Too Much Happiness

believe Jon could have got religion.
    “I do wish they could have come,” she says, explaining all this to a neighbor. (Neighbors have been invited, so there won’t be any fuss about the noise.) “Then I could have had my share in the complications. There was a second wife, but I have no idea where she has got to and I don’t believe he has either.”
    There is lots of food that Matt and Joyce have made and that people have brought, and lots of wine and children’s fruit punch and a real punch that Matt has concocted for the occasion-in honor of the good old days, he says, when people really knew how to drink. He says he would have made it in a scrubbed-out garbage can, the way they did then, but nowadays everybody would be too squeamish to drink that. Most of the young adults leave it alone, anyway.
    The grounds are large. There is croquet, if people want to play, and the disputed swing from Matt’s own childhood that he got out of the garage. Most of the children have seen only park swings and plastic play units in the backyard. Matt is surely one of the last people in Vancouver to have a childhood swing handy and to be living in the house he grew up in, a house on Windsor Road on the slope of Grouse Mountain on what used to be the edge of the forest. Now houses keep climbing above it, most of them castle affairs with massive garages. One of these days this place will have to go, Matt says. The taxes are monstrous. It will have to go, and a couple of hideosities will replace it.
    Joyce cannot think of her life with Matt happening anywhere else. There’s always so much going on here. People coming and going and leaving things behind and picking them up later (including children). Matt’s string quartet in the study on Sunday afternoons, the Unitarian Fellowship meeting in the living room on Sunday evenings, Green Party strategy being planned in the kitchen. The play-reading group emoting in the front of the house while somebody spills out the details of real-life drama in the kitchen (Joyce’s presence required in both locations). Matt and some faculty colleague hammering out strategy in the study with the door closed.
    She often remarks that she and Matt are seldom alone together except in bed.
    “And then he’ll be reading something important.”
    While she is reading something unimportant.
    Never mind. There is some large conviviality and appetite he carries with him that she may need. Even at the college-where he is involved with graduate students, collaborators, possible enemies, and detractors-he seems to move in a barely managed whirlwind. All this once seemed to her so comforting. And probably it still would, if she had time to look at it from outside. She would probably envy herself, from outside. People may envy her, or at least admire her-thinking she matched him so well, with all her friends and duties and activities and of course her own career as well. You would never look at her now and think that when she had first come down to Vancouver she was so lonely that she had agreed to go out with the boy from the dry cleaner who was a decade too young for her. And then he had stood her up.
    Now she is walking across the grass with a shawl over her arm for old Mrs. Fowler, the mother of Doris the second wife and late-blooming lesbian. Mrs. Fowler can’t sit in the sun, but she gets shivers in the shade. And in the other hand she carries a glass of freshly made lemonade for Mrs. Gowan, the on-duty companion of Sally. Mrs. Gowan has found the children’s punch too sweet. She does not allow Sally to have anything to drink-she might spill it on her pretty dress or throw it at somebody in a fit of playfulness. Sally does not seem to mind the deprivation.
    On the journey across the lawn Joyce skirts a group of young people sitting in a circle. Tommy and his new friend and other friends she has often seen in the house and others she does not believe she has ever seen at all.
    She hears Tommy say, “No, I am not Isadora Duncan.”
    They all laugh.
    She realizes that they must be playing that difficult and snobby game that was popular years ago. What was it called? She thinks the name started with a
B
. She would have thought they were too anti-elitist nowadays for any such pastime.
    Buxtehude. She has said it out loud.
    “You’re playing Buxtehude.”
    “You got the
B
right anyway,” says Tommy, laughing at her so that the others can laugh.
    “See,” he says. “My
belle mère
, she ain’t so