Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  It is peculiar to go anywhere with Roxanne. No matter how much people gossip about our sex life, they don’t treat us as a couple. A man and a woman don’t have to live together to be paired. At their slightest indication, they are treated like Siamese twins. Roxanne and I are two single women at the same party, ten years older than most other single women there. Roxanne doesn’t look it. I do. We don’t look as if we came from the same generation, or perhaps planet. The surprise of this public separateness is always double-edged: I feel relieved not to be so exposed and at the same time very unprotected. Though Mike at these occasions could be so obnoxious I wanted to disown him, he was nevertheless my husband, the tallest and handsomest man in the room. He was better than a mirror for my vanity. Roxanne doesn’t disappear in a crowd; her hair is too extraordinary. The way she turns to anyone who speaks to her, like a flower to the sun, alarms rather than makes me jealous, but she isn’t really easily taken in. I know that. Still, she’s vulnerable, and I have no convention for protecting her either.

  Carlotta, skeletal and composed, is very elegant in a long dress the color of fine ash. She more or less ignores her friends on these occasions, expecting them to do what she is doing: soft-selling to potential buyers. I link arms with a doctor friend of my father’s and say, “It must be your training to save lives. Have you noticed that, if it weren’t for the medical profession, a lot of Vancouver artists would starve?”

  “There are some real collectors,” he agrees. “I can’t claim to be one, but I always have been interested in Carlotta.”

  We look together at her X-rayed bones, arranged in tidal washes. He chooses her pelvic bone, stranded alone on an otherwise-barren beach.

  “I should have given that to you,” Carlotta says, the first time she’s spoken to me since I arrived, and I have no idea what she means, peace offering or taunt.

  “Too late. I’ve sold it,” I tell her.

  We both turn away to other buyers. I don’t care about being reconciled with Carlotta. I want to be interesting enough to her so that there will always be at least brief moments between us, which never have worked and never will. I don’t mind that now, and, when I did, I didn’t know. Long friendships may be seasoned by unrequited love and betrayal. She hasn’t given up my perfume.

  Allen and Pierre are here, as separate from each other as Roxanne and I are. Pierre has found Roxanne. They stand together in their transparent shirts, Pierre flashing his diamonds-are-forever ring like a newly engaged teenager, Roxanne’s pearl perfectly visible between her small, arrogant breasts. There are so many outlandish costumes here that they don’t seem out of place. Nor do Allen and I, who are not simply disguised as buyers, since I will help him choose the debris I watched Carlotta sketch with such moody accuracy on the beach that cold day last spring. As we stand discussing it, I am aware that my father’s doctor friend has noticed us and is probably deciding I am now half of a less striking but more appropriate couple. Allen does enjoy being one of the most elusive and eligible bachelors in Vancouver, whose name has been linked with a dozen different women, none of whom, he assures me, has had any more illusions or desires than I do. “All lesbian?” I ask, incredulous.

  “My dear, I’m not a gossip.”

  Now he admires my brown sapphires.

  “They belonged to my grandmother.”

  “A woman should wear nothing but real jewelry, preferably at least fifty years old.”

  Allen’s attention is caught by a sound which has been repeating at long but fairly regular intervals, familiar as a friend’s voice, but I can’t place it until Allen excuses himself and goes over to Joseph. The sound is Joseph’s laugh, like a warning buoy in that sea of people. He looks less seedy than when I saw him last, but he’s still not a good color, and the vacant hopefulness on his face makes me afraid he won’t be able to remember Allen’s name. Allen is inviting Joseph and his wife back for drinks after the opening, as I have been invited, with Roxanne.

  I wish they weren’t coming. I wish Carlotta had other friends, a lover to go off with, and Roxanne and I could go home to bed. I don’t realize, until after we’re there, that I must not trust Roxanne to understand what she understands perfectly well and can deal with.

