“A bauble, an ornamental affectation! Keeper would have swallowed your Montgolfier in one bite and would never have thought of him again unless, of course, his artificiality caused him to have indigestion.”
“Then Keeper was cruel and wicked.”
“Oh, yes,” said Emily proudly. “And strong and fierce.”
“All of the children at the fairs and picnics could play with Montgolfier.”
“None of the children could have played with Keeper.”
“Why would you want to keep a dog like that?”
“Why would I want to keep any other kind? Listen. Keeper was not fickle, he loved only me. His attentions were never diverted. You wouldn’t see him fawning and cowering before any other individual. He wouldn’t have taken a table scrap from anyone else. He was that sure of who he was and who he belonged to. He was proud and completely faithful. Who wants a dog who could be anybody’s dog?”
“Who wants a vicious, snapping beast who can only show kindness to one person?”
“I do … or I did …” Emily paused, tired of the disagreement, and looked towards the heights. “My house wanted those kinds of dogs as well, so I filled all the dark corners with them. They were … savage.”
Arianna shook her head.
“They were so savage,” Emily continued, “that they attacked any intruders, and to them, all non-residents and guests were intruders.”
“Could they be called off?”
“Yes.”
“By whom?”
“Oh, I’ll talk about him later.”
“He,” said Arianna, as if the masculine pronoun could, for her, conjure only a single image, “never liked Montgolfier much. But by then he didn’t like me much either.”
“But he still touched you?”
“Yes, because he said he could do that with indifference as easily as he could with love.”
“And why did you touch him?”
“Because, like your Keeper, I was unable to be distracted by anything … anyone else. Except my balloon, sometimes, and the landscape that moved beneath it.”
Both ghosts were silent for a few moments. Several seasons passed. Then Arianna spoke again.
“You see … I was like your dog-not in temperament–I didn’t attack intruders, but in fidelity, in a fixed state of mind. Would Keeper have abandoned you if you had stopped caring for him? I doubt it. I couldn’t abandon Jeremy, though I often wished that I could at least want to abandon him. I simply couldn’t. My mind, my heart, wouldn’t let me. I was trapped by my love and so was he. That was what he hated most of all-being trapped by my love.”
“He isn’t trapped now,” said Emily. “The Arctic is the landscape of the self, of the naked soul. It is what the inner landscape looks like when everything beyond the self has been discarded. Imagine, everything that moves up there, everything alive, is white: for camouflage, for safety. The self would be the only visible detail in that landscape. What a place to visit! I pretended to visit it so often that eventually I started imagining dungeons instead. Invisible bears! Invisible birds! Eventually, I wanted my terrors to be visible. I wanted to see the chain on the wrist and on the wall. God! Imagine floating into white!”
As she spoke, a swift blizzard swept fiercely through the valley below them, buffeted both spirits briefly and disappeared over the back of the hill they stood near.
Emily smiled at Arianna. “How I love storms,” she said. “I simply adore weather!”
White … white, wailed the wind.
“Balloonists are not too fond of storms, not too fond of wind. Especially unexpected wind.” Arianna watched one of the twisted trees near the old farmhouse bend, like a dancer, at the waist as the weather manipulated it. “Is that what happened to me? Was it the wind?”
“No,” said Emily evasively.
“Well, what did happen to me?” asked Arianna. “How did this happen to me?”
“Slowly and painfully, like all falls. The actual physical fall seems to me to be just the final moment of a much larger fall, don’t you think so? One of my characters, for instance, tumbled from the house I built up there, into the safe valley and the house I built down there. I wasn’t nearly as interested in the second house, by the way. I mean the storms weren’t as violent and there were too many trees.”
“I’m not too fond of trees either. Have you ever seen what a tree can do to a balloon?”
WHAT IS ANN leaving behind in order to embrace at last the weather of Wuthering Heights?
Finally, it was only questions: the questions people ask habitually on phones. Are you there? Where have you been? Are you all right … is everything all right? Is there any chance? What are you doing now? What’s wrong? Can you speak? Can you talk to me? Can we talk?
Ann, shivering in phone booths on the edge of the highway, asking those questions. Where are you? What is wrong? Heart pounding like thunder. Is there something wrong?
“No … yes.”
“What is wrong?”
“Nothing.”
What she will remember forever is the oddness of the last room, for she has come to believe, after one and a half years, that every hotel room on the highway is exactly the same. Then suddenly there is this oddness, this difference. This sense of something slightly askew.
He opens the bed, as always, as though it were a door, a grave, a theatrical curtain to be swept aside. They lie together, removing their clothes, each other’s, speechless. His hands in her hair. They make love and tell each other stories and make love again. Then she speaks, her mouth at his neck. Knowing the answer. Fearing the answer.
“I told you I’m not in love with you,” he says.
She has never wanted to stop, has wanted to fling her quiet self, always, right into the centre of the blizzard and all the high and low pressure areas that cause it. She has learned that weather happens to you and around you with ruthless detachment. It even happens without you. It just doesn’t care.
“I feel most ambivalent when I leave here. It’s very difficult to go back.”
