Changing Heaven (29 page)

For Ann there cannot be any best or better, locked as she is in the perpetual present of her own emotional landscape, and the path through it to Arthur. It is as though she were bringing with her all varieties of event and weather into a city that has held itself alert and frozen until her entry and her search.

Her inner voice is conversing with him.
I’m coming
, it says,
I will find you. It will be pure now. A clean wind is moving me
.

Something colder than her imagined wind blows across the surface of a canal. She keeps walking.

Every morning for three weeks she repeats this journey, her mind never once losing the focus of her intention: to find him in the correct setting and then to place herself beside him in its light. And still she registers no details of the approach. Only her legs remember and guide her, with confidence earned by repetition, up steps, across campos, around corners.

Every day, inside the Scuola, she is handed a mirror by a man whose name, she has learned, is Carlo. “For looking at the ceiling,” he explained, that first morning.

Now she knows how to operate the mirror; how, depending on where you stand and at what angle you tilt the frame, the glass will allow you to concentrate on details or to hold the whole ceiling in your hands. When she swings it back and forth, like the flat top of an adjustable drafting table, she is able to move angels, devils, storms, rapidly towards her, or fling these same entities hastily away.

Carlo, who greets her cheerfully each day
(“Giorno Signorina”)
, stands discreetly in the corner of the vast upper
room, the buttons of his guard’s uniform glowing on his round belly, while Ann engages in hours of this activity. Not knowing that her absorption is merely the cover for another form of absorption, he is amazed by her concentration.

“Maybe you are a scholar …?” he asked some time after the first week.

“Oh, no … not at all,” she replied.

After the second week he walked up to her and announced confidently, “Now I see you are a sister, a nun, who is studying the Old Testament prophets and wearing, as they do now, no habit. I am correct … yes?”

Ann surprised herself by laughing loud enough at this remark to make the empty room ring like a bell. Carlo retreated, puzzled, to his corner.

Now, at the end of the third week, Carlo is friendly enough to speak to her constantly of Signore Tintoretto. While she gazes into the height of the mirror he abruptly leaves this topic, makes a pronouncement that causes her to look directly into his dark eyes.

“You are looking for something else altogether, then. This is what I now know is true.”

“Yes,” answers Ann, unaware that her mirror, relinquishing its hold on the ceiling, has caught a sun ray and is sending fiery signals to each of the four walls.

“I am not a wise man,” says Carlo thoughtfully, “but it seems to me that if you cannot find it here you should put the mirror aside and examine, for a while, the paintings on the walls of the ground floor hall. Perhaps, whatever it is, you will find it there.”

Ann smiles at him, but tightens her grasp on the mirror. As he returns to his corner, sighing, she looks into her own obsessed eyes. She examines her face and head and hair and all the painted wings of angels that seem to extend from her curls. She walks around the room one last time, moving her face across miracles and tragedies, across brutalities and
acts of unspeakable kindness. Then she hands the mirror to Carlo and prepares to leave the room.

She meets Arthur on the stairs.

“I have never seen so many angels,” she eventually says to him, “they’re all there … the Rockettes … all the ones you told me about.”

Arthur stands, one foot poised on marble, silent.

“But now I’m finished up there …” Ann continues, “I’ve given the mirror back to Carlo. Do you know Carlo? He has a grandson in Toronto.”

Still he does not speak.

“I’ve been looking at the miracles … for days and days now. They seem … I don’t know … different, not what I thought they would be … darker. Somehow I never associated darkness with miracles, and you didn’t say anything about the darkness. The miracles up there are like storms … the manna … you know, the manna, it really is like a bad hailstorm. How can this be?”

“I don’t know, Ann,” Arthur says quietly.

“And it’s true about the lightning … absolutely everything is struck … you described that perfectly.”

They haven’t moved one inch on the stairs. Ann feels perspiration forming along her hairline. She does not look at him; looks at the patterns in the different colours of marble instead. She runs one hand along the cool stone wainscoting and leans her forehead against the damp wall.

“I came here for you,” she whispers, and the clarity begins to disappear down the deep well of his silence. “I caught the train because of your letter. I knew I would find you here.” The marble pattern against which she has rested her face is out of focus, foggy.

Arthur says, “I know,” and nothing else. Ann can hear Carlo pacing back and forth on the upper-floor parquet, waiting out another afternoon, imprisoned by Signore Tintoretto.
She wishes that he would walk over to the edge of the staircase, is certain that unless he does, she and Arthur will never be able to break their pose: a man arrested forever in the act of ascending a magnificent marble staircase, a woman with her face pressed against a marble wall.

There are centuries contained within this moment.

Then Arthur says, “Would you like to go now, Ann?”

On their way through the ground-floor hall they pass by Annunciations, Adorations, and Assumptions without pausing to admire. Arthur stops, however, for a moment in front of each of two painted female saints. “I never spoke to you about these,” he says to Ann, “I knew you would have to see them.” Both women hold books and are seated in tempestuous landscapes. “There is an Emily Brontë for you, two in fact. Solitary women of words.”

He doesn’t speak again until they reach his room.

O
NCE SHE IS
indisputably in his company, Ann is unperturbed by Arthur’s quietness. She is clear, again-full of what she feels is love for him. She will break his silence. She is certain of this. The city clicks into life around her now that she is with him, delights her. “Look,” she says to him, “look, look!,” pointing out details, showing off her splendid eye as if she, not he, were the expert. She brings large bottles of cheap red Italian wine back to his room, day after day, hoping to open him, to release words. We are here, she tells him in an orgy of speech to which he is barely responding, we have a setting. Look out the window, see what we will have to remember.

“We already,” he replies bitterly, “have more than enough to remember.”

