The Madwoman Upstairs

by Catherine Lowell

  I said, “Who’s there?”

  The voice was loud: “Open the door, Samantha.”

  “Professor?”

  “Open the door.”

  I did as I was told. There, to my great surprise, was Orville. There was not a speck of snow or rain on his coat. I wondered if he had arrived by chopper. There was a suitcase in one hand and a small plastic bag in the other. He was panting.

  “Do you mean to tell me that you climb all those stairs each day?” he said. I didn’t answer. He entered and looked around. The chipping red paint from the wall glowed like drying blood. My wet, translucent bedsheets were drying on the fireplace mantel. We looked like we were standing inside a sickroom from the Civil War.

  Orville cleared his throat. “Nice place.”

  I was shocked to discover him here. It was like seeing the pope visit a radioactive wasteland. I offered him a seat on my naked mattress, but he didn’t take it. Instead, he passed me the plastic bag. I didn’t look inside.

  “Why are you here?” I asked. “On a Sunday?”

  “It’s Monday.”

  “Oh.” I frowned. “Did I miss our tutorial? Have you come to scold me?”

  “We have no tutorials for the next three weeks, until term begins again.”

  I said, “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yes, you did. I sent you an e-mail.”

  “I don’t read e-mails anymore.”

  “Which is why I figured I should come to talk to you in person.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  To my surprise, he snapped at me. “Stop calling me ‘sir,’ Samantha. I never asked you to call me that.”

  I paused. “What do I call you?”

  “Dr. Orville.”

  “Can I call you by your name?”

  “Which name?”

  “James.”

  “No.”

  I shrugged. “That’s fine. You don’t look like a James, anyway.”

  “What do I look like?”

  “Irving.”

  “Don’t call me Irving.”

  I glanced at the Governess as if for moral support. She looked more hostile than usual today, as though she was preparing to shoot Orville from the hip and was just waiting for him to step within range. I noticed that his facial hair had grown in the last few days. The lower half of his chin looked like someone had shaded it in with a pencil.

  I motioned to his suitcase. “Where are you going?”

  “North for a week.”

  “I see.”

  “I handled myself badly the other night,” he said. “I came to apologize.”

  I feigned indifference. “Sorry, what are we talking about?”

  “You asked for an education,” he said. “I should have given it to you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You are right,” he said, ignoring me. “I do, in fact, know quite a bit about the Brontës. Perhaps more than your average person. Perhaps more than your average don. It may be somewhat cruel of me to deny you my expertise.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Do you know as much as John Booker?”

  He didn’t answer the question. “All of this said, it is only fair you know that the Brontës bring up somewhat painful memories for me.” He motioned toward the bag in my hands. “Here. Open it.”

  I did as I was told. There, inside, was Wuthering Heights. I was trying to remember a time when I looked down and that infernal book was not there. There was Cathy, right on the cover, clutching Heathcliff’s bare, hairy chest. Heathcliff looked like James Dean. I recognized this book. It was James Orville’s personal copy. The note from his father appeared on the first page. Dear James, love, Dad. For a moment, I couldn’t speak.

  “You can read out of this one if your copy is filled with as many margin notes as appear in Jane Eyre,” he said. “We will do this in private. And you are not to mention it to anyone.”

  “Who would I tell?”

  “Then we have an agreement?”

  I nodded. He was standing very close to me. He smelled of chamomile and aftershave.

  He glanced at his watch. “Read the book in its entirety and prepare an essay on the use of windows.”

  “Why windows?”

  “Is it not obvious?”

  “No.”

  “I will send you an e-mail with additional reading tonight,” he said. “I expect you to complete it by the time I return.”

  I croaked, “Thank you. Really, thank you. I—”

  “This visit?” he interrupted, holding up his index finger and stirring the air with it. “Never happened.”

  “Okay.”

  “And the tutorial we will have? It also will never have happened.”

  “Right.”

  He looked me over once, then gave a quick nod. He dusted off his scarf and made to leave but was arrested, quite suddenly, upon noticing the Governess. She looked good at the moment—the muted light flattered her solemn features.

  “That painting. Where did you get it?”

  I shrugged.

  He said, “Answer.”

  “It came with the tower.”

  Orville looked between us, like he had just discovered my twin. He and the Governess stared at each other in a vast recognition. He cleared his throat, and in a moment, his face readjusted back into its usual expression of apathy. He didn’t answer me—just wrapped his scarf around his neck like nothing had happened.

  He said, “She looks like you, that’s all.”

  I pressed my lips together. “That’s the second time a man has said that to me.”

  “Is it?” he said. He turned toward me. He was terribly attractive, and I couldn’t seem to look at him directly. “Samantha, will you promise me to be careful?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Careful. You.”

  I gorilla-pounded my chest as an affirmation. Orville didn’t understand what I was doing and I didn’t either. Then he walked over to the door and closed it behind him. With him gone, I glanced back at the painting. She was different, yet again. Blame the lighting, the fatigue—anything—but the Governess, I was quite sure, had just blinked.

