Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  To do that, Mike would have to know what he wanted to do with the boys. Sometimes he imagined driving them down to his mother in Arizona, but she already had her hands full with his brother’s kids, and there was the complication of the border. One morning, visiting with Ann, he had a fantasy of moving the boys in there, giving them sisters to teach them the lessons about female nature mothers instinctively withheld from sons. But that was even more a fantasy than getting them across the border and had more to do with Mike’s own wish that he’d had a sister, that he’d one day have a daughter, like Susan or Rachel.

  He could, of course, simply throw Alma out and occupy the house himself, but there was no way he could take care of the boys, go on earning them a living, and work. Carlotta had no motherly interest in them.

  The real reason his plans came to nothing was that he would not ever take his sons from their mother. However much Mike disagreed with her, it was not because he thought her inadequate as a parent. Her job was to nurture and protect, his to discipline and challenge. For him the conflicts were a natural part of the job of marriage, as sex was their obvious resolution. Alma apparently thought both conflict and sex were a proletarian plot against her class and person.

  What had he hoped to achieve, walking out like that? He certainly hadn’t expected to have to carry on with the separation for weeks, now months. Once he had made it clear that he couldn’t stand what was going on any longer, he had expected Alma to give in, not simply to avoid the humiliation of being deserted, her cover blown for that silly nonsense with Roxanne, but because she was, after all, his wife, and it was her place to come to him and apologize.

  Was it because of Carlotta that Alma refused to make any gesture toward him? He’d waited weeks for Carlotta, but Alma had no way of knowing he hadn’t walked out of the house and gone straight to her. Certainly he’d made no effort to hide the fact that he was seeing her, even spending money on her. But shouldn’t jealousy or fear of really losing him force Alma to do something?

  To hang onto the last shreds of the fantasy that Alma was capable of jealousy, fear, love, Mike did not go to her. He could not bear to know what he did know, that she was relieved to be rid of him.

  Without Carlotta he would have hanged himself in earnest. Instead, he posed for his portrait, and the slow work of it became a reason to go on waiting, as if Carlotta were gradually making him whole and life-sized again so that he could claim what was his.

  Joseph was better. Ann talked about bringing him home for Christmas. He might even be able to go back to work in the new year. This news, which Mike had waited for so hopefully, made him apprehensive not just for Joseph but for himself. He had not only worried about Joseph but envied him there in that protective environment where other people made the decisions, and sometimes the dreaded shock treatment lured Mike as a violent solution for himself if it could blank out, even temporarily, the last six months. But now even Joseph was being asked to come back, to go on. For the first time since Joseph had been hospitalized, Mike’s sympathy for him was clarified of odd jealousies not only for Joseph’s wife and children but for the illness itself.

  Joseph was easier to be with now, though he was certainly not yet his old self. He talked a good deal more, always a slight agitation in his voice, and, though he could still listen, there was a new watchfulness in his attention as if he expected pitfalls dangerous to himself in what other people said. Mike could tell him about fixing the swing for Susan and Rachel, replacing a pane of glass a newsboy had broken. He could praise Ann’s efficiency and calm. But when he mentioned Carlotta’s portrait of himself, Joseph drew back in his chair and braced himself for an accident in which he would be involved, so the only thing Mike didn’t say was that he had left Alma. Joseph could bear it no more than Mike could. Instead, Mike had to brace himself for Joseph’s revelations.

  “The one important thing I forgot is that Ann is pregnant,” Joseph admitted, and then laughed the note Mike hadn’t heard in months.

  “Well, that’s great!” Mike said. “A kid of your own.”

  “I didn’t think it was necessary.”

  “Maybe I’m a dinosaur,” Mike admitted. “Maybe I’m the only one left in the world who thinks kids are necessary—yes, kids of your own. It’s great you’ve adopted the girls, but it can’t be quite the same.”

  “If it were, it would be okay. I feel responsible, but not exactly. I mean, I’m sorry for them that I went crazy, but then I think they know I’m only adopted, not ‘real,’ nothing in their blood or anything serious like that. Don’t you feel with kids of your own you haven’t any right to be who you are?”

  “Hell, no!” Mike said. “You give them life. They’re the only people in the world you do have the right to be yourself with, and they have to put up with it—until they’re grown. Your own are your own.”

  Mike believed what he said until he heard himself say it, refusing to admit aloud that he hadn’t even felt the right to call on his own sons for months.

  “Was your father like that?”

  “Sure was. Beat the shit out of me when I was fifteen and so cocky I thought I could take over the house.”

  “My father was a refugee. When I got my first bloody nose, he wept and said I was the blood on his hands, and could I ever forgive him.”

  “He hit you that hard?”

  “No, no, he hadn’t hit me. He never laid a hand on me. He just didn’t think I should have been born. He was such a sad man I used to pick him flowers. Susan and Rachel brought me flowers the last time they came, five Christmas roses.”

