Changing Heaven Read online

  Arianna ran her fingers through the halo of her yellow hair. She understood little of this. Outside the window she could see the moon racing through grey clouds, full, like an alabaster balloon travelling, travelling.

  “Do you remember,” she asked the man across the carpet, “how you found me? Do you remember the white room and all the white nightdresses and the sheer curtains and those white sheets? Even the furniture was painted white and you said everything around me should be white.” She turned to look at him. “Jeremy … Jeremy. How did you stop loving me?”

  “We left the room. I stopped.”

  “Why won’t you leave me?”

  “I can’t. You won’t stop.”

  She stood up and approached him. “I set you free,” she said. “Go!”

  “I’m not free to,” he whispered, turning his face away. “I’m not free. No more sailing for Sindbad. Prison instead for Svengali.”

  “Come up with me.”

  “No!”

  “Go by yourself.”

  “You understand nothing!”

  Several leaves from some lone tree struck the window Arianna had abandoned, and then disappeared as quickly as they had arrived. A sudden touch of night’s fingers against the glass.

  “You used to tell me stories,” Arianna said.

  “No more stories, Arianna.”

  “You used to love me.”

  “No more love, Arianna.”

  “Admit it … you used to love me.”

  “What is memory, Arianna? A reflection of something that is gone … gone. Why do you insist on memory? There is only this now,” he gestured around the room, “this ever-changing prison that you’ve built for me. Oh, don’t look at the walls, Arianna, they have nothing to do with it. Nothing solid like that. It is a prison of light, of ethereality … I can’t get out.”

  “You’re free to go,” she said, nodding towards the door.

  “No,” he said quietly, “I’m not free. There is nothing out there. There is only this.” His delicate features contorted into a look of despair.

  Arianna, moved by his sorrow, reached one hand forward to touch the side of his cheek. He clutched at it with one of his own.

  “There is only this,” he repeated, drawing her down on the bed beside him.

  There he made passionate, prolonged love to her, crashing up against her again and again like a ship in a hurricane encountering rocks.

  When Arianna awakened an hour later Jeremy sat hunched over a table at the far end of the room, his black hair gleaming in the lamplight. He did not turn around when he heard her stir, leave the bed, begin to dress. He did not turn around when she left the room, closing the door softly behind her.

  She knew what he was doing, what he always did after they made love. He was scrutinizing his maps of the polar seas. Tonight, she had noted, as she passed quietly by his table, it was the South Pole he was examining; a contradiction in terms as far as she was concerned. How a continent could be south and cold at the same time eluded her. Nevertheless, back in the days when he still spoke to her, his polar lectures indicated that that particular end of the earth was as bleak and white and featureless and freezing as the other. More than anything Jeremy had wanted to sail a balloon there … to disappear into white. Instead, he had somehow evaporated because of her. Or, so he believed, had become grounded, ordinary.

  For his sake, in the early days, Arianna had pretended to love the idea of polar regions and, in fact, had eventually in some ways come to do so, because they represented Jeremy. She had learned the names of glaciers and ice barriers and Arctic seas. She had listened for hours while he spoke about polar expeditions and their sad, inevitable ends.

  Now she tiptoed down the hall to her room and left Jeremy alone in his. Alone with his isolated, personal interpretations, his calculations concerning ice floes, icebergs, and Arctic air currents, his lists of polar destinations. “Starvation Cove,” she had heard him whisper as she slowly, quietly, closed the door, “Cape Farewell, Ice Haven, Fury Strait, Winter Harbour …”

  The wind woke her, though it had been in her dreams as well, tossing white garments from a long clothesline up towards black chimneys. She lit the lamp and walked over to the window, whose deep ledge allowed plenty of room for both the oil lamp and her own two thin arms. Fierce black outside; the moon was down, and dreadful stars, sharp and exaggerated – little knife-points in the sky. But steady, at least, in the shrieking gale.

