They are out on the lawn, in the still, dark, humid air, smoking; their cigarettes like signals from separate boats, distant from each other on the Great Lake. The roar of traffic from everywhere else in the city a muffled sound that surrounds but does not involve them. Inside, someone at the party shrieks with laughter – a single voice in a sea of voices-and then thunder, far off.
He says, staring straight ahead, “I’m going away now.” And then there is the thunder again, the artillery.
A breeze moves into the lush, well-manicured vegetation of the Rosedale back garden. And from somewhere, probably a mundane car lot, a searchlight appears in the sky, and begins to compete with the lightning.
Ann knows that he is not speaking to her, is barely aware of her presence, that he is drunk and on the edge of self-argument. She lights another cigarette, and waits.
“I’ll be back in six months.”
She has never, since the hurricane twenty years ago, thought of the city’s trees, those plump familiar maples, as ominous. But now, abruptly, they seem so; their shapes like Goya monsters pulsing, reluctantly, into life against the unnameable colour of an urban night sky. What meteor shower could penetrate this unpredictable lighting, she wonders, and all the rest of this activity, all this artificial illumination?
“If I come back in six months,” he continues, “at least then I will have done what I must. I must go away.”
Ann searches the sky directly above her head, the only uninfected area – if you ignored the airliners – where the stars have enough dark to shine. She remembers her first star and what a disappointment it was after the solid yellow five-pointed drawings in books. “That’s a star, Mummy?” she said, after being allowed to wait up for this vision one night, when she was three. “Is that all there is?” “But look,” her mother said, “there are hundreds and hundreds of them. They are small because they are farther away than you can even imagine. But if you could get closer, then they would get bigger. They are the farthest away things that we can see.”
And here he is, Arthur Woodruff, art historian, talking to himself about being far away. Explaining the necessity to the night. Unaware that she is listening, letting the subject of distance enter her preoccupation concerning the meteor showers, the lightning, the earthly searchlight, the maples, ominous under the touch of sudden troubled weather.
“And then I’ll come back,” he says.
Ann listens to the swelling whir of the cicadas, unsure whether or not to include them in her catalogue of weather. What insects hum around the wind-blasted walls of Wuthering Heights? Insects are so stubbornly seasonal they must have, in some way, been invented by barometric fluctuation. Should they not then be, by rights, on those moors in droves? She imagines Heathcliff gloating as a cloud of locusts moves down the valley towards Thrushcross Grange and then Catherine emerging dark, triumphant, from among them.
“Yes,” he says, “I am going for six months. …” He pauses, lights another cigarette, flings his glass into the lily-of-the-valley, and quite savagely shouts the word, “AWAY!”
Ann has seen him now and then, aloof and brooding, in the halls of the college. A Renaissance man. The art historians, she knows, lecture in the dark, lurking by their slide machines, gazing in the golden half-light thrown out by projected images of Crucifixions, at the backs of their students. They recite dates. They speak of influences and the birth of perspective.
“Can I do it?” he wonders now, in a gentler, more reflective tone. “Can I go?”
Ann’s ideas of travel have been formed by one European voyage with her mother and by that slow, stately journey to the country, before the highway, by everything encountered along the way, by the presence of the Great Lake out the right-hand window of the Buick, by the small towns through which they’d passed, by the little old ladies with flowered hats and lace-up shoes she’d seen there, making their daily trip to a series of similar general stores. That and the hard road, the sad heart of Wuthering Heights; the cumbersome books she studied and taught. It was as though her life were being lived, uncomfortably and secretively, inside the great, dark, rattling carriages of nineteenth-century fiction.
“If I go,” he says, “I’ll be gone.” He clasps his hands behind his back. “But in six months I’ll return.”
Impatient suddenly with the party, her escape from it, and this man’s insistent subject matter, Ann surprises herself by shouting at him from across the garden, “Then what are you going to do about it? Why don’t you just go?” She immediately regrets this challenge she has flung into the darkness. It is not like her to give advice. The word “go” hovers uncomfortably near the lawn chairs, or seems to, so fixed is Ann’s gaze upon these neutral objects.
