Changing Heaven (9 page)

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.

But Arthur, facing in the opposite direction, does not see this. He is too busy with the flaming drapery, too busy trying – as his father sees when he opens the door-to put the fire out with his bare hands.

A
NN’S MOTHER
is brushing out her daughter’s hair, preparing her for the dance in the Presbyterian church basement.

In the face of this dance, this reality, which looms as large as a freighter in the harbour of her imagination, Ann is unable to exchange her auburn curls for the preferred long black curtain of hair. She is unable, too, to exchange her grey pleated skirt and cashmere sweater for a wind-tossed dark cloak, dampened by rain. The failure of her imagination, at this point, appals her. As she looks out the kitchen window she sees only the back of the neighbouring house on Glen Grove Avenue, several fruit trees whose leaves detach in a light wind, Toronto autumn twilight, and her own garage. Tonight is her first dance. She is fourteen.

“Sit still,” her mother says.

Ann stiffens the muscles in her neck against the pull of the brush. Everything around her is in sharp focus; the waxed linoleum, the glass-covered kitchen clock, the ungainly handle and buckle lock on the refrigerator door, one knife and one fork on the gleaming kitchen table. She is terrified, practically paralyzed. After the torturous brushing of hair Ann will be forced, by her mother, to eat. Then she will be forced, by her mother, to go to the dance.

“Aren’t you going to have supper?” she asks, now.

“Daddy’s coming home later.”

“Daddy’s
coming home
tonight?”

“You knew that,” says Ann’s mother, tying a ribbon in Ann’s hair-which has grown, under the attentions of the brush, into something resembling brown candy floss. “Business,” she explains.

Sometimes Ann’s father inhabits a territory called Ungava, a vast trackless region in Arctic Quebec where there may or may not be minerals. Sometimes Ann’s father inhabits a territory called “the bush,” the middle north of eight out of ten Canadian provinces, where there also may or may not be minerals. Sometimes he inhabits a region called Bay Street, where he attempts to convince millionaires that minerals exist in the other two regions, whether they do or not. The territory that he rarely inhabits is this kitchen, where Ann is experiencing a terror of anticipation concerning a church basement. Though graced by a startling imagination, (as evidenced by his belief in invisible minerals), and given to spectacular appearances, in bush planes, near the docks of Ann’s various summer camps, Ann’s father is neither vain nor showy. He prefers the midnight chill of an Arctic tent or a cabin overheated by wood-stove to the comfort of wall-to-wall carpets and French Provincial furniture. He is hardly ever home.

“Does he … did he know about the dance?” asks Ann.

“I don’t know. …” Ann’s mother is removing a tuna fish casserole from the oven. “I don’t think so … why?”

Ann does not wish to risk the possibility of the spectacular appearance of a bush plane on the church lawn. Once, her father buzzed one of her backyard birthday parties and five little girls ran tearfully home.

“Oh … nothing,” she says.

She closes her eyes tight, inhales the fishy odour of the casserole and attempts to be Catherine preparing for the arrival of Edgar Linton at Wuthering Heights. No banal bush planes there, buzzing doggedly through wind. There, financial security rides up from the valley to the heights in a stunning leather coach, pulled by charcoal-coloured horses. The calendar on the wall would not reveal her father’s itinerary (Ungava, Goose Bay, Yellowknife), would sport instead a series of grim black crosses made by Heathcliff on the days that Catherine had not spent with him.
And Heathcliff, himself, would be brooding about this; in candlelight, in firelight, in moonlight. But he could never successfully brood, Ann knows, under the fluorescent light over this kitchen sink. Sink light, thinks Ann, attempting to banish it with her imagination.

But it is no use. Fear causes even the vaguest of animals to pay attention. The outer world has never been so clear.

Ann is afraid of two things: one is a certainty and the other is almost a certainty. She is afraid that there will be no one resembling Heathcliff in the church basement-a certainty–and she is afraid that no one will ask her to dance. Her mother, driving Ann through the autumnal streets that lead towards the dance, is afraid of something else altogether.

After she has stopped the car near the church door she looks directly into her daughter’s eyes. “This is your first dance,” she says.

“Yes, mother.”