“If I were to haunt him it would not be possible that he could be ugly. He was beautiful.”
Emily rolled her ghostly eyes, deciding to ignore Arianna’s illusion. “It was Tabitha who frightened me the most,” she said.
“Tabitha?”
“Tabby. She was our servant … but more than that really. We adored her. A great lump of fat she was who smelled of baking bread and potato skins. Her face, you know, was like an enormous Yorkshire pudding; the same colour and texture, the same creases and folds. I lurked around in the kitchen and she didn’t even notice I was there watching her. Grown-up, dead, and haunting. A ghost in her presence and she ignored it! Even though she was the one who was continually filling our little heads with supernatural nonsense–
It was far in the night, and the bairnies grat,
The mither beneath the mools heard that
I put that in my book: one of her songs. A lullaby.”
“I can understand why she frightened you.”
“No, no … those were my favourite kinds of songs. What frightened me was that I couldn’t see her whole. I mean each detail, each large, small, dark, light detail was of equal importance. Nothing receded and nothing predominated. There was no depth and no distance to her. None at all. Nothing clustered together into a mass. Every particle of her being made a separate, disconnected statement. Do you remember how, when you were alive, if you looked at a tree you saw a tree? I mean, you didn’t see each of fifty thousand leaves extending from its own personal twig or stem. Well, and I’m warning you, when you haunt, it’s the leaves and the stems and the twigs that you see. For some reason it’s impossible to bring the whole tree into focus. It was the same with Tabby. The hairs on the ends of her warts, the enlarged pores of her bulbous nose, a string of saliva between her upper and lower teeth became just as important, just as demanding of attention as her kind eyes and clean apron … which, because of all this intensification, I found wasn’t nearly as clean as I’d thought. She was really made up of a collection of tiny uglinesses. I couldn’t bear to be around her. And perhaps it’s true … perhaps the spirit really does abhor the flesh because, when I saw myself as a child, I found that I was ugly too. I had a cold and the area around my nostrils was inflamed. My fingernails were cracked and filled with coal dust from playing near the fire. My hair was dirty, my shoes were scuffed. Oh, Lord … the world is filled with such squalor!”
“You mean we can haunt ourselves?”
“Yes … but believe me you wouldn’t want to. There is dirt everywhere. Nothing is pure.”
“What else did you see?”
“Glances.”
“Glances?”
“Yes, the way my sisters looked at each other, secretly, and with envy, blood lust-even hatred.”
“But they were just children.”
“So was I. And I was the most pulled in, the worst of the secret haters. It was very plain. I never looked anyone in the eye, but I scrutinized them, investigated them, when they weren’t looking at me, and with a ruthless coldness. And I thought that I loved my family. In fact I thought they were all that I loved. Looking at my dirty little face and suspicious darting eyes I realized it was only my own imagination and my brother Branwell that I loved. And how jealous I was of my imagination: that tiny, detailed, horrifying world I carried with me everywhere I went. My treasured, invented nightmare, my darling pain. It locked me carefully away from other people; even the other people that I believed I was close to. But it opened me up too, and set me loose in places no one could have believed I would ever be able to visit.”
“What places?”
“Kingdoms. Bright kingdoms of the heart, which were built of terrifyingly clear palaces-some of ice, some of glass. Dusky, empty kingdoms whose architecture had crumbled and whose inhabitants were ghosts: much more complicated and interesting spirits than we can ever hope to be. Claustrophobic kingdoms where everything rubbed shoulders with everything else. Forests you couldn’t move through, impassable streets, clogged sewers, and bestial, multiplying populations. In those kingdoms everyone, everything collided and embraced and wrestled and seethed and grew into and out of everything else. Melting kingdoms where steam was the only weather and the roads bubbled and the destinations dissolved and the lovers washed over each other like waves and disappeared down drains. Kingdoms of eruption where everything vomited something else.”
Emily smiled, remembering. “But, you know,” she said, “I never imagined this tranquillity, this fluidity. This kingdom of absence we inhabit now.”
ANN KNOWS she would never be able to sit, working on her book, in one part of a house while Arthur inhabited another; would never be able to say to herself, rooms away, Those footsteps downstairs are Arthur’s, and then continue to use words describing another subject altogether. She would, even after exposure to the dailiness of him, be thrown by evidence of his presence into the same state of red alert that she experiences now when she is near him: each of her senses tuned to high frequency, her radar picking up moods that haven’t even reached him yet, that are still two days, two weeks, or sometimes even months away. She, who so rarely sees him, is aware, from great distances, of how his feelings toward her shift and change.
She is, when they are together, so tremendously awake, her ability to concentrate so focused on the moment, that she takes all the superfluous details of their meetings home with her; the pile of the terrycloth hotel towels, the cracked rubber of the insulating lining of the curtains they must pull in order to ensure privacy, the small triangle of dust that a maid has overlooked on a plastic telephone, his cufflinks and her earrings, thrown like dice onto a bedside table. These trivial particulars move out with such precision it is as if he has brought all of the perceived world with him into the room so that there is a barrage of stimuli springing, at his touch, into life all around her. And she, newly sighted, taking it all in, taking it all in. Unable to keep any of it out. Unable to sort or classify; unable to say this object should be carefully scrutinized, this object glanced at in passing, that ignored altogether. So she takes home all the details that move out from him and she takes him home as well: not just the way he approaches but also the way he moves away from her. She can recall, at any moment, the way he rises abruptly, changes the angle of his gaze, the tilt of his head; or the way he changes, quite suddenly, the topic of conversation.
She takes all of this home to her empty apartment and there attempts to sift it, wanting to pan for gold, wanting to let the ordinary slip back into life’s stream. She wants to choose perhaps one or two words, a glance, a specific touch to keep. But this is impossible. The fool’s gold of the attached details clings to her memory with as much tenacity as the rare gold of emotional response. She hoards it all.