As Arthur walks towards her, across the grass, his face is illuminated by sheet lightning. She will always remember this: the white mask, startling and disembodied, the dark suit he is wearing blending with the night. He kisses her once, roughly; then, standing back he holds both her hands and looks through the dark directly into her face. And she sees him, even without lightning, and all her indifference evaporates. It changes, in a second, into something as huge and monstrous as the swaying night maples. The shock of this silences her and she will never be able to speak of these first moments. She takes them, private, into herself, shares them with no one. They are the first signs of raw materials she will need to keep near her, the small bits of fabric she will use, their patterns ripped so haphazardly they are impossible to identify.
During the next six months Ann begins her book about weather-the notes for it-which she hides in various places all over her apartment: under rugs, behind radiators, inside slipcovers, so that years later, cleaning, she might come across a yellowed slip of paper that would say something like, “west wind, 70 references; north wind, 92 references. East wind, south wind, nothing.”
She begins to pay attention to the skies she sees in paintings, photographs, and travel posters. Visiting her mother, listening to stories of the past, she asks, “What was the weather like?” Ordinary conversation, at the post office, in the grocery store, becomes charged with meaning; “Hot enough for you?” or, “What crazy weather!” She collects odd names for certain seasons: dog days, or for strange meteorological regions: horse latitudes, the Bermuda Triangle.
And all the while she is building a man, a partner in storm, creating the idea of him in his absence. She selects certain images from her childhood: a shard of broken heaven near the highway, the wind of the disregarded hurricane pushing against the walls of her house, the grimace on the face of a faintly remembered saint in a dark, kept painting. That and the sound the page of a book makes as you turn it to discover sorrow immodestly disclosed there, and how you take the sorrow from it and preserve it more carefully than your own happiness.
She grafts all this to the fractional collision in the garden, carefully constructing its significance over and over. How he stumbled against her and then vanished. How he spoke of being away and then thrust his hands through the dark to meet hers. The stars her mother spoke of speeding towards proximity and then exploding into invisibility. The perfect balance of here and gone, dramatized in a Toronto back garden in thirty startled seconds.
Then she takes her construction and superimposes his shadow over everything else she does, so that in a way he is always with her and the engineered idea neatly precludes any expectation about the actuality of the man in her life. The energies of what might have been expectation are directed towards the beginnings of her book about weather–a subject she was introduced to by a woman who has been dead for over a hundred years.
Ah, Emily, she thinks. Oh, fora walk on your moor now that I have something to take there with me; a male face disclosed by lightning, a searchlight, a star.
And the shock of unexpected touch.
“I LOVE A ROOM that is full of wind,” said Emily, “a room that moves. Papa never let us have curtains, which would have been perfect, especially light curtains, because the windows ther
e could never keep the wind out, never! Even as it was, even though we were clothed in woollens, our skirts moved in the air while we stood utterly still. We were besieged, you see, by something other, something outer, regardless of how we were sheltered. But in spring Aunt and Tabby aired the house-windows open-and everything flew. Once we chased one of Papa’s sermons around the house, up and down the stairs, through the parlour into the kitchen, and rescued only the last page before it was sucked into the fire. ‘Our God is a consuming fire!’ the last page began and we laughed and laughed. Papa, too, and Branwell laughing, almost hysterical, his red curls tossed by wind.”
“I was never happier than when the wind was in the house – unless it was when I was out of the house myself, in the wind. The only thing that could have moved me more would have been to haul some of the stars I saw from my bedroom window into the parlour in the afternoon. Or snow. To freeze the interior, to make it polar, to change everything to white. To have icicles.”
“At night sometimes my mind went white, as if it had become a white wind. Howling.”
“Have you ever howled, Arianna, at the moon, at the wind, at the moors? You should have howled at him, tossed your anger out to the sea. You should have let the wind into the white room. “If you couldn’t move him, you might, at least, have moved the room.”
