Changing Heaven Read online

  “When I stopped talking I realized that the white room was filled with his silence and the pounding of that fearsome sea. He looked at me from across all that and his face was a mask of sadness. He just gazed at me, not with the neutral look that I’d seen before, but with one of real pain. ‘You’ve killed the white room, Polly,’ he said to me. ‘You created that house and destroyed the white room.’

  “That was the first night since I’d known him that he didn’t touch me at all.

  “The next day I knew that, by telling him, I’d put the front on my house-that the inside was no longer open and that somehow I’d built a wall around the garden and its gate was closed as well. The sea roared outside the white room but even when I rubbed a clear spot on the glass I couldn’t see it because there was a fog. Horns and bells in the distance and the packing of suitcases inside the tourist home. Within a week or two I was sailing in the balloon with him, and he’d changed my name to Arianna.

  “As for me, I took all the love and affection I’d had for the imaginary house and gave it to the balloon and sailing it and the details of the landscape underneath it.

  “And for a little while, when we were working together, we had some details, we had some memories. But he was always unhappy, always silent, and eventually he stopped ballooning altogether to manage my career.”

  “Oh, my,” said Emily, “Yes, I could see your house clearly, and I could see the white room as well. How strange! I seem to think that the white room was his invention as much as the house was yours. He may have imagined the whole thing. I was right, you see, about the house being all yours. It was yours in a way no real house could ever be. How easy it must have been to transfer that ownership to the balloon. You must have loved your balloon.”

  Arianna nodded silently, sadly.

  “Yours was a very civilized house, I must say. The house I built wasn’t like that at all. Its energies were not contained in the way yours were, they were always bursting free. But the white room-maybe I know about that too, maybe I could tell you! But first I want to tell you about the house I built, and I wonder what you will think of it. Look up there!”

  Emily pointed a vapour-like finger up towards the summit of the highest of the swells that surrounded them. On it stood an old black farmhouse in very poor repair. Near its walls, outside its doors, a few chickens were doing their best to scratch at the earth in the same strong wind that, in an instant, had carried both Emily and her friend much closer to the structure.

  “There are trees here!” said Arianna, surprised.

  “Only two,” replied Emily, leaning casually against one of them. “Please look at that,” she said to Polly/Arianna, holding one thin hand towards the view.

  Rolling down from where they stood was billow after billow of moorland; black heather in the dark light (for now it was November) crossed, now and then, by a slate-grey cliff or a patch of orange ling. The moors appeared to go on and on forever, as if they were out of control and couldn’t stop. Above this strange, endless expanse, walls of fierce clouds trailing scarves of rain. And behind them, the odd straight sword of light, thrust down by the winter sun.

  Both ghosts were silent for several minutes, maybe hours, maybe a season or two.

  “Oh,” said Arianna at last, “I think maybe this is frightening.”

  “Awe-inspiring, not frightening,” Emily said quietly. “Not nearly as frightening as a closed, white room.”

  “All this wind!”

  “Yes,” agreed Emily, joyfully.

  AT THE AGE of fifteen, Arthur Woodruff becomes obsessed with Tintoretto, for several reasons. The first and perhaps the least important is that when herded, along with thirty of his unwilling classmates, several blocks south-east from Harbord Collegiate to the Art Gallery of Toronto, he is, if not impressed, then at least surprised by the size of the Tintoretto there. While most of his friends move, snickering, from naked woman to naked woman, Arthur paces back and forth in front of the Tintoretto until he feels he has walked the marble floor, patted the stationary dog, exchanged pleasantries with Christ, and cast one or two suspicious glances in the direction of the turned back of Judas. You can move around in this painting and Arthur, at fifteen, needs that. He finds himself becoming gradually enchanted by the canal at the far end of the tiled room and by the three trees that are revealed by three arches. He finds himself becoming more and more interested in the white towel that one of the disciples has draped over his arm like the maître d’ in a high-class restaurant and by the white, apron-like cloth that Christ has tied around his waist like a fastidious housewife concerned about spoiling a new skirt.