  CHAPTER 9

  Dear Samantha,

  This is Sir John Booker from the Brontë Parsonage. How are you? I hope you passed a pleasant holiday.

  I must say I am very disappointed. I would have expected your mother—if not your father—to have raised you with more manners. I have now left you three voice mails and have yet to hear back from you. As a father myself, I feel it appropriate to give you some advice. At some point in your life, you will have to gain the courage to face your problems instead of shutting them away with you.

  Please have the courtesy to call me back immediately. I am curious to know whether your father’s books are still arriving at your doorstep, and how I might be of help.

  Yours,

  John

  Two weeks later, Orville and I agreed to meet at eight in the evening for our Tutorial That Never Happened. He chose an underground bar with a name too avant-garde to actually pronounce. Apparently, he had gone to great lengths to find somewhere where no one would ever see us.

  It took me some time to find Agatha Street, which was a darkened artery in a sullen, residential part of town. Narrow, skeletal houses were stacked neatly against each other, pressed together as if to keep warm. I walked along, counting the numbers on the door. Number 11, the address of said avant-garde lounge, turned out to be an old door lurking incognito amid a wall of decaying brick. We were supposed to meet outside and Orville was late. I leaned against the wall and waited. A woman with grocery bags scuttled past, babushka’d tightly in a coat and scarf.

  My cell buzzed. It was an unfamiliar number. I said, “Hello?”

  “Is this Samantha?”

  I frowned. No one ever called me. “Is this Mom?”

  “This is James.”

  “James.”

  “Orville the Third.”

  “The reception is terrible.”

 
I didn’t know James Orville had my number, or a cell phone.

  “I am at a crêpe stand,” he said. He didn’t finish his thought, because he had started rattling French in a rusty, sandpaper accent, presumably to someone else. When he resumed our conversation, he said, “Where are you?”

  “On the street corner,” I said. “Picking up men.”

  “Listen, I’m running late,” he said. There was some sort of noise in the background—a truck, maybe, or a street cleaner. “I stopped for a bite. Are you hungry?”

  “Not very.”

  He swore.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing—it’s hot.”

  “What kind did you get?”

  “Jambon et fromage.”

  I said, “Ham and cheese.”

  “I was using the French.”

  “I was using the English.”

  A gust of wind slammed against the phone. He said, “I won’t keep you waiting much longer.”

  I said, “Take your time—it’s really exciting over here.”

  But he had already hung up. I was smiling, and then I stopped. It was always disconcerting to see people standing on the sidewalk, grinning to themselves. Then again, there was no one around to watch me. The streets had emptied rapidly. The wind stopped and started intermittently, like bad traffic. I pulled my jacket around my chest and raised the collar so that it armored the lower half of my face from the cold. This was the position my father called turtling. It was what my mother used to call You’re going to get acne.

  In ten minutes, a large figure appeared in the distance, wearing . . . a cape? Orville had left his wool coat unbuttoned and it flapped in the breeze behind him, Zorro style. When he arrived, he was taking the final bites of his crêpe. I was unused to seeing him in civilian attire. Tonight, he was wearing a leather jacket under his coat, Ray-Bans on top of his head, and a look that said, I’m here, baby, let’s go surfing.

  I nodded toward the remains of his jambon et fromage. “Smells good.”

  “Did you want some?”

  “No.”

  He stood in front of number 11 and placed his palm in the center of the door, like it might be a magic portal that opened only for genies.

  “I didn’t know you spoke French,” I said.

  “ ‘Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine. Et nos amour, faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne, la joie venait toujours après la peine.’ ”

  His accent really was atrocious—brittle, like a tin of stale cashews.

  I said, “If you could stop, that would be great.”

  “You don’t like poetry?”

  “I don’t like French, either.”

  Orville knocked on the door in front of us and stood back with his hands in his pockets. There was an abnormal calm about him this evening. Perhaps something had, in fact, changed between us since Christmas. Were we becoming low-level friends?

  The door opened. The man on the other side was round in every way, with dewy pigeon eyes and a mop of dandelion-blond hair, which fell over his eyes like a wedding veil. He checked our identification and led us inside, down a small, rusty corridor and into a dramatically darkened salon.

  Orville led us past the bar, which sparkled like a collection of pipe organs. The bartender was a woman with a plunging neckline and big, flat fish-lips. At the bar was a pack of men in multicolored ties, and dancing alone in the middle of the room was a softly swaying woman in green.

  Orville found a quiet back table and removed his coat. He looked around. “Well?”

  “This is definitely weird.”

  We slid into our seats, and Orville ordered us each a drink from a woman whose legs were so long that all I could really see was her plaid kilt, right in front of my face. When she left, Orville asked, “How did you like the reading for this week?”

  “Which one?” I asked. “ ‘Wuthering Heights Is a Freudian Sex Drama,’ or ‘Emily Brontë: An Analysis of Premodern Lesbianism’?”

  “Both.”

  I said, “I thought they were a disgrace to academia.”

  “Because they were about sex?”

