Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  It doesn’t change anything. I wish there were somebody I could talk to who has been through this. I remember trying to persuade Mike that getting a divorce was the most ordinary thing in the world, something simply everyone did these days, and we were somehow retarded not to have thought of it years ago. Everyone did think of it years ago, getting out while Mike and I were struggling to get deeper in. Where is out? Where did they all go, those broken-in-half couples? Out of the country, like Mike, back to Mother and Daddy, like me? I don’t know. They simply disappeared.

  I want to disappear. Maybe I have and just don’t realize it. I’m in the nowhere I’ve been in ever since Mike left. I want him back to get this over with. To get what over with?

  I want to be punished for what I’ve done, but not like this, not the daily dread of all those years washing up on the shore, undisposed of after all, the garbage still life of all I’ve done, and the much more I haven’t.

  If I’m a free woman, why doesn’t someone untie all this guilt, all this fear and say to me, “Yes, it really is true. You really are free.” What I’m waiting for is to be as humiliated as I feel, and I know I couldn’t bear that. There is no point in it.

  Is freedom nothing but responsibility to punish myself, shout “cunt!” and “dyke!” in the mirror? Face myself with my own sins until I’m as sick of and bored with them as I was when they were Mike’s to catalogue, until I can feel as superior and defiant as I did then?

  I have never paid for anything in my life. And if I’m paying now, I don’t even know how to recognize the price.

  I have seen Roxanne. She’s as unwilling to be angry with me as everyone else. When I tried to tell her how guilty I felt, how fearful, as if I had no right to anything, hadn’t earned anything, was in terrible debt to everyone, she said, “That’s no way to get out of being loved.” That isn’t at all what I meant; at least, I don’t think it is, though I could hear then what it must sound like to her.

  All these months Roxanne has been different from everyone else, a time bomb in my life, dangerous enough to make the risk a kind of price in itself. But now, unless I were graphically perverse and exhibitionist, my parents would accept my living with Roxanne as a reasonable solution. I have to begin to count costs I couldn’t pay or she couldn’t pay.

  “You don’t want to have to lie. You’re not a hypocrite like me,” I said.

  “I don’t lie. There’s no point in making love in front of people who don’t like it. It’s something to share, not to expose.”

  She doesn’t understand that if we actually lived together, I’d have her in a bra in a week, in slacks that belted over her rib cage. Or if she does understand, she thinks she wouldn’t care if it pleased me, just as Mike tried not to care when I dressed him up in suits.

  I won’t even meet her friends now. When there was no possibility of it, I liked her to tell me about them, about their wild parties and partner swapping. As erotic fantasy it was just fine, but in fact, I’d be as turned off as I was with Mike. I can’t even watch the sex in movies. I hate it.

  She doesn’t believe me: my nakedness, unabashed, my breasts offered up to her, my legs spread wide, so open, so hungry, I could swallow a roomful of her friends.

  “You want to earn this,” she asks, “and you also want to be punished for it? Is it so good and so bad?”

  “Why don’t you feel guilty?”

  “Nobody ever taught me how.”

  She is trying to unteach me, and she does at moments when coming to her is the grand performance of my life, as amazing as giving birth but without its pain. I can feel then that I not only wouldn’t mind a world of bystanders but would think it is the one act the world should witness, its pure pleasure, its pure joy. But that is euphoria.

  Away from her, the safer I actually am, the realer the possibility of taking her not only as lover but as mate, the more guilty I feel, the more certain I am that the only way I could live with her would be to ruin her. Roxanne is wrong. Guilt is exactly the way to get out of being loved.

  Taking the boys to the dentist this afternoon, I met Joseph and Carlotta, who had met each other on their way to the liquor store. I had to prompt Tony and Victor into speaking to Joseph. Only now I realize they didn’t recognize him. If he had not been with Carlotta, I’m not sure I would have either. I suppose he has to wear out some of his old clothes, but, if I were his wife, I’d draw the line at those particular trousers. He’s withered, and his color is awful. I don’t remember that he actually stammered before, though he’s always looked like the sort of man who would.