“Where is he, where is he?” wept Arianna, “Why do I want him?”
Waste, waste, waste, whispered the wind.
“All this wanting is a waste,” said Emily. “And I thought you’d stopped.”
“So did I,” said Arianna miserably.
“Why want?” Emily continued. “Enjoy desirelessness. Such is oblivion. This wanting will pass. And yet … and yet Catherine would never rest in my book. She scratched and clawed and wanted and haunted. Poor Heathcliff. How weak he was and how weathered by her wanting. ‘I’ll never rest!’ she promised. But how elusive she was. Just beyond his grasp … always. She was shameless. A shameless, shameless ghost! Always a ghost – a wanton shadow. Ah Heathcliff, she would sigh, and then evaporate! Take any form! he cried. So she became invisible out here in the landscape. Ha! Such forms! He couldn’t see her, so he wanted her, which was what she wanted! They were engaged in a never-ending circular argument. It was their chosen vocation.”
Hallucinate, hallucinate, howled the wind.
“Their whole love affair was an hallucination! I never really let them touch-except once. One desperate embrace. But by then she was dying. And on purpose! To make him want her! Her death swallowed him whole. The new form she took-that of absence-obsessed him.”
“Who is Catherine?”
“Someone I invented. And in some ways she was the invention of someone else I invented and he was her invention. I invented them so that they could invent each other.”
“He invented Arianna Ether,” said Polly, becoming for the moment Polly, “but then he didn’t want her.”
“He was afraid of the second invention. He invented the white girl too, though, and he wasn’t afraid of her-Polly Blanc, Polly Blank: Who was she, anyway? An evanescent creature. Pure fog. He could walk right through her. Listen, once in the book I have Mr. Capital H – Heathcliff, He, Him-bribe the sexton to open Catherine’s coffin eighteen years after her death. ‘It was her face yet,’ he comments and then, ‘It would change if the air blew on it.’ So he closes the casket – quickly. A little air, a little exposure in his presence and it would change. The face, the person would evaporate. He knew that; so did she. Absence was essential, after childhood, to the hallucination. Desperate departures, absences, reversals, withdrawals – the ongoing war. A permanent state of unfulfilled desire. And, weirdly enough, longing itself was what they desired. Mr. Capital H gave a long melodramatic speech about Catherine’s ghost, her well-honed haunting skills. Moaning and complaining and writhing and loving every minute of it.
“If you must haunt, Polly/Arianna, then haunt well–although I still maintain it’s a waste of time. Never reveal yourself completely. Just when the haunted one believes in your presence-disappear. Never let him see you whole.
“It’s good to be a ghost, Polly/Arianna … you can use absence to a marvellous advantage.”
SIX SILENT months in Ann’s tidy kitchen where tea towels hang-clean, motionless rectangles – from a gleaming metal bar; where the only change in temperature is the heating and cooling of the pristine oven that warms single portions of frozen food; where Ann sits at a small, unstained table, marking the papers of students who do not share her passion for Wuthering Heights, or where she sits, as she does now, working on her book.
She has just written a paragraph on rain. “Weather has come right in through the window,” she has stated, “in the form of driving rain at the time of Heathcliff’s death. He has finally (she has underlined the word finally) opened the window. He has opened himself. He has let himself out and he has let the weather in.”
The first ring cuts right into the middle of a mental picture Ann has constructed of a casement window swinging free on its hinges. With the second ring the window slams shut, and the landscape begins to fade, hill by purple hill.
She carefully caps her fountain pen. She walks across the bare floor. She answers the phone.
“I’m back.”
“Yes.”
“I went away and now I’m back.”
“Where did you go?”
“Venice.”
“Why?”
“Tintoretto.”
Ann gasps. She remembers the square inch. “You’re sure,” she says now in confusion, “that it was Tintoretto? Oh, God,” she murmurs, “Tintoretto.”
“The drapery,” he explains. “And the angels,” he adds.
“What?”