  Carlotta is elated by the success of her show, jokes about being the richest rag-and-bone woman in the city. She’s free of financial worry for six months now and has a couple of good commissions. There is no one who plays big frog in little pond with more attractive irony. Roxanne and Allen are being a good audience, Allen because he plays her quipping game with her, Roxanne, as always, because she listens. I watch Carlotta contemplate Roxanne’s breasts, the pearl which Carlotta touches suddenly as if it were something she herself is wearing, a gesture so uncertain and sexual that it makes me catch my breath.

  I am standing with Ann Rabinowitz and turn to her to shield her from something that is shocking only to me, who, in imagination, quite cavalierly changes the sexes of all my friends but never their sexual partners. I feel prudish and silly. There is a spot of milk on Ann’s blouse. My own breasts tighten in sympathy, in pleasure. I ask her about the baby. Behind her glasses her eyes are very tender. This is the first time I’ve ever talked with her, and I feel she’s being very careful of me, a manner she may have developed for Joseph, a gentle testing of what I can take. I mention Mike casually to indicate that I’m not fragile.

  “He was very kind to me, a good friend.”

  “I’m glad,” I say. “Joseph has always been a very good friend to Mike.” And I like admitting that without my own selfish reservations. “How’s Joseph getting along? He does look better.”

  “He is. He has trouble with his memory. It makes his teaching very tiring. But he loves the baby. We all do.”

  “I’d love to see her.”

  “Then come over some morning. I bathe her around ten o’clock.”

  And then feed her? I have such a desire to see those milk-filled breasts, to watch their being sucked by a hungry girl baby, that in this moment I wish I’d let Mike talk me into one more baby not because I’m envious, not because I want another child but because I want to share the experience with Ann, its marvelous sensuality.

  “Why are you the only one not in purdah with your breasts?” I asked Roxanne later, in bed.

  She laughed at my lust, and so did I, because she sucked me until I was Ann, until I was everywoman, brimming with milk, frothing, spilling over, an orgasmic fountain.

  After Mike and I went to a party, our separately stored-up lusts burst out as accusations of narrow jealousy so that, if he finally did fuck me, it was in assertive ownership and revenge. Roxanne gathers up the details of the evening, hers and mine, and takes them home to be opened and shared, like the presents they were meant to be.

  “I’d die at an orgy,” I said just after dawn.

  “Perhaps.”

  “This is an orgy, at least four of us in this bed all night.”

  Lovely, as long as it is fantasy. Roxanne knows that. I think it may be something she regrets about me and hopes I’ll outgrow. I can regret it a little myself until I am cooking breakfast for two small boys and wonder at such depravity.

  Carlotta is doing a portrait of Roxanne. Carlotta phoned and asked my permission.

  “You must ask Roxanne. It has nothing to do with me.”

  “Her body is so much like mine, I thought I might break the narcissistic spell—or extend it. I’ve already done a couple of male portraits that aren’t bad, one of Joseph particularly, but I feel much less certain about doing women. If I could do Roxanne, I might try you. If you would.”

  Carlotta, as a painter, can do that, simply borrow any friend she wants to study without apology or subterfuge. I’ve done a portrait of Joseph, too, but he’s a twenty-five-year-old girl who cracks up after an abortion. About the only thing left of Joseph is the laugh, which Roxanne has also recorded. She used it in a short piece called “Similes,” which has single notes of all sorts of instruments as well as car horns
, buoys, bells. Carlotta can’t paint his laugh. A portrait can suggest a great deal but reveal nothing. What, after all, is a cruel mouth? Just that, if I write it down. But in a face actually represented, unless it is a cartoon, all the features are as ambiguous as those of any stranger—unless, of course, you actually know the person. Will I be able to tell, by looking at Roxanne’s portrait, how aroused she is by the exercise? Since it will go on for weeks, perhaps months, Roxanne will go through every sort of mood. Carlotta will catch what she wants. So, whether they’re her own bones or someone else’s face, Carlotta’s paintings will go on saying more about Carlotta.