  It is an interesting phenomenon that the light that warms evening rooms creates a barrier, a kind of blindness, to the differing darknesses outside. It also transforms all windows miraculously into mirrors, so that their function suddenly is to reproduce what is in the room rather than to reveal what is outside it. Arianna, leaning towards the window, then, could see very little of the street below; could see only black, those intense stars, and then her own white face floating in the centre-light, airborne, balloon-like.

  Gradually, the thought of a balloon at night began to form in her mind and, as it did, the ominous stars became benign. Sailing through silence into black, with or without moonlight, but with the night wind; a song in the silence. Enchantment. “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” she murmured, remembering, just for a moment, something of her lost childhood.

  Arianna very rarely became poetic and was mildly surprised that she was doing so now-and even more surprised at the soothing effect it had upon her. She extinguished the lamp. Nothing emerged from the street below. The wind lullabied her, singing:

  Sail on a river of crystal light

  Into a sea of dew

  And then as she sank into sleep it breathed the word ether over and over again in her ear.

  The next morning. Ah … the next morning! As if the wind had forced some magic dust in through the cracks of the windows of this very ordinary inn, miracles had occurred. First Arianna discovered that her window looked out, not to the street at all, but onto a sea of purple heather that seemed to stretch on forever, moving over the swells of the hills under the power of the wind. As she stood gazing at this stupefying phenomenon, Jeremy, as if having undergone some mysterious stage of evolution during the night, burst into her room and looked at her with such affection and longing that she drew away from him somewhat, startled by the change.

  “I’m free of you,” he said excitedly, “I love you again. I am separate. I am other. I adore you. I’m free.”

  In his joy he lifted her up and whirled her, in her white nightgown, ecstatically around the room; a small room, but the best in the house and possessing, therefore, two windows. Both of these flashed by Arianna now, so that she glimpsed first the white of the walls, then the purple of the heather, then the white of the walls again.

  “You are a beautiful white iceberg,” he said, “floating on an Arctic sea under a midnight sun and I … I am a navigator on a ship three miles away, looking at you through a spyglass. We are NOT the same because you are THERE and I am HERE! And when you are here I shall be there in order to avoid collision but loving you, LOVING you madly!”

  “Oh Jere–” Arianna began. But he silenced her.

  “Perhaps I am an aurora borealis,” he continued, “and then you can be a white drift beneath. You see how different we will be? How unconnected? How beautiful it will be?”

  “Yes,” said Arianna, doubtfully, while her imagination for some reason sang:

  With a clear pure light

  Like a little candle

  Burning in the night

  You in your small corner

  And I in mine

  Something else from the mists of her childhood but she couldn’t remember where, when, or why.

  “Dress!” Jeremy commanded. “Prepare yourself. Something white … a white skirt.”

  “But the trapeze …”

  “Ah, yes, the trapeze … white stockings then, and lots of lace in the blouse. I’ll see to the balloon.”

  And after one, long, passionate kiss, he left her there; puzzled, perplexed, wildl
y happy, and alone. She savoured each of these states in turn, then flicking open the clasps of her little leather trunk she began to lay out her aeronautical costume on the bed, positioning its arms and legs in the exact gesture she herself assumed each time she dropped through air to earth.

  WALKING HOME through a storm more clamorous than the full force of the rhythm band she remembers from kindergarten, more clamorous than recess in the thick of fifty-seven boys larger than herself, the child inhales wind.

  It is everywhere; lifting her small plaid skirt, slamming her schoolbag against her shins, tossing cinders into her eyes, tearing the very important mimeographed home and school announcement out of her hands. Ann fights this turbulence down Greer Avenue under churning September trees which have already begun to throw off their smaller twigs. Some of these sticks attach themselves to Ann’s ankle socks. Others ride, unnoticed, in her hair. On either side of the street the square brick Tudor-style houses present a succession of moving walls to the assault of the storm. Ann looks at these as she negotiates the blast, using them for ballast. They slide, like dark freighters, slowly past her. If she keeps moving, keeps swimming through the ocean of air, one of the houses will be hers. She will step inside and the outer storm will vanish. The carpets will not stir, the pleats in the drapes will remain undisturbed.

