Changing Heaven

by Jane Urquhart

  Ann had been forced, until recently, to carry rural attributes around in her mind in much the same way she carried Wuthering Heights, the two melding now and then.

  Before the highway, there was Ann’s early childhood in the city and a more complicated road to the past: a road made up of the sequential experiences of earlier forms of travel. Ann sitting in the back of her mother’s lush, curvaceous Buick, meandering along the old road which turned and dipped and then changed with ruler-straight regality, into the King and Queen Street of one small town after another. Pickering, Newcastle, Port Hope, Grafton-their red brick town halls, their clapboard churches, their five-and-dime stores, their gas pumps which resembled undersea divers. There were spots, too, in the countryside between towns where trees would reach towards each other to make a tunnel through which the car hummed. Then light and shade would flicker briefly on the paper dolls and their wardrobes which Ann had placed on the plaid fabric of the back seat.

  Farmers rumbled by in pick-up trucks; twelve bales of hay in the back, a dog beside them, alert, in the cab. Other dogs, too, that leapt towards the car, having crouched in anticipation behind farmhouse shrubbery ever since the appearance of the last vehicle some twenty minutes before. Porch swings, rail fences. Brief glimpses of water: a brook, one river, and now and then the Great Lake itself shining on the far side of an orchard.

  All of this seen from deep inside the moving room of the car and through the sun-shot mist produced by the cigarettes her mother smoked as she sat behind the wheel, separated from her daughter by the thick slab of the seat. Ann straddled the hump in the back and picked up the cardboard dolls and laid them down again. Gingham dress after gingham dress. Or she counted horses in disappearing pastures. Or she looked for children of her own age playing near the front stoop of their houses.

  Now that the highway has come into being it eliminates the landscape of getting there. Now there is, as there would later be on jumbo jets, only there and here and a swift void in between.

  Ann sits erect in the back seat, stunned by velocity as new green-and-white signs announce towns she can no longer see. The bright white broken line, the slick, grey overpasses. Near one of these, but in the world rather than on the highway, a brand new dome made of glass is being lowered by a huge crane onto a brand new Catholic church. This is taking place on the outskirts of a town whose name reproduces, exactly, the sound of the Great Lake’s waves tossing foam and pebbles near the shore.

  “Oshawa, Oshawa …” the child whispers in the comfort of the car.

  Like all the other finned vehicles surrounding them, the car slows, and slows again, and finally stops altogether. Ann’s mother lights another cigarette, and squinting, leans over the wheel and looks up through the windshield towards the hemispherical blaze of glory that hovers just above its final destination, suspended by a chain from the sky. Ann has both her hands on the rear side window. Then she rolls it down and sticks her head out to see. Oh my Lord!, to see this, this glass heaven swaying in the wind, sunlight breaking through it like rain. It is a conductor of the light that blazes down to the surface of the highway.

  The overpasses are jammed with crowds of people who gaze like an awestruck primitive tribe or an entranced group of pilgrims at this miracle of light floating in the air. A brass band! Ann is sure there must be a brass band! In her imagination the band is crowded with heraldic horns and she sees sunbathed gold even though there is no evidence of music whatsoever. At the same time she sees, when she pushes her face out the window, only the dome and, for a fraction of a second, the silver glint of a row of automobile side-view mirrors stretching out from her own car. One by one, the little ovoid landscapes reflected there, the little green signs and cement overpasses, begin to pull away and then the Buick in which she sits slides under the concrete bridge and out the other side into a place where no majestic events happen at all.

  “Mummy!” Ann shouts, clutching the foam, vinyl, and springs, “Mummy, we have to stop and watch it!”

  “Honey,” replies Mummy, jamming her cigarette into the ashtray, “this isn’t the kind of road you can ever stop on.”

  Nevertheless they enter, and then come to a stop in the past. Grandma’s house, as reassuring as a Bartlett print. Autumnal walks through the blazing maple woods, crackling fires on the two chilly, windy mornings that make up the weekend, evening games of Chinese checkers, snap, old maid. And then, of course, the highway again, the return to the city.

  At this point the highway goes bad. The sun disappears, the wind turns icy, the Great Lake is as grey and still and featureless as the asphalt on a four-lane, highway. Nothing reflects gold. The outer world beyond the guard rails loses significance. The word “Oshawa” no longer sounds like the currents of a Great Lake caressing its beaches and begins, instead, to resemble the sound of one car after another coming off an assembly line, or the discontented mutters of striking auto workers, or a thousand transport trucks shifting, simultaneously, into fourth gear.

  The trouble, for Ann, with having this memory in the future is that it will be impossible to have just the first half of it. The inevitable second part will nudge the first aside, making its presence known before the floating dome can be fully savoured.

  Because, returning, they see no hemisphere of glass on its basilica pedestal, see instead an unfinished church, a crane from which hangs emptiness, and enormous glass shards littering the space between the architecture and the highway. Because of this, the whole memory will be broken.

  A suitably profound finish to the landscape of getting there. Grey, broken, unstoppable. Adolescence, adulthood, old age.

  No more luminosity hovering in the outer world.