  And my writing? Well, here in this notebook, of course. I haven’t really tried to present anyone but me and often at my least presentable. Carlotta has yet to paint herself masturbating with one hand, painting with the other. Maybe she doesn’t. Obviously her deciding to do portraits is like my attempting stories to get outside myself, but I don’t think I have the right to use my friends for that, except in unrecognizable fragments. If I actually tried to do a word portrait of Roxanne, I couldn’t simply catch a passing expression on her face; I’d have to know what it meant. And since words don’t trap a subject in space and time, she wouldn’t have to be alone or thirty-one years old. I could write something as long as a novel about her, fleshing her out with all her past experience so that she would be a person rather than simply a presence in this notebook, a snatch of dialogue or a yellow tank top in a story.

  Major biographical clue: any character in my fiction who wears a tank top is sexually attractive, even though I wouldn’t be caught dead in one.

  A portrait painter doesn’t have to deal with anything but the physical presence. A writer, like a lover, has to deal with the past, with all the acts of the past, and that’s impossible. Yet the minute you start paring away at the clutter of events to get at essential experience, you’re probably doing the equivalent of removing essential teeth for the line of the jaw. Maybe leaving thirty-one years undisturbed inside the sack of skin and concentrating on the shape and texture of that sack is more possible, as making love is more possible than loving. That is, I know Roxanne when we’re making love. My tongue by now can call the farthest outpost of her nervous system to attention. I can consume everything alien until her mind is purified of everything but what I am doing and about to do. But do I know her at all when desire hasn’t emptied her of a self that remembers, experiences, and grows quite apart from me, and always will?

  I don’t even know why she isn’t living here, but that may be because I don’t think about it. I suspect she isn’t living here because I haven’t made it clear that I want her to. I am not sure I do. So, when I stop to think, I learn something about myself rather than about Roxanne, except that she is tactful.

  When we are making love, I am a female multitude with an appetite so various that I can be a hundred women, each a new pleasure to her, but the lovelier the night has been, the more I want time to myself, time when I am not waiting for her to come home, wondering where she is. Then I can think of her as a person instead of the obsession she is to me.

  Pierre’s history is an important part of his attractiveness to Allen, who is more apt to dwell on him as an abandoned child and street orphan than on his transparent shirts and tank tops. That Roxanne was a foster child is important to Pierre, a way they make common cause. For me she might have been born full grown the night of my thirtieth birthday. What is childlike about her has nothing to do with her childhood; it is an essential attention she’s never lost. Carlotta can hardly help catching that in her face, for if she isn’t paying attention to Carlotta, she will be to something or someone else.

  Roxanne didn’t call me; she called Allen.

  “She didn’t want to bother you. I told her I didn’t mind bothering you at all.”

  At first I said I couldn’t go and leave the boys alone. What if Victor woke up and needed something?

  “There are parts of the world where people Victor’s age are supporting their old mothers. Tony’d look after him. Leave a note.”

  “Can’t you just go and bring her here?”

  “Yes.”

  I responded more to the anger in Allen’s voice than to any sense of responsibility of my own to go to the police station. I hadn’t had time to take in what had happened to her until after I’d hung up the phone and began to wait for him to get here. Once I’d written Tony a note and put on my coat, there was nothing else to do.

  I simply couldn’t understand how she could have been caught breaking into the store where she works. She has a key. She often goes down there at night to work.

  When Allen finally arrived, he explained, “I didn’t say she had broken in—I said she was charged with breaking and entering and theft over one hundred dollars.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she was down there running half the tape recorders in the basement.”

  “But she does that a couple of times a week and has for years. It’s the main reason she likes the job.”

  “And never bothered to ask permission?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t suppose she thought of it as doing anything wrong. I mean, she’s sometimes wished she could take me down to hear, but she thought, since I wasn’t an employee, it might not be right.”

