Changing Heaven

by Jane Urquhart

  They turn down the Gardiner Expressway towards the centre of the city and the change of direction relaxes them slightly. They begin to talk about weather; about how to drive through storms, about snowploughs, about runways in airports, which are heated from underneath in order to melt the deadly ice, about the ropes that are tied between houses and barns in Saskatchewan so that farmers visiting cattle will not be lost in the ever-present blizzard. Ann describes to him a small set of snowshoes she had as a child.

  By the time they reach her street, however, they are silent again and Ann’s heart has begun to pound disturbingly. His expression is grim, cold. He turns this mask towards her as she prepares to leave the car.

  “We’ll meet on Tuesday, then,” he states, “at that place.”

  Ann steps into the six-inch snow on the sidewalk and bends at the waist with her hand on the open door. “The Tintoretto,” she says, “the one at the Art Gallery?”

  He nods impatiently.

  “It isn’t real.”

  “I know,” he says, throwing the car into gear.

  Looking at the two long tracks the vehicle leaves in the fresh snow on the street, Ann realizes two things: that she has agreed to meet him, and that during their ride through the storm they never touched each other, never even shook hands.

  She stands perfectly still for a while. The blizzard thickens around her.

  How strange her apartment seems in the late afternoon light. The sun has made one last appearance, dazzling behind the still-whirling snow. Ann stands stupefied at the window, taking in white and gold and several other subtle prismatic colours. Every object on her windowsill is clothed in this new light; her antique bottles and telephone insulators and jars of stones collected from the shores of the Great Lake. Pale pastel statements, unobtrusive, the only parts of her observable from the outside. She becomes in her imagination, for a moment, someone walking down the sidewalk looking at her window. Ah, they would think, someone quiet lives there, someone from whom we shall hear very little. Like the soft brown woollens that she so often chooses to wear, the objects in her windows cover her, revealing very little of her interior in the window’s small theatre with its opaque curtains. How still everything has been, everything continues to be on that stage, how silent and unmoving. Behind her, rooms unfold with absolute calm. The shining surface of her kitchen table, the cutlery, unmusical and unshining in the dark of the drawer, the clean undented fabric of the pillows, her skirts hanging, lifeless, in the closet. The small amount of jewellery she owns has been carefully placed in a velvet-lined box with a closed lid, sleeping in a place where no light visits, where no flames glint from its few facets. It has been so easy to put everything she owns, everything she is, away, out of sight in drawers and other dark locations, revealing only smooth stones and soft wool and opaque glass to the world. And it has been so easy to keep that world out.

  Even as she stands in its light, Ann knows that the window is keeping the weather’s energy apart from her. Abruptly she wants the storm’s sharp breath to disturb the air and touch her skin. She removes the glass bottles, the insulators, and the jars of stones from the little wooden ledge and puts them behind her on the floor. There is only myself at the glass now, she thinks, this person that I am. Myself and fabric. The delicate gauze curtain echoes the white, sun-shot particles of snow. The wind slams hard against the invisible barrier she has come so close to. Her breath fogs the surface as miniature drifts gather in the lower corners of the wooden frame. Quite suddenly Ann grasps the curled brass pulls and forces the window up and open, experiencing, as she does, the shock of frantic currents on her stomach, breasts, neck, and eventually on her face. The burn of sharp snow on her cheeks and eyelids.

  She stands transfixed for several minutes, allowing the storm to assault and caress her. Then, with the wind still in her face, she backs up ten paces to watch the weather enter her rooms and as she watches, one curtain disentangles itself from its sash and rises, triumphant, sailing on the back of the wind, with air, snow, and sunlight all around it.

  She sees the curtain dance into life, shaken by the teeth of tempest. The fabric snaps, then billows, then snaps again, straining outward from its valance, a celebrant of pure energy.

  This is what Ann wants, what she will get from him, what she will become in his presence.

  A curtain responding to storm.