Ann senses the wind, the fir tree tapping against the imagined mullioned window. “Let me in, let me in, I’ve been a waif for twenty years!” She says nothing. A blanket of snow covers her. And yet she is, she realizes, so naked. How has she let this man make her this naked? They were standing on a hill once, a year before. There was a hill, then half a mile of forest, then that same highway-the one that roars like a fierce river behind plate glass now. The view, however, was wonderful. From that distance the Great Lake appeared to be pure and uncomplicated. Rom that distance it was possible to believe, even though you knew better, that the water was not poisoned. And possible to believe that the noise of the highway was merely wind tossing leaves around on forest trees.
It was their first, their only, their last landscape. After that they withdrew into rooms together at places along the highway. “A long road and a sad heart to follow it. We have to pass by Gimmerton Church along the way.”
He is still talking. “I’ve never been in love with you. Perhaps I’ve merely succumbed to your demands.”
A jet plane screams over the hotel – an alarm flung into the room. Pandemonium, chaos, panic, fire, police!, thinks Ann. Arthur leans casually over her, reaching for an ashtray. Then he moves abruptly away.
Ann rises from the bed and walks across the room into the bathroom. The water pouring into the tub sounds like the highway. Immersed, she silently mouths the words: distance, detachment, casualty. She closes her eyes and sinks further into the liquid warmth, the convenient noise. Trying to wash the last afternoon away.
When she re-enters the room he has dressed. He has closed the bed, perhaps as a last, casual kindness to her. As if the tangled sheets could speak of an open wound and the proximity of the weapon.
The whole room between them and this is what she sees: her own clothing, scattered; bright bits of fabric that have to be collected again in order to assemble the self, in order to depart. She dresses facing him s
o that he can see each gesture; each movement is a message from her heart’s dark garden. Knowing that from this room on, each day is a day after.
Buttons that lock her body away. Soft and hard fabrics that cover the heart. She visualizes every piece of clothing he has worn over the months: the woollens and cottons, the leather belts, the colours of socks and ties. But today he has dressed while she was in another room. Away from her.
There is no mirror in the room. Until now Ann has believed that every space they entered contained a mirror. Now there is not even a possibility that she can glance into a reflection to reassemble her own poise, her own sense of decorum. The room reflects nothing.
Where the mirror should have been there hangs, instead, a print of a Brueghel landscape. A landscape for lovers such as themselves, a landscape for lovers lacking setting. For lovers lacking love. Hunters in the foreground and in the distance, ice, and those who skate there. Ann’s own heart booming like ice forming on a winter lake at midnight. The spring, the thaw, a long, long way off.
She sees, across the room, the thin spear of glass that shines through the slightly parted curtains, and the one shaft of light that comes in from the world outside. One cold blue blade of winter colour that has lain between them and that now cuts the room, the afternoon, the moment, into two brutally detached parts.
For weeks afterwards she will try to reconstruct the last room, try to imagine the ring of her phone call or the thump of her fist on the other side of the door. I’ve been out on the moor for twenty years. The ringing and knocking-sounds of her wanting in, echoing through the still space, and she hadn’t entered yet, would never enter. “In, let me in!”
Still, it is the winter landscape, filling the mirror’s absence, that she will remember most vividly. The flight of dark birds against grey sky, and one of the hunters, his back turned, walking towards the frozen pond, the ice-bound sea. He, she thinks now, does not notice the colour of his shadow on the snow. To his left there is a fire that has, also, not caught his attention. She will not remember exactly what it was he had killed, only that the hunt was over, that something lifeless was slung casually over his shoulder, that everything was frozen, and that he was walking way.
What Ann does not see in her memories is Arthur standing near the door of a hotel room from which a wounded woman has departed, his mind a vacant house. A weapon that he hadn’t known he’d carried had been called into action with such ease it was as though the act had been committed while he was glancing out the window or straightening his tie: the words merely those of a popular tune one sings quietly while performing daily chores.
And now she is gone.
Arthur, standing on the inside of the door Ann has closed, reads the Hotel and Innkeeper’s Act seven times, smiling at the peculiarity of its language. Then he reads the emergency procedures in the event of fire. Do not, he wants to add to the end of the list, attempt to put the fire out with your bare hands.
He examines the palms of his own hands, the strange smooth texture of them. The polished skin there is like that of a child, only smoother, rosier. With the nails of one hand he rakes the palm of the other while he reads again all about closing windows, identifying exits, and the final, desperate act: wet towels along the crack at the bottom of the door.
He believes that he feels nothing.
He took his palms to a fortune teller only once, as a kind of practical joke on the world, on himself. But the visit turned out to be even odder than he had anticipated. After looking at the shining skin for a long time the old woman folded his hand in both of hers and raised eyes full of compassion to his.
“You have no story,” she said. “You can touch, but you can feel nothing.”
