by Jane Rule
Then she’s not at home, two days, three days, a week. I track her down, sometimes at Carlotta’s, sometimes at Pierre’s. I feel their reluctance to let me in.
“I thought you said you were looking for a job today.”
She shrugs. Pierre sulks, wanting Roxanne to himself because Allen is again out of town. Carlotta won’t let me look at the portrait. She won’t let me stay around while she works. Daily the wall around Roxanne is getting higher. She might as well have been sent to prison. I know I am building it, and I can’t stop. She has become the prison of my need, and she won’t let me in, angel at the gate with flaming sword instead of welcoming jailor. No, just something I’ve broken and can’t mend and want to smash and want to mourn and want back. Roxanne! Roxanne!
I haven’t seen Roxanne for a month. I haven’t seen any of them, except for Ann Rabinowitz, who doesn’t seem to me one of them. I went first because Joseph was spending all of the Christmas holiday in the hospital, and Mike is no longer around to be the friend he was to Ann last time. I watched her bathe and then nurse the baby. We talked about the care of cracked nipples. Then I asked them all over for dinner, though we agreed the children were just the age to detest each other. But the baby is a real novelty to the boys, and since the girls are so good with her and also just that much older than Vic and Tony, the boys are impressed with them, too.
I feel useful and wholesome around Ann, companionably matronly, and I like her. We’ve been slow to exchange real confidences, she probably because she hasn’t wanted to burden me with hers, I because I didn’t believe she could understand mine. Then this afternoon she gave me a surprising opening.
“Mike told me you’d had some sort of breakdown.”
“He did? What else did he say?”
“Not much. He thought it had alienated you from him. And he said you had one friend who had stayed close to you.”
“Did he tell you I was a lesbian?”
“No,” Ann said.
“Well, that’s the breakdown, and that’s the close friend. I was in love with another woman.”
“And you aren’t now?”
“Yes … no. I’m not seeing her right at the moment. I’ve been so obnoxious I may not be able to see her again.”
“Why?”
“I think it must be more important for me to be guilty than anything else in the world, as if my life depended on it. Have you ever felt that way at all?”
Ann nodded.
“Do you feel guilty when Joseph’s sick?”
Two tears, like premature bifocals, caught on the lower rims of her glasses.
“No, I feel angry.”
“At him?”
“Not exactly. At the pattern of suffering, I guess. I try to believe it has some point.”
“Is that why you had the baby?”
“Yes—and why I named her Joy.”
“Mike wanted a daughter.”
“Joseph didn’t. He may have been right. Sometimes I think it’s a kind of joy that shakes him apart. He tries to live his life in camouflage, which doesn’t really help because, if it doesn’t see him, he still sees it.”
“What?”
“Wonder. He seems to be able to deal with it only when he’s irrational.”
“Do you ever feel crazy?”
She shook her head, and then she smiled. “I’ve felt wonderful.”
“And you can cope with that,” I said, laughing.
“Oh, yes.”
“Well, apparently I can’t. I wreck it.”
“Maybe we all do,” Ann said. “Maybe that’s the pattern.”
I share Ann’s anger at that possibility. Perhaps it’s time I felt guilty about those things I can do something about. Correction may be just a polite word for punishment, but it might also help.
Carlotta wouldn’t come to dinner last night; neither would Pierre. Allen came by himself. It has always puzzled me that of all the people I know, Allen is the one I find easiest to talk to. He puts so many people off with his flippant cynicism, though it’s usually directed at himself.
“This was supposed to be peace and reconciliation night,” I said to him, “but I’m glad you’ve come alone.”
“I never turn down dinner with a handsome woman,” he said, “particularly if she has delicious sons.”
“Actually Vic and Tony are at their grandparents’ tonight.”
He sighed.
Once we’d settled with drinks and Allen had paid the appropriate number of compliments to the flowers, the fire, my hair (which I’ve had cut), I said, “I want to talk about love—honestly.”
“You’re too ambitious. Only writers talk like that.”
“I am trying to write.”
“Oh, my God, Alma, not you! How long has this been going on? Why didn’t you tell me at once? Maybe I can still help.”
He did such a parody of the male friend advising abortion that I had to laugh, and his mock horror—real enough underneath his style—made it easier for me to have finally confessed to someone other than Roxanne.
“I need to do it.”
“But I offered to get you a decent, quite interesting job. You go right on confusing freedom and bondage. Freedom is money, Alma, not art.”
“Well, you manage both.”
“I do not. I have never pretended to be an artist.”
“You are one just the same.”
“I’d rather talk about love, if those are my only two choices.”
“Good. So would I. How is Roxanne?”
“Working at a drugstore, one of the few that don’t stock tape recorders.”
“Where is she doing her real work?”
“She isn’t. She says she doesn’t feel like it.”
“I’ve been working harder than I ever have in the last month.”
“Self-justification.”
“What?”
“That’s all art is, you know, for most anyway.”
“We were going to talk about love.”
“So we were.”
“Would she see me again?”
“Of course. She’s the same fool she was a month ago, only slightly less miserable.”