  Early the next morning, while Ann is dreaming of tornadoes – tiny ones that carry dollhouse furniture carelessly around and around in their wake – the shrill ring of the phone awakens her.

  “I’ve just spent a sleepless night,” he informs her, “I can’t do this.”

  Ann’s room is frigid, her casement flung open. There is a sizeable snowdrift on her bedroom carpet but the sky beyond the partly opened bedroom window is pinkish and calm.

  “Where are you?” she asks.

  “It’s not that I don’t … Jesus, it’s just that I can’t. This will be chaos.”

  Ann’s mind goes numb. The receiver is so cold her breath is causing beads of moisture to form on the plastic. She can’t speak. The room begins to tilt. Her body, so powerful in the evening storm, feels small now, insignificant, the body of a waif. The body of one who has been brutally abandoned. Already, she has been abandoned, unworthy of even the mildest snowstorm.

  She places the telephone politely, quietly, back on the hook and rolls over to regard the wall.

  One hour later, with tears in her eyes, she staggers across the room to close the window.

  Two hours later the phone rings again.

  “It’s me. It’s all right now. I’m sorry. Could we still meet?”

  “Yes,” she says, and then she adds: “Please.”

  In her mind’s eye the curtain awakens, twitches under the touch of air. Lint rises from it, magic dust in a shaft of sun.

  “Was there something wrong?” she asks. “What was wrong?”

  “Oh, nothing.” He is casual now, relaxed. “I’m just nervous.”

  Ann inhales deeply and falls with full lungs sideways onto the pristine coverlet that lies across her bed. She laughs aloud, feeling as she does so the exact location of pure oxygen as it makes the long red tour of her body.

  She spends most of the rest of the day writing in her notebook. Unable to leave or re-enter the room in which she has experienced this first bout of suffering, she leans in its doorway with her notebook and fountain pen, recording the cloud formations that pass by the bedroom window.

  “SOMETIMES MAKING love is like a terrible accident,” said Arianna, “and then, afterwards you are shipwrecked, broken.”

  “Left for dead,” Emily continued, “on some God-forsaken beach, ruined. Imagine a man entering the Arctic or gone for a soldier, flinging himself away from this terrible twinship, away from this daze of completion into the raw, open awakening of the severed self.”

  “Terrible twinship,” repeated Arianna, “we were a terrible twinship. Sewn together, bound together, chained together.”

  “Together,” said Emily. “Consider the pronoun we. How does one take it apart to become I and thou. Each is shipwrecked against the other until all the shared furniture tumbles together in rooms. Everything is a maze of oblique angles – tables and chairs pushed against a door, wedged under the latch to keep the world at bay. Suffocation. Claustrophobia. You can’t get out and life loses interest in you.”

  Arianna watched the shadows of clouds gallop like herds of swift animals over the moor. “But sometimes,” she said, “making love is so soft, so easy, none of the room’s furniture comes between you.”

  The ghosts were drifting along the old Roman road that led past Lower and Middle Withins. Smoke from the chimneys of the Old Silent Inn and Ponden Mill in the valley scattered over the moor.

  “Do you know what a hig is?” Emily asked.

  “No.”

  “A hig is a short, dramatic bout of bad weather-here and gone in an instant. A sort of tantrum-an outburst of the elements. Sometimes maki
ng love is like that.”

  “Yes,” agreed Polly/Arianna. “Sometimes it’s like that.”

  THE ROOM, when she enters it, is dark and closed and still. They do not speak to each other.

  Mouth approaching face and hair. His skin is warm, supple, under a starched shirt. And then there is the smell of him: some herb she doesn’t recognize, the essence of his unfamiliarity. That, and the rough texture of his woollen jacket near her face. This other body. This other heart and pulse. He touches her, from the beginning, with his whole body. The long hard thigh muscles, the face against her ribcage, her neck, her inner thigh. His shoulder moving across her breasts, a wrist resting gently on her throat.

