Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  Roxanne had a curious, faint memory of lying in an enclosed space, seeing nothing but the underedge of a window sill and a ceiling, listening not to a human voice but to a myriad of sounds coming in from outside. The world outside must have been her teacher, and she was still struggling to speak her own mother tongue.

  “Nothing is really forgotten,” Joseph said. “I’ve been reassured.”

  It was not reassuring. Fortunately or not, the bizarre events of any day in the drugstore where she worked distracted Roxanne from worry about anyone not in her presence. Chewing gum, cigarettes, prescriptions for antibiotics, sex magazines, deodorants, eyebrow pencils, vibrators—life is habit-forming, even for the old woman over there by the greeting cards, grunting out pungent turds while she looks for a birthday card for her grandson. Roxanne must clean up after her quickly before someone decides to lock the old lady up. No one gets indignant about dogs, which not only shit but nose each other’s private parts just to say hello, but let the manager catch a couple of kids feeling each other up over the magazine rack, and he calls the RCMP.

  Roxanne had to work as hard to figure out other people’s morality as she did their taste in sound. The first principle was not to assume that what shocked and outraged people was something they didn’t do themselves. The manager, for instance, finger-fucked the cashier every time there was a slow couple of minutes. Roxanne didn’t object to it. It seemed no more offensive than rubbing a cat’s ears or scratching the base of its tail, but you could be arrested for doing it in public, and she’d been jailed for doing it in private before she was twenty-one. Yet it was what everyone wanted, in jail or out of it, a little wild comfort of one sort or another. In a humane society you wouldn’t punish people able to find their own; you’d help those who couldn’t … children, crazy people, old people. But Roxanne knew better. She was very careful to be of no real help to anyone while she was at work.

  She had nearly forgotten the dangers at home when she walked in not only to Joseph having a cup of coffee at the dining-room table but to Mike, Victor balancing on the back of his father’s chair, Tony standing protectively by Roxanne’s wall.

  “Where’s Alma?”

  “In her room,” Tony said.

  Roxanne acknowledged no one as she went through the room. She found Alma staring out the window at the city.

  “When did he arrive?”

  “About an hour ago,” Alma said, “just after the boys got home.”

  “It’s only the first of June.”

  “He said he wanted time to look around the old town before he took the boys south.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh, Roxanne, it’s terrible, just terrible. When he sat down at the table with Joseph, it was as if the last two years hadn’t happened. …”

  “You don’t want to go back to him, do you?”

  “Of course, I don’t, but don’t you see, if you were a man, he wouldn’t dare come in like this, expecting me to make him coffee, settling to talk with Joseph as if he were in his own house. And you wouldn’t just stand there asking stupid questions … just like a woman!”

  “I am a woman,” Roxanne said wearily.

  “Oh, darling, what are we going to do?”

  “What do we have to do?”

  “Will you stop asking questions, for God’s sake, and tell me what to do?”

  “I’m trying to say we don’t have to do anything except be civil to him when he’s here to see the boys. If he hangs around too much, tell him you have work to do.”

  “He looks so … well.”

  “Good.”

  “Did you see his car?”

  “I came the back way,” Roxanne said, looking out the window to which Alma nodded.

  There was a sage green Lincoln Continental parked in front of the house. To Roxanne it was nothing but a cancerous lump in his ego, but it was obvious that Alma was admiring it.

  “You ought to go back downstairs,” Roxanne said, trying to sound both matter-of-fact and decisive. “I need to change out of my uniform.”

  “Shall I ask him to dinner?”

  I don’t know—Play it by ear—Do you want to?—No—Yes—It doesn’t matter. Nothing that occurred to Roxanne to say was useful. She shrugged.

  “Oh, shit!” Alma said, and slammed the door as she went out.

  Roxanne got out of the institution green she wore all day and put on her most transparent shirt, her lowest-slung pair of trousers, and her pearl. She knew, if Mike had come to buy Alma back, she might be tempted not by the money itself but by the respectability of it. Roxanne could compete with respectability only by offending it; she needed to be as visible as possible.

  Joseph was leaving as Roxanne arrived back downstairs. “I’ll come by to give you a hand tomorrow,” Mike was saying. “We could get it done in a day together.”

  When Joseph had left, Mike said, “He’s not in very good shape, is he? It’s nice of him to give you girls a hand. I did as much for him when he was away but still … Well, poor guy. So, how about I take you all out to dinner?”

  “Funny!” Victor said.

  “You don’t change much, Funny!”

  “You have,” Tony said quietly.

  “Have I?” Mike asked, smiling.

  He was even better-looking, his dark desert tan making his teeth all the whiter, his eyes bright with a warmer fire. He was dressed casually but expensively, his shirt the sort Pierre bought imitations of from Hong Kong, his shoes handmade.

