Changing Heaven (31 page)

For a second or two the memory of the glass dome on the side of the highway makes itself felt in her mind, but she shakes it away in favour of the present.

“You’ve taught me all about this,” she says, “all about varying degrees. You must see how I am responding, and responding always differently, sometimes more than others but never with neutrality. But I suppose neutrality would be a lack of response, and that could never happen to me, not only while you are with me but while you are in the world. No, that’s not quite true, I almost stopped responding while you were upstairs in the Scuola, maybe because of those two saints I was looking at. They seemed so, somehow … well … neutral. But the minute I saw you, when you came down the stairs, everything in me burst open again. If we had never been together I might have lived my whole life closed. And you, would you have lived your life closed if you had never been with me?”

“I don’t know. Ann … I think not … how can I know?” Arthur is awash with longing for his daily life; the sound of the television in the next room, his wife’s voice, a child stumbling through a piano exercise, car repairs, a Canadian newspaper, the untidy region of his academic
office. “You can’t live your whole life,” he says, “with your nervous system exposed to the air.”

“Yes, you
can”
she says, while he fumbles with the key at his hotel room door, “you can, you must. That is why we found each other, that is our purpose, to open each other. You’ve done that for me, and I know it’s only a matter of time until I will do it for you.”

“Please stop, Ann,” Arthur’s inner voice whispers, begs.

As they make love he has the impression that he is disappearing, each wave of pleasure peeling off another layer of his personality, his intellect, until he is raw, shuddering flesh, flayed alive, burnt, howling in agony as he comes. The word
stop
is all that is left of his vocabulary, while she repeats her tragic litany whimpering beneath him. “You see how it is?” she says over and over. “This,
this
is how it is.”

He collapses into sleep and wakes again to find her staring into his face. “This time,” she says, “while I watched you sleep, I was almost able to see your dreams.”

“I wasn’t dreaming,” he says coldly. And then he flings himself away from the bed, away from her, stands naked in the fading afternoon light, and hisses, a cornered animal, “Don’t you understand … I don’t want you to see my dreams.”

“I don’t believe that because, otherwise …”

“No, no … believe it. I don’t want that. Who do you think you are looking into me, scrutinizing me like this. God damn you!” he shouts, his voice rusty from days of inactivity, “looking into me like that. You fool! There’s nothing there to look into!”

“Yes, yes, there is,” Ann says, her heart cartwheeling in panic. “There’s all this activity, this emotion … I’ve glimpsed it. I’ve seen your face, I’ve seen …”

“You’ve seen nothing.” Arthur reaches for a full package of cigarettes and rips it open angrily. “I want you to stop! Whatever this web is that we’re trapped in, you wove it!
God, Ann, why don’t you look at me, just once, why don’t you really look at me?”

“But I do, and I see everything alive and moving and vital.”

“No, you
don’t!
Or maybe you do. But you don’t see me, Ann, you see yourself.”

She has begun to weep, has covered her eyes with her hands. “Without you I was vague, nothing. You awakened me and then I saw what you were and I fell in love with you.”

“For God’s sake, Ann, stop it! Look at me!” Abruptly he sinks into a chair and turns his back on her. Then, just as abruptly he rises and crosses the room. “Look at my hands, Ann,” he says, thrusting them near the vicinity of her covered face. “We’ve been together all this time and you’ve never looked at my hands.”

“You’re not being brutally honest,” she sobs, “you’re just being brutal.”

“Look … at … my … hands!”

“Oh …” she says, gazing at smooth, seamless skin. She has never seen flesh like this. Poreless, tight, stretched across bone and muscle, it appears completely unvisited by experience, instead of what it really is: the product of an experience from which it can never recover.

“Doesn’t that tell you something?” Arthur asks. “It should tell you everything.” Sitting on the edge of the bed he turns away from her. “I’m not what you think,” Arthur’s voice is practically inaudible, “and I never will be. I’m not desperate or passionate. We tumbled into each other, that’s all. I’m fixed, Ann, stationary. Nothing like this should have ever happened to me. I’m just trying to live for the rest of my life.”

“Your hands,” she whispers, awe-struck, “is there pain?”

“No … not now. Now there’s just nothing.”

“Nothing?” Ann repeats. “How can there be nothing?”

Arthur does not immediately answer, carries his hands in front of him to the other side of the room. Then he speaks.
“I wanted to touch you, to love you in that way, but I can’t just stop living the rest of my life. I’m terrified that my life will collapse around me and then I will feel nothing.”

“But I feel everything.”

“I know.”

Ann looks at Arthur and sees his averted face, his spine curved like a scythe near a table filled with sad, neglected papers. She remembers the beast that prowled through her illness, how it was both male and female-the fused lovers–what she wanted to become, what she has been trying to draw Arthur into. It wasn’t that she wanted
him
so much as that she wanted him to become her. That was how she was trying to tempt him. Like that other androgynous beast, the beautiful devil/angel in Tintoretto’s wilderness, she held fragrant loaves in her outstretched hands, but they contained annihilation for him. She wanted him to feel only what she felt. A rush of moorland wind-the weather–and all the real details swept away.

“I am only an interpreter,” he is saying. “I can’t live this. I can’t make the paintings. I can only interpret them.”

“But I’m an interpreter too. I’ve always been apart … living my life through books. In that way we are alike.” Ann would like to touch him again, to make this last tentative connection. “Neither one of us,” she says, “has anything to do with real life.”

But Arthur won’t accept this either. “No,” he says, “the difference is that you
want
to live the fiction or the life or whatever and I … I simply don’t. You said it … you said you feel everything.”

“Do you think I really meant that?”

“Oh … yes.”

