. But if you want an appointment with Brad, we're booking four months from now.” How familiar and proprietorial that
Brad
.

“I just need directions and the address.” Four months meant November.

“Where are you?”

“Coming from the north.”

“From the East Side, take a Number Six to Bleeker and come out the Houston Street exit, or take the Broadway line to Prince. We're south on Broadway, east side of the street, just above Prince.”

Claire did not call Stefan at work on the morning of Wednesday, July 12. She travelled on points, her intention being to return
that night. She didn't call Charlie Gorjup either, although the wetland survey a.k.a. the mosquito map was so far overdue it really wasn't funny, because it was Charlie who had instilled in her that mapping was an investigative calling and wasn't she, in the end, just taking his dictum to heart?

At 2:16 p.m., she was climbing the subway stairs to Houston Street, just east of Broadway, and once she stepped out of the subterranean heat into the even moister, denser, dirtier New York air, nothing seemed surprising, least of all the fact that she'd travelled through three cities in three days, or six cities (well, four cities, a town, and a terme) in five days, or that she'd had breakfast in Toronto and found herself, just after lunch, at the corner of Houston and Broadway, and now these taxi horns these fumes these throngs these skimpy-clothed bustlers these three old women in flowered dresses on their lawn chairs at their card tables hawking what might, as far as Claire knew, be the same sad ancient issues of
Reader's Digest
and individual packages of instant soup as she had seen when she'd passed this way a month before, all the jangle of New York slipped around her as easily and pressingly as a skin-tight dress, and carried her forward, making its own urgent and unignorable claims upon her.

Claire hurried down Broadway. The heat was terrific and odorous, anything but pure. What she was looking for turned out to be an older office building, with glass doors, a light-filled vestibule, and a security guard at a desk. In an alcove, to his left, stood a bank of elevators. Upstairs, on the fifth floor, she stepped out into a wide, high-ceilinged hallway larger than many
New York apartments. As she rounded the first corner, a young woman in grey track pants and a white tank top, as lean and clear-skinned as a sylph, stepped through a pair of frosted glass doors, on which the word Pure was etched.

The room that Claire entered, just over twenty feet by thirty, appeared to be made entirely of greenish glass. It brought to mind not only an aquarium but also the interior of a spaceship. So much minimalist elegance (such cool beauty) surprised Claire, and seduced her, even as she scrambled to take in the fact that somewhere in here scruffy Brad Arnarson apparently was. The walls shone, as if some spectral sun hovered beyond them, illuminating the tinted glass bottles of potions – pink, yellow, blue – set alluringly on shelves at different heights along the walls.

At a translucent desk, her hands poised over her clear plastic keyboard, a honey-haired young woman asked how she might help. Claire gave Brad's name. She sensed some reluctance on the part of the young woman to entertain her unorthodox request to wait and speak to him, without an appointment or desire for service, as if she might burst Pure's bubble with her over-eager demands from the outer world. “I guess you can sit in the clients' lounge. When he's finished he usually goes into the staff room. It's across the hall. Ill leave him a message.”

The young woman led her down a greenish hall into a room where she directed Claire to take a seat on one of three six-foot, off-white sofas. Two other women were already seated, both wearing unbleached terry cloth robes and plastic thongs on their feet and flipping through books of black-and-white photography. Both glanced up, took in Claire's streetwear, looked
away. There were sixteen-foot windows covered in sheer drapes behind her. Here, too, the glass was frosted: light poured in upon the whitish walls but it was impossible to see out. There was a tall vase of flowers on the low table in front of her and beyond, to her left, on a linen-covered sideboard, bottles of water and juice, a pot of boiling water on an electric hot plate, a saucer of lemon slices and, in a small basket, six packets of instant hot chocolate.

A woman in a white T-shirt and jeans called, “Corinne?” from the doorway and one of the women went away.

Of course Rachel had been here. Claire didn't doubt it. This was where she'd met Brad. Of this Claire was suddenly convinced. Once she herself might have found a place like Pure too much, but she was beginning to see its appeal. The piped-in flute music continued, annihilating any vestigial roar of the city. The sweat had already dried on Claire's skin. Pure felt like a lung, a filtering organ that breathed for you, that circulated its own citrusy, astringent air. Escapist and vaguely puritanical. Perhaps the other woman was here to see Brad, and Claire was intruding on their private sphere, breaking the unspoken contract between therapist and client that maintains that in a certain space for a certain span of time you two are the only people in the world.

A figure passed down the hall – blond, a blur of brown and white. Claire leaped to her feet as Brad stuck his head through the doorway.

He bounded across the room, arms outstretched, hugged and kissed her like an old friend, not someone he'd met only once before, while peppering her with questions: what was she doing here, when did she get in, of course she'd got his messages?
At the same time he did not seem
so
astonished by her arrival, as if it were almost natural for her to have shown up.

He was chewing mint gum. His shirt, untucked, was of a garish brown and white paisley, sleeves rolled high on his biceps. His uncombed hair was longer and therefore more dishevelled than a month ago, although now Claire had the sneaking suspicion that there was something a little more cultivated about his appearance than she'd originally thought. He beckoned her across the hall towards the staff room. She'd missed, on first meeting him, any impression of his professionalism. He was at home here, offhand because he could afford to be. He had rank, even seniority. The voice of the woman she'd spoken to that morning by phone returned to her, the almost possessive tone in which she'd spoken his name. He must be good (four months to get an appointment). It would cost many dollars per hour, dollars per minute, to be worked on by those hands, those clean, citrus-scented hands. Imagine those hands on Rachel. On herself. Try not to.

In the staff room, a couple of women – other massage therapists? – were chatting. Brad introduced Claire to them. Mel and Rae. From a mini-fridge, he hauled a carton of vanilla soy milk, swallowed a mouthful, then handed the carton to Claire. She took it, a little nonplussed, as he grabbed a black nylon knapsack out of a metal locker and hoisted it over his shoulders, before taking the carton back.

As they passed the front desk, the young woman sang out, “Brad, your three o'clock just phoned, she's going to be a little late” – again that proprietorial note of intimacy, now affronted, as if Claire, an interloper, were stealing Brad away.