EMILY BRONTË

I’d been thinking about Emily, about her ravaging love story, ever since Ingrid had told us she’d been commissioned to write the music for a dance version of Wuthering Heights that a Dutch troupe was developing.

̶ I can’t wait to hear what music she’ll come up with!
̶ Whatever it is, it’ll be powerful. She loves Wuthering Heights as much as I do.

A gust of wind rattles the brittle grass; softly, the soughing of the breeze resumes.

̶ Marietta, I am Emily.
̶ Like a million other readers!
̶ You think so?
̶ I’m sure of it.
̶ Yes, I suppose so. It’s amazing, isn’t it, how she bewitches us?
̶ It is. When I was seventeen I was quite in love with her. And that feeling has never really diminished. It’s very subtle, the sexual power she exerts, but no less strong for that.
̶ How do you explain it?
̶ The book doesn’t flatter the reader, it guards its secrets. And that, as every woman knows, is an aphrodisiac.
̶ And yet she died a virgin. Unknown.
̶ But not unknowing. She may or may not have loved someone at Law Hill School, but what’s certain is that she loved herself. That’s enough to know the essential.
̶ You think so?
̶ Yes.
̶ I don’t.
̶ My view, Sprague, is this: All the mirroring in the book, the mixing of names and genders, suggests a lesbian consciousness. When you understand the role of Heathcliff, it all becomes clear.

I open the Evian.

̶  How could I have missed it before?

I pass you the bottle. When you give it back, I drink a mouthful and find myself savouring it: So this is the taste of transparency.

̶  Did you really see that scene as Catherine confessing to Nelly her dilemma in choosing marriage partners?
̶  Yes, I suppose I did.
̶  You are sentimental, Sprague.
̶  I told you, when I give up haiku, I’m going to write a Harlequin Romance.

In your sly smile I see my future: I don’t have Emily’s genius, I cannot write a novel as vicious as hers. Instead, I will write one that walks the knife-edge of tenderness, and when I’m done something more will remain than the sheen of my blood on the blade.

̶  For every lesbian, that scene with Nelly is perfectly transparent. Catherine is confessing that she’s going to deny her homosexuality, and she’s aware that it’s a fatal mistake. Remember, she says, ‘If all else remained and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger’.
̶  And in rejecting the stranger, she becomes a stranger to herself.
̶  Yes. Without Heathcliff, she loses all sense of who she is. She didn’t die after giving birth to Cathy, she died when she turned her back on Heathcliff.

You’re pushing one-seventy. I caress your cheek with the back of my fingers; you kiss my fingertips.