“I don’t know what I was doing.”
“Shall I tell you? You were having a long, self-indulgent tantrum about your sullied love. I took you down to that jail to give you a taste of the reality Roxanne lives with. I thought it was time. I was wrong.”
“How often have you had to bail Pierre out?”
“Once … after he’d been picked up in the men’s room at The Bay. I took him back to the diamond department and bought him that ridiculous ring. You don’t seem to believe in Roxanne’s innocence.”
“I should have bought her a … tape recorder?”
“As a start. You shouldn’t punish other people for what only you feel guilty about. Roxanne doesn’t feel guilty about loving you any more than Pierre feels guilty about loving me, and if someone as self-loathing as I am can cope with it, certainly you can learn to.”
“How?”
“Where are you most likely to find your self-respect? Mine’s in making an adequate amount of money—more than adequate, enough to buy off my guilt in ways that please Pierre.”
“In writing, I suppose.”
“Well, then, all right. It isn’t that either of them needs buying off, but at least you could live with Roxanne. That would spare her something.”
“You think I ought to earn money and support her.”
“Of course I do. I’ve been telling you that for months.”
“Why me? Why not Roxanne?”
“With a jail record and a grade eight education? Are you kidding?”
“I haven’t ever even supported myself.”
“Think of it as noblesse oblige. That should suit you better than women’s liberation.”
“I don’t feel all that superior.”
“Being a snob has nothing to do with feeling superior.”
“What has it to do with?”
/> “Being afraid. You shouldn’t be afraid of Roxanne. She’s very gifted and very gentle.”
“Are she and Pierre having an affair?”
“What has that got to do with anything?” Allen demanded.
“I don’t know,” I said, and got up to put dinner on the table.
It had never had anything to do with anything before, but, once Allen started talking about money, I began to think of Roxanne as an object which should come with an exclusive lifetime guarantee, very like Mike’s image of me. It was the one mistake I had not already made.
“If only you were a man,” Allen said as he sat down to eat, “you’d understand what I’m trying to say.”
Allen does not know how often I play that game. If I were a man, I would probably be in love with Ann or Allen. For the first time my lot as myself seems less complicated and more possible. All I really need is nerve.
All my reconciliation scenes were extravagantly penitent and entirely sexual. The reconciliation itself took place over the phone yesterday morning. When Roxanne arrived for dinner, the boys greeted her as if she’d been away on a long trip. She brought them a game involving Ping-Pong balls and cones, which they played all evening. I didn’t rush them off to their rooms. Even after they went to bed, Roxanne and I sat in the living room, having a drink.
“I guess I should make the boys’ lunches before we go to bed.”
“I’ll need one, too. I’ll make the soup.”
The sacramental moments in real life come over lunch boxes on kitchen counters. The ordinary for the reconciled is holy. This house is going to have two cooks and no master.
Roxanne Recording
ROXANNE WAS MAKING A sound map of the house. What other people might have fixed, a dripping tap or squeaking hinge, she listened to. What other people blanked out—the refrigerator or furnace going on, a plane passing overhead—she heard. She was interested in the difference in tone between eggshells and chicken bones in the garbage disposal. She compared the refilling times of the two toilets. She recorded the boys’ feet up and down the stairs, in and out of the house, and she asked them to spend one rainy afternoon doing nothing but sitting down over and over again on different pieces of living-room furniture.
“Victor farted—on purpose,” Tony said, outraged.
“It’s okay; it’s okay,” Roxanne assured him. “Everything is okay.”
One morning she was out on the front lawn, setting up the sprinkler, and heard Tony upstairs practicing his violin. She got bowing exercises through the slow rhythm of water, falling back and forth like a metronome. The next morning she recorded only the sprinkler, then only Tony’s bowing. She wanted her machines to be one-voiced instruments as much as possible, not the garbage cans of sound like radios, everything jammed together at one source.
Roxanne rarely listened to recorded music. Alma’s stereo gave some space for the music to happen in but still not enough. It was like putting a whole orchestra into an elevator. She would not listen to symphonies at all unless she could go to the concert and see the numbers of instruments. Listening to a record gave you no idea how many violins were trying to vanish into the same note, an odd exercise to do over and over again for centuries, the obliteration of distinctive sound for volume. But, given a choice, she’d any day rather stand on a street corner and listen to a band march by each instrument giving her a solo a couple of steps long inside the traveling collective of sound.
Musical instruments were not of major interest to her, and she doubted that they would have been even if she’d had a childhood like Tony’s, practicing an hour before breakfast every morning. She would have been out with Victor listening to the neighborhood dogs bark, throwing stones into the fishpond, talking back to the crows. And like Victor, she’d rather shout than sing. The only kind of singing she could listen to was the sort people did alone, where they might imitate for a while the unnatural pretentiousness of the professional singer but soon turn it into the sound joke it was. Most singing was like the resonance of a cleft palate or the voice of someone born profoundly deaf. Learning to sing was like learning to limp. Roxanne had refused in school to carry a tune, except in her head, where she couldn’t help it. If she’d been allowed to whistle, she might have cooperated, but only on her own, not with a bunch of others.