  He does not seize but pours over her. There is nothing here that is grasped for or clutched. He slides the backs of his hands across her stomach, his face between her jaw and collar bone. The sheet wraps around one ankle. Various objects in the room tumble and disappear. The ugly hotel light blurs and darkens.

  “Why Tintoretto?” Ann asks, later.

  “Because he was alone.”

  “But his family … that daughter.”

  “He learned alone, without workshops. Without painting backgrounds for some other artist’s commissions. Without, in the beginning, models.”

  I am alone, thinks Ann. Is he alone?

  “When I was younger,” he confesses, “I used to believe that Tintoretto was my great-great-grandfather, or several more greats than that. Then, quite suddenly, I knew he was no relative of mine. Though I hadn’t been to Italy yet.”

  “Tell me about Venice.”

  “It is bubbles and blisters and walls warped by water. It is sinking and dying. So-o-o-o beautiful. The city weeps. It is, somehow, my landscape and yet … I can’t get hold of it, can’t quite bring it into focus.”

  Ann moves one hand lightly, cautiously, towards his thigh and he watches her.

  “My landscape,” she says, “is the moors … West Yorkshire, though I haven’t been there. I would like to buy air rights to those hills … to purchase their atmospheric conditions. I feel possessive about them. I want them to be all mine.”

  “Brontës.”

  “One Brontë. Emily. One book.”

  “Wuthering Heights.”

  “Yes. How many Tintorettos? How many paintings?”

  “One-or at least one at a time.”

  “Which?”

  “At first it was St. George and the Dragon. Do you know it?”

  Ann does not.

  “There is something terribly the matter in the painting. The woman – the princess – has just had some earth-shattering news and she is trying-I’m convinced of it-to get out of the painting.”

  “Pardon?” Ann laughs.

  “No … I mean it. She is quite frantically trying to escape.”

  “From the dragon?” Ann is recalling the myth.

  “No … the poor dragon, he is not even remotely menacing.” Arthur places his hand, lightly, absently, on Ann’s arm. “I’m quite serious, she is trying to jump off the canvas. You see-there is something terribly the matter, something that has nothing to do with the dragon and I can’t–couldn’t ever-figure out what it was.”

  “You said ‘at first.’ Is there something else … some other painting now?”

  “Many. But, yes, one. The Temptation of Christ in the Scuola San Rocco in Venice.” Arthur squints his eyes as if he were studying a painting. Then he opens them wide. “The devil in that painting-I just thought of it-is dressed in the same pink silk, the same drapery, as that princess.”

  “A devil in pink silk. How strange!”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  Later she feels his body grow tense beside hers. “I have to go.”

  She rises immediately, unable to bear the repetition of the sentence. Suddenly she can hear the tick of his watch. The chill of the room reaches her.

  “You could, you know, have come to my place.”

  “I would never do that.” Now he is busy, hurried, angry. “I don’t want to know about that.”

  “But it’s fine, I …”

  “No. And we must not meet again; at least not for a long, long time. We want to end this, not escalate it. We want to get this out of our systems.”

  Stricken, Ann gropes for her clothing, turns in her pain away from him, dressing quickly. The garish colours of the room snap into her line of vision everywhere she moves. She avoids her own eyes in mirrors. He is buckling his belt.

  There is failure here and she can see it in the tawdriness of the room’s furniture, in the rumpled sheets. How dreadful, she thinks, this is, this desire for something not mine. One glance towards his preoccupied gestures. He is drinking a glass of water as if she were not there, as if she had never been there.

  Outside, winter has taken hold with a grim silence. Nothing moves.

  The stationary knife of frozen air, his voice cutting into her ear, saying, “We must not … we must not.”

  But they do.