  “Listen, Joseph, this place has done you a lot of good. I don’t want to knock it, but these guys can make you get introspective about farting if they feel like it. There are things that are just natural, and having kids is one of them. It’s not as if a kid would change your life all that much—or Ann’s either with the girls as old as they are, and being girls.”

  “Ann will change, won’t she?”

  “Christ! Women are always changing. Nothing you can do about that. She wants the kid, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes, but mostly because it’s something to give me.”

  “Well, it is, man. That’s how it’s supposed to be!”

  Mike left the hospital, confused by impatience and concern, back to the ambivalence he had felt through the months of Joseph’s illness. Joseph didn’t deserve a woman who wanted his child, but then Mike thought of Joseph at the age of his own Victor, picking flowers for his sad father. It seemed so like the man who had been Mike’s friend. Losing that friend to this new, needy candor must turn Mike into a friend of a sort he had not been before, concerned with Joseph’s moods and frailties, involved in his once-hidden domestic life. At least being with Ann and the children gave Mike some sense of a normal world around him. Carlotta might have saved his life, but Ann preserved his sanity, what there was of it.

  “Sometimes I wonder if for some people being normal drives them crazy,” he said to Ann, having accepted a cup of coffee. “Like Joseph and my wife.”

  “Has your wife had a breakdown?” Ann asked.

  “Sort of,” Mike said. “But I don’t want to burden you with my troubles.”

  “Why not? I burden you with mine all the time. Surely you think of me as a friend?”

  “Oh, I do,” Mike said. “I realize you’re about the only ordinary person I know—except for myself.”

  “But you’re an artist.”

  “Well, yes,” he admitted.

  “And so you have a way to be yourself most people don’t. Joseph has the temperament without the gift.”

  “Did Joseph want to be an artist?” Mike asked, surprised.

  “Oh, no. In fact, he says he feels spared.”

  “He’s very lucky to have you, Ann. A lot of people wouldn’t have the patience for this sort of thing. Sometimes even I … well, I wonder what he’s got to go crazy about.”

  Ann’s eyes were kind, but something in their expression checked Mike. He did not
want to seem to her disloyal.

  “It’s one of the ironies, I guess.”

  “And your wife? I don’t even know her name.”

  “Alma.” He sighed. “I’ve left her.”

  “Should you have done that … if she isn’t well?”

  “Part of the sickness is that she doesn’t want me around. Actually, she can’t stand the sight of me.”

  “How hard,” Ann said, laying a hand on his arm. “How terribly hard.”

  “Yeah, it is, and I’ve got the two sons, and I haven’t seen them in months.”

  “But surely, Mike, you mustn’t let her stop you seeing the children. They must need you.”

  “She’s a lot better with them if I’m not around,” Mike said, discovering an excuse he suspected of being true.

  “Is she getting any help?”

  “Not professional help. She’s got a friend she’s close to.”

  “It seems to me the only comfort in trouble is when you can do something to help.”

  Among women as tender as this one, as passionate as Carlotta, he had chosen Alma, who had no sympathy in her. Once it had seemed to him a supreme confidence which came out of the security of her childhood. He had admired what was, in fact, coldness and indifference. She had learned to count the cost and found everything human far too expensive, except for her children, and she put a limit there, too.

  “I don’t know, Ann. We marry too young or too quickly before we know enough. My father tried to tell me. He said, ‘You think life’s too short, and what you’re going to find out is it’s too long.’ He was already sick then. I thought it was his sickness speaking.”

  “Maybe it was,” Ann said. “People can grow past trouble.”

  “Where do you get the faith?”

  “With John at the last … oh, people say it’s the drugs that produce a state of euphoria, but even if it was a sort of hallucination, he did see … something. He said, ‘I see,’ and then he said, ‘It’s all all right.’ I believe life has a shape we can’t see except maybe for a moment at the end.”

  “A shape?”

  “Yes,” Ann said, obviously not willing to go beyond that.

  Mike looked down at her and realized that she was one of those pious little girls in the eighth grade who wore crosses on gold chains, who flunked math and history and never were first in anything but neat penmanship. Even then he’d been chasing the ones who could spell almost as well as he could, who could run almost as fast, who flaunted their tits as much as he did his biceps. He had no intention of building a wren’s nest. He’d mated with a mockingbird. He could hear Alma even now, saying with exaggerated piety, “I believe life has a shape.”

  Well, Christ, it had to, didn’t it? And what some people called hallucinations other people called visions. He certainly knew that sense of supreme balance he felt smoking pot was real. Or he could make it real, build it into his work. Maybe for some people, simple, sincere people like Ann, just hearing about it from someone else was enough. “It’s all all right.”