During the long night, while Arthur sleeps, Ann sits near the window at the little wooden table, one small light washing over all his scattered notes. As the hours advance, the
air calms and clears and she, glancing at the unconscious man, is at last able to see his fragility and his imperfection. His age. The obsession is breaking, is falling away. She hears Arthur’s breath, helpless, lost in the rhythms of sleep, while the night hours fill the space that has always existed between the man that he is and the woman that she is. The space that she has refused to acknowledge. The space that Arthur has had to cross each time they met.

Ann thinks of how Catherine described her adolescent dream in
Wuthering Heights’
, how she knew that heaven was not her home. Ann can practically see this dream, in which angry angels toss a young girl out of the clouds and down onto the unreclaimed moor, as if her body were weather itself. Catherine asleep, her mind falling through air, the angels receding. And then the crash, the awakening. The real, the painful joy.

All through the night Ann falls, falls to earth, just as if certain angels had taken it upon themselves to toss her out of an inappropriate heaven. Everything she sees is draining downwards; the dim furniture, roses on the wallpaper, curtains, bedclothes. She can actually feel her own body gain texture, substance; the miracle of gravity guiding her towards solidity and weight. The city beneath her is rumoured to be sinking as well. She imagines it shifting and settling under her newly acquired weight. How the real earth holds, embraces, reclaims these built things; Tintoretto’s painted tantrums or her own frail palace of romance. The man she built and now this breathing form. This life.

Every now and then Ann lifts her right arm up from the table and then lets it collapse with a satisfying thud onto the wooden surface, and, as she does this, she marvels at the construction of her own hand and the complicated grain on this one piece of ordinary furniture.

By dawn Ann has completed her descent, has fallen back into the world. She watches as the grey light turns to gold,
fills with wind, parts the white curtains and dances towards her on a rug whose patterns she has never seen until this moment. She pictures herself an Elizabeth, a Magdalene, alone, surrounded by vital light and tumultuous weather-a still figure in a frantic landscape. She can keep it all: the idea of this man, this city, the ancient moor wind – even the currents of the highway with its clouds of fumes and thunderous noise, keep everything in the manner of painted saints, with patience, near trembling streams under glistening trees. The difficult love. The troubled awakening weather.

Before she leaves the room Ann goes to Arthur and reaches for his arm. “Sandy,” he whispers, without opening his eyes.

“Who is Sandy? … your wife?… your little girl?” Ann tentatively approaches, now, the facts of his real life.

“My dog,” he says, stirring. “You didn’t even know I had a dog.”

“No,” says Ann, “I didn’t even know you had a dog.”

Without turning to look at her, he moves one hand to her wrist. “I told you I’m not in love with you,” he says.

“Yes, you told me.”

He is silent and still turned away from her. She places his hand on the pillow and lifts her own from his naked shoulder.

“P
ARRY LOVED
the northern latitudes. He made certain that he spent a lot of time in them. No grand tourist he! He wanted to
live
in the countries he visited. There were two words in my father’s book of Arctic anecdotes that described him perfectly. The sentence reads, ‘Parry was the first explorer to winter deliberately in the high Arctic.’ You see, he was a deliberate winterer. What a wonderful verb! To winter. That is what Parry liked to do most of all, he liked to winter. So first he lived in Halifax, Canada. But that wasn’t wintery enough for him. So then he accompanied the whalers to Spitzbergen. Now there’s a spot! After that he deliberately wintered in the high Arctic. I suspect he loved that! Oh … and he attempted to reach the North Pole by sledge over the pack ice from Spitzbergen. He was a winterer.”

Emily was lecturing Arianna about the life of Sir Edward Parry. But she was not standing up and raising her clenched fist as she normally did when pontificating on this particular subject; rather she was quietly relating the information, as if teaching prayers to a child.

“Ross was different … a fool and a coward. He didn’t enjoy wintering at all, I expect. He was a negationist. Nothing went anywhere as far as he was concerned. There was no Northwest Passage. There was no North Pole. There was no hope. There was no dream.”

“I wish you’d tell me, Emily,” Arianna insisted. “Why don’t you just tell me?”

“So Parry said to Ross, ‘Go your own way, then, and I’ll be the Arctic explorer for both of us!’ Oh, crime can make the heart grow old, sooner than years of wearing woe; can turn the warmest bosom cold, as winter wind or polar snow.”

“Parry said that?”

“No … I said that.”

“Please tell me. How did I die, Emily?”

“I wonder whether Parry is an angel or a ghost? Perhaps he began as one and ended up as the other. Did I tell you about his kingdom? The one I made for him when I was a child?”

Arianna was silent.

“I probably did, but I’ll tell you again. It was white, well ordered, sparse, and, of course, cold. Ice palaces everywhere. And statues … clear blue, like glass. It is odd, but I seem to remember only my imagination now. I wonder, do I still have one? Perhaps I have become my imagination. I can see those statues perfectly, and the little snow paths around them, but I can’t recall Anne’s face. Poor Anne … what colour were her eyes?”

“You said they were blue. Emily … you do remember what happened to me, don’t you?”

“Yes. And Charlotte’s eyes? Did I mention them?”

“How do you know? Were you there? Were you out here watching?”

Emily was quiet for several seconds. Then she spoke. “I remember seeing your white balloon. And for some reason I remember haunting your hotel room. Why did I do that I wonder? That wasn’t like me at all. Then I drifted around the village for a while the next morning, through the graveyard and into the house for a bit. Oh, yes … I was collecting views. You know what I mean. This was to be my last haunt, I meant to give it up completely. There’s something cowardly about haunting, you know, trailing listlessly about, all unapproachable, and then vanishing at the least provocation. And besides, only certain gifted individuals can see you, even when you’ve materialized.”

“Did anyone see you?”

“No … though I thought you did once … in the middle of the night. You spent a lot of time looking out the window. Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.”