  Above her head, wires revolve like playground jump ropes, sing as though children were playing near them, with them. One snaps and sends a shower of tiny stars down to the unyielding sidewalk on the opposite side of the street where the end of the black cord jumps and jumps like a child skipping rope, driven from within by its own electricity, from without by the fists of the wind. Ann looks at it, amazed by this pretty display of danger and power. She had no idea that the ordinary overhead wires, slung across her street from pole to banal pole, were filled with glittering fire. But Ann knows that fire burns children and she moves away from it, struggling up the cement steps towards her door.

  Inside there is calm, her mother’s voice and a radio describing the surrounding storm; the velocity of the present wind, the enormity of predicted rainfall. Ann swallows a glass of milk, slowly, filling her throat with the tranquil liquid while her face and body distort on the surface of the electric kettle. Then she climbs the carpeted stairs to her room, where she is greeted by the expressionless glass eyes of thirty neglected toy bears. Ann no longer cares about the bears in whose adventures she was deeply involved just three months ago. She has forgotten their journeys over pillow mountains, their weddings, their birthdays, their illnesses and recoveries. Now what she cares about is a book, its pages and the landscapes created by them. She cares about the androgynous child couple, separation, an early death. She cares about millstone grit walls and casements, rifled tombs and obsessions.

  The wind in her own yard is beginning to disengage larger branches from a variety of trees. Downstairs the radio speaks the word “hurricane.” By the next morning ravines will have become lakes, cars will have been crushed by maples, electric cables filled with fiery stars will be dancing on the corners of most of Toronto’s city streets, and Ann’s school will be closed. But she will not care about a natural disaster too close to home to be significant. Ann is storm-driven instead by the distant winds of Wuthering Heights.

  As the child Heathcliff, a demonic baby god with the sea in his eyes and foreign ports submerged in his unconscious memory, is unfurled from the master’s cloak at Wuthering Heights, the wind outside Ann’s house flings open the milkbox under the kitchen window and begins to slam the tiny door in a repetitive, disturbing fashion. As Heathcliff and Catherine scramble over the moors or climb to Peniston Crag, the banging gathers momentum, resembles a fist striking a table in the midst of argument – a furious point being made. While Catherine stands all night long, desperate in the rain, looking for the vanished Heathcliff and allowing the weather to infect her with her first bout of dementia, a bridge on the outskirts of Ann’s Canadian city sighs and slips quietly into the embrace of a swollen river. Six houses full of children who have never read Wuthering Heights follow the bridge’s example. Ann does not know about this; nor would she be likely to care if she did know. Catherine is delirious. “Open the window, Nelly,” Ann whispers. “I’m starving.”

  The next morning all schools are closed. Catherine and Heathcliff have reached adulthood. Ann can read all day.

  She reads for most of the daylight hours, descending the carpeted stairs, visiting her mother’s kitchen for breakfast and lunch. “Are you playing with your bears?” her mother asks and Ann says “Yes,” enjoying the taste of the lie on her tongue, not wanting her mother to enter the novel’s territory with her-keeping it secret, special, apart. She is a prim child, perfectly behaved, carries her dishes to the sink, smiles at her mother and walks upstairs, step by step, towards the wonderful chaos she has recently discovered.

  Outside, the manicured lawn has become a jungle of tangled branches, the flesh of several trees jagged and exposed, the garden earth sodden, tulip bulbs revealed. Inside, the child imagines moors, brutality, passion, fixation. Heathcliff has returned from a three-year absence and is wreaking vengeance on all around him. Catherine is undergoing her final stage of evolution from child to changeling to ghost. Ann skips over the parts she doesn’t understand. She understands more than she knows.

  By five in the afternoon the dark day grows darker and Ann’s eyes are tired. She closes the book and slips it between the mattress and the springs. On her way through the living room she pays no attention to the television, which shows scenes of destruction in flickering black and white. “The wind,” says her mother as her daughter passes through the cold television light, “exceeded one hundred miles an hour.”