  “Thank you for telling me that,” he said. It was the sort of thing Alma sometimes said to Tony to encourage him to confide in her, and it had irked Mike to see his son so manipulated. But he wasn’t trying to manipulate Ann. He did want to thank her.

  “Would you like to be with us for Christmas, Mike? If Joseph’s home, I know he’d like that.”

  “Why, thanks,” Mike said. “I hadn’t really thought that far.”

  “It’s only two weeks away.”

  Certainly he wouldn’t go home for Christmas to play disenfranchised Santa Claus to Alma’s father. They had tried not to dislike each other and were modestly successful except on holidays, when each inadvertently showed up the other, Mike a stingy inadequate provider, his father-in-law a buyer of affection who felt no more certain of his daughter’s admiration than Mike did. The very first Christmas, before there were children, Mike was simply amazed at the accumulation of things not only for Alma and her sisters but for himself. Christmas in his own home had been primarily a daylong drunk and a feast at which lesser men than his father often passed out. No one ever gave anyone else more than one gift, and in bad years it might be a dollar from his father, socks she had knitted from his mother. Was it that when you couldn’t give much, you learned to dislike giving? Mike’s brother was as tight with money as he was. They hadn’t given anything to each other for years. Alma had taken over sending presents to Mike’s mother and his niece and nephew. Since she did not ask him for extra money, she probably spent her own. He never asked her what money she had. It was none of his business. Over the years he had fought with her about every taste and value money could buy, but money itself was never mentioned. Mike wore the expensive clothes his in-laws gave him when he was less and less frequently invited to their house to dinner, and he had a closetful of golf clubs, tennis rackets, skis, and equipment for other middle-class games he had never learned to play. When one of Alma’s sisters asked him his favorite sport, he had answered, “Fighting.” She gave him boxing gloves for his birthday. The only present Mike had ever objected to was a life insurance policy.

  “Jesus, Alma, he might as well have a contract out on me. Is he a secret member of the Mafia, or what?”

  Alma told him it was just like having a suit of clothes or a martini pitcher, and anyway, it wasn’t for him; it was for the children.

  Gradually Mike understood that Alma’s parents had not objected to him as a son-in-law because they felt perfectly confident that, propped up by their money, he could at least look and, therefore, finally become the part. When he did not, they tried to overlook what offended them most, the house he rented and his job, by calling him not an artist but artistic, which made it sound something like asthmatic.

  God knows, it could seem as much an illness to him, quarantined down there in his warehouse like an untouchable, a leper, unless Carlotta was with him in a cold trance of work, which, because it was hers, only she could break with the aggressive sexual appetite that studying him seemed to give her. Once he had insisted on having her when she first arrived, not so much because he wanted her urgently but because he didn’t like the idea of being the object of her appetite. She was only superficially reluctant, but afterwards she couldn’t work, and she didn’t return to the portrait for more than a week. Alone in its unfinished company, Mike realized he wouldn’t work again until Carlotta had completed him and relinquished his space. If then.

  Mike had not gone out of his way to avoid meeting his wife. It was simply that unless he sought her out, they had always lived in different territories of the city. She left their house in Kitsilano for visiting her parents in West Point Grey or a sister in West Vancouver. Though shops in their neighborhood were rich with a variety of foods for Greek, Italian, and Oriental tastes, she preferred the Safeway near her parents’ house, the shop that carried only French and English cheeses. Mike lived in his old neighborhood and went east to Commercial to shop. He crossed False Creek only to visit Carlotta or Ann.

  It was outside Carlotta’s he finally did see Alma a couple of days before Christmas. She was getting into her car and didn’t see him parked across the street in his truck. He was shocked to realize what a large woman she was, almost gross.

  “Cow!” he whispered harshly. “Bloody great cow!”

  Moments later, in Carlotta’s company, he was sullen with his own betrayed taste, her unnatural thinness as repugnant to him as his bovine wife.

  “Why sulk?” Carlotta asked. “Surely you don’t expect me not to see her?”

  “I don’t give a fuck who you see.”

  “Truth to tell she’s not my favorite caller these days. She was bringing me a Christmas present, that’s all.”

  Mike saw the familiar shape of the box Carlotta’s perfume came in. He picked it up and looked at the card, which had always read “From Alma and Mike.” This one read “From Alma and Roxanne.” He smashed the box down and felt the glass break. The concentrated scent exploded into the
room like gas.

  He turned and ran down the stairs, slammed into his truck, and drove the brief blocks to his house. Alma had not come back. He sat, staring at the house, wondering if the children were with their grandparents. He knew they were not. They were in his house with Roxanne, who slept in his bed, sucked his wife’s cunt, and appeared in his place on Christmas cards. And he had let this go on for four months!

  “Come to pay a Christmas call?”

  He turned to find Alma standing in the street right by his door.

  “Where are the kids?” he demanded.

  “With Mother and Dad.”

  “Why?”