Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (22 page)

and died on the sofa at home at 2
P.M
. on a winter afternoon

in her thirty-first year. She spent

most of the hours of her life brushing the carpet,

walking the moor

or whaching. She says

it gave her peace.

“All tight and right in which condition it is to be hoped we shall all be this day 4 years,”

she wrote in her Diary Paper of 1837.

Yet her poetry from beginning to end is concerned with prisons,

vaults, cages, bars, curbs, bits, bolts, fetters,

locked windows, narrow frames, aching walls.

“Why all the fuss?” asks one critic.

“She wanted liberty. Well didn’t she have it?

A reasonably satisfactory homelife,

a most satisfactory dreamlife — why all this beating of wings?

What was this cage, invisible to us,

which she felt herself to be confined in?”

Well there are many ways of being held prisoner,

I am thinking as I stride over the moor.

As a rule after lunch mother has a nap

and I go out to walk.

The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April

carve into me with knives of light.

Something inside it reminds me of childhood —

it is the light of the stalled time after lunch

when clocks tick

and hearts shut

and fathers leave to go back to work

and mothers stand at the kitchen sink pondering

something they never tell.

You remember too much,

my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,

Where can I put it down?

She shifted to a question about airports.

Crops of ice are changing to mud all around me

as I push on across the moor

warmed by drifts from the pale blue sun.

On the edge of the moor our pines

dip and coast in breezes

from somewhere else.

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is

to watch the year repeat its days.

It is as if I could dip my hand down

into time and scoop up

blue and green lozenges of April heat

a year ago in another country.

I can feel that other day running underneath this one

like an old videotape — here we go fast around the last corner

up the hill to his house, shadows

of limes and roses blowing in the car window

and music spraying from the radio and him

singing and touching my left hand to his lips.

Law lived in a high blue room from which he could see the sea.

Time in its transparent loops as it passes beneath me now

still carries the sound of the telephone in that room

and traffic far off and doves under the window

chuckling coolly and his voice saying,

You beauty. I can feel that beauty’s

heart beating inside mine as she presses into his arms in the high blue room —

No, I say aloud. I force my arms down

through air which is suddenly cold and heavy as water

and the videotape jerks to a halt

like a glass slide under a drop of blood.

I stop and turn and stand into the wind,

which now plunges towards me over the moor.

When Law left I felt so bad I thought I would die.

This is not uncommon.

I took up the practice of meditation.

Each morning I sat on the floor in front of my sofa

and chanted bits of old Latin prayers.

De profudis clamavi ad te Domine.

Each morning a vision came to me.

Gradually I understood that these were naked glimpses of my soul.

I called them Nudes.

Nude # 1. Woman alone on a hill.

She stands into the wind.

It is a hard wind slanting from the north.

Long flaps and shreds of flesh rip off the woman’s body and lift

and blow away on the wind, leaving

an exposed column of nerve and blood and muscle

calling mutely through lipless mouth.

It pains me to record this,

I am not a melodramatic person.

But soul is “hewn in a wild workshop”

as Charlotte Brontë says of
Wuthering Heights
.

Charlotte’s preface to
Wuthering Heights
is a publicist’s masterpiece.

Like someone carefully not looking at a scorpion

crouched on the arm of the sofa Charlotte

talks firmly and calmly

about the other furniture of Emily’s workshop — about

the inexorable spirit (“stronger than a man, simpler than a child”),

the cruel illness (“pain no words can render”),

the autonomous end (“she sank rapidly, she made haste to leave us”)

and about Emily’s total subjection

to a creative project she could neither understand nor control,

and for which she deserves no more praise nor blame

than if she had opened her mouth

“to breathe lightning.” The scorpion is inching down

the arm of the sofa while Charlotte

continues to speak helpfully about lightning

and other weather we may expect to experience

when we enter Emily’s electrical atmosphere.

It is “a horror of great darkness” that awaits us there

but Emily is not responsible. Emily was in the grip.

“Having formed these beings she did not know what she had done,”

says Charlotte (of Heathcliff and Earnshaw and Catherine).

Well there are many ways of being held prisoner.

The scorpion takes a light spring and lands on our left knee

as Charlotte concludes, “On herself she had no pity.”

Pitiless too are the Heights, which Emily called Wuthering

because of their “bracing ventilation”

and “a north wind over the edge.”