  Ann barely hears her. She is taking what she has learned to the basement. Another space.

  Upstairs and upstairs again is so extensively polished. Glass windows reflect an interior where everything gleams. Kitchen counter, linoleum tile floors, hardwood around the edges of the living-room carpet slippery enough for skating in socks. Banister for sliding down, had Ann been the kind of child to slide-its rich wood shining, dark, gold. Flat table in the dining room, smaller surfaces of side tables by chairs glowing, dustless, remote. This is the homeland of the cleaning lady: that sad, grey individual who claims the house twice weekly. She arrives dressed in what seem to be her own cleaning cloths, and Ann has often watched her move like a ghost with galvanized pails, from room to room to room.

  The moment Ann closes the door to the basement stairs and stands on the third step down, it is clear that she is somewhere else; a location that the cleaning lady never visits, an unpolished region. The rough plastered wall, the painted grey stairs. And, at the bottom of these, the damp smell of the real earth beneath the concrete floor.

  Several rooms hunker down here: one for preserves; one for the furnace, that large beast with its boiler; one for laundry; and one that operates as a sparsely furnished, primitive form of recreation room, in whose corner Ann keeps her dollhouse. This elaborate toy, largely overlooked until now because of emotional involvement with bears, is suddenly an apparatus perfectly designed for shrinking the world of the novel into the territory of seven small furnished rooms. Four tiny dolls live there and magnificent dramas are born among them. Tempers flare, furniture is overturned, tiny pots and pans are hurled against a tiny kitchen counter. Father doll loses his job and sits for days in the living room-a ruined man. Mother doll runs away or hides for hours behind the dining room sideboard while police are called and the two children languish in their beds, wasting away from diseases with names like calaria or malthropia.

  Father doll is angry, violent, he drinks some. Mother doll is beautiful, petulant, passionate. Their names are Heathcliff and Catherine. The children, who are called, collectively, “the children” or, separately, “child,” are incidental to the central drama. They are minor characters who, when not dying, are used cruelly by their more interesting elders–forced, for instance, to dust each small s
uperfluous item in the house, or locked outside while their parents make delirious love.

  As the days go by, Heathcliff becomes angrier and angrier, finally leaving the dollhouse in a fit of black rage. He goes as far as the laundry tubs where, during a soapdish sail in a violent sea, he is nearly drowned. The next day Catherine, believing him dead, and driven mad by sorrow, spends four foodless days on the roof thereby catching scandaldralia from which she surely would have died had not Heathcliff, at the last moment, dragged himself from his own sickbed in order to harangue her back to life. The children, who are mercifully healthy at this time, carry small bowls of hot soup in and out of the rooms of their unco-operative parents.

  Involving other children in this play, Ann quickly discovers, is a waste of time. They want to call the adult dolls “Mummy” and “Daddy” and the smaller ones “Susie” and “Bobby.” They want to send them to school, or to the kitchen, or to church. They want to sit them down at the table for pleasant family meals; want, in fact, to reproduce the orderly ordinariness of the world upstairs. They have not read Wuthering Heights, and when Ann describes the book to them their eyes glaze.

  During the weeks and months and eventually years that follow the hurricane, while all around her adults are re-ordering what chaos has done to their world, the doll-house dramas become Ann’s secret; her private passion, her miniature theatre which absorbs her, between the ages of eleven and thirteen, for several hours each day. At thirteen and a half, still clinging to the pages of the book, she abandons the dollhouse forever.

  But then, is it really possible to abandon such delicious alternatives forever?

  ARIANNA’S BALLOON was, of course, white, and festooned with garland after garland of pale pink roses held aloft by white winged cherubs, whose toes caressed soft, unmenacing clouds. The basket was made of the finest ornate wicker with decorative swirls and scrolls, and was also painted white in order to be a suitable accompaniment to the gorgeous globe that surmounted it.