Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  These days even mentioning Alma could bring the look of a wounded animal into Mike’s eyes. And that bewildered fury always touched Joseph with tenderness and unease. Alma was not a territory to conquer but more like sculpture as Mike talked about it, monumental, occupying her own space, hard as stone.

  “Harder,” he remembered Carlotta saying. “We have to be …”

  Why didn’t she or Alma respond to Mike’s vulnerability, his large and fragile pride? He could be silly, boring, a bully, but those were his responses to being mocked or ignored or shut out. He had not married Alma’s money, he had married her arrogance, thinking he could give it his name and make it his own, but instead, he had taken his worst enemy into his house and heart, and she festered there.

  Alma was the first to celebrate her thirtieth birthday. She managed to make the four extra months of her life yet another source of superiority over Mike instead of the conventional shame it might have been.

  “I hated being young. Every year older I get will be better. I’ll be very good at being eighty.”

  “Eighty,” Pierre echoed faintly, balancing between awe and disgust.

  “All of us will be dead,” Allen said, gesturing to Mike, Joseph, and himself.

  “When’s your birthday, Allen?” Joseph asked.

  “I’ve had my last.”

  “Suicide this year?” Carlotta asked.

  “No, no. I’m going to be a Dorian Gray. Perhaps you’d like to do the portrait?”

  “It’s an idea. Does narcissism begin to fade at thirty, Alma?”

  “It shouldn’t in you,” Alma replied, smiling.

  Her condescension to other women seemed neither to intimidate nor to offend them. Roxanne, who was meeting Alma for the first time, stood before her offering herself like a flower, and, when Alma picked her for her momentary amusement, calling her Dandelion, Roxanne was delighted.

  Mike, in his attempt to be host, seemed more like a waiter in his own house. The moment he stopped trying to dominate, he didn’t know how to do anything but serve. Joseph offered to help him with the drinks, wanting him to have an ally.

  “If it wasn’t her birthday, I’d tell her to get her ass out here in the kitchen,” Mike grumbled as he struggled unnecessarily with the ice tray. “If that fucking faggot hadn’t brought a bottle of rye, we wouldn’t need this fucking ice.”

  Mike had provided a couple of gallons of British Columbia wine, two large hunks of cheese, a round of Polish sausage, and some dark bread. The food looked crude and out of place on the handsome dining-room table. Mike glared at it as they went back into the living room. “I’m losing a night’s pay for this.”

  The real celebration, Alma made it clear, was with her parents, her sisters, and her children the next evening when Mike would be safely back at work, taking out his resentment on drunks of both sexes. A new BMW, a gift from her father, was already parked out front behind Mike’s beat-up Datsun truck.

  “She doesn’t need a fucking car. She has the truck all day. She can’t run around at night, for Christ’s sake, not with the kids. Well, a credit card goes with it, so it’s no skin off me.”

  Pierre would have helped distract Mike if he’d dared, but he had taken Allen’s initial warning seriously and admired Mike from a safe distance with his large, orphan eyes. Everyone else in the room had chosen Alma and on her birthday made no attempt to hide it, except perhaps for Carlotta, who had put up with Mike for so long she had developed a nearly affectionate tolerance.

  “What did you give Alma, Mike?” she asked.

  “She’s yet to get it,” Mike answered. “The best screw of her life.”

  “Chained or free?”

  “On her birthday she has a choice.”

  Pierre at the edge of this exchange shuddered, and Joseph laughed the note that always turned Roxanne toward him with the same question, unspoken now, that he had not answered.

  Joseph only knew it was one of the ways, like walking, to keep from bursting into words, and he was feeling closer to crazy that night than he had in months.

  “You’re such a perfect Aries,” Allen was saying to Alma.

  Her large, graceful hand pulled her fair, bright hair away from her face, the gesture of a woman acquiescing to flattery. She didn’t do it often. Her audience was not Allen but Roxanne, and Allen knew it.

  Joseph had had his glass of wine, all he ever risked drinking, and he needed badly to get away.