  In fact, to the adolescent Arthur, Christ looks as if he were preparing, not to wash the disciples’ feet, but to scrub the floor.

  Arthur quite likes the floor. Although he sort of wants to swim the waters of the distant canal and walk across the distant hills, more than anything he wants to click his cleats on the marble-tiled floor and, while he is clicking them, to pace out the carefully measured perspective the artist has painted there.

  He is bored, almost repelled, by every other painting in the gallery, even the ones with several pairs of breasts to ogle. The women seem to him simply fat and he prefers his girls long-thighed and thin. He prefers, he believes, for he hasn’t much experience in the field, that female flesh be one consistent texture and colour-unbruised and undimpled – and if it is not depicted in that manner then he doesn’t want it there at all.

  After his class is dismissed, Arthur takes the news of the painting home with him to the apartment above his father’s laundry and dry-cleaning business. The painting is enormous, he tells his Italian mother. It includes all the disciples and all of their stockings. The word Tintoretto, repeated by her tongue, sounds musical, almost perfect, and they laugh together when she tells him that tintoretto means “little dyer of cloth” in Italian, because that is one activity in which Arthur’s ordinary Canadian father engages in his purgatory below. One of the worst, though most encouraged activities because of the extra fee. It is right there on the sign that announces WOODRUFF’S DRY CLEANING AND LAUNDRY. In smaller letters, added almost as an afterthought, is the sentence WE DYE ANY FABRIC. Arthur’s father, then, with his wounded leg, his ordinariness, his boring, repetitive war stories, is a tintoretto. Arthur loves it. It adds a touch of theatre, a touch of the exotic, to the steamy, claustrophobic earnestness of his father’s profession.

  That is the second reason for the obsession.

  The third is dictated by his Italian blood, which has a tendency to dance, regardless of how he tries to repress it, sentimentally in his veins, as it does in the veins of his mother. She has filled their apartment with plastic, illuminated shadow boxes depicting The Last Supper, or The Bleeding Heart of Jesus, or angels speaking quietly to dark-haired children. She wears crucifixes and says rosaries. She prays in dark Catholic churches at dawn for the health of her husband, the welfare of her child. She weeps often: with joy, with sorrow, with resignation. When Arthur takes her to see the painting she weeps for its Italian-ness, its religious subject matter, its glimpses through arches of landscape she knows she will never see again. Arthur adores his mother at these moments, adores the tears that she weeps so easily.

  But there is another aspect to his blood, an aspect that keeps the dancing, sentimental Italian element severely under control. His father’s stiff repression. His father’s almost military fear of emotion. His father’s withdrawal to cold neutral places after a day involved with the heat of cleaning other people’s soiled belongings. And so, even while Arthur adores his mother, he shrinks from the intimacy of the moment, in love and in terror, speechless and removed. In mid-adolescence the battle is over. His father’s blood has won.

  To overcome this rush of love and fear he jokes with his weeping mother. “Look, Mama, look at Christ with his apron on and that big tub. Maybe he isn’t washing the disciples’ feet at all. Maybe he is dyeing the disciples’ socks. Maybe Tintoretto made Christ a tinto
retto!”

  His mother weeps with laughter. Arthur stands apart from her, smiling vaguely, attempting to enter the cold marble of the painted room.

  By the time he is eighteen, preparing to enter the University of Toronto as a scholarship student, his destiny has been determined by his obsession. His father, suspecting a scholar, perhaps even an artist, in their midst, has given him a small room behind the laundry, for a study. More like a hallway than a room, it contains one window, through which Arthur can never see because of the steam that continually coats it. Still, the room seems cool and clear compared to the laundry itself, and Arthur withdraws there in the evenings after lectures and on weekends after several perspiring hours on the pressing machine.

