Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  Once the thing was cut down, its power was gone. Joseph took the screwdriver out of the trousers, thinking how childish both Mike’s humor and anger were, sorry for him. He folded the head and hands under the stuffed body. He found “Trasco’s Decrees” where he had dropped it and put it on top of what now looked like a pile of clothes. Soft sculpture might be a pile of crap, but Mike had certainly managed to be successful at it. Joseph hoped his birthday greeting would somehow turn this into something to laugh at. What if it wasn’t a joke?

  Joseph stood staring. Could Mike somewhere else at this moment be hanging dead? At the warehouse? Joseph hurried back into the house. He could hear Alma with the children. He went to the phone and called the club where Mike worked, to be told he wasn’t there. “It’s his birthday. He’s taken the night off.”

  “Alma?”

  “I’m just coming down.”

  Joseph did not want to frighten her, but he had to find Mike now as quickly as he could.

  “Could I borrow your car?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’d just like to find him.”

  “You don’t think …”

  “I don’t know,” Joseph said. “I just want to find him.”

  At the warehouse, Mike was not hanging dead but swinging alive on the triangle he had strung from the ceiling.

  “You found it? Shit!” Mike said.

  It was hard to have a conversation with him while he was up there. Mike made no effort to get down, and there was no room to join him. Joseph leaned up against one of the poles, always surprised now that they weren’t trees, and waited. He should probably find a phone and let Alma know that Mike was physically all right. Joseph knew, contrary to what she said, that she wasn’t past caring, but maybe an hour or two of anxiety would remind her that she had real feelings. Now that he was with Mike, Joseph felt apologetic about what he had done, but surely he couldn’t have left the thing hanging for the children to come upon.

  “Why don’t I buy you a beer?” he finally suggested. “It’s your birthday after all.”

  Mike didn’t answer.

  “Well, I’ve got Alma’s car. I guess I’d better return it.”

  “Anyone who’s a friend of hers is no friend of mine,” Mike said sulkily.

  “Look!” Joseph shouted. “It scared her half to death!”

  “Then it was only half successful.”

  “Why don’t you stop playing Tarzan and come down where we can talk?”

  “I don’t feel much like talking,” Mike said, but with acrobatic grace he swung down off the triangle and slid down one of the poles to the floor. Then he stood looking at his work. “Maybe I could sell this to the zoo for the ape cage.”

  “‘His glassy essence, like an angry ape, / Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven / As makes the angels weep.’”

  “That’s my birthday poem, is it? What was the one you had for Alma? I liked it better.”

  “‘A daughter of the gods …’”

  “No, no, the other one.”

  “‘He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, / Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.’”

  “That’s the one,” Mike said, and snorted with satisfaction. “Hey? Did you find the screwdriver?”

  “Yeah.” Joseph nodded.

  Mike’s bark of a laugh surprised Joseph into joining him. At first it was mirth both strained and angry, but then it began to trill and giggle. As one stopped for breath, the other started up again until they were stumbling weak, crying and unable to make any sound but high sighs of intaken breath.

  “‘How sad and bad and mad it was— / But then, how it was sweet’” traveled through Joseph’s mind without his being able to say it.

  When he finally left Mike, Joseph was calm. The heat had drained out of the air, and he drove through the cool night with a sense of relief.

  Roxanne opened the Trasco front door to his knock.

  “Is he … ?”

  “He’s down at the warehouse working,” Joseph said, holding out the keys to Alma’s car.

  “Won’t you … ?”

  “No,” Joseph said. “It’s late. I have my own wife and children waiting for me.”

  He turned and ran down the steps, unable to believe he had said such a thing, and to Roxanne, whom he hardly knew, of whom he instinctively disapproved. She would tell Alma, who might not tell Mike but certainly would tell Carlotta. Roxanne would also tell Pierre, who would tell Allen. What was the horror of it?

  “I am the husband of a dead man’s wife. I am the father of a dead man’s children. It’s no more a betrayal than marrying her. She said so. ‘Life struck sharp on death, / Makes awful lightning.’”