  And so, the child turns inward. Her grandmother dies and the fist of time closes around the past, but the past is kept nevertheless, like mythology, between the covers of a book. Or like ancestors with names such as Obadiah, Kaziah, Oran, Ezekiel, in a tidy, fenced, nineteenth-century graveyard with a view of rolling hills and snake-rail fences, and no noise at all except the wind moving the cedars at the back of the plot.

  After the broken dome, Heaven changes. Ann again takes the book down from the shelf. She looks at its cover; a strong man depicted there, growling at the wind, his back to a stunted tree. The wood engraver has drafted the weather so intricately it looks like the sea. Swirling currents lift the man’s dark curls. Ann opens the book and turns from wood engraving to wood engraving: graveyards, stone walls, fierce emotion, snarling dogs, landscape, landscape. She begins to read and becomes once again irrevocably lost in that first moorland blizzard. Let me in, let me in. I’ve been lost on the moor for twenty years. She enters, Ann enters the structure called Wuthering Heights.

  “Oh, Heathcliff, Heathcliff,” she whispers in the dark of her own pink bedroom, any winter night the wind chooses to howl through the city in which she lives. “Oh, Heathcliff,” she sighs, while her mouth aches with a combination of desire and orthodontia. She is taking small steps, groping, blind, towards weather.

  The blizzard she has stumbled into shrieks through the dining room, on whose round rug she often sits reading. It howls around the china cabinet and attacks the sturdy, plump rosewood legs of the table as if, the moment she opened the leaded-glass door of the custom-built shelves to remove the book, she had let it out; this beast, this innerness, this otherness. The past. The difficult past.

  The events along the road from the valley to the heights.

  “WHEN YOU’RE lighter than air,” Arianna/Polly said, settling herself into a corner made by the intersection of two stone walls, “then a house can hold you down, weigh you down in a pleasant way, so that you don’t float away altogether.”

  “I suppose …” said Emily, doubtfully.

  “And, if possible, there would have to be two houses for us. One for the balloon, you see. A Balloon House.”

  “Was this imaginary house yours or his?”

  “It was ours.”

  “No,” said Emily thoughtfully, “No,
I think it was yours, but … never mind. Go on. Tell me what happened.”

  “I began thinking about the house a lot when we lived in a white room-a white room in a tourist home right by the sea so that, no matter what, I was always afraid that one wave might wash us away altogether. And I couldn’t swim and was very afraid of the water.”

  Arianna looked at Emily to see if she disapproved of this fear. Seeing no reaction, she continued.

  “It pounded, this sea, always, because it was winter and stormy, and its nearness fogged the windows behind the white curtains, making the glass white, too, and shutting the view of the world out. The water was always out there calling and, because of that, the room felt temporary and, of course, what I really wanted was eternity. I didn’t much like what the sea was doing to the house where we had the room. I discovered why the term ‘weather-beaten’ had come into existence. That house was beaten by the weather every day. Eventually, I knew, it would have to succumb.

  “All we did in the white room was make love, over and over and over. He was under me and over me and all around me and inside me. There wasn’t an inch of me anywhere that he didn’t know, hadn’t touched somehow. He was only concerned with me as I was then, with the physical details of me and he would want to know nothing of my past; only what I thought, how I responded there and then. He would always silence me when I spoke about another time, by placing his mouth on mine, his body flat over mine, as if constructing a barrier to memory.

  “And the sea that I feared got into our lovemaking until at times I felt that he was a large wave crawling up my shore; a wave or maybe a whole ocean, filling the rented, white, temporary room. A white sea that I sailed, dazzled and terrified, because, as I knew, water is heavier than air. I’ve never been afraid of the air.”

  “This moor is like a sea sometimes,” said Emily.

  “How I loved him, though, so that the fear got mixed up with the loving. I navigated him, or tried to: me the only detail on a white sea. Soon, however, I saw that there was never going to be any past; that he had locked it out, had locked out even a past that was connected to us because, in that sea, in that white room, there were never going to be any details. There was only weather, the weather of a featureless sea, and the present, which was skin and hair and bone and pleasure.

  “You must know that a sea is unidentifiable, because, despite its waves and white-caps and froth and foam and colour, it really has no identifying details. I could show you engravings or paintings of twelve different oceans – the Indian, the Atlantic, the Pacific – and you couldn’t tell which was which because they all look the same. No recognizable features. No details. Just water the weather is working on. No special details at all.

  “And, of course, I wanted some. To be able to say, this is us. This is what happened and this is where it happened. I wanted more, I guess, something beyond the white room, though when he was touching me I couldn’t have moved to anywhere else. Because I was drowned in him.

  “He would have to leave sometimes to do a performance. He would leave, sail his balloon somewhere and return, usually wordless, with a bouquet of white carnations for me and his heart beating like the sea and his breath as deep as the weather. I began to feel his eyes staring out from beneath my lids and the world got farther and farther away.

  “And so, in time, of course, I wished it back again-just a little, just enough to provide a setting for us to love against. Somehow I thought that unless there was some more scenery, I wouldn’t be able to remember our loving. I wanted memory and there really isn’t any memory in a white room. A white room has no memory, perhaps, if you want to look at it from that point of view.