  My eyes flew open. I didn’t know James Orville III used that word. I tried to find something appropriately clever to say, but couldn’t. Orville was testing me. I could feel it. My lips twitched but no sound emerged. Somewhere in my mind, Samantha Whipple was being terribly witty. It was a shame no one could hear her.

  “I’d like to talk to you about your essay,” said Orville.

  “Sure.”

  “It was . . . different.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  He didn’t answer, and I thought he might be thinking of how best to fire me from school. I had written this essay at four in the morning, when I had given the finger to thinking up a legitimate argument. Orville had asked me to analyze the use of windows in a novel that had nothing to do with windows. I decided to argue that windows were not windows at all; they were all that separated the savage moorland from the civilized home, Thrushcross Grange from Wuthering Heights, even Cathy from her own self-constructed identities. Windows were the barrier between this world and the next, a barrier as ill-defined as the boundary between the reader and the text itself. It was a bullshit parade, and I was the proud mayor. I used the phrases Jungian realism and linear archetypes, and congratulated myself on achieving a level of douchebaggery I had previously only witnessed in shampoo commercials for men.

  I cleared my throat. “What did you think of it, sir?”

  Orville looked at me long and hard. In this lighting, his eyes were the size and shape of two olives.

  He said, “It was one of the finest papers I’ve ever read by a student.”

  I blinked. He had a strange, sadistic smile on his face. I felt like a courtier who was finally receiving the full attention of the king, only to discover it was Henry VIII. The drinks arrived. Mine was green.

  “I gather that you do not like what you wrote,” he said.

  “It was idiotic,” I said. “Any fool can find obscure patterns in a novel, fabricate an intention behind it, and then trick people into believing it’s relevant. I call that intellectual narcissism.”

  “I call it creativity,” Orville said. “The purpose of literature is to teach you how to think, not how to be practical. Learning to discover the connective tissue between seemingly unrelated events is the only way we are equipped to understand patterns in the real world. And I did not give you this assignment on a whim. The world has analyzed window symbolism for decades.”

  “I did not know that.”

  He nodded with an “as I expected” expression. I pressed my lips together and drew the green glass toward me. Here was the first compliment Orville had ever given me. Part of me wanted to accept it—frame it, mount it on my wall the way some people did dead animals—but it didn’t seem right, not when I was convinced of my own foolishness. I peered down at my drink and took a swallow. There was ginger and pear and an unrecognizable alcohol.

  “Do you like it?” Orville asked, pointing to my glass.

  “No. Can we trade?”

  Orville passed me his drink. It was bronze and it tasted like it might have been scotch in its first life.

  I said, “I hope you don’t have mono.”

  “Do you have Wuthering Heights with you?” he said. “I’d like to begin.”

  I nodded and removed both books from my bag—my father’s copy, and Orville’s father’s copy. I placed them on the table between us, feeling uncommonly vulnerable. It was as though I were actually handing him my kidney: it wasn’t particularly pretty, and I didn’t quite understand what it did, but it was personal and it was mine. I watched Orville’s movements very closely. He wrapped his fingers around the spine of my father’s book and pulled it toward him with a deep sigh. There was a look of torment on his face that made me furious. Why should the Brontës bring up more painful memories for him than they did for me? He was commandeering my claim to being tragic and misunderstood.

 
I carefully inched closer to him and told him we should start with the Scene with the Hand, since it was really the centerpiece of the book, wouldn’t he agree? Orville waved me away and found the page himself, like a man who has thought through all of the text’s nuances already, thank you very much. I felt a surge of protectiveness. What if he had a distorted image of this book in his mind? What if he imagined Cathy with long hair? Goodness, the thought.

  I cleared my throat. “Can you tell me what this scene means to you? My father was preoccupied with it.”

  Orville must not have understood how desperately I wanted an answer, because he was contemplating something quietly on his own. I felt very alone.

  After a considerable silence, he mused: “A beautiful scene.”

  “Oh?”

  “It is a fine presentation of a lover’s anguish,” he said. “Heathcliff, moved by despair, imagines his deceased love everywhere he goes. An imagination infected by pain can take you to terrible places, Samantha. Here, the effort of resuscitating Cathy has left Heathcliff half in the real world, half in the next, forever tortured.”

  I had been expecting something a bit more original. I waited a respectable amount of time before saying, “Want to know what I think?”

  “Naturally.”

  “I think the scene just means that a woman appeared at the window.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “How do you know that someone didn’t appear outside the Brontë parsonage, and Emily decided to put it in a book?”

  Orville blinked. “Because we are academics, not fools.”

  I said, “Will you please stop overestimating my stupidity? The scene is entirely out of place otherwise. It’s poorly written and doesn’t fit with the rest of the book. You have to wonder why Emily thought to include it at all. It’s probably because this actually happened to her.”

  “Please do not attach literal value to a scene whose weight is purely emotional,” said Orville. “How would you feel if your sister appeared up at your window after years of being dead?”

  I stopped abruptly. I repeated, “Sister?”

  “Certainly.”

  I stared at him in blank horror.

  “Heathcliff and Cathy,” he clarified. “They are siblings.”