  No, no, it didn’t, quite the opposite. His house, his family were quite ordinary, sunlit, and he must protect what he cherished from the extraordinary as long as he could, even the beauty of it, for it would make no difference to them whether he was sculpted for death by cancer as John had been or driven into the joyful light of madness. They knew, even the little girls, how fragile and precious the ordinary was, unlike these people he visited, who played at life as if they were immortals, killing themselves nothing but an art to be perfected. Still, they were his craziness under control rather than any temptation to it.

  The loveliness of Ann’s aging and ordinary face, as she told him she was pregnant, finally sent him into the light, and it was Ann who found him, raving at eagle and gull alike, “Greatness is a Way of Life. Art is Immortal. I am the Redeemer King. Death is Bullshit,” the day before school was to begin in the fall. Joseph was committed on his own thirtieth birthday. “What I aspired to be, / And was not, comforts me.” “Where the bee sucks, there suck I; / In the cowslip’s bell I lie.” “I am a part of all that I have met.”

  Mike Hanging

  “YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE,” Carlotta said.

  “I haven’t any other damn place to go,” Mike answered. “Do you know he’s in the loony bin?”

  “Who?”

  “Joseph, and he does have a wife and kids, only they’re not his kids; he adopted them. I’ve just been there, to his house.”

  “Come in,” Carlotta said.

  Mike followed her up the stairs. He never got over being amazed at her thinness. She didn’t have more width than a two-by-four. It should have made her unattractive. Perhaps it was simply the contrast with Alma, who looked the kind of woman who should have been hot brine and was instead as dry as a rag. “It’s the ones who smell of tuna fish … they’re the ones …”—old schoolyard advice. Carlotta smelled of paint and the expensive perfume Alma gave her every year for Christmas, like peppery lilies and Greek wine. Her body didn’t excite him so much as make him curious, and the distance she always kept from him made him suspect she was curious about him, too. Then he wondered what Alma might have said, what lies she might have told. “Girls don’t talk about sex. They’re more interested in your wallet than your cock.”

  “I’ve got nothing but tea,” Carlotta said.

  “Tea’s fine.”

  The space of this room surprised him. He had not been in it often and tended to think of it as the pitiable place it seemed to Alma, who romanticized both Carlotta’s poverty and her singularity. Now that he was sleeping in his own studio, cooking makeshift meals on a hot plate, this room seemed remarkably civilized.

  “It’s not for rent, so don’t try it on for size,” Carlotta said.

  “I know, but it is a good setup … for one person. It sure beats an eighth of a warehouse. I’ve got to go next door to shit.”

  She turned her back on him for practical reasons, but he felt the rebuke. Why did women have to pretend only babies had bowels? Or was she, who had never really sided with the snobbish prudery in Alma when they were together, feeling she had to take on Alma’s role now?

  “Carlotta, we’re friends, aren’t we?”

  She shrugged.

  “Look, I’m not going to play the inj
ured party. I don’t even want to talk about her.”

  “Then let’s not. I don’t live alone to be a wailing wall … for anybody.”

  “Joseph used to …”

  “He was my wailing wall.”

  “Yeah. I guess it was something like that for me, too.”

  “I told him he’d go crazy.”

  “Why did you say a thing like that?”

  “Oh, I didn’t put it into his head,” Carlotta said impatiently. “I just wanted him to know I knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “That he was crazy. But I didn’t know why. What did she say?”

  “His wife? That he’s on drug therapy and, if that doesn’t work after a month or so, he’ll get shock treatments.”

  “Christ!”

  “Maybe he can have visitors in another couple of weeks.”

  “What did he do?”

  “I don’t know exactly … went manic. She said he’s done it before, but not so bad as this time. I asked her what set it off, and she didn’t say anything very clear, just shook her head and said, ‘Death … life …’ Her first husband died of cancer. He was a friend of Joseph’s.”

  “How long have they been married?”

  “A couple of years.”

