Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

Talking to a stranger

  Naming the sorrow you’ve seen

  Too many bad times, too many sad times

  Nobody knows what you mean.

  Joseph joined him on the chorus:

  But if somehow you could

  Pack up your sorrows

  And give them all to me

  You would lose them,

  I know how to use them

  Give them all to me.

  And listened again:

  No use rambling

  Walking in the shadows

  Tracking a wandering star

  No one beside you, no one to hide you

  And nobody knows what you are.

  “But if somehow,” they sang again together, “you could pack up your sorrows …” until John sang the last sad verse alone:

  No use roaming

  Going by the roadside

  Seeking a satisfied mind

  Too many highways, too many byways

  And nobody’s walking behind.

  Joseph kept on working, hardly able to see, more ridiculously exposed than he had been at the edge of that autumn sea, with a friend who would be dead before there was time to laugh about it.

  It was the picture on the cover of Arts Canada which was also responsible for putting Joseph back in touch with Mike Trasco, a man he had known in his student days when they were in some of the same courses in education at the University of British Columbia. Joseph answered the phone to “No shit, is that you on the cover of that magazine?”

  When Joseph admitted that it was, Mike wanted to argue about it.

  “I didn’t take the picture,” Joseph protested. “I just happened to be walking by.”

  “In your shorts?”

  Joseph laughed.

  “Soft sculpture is a pile of crap.”

  “Actually, it’s a car,” Joseph said.

  “Listen, if you’re so big with Arts Canada, I want you to come over and see some of the stuff I’m doing.”

  “I haven’t got anything to do with Arts Canada.”

  “But I’m working. I’m doing the real thing.”

  Unable to be rude, Joseph agreed to meet him at an unconventionally early hour at his studio—a shed in the back alley behind Trasco’s house.

  Joseph walked toward his appointment before the late fall sun was up, the time of morning when only the more modest of workers waited at bus stops, carrying shopping bags and lunch kits rather than briefcases, looking cold in thin coats, coughing. He walked several blocks along the bus route, then chose a residential street where he could watch the first waking lights of family houses, listen to the thud of the morning paper against front doors and the bicycle whir of a paper boy approaching behind him. Dawn on a flat block in the district of Kitsilano was no more than a gray gradually brightening to day, windows fading into small stucco houses, like creatures up on their haunches, approached by six or eight concrete steps, painted red or green, kept forlorn company by winter-saddened hydrangeas or rhododendrons. Even the mountain ash trees had been stripped of their berries by the last migrating birds. The only leaves still falling were from alders, flat gray-green and sodden in the gutters.

  Joseph was now coming into an area of new apartment blocks and old houses, each uncomfortable in the other’s presence. Mike Trasco’s was the last house left on his block, squashed between two long three-story buildings like the token filling in a bready sandwich. There was no room between his fence and his house for a walkway to the backyard, and Joseph decided against presenting himself at the front door, recalling that Mike was married, with children. He walked, instead, around the corner and approached the house from the alley, narrow and cluttered with garbage cans.

  He found Mike at the door of his shed, the welcome smell of coffee coming from a pot on the wood stove.

  “You are really beginning to lose your hair,” Mike greeted him with loud cheerfulness.

  Joseph looked up at the vigor of Mike’s growing abundance, fiercely pruned and finely shining black, the same light of health in his black eyes. He had not seemed young even in his student days, his virility so accustomed that there was nothing of the boy left in him. He was the sort of man who would be in his prime for years before he suddenly, unaccountably, shrank into age. And what he observed of Joseph was true. At twenty-seven he had begun to move from boyhood into middle age, having inherited the nearly colorless fairness of his English mother, nothing but a tendency to stoop from his Jewish father. Mike Trasco lived in a season Joseph would never experience.

  The mug of coffee Mike thrust at him warmed his hands and made him feel oddly, domestically welcomed in the clutter of the shed, where the only places to sit were on stacks of lumber or metal.

  “There’s nothing here,” Mike explained. “I haven’t got the room,” and he glared as he looked around at the limits of his space. “But I’ve got some drawings and some models, to give you an idea anyway. I’m trying to get it together to rent real space, but the price on it these days! Guys talk in square feet like they thought they meant quarter acres.”

