Changing Heaven (15 page)

“M
Y HOUSE
,” said Emily, “began in the grate of our parlour, which at certain times was my whole world. You see, we stayed there most of the day acting out wars and passions-great military campaigns on the carpet. Whole continents in a woven rose! We children shared a single fused mind for hours every day. We all saw the same fantastic histories. We had collective hallucinations! It was like spontaneous combustion!

“We would work at it and work at it – destroying cities, destroying marriages, building and then demolishing empires, causing the most unlikely people to fall illicitly and disastrously in love with each other. Finally, it would become so interpersonal, so complicated, that my brother Branwell would shout, ‘Time, gentlemen, time!’ And he would have to practically bellow to be heard above the din.

“And then we would each take our little lap desk down from the top of the piano and write quietly for an hour or two.”

“About your play?”

“Yes, sometimes, our invented lands. But as we grew older we sometimes became more private … to have something of our own.”

“At first, before those special kingdoms that I told you about, the place I called my own was
Parry’s Land
—a great Arctic continent-pure white-like that room, and named after my favourite Arctic explorer.”

“Arctic!” gasped Arianna. “How he loved the Arctic! He wanted to balloon there.”

“I know that. He will … now.”

“Oh.”

“But that’s not what I want to talk about. My house began in the grate, the fireplace; it began while I was listening to the wind and looking at fire and stone. I thought about how the stone hearth shelters and contains a fire, like a house would, but, regardless of all that protecting and sheltering, the wind works on it anyway. Really, there is nothing you can do to keep this wind away from the fire or anything else. It gets in everywhere.”

In … in
, sang the wind.

“But I’d never seen it put the fire out. It never managed to destroy it. So I invented a house that contained fire and I wanted both the house and the fire to be worked upon by wind. Wind. Fire. Stone.

“I wanted a house with a fire inside and a storm outside. But since I, myself, was inside when I began all this, I started with the idea of flame. Then, suddenly, the flame became a person-two, in fact, two flames lapping at each other but never joining to become a single flame though they shared the same stone hearth and were a party to the same storms. You know how when a flame is strong enough the wind feeds it? These flames, these people, were nurtured by storms. They needed them and they knew it.

“Which is why, when one of the flames descended into a house in a sheltered valley it began, slowly, to die. But that house, that sheltered house, I built a little later.

“I began, as I said, to build the house as a result of looking at the fire and, of course, I built it with words. In the very beginning fire was fire only, had not yet developed into personality. So I talked about it and talked about it. Made it stir shadows in the corners of dark rooms, made it reflect in pewter dishes and silver jugs and in the polished surface of an old oak dresser. It seemed, suddenly, to be the only source of light in this cavernous dark room-the
house
as we call it here-the place where people really live in a dwelling.

“One moving orange light, reflected on surfaces, but shut out of recesses. Then, I thought, would these shadowy
places in the house be empty? And as I thought this, my dog, Keeper, groaned and twitched in his sleep, lying by my left foot, and I knew that the shadowy corners of my house would have to be filled with dogs.”

“I had a dog once,” said Arianna. “A French poodle whom I called ‘Montgolfier.’ He was so adorable. He often flew with me … just a little thing … a toy French poodle.”

“A French poodle,” sniffed Emily contemptuously, “is
not
a dog!”

“Oh, really?” said Arianna, offended and coming to Monty’s defence. “Then what exactly is it?” She crossed her arms, stood up very straight, and looked sternly at Emily.

“A French poodle is a piece of frippery. A vain, stupid, overbred, hothouse flower. That sheep,” Emily pointed to a woolly creature who munched near them, “has more brains than a French poodle and six times the character.”

“Monty was very good-looking and he was
brave …
unafraid at a thousand feet. He even parachuted! The crowd loved him!”

“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?”

W
HAT IS
A
NN
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 so 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.