  “It isn’t even a Maoist plot, but it might as well be as far as the authorities are concerned. I can understand why Roxanne has no sense of private property, but surely by now a little capitalist responsibility could have rubbed off from you. You don’t really think all the toys in the world belong to you.”

  “Why are you so angry?”

  “Because you don’t take care of her, for God’s sake!”

  “She’s a grown woman, Allen.”

  “She’s no more a grown woman than you are!”

  “I am the mother of two real children. I’m not about to pretend she’s another. I don’t happen to want her to grow up and leave home.”

  We couldn’t share the anxiety except by fighting with each other. By the time we arrived at the station, I felt Allen was taking me there not so much for Roxanne’s sake as for punishment because in some way I hadn’t anticipated the danger she was in and prevented this from happening.

  Allen’s lawyer was already there when we arrived. Allen was so familiar with the procedure I wondered how many times he’d bailed Pierre out of trouble Allen had not been able to prevent in all his wisdom and self-righteousness. I had a sudden image of Roxanne as someone quite alien to me, a hardened juvenile delinquent who might be caught any night she wasn’t with me, breaking into buildings, stealing quantities of expensive equipment, or out cruising the streets like a prostitute. The infidelity—mine—shocked me, but I couldn’t shake it. In my own safe house and all the way down to the jail I could be sure of what had happened and why. Once in that wretched public place I was exposed, reduced, with nothing to do but shake, while the men played their power games against each other, Roxanne the prize.

  When she was finally produced, she looked like one of those mechanical dolls whose spring has been wound too tight and broken, rigid and still. I wanted to run to her, embrace her or shake her or whatever it took to bring her back to life again, but I was as rigid with terror as she was. Allen took her arm, and then he took mine and steered us both out of the building to the car. Roxanne answered his battery of questions very softly with no more than a word or two each time.

  “And who was it who found you? A night watchman?”

  “The owner.”

  “The owner?” I asked, indignant. “But he’s a friend of my father’s!”

  “Why didn’t you think of that two hours ago?” Allen demanded.

  “Don’t get your father into this,” Roxanne pleaded.

  “Roxanne,” Allen said, “I hate to face you with the facts of life this late at night, but we’re talking about the difference between a jail sentence of a couple of years and dropped charges. Would your father be willing to talk with him, Alma?”
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br />   “I’m sure he would.”

  Dad was able to make the store owner listen to reason. All the charges were dropped the next day but Roxanne is out of a job, and Mother is a little more formal and dubious about her than she was, giving me one of my attacks of respectability, and I question Roxanne not like a lover but like a lawyer for the prosecution.

  Roxanne assures me that she has served time in jail only on morals offenses, never for offenses against property. She served her first term when she was fifteen in a juvenile correction center in some place like Kamloops or Nelson. After that she was put in a foster home where people are paid eight hundred dollars a month to deal with incorrigibles. Roxanne was in and out of jail until she was twenty-one and became a consenting adult. After that, she was careful not to associate with anyone under age, not only to keep herself out of trouble but not to risk jail for someone who had never been.

  “They’re not good places,” she says.

  I am appalled. I behave as if I’d just discovered that the maid had syphilis. I don’t want someone with a criminal record around the children. I make excuses not to ask her to the house. Since she never questions or protests, it isn’t difficult, now that she’s not working, to see her in her room during the day. Simply because I’m scandalized by her, I am more obsessed by her than ever. I grill her with sexual questions. I want to hear exactly how women intimidate, rape, keep in bondage other women. I know I’m making her miserable. I can’t seem to help it. I want her to act out all her own sexual humiliations on me. I beg to be abused. For I’ve had a revelation: the punishment is the same as the crime, and I am in a frenzy for it. She won’t.

  “It’s my past, Alma. I can’t give it to you any more than you can give me yours.”

  Often now, when I arrive, she has the same rigid, blank look she had that night at the jail, and again I feel she is a doll wound too tight, broken, and I am an alarmed and petulant child who wants to shake, push, wind tighter the toy I’ve already broken.