  He has a daughter two days old and was buying champagne to celebrate.

  “I hope that’s what you wanted,” I said.

  “I didn’t want anything,” he said, and laughed that peculiar laugh.

  Is that why I’ve been afraid to go out? Carlotta and Joseph are the two people in the world who genuinely disapprove of me as much as I do of myself. And they’re the only two, aside from Allen and Pierre—who really don’t count—to know what I’m doing. They didn’t make me at all nervous. My best friend and Mike’s best friend both turn out on Mike’s side because they share with him their heterosexual pruderies. They were nervous, behaving as if they’d been caught in an obvious conspiracy, a couple of refugees from the year we were thirty. I’m the only one of us who could stand to lose fifteen pounds. I know I’ve never looked better in my life, and they would have had to say so to each other when I left. They would have had to say, “Well, divorce seems to agree with her.” There’s nothing like a little real disapproval to give perspective.

  Joseph never has liked me. Mike and I pretty well forced people to choose sides. The parties we gave got more and more like intramural sports. I always thought Carlotta was so deeply on my side she could afford to play referee. But she always liked Joseph. I didn’t. I couldn’t stand the way Mike felt obliged to behave when Joseph was around, Marlon Brando playing the life of Henry Moore. Joseph didn’t forgive me for refusing to get into the act.

  Why is it that men—even men who pick up their own socks and know how to fry an egg—never manage to believe in themselves without a deeply sympathetic audience? Carlotta has never asked anyone to believe in her as an artist. Roxanne so simply believes in herself she wouldn’t know what to talk about. If I’m as much a needy fake as Mike, at least I keep it to myself. I couldn’t fawn over him. And that damned dummy was so mean and melodramatic and like Mike I couldn’t believe it. It was Joseph who made me afraid. I’ve wondered how much that night contributed to his crack-up.

  I’m sure Mike doesn’t have Joseph on his conscience, or Carlotta either, and why they’re loyal to him when he screwed them both so soundly is one of the mysteries.

  I miss her. I always did feel a little on her sufferance, but the sense that any minute she might be bored was a challenge. I was almost required to say any outrageous thing that came into my head. A present could never be something small and thoughtful. It had to be extravagant. I didn’t have overt sexual fantasies about Carlotta, but I used to like to think of us as a pair, a contrasting pair of women, extremes, of the sort that attracted Picasso. If there had been a hope in hell of Mike’s being a Canadian Picasso (which I admit is a contradiction in terms), would I have fawned over him and encouraged him to act out my appetite for other women? Another of my invented flashbacks to before Roxanne which would exclude Roxanne, give me back my innocent misery.

  I meet her at Allen and Pierre’s tonight for dinner. We haven’t been there together for a long time. Allen’s been in Europe. If Pierre is alone, only Roxanne is invited. As a couple we’d simply increase his loneliness.

  I asked Allen last night why Pierre never went with him. For a moment he kept his eyes on the chessboard, reluctant to take his mind off the game. Then he seemed to realize it wasn’t an idle question.

  “He’s phobic about traveling. Aside from that, most of the places I go I couldn’t take him. Since Trudeau got married, single men, unless they are distres
sed fathers of three legitimate sons, just aren’t in. I have a string of good-looking women over two continents.”

  “Do you feel guilty about that?”

  “Heavens, no. As a matter of fact, I was about to ask you to the Gallery Ball, now that you’re a respectably divorced woman.”

  “I’d be delighted.”

  “Good,” he said, and turned back to our game.

  “Don’t you ever feel guilty about any of it?”

  “About Pierre, of course, but sex, if it isn’t a tiny bit wicked, is ever so dull, don’t you think? Mike must have been an awful weight of responsibility in bed.”

  “I was.”

  “Well, my point is made either way.”

  “Roxanne doesn’t feel guilty.”

  “Of course not. It takes a certain amount of breeding to be morally trivial, as you and I are.”

  “Morally trivial?” I know Allen jokes and never jokes.