  He had got out a large notebook and was flipping through it energetically.

  “Are you teaching these days?” Joseph asked.

  “No, I’m not cut out for it, you know. I haven’t got the patience. Your own kids, you can belt them one when they need it. The punks I had to deal with … no way. Here we are. Now just take a look at this to get an idea.”

  Joseph moved close to Mike in order to see what he was looking at. It was characteristic of Mike not to be able to give space even in such a circumstance. What Joseph saw, peering around Mike’s large shoulder, was what looked like a plan for something part bench, part fence, part boat.

  “Wood?” he asked.

  “Yeah, clean lines but my own.” Mike frowned. “Now that’s something to look at, to recognize. That outsized garbage bag on the Arts Canada cover, it’s a woman’s work. I could tell in a minute, didn’t even have to look. They’re all doing monumental domestic crap. Soft sculpture! It’s a joke! Now look, look at this one.”

  Again Mike blocked Joseph’s view, but what part of the drawing he could see looked like a pile of discarded desk chairs.

  “Do you find them or build them?” Joseph asked.

  “Built them. Things don’t need to be rescued. Found art is bullshit. Form has to be rescued from usefulness.”

  “You must have to be quite a carpenter.”

  Mike turned at Joseph and glared.

  Joseph’s one note of laughter ended high and hopeful.

  “A carpenter builds things. A sculptor builds objects of art.”

  “I only meant … the same tools.”

  There was a timid rattle of the door latch.

  “What is it?” Mike shouted.

  The door opened, and a boy of about four came in. “Time to eat.”

  “Oh.” Mike looked undecidedly at his sketchbook, then closed it and shoved it away. “Come eat.”

  “Thanks, I’ve had breakfast,” Joseph explained. “I need to be getting along to school.”

  “At seven o’clock?”

  “It’s over an hour’s walk.”

  “Take a bus, for Christ’s sake,” Mike said, a compelling hand on Joseph’s shoulder. “And at least have another cup of coffee.”

  Joseph did not want to meet Mike’s wife because he did not want to see Mike being a husband and father, but, short of explaining the necessity of his walking, which he would not do, he had no ready excuse.

  Not until he actually met Alma did Joseph realize he had in his imagination married Mike to quite another kind of woman. Alma was tall, ample-bodied, with a Nordic fairness as shining as Mike’s Polish darkness. What surprised Joseph was not her good looks but her intimidating confidence and its effect on Mike.

  Mike Trasco, who had seemed to Joseph grandly, confidently male, became in the presence of his wife blunderingly assertive, behavior she tolerated alternately with amused condescension and superior scorn. She didn’t shout
at him, “Polack! Barbarian!” She hardly spoke to him at all. But her northern eyes, as cold and clear as a well-below-freezing sky, and the serene planes of her face locked him out of her approval with finality. After fifteen minutes in her company, Mike’s eyes took on a look of stunned rage. Joseph, who had not before felt in enough sympathy with him to seek him out, became, because of that look, Mike’s friend.

  Joseph did not dislike Alma, and it would have been impossible at that first meeting to disapprove of her. She did not charm, but her presence had to be admired, calm at the center of all that masculine noise, from squalling one-year-old in his high chair to bellowing husband at the foot of the table.

  “Why in hell call me in if the meal’s not on the table?”

  Shortly she placed a plate before him, mounded with slices of rare roast beef, two stuffed baked potatoes, green beans, and sliced tomatoes. She and the two children were having an ordinary breakfast of fruit juice and boiled eggs. Joseph had accepted a glass of orange juice rather than coffee, which he nearly spilled at the moment Mike’s hand slammed down on the tray of the baby’s high chair and he shouted, “Eat! Don’t dream. You can sleep after breakfast.” The four-year-old did not look up from his egg. Alma watched her husband as if she might be attending an ethnic movie.

  He seemed to Joseph a fraud of a father, of a husband, perhaps of an artist, too, with all his belligerent talk of aesthetics. But before Joseph left that breakfast hour, he had offered to lend Mike some of his own tools and to see what influence Allen Dent might have with Arts Canada.