Whaching a north wind grind the moor

that surrounded her father’s house on every side,

formed a kind of rock called millstone grit,

taught Emily all she knew about love and its necessities —

an angry education that shapes the way her characters

use one another. “My love for Heathcliff,” says Catherine,

“resembles the eternal rocks beneath —

a source of little visible delight, but necessary.”

Necessary? I notice the sun has dimmed

and the afternoon air sharpening.

I turn and start to recross the moor towards home.

What are the imperatives

that hold people like Catherine and Heathcliff

together and apart, like pores blown into hot rock

and then stranded out of reach

of one another when it hardens? What kind of necessity is that?

The last time I saw Law was a black night in September.

Autumn had begun,

my knees were cold inside my clothes.

A chill fragment of moon rose.

He stood in my living room and spoke

Without looking at me. Not enough spin on it,

he said of our five years of love.

Inside my chest I felt my heart snap into two pieces

which floated apart. By now I was so cold

it was like burning. I put out my hand

to touch his. He moved back.

I don’t want to be sexual with you, he said. Everything gets crazy.

But now he was looking at me.

Yes, I said as I began to remove my clothes.

Everything gets crazy. When nude

I turned my back because he likes the back.

He moved onto me.

Everything I know about love and its necessities

I learned in that one moment

when I found myself

thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon

at a man who no longer cherished me.

There was no area of my mind

not appalled by this action, no part of my body

that could have done otherwise.

But to talk of mind and body begs the question.

Soul is the place,

stretched like a surface of millstone grit between body and mind,

where such necessity grinds itself out.

Soul is what I kept watch on all that night.

Law stayed with me.

We lay on top of the covers as if it weren’t really a night of sleep and time,

caressing and singing to one another in our made-up language

like the children we used to be.

That was a night that centred Heaven and Hell,

as Emily would say. We tried to fuck

but he remained limp, although happy. I came

again and again, each time accumulating lucidity,

until at last I was floating high up near the ceiling looking down

on the two souls clasped there on the bed

with their mortal boundaries

visible around them like lines on a map.

I saw the lines harden.

He left in the morning.

It is very cold

walking into the long scraped April wind.

At this time of year there is no sunset

just some movements inside the light and then a sinking away.

Kitchen

Kitchen is quiet as a bone when I come in.

No sound from the rest of the house.

I wait a moment

then open the fridge.

Brilliant as a spaceship it exhales cold confusion.

My mother lives alone and eats little but her fridge is always crammed.

After extracting the yogurt container

from beneath a wily arrangement of leftover blocks of Christmas cake

wrapped in foil and prescription medicine bottles

I close the fridge door. Bluish dusk

fills the room like a sea slid back.

I lean against the sink.

White foods taste best to me

and I prefer to eat alone. I don’t know why.

Once I heard girls singing a May Day song that went:

 

Violante in the pantry

Gnawing at a mutton bone

How she gnawed it

How she clawed it

When she felt herself alone.

 

Girls are cruelest to themselves.

Someone like Emily Brontë,

who remained a girl all her life despite her body as a woman,

had cruelty drifted up in all the cracks of her like spring snow.

We can see her ridding herself of it at various times

with a gesture like she used to brush the carpet.

Reason with him and then whip him!

was her instruction (age six) to her father

regarding brother Branwell.

And when she was 14 and bitten by a rabid dog she strode (they say)

into the kitchen and taking red hot tongs from the back of the stove applied

them directly to her arm.

Cauterization of Heathcliff took longer.

More than thirty years in the time of the novel,

from the April evening when he runs out the back door of the kitchen

and vanishes over the moor

because he overheard half a sentence of Catherine’s

(“It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff ”)

until the wild morning

when the servant finds him stark dead and grinning

on his rainsoaked bed upstairs in Wuthering Heights.

Heathcliff is a pain devil.

If he had stayed in the kitchen

long enough to hear the other half of Catherine’s sentence

(“so he will never know how I love him”)

Heathcliff would have been set free.

But Emily knew how to catch a devil.

She put into him in place of a soul

the constant cold departure of Catherine from his nervous system

every time he drew a breath or moved thought.

She broke all his moments in half,

with the kitchen door standing open.

I am not unfamiliar with this half-life.

But there is more to it than that.

Heathcliff’s sexual despair

arose out of no such experience in the life of Emily Brontë,

so far as we know. Her question,

which concerns the years of inner cruelty that can twist a person into a pain devil,

came to her in a kindly firelit kitchen