The Madwoman Upstairs (21 page)

Orville led us past the bar, which sparkled like a collection of pipe organs. The bartender was a woman with a plunging neckline and big, flat fish-lips. At the bar was a pack of men in multicolored ties, and dancing alone in the middle of the room was a softly swaying woman in green.

Orville found a quiet back table and removed his coat. He looked around. “Well?”

“This is definitely weird.”

We slid into our seats, and Orville ordered us each a drink from a woman whose legs were so long that all I could really see was her plaid kilt, right in front of my face. When she left, Orville asked, “How did you like the reading for this week?”

“Which one?” I asked. “ ‘
Wuthering Heights
Is a Freudian Sex Drama,’ or ‘Emily Brontë: An Analysis of Premodern Lesbianism’?”

“Both.”

I said, “I thought they were a disgrace to academia.”

“Because they were about sex?”

My eyes flew open. I didn’t know James Orville III used that word. I tried to find something appropriately clever to say, but couldn’t. Orville was testing me. I could feel it. My lips twitched but no sound emerged. Somewhere in my mind, Samantha Whipple was being terribly witty. It was a shame no one could hear her.

“I’d like to talk to you about your essay,” said Orville.

“Sure.”

“It was . . . different.”

“That’s for sure.”

He didn’t answer, and I thought he might be thinking of how best to fire me from school. I had written this essay at four in the morning, when I had given the finger to thinking up a legitimate argument. Orville had asked me to analyze the use of windows in a novel that had nothing to do with windows. I decided to argue that windows were not windows at all; they were all that separated the savage moorland from the civilized home, Thrushcross Grange from Wuthering Heights, even Cathy from her own self-constructed identities. Windows were the barrier between this world and the next, a barrier as ill-defined as the boundary between the reader and the text itself. It was a bullshit parade, and I was the proud mayor. I used the phrases
Jungian realism
and
linear archetypes
, and congratulated myself on achieving a level of douchebaggery I had previously only witnessed in shampoo commercials for men.

I cleared my throat. “What did you think of it, sir?”

Orville looked at me long and hard. In this lighting, his eyes were the size and shape of two olives.

He said, “It was one of the finest papers I’ve ever read by a student.”

I blinked. He had a strange, sadistic smile on his face. I felt like a courtier who was finally receiving the full attention of the king, only to discover it was Henry VIII. The drinks arrived. Mine was green.

“I gather that you do not like what you wrote,” he said.

“It was idiotic,” I said. “Any fool can find obscure patterns in a novel, fabricate an intention behind it, and then trick people into believing it’s relevant. I call that intellectual narcissism.”

“I call it creativity,” Orville said. “The purpose of literature is to teach you how to
think
, not how to be practical. Learning to discover the connective tissue between seemingly unrelated events is the only way we are equipped to understand patterns in the real world. And I did not give you this assignment on a whim. The world has analyzed window symbolism for decades.”

“I did not know that.”

He nodded with an “as I expected” expression. I pressed my lips together and drew the green glass toward me. Here was the first compliment Orville had ever given me. Part of me wanted to accept it—frame it, mount it on my wall the way some people did dead animals—but it didn’t seem right, not when I was convinced of my own foolishness. I peered down at my drink and took a swallow. There was ginger and pear and an unrecognizable alcohol.

“Do you like it?” Orville asked, pointing to my glass.

“No. Can we trade?”

Orville passed me his drink. It was bronze and it tasted like it might have been scotch in its first life.

I said, “I hope you don’t have mono.”

“Do you have
Wuthering Heights
with you?” he said. “I’d like to begin.”

I nodded and removed both books from my bag—my father’s copy, and Orville’s father’s copy. I placed them on the table between us, feeling uncommonly vulnerable. It was as though I were actually handing him my kidney: it wasn’t particularly pretty, and I didn’t quite understand what it did, but it was personal and it was mine. I watched Orville’s movements very closely. He wrapped his fingers around the spine of my father’s book and pulled it toward him with a deep sigh. There was a look of torment on his face that made me furious. Why should the Brontës bring up more painful memories for him than they did for me? He was commandeering my claim to being tragic and misunderstood.

I carefully inched closer to him and told him we should start with the Scene with the Hand, since it was really the centerpiece of the book, wouldn’t he agree? Orville waved me away and found the page himself, like a man who has thought through all of the text’s nuances already, thank you very much. I felt a surge of protectiveness. What if he had a distorted image of this book in his mind? What if he imagined Cathy with long hair? Goodness, the thought.

I cleared my throat. “Can you tell me what this scene means to you? My father was preoccupied with it.”

Orville must not have understood how desperately I wanted an answer, because he was contemplating something quietly on his own. I felt very alone.

After a considerable silence, he mused: “A beautiful scene.”

“Oh?”

“It is a fine presentation of a lover’s anguish,” he said. “Heathcliff, moved by despair, imagines his deceased love everywhere he goes. An imagination infected by pain can take you to terrible places, Samantha. Here, the effort of resuscitating Cathy has left Heathcliff half in the real world, half in the next, forever tortured.”

I had been expecting something a bit more original. I waited a respectable amount of time before saying, “Want to know what I think?”

“Naturally.”

“I think the scene just means that a woman appeared at the window.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“How do you know that someone didn’t appear outside the Brontë parsonage, and Emily decided to put it in a book?”

Orville blinked. “Because we are academics, not fools.”

I said, “Will you please stop overestimating my stupidity? The scene is entirely out of place otherwise. It’s poorly written and doesn’t fit with the rest of the book. You have to wonder why Emily thought to include it at all. It’s probably because this actually happened to her.”

“Please do not attach literal value to a scene whose weight is purely emotional,” said Orville. “How would
you
feel if your sister appeared up at your window after years of being dead?”