Over the months, he has used no words to describe his own response to her. She must read his face, his body, to assess the climate of the affair and she must, always, use her powers of prediction concerning his future changes of mood, his reversals, his subtle denials. This is how obsession is created, she thinks: by the other’s unwillingness to be known. The mystery, the secret that he keeps from her while exposing her, constantly, to the fact that they are inexorably joined. Two adulterous lovers tied, back to back, in a purgatorial eternity. What does he return to, and how can she know that, and how could she interpret it were the information suddenly within her grasp?
He does not want to be known-at least by her-does not wish to submit to her scrutiny. Short allotments of communion. Dark acts in hidden places. She is becoming almost familiar with the way he touches, then releases her, practically propelling her back into a world in which he has no function. The world outside. Ann thinks about all of this while she rides the subway or walks the halls of the university, or even when she is driving her small red car towards the limits of the city-that no-man’s-land. The only acre that is theirs.
Now she watches him walk across the rented room, reach into his discarded jacket and pull out a package of cigarettes. He
lights one and returns to her, pulling his knees up as he leans against the wall, resting the ashtray on his stomach.
“What are you thinking?” she asks.
“What am I thinking? I’m thinking about Tintoretto’s use of lightning. Most of his paintings appear to be illuminated by lightning, so that, if you look again, you are afraid that they might have returned to darkness.”
“Lightning Tintoretto.”
“Yes, but that term’s a reference to his speed of execution. I’m talking about the way the painting looks hundreds of years later. As though you might blink and it would be gone.”
“And are you thinking about any special paintings?”
“Yes. Have you seen a copy of it, I wonder?” The smoke from Arthur’s cigarette has moved halfway across the room. “There is this most wonderful angel swooping down with a tray-looking just like a garçon in a French café-delivering the bitter chalice to Christ in the garden at Gethsemene. And all the drapery is practically transparent, edged in blue and white, illuminated by lightning. In fact, the drapery almost is lightning. Imagine a French waiter with wings clothed in lightning.”
“Tell me more about it. Is there landscape?”
“Ah, yes, there is often landscape. Odd, that, because apart from gardens there is no landscape in Venice. Everything is built, architectural. And Tintoretto never left Venice. Why then all this landscape?”
“What is it like? Describe the landscape.”
“Maybe it’s not landscape. Maybe it’s skies and weather.”
“I love weather. Tell me.”
“The illuminated angel casts his light on everything: on Christ who wears red, on the sleeping apostles, and on this very stealthy procession of soldiers who are creeping in on the left. The marvelous thing is the way the landscape is just suggested by all the leaves glowing in the reflected light of the angel and the chalice. The soldiers have no landscape, neither do the disciples, but Christ has these luminous leaves.”
“We have no landscape.”
He moves away. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
“We should have some landscape.”
Silence.
“Tell me about another painting then; one without landscape.”
“There is Jacob’s Ladder” Arthur visibly relaxes. “A really disturbing architectural painting. The ladder is a stone staircase – spatially confusing because of the weird perspective he used and even more confusing because the painting is on the ceiling. The angels in this painting, the way they come down the stairs, they look like Broadway dancing girls: like Rockettes.”
Ann laughs, recovering from rejection.
“The whole thing could be a stage set. Tintoretto was not above resorting to the blatantly theatrical.”
“What about God the Father?”
“Oh, he’s there – a wispy pink cloud at the top of the staircase. Utterly upstaged by the angels. And Jacob. Jacob has his face averted as if he’s trying to ignore the whole event-as if he’s embarrassed by it.”
“All these ceilings. I’m amazed that you don’t have a permanent bend in your neck.”
“You don’t need to worry about that. When you go into the Scuola San Rocco … where all these paintings are … they give you a mirror.”
“A mirror?”
“Yes, a mirror to look at the ceiling.”
“What are your favourite, who are your favourite figures in the paintings?”
“Angels.”
“Not disciples … not pink, wispy God-the-Fathers?”
“No, definitely angels because of the light that is in them, the light they cast, and because of the drapery.”
Ann looks around her at the sheets, the rough sea of the untidy bed. This, too, is drapery.
“Do you have a favourite angel?”
“The one who tempts Christ in the wilderness. I told you about him before.”
“But you said the devil did the tempting.”
“Yes, but Tintoretto makes the devil an angel – androgynous-and with such a face! A face filled with sorrow and compassion and hands filled with wholesome bread. The most beautiful eyes. The tempter has the most beautiful eyes and the eyes are filled with tears.”
Ann is silent. Then she speaks. “I wish …”
“Don’t wish.” He turns his face away, examines his watch. “I have to go.”
“Where are you going?”
“I have an appointment.” He is dressed, has disappeared before she can tell him what she wishes. She wishes she could see the paintings. She feels that they might be a map of him; all of the hidden places to which she can’t travel. She will see the paintings, she decides, some day … with or without his permission.
In the evenings, after she has seen Arthur, Ann reads the words of Thomas Aquinas concerning angels. Angels, the old saint tells her, are composed of action and potentiality. Their bodies are made of thick air. Many of them cannot be in the same space. The motion of an angel is the succession of his different operations. The motion of the illumination of an angel is threefold: circular, straight, and oblique.
Light. Heat. Motion. The beating of wings in an otherwise still room.
The Venetians sometimes called Tintoretto “Thunderbolt.” “Brontë” is the Greek word for thunder. There are connections everywhere.
Ann wants to see Arthur’s burning angels, the light that is in them. Ann wants to see herself, aglow, in the light that Arthur’s angels cast.
“MY 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!”
Changing Heaven Page 10