Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  Contract with the World

  A Novel

  Jane Rule

  For Shelagh Day

  Contents

  Introduction

  Joseph Walking

  Mike Hanging

  Alma Writing

  Roxanne Recording

  Allen Mourning

  Carlotta Painting

  A Biography of Jane Rule

  Introduction

  “JOSEPH WALKING,” “MIKE HANGING,” “Alma Writing,” “Roxanne Recording,” “Allen Mourning,” “Carlotta Painting”: three men and three women in their early thirties caught in actions that define them for a moment or for a lifetime. In Contract with the World, written in the late 1970s and first published in 1980, Jane Rule undertook a bold narrative experiment: to tell a story through six characters, shifting the point of view with each chapter. Each chapter immerses the reader in the sensibility of the character who names it, we must see and feel the world through each in turn. While some of the characters already know, desire and/or loath each other, most of the links among them are serendipitous. Joseph’s therapeutic morning walks gradually create connections, if not bonds, among them. Apart from age, they have little in common except that they work at being artists or artisans; Roxanne, Allen, and Carlotta reshape the world through their unique perspective in sounds, photographs, and paint. Alma would write and Mike would sculpt, but they fail as artists. Joseph has no pretensions and instead prints or speaks the words of others. A modest man, he is overcome by the wonder of the ordinary.

  Community, art, desire, the power and limits of language, the miracle of the everyday: the themes explored in this midcareer novel are hallmarks of Rule’s work and had a special resonance for Rule’s readers in 1980. By the late 1970s, newspapers such as The Body Politic in Toronto (for which Rule started writing a column in 1979) and The Gay Community News in Boston had become cultural institutions for the communities they served. And those communities were deeply invested in fiction—as a way to explore and celebrate long-repressed identities, to recover the past, and to imagine the future. Small presses were publishing new fiction that was unlikely to be accepted by mainstream presses and recovering classic lesbian texts, such as the pulp novels of Paula Christian and Ann Bannon. Contract with the World is the first of Rule’s novels to thematically incorporate gay communities, institutions, and politics. Rather than privilege gay identities and idealize community, Rule created characters, straight, gay or bisexual, who are all capable of intolerance, pettiness, and overblown egos as well as sensitivity, generosity, and genuine talent. Alma’s narcissism and class privilege shape her lesbianism as profoundly as brutality and deep-seated conventionality mark Mike’s heterosexuality.

  In the novel that preceded Contract with the World, The Young in One Another’s Arms (1977), Rule had explored the importance of community-building. Individuals, especially vulnerable people, need connection and mutual support to survive. But Rule always maintains an outsider’s perspective, she goes against the grain and against the season. Groups risk developing a mob mentality, attacking anyone whose difference seems to threaten their self-definition. The loose community of outsiders in The Young in One Another’s Arms bond in resistance to brutal state power. In Contract with the World the Surrey suburbanites who attack Carlotta’s portraits of the main characters and those close to them become an unthinking beast, bent on expelling all representations of values that don’t conform to their own. Allen sees their attack, ironically, as a vindication of the power of art.

  The politics of art that Allen values is the power to challenge, to confront complacency and to make us uncomfortable. Carlotta’s portraits achieve their power by presenting her stark, unflattering vision of her friends. She doesn’t try to promote a particular political view, but she tries to make the viewer look directly into the faces of others who don’t mirror them. And that, too, is the power of Contract with the World: moving from one character to another, taking the part of each one whether we like them or not, we must reexamine the hidden clauses of our own contract with the world. The reader who looks for simple affirmation will be disappointed, but the reader who is willing to risk the discomfort of self-examination and, possibly, growth will be richly rewarded.

  Marilyn Schuster

  Smith College

  January 2005

  Joseph Walking

  JOSEPH RABINOWITZ WAS PUZZLED about going crazy. Describing his symptoms to a doctor who disapproved of psychiatry, Joseph was advised to walk ten miles a day to prevent manic breakdown. Since he lived less than a mile from the school where he taught industrial arts, commuting on foot did not complete the requirement, so Joseph set out at six in the morning and walked until eight-thirty, when it was time to arrive at school to set up his classes for the day.

  His walking was lonely at first, except for the mute acknowledgment of joggers, nearly all male and nearly all at least ten years older than Joseph, who was twenty-five, bellies pregnant with middle age in their Adidas running suits, blue, red, or manly green, shoes to match. That Joseph could attempt to maintain his sanity in his ordinary clothes was a relief to him, and he was careful to make no particular road a habit so that only very near where he lived did he have the embarrassment of sharing the embarrassment with a familiar heart patient or health freak.

  Walking did calm him. He arrived at school able to talk only enough to give adequate instructions to his students. For months he was not even tempted into excitement of the sort that used to start him babbling. His reputation as the school loony began to fade. He even acquired a new nickname, the Rabbit, used only behind his back, as “raving Rabinowitz” had been, but affectionately. Joseph knew how to teach, and he cared for his students as he did for all growing things, learning their individual habits and needs.