  As the months go by Ann is stunned again and again by her meetings with Arthur, finds herself staggering down hotel halls, not knowing how she got there, where she has parked her car, how she will escape, how much longer she will live. Everything is geometry, tilts at odd angles to a ground no longer horizontal. Her life becomes a series of doors that slide shut or click closed, whose locks must be constantly examined for safety. The rest of her days evaporate into a sequence of barely remembered landscapes glimpsed from the windows of a car racing at impossible speeds down an eight-lane highway. Her handbag is littered with crumpled tickets given to her by oddly gentle policemen who examine her face and ask if there is anything that they can do to help.

  But she inhabits a region where no help is possible. On the other side of doors she collapses into a great lake of flesh, a lake so huge that from its centre no shore is visible. Having nothing to do with the way his mouth moves over her, her conversations with Arthur concern the wings of angels, the expression of prophets, the creation of scaffolding, painstaking sixteenth-century labour. They delight her with their whimsicality and annihilate her with their lack of relevance concerning his feelings for her. Occasionally he brings news of his daily life. We have bought a new car, he says, or, we are looking for a new apartment. Simple statements with the impact of the blow of an axe. The enormous reality of the rest of his life slams against the walls of her brain, and then she must hurl herself into the privacy of the painfully bright bathroom in order to regain her balance, her belief in gravity.

  In the bathroom, clutching the cold sink, she looks at her own face in the mirror, sees twisted features and the burning eyes of an animal left for days in a leg-hold trap. She must leave him, must leave the room, must never return. It’s not so much that she doesn’t want to see him again but that she doesn’t want him to see her as she is-so mutilated, so exposed, so open to the pain he unwittingly inflicts. She knows the word “we” coming from his mouth will never include her, can never include her. She is a river of flesh to him, a river whose source is the room. She is born there. The room’s borders are the limits of her existence.

  She leaves the bathroom and is, in seconds, awash in his embrace. He is hers again, she is certain of this. She would lie beneath the wheels of a thousand freight trains for twenty minutes of this pleasure, this troubled storm of blindness and forgetting. His mouth, silent now, draws her toward him, his body cracks her open and certainly there is lightning and thunder, the tempest she has always wanted, the hurricane: its power, its devastation.

  He falls away from her into sleep and she watches several dreams flicker on his face like the shadows of leaves on the grass. “I love you,” she whispers into an ear deafened by dreams, her planned flight obliterated, broken.

  Leaving the room, the lake of flesh, she drives her car back into the city and the vehicle is now a cage, its speed and direction locking Ann away from Arthur.

  Anyone who glanced into the cab of this car would see a young woman speaking to no one. But Ann is
not speaking to no one, she is speaking to Arthur, engaging him in a one-way conversation to which there are no answers, a conversation that even lacks questions. She is making a series of announcements. “This is the way it is …,” she begins, “there are no memories beyond you. Everything finishes with you.

  “Your face in my hands,” she says, “you in the room. I’m not leaving you. There is no weather without you.”

  Meaningless landscapes slide by the windows. She is already waiting for the next time.

  “I ONCE WENT back,” said Emily, turning her transparent face towards Haworth. “I didn’t exactly haunt but I went back and looked around.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Just the same. Utterly different. I was there. I was a child.”

  “How was that possible?”

  “Oh … you can haunt the past if you want to. We’ve transcended time. Odd … I was always trying to do that while I was alive and now that I’m dead it seems so ordinary. Ordinary, but all the same somewhat interesting.”

  “What does transcend mean?”

  “I’m not sure after you are dead.”

  “Well … you went back and …?”

  “I had been remembering it, the day-after-day of it, out here all by myself. Silently, when I was alone, before you fell in. When I was alive I was always longing to be out here on the moor tramping around with the wind. And suddenly here I was, my wish granted, for eternity. Knowing this I started to long, once in a while, for the parsonage where I lived all my life. So I decided to haunt a little, even though, for me, it’s quite out of character. Longing for something that you once had is a mistake because the pictures in your mind are never the same as whatever it is you are longing for. Memory puts gauze over it, makes it look prettier. Then, when you return, you notice the small ugliness in a way that you never did before. Maybe the mistake is the return.”