  Joseph took a bus partway back to school, sharing it with a number of students, until he saw, in a garden he looked out at while the bus was loading new passengers, the first Christmas rose. Joseph had to get off the bus and walk, even though he would be late for work.

  He did not discover for some weeks that Mike’s extraordinary breakfast was really his dinner. He worked at a downtown nightclub as doorman and bouncer six nights a week, came home at three or four in the morning, and worked at sketches and models for sculpture until Alma got up and cooked him a meal sometime between six and seven in the morning. He slept through the late morning and afternoon.

  What puzzled Joseph for a time was the apparent material comfort in the house when Mike was obviously pressed for funds. Mike, who could rail at nearly anything his wife or children did, never commented on the good china and glassware that were used every day on a handsome dining-room table, the good-looking clothes his children wore, the expensive toys that blocked the front walk, the English baby carriage. The things that surrounded Mike, aside from the shell of the house, were as unlikely as his wife.

  Finally Mike confessed, “I pay the rent. I put the food on the table. If Alma’s parents want to clutter up the place with their sort of junk, it’s all right with me.”

  For Joseph it was disappointing to have so simple an explanation not only for the mystery of the things in the house but for Alma’s sense of superiority. He was immediately less impressed by her and more critical, silently taking sides with Mike even at his belligerent worst.

  “It’s easier to dislike the rich than to make money,” Allen Dent observed, having chosen for Alma the moment he met the Trascos.

  “It’s easier to dislike the straights than to be one,” Pierre countered; for him no man as beautiful to look at as Mike could be basically bad. “You’re jealous.”

  “I’m incapable of jealousy, and in this case you’re fawning over the classic castrating male. He’d kill you.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” Pierre said sadly.

  “I can’t abide people who are serious about their work,” Allen said, “particularly if they’re bad at it.”

  “Is he bad at it?” Joseph asked.

  “Well … no,” Allen admitted, “but he might as well be since he can’t be great.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s all he wants,” Allen said. “Why do you think he married a woman like Alma?”

  “Are you going to help him?” Joseph asked. “Can you?”

  “It would be unkind,” Allen said.

  “Love is,” Pierre said.

  Allen ignored the remark. Joseph wasn’t sure how much of a teasing cliché it was, how much a real message.

  “Well, I’ll see,” Allen said, “but as I told him, he’s got to build something first, not just a model.”

  As he walked with Mike down among the warehouses on the Vancouver waterfront, looking for space, Joseph’s concern for his friend shifted from pity to pleasure. In this neighborhood, Mike’s muscular swagger and big voice were natural to him and right for his friends there. He returned quick jabs to the shoulder with men half his size and laughed at every greeting. Here was the only place Joseph saw Mike diffident before men twice his age, who embraced him and said things like: “Look at the head of hair on him! Look at those shoulders!”

  These were the streets on which Mike had grown up, and though the houses had long since been torn down and the women had disappeared, many of the men stayed on to work as loaders and drivers.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t come back here,” Mike said, “not to work, I mean.”

  But it was here he could make deals of the sort he understood, reductions in rent for a few heisted bottles, traded goods and favors among people he knew just how far he could trust. If he felt too at home to work as hard as he might have under the eyes of his skeptical wife, distractions made him cheerful. The jokes he could not put up with from anyone else didn’t threaten his status here. So he finally settled on space in a warehouse right by the water.

  There Mike began to build from the first sketch he had shown Joseph, proceeding as any boatbuilder might at first, so that he had to tolerate only jokes about the seaworthiness of his efforts. With his childhood friends Mike didn’t argue that what he made must be redeemed from worth, but they saw it happen before their eyes, a prow turning into a fence, turning into a bench.

  “Now don’t bullshit me, Mike. What is it?”

  Mike laughed loudly and happily.

  But to Joseph, who preferred to drop in on Mike at the warehouse now, he would talk earnestly, ideas patched together from old notes taken in an art history course ten years ago. However he put it, with whatever historical authority and elegant terminology, all Joseph could gather from it was that art for Mike must have one quality, one virtue: it must be useless.