  “You’ve already begun to fret about ruining Roxanne, I expect, teaching her your own nasty middle-class inhibitions, isolating her from her old free life. It’s one of my favorite topics for brooding about Pierre, and I have the advantage of being years older, of having found him when he was still a criminal offense. You couldn’t even be jailed. The fact is, of course, Pierre seduced me, and he would have been beaten to death years ago if he hadn’t found someone to take him in. But the facts haven’t much to do with it.”

  “Roxanne doesn’t need my protection—if I could protect her.”

  “No, but she does need your love. There’s that, you see. If I go to friends’ second and third weddings with you and we’re occasionally seen at an opening, that should take care of our need to pass and give Tony and Victor the option of thinking of you as heterosexual if either of them needs it. That way each of us earns the right to an immodest and indecent bed. Do you know, I’m nearly the only man I know who goes home for sex? I attribute it to my impeccable heterosexual behavior in public. I deserve my vice.”

  Pierre appeared at that moment from the kitchen. “We’ve decided to make fudge.”

  Allen sighed and shook his head. “They conspire to turn us into a pair of fat old cows.”

  It’s true that Roxanne mourns every pound I have so gratefully lost, and Pierre needs to imagine that Allen fasts in his absences. I am not sure he doesn’t, for all his tales of expense-account dinners with the handsomest flesh of both sexes in all the cities of Europe. I wonder if the only kind of success I can accept in a man is the kind he believes in as little as I do. I admire Allen.

  “You have no alimony,” he said then.

  It was my turn to be more interested in the neglected game than in the turn of conversation, but I answered, “No, I didn’t want any, but Mike keeps sending money anyway. He must have got a job down there.”

  “That shouldn’t irritate you.”

  “He’s trying to buy my good behavior.”

  “Is he? Then he should have contested the divorce.”

  “Yes, he should have.”

  “You wanted him to?”

  “Oh, Allen, I don’t know. I feel so irrational about it. I don’t feel free.”

  “Of course not. When are you going to start looking for a job?”

  “I don’t know. Would that solve anything?”

  “Part of your charm, Alma, is that you are hardly aware of how totally spoiled you are.”

  “Oh, I know. I do know.”

  “Allen has a friend who runs the most successful gallery in Vancouver, one nobody ever hears of because it doesn’t handle anyone local, only the international giants. There are no opening nights. The place isn’t even open to the public during the day. Investors make appointments and fly in from Montreal and Toronto, even from Los Angeles and Houston and Atlanta. His last local employee couldn’t resist a second business with the customers, and he felt it lowered the tone of the establishment. He’s perfectly willing to supply call girls or boys, but he wants people working in the gallery to be singularly professional.

  “I didn’t ask him the salary, but it wouldn’t be peanuts. You don’t type, I suppose, or add, or do anything useful like that?”

  “I type,” I said. I must have been the only one in the class for whom it was nothing more than part of a fantasy for future greatness.

  “Would you like an introduction?”

  “I don’t see how I could work full time … with the boys.”

  “It isn’t that sort of job.”

  I wanted to say, “Don’t push me,” but I’ve been waiting for months to be pushed in some direction. I think I imagined ultimatums rather than possibilities.

  I am thirty-one years old, and I have never had a job. I have never even considered it seriously. I majored in education instead of English not to be practical but because it was easier. Mickey Mouse courses were ideal preparation for the hours I play stupid card games, Monopoly, and put together jigsaw puzzles with the boys. Roxanne says working is as interesting as gin rummy.

  If I’d decided to be something outlandish—a brain surgeon, a commercial pilot, a Greek scholar—to work would be the natural outcome. To take a job simply for the sake of a job seems slightly sordid for a woman, particularly for anyone with children. Oh, I know I sound more like Mother than I should, who thinks Roxanne is such a brave little thing to sell records to people.

  “Do you work a cash register?” Mother asked her, as if that were one of the central mysteries.