  “It’s all this hair,” he said aloud, “blowing in the wind.”

  Pierre turned his solemn child’s eyes to Joseph, smiled, and offered him a joint.

  “No, no, thank you,” Joseph said. He had never smoked anything, and he could not stay long in a room where marijuana was being shared because it gave him a headache of a curiously specific sort, like a cork plugged too tight in a verbal center.

  Carlotta was the only one of them who shared his suspicion of alcohol and drugs.

  “The world already hurts my eyes,” she said, and: “Drinking water can make me dizzy and want to vomit. Why spend money?”

  Mike, on the other hand, reached for a joint gladly, for it could jail his temper and restore him to visionary quiet even in the presence of his wife, who could then sometimes appear to him as his creation.

  Joseph watched him inhale and said, “‘A daughter of the gods, divinely tall, / And most divinely fair.’”

  “What’s that?” Mike asked.

  “Tennyson,” Joseph said, “my mother loved Tennyson,” and laughed.

  Roxanne was smiling at him. “You took the words right out of my mouth.”

  “Out of Tennyson’s,” Joseph said, but he saw her unnaturally large, fine teeth and knew, if he didn’t get out, he would be stealing everyone’s words, shouting, singing, “‘Of all the glad New Year, mother, the maddest, merriest day; / For I’m to be Queen o’ the May mother, / I’m to be Queen o’ the May.’”

  “Old Joseph coming out?” Allen asked, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I can’t believe our good fortune.”

  “What did you put in his wine?” Pierre asked Mike in genuine dismay.

  “‘If time be heavy on your hands, / Are there no beggars at your gate, / Nor any poor about your lands? / Oh! teach the orphan-boy to read …’ Tennyson, Tennyson, Tennyson!” Joseph shouted.

  “Easy,” Allen said, his arm now firmly around Joseph’s shoulder.

  Joseph let himself feel the firmness, vibrating inside it. He had to get out. He turned to Alma, meaning to wish her only happy birthday and good-night, but instead, he found himself saying, “‘He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, / Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.’”

  “Tennyson, too,” Alma said, unperturbed.

  Joseph turned and ran out of the house, down the steps, stumbling over pedal car and tricycle, the April moon as staged as he felt he must seem.

  “Nothing is genuine but madness,” he said loudly to a parked car, the BMW, and then he ran as blindly as he could, trying not to think of tulips sheltering all around him in the dark. When he finally reached the house he called his own, entirely out of breath and Tennyson, he let himself in by the basement door, knowing Ann would hear him and recognize his need to be alone.

  Standing before the long drawers of type, Clarendon, Newsprint Bold, Bembo, he laughed three times to catch his breath. Then he opened the drawer that held ten-point Stymie Bold, took, up the stick, and reached for a capital .

  “Jesus began his ministry when he was thirty years old,” Joseph said as he set the letter.

  “And died at thirty-three.”

  “On the cross.”

  “For the world.”

  “Joseph?”

  He did not know how long she’d been calling him. She was standing right in front of him now, a look of no more than ordinary concern on her face.

  “I just wanted to get this set …” he tried to explain, gesturing with the stick, knowing the type was too small even f
or someone used to reading backwards for her to see what he had set. Even if she could, Ann would not recognize it for the crude craziness it was. She was, unlike himself, modestly religious.

  In her face was a sound he did not have to make. “Jesu, joy of man’s desiring … desiring … desiring.”

  Joseph did not wonder, until Ann lay sleeping beside him, whether Mike ever made love to Alma like that, briefly for himself, to get it out of the way, then long for her, hardening her nipples in his mouth, listening to her heart, her breathing, the shallow sounds in her throat to adjust the rhythm of his hand, finally going down on her, sucking her to coming, which she did with an arching heave that forced him out and away from her in violent rejection. Then she wanted his weight, held him to her, and he lay newborn and quiet until she slept. Mike, the father of sons, would not suckle at a woman, be hurled into new life by her and then held tenderly like a child. Mike would not be “an artist” in bed but a man turning a woman of stone into flesh to bear him, to bear his children. Alma resented it, and so did Carlotta. “All of you try to carve us into your own needs.” For him to have no real need, to make love for pleasure, her pleasure, was that what this woman sleeping quietly, what any woman, wanted? It was not enough surely, though it was all Joseph wanted himself: to be out of the way and quiet.

