Changing Heaven by Jane Urquhart Page B

by purple hill.
    She carefully caps her fountain pen. She walks across the bare floor. She answers the phone.
    “I’m back.”
    “Yes.”
    “I went away and now I’m back.”
    “Where did you go?”
    “Venice.”
    “Why?”
    “Tintoretto.”
    Ann gasps. She remembers the square inch. “You’re sure,” she says now in confusion, “that it was Tintoretto? Oh, God,” she murmurs, “Tintoretto.”
    “The drapery,” he explains. “And the angels,” he adds.
    “What?”
    “It doesn’t matter. We’ll go for a drive. You’ll come with me for a drive. Is it okay with you?”
    No, thinks Ann. “Yes,” she says.
    “Well, it’s not okay for me,” he says. “This is not okay with me. This is a disaster for me. I can’t do this.”
    “All right,” says Ann quietly, amazed at her disappointment. What is a disaster? she attempts to wonder. But she knows, she knows.
    “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. And we both agree to one ride together: the first and the last.”
    “Yes,” says Ann.
    “We’ll drive, we’ll talk, and then we’ll go back. And that will be that.”
    Jesus, thinks Ann as she replaces the receiver, I knew exactly who he was. He didn’t even have to identify himself.
    Although she has been on the phone for only a few moments, the afternoon has turned to evening, and when she returns to her page she has to light her kitchen to see what she has written.
    Ann is speechless in the car, overcome by a combination of anxiety and expectation. They are driving the highway, fast; green signs blurring past the side window she has turned towards. He is talking.
    “Look,” he says, “I’m not in love with you. I just really desire you but I’m not in love with you. What this is all about is that I want to go to bed with you.”
    There are ugly subdivisions now all along the highway where it once was green. Ann wishes that she were a child again, that she had brought along her paper dolls to distracther. Ann wishes she were a paper doll. Then she could change, in a second, into something else-or someone else could change her by folding paper tabs over her cardboard shoulders. She could change into a girl going to a ball or into a cowgirl dressed for the rodeo. They are nearing the airport. She could change, she remembers, into a stewardess, or a shipboard nurse. What she wants now is to change her mind about this man with whom, she realizes, she has inexplicably fallen in love.
    “And,” he is continuing, “if there is any chance of you falling in love with me then we stop right now.”
    Ann notices the sky above the highway darkening, turning asphalt grey. “I won’t,” she says to him, twisting in the seat to examine his profile.
    “I’m in love with someone else,” he says, staring fiercely ahead. “We have a wonderful, warm relationship.”
    Ann knows he is married. She hates the word relationship; the way it sounds in his mouth. She watches the flakes of snow melt on the windshield of the car, the dancing swirls of white on the road ahead. She understands that until now this has been a summer road for her. Weather and the highway have not yet come together in her life. He has turned on the windshield wipers and the headlights, for now it is getting quite dark.
    “This is bad weather and it’s getting dark,” she says. “We should be going back.”
    “Back!” He throws both hands off the steering wheel and brings them back down again in a slapping gesture. “Back? We never should have come out here in the first place. This is crazy.” He shakes his head. “We must think of a place to meet, somewhere out here on the highway. Just once and then never again.”
    “We should be driving in the other direction,” Ann says to him. “We are too far from the lake.”
    “What has the lake got to do with any of this? We could meet here.” He jerks his head in the direction of one of a series of highway hotels.
    “I’m used to the lake on this highway,” says Ann. “It was