  Once his body became accustomed to the exercise, however, he sometimes forgot he walked out of necessity and was threatened again with that old joy. The fires, robberies, and accidents which are the urban raw materials for most people’s nightmares and TV entertainments did not attract Joseph or disturb in him anything but ordinary fear and sorrow. But a child running, a light-struck cloud, a small pink shell, bloom on a dying dogwood could shock him with a wonder he needed to express or explain. He had to struggle away from speech, swallowing words as he might his gorge, and run, run until he had no breath left. One morning, walking the seawall around Stanley Park, he saw nothing more extraordinary than a gull landing on the near orange tower of Lion’s Gate Bridge, and the sickness of words was upon him.

  Joseph tried to think of these attacks as something like hayfever. His friend Ann Geary could have violent spasms of sneezing, set off by things as seemingly harmless as a mouthful of stringed beans or the proximity of blooming ragweed. Joseph had even tried her antihistamines for a while. If it weren’t for the embarrassment it caused other people, Joseph might even have enjoyed himself. But just as one couldn’t teach through a prolonged fit of sneezing, Joseph couldn’t teach through attacks of words which could flow out of him suddenly at the sight of a boy locking type into the chase, hand and key together so articulate Joseph could not keep silent.

  If only he had been good with words, as he was with his hands, perhaps what seemed an illness would have been a gift. What came out of him could not be called poetry unless found poetry, everything from biblical quotations to lines of popular songs, juxtaposed in a way that seemed to soil as it clarified.

  John Geary, Ann’s young and dying husband, told Joseph, “You’ve got to learn to shut up.”

  John kept his head shaved because his hair had begun to come out in handfuls, and he wore a bulk of clothes to conceal a skeleton daily being robbed of flesh. He did not want his two small daughters t
o encounter sharp edges as they climbed about him in these last months of his life, and he asked Joseph for dinner often to distract Ann from his own lack of appetite.

  He looked like a convict and was, under a death sentence he no more understood than a character in Kafka. At his angriest, he would say, “Hell, I may have more time than you do.” At his gentlest, the game he liked to play was “If we had all the time in the world, Joseph, what would we do with it?”

  Joseph’s honest answer would have been “Keep from going crazy from day to day just as we do now,” but instead of answering, he encouraged John in grandiose schemes, one night space travel, another, conversion of the world to solar power, harvesting of the seas.

  “Do you think the world’s dying, Joseph?”

  Questions like that John never asked in front of Ann or the children.

  “When the pain is very bad,” Ann confided, “he sings to be sure he won’t moan.”

  Joseph walked to keep from singing, sometimes now not only in the early morning but in the late afternoon as well and often on into the evening if he was not spending it with Ann and John, hundreds, gradually thousands of miles through the city of Vancouver, out into the university grant lands, down along the beach, among the dog walkers, scavengers, and natural solitaries.

  On a negatively safe morning, a mist, heavy with the smoke of fall slash burning, hung low over the water, obscuring the north shore mountains. As Joseph made his way along the beach, his eyes smarting, he was composing a joyless sermon to practical men who insisted that slash burning was simply good housekeeping, a safety precaution, no hazard to health. It was a hazard to pleasure, and didn’t people have a right to protect the quality of their visual life? Joseph’s preoccupation with sharing a headache with all greater Vancouver kept him from seeing the camera until he had nearly tripped over the tripod.

  “Watch it!”

  Joseph looked toward the shout and saw a man of about his age, dressed in a London Fog raincoat, standing beside a car entirely wrapped in plastic.

  “Is it for an ad?” Joseph asked.

  “Heavens, no!” the man replied. “It’s Art.”

  Joseph laughed, disconcerted and delighted at the lightly self-mocking tone in which the explanation was offered. “Is it yours?” he asked, gesturing toward the car.

  “The camera is, and it’s far too expensive for you to fall over or dance with or whatever you were intending to do,” the man answered, walking toward his possession protectively.

  He was tall, slightly built, uncommonly handsome, and the flirtation in his scolding made it evident to Joseph that he was homosexual. As he did with men of any other race, Joseph prepared to be particularly courteous and friendly, behavior others might have challenged as inverse prejudice, but was simply kindness overcoming timidity.

  “Can you get a picture on a day like this?”

  “I chose a day like this. It’s for Arts Canada. There has to be something subtle about it.”

  Joseph regarded the plastic-wrapped car again in silence.

  “The only problem is … I need a swimmer.”

  “A swimmer?”

  “Just off in the background, in his trunks, at the edge of the sea.”

  “On a day like this?”

  “Yes … I wonder, would you mind … that is, if you’ve got on decent shorts?”

  It seemed far too outrageous a request to be anything but innocent.

  Two months later there indeed was Joseph Rabinowitz, shivering in his shorts at the edge of the smoke-misted sea, just a few yards away from a car wrapped snugly in plastic, on the cover of Arts Canada.

  He and Allen Dent were both looking at it and laughing at the memory and achievement of their first meeting, while Pierre served them tea in mock-indignant silence.