  Joseph walked for ten days without calling on any of his friends, fifteen, sometimes twenty miles, mostly in the labyrinth of city streets where he had only occasional glimpses of the sea or sky which, separated from each other, did not have the blatant season of Vancouver gardens, a vulgarity of azaleas, armies of irises, rashes of blooming vines. Ann had begun to sneeze, but Joseph suffered no more than a dull headache from the noise and exhaust of the commuter traffic by the time he got to school in the morning, which dulled him to unthreatened quiet.

  “Where have you been?” Pierre demanded when Joseph finally felt recovered enough to stop for a cup of tea.

  “Have you had the flu?” Joseph asked. He would not have thought it possible for Pierre to lose weight, but he had. If his normally skintight tank top had not now hung from him, Joseph was sure he could have counted Pierre’s ribs.

  “Not yet,” Pierre said gloomily.

  “Is Allen away?”

  “Isn’t he always?”

  “Where’s Roxanne then?”

  “I’ve seen her once, just once, in ten days. She’s in love.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s nice for her … isn’t it?”

  “It’s going to be horrible.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s in love with Alma.”

  “Are you sure?” Joseph asked.

  “You were there. You saw it happen.”

  “When?”

  “At Alma’s birthday party. Allen thought that was why you left. Wasn’t it?”

  “No,” Joseph said slowly. “I wasn’t feeling very well … I was …”

  “I thought you were drunk. Allen said … well, never mind. Sit down. I’ll fix you something. It is upsetting, isn’t it?”

  “Have you talked with Roxanne?”

  “Talked? I’ve listened. I thought I knew Roxanne. We were friends. Oh, I knew she was gay of course, but she wasn’t vulgar about it. Now she can’t stop talking about Alma’s … breasts, and she doesn’t even call them breasts. It’s disgusting.”

  “Alma does have beautiful breasts,” Joseph said in fairness.

  “Are you going to start, too?”

  “But she’s not … surely she’s not interested in Roxanne?”

  “Roxanne is wonderful,” Pierre asserted. “She’s hardly like a woman at all, and she’s very intelligent … in her own way. Allen says she’s probably the only real artist among us.”

  “Artist?”

  “Composer,” Pierre said, pretension raising the pitch of his voice.

  “I don’t know Roxanne, of course,” Joseph admitted. “Not well.”

  “She thinks you’re very sensitive and crazy.”

  “She doesn’t like the way I laugh.”

  “She does. She says you are one wind chime … like the sound of one hand clapping,” Pierre shouted, by this time out in the kitchen.

  Joseph followed him out and stood watching him make tea.

  “Why have you stopped eating?”

  “I haven’t,” Pierre said. “It’s just that I throw up every time I think of her.”

  “Roxanne?”

  “No, Alma.”

  A woman like Alma, who would marry Mike, surely wouldn’t be attracted to someone like Roxanne. For the hours Joseph had speculated about why Mike had married Alma, it had not occurred to him to wonder why Alma had married Mike. Joseph had assumed that any woman, asked, would have married Mike because he was, in Joseph’s eyes, a man. Actually the women Joseph had seen with Mike—admittedly only Alma and Carlotta often—were unimpressed by his virility. Did only men admire the masculinity of other men? Then why had Alma married him?

  “She’s a dyke all right,” Pierre said as he arranged cups on a tray.

  “Roxanne?”

  “No, Alma.”

  “How can you think so?”

  “Why else would she marry Mike? She despises him,” Pierre said indignantly.

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Of course, it does. If Allen wanted a wife as a cover, he wouldn’t marry someone like Alma or Roxanne. He’d marry the prettiest, silliest woman he could find … and loathe her. As long as Alma’s married to Mike, it wouldn’t cross anyone’s mind …”

  “It has yours.”