  Well, it’s a mystery to me, too, and I have Mother’s unhealthy awe of the million very ordinary things I don’t know how to do, like use a laundromat or put gas in my own car.

  I don’t suppose the gallery has anything as obvious as a cash register.

  Being propositioned by rich men doesn’t frighten me. I doubt that it would happen. Might there be a rich woman or two? Allen was careful to point out that the last thing his friend wants is sex-crazed employees of whatever tastes.

  Do I think the only respectable reason for doing anything is love? I certainly wouldn’t have married for money. In the first couple of years I was very proud that people would know I’d married for love.

  If love was really vanity and a need for safety, what is it with Roxanne beyond lust and escapism? If I lived with her, we might lock ourselves into roles as stupid as mine and Mike’s, or, what is more likely, we’d fight constantly about the roles we weren’t playing. Who cooks? Who pays the utility bill? Who changes the beds?

  Mother and I never fight about chores. She never expects me to do anything, and aside from cooking, there’s very little to do. Roxanne and I wouldn’t have a cleaning woman, not just because we couldn’t afford it. We couldn’t have someone like that poking around in our lives.

  When I’m with Roxanne, I really enjoy doing ordinary things for her. In her room it’s like playing house. She hasn’t more than a couple of glasses and plates to wash, and her clothes fit into two drawers. The only complexities are her machines, and she keeps them impeccably.

  But would I enjoy coming home from work and having to cook the meal, spend the evening doing the laundry, being with the boys, while she was off fiddling with her recorders, night after night? When would I ever read a book or write—or cut my toenails for that matter? I put up with Mike’s sculpting and crazy hours for two reasons: it gave me plenty of time to myself, and I didn’t want to be with him. I don’t even like Roxanne to go to the bathroom without me. Anytime there’s a chance to be with her, I don’t want to do anything else. The idea of sitting in the same room with her and reading a book is unimaginable.

  Why won’t I imagine? It has nothing to do with Roxanne. I don’t want to be looked at and called “an unfortunate woman,” having to work, living with another woman. Being lesbian is a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. I don’t feel humiliated at home because it’s temporary.

  Any day now I can suggest to Dad that summer will be too much for Mother, the kids underfoot all the time. School is out next week, and once th
ey’ve been running around loose for a while, Dad won’t be hard to convince. I couldn’t stay here and work and let Mother cope all day with the children. Once I move out, there’s no way I can have a job in summertime.

  If I rented a room to Roxanne, a room to herself, I wouldn’t be asking Dad for a house of my own simply for that. I could start using Mike’s money. He told me it was to keep me home with the boys. If Dad bought me a house—he certainly has offered more than once—and there was no rent to pay, Mike’s money and Roxanne’s rent together would be enough—well, not for clothes, but Mother and Dad have always been generous about that.

  I simply assume Roxanne wants to live with me. We talk about living together all the time, but it’s always in some other place, near other mountains, by other seas, in a house of our own, which never gets furnished beyond a huge bed and sunning mats and certainly doesn’t have Tony and Victor running in and out with stomachaches, broken arms, and the obsessive need to tell the plot of every TV program, including the commercials. There is no huge laundry basket for the piles of their dirty clothes. In those dreams, the nearest they’ve got to us is about a mile down some tropical shore as naked as we are, as absorbed in seashells as we are in our oceanic sex. I have never said to Roxanne, quite simply, “Would you live with me and help me raise the boys?” She can’t suggest it herself, but also she may have as many doubts as I do.

  I have just read this through. It’s hours and hours of nagging myself with guilts and doubts and indecisions. The only changes that seem to have taken place are that from resenting Mike’s money I’ve begun to be grateful for and count on it; from being afraid I’d do that drastically immoral thing of living with Roxanne, no matter what anyone thought, I’m afraid I can’t live with Roxanne because of what I think.

  This isn’t writing. This is to writing what masturbation is to making love, an analogy that wouldn’t have demeaned it for me while I still lived with Mike since my own fingers were so much more skillful than his. The lonely pleasing of oneself is certainly better than the mutual displeasure of bad sex.