Changing Heaven (12 page)

“It’s good to be a ghost, Polly/Arianna … you can use absence to a marvellous advantage.”

S
IX
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 fiercely 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.

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.