  Joseph had been too shy in those early days of his friendship with them to tease Pierre out of sulking, and later, when he was accustomed to the moods of the household, he realized that Pierre enjoyed jealousy as some women seem to, particularly those who are minimally attractive and insecure with husbands they admire and can’t believe their good fortune to be married to. Pierre, seven years younger than Allen, found by him in a gay bar in Montreal when Pierre was sixteen, exaggerated their inequality in any way open to him. Allen was “the man,” Pierre the boy wife, adoring, dependent.

  When he was convinced that Joseph was a friend rather than a rival, he confessed, “I hate Allen to tell people he picked me up in a bar. It’s so unromantic. Why couldn’t he have found me, as he found you, on a beach and picked me up and taken me home like a beautiful, fragile shell?”

  It was a ridiculous and accurate image of himself, and he dressed to accent that fragility, a body as slender and small as a ten-year-old’s, eyes large and dark as the eyes in the Foster Parents’ Plan ads.

  “The only way to legalize a taste for young boys is to keep an undernourished orphan,” Allen said, not only about Pierre but in front of him.

  But none of Allen’s insults, delivered in the same light tone he used to mock himself or his work, seemed to trouble Pierre. What did hurt or offend him never made any sense to Joseph and seemed of no interest to Allen, who would ignore him until he decided to get over his pique without help.

  A peculiarity of the relationship was that the longer Joseph knew them, the less he saw of the negative flirtation between them. It was as if they displayed all the faults they could be accused of as a testing defense, unnecessary with good friends. Instead, Joseph saw how protective Allen was of Pierre, never encouraging the great range of his timidities but reassuring him, helping him to small new self-confidences in everything from keeping a checking account to reading books.

  “I’d send him back to school,” Allen confided, “but he simply couldn’t take it. He’s such a natural victim.”

  Allen never talked with that kind of candid concern about his work. His increasing success as a freelance photographer, a constant source of pride for Pierre, made Allen the more self-mocking. He called himself vanity’s pimp, a political window dresser, a voyeur, a camera for hire.

  “He pretends to be hard and cynical,” Pierre explained to Joseph, “but he is really very sensitive and suicidal. He cares about his work. He is a real artist, a genius.”

  “I have one ambition,” Allen said on more than one occasion, “to grow up to be a dirty old man and the greatest pornographer of the century.”

  Aside from his natural flirtatiousness, directed at anyone, male or female, who had not grossly offended him, Allen was, in fact, nearly a prudish man. He never told dirty jokes and was not an admirer of parts of the human bodies. His taste was for an innocence that could accommodate him, like Joseph’s.

  “I do like you. Joseph,” he would say. “You never stay long enough to be a bore, and you’re the only person I know who believes what I say.”

  At such statements Pierre ran thin fingers through his long dark hair, listening for criticism of himself in the praise of someone else. He liked Joseph because he could be forgiven the pleasure he gave Allen, because he stopped around even more often when Allen was away on his frequent picture-taking assignments and let Pierre brag/complain about Allen’s success and Pierre’s loneliness and neglect.

  “Once, when he’d been away for a month, sailing on some rich man’s yacht, I was sure he wasn’t coming back. I was desperate, I was so lonely and frightened. I started wandering around the city—not at night, just in the daytime. I don’t really know Vancouver. He doesn’t understand why I wasn’t frightened in Montreal, but I know Montreal. I’d never get arrested in Montreal. I got busted in the men’s room at The Bay. It was awful. It cost him a terrible amount of money, and he wasn’t even angry with me. He never even let me explain, and he bought me this beautiful ring.”

  It was a diamond of the sort advertised in the Hudson’s Bay department store ads under the caption “Diamonds are forever.”

  Joseph didn’t mention Allen and Pierre to Ann and John, who would probably find
them bizarre and unsympathetic, a symptom of Joseph’s own instability. He was, therefore, embarrassed to see that issue of Arts Canada on their coffee table. John was past saying anything about it, but Ann nodded to it and gave him a polite, puzzled look.

  “The photographer’s a friend of mine. I was doing him a favor,” Joseph explained on a single note of laughter.

  “How interesting,” Ann said, and she meant for him, not for herself.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “At the library.”

  “Joseph,” John called through the conversation, “help me downstairs.”

  John had an old printing press in his basement. There, before John knew he was dying, Joseph had spent hours with him, at first teaching him how to use it, then listening to him dream aloud about this archaic and at the same time revolutionary machine, by means of which he would somehow—he had not ever decided how—change the world. Over the press he had tacked the statement “He who first shortened the labor of Copyists by the device of Movable Types was disbanding hired Armies, and cashiering most Kings and Senates, and creating a whole new Democratic World: he had invented the Art of Printing.”

  “Set up anything,” John said, “and let’s run it awhile. I just like the sound of it.”

  Joseph took the stick and set quickly:

  What I aspired to be,

  And was not, comforts me.

  “Nice,” John said. “Who is it?”

  “Browning,” Joseph said.

  Joseph lifted the chase into place, thinking how many months it had been since John was able to do it himself. Three-dimensional now only because of the number of Ann’s sweaters he wore, he could hardly sit up. Joseph adjusted the pins, pulled the wheel, and threw the switch, setting the old machine into the rhythmic motion they both loved. Then he took a stack of bookmarks to feed into it. Above the sound, he could hear John singing:

  No use crying