  “Not until Roxanne …”

  “But Alma’s got two children …” Joseph protested.

  “Even Sappho had a daughter, and the steam baths are full of fathers of seven … well, in Montreal anyway.”

  “Mike would kill her,” Joseph said quietly.

  “Roxanne?”

  “No, Alma.”

  But Joseph did not believe what he said. He was not afraid for Alma. He was, as he had been all along, afraid for Mike.

  “I wish Allen had finally taken those pictures.”

  “He said there was no point. Arts Canada just isn’t interested in unknown carpenters,” Pierre said, his inflection an exact imitation of Allen’s irony.

  “I don’t go begging. I’ll be discovered!” Mike shouted from a perch fifteen feet from the ground, on his newest piece, a series of welded ladders and poles, above which suspended from the ceiling was a large triangular shape made of tubing, something between window frame and musical instrument.

  Joseph waited for him to come down before he said, “But don’t most people at least approach galleries?”

  “I’m not most people!”

  “What about that big sculpture competition in North Vancouver?”

  “It’s invitational,” Mike said.

  “Some of them around the country must be open.”

  “Listen, Joseph, nothing in this country is ‘open’ to a Polack bouncer with an education degree and minus twenty cents in the bank. And even if it was, when you look at the shit the ‘experts’ call sculpture … If only I had space. Christ, you can’t see any of these now.”

  Mike paced, disappeared into and behind his work, emerged again, as if deep in thought. He did not want to talk about or do anything toward becoming, in the world’s eyes, a sculptor. Safer to stay here in his kingdom of uselessness, posturing for his childhood friends, lecturing Joseph, but his own thirtieth birthday was approaching, and there was a crisis in his household. If Mike had been an authentic phony, he’d have had self-protection enough, but he had worked hard in the little time he had, scrounging materials, building. The objects that had begun to crowd the space were, at the least, genuine delusions. For all Joseph knew, they were also art.

  “Why won’t he try to help himself?” Joseph asked Carlotta. “Why won’t he at least try to get a dealer?”

  “He did try showing his sketches and models several years ago before he started all this work. Now he th
inks he’s kidding himself and doesn’t want to find out.”

  “Is he?”

  “Who isn’t? My paintings sell, not well, but they sell. Mike’s right to be scornful of that. It doesn’t prove anything, not even that people who buy them care about them, much less know whether or not they’re good. My theory is they buy them because they don’t understand them. If they did, they couldn’t live with them. I couldn’t. Could you?”

  Joseph looked at the painting Carlotta was working on.

  “It’s an X-ray of my hip, but I stole the color from Georgia O’Keeffe.”

  “I thought you went to the doctor for … ordinary reasons.”

  “I do. When I’m not thinking about killing myself, I’m terrified I’m dying of one disease or another.”

  “Do you like Mike at all, Carlotta?”

  “Sure,” she said, but she turned away.

  “Can’t you help him?”

  “He’s married to Alma.”

  “She doesn’t do anything to help him.”

  “He won’t let her. She’d get her father to buy him a gallery. You know why Mike won’t make it? He’s too moral about his in-laws, and he thinks art is important. There’s nothing important about it.”

  “Why do you paint then?” Joseph asked.

  “Because I like being alone, because I like being poor, and because I’d bore myself to death if I didn’t do something, and that takes too long.”

  “Mike’s different.”

  “Mike’s a man.”

  Joseph might have said, “So am I,” but he was irrelevant to this conversation.

  “Have you seen Alma since the party?”

  “A couple of times.”

  “Had a ride in the new car?”

  “Joseph, you can’t stand Alma. She’s my closest friend. I’m not going to talk about her. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I’d like to,” Joseph protested. “I don’t dislike her. It’s only that I feel sorry … for both of them.”

  “For Roxanne and Alma?”

  Joseph had not intended to trick Carlotta into confirmation, but he had wanted it. “No, I meant Mike and Alma.”