  “Why didn’t he ever say?”

  “I don’t knows,” Mike said. “She’s … Ann’s her name … really a nice person, very straight, but not … oh, she seems sympathetic.”

  In trying to describe her, Mike realized she was the kind of woman he never really noticed until he had noticed her. So maybe there were a lot of them around whom you didn’t see unless for some reason you had to look. When you did, you saw something in them.

  “She wears glasses. She’s sort of plump. I want to say she’s ordinary, but I don’t think I know enough ordinary people to be sure.”

  Carlotta smiled, and that encouraged him.

  “I told her I’d like to do anything I could. I didn’t want to go on about what good friends we were when I’d never met her before, and I didn’t want to ask a lot of questions. I told her he dropped around occasionally. She said he had to walk; it was part of his therapy.”

  Mike stood up and walked over to the window. What he wanted to ask Carlotta was why Joseph, with a job he apparently liked, with a kind wife and a couple of sweet girl children, went around the bend, while he, Mike, with a bitch of a wife, two kids he couldn’t keep in shoes, and the burden of a talent he couldn’t seem to carry or put down, was still walking around loose. But that would mean mentioning Alma, and he was here on too frail a permission to risk that.

  “The things you don’t know about people … even people you think you know,” he said instead, turning back to her. “For all I know, you’ve got a husband and five kids.”

  “I’ve got nothing but my bones,” Carlotta answered, “and I’m busy exposing them.”

  “Why don’t you ever paint anyone else?”

  “I have to work from life, and I don’t think I could stand anyone else around for as long as that would take. Funny … I did think I might try Joseph.”

  “Not much to look at,” Mike said. “You know, he’s hard to remember?”

  “Maybe that’s why I wanted to do it. I might have been able to stand two of him in the room at the same time.”

  “Why don’t you do me?” Mike suggested, and, when she laughed, pressed on. “No, I mean I’d model … free.”

  “My own private life class? Mike, that’s a woman’s ploy.”

  “Look at me! What’s the matter with me?”

  “You’re a man.”

  “What’s the matter with that?”

  “I could never use Alma’s castoffs. They’re not my size.”

  “All right,” Mike said with a sense of angry satisfaction, “you mentioned her. I didn’t. For your information, I wasn’t ‘cast off.’ I left.”

  “After hanging yourself in the shed. I know. I heard all about it.”

  “Not all because I haven’t told you about it.”

  “I don’t want to hear.”

  “Why not? Why not?” Mike shouted.

  “I don’t want your pain or hers either.”

  “You women are so hard, and you tell us we don’t have any feelings. Why, Joseph has more feeling in his little finger than you or Alma …”

  “Joseph is crazy.”

  No hard fist in the gut ever hurt the way these female truths did, taking away not your breath but your point, the whole point. Mike took a deep, shuddering breath around the fist of tears in his throat.

  “I wish I were.”

  “It’s kind people who go crazy.”

  “I am not unkind!” Mike shouted, and slapped her.

  Carlotta didn’t move, not even to touch her cheek. She looked at him with cold calm.

  “You hurt me,” he said, hating the guilty petulance in his voice. “And I am a little crazy.”

  “No, you’re not. You’ve just been a bouncer too long. Throw yourself out, will you?”

  “Look, I didn’t mean to do that. But don’t you understand? A man can take just so much taunting.”

  “You don’t have to take any more of mine. Get out.”

  “Come to dinner with me. Let’s go over to the Orestes and have a decent meal.”

  He didn’t expect her to accept. He didn’t even want to take her, but he didn’t want to leave without saying something conciliatory. When she walked over to the closet and got her coat, he wasn’t sure that she didn’t intend simply to walk out. He followed her down the stairs, and only when she went to his truck and opened the passenger door did he realize he was actually going to pay the price of a meal. Was she that hungry? Or was it a punishment she was exacting, knowing how little he liked to spend money?

  When he got into the driver’s seat, he saw that she was crying. Alma never cried. He didn’t know what to do.

  “I’m sorry. I really am.”