I stopped abruptly. I repeated, “
Sister?
”

“Certainly.”

I stared at him in blank horror.

“Heathcliff and Cathy,” he clarified. “They are siblings.”

“No. What?”

“Well,” Orville corrected, “
half
siblings.”

My eyes widened. I was silent for several moments, searching for the right words to express my shock. I felt like a cartoon rodent who had flung himself off a cliff only to be suspended over the abyss.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Samantha,” said Orville. “Read closely. Are we really expected to believe that the respectable Mr. Earnshaw pulls a scrawny, wild-eyed boy off of the polluted London streets, then raises him as his own child—all out of the goodness of his heart? The only explanation is that Earnshaw secretly fathered Heathcliff.”

I looked away, and around the room. It was as though I had just glanced down only to find that I’d been naked all this time. The entire novel took on a new, grotesque hue. Of
course
Cathy and Heathcliff were half siblings. They tattled, they fought, they skipped into the moors hand in hand, and they never had sex. Their devotion to each other never evolved from childlike affection. What had Cathy once proclaimed?
I am Heathcliff, and Heathcliff is me.
I guess she was telling the truth.

I glanced at Orville in defeat. It was incredible, the ease with which other people’s ridiculous ideas always struck me as true. I looked around again. Everything seemed flatter, all of a sudden. There was no more mystery in the lighting, no more romance.

“So that’s it?” I said. “The greatest love story of all time is an advanced case of incest?”

Orville said, “Relax, Samantha. It’s only a story.”

“Nothing is ever just a story,” I said. “Not in a world where windows can be seen as a portal to another world. Does this mean that Emily Brontë was secretly in love with her brother?”

Orville took a long, exhausted breath. “Let’s not regress, shall we?”

“But it
could
have happened, couldn’t it?” I said, growing animated. “Emily’s whole life was a muddle between her fantasy life and her real life. Who’s to say that she didn’t appear at Branwell Brontë’s window one night? Who’s to say the two of them didn’t have a very close personal relationship? What if this was the grand secret my father wanted to share with me?”

“Samantha, please—”

“After all, Cathy was a nutcase, and Emily Brontë was a nutcase; Heathcliff was unstable and so was Branwell. Emily wrote something grotesque and incestuous—maybe it was a reflection of her own life.”

“Please stop saying incorrect things.”

“You don’t believe it’s possible? It wouldn’t be the first time the Brontës put their lives into their books.”

“You cannot evaluate a novel based on the life of an author.”

“Oh? Do you remember how, in
Jane Eyre
, the madwoman sets Rochester’s bed aflame and he almost dies? Branwell also supposedly set his own bed on fire. Coincidence?”

“Branwell’s near death was not the result of an attack by a madwoman.”

“How are you so sure? He lived in a house with three destitute sisters whom he could have saved had he ever gotten a real job. Are you telling me that you don’t think at least one of them wanted him dead?”

Orville regarded me for a moment. “You treat your relatives with extraordinary contempt.”

“I have a right to,” I said. “They split apart my family.”

“They split apart mine, too, and you don’t see me vilifying them.”

I paused. The words seemed to have slipped out of his mouth without permission.

“Another drink?” he said.

“I haven’t finished my first.”

He turned to flag down the lanky waitress, but she had disappeared. He turned back to me.

“Where were we?” he asked.

“You were about to spill some dark secrets.”

“Your problem, Samantha, is that you are trying too hard to find a grand meaning in these novels. Usually, meaning tends to find
you
, in the middle of the night, and when you least expect it.”

“You mean like a murderer?”

“I mean like Cathy Linton’s ghost,” he said. “Emily Brontë’s two eldest sisters—Maria and Elizabeth—died of tuberculosis as children, when Emily, Anne, and Charlotte were still very young. If there is any autobiographical inspiration for this scene in
Wuthering Heights
, then that is it. Have deceased family members and loved ones ever appeared to you in a dream, and felt as real to you as they did in real life? Love, like good fiction, can create reality from nothing. That, Samantha, is the ‘purpose’ of this scene, if you must have one. If a real woman did appear at the window, it would only be because Cathy’s ghost is as real to Heathcliff as anything in the physical world.”

I pressed my lips together. “I see we’ve come back to Frederick Douglass. You believe this scene represents mere emotional truth, while I—correctly—believe that it’s literally the truth.”

“Sometimes you need emotional truth to create literal truth.”

I swirled my drink around and stared into it. “One day, you and I will schedule a two-hour fistfight, and I will show you that it can happen.”

“I look forward to it,” he said.

When he grinned, Orville looked like a wolf. He took his glass in his hand, realized it was empty, and returned it to the table with a smack.

I studied him carefully. “I have a question for you,” I said after a pause.

“Go ahead.”

“Do you know anything about the Warnings of Experience?”

A pause. “The what?”

“The Warnings of Experience. Do you know what that is?”

He frowned. “No.”

I couldn’t tell if I was disappointed or relieved. I said, “All right.”

“Why do you ask?” he said.

“My father. That’s what he said I was to inherit. The Warnings of Experience.”

Orville didn’t say anything for a long time. The room was dark and his eyes were lost to me. I held my own empty glass in my hands, looking down at the way it scattered the muted blue and red lights above us. I waited patiently for a response.

“Thank you, Samantha,” Orville said finally, “for trusting me with that information.”

I shrugged. “I just hoped you’d know what it meant.”

He let out a long breath. I was about to return our attention to
Wuthering Heights
when he said, quite abruptly:

“I’m tired of thinking about this,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

I blinked. “I’m always tired of thinking about this.”

“Good.”

“Does that mean we’re leaving?”

He glanced at his watch. “We’ll have another round,” he said.

Kilt Woman reappeared and to my great shock, James Timothy Orville III ordered two more drinks.