She beats back the pain statements such as this cause, drowns it in a sea of red wine as she talks and talks. She tells him of the letters that she wrote to him and didn’t mail, how mentally she called to him and called to him, knowing, just knowing, that eventually he would reply.

“And you did,” she says, smiling at his blank face, “didn’t you?

“It isn’t that I can’t live without you,” she says, “it’s just that I love you so much I don’t want to live without you. I should have known this in Toronto. I would go home after we met and it would be as if I hadn’t gone home at all, as if we were still together, which is funny because at the same time I would feel so abandoned. Nevertheless, you
were
there with me, weren’t you? You must have been because otherwise how could I have thought of you so constantly? And I never stopped, you know, even in Stan-bury. Sometimes, there I thought I
had
stopped, but then
you’d walk into a dream I was having, and it was just as if you’d touched my shoulder to remind me, as if you didn’t want me to forget you.
Were
you trying to remind me?”

“No … Ann.”

She pours herself more wine. “Well, then,” she says, after a long swallow, “I must have been trying to remind myself, because of the truth of this. You see what I mean; the truth is unkillable. I tried, yes, I did try to kill it, but that was foolish, almost wicked of me. What I should have done was try to show it to you instead.” She begins to pace up and down the hotel room’s patterned rug. “I was afraid you’d reject me, but then I realized that didn’t matter. What mattered was that I would never reject you. I remember every single shirt you ever wore when you were with me. When I got home, I mean back to my apartment, I would imagine those shirts hanging in my closet.”

“Ann, you knew that wasn’t …”

“Oh, no.” She pulls aside the curtain and looks out to a canal bubbling under forceful rain. “No … that’s not what I meant, not that. Just the shirts. I suppose I wanted a museum of you. Just those shirts … not any others. I didn’t want any part of you that didn’t concern me. But I wanted more of you to concern me. For instance, now the way you sleep concerns me … it didn’t then. I didn’t know that you cross your arms when you sleep and you look stern … like a genie. Yes … that’s how you look, like Aladdin’s genie; proud and slightly disdainful. As if you knew that any and all of the wishes that you might be about to grant were really trivial, inconsequential. As if there couldn’t really be a wish worthy of the enormous power you have to make it come true.”

Arthur smiles ruefully.

“But I know you’re really not like that. You’re not really disdainful. You
have
considered my wishes and you granted one of them … at least one of them. You wrote to me. Why did you write to me, Arthur?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s all right … that’s fine … because I do know. And soon … I feel it, you’ll know too. You already do know, you just haven’t admitted it to me, to yourself.”

“I’m not in love with you.”

“I might have let that hurt me,” says Ann, thoughtfully, “but my heart is so perfectly mended by us being here together that even that can’t hurt me. You’ve let me sit close to you, sleep in the same bed … I’ve, I’ve seen your angels. You let me talk to you. And it’s such a pleasure … such a relief, to be able to talk to you like this. And think of what we’ve seen here in this city. Absolutely everything we’ve seen together is a part of you that concerns me. All of it, all of it will go into that museum of you. Do you know how wonderful this is? All this walking we’ve done, all those paintings, every forkful of food we’ve eaten together, this wine –” Ann pours herself another glass. “The label of this wine will go into the museum. I don’t mean I’ll really save the label or anything like that, but I will never ever forget it.”

Arthur closes his eyes and leans his head back against the tall, overstuffed chair in which he has been sitting. He rubs his forehead as if trying to massage away a headache. But he has no headache. He is exhausted, stupefied by Ann’s talk. He has no answer for her. His notes on the Scuola San Rocco lie interrupted, abandoned on the table in this room. When he closes his eyes he sees the drapery of angels, but he has nothing to say about this. During the past three days he has moved from the bed into this river of talk and back to love-making again, over and over. He is surprised, when he opens his eyes, to see that the streetlights outside the window Ann stands near are illuminated. Time is beginning to evaporate, to dissolve, in a thick river of words.

“Sometimes I thought I had forgotten what you looked like,” Ann is saying, “but then, quite suddenly, your face would flash into my mind, as clear as if you were standing right in front of me. I know it sounds mad but it was at those moments that I knew we would never be apart …
not really apart because I would never stop thinking about you.” Ann kicks off her shoes and throws her legs over the arm of the chair into which she has suddenly collapsed. “I wasn’t always happy about this. I admit. I wasn’t always pleased that you had become the only thing I could think about. I wanted to stop; that’s why I went away. I tried many, many things to get myself to stop.”

“You should stop.”

“But no, I don’t think so now. I think I should be thinking of you. Look at the way we make love. Look at the way we walk together.”

This time, when Arthur closes his eyes, he sees singed feathers; as if his angels were burning up, burning away. “I should work …” he whispers.

“Yes, yes, … I want you to work. I want to watch you work and then that will be a part of you that concerns me.”

“It’s late and I …”

“Don’t you see, if you work it will be all right because I love your work. I love everything you say about Tintoretto … I love Tintoretto. Because of you I was able to stand in Emily Brontë’s landscape and think about Tintoretto. His lightning was there! Think of that! It’s like a miracle … he, Tintoretto, would have appreciated that, might even have painted it somehow. And you, you … did you ever think of Emily Brontë being transposed into the landscape of Venice?”

“No.”

“Well, think about it now, think of how miraculous that is. Because of our … connection we can move forces as powerful as theirs from landscape to landscape. They were both, after all, deeply concerned with weather. Tintoretto would have loved the moors … all that wind and everything moving … the ideal setting for angels and miracles.” For a moment as she says this, John’s face leaps in her memory: his face and his warmth. The words
he has tarn you
echo.