  She shook her head and then said, “I can’t stand to think about Joseph.”

  “Let’s not. Come on. Let’s just go and eat. We’ll both feel better.”

  The first several times they went out, Mike was mildly embarrassed by Carlotta, as if someone might hold him accountable for starving her to that thinness, and her table manners, probably from living alone, were irritating. He wanted and needed to talk about Alma, his obsessive bitterness in the way of his work and his sleep; yet, because Carlotta refused her as a subject, Mike was free, only when he was with Carlotta, to think about something else, and she did listen, agreeing with him often enough to surprise him but not to make him suspicious that she flattered him. Unlike Joseph or Alma in the early days when she still listened, Carlotta actually understood what he said. They were, after all, fellow artists, and, though her sort of painting was too subjective, at least she hadn’t any silly pretensions about it. Mike decided that she was, in her own peculiar way, elegant, a woman who attracted men rather than boys.

  For a few moments each time he left her, he puzzled over his reticence with her. Now that Alma wasn’t there to be offended by his sexual remarks, he didn’t make them. He even forgot that one reason for seeking Carlotta out had been a fantasy of sexual revenge. Once she refused an invitation to his studio, but he’d offered it very tentatively. He knew she wouldn’t smoke dope, and he was not at all sure that he could discover enough appetite for a first attempt without it. Her independence daunted him, yet he liked the brief moments of independence she made him feel himself. Whenever they encountered her friends or she was recognized as Carlotta, the painter, as she occasionally was, she introduced him as “Trasco, the sculptor.” She sometimes now called him Trasco, which made him feel momentarily more himself and less the severed head of a family.

  He heard himself say, “I’ve always liked you, Carlotta,” and he meant it simply.

  Mike’s schedule was too antisocial for him to see Carlotta as often as he would have liked. He had only one night off a week. Since he’d always made it a rule not to mak
e friends among the people he worked with, he knew no one who could help him get through the worst hours between two and ten in the morning. Occasionally, when he felt he wouldn’t sleep anyway, he’d take Carlotta to lunch.

  “I’ve got so used to crazy hours, I’d almost forgotten they were crazy.”

  “There’s not all that much to recommend the land of the living,” Carlotta said. “And you’ve got a social life.”

  “Social life? They’re a bunch of young punks and nubiles. It’s what you might call adult babysitting. Its only virtue is that it pays. If I have to knock a guy down to take his keys away and send him home in a cab, he thanks me with a twenty the next time he’s in.”

  Mike had never talked about his job with Alma, and he had never wanted anyone he knew to see him at work, standing there at the door with his hands over his privates, flexing his muscles, smiling, smiling, calling all the male customers by name. If they were relatively well behaved and generous in their spending, it was his job to be obsequious. With the mean ones he was to be ugly which had the virtue of being the way he really felt. It was a shit of a job, but at least it paid fifteen hundred dollars a month, which was a damned sight better than teaching, particularly since a lot of it was outside taxes. Saying that to Carlotta didn’t embarrass him. She’d done her own time as a cocktail waitress, not in the kind of brain-splitting music and bawdy brawling he lived with night after night but in a good hotel bar. Still, she’d known what it was to be meat, and there wasn’t all that difference between being tits and ass and being a muscle stud. She’d still be at it if she’d had responsibility for anyone but herself. She wasn’t exactly making it, beyond rent and not enough to eat.

  Christ, how he wished Alma had, just for a few months, the taste of what his life, or Carlotta’s life, was really like. Alma didn’t even know there was any similarity. She thought her father’s money stood as much between Mike and the world as it did between her and the world. How could he really have explained it without sounding like some kind of mean bastard, trying to deprive his wife and children of a half-decent life simply because he couldn’t or wouldn’t make that kind of money? At least, even if he did take a minimum of what he needed for his own work, he tried not to be a pigheaded son-in-law. Alma and the kids could have anything they wanted as long as it didn’t involve him. Alma thought that was pigheaded. He should have given his own effigy a snout.