One of Roxanne’s chief difficulties in learning to understand and be understood was that she had so little sense of what was commonly irritating and commonly pleasurable to listen to. Mastering table manners, polite conversation, other people’s orgasms, she could quickly get the balance of the natural, technical, and conventional, but it was years before she could believe that there was a common response to sound from which she was excluded. Fingernails across blackboards, cracking of finger joints, tapping of pencils—at first she made specific lists, only gradually began to generalize to any extended tapping or drumming, any machine except for those specifically designed for making a sound and having no other purpose. She finally was able to conclude that people were irritated or embarrassed or bored or frightened by any sound that was not specifically made to please, while for her that very motive in sound made it less interesting, less true. She was drawn to what she sometimes called weed sound because it was what other people would root out if they could. She named some of her pieces after weeds: dandelion, crabgrass, broom.
“The names of a lot of the sounds I love are ugly. I’m glad I’m not trying to write,” she said to Alma.
“Like what?”
“Oh, like the sound of your body shifting in the tub. A sort of grunting sound.”
“Have you recorded that?”
“Yes.”
Roxanne was working very hard and had been for the month since she’d moved in with Alma. It was intensely interesting for her, and it also kept her from thinking over-much about Alma and herself until it would be useful to do so. Roxanne had never lived with anyone since she’d had a choice because everywhere not her own had been some sort of prison. But she’d always had a dream of living that was shared, erotic and companionable, which would simply go on and on, maybe with one other person, maybe with several.
Alma was not like anyone Roxanne had known before. When Roxanne first met her, she had been astounded by her physical beauty, the generous clarity of her face, her magnificent size, the prize specimen of a breeder god who had made sure she was fed to a fullness of breast and thigh, teeth perfectly white, skin without flaw. Roxanne’s hunger was cannibal, to be satisfied whatever the price. She had known women who used husbands and children against her greed as a lover and had expected it of Alma, but Alma almost at once gave what Roxanne was intent on stealing. She had never known anyone as generous with her body and as selfish with everything else—with things, with space, with imagination, with heart. It was not conscious. For Roxanne it was oddly admirable because so uncalculating. Allen, who worked hard to maintain cynical superiority and was fond of making common cause with Alma, was guiltily generous in ways Roxanne understood. Alma’s guilt was never connected with her selfishness. She wanted to be punished—even brutally punished—for the generosity of her body. That was what Roxanne couldn’t stand, Alma’s wanting pain as if it were something she had earned, something Roxanne owed her as an emotional debt. It was heartbreaking. It was ridiculous. Roxanne didn’t understand it. She wouldn’t do it.
Now Alma seemed almost to have forgotten all that. Their lovemaking, necessarily quieter, except when the boys were off for the night with their grandparents, was positively domesticated in other ways. Though Alma was shy of the lovely size of her breasts, particularly her nipples, she was learning to use a bra like a purse, something for storing valuables when she went out, and she never resisted the pleasure Roxanne took in them, whether they were working together in the kitchen or making the bed. Roxanne indulged Alma by covering her own more often in public, though it was almost like being blind or deaf to shield what she felt through her tits. Alma did not know there was anything to receive except sexual pleasu
re.
She was not insensitive or unintelligent. Her selfishness made her a better mother than she would have been without it, functioning for the boys in the ways she felt them an extension of herself, in material and creature comforts, healthily against them as she made it clear this was her house, her life out of which they were expected to grow.
She did regret Roxanne had no room of her own, but it did not occur to Alma to offer to have one built in the basement, where Roxanne had stored most of her belongings since there was no obvious room for anything but clothes in their bedroom. It was not their bedroom; it was Alma’s, as it was Alma’s house, Alma’s children, Alma’s life, into which Roxanne would fit if she could.
It wasn’t that Alma couldn’t imagine so much as that she didn’t. Or did only when she was writing, when she often seemed to imagine so much that it ceased to be documentation at all.
It was comfortable, even rather grand, not only for Alma but for Roxanne. There were no calculated thoughtfulnesses that had to be noted and returned. There were very few distracting responsibilities to be assumed since it would never occur to Alma to say, in an aggrieved tone, “These are your children as much as mine,” or, “This is your house as much as mine.” She was surprised and pleased by Roxanne’s ordinary attentions to the children, her willingness to vacuum. She was relieved that Roxanne routinely contributed to the housekeeping money. In emotional ways, Roxanne felt freer of Alma than when they had not lived together. But she had no idea either how long she would be welcome or how long she’d be able to stay. She didn’t brood about it or puzzle anxiously. She noticed and worked.
Roxanne still posed for Carlotta once a week. The portrait, much referred to, had only just begun. Before, Carlotta had been sketching. She had begun working with Roxanne dressed, but after a month she said impatiently that this was work for a fashion designer or commercial artist selling shirts. Roxanne traded her clothes for closed windows. It was still very cold. She drank cups of tea and had a hot shower before she left.