  For the first few months he makes repeated attempts to wipe the fog from the window with a borrowed piece of laundry. He tries all fabrics from rayon to terrycloth. The only result of this small task is that the world outside is changed to a blur of smeared colours. Then gradually, gradually, the window returns to its original state of opacity. There is something satisfying, something comforting about this – this useless attempt to let his vision out and let the light in, and Arthur experiences a mild delight while engaged in the activity. He watches, with pleasure, as the sharp edges of Lee Wong’s Groceteria and Schendell’s Used Furniture become blurred, dissolving into soft, abstract, pastel shapes. Believing that he wants to be a painter, he attempts to store visual experiences of this nature in his memory. After a few months, however, he leaves the window alone, resigns himself to the moist, close environment, and forgets altogether that the colours and shapes of the outside world ever held his attention at all.

  By now he has learned, by borrowing the cumbersome art books from the Central Library on College Street, an enormous amount about Tintoretto; about his ceilings and scuoli and about his life; about the art and the art world of sixteenth-century Venice, its rivalries and vendettas.

  On the wall of the steamy little room he paints the words “Il disegno di Michelangelo e’l colorito de Titiano,” words he has learned that Tintoretto had inscribed on the walls of his sixteenth-century studio. But Arthur hates Titian–colour or no colour-imagining him a wildly jealous man, unable to cope with Tintoretto’s superior talent. Arthur believes, utterly, the legend that states that Titian expelled Tintoretto from his Venetian studio upon discovering the extent of his young pupil’s genius.

  It is Tintoretto’s character that Arthur is beginning to admire at this point, even more than his achievements. He loves the concept of the passionate inner man combined with the practical outer one, who even as a boy could undergo such an unjust dismissal and still admire the man who carried it out. A man who in an era of studio-trained artists was himself, of necessity, self-taught. The son of a simple dyer of cloth.

  Many of the Tintorettos that Arthur sees in the books he has borrowed are filled with wild activity. Cloth and weather, cloth and wind. This is interesting, because nothing at all appears to disturb the atmosphere of Arthur’s first Tintoretto at the Art Gallery of Toronto. It hangs, serene and slightly pompous, covering a full wall with static heaviness. Its very lack of movement is in direct contrast to the only other Tintoretto reproduction available in the gift shop—St. George and the Dragon

  Arthur has pinned St. George and the Dragon up on his wall. He spends hours studying it, trying to decipher its messages. In the foreground of the painting a menacing, hysterical princess is thrust towards him by something she is trying to escape from; her voluminous clothing struggling with her away from threatening weather, dark landscape, and the languid corpse of a young, nude man. She wants out, she wants to be away, and at certain moments, when Arthur has looked at the painting for too long, he fears that she wants him.

  What she appears not to want is Saint George himself-a small horseman in the background who is engaged in the act of spearing a timid, lethargic dragon. The dragon is not nearly as frightening as the emotions of the princess. Perhaps she has not even noticed Saint George, so driven is she by the demons that seem to live with her inside those yards and yards of pink silk.

  Arthur is only a student. He knows next to nothing about women. But looking at the poor, dutiful, underrated saint, and then at this huge whirlwind of a princess, he is certain that the story is all about her.

  By the age of eighteen Arthur has read Ridolfi’s strange, antiquated biography of Tintoretto no fewer than ten times, making use, at last, of the small amount of Italian his mother had coaxed into his memory when he was a child, and making use, also, of his mother to help him translate the difficult passages. It is in this small book that he learns that Tintoretto, deprived of a studio and live models, constructed miniature rooms filled with tiny wax figures. Rooms with little windows cut into them and candles placed outside them so that the artist could examine the effect of a low sun streaming into a room, or could study the dispersal of light in religious miracles. He constructed luminous, three-dimensional worlds so that he might represent them two-dimensionally on canvas. Arthur learns that the apprentice painter hung small wax angels from his studio ceiling so that he, squatting beneath, could draw the human figure floating over him. Arthur covets such an environment. Oddly enough, it is not the canals, the romance, the splendour of sixteenth-century Venice that he wants. Only the calm interior of a young man’s studio, its tranquillity – the hand-made angels turning on their threads, the flickering candles throwing golden light, the small room full of static religious subjects. The artist himself moving in an orderly, quiet, daily fashion, away from the bustle of crowded studios, towards greatness.

