Changing Heaven (16 page)

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
.

PART TWO
The Upstairs Room

And a Suspicion, like a Finger
Touches my forehead now and then
That I am looking oppositely
For the site of the Kingdom of Heaven–

–E
MILY
D
ICKINSON

“L
ET ME IN
, let me in…. I’ve been lost on the moor for twenty years.”

Then the glass shatters, the arm extends past the window’s teeth into the warmth of the room. The little cold hand that brings a sample of weather with it into the claustrophobic interior. The shards of glass on the dusty blanket. The delicate, damp, determined hand reaching forward. One man’s hysterical, murderous fear.

“I’ll never let you in, not if you beg for twenty years.”

The wounding. The wrist attacking broken glass. The only evidence of this frantic attempt a blanket soaked with blood. And even that an hallucination.

“Let me in,” thinks Ann, “I’ve been a waif for twenty years.”

She has brought Arthur with her. A part of him has accompanied part of her into this strange geography.

Ann sits, now, out on the West Yorkshire moors on a rock, under a leaden sky and thinks,
I’ll never be free of this
. She thinks,
let me in, let me in
. She who has only recently managed to get herself out.

She has memorized the words of the first scene in
Wuthering Heights
. She cannot shake its weather, cannot stop responding to the descriptions.

“Merely the branch of a fir tree that touched my lattice as the blast wailed by,” and “the gusty wind, the driving of the snow.”
I was
, she thinks,
mistaken. I was misperceived as a harmless piece of vegetation tapping on the glass that separated us
. The word “merely” bruises her. The words “detected the disturber” bring tears to her eyes. I
was a disturber
, she thinks,
then more than that … and then the full fury of the nightmare was upon him
.

It is as if thinking of that early scene at this moment, when she has left Arthur and has dragged her limping self out into the weather, identifies it, surely, as his; as if he had taken one of his immaculately sharpened pencils and had drawn a fine line beside the passage to bring it to her attention. “Look, here we are, you and I,” he might have said, “This is the nature of our relationship: you trying to get in, me trying to keep you out. The war, the constant war between us.”

She rises now to continue her walk on the narrow path that crosses the moor. Now and then she passes an abandoned farm whose buildings are so black they appear to have been burnt by a mysterious, indifferent fire. From their glassless windows hang the frail lines of broken mullion. Around them, like soft grey clouds, lurk clumps of empty-eyed sheep. Ann has already seen several rotting carcasses, remnants of those animals who, for one reason or another, were unable to survive the winter. Unable to survive exposure.

The thing about weather, thinks Ann as she climbs a wooden stile over a drystone wall, the thing about weather is that you either embrace it or you shelter yourself from it. Either way, it can extinguish the flame, with wind and rain on the one hand, or, if you run from it, if you hide in a closed space, the fire suffocates from lack of oxygen.