“It doesn’t matter. We’ll go for a drive. You’ll come with me for a drive. Is it okay with you?”
No, thinks Ann. “Yes,” she says.
“Well, it’s not okay for me,” he says. “This is not okay with me. This is a disaster for me. I can’t do this.”
“All right,” says Ann quietly, amazed at her disappointment. What is a disaster? she attempts to wonder. But she knows, she knows.
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. And we both agree to one ride together: the first and the last.”
“Yes,” says Ann.
“We’ll drive, we’ll talk, and then we’ll go back. And that will be that.”
Jesus, thinks Ann as she replaces the receiver, I knew exactly who he was. He didn’t even have to identify himself.
Although she has been on the phone for only a few moments, the afternoon has turned to evening, and when she returns to her page she has to light her kitchen to see what she has written.
Ann is speechless in the car, overcome by a combination of anxiety and expectation. They are driving the highway, fast; green signs blurring past the side window she has turned towards. He is talking.
“Look,” he says, “I’m not in love with you. I just really desire you but I’m not in love with you. What this is all about is that I want to go to bed with you.”
There are ugly subdivisions now all along the highway where it once was green. Ann wishes that she were a child again, that she had brought along her paper dolls to distract her. Ann wishes she were a paper doll. Then she could change, in a second, into something else-or someone else could change her by folding paper tabs over her cardboard shoulders. She could change into a girl going to a ball or into a cowgirl dressed for the rodeo. They are nearing the airport. She could change, she remembers, into a stewardess, or a shipboard nurse. What she wants now is to change her mind about this man with whom, she realizes, she has inexplicably fallen in love.
“And,” he is continuing, “if there is any chance of you falling in love with me then we stop right now.”
Ann notices the sky above the highway darkening, turning asphalt grey. “I won’t,” she says to him, twisting in the seat to examine his profile.
“I’m in love with someone else,” he says, staring fi
ercely ahead. “We have a wonderful, warm relationship.”
Ann knows he is married. She hates the word relationship; the way it sounds in his mouth. She watches the flakes of snow melt on the windshield of the car, the dancing swirls of white on the road ahead. She understands that until now this has been a summer road for her. Weather and the highway have not yet come together in her life. He has turned on the windshield wipers and the headlights, for now it is getting quite dark.
“This is bad weather and it’s getting dark,” she says. “We should be going back.”
“Back!” He throws both hands off the steering wheel and brings them back down again in a slapping gesture. “Back? We never should have come out here in the first place. This is crazy.” He shakes his head. “We must think of a place to meet, somewhere out here on the highway. Just once and then never again.”
“We should be driving in the other direction,” Ann says to him. “We are too far from the lake.”
“What has the lake got to do with any of this? We could meet here.” He jerks his head in the direction of one of a series of highway hotels.
“I’m used to the lake on this highway,” says Ann. “It was always there, on the right, whenever we went anywhere.” And then she adds, for no reason, “And it was always on the left when we came back.”
“It would have to be during the day,” he remarks, becoming fractionally calmer. “I’m always at home at night. Tuesday, I’ll meet you on Tuesday.”
By now the wind has lifted the accumulating snow off the surface of the highway so that, mixed with that which falls from the sky, it becomes a new texture, ghost-like, around the windows of the car. The atmosphere becomes exaggerated, confusing, unclear. Except in the closed cab of the moving vehicle where a man and a woman are locked in together, locked in a prison of speed. There, tension hangs in the surrounding air with knife-like clarity.
“You could cut it with a knife,” Ann’s mother always said about tension in a room, or about silence. Her grandmother, on the other hand, used knives to describe velocity. “Quick as you could say knife,” she would confide. Vanishing acts were usually associated with this modifying clause. He left the room, he ran away, he was out the door, he hopped a train, he jumped the crick, he was over the wall, he was into the lake … quick as you could say knife. The glint – the brief, bright flicker of the blade – enters Ann’s mind now as the storm grows stronger around the car.
Changing Heaven Page 8