It wasn’t strictly true, of course, He could hold a pen and pencil, forks, knives, spoons, steering wheels. The musculature was intact. It was the finer sense of touch that eluded him: the difference between cotton and silk, between a tulip leaf and a blade of new grass, between different grains of wood, ebony, and ivory. The weight of various kinds of paper confused him and sometimes when he was writing he would mistake vellum for bond. That and extremes of sensation. He could not, with the tips of his fingers, feel the painful cold of ice or, ironically, the burn of fire. Snow, because of its weightlessness, his fingers couldn’t recognize at all. It was, to that small area of his anatomy, non-existent.
He has told Ann none of this, has hidden his palms, concealing them, after years of practice, with such skill that she never missed them. He touched her with his body, his mouth; caressed her with the back of his hands. Later, when they lay together, quiet and close, he allowed his hands to curl naturally, near his body or hers, like those of a sleeping child.
And now that she is gone, his hands feel nothing and his mind is a vacant house full of instructions for surviving fires.
Close all doors, close all windows, his inner voice announces, do not panic. Identify the nearest exit and leave the building as quickly as possible. Walk, don’t run, it adds.
But he is in no hurry to leave the building. He wants to fill the empty house in his mind with objects from this ordinary room. It is suddenly of great importance that he remember every piece of furniture here, that he imprint their shapes, their odd angles, on his memory before they are consumed, forever, by his permanent absence. The phoney Danish chair near the window, the metallic base of the desk lamp with its on/off switch. He looks for a long time at the pattern of the spread. Why all those flowers? He scrutinizes the room service menu, the list of available blue movies poised on the television set.
In the open closet hangs his own tweed coat looking calm and comfortable as if it were familiar with the room. Near it the hanger from which she snatched her jacket still twitches slightly as if touched by a barely perceptible breeze. What was the colour of the cloth, he wonders, and he wishes, just for a moment, that he had turned towards the closet while the woman was still in the room, to see the two garments hanging there side by side.
He paces out the length of the room and then the width. Then he begins to play a distance-guessing game with himself, pitting himself competitively against the size of the room. The closet, he announces out loud (and only the room is listening), is seven feet across. Then, using his own feet, he measures eight.
One for you, he says to the room.
He waits until he has won the game five times before he attempts to guess the distance between the bed and the door. First, lying on top of the spread, he describes the space across the floor, verbally. It isn’t such a long way, he whispers. Just a few steps. As a child he would probably have been able to leap from here to there. Hadn’t he once won the long-jump at his school’s field day? He imagines the cheap carpet blurring beneath such an act of speed and wonders if he could leave two footprints on the pile. Has she left footprints? What colour were her shoes? What was his longest jump? The distance to the door, he now believes, would be the same as his longest jump. He wants to win this one. He wants to humiliate the room.
He, who has always made the arrangements for this series of rooms, now finds that he can remember nothing of the others. Or even if there were others. Perhaps it was the same room, this room, over and over. Or perhaps he has been with her in rooms all over the hotel. If it were the same room then the distance from the bed to the door would be constant and this time would be like all the other times. Nothing would have changed and he would still feel nothing. He would still want neither to know nor to be known.
He rises from the bed and, turning, smooths out all the creases that his body has made there during its brief stay. He erases the hollow his skull has made in the pillow. It is the third time in a matter of hours that he has performed this ceremony but he has already forgotten the other two. He moves over to the large window and returns the curtains to their original, half-opened position. He was wrong about the size of the windows, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Glancing around him quickly, he is relieved to discover that the room holds no evidence of his
presence and no evidence of hers. It is as if it had remained locked and vacant all afternoon. As if no one had ever been there at all.
He is suddenly in a great rush, recalling a paper he must finish on Tintoretto’s Ultima Cena in the Church of Santo Stefano in Venice. He wants to spend a long time discussing Tintoretto’s visual interpretation of the word ultima: how the disciples at the table fade away into darkness, into absence, the table being placed at such an angle that it is being thrust away from the viewer towards the land of never again.
Arthur removes his coat from the closet and steadies the swaying hanger with his unfeeling hand. Leaving, he closes the door firmly behind him. He has won his contest with the room. He no longer cares, no longer wants to know anything at all about its secrets, about the distance from lovemaking to the door.
The following days pass like thin black trees beyond the dirty windows of Ann’s car. The traffic of the world. She drives the city streets making a senseless series of right-hand turns, noticing grey slush and raw, torn construction sites. Harsh reality at a stop sign. Life after the room.
A life filled with detached wires and empty-handed postmen who carry no messages. A life in a winter country where no one requests your address or suggests that you look at the moon. Nothing, Ann now knows, will move closer to her than one desperate winter tree bending in a wind that has blown arbitrarily, casually, in her direction. The earth ragged, ripped open. Out. There. Where the cold is.
She decides, in that moment, to do her very best to leave the highway, the city, the country. She buys a one-way ticket: a one-way ticket to the Brontë moors.
“A rough journey and a sad heart to travel it,” she thinks now, again on the highway, but this time leading to the airport. In her heart that same blizzard. In her luggage The Life of Emily Brontë, Emily Brontë’s Collected Poems, Wuthering Heights, an air ticket to England, and her own unfinished manuscript, tentatively entitled Wuthering Heights: A Study of Weather.
Changing Heaven Page 11