  Joseph was not argumentative. He was often drawn to people for the contradictions they offered to his own life or way of thinking. Because Joseph cared about a thing first for its function, then for its beauty, he found Mike’s disdain for either as attractive as his hair.

  “If you don’t know how to envy, how can you think?” Allen asked one day.

  Joseph, walking, wondered if he ever did think, properly in the sense Allen meant. Joseph’s habit of mind was to wonder or daydream. Any systematic process was toward a solution to a particular problem, and he did that as a way to avoid thinking … or feeling. Envy? The only person Joseph had ever envied was himself when language charged through him and words flashed out of him and fell like burning flowers.

  Allen envied nearly everyone for what he scorned in them and in himself, sexual appetite and worldly ambition.

  “If I were not essentially frivolous, I would have been a monk,” Allen was fond of saying, at which Pierre would giggle.

  “Are you religious?” Joseph asked.

  “Not at all,” Allen answered, clownishly wistful.

  Pierre, alone with Joseph, said, “Allen is my religion. Sex for me is prayer.”

  Joseph wondered if some women talked together as Pierre tried to talk with Joseph. He suspected not. It was not the feminine in Pierre that baffled Joseph; it was his passionate inferiority. No woman Joseph had ever known enjoyed being inferior. But children sometimes did, children of a good father, as John Geary had been.

  “If I have walked seven thousand three hundred miles in the last two years and am twenty-seven years old, how
many miles will I have walked by the time I’m thirty-five?” Joseph asked aloud as he walked, trying to avoid bitter questions about death. “Good fathers die is not the answer.”

  Joseph mourned John Geary in his children’s faces and proposed to their mother nearly at once. Ann asked him not to buy her a ring of any sort. She became his wife with the wedding ring she had already worn for ten years, and Joseph told neither Allen and Pierre nor Mike about the ring or the wedding. None of them knew where or how he lived, and gradually he forgot to wonder whether or not that was strange since they all seemed to accept the terms of the friendship without question. He went on dropping in with the same irregular frequency, rarely staying longer than an hour, feeling as wholly there with his untold life as with his interior bones and organs.

  Joseph imagined that if a novel were ever written about the household he found himself living in, he would be represented as an empty space, reserved as if for an antique chair off being mended. Energy centered on Ann, for whom life had to go on quite ordinarily. Joseph had married her for that reason. She had married him, he could only guess, because he had asked her and because it was ordinary for her to have a husband to help pay the bills and raise the children. Joseph was very grateful for the children, who took up so much space for Ann that his absences were no great deprivation for her. The only place he’d been able to fill was a place he had already had, in the basement working at the old printing press. Called to dinner, he still felt more a kindly welcomed guest than a husband. It was not Ann’s doing. Joseph had never managed to live where he lived, though he did not ever eat, make love, or sleep anywhere else.

  “We don’t have to have a child,” he said to Ann. “There are two already.”

  She was not listening to his words but to his desire to give her pleasure, pure pleasure.

  “You’re an artist in bed,” she said to him.

  He was flattered, but he was aware that he should rather have been a husband for her, a father for her children.

  Occasionally he asked Ann to walk with him, but together they never went anywhere, only along the boulevards and into the grant land bush, the children trailing or kiting ahead out of sight. She took his hand sometimes, and, though he knew they looked like a settled married couple out with their children, he felt more like a high school boy, too shy in courtship to have it ever come to anything. Some months ago her mother had come to visit and had taken photographs. Joseph was surprised to find his own image among them, there on the summer lawn. Ann kept one of the pictures of the four of them tucked into her dressing-table mirror. There was no picture of John, even in the children’s rooms. But Joseph knew he still returned to her and to the children in their dreams. Joseph could not rid himself of the expectation of his resurrection and return. But it was not John’s place Joseph could not fill. It was his own there by her side, though he loved her. He walked and walked away to Allen and Pierre, to Mike, or to Mike and Alma, a household so substantial, so real in its tensions and noise, everyone from squalling baby to bellowing husband present compared to himself and the woman and children he went home to, but never mentioned.