Changing Heaven (8 page)

“I hope you changed the seasons now and then,” said Emily, “to allow for storms.”

“Why, no,” said Arianna, “I didn’t think of that. Anyway, with the sea right there I had plenty of storms in the white room.”

And as they spoke, the season all around them changed again, this time to autumn.

“After those days I spent secretly building the house or working on the garden, he, Jeremy, would come back and enter the white room. He would pull me over to the bed – not roughly – gently, and we would begin again those hours and hours of lovemaking.

“It was always he who operated the door that closed us in together, always he who turned the key; twice, now I remember a double lock. At first I thought it was to keep the sea with its white breakers out, all his bolting and locking, but then I realized, after the ocean got into our love-making, that he was really locking it in. And me too. Making me so much a part of him I was swallowed.

“It was then that I started to use the imaginary house to ground me when I thought that I might float away altogether from too much touching. I would visualize some small detail when he caressed my thighs and stomach; an ink stand with two metal deer perched on it, or the inlaid box where the fish knives were kept. And while I moved through swell after swell of pleasure I would have something to hold on to; a rose bush from the garden, or even a common rake. As I melted under him or dissolved over him I would visualize these things – in detail – as if I were drawing them on the white paper of the room. I remember once, when my whole body was aching and aching with pleasure, I became confused and thought the white sheets were the blue curtains of my imaginary house, and I realized that I would have to tell him because otherwise I was being unfaithful: like harbouring a secret desire for another lover.

“And so, a few weeks later, after he’d returned from another two or three days of ballooning, I confessed my pretend house, my play house I called it, taking care not
to omit any facet of it, any of my precious details, so that when I had finished explaining he would know it as well as I did. I took him on a sort of tour; room by room by room. By then I’d travelled that route so many times by myself I could actually hear things: how footsteps sound different on wooden floors than they do on soft rugs, the
tick tock
of the clock in the hall and its chime-I don’t like the important-sounding gongs that clocks sometimes have, so I was careful to give mine bells. Then we strolled pleasantly, I thought, all around the garden where now I could smell the earth and flowers. And inside again, afterwards, I lit some fires in the hearths of the parlour and the dining room. I was cooking something as well, I was so pleased to have him there, and I could smell the herbs and the meat.

“I finished by leading him up the red-carpeted stairs to the bedroom with its wallpaper and mirrors-there were no mirrors in the white room-and its bureaus and ample bed. Of all the rooms in the house, that was the one I had made for both of us.

“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.

A
T 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
tintoretto!”

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.