  When Arthur was perhaps ten years old, his mother placed a plaster-of-Paris Last Supper on a shelf above the television. There it remained, unchanging, as Arthur grew.

  Now, at eighteen, he begs it from her, takes it down to his narrow room, and places it in a cardboard box from which he has removed one side, and into the walls of which he has cut three or four windows. Arthur turns off the lights, covers the foggy window with borrowed dirty laundry, and lights a candle.

  From the ceiling, like lumpy pink fans, hang rubber dolls that Arthur has collected over the last few months from Queen Street junk shops; the cardboard wings he has made for them droop listlessly from their plump shoulders. For the moment these are ignored, as Arthur focuses his attention on positioning the candle outside the four-inch window. Then, kneeling so that his eyes are level with the small sculptural group, he contemplates the room he has created.

  Into this room streams a shaft of yellow, unearthly light. One half of the face of each disciple is illuminated, orange, except for the garish features of Judas. His head is turned towards the window, towards Arthur, towards the candle, away from Christ, whose vaguely menacing face shines like a partial moon in that company. The colours of all the painted clothing-the hideous turquoises and purples-are deepened, enriched, by the tint of fire. Arthur lights another candle and places it behind the rear window he has cut into the box.

  When the light moves into the room from the rear window the Last Supper amalgamates, becomes an ugly lump, resembles a poorly constructed artificial mountain. Personality disappears. Judas, Peter, John, Jesus, Timothy, Andrew melt into a meaningless mass of flesh and clothing. So much clothing, obscuring everything beneath. Arthur thinks of the canvas sacks on wheels that his father pushes through the humid rooms of his shop, the endlessness of it. He thinks of the bolts of silk that Tintoretto’s father dyed, over and over, during long sixteenth-century workdays, he thinks of the riotous clothing attached to the princess on his wall.

  Arthur lights another candle and places it in front of the grouping just beyond the territory of the box. His own face leaps into startling life, lit from beneath. Above him, still ignored, the round undimpled bellies of rubber dolls shine, orange, in the light.

  When he illuminates the west, the final window, all the disciples come back into amazing focus. Christ’s clumsy plaster-of-Paris hand becomes eloquent, its gesture profound. The unexceptional
plaster robes worn by everyone in the room now evolve into something magnificent, something which Arthur knows the great masters referred to as drapery.

  “Drapery,” he mutters, looking around his narrow dark room at the barely discernible bundle of soiled laundry he has crammed into the window and at the trail of shirts and vests he has dropped carelessly across the floor. All these years the clothing that has come into the shop, other people’s laundry, has been drapery; something gentle, boneless, something that falls over, that transforms the frame beneath. “Drapery,” he whispers again, the sound of it suddenly sanctifying his mother’s tablecloths and curtains and pillow slips and coverlets, his own jeans and T-shirts, his father’s profession, the dirty laundry on the floor of his bedroom.

  Arthur runs out of his room and into the front of the shop, gathering silk now (Tintoretto – little dyer of silk): women’s undergarments, the smaller the better, to drape over his dolls. Unconcerned by the sexual significance of these small pieces of cloth, unconcerned by the fact that they are nylon and not silk at all, he drapes the panties over his naked rubber angels and the larger swaths, slips and half-slips, over any object in the room: two chairs, one stool, the cardboard room, his piles of books. He lights the remaining seven candles, positions them dramatically to the left of several draped objects and, reaching for his sketchbook, ink wash, and sanguine Conté crayon, he begins to draw.

  Four hours later, Arthur’s father puts down the sports section of the Saturday paper and leans inquisitively forward in his chair. His eyes dart suspiciously around the room as his nostrils recognize smoke. Following the smell of burning rubber, burning nylon, down the narrow staircase, he moves towards the room at the back of the shop.

  Behind Arthur the reproduction of St. George and the Dragon disengages itself from the lower of the two thumbtacks that fasten it to the wall and curls upward in the heat. First the frantic woman disappears, then the corpse, then the tiny knight and listless dragon. For a few moments, before the complete episode bursts into flames, all that is visible is the turbulent sky.