BECAUSE THE STOREKEEPER IS WEARING A WHITE butcher coat he makes her think of a movie she went to with her husband once-back in their married days- a movie in which a butcher (who was also a psychopath) courted a beautiful woman with fresh cuts of meat. He would appear outside the little schoolhouse where the woman was giving lessons to her students, the newly sawed leg of some animal wrapped up in pink butcher paper, a florist's twist where its hoof would have been. The memory of the shock she'd felt when what she had taken to be a bouquet of flowers appeared, in the camera's close-up, to be a crude rosette of red meat instead of red petals, makes her almost jump when Habib bows to present her with a bouquet of actual flowers."Thanks, Habib, but what's the occasion?""Spring is the occasion. And to celebrate this rare Canadian phenomenon we are making a small presentation of flowers. But only to our very best customers.""In other words, to all your customers.""Yes," Habib tells her. "All."SPEARED AND FURLED IN THEIR GREENISH GLASS JUG, the irises have a churchy but phallic look. She places the jug on the windowsill above the kitchen sink, then carries the tulips, in a clear glass pillar, to the room whose sofa looks out over the muddy back garden. But before she was awarded the flowers she was perched on another sofa-the sofa at the Fowler Institute-waiting to see which of the Institute's four doctors would turn out to be her doctor. The doctors at the Institute were medical doctors who no longer practised medicine. In fact, the friend who'd recommended the Institute to her had referred to her own Institute doctor as a psychoanalyst who was also a gymnast. It was clear that these doctors weren't the sort of doctors who would attire themselves in the white lab coats of butchers or shopkeepers, they were the sort of doctors who attired themselves in the jeans and checked shirts of farm boys. One of them had come out of a consultation room to look for a chart. He was wearing a midnight-blue corduroy jacket along with his jeans. She had hoped he wouldn't turn out to be her doctor. He was attractive, certainly, but there was something really quite sad about his shoulders. He had also seemed to be somewhat shy. While he was sliding a chart into a wall of charts he had coughed briefly and she had imagined his skin: warm with fever.When he'd said, "I wouldn't dream of it," she had secretly studied him, uneasy and puzzled, from where she was lying on the treatment table, one arm bent under her head. With his long sideburns and his long-waisted blue corduroy jacket he'd made her think of a doctor from another century. But his voice came out of the modern world and was modernly hoarse. Well, naturally; he had a cold. She had smiled up at him. "Why wouldn't you dream of it?" (She'd half-thought he would say, "Because you are too intelligent.")"Because you are living too much up in your head.""I'm too skeptical to be hypnotized?"The smile in Excerpted from Excessive Joy Injures the Heart by Elisabeth Harvor All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