  “When I mentioned a house to him, or even a journey together, he would become as silent and as neutral as the white walls that surrounded us and I knew he really didn’t want anything more, anything else. ‘There’s just us, Polly,’ he would finally say, for I hadn’t yet become Arianna, ‘just us and your lightness and your whiteness.’ But he would say this almost angrily, if I mentioned the house, or at least coldly, without an expression of any kind on his face.

  “So when he went off to make money in his balloon and I was left alone in the white room for a few days I began to make the house-you know, to picture it in my mind. At first I just made the inside and it was just about the size of a dollhouse I’d had as a child, with the back missing and the other side not quite real despite its lovely little windows with shutters and its front door with a tiny knocker, because you hardly ever turn it around to look from the outside in.

  “I picked out all the wallpapers and the curtains; all the colours for the various rooms. I wanted colour! I refused to have a single white object in the house. Even the bath I had constructed out of cream-coloured porcelain with chartreuse and pink roses painted in it, and green vines. It wasn’t a rich person’s house, mind you, but it had charm: lots of chintz in the parlour, though never on a white ground, and lots of odds and ends, bric-à-brac, and pictures. Pictures on the walls, you see, because I wanted details … to the point where I didn’t mind crowding. I wanted lots of objects and I wanted there to be lots of memories associated with those objects.

  “Gradually, I became quite happy with it, with all of it. The dining room had Chippendale chairs and silver candelabra. But the house was not too large, not, as I’ve said, a rich person’s house. And no servants because I did want to stay alone with him.

  “Eventually, the inside of the house became so wonderful (there were fireplaces in all the rooms), and so full and so furnished (I had those clasps on the inside of the windows-have you seen them?-the ones that look like little hands). … I had all the china-a soft blue with peacocks–and all the silver (just plate, I was not ostentatious). After he had been away four or five times I knew that I had finished my house but I couldn’t bear to put a front on it because then I’d feel shut out. So I left it open, like a dollhouse, and began to work on the garden. This was nice, leaving it open, because then I could look at all the rooms at once.

  “I didn’t know anything at all about gardening and I still don’t-but that didn’t matter because I was able to create the garden finished. I didn’t have to plant it, I just had to want it and there it was, just as if some old gardener had been working on it for twenty years. Roses climbed over arbours, iris swayed in flower beds, springs jumped out of little grottoes, vines climbed trellises. I had a boxwood maze, of all things, which led to a small bench (painted yellow, not white), and baths for the birds who, under the circumstances, I was able to choose. And the birds never migrated and all the flowers bloomed at once.”

  “I hope you changed the seasons now and then,” said Emily, “to allow for storms.”

  “Why, no,” said Arianna, “I didn’t think of that. Anyway, with the sea right there I had plenty of storms in the white room.”

  And as they spoke, the season all around them changed again, this time to autumn.

  “After those days I spent secretly building the house or working on the garden, he, Jeremy, would come back and enter the white room. He would pull me over to the bed – not roughly – gently, and we would begin again those hours and hours of lovemaking.

  “It was always he who operated the door that closed us in together, always he who turned the key; twice, now I remember a double lock. At first I thought it was to keep the sea with its white breakers out, all his bolting and locking, but then I realized, after the ocean got into our love-making, that he was really locking it in. And me too. Making me so much a part of him I was swallowed.

  “It was then that I started to use the imaginary house to ground me when I thought that I might float away altogether from too much touching. I would visualize some small detail when he caressed my thighs and stomach; an ink stand with two metal deer perched on it, or the inlaid box where the fish knives were kept. And while I moved through swell after swell of pleasure I would have something to hold on to; a rose bush from the garden, or even a common rake. As I melted under him or diss
olved over him I would visualize these things – in detail – as if I were drawing them on the white paper of the room. I remember once, when my whole body was aching and aching with pleasure, I became confused and thought the white sheets were the blue curtains of my imaginary house, and I realized that I would have to tell him because otherwise I was being unfaithful: like harbouring a secret desire for another lover.

  “And so, a few weeks later, after he’d returned from another two or three days of ballooning, I confessed my pretend house, my play house I called it, taking care not to omit any facet of it, any of my precious details, so that when I had finished explaining he would know it as well as I did. I took him on a sort of tour; room by room by room. By then I’d travelled that route so many times by myself I could actually hear things: how footsteps sound different on wooden floors than they do on soft rugs, the tick tock of the clock in the hall and its chime-I don’t like the important-sounding gongs that clocks sometimes have, so I was careful to give mine bells. Then we strolled pleasantly, I thought, all around the garden where now I could smell the earth and flowers. And inside again, afterwards, I lit some fires in the hearths of the parlour and the dining room. I was cooking something as well, I was so pleased to have him there, and I could smell the herbs and the meat.

  “I finished by leading him up the red-carpeted stairs to the bedroom with its wallpaper and mirrors-there were no mirrors in the white room-and its bureaus and ample bed. Of all the rooms in the house, that was the one I had made for both of us.