  “You never took us out to dinner before.”

  “Well, I lived with you, son. That was different.”

  Alma sat in front with Mike, Roxanne with the boys in the back seat of the Lincoln. Mike didn’t stop Vic from trying every button within reach, even played a teasing game with him by locking his door and closing his window from the master controls. Tony sat very still and straight.

  “You know, I thought I’d hate working for a living—well, seriously. I love it.”

  “It certainly agrees with you,” Alma said.

  “Does, doesn’t it?” He grinned at her.

  Roxanne had been afraid but not jealous of Mike when he was still Alma’s husband. At that time she knew he could kill either of them, and that was the only way he could have interfered with their relationship. But it was now not only domesticated but complicated by unsatisfied needs and subtle messages. Mike might enjoy meting out the sexual punishment Roxanne had refused, and Alma could still be roused by guilt to want it.

  She was no less magnificent than he. Roxanne had got used to Alma’s loss of weight and knew being slender became her. Her face, which could be a bland mask when Roxanne first knew her, most often when Mike was around, rarely took on that defense now. She had learned to say and show more often what she felt. Now it was perfectly easy for Mike to read there that he pleased her. Roxanne’s cunt ached, so did the palms of her hands. She leaned on them.

  “Seafood all right?” Mike asked. “Damn few fish on the desert.”

  He indulged the glutton in Victor as they competed to see who could eat the most steamed clams. He encouraged Tony’s curiosity about an oyster dish he hadn’t tried. He was as attentive over Alma’s dinner as if she’d been a nursing mother. Roxanne, who knew shellfish were the sewers of the sea, ordered a dish which had both clams and oysters, a suicidal gesture only Pierre could have appreciated, and it was only a gesture because she could not eat.

  “Well, I don’t know why I was so thrown this afternoon,” Alma said as she began to undress. “I was even wearing a bra because Joseph was around. I think Mike Trasco has turned into a human being.”

  Roxanne took a fistful of Alma’s radiant hair and pulled, hard.

  “Hey.”

  “I’ll fist-fuck if I have to,” Roxanne said.

  “Oh, love, love, don’t be silly. These are yours; this is yours. He’s always appealed to my vanity but you’re my addiction. You know that. I tried to swear off, remember? I couldn’t.”

  “I’m your friend.�
��

  “Of course you are, and my lover and my beloved, and I know you don’t like seafood, but oysters for me are like first-course sex with you, and I’ve been hungry for you all evening …”

  Her lies were like Roxanne’s own, motivated by love, and Roxanne understood them. If she was not, in fact, the cause of Alma’s ready wetness, she was its welcome recipient. Alma was not at this moment thinking of Mike sucking her cunt, rimming her anus, preparing her for multiples of coming. Her mouth and hands were busy with the same plans for Roxanne, delicate, shocking, sure.

  “Sweet woman.”

  “Sweet woman.”

  Out of bed, the ache returned, not just when Mike was around. Roxanne ached all day simply with the possibility of his presence. It was a great relief to her that her workroom was finished in a couple of days, but anytime the boys were home Mike had excuse enough to be there. Alma did nothing to discourage him.

  “It’s such a relief simply to like the man,” she explained. “It makes me feel less crazy to have married him.”

  Crazy to have divorced him? Roxanne had stopped asking questions. The sexual reassurance she insisted on, Alma gave her without grudge, but lying naked in Roxanne’s arms, Alma could still talk about Mike, his new confident kindness.

  “He doesn’t even object to Tony’s violin.”

  “He calls him owl eyes,” Roxanne countered, knowing that here, too, it was her jealousy that spoke; though Tony was far more cautious with his father than Victor, neither boy had eyes for anyone else.

  “As a joke. Tony’s really looking forward to the summer. It sounds horribly hot to me. Mike says the best time to go is winter. We all might go down for Christmas.”

  Roxanne assumed that she was not part of that all. She said nothing.

  She was not surprised to come home to an empty house and a note on the dining-room table. Mike had taken them out for dinner and to the movies. Alma knew Roxanne would love an evening to herself to move into her workroom. She did go down to the basement, but the place smelled of Mike, and the empty house above her weighed too many aching tons.

  She phoned Pierre.

  “I’ll set another place at the table and give you rats’ tails on toast. Allen will come get you.”

  Allen greeted her with “You must be a mind reader. I’m just home from Ottawa, where I got a lot of good advice. We’re going to get you a Canada Council grant.”

  “What for?”

  “To go on with your project, your sound map, whatever you call it.”

  “I call it ‘Mother Tongue,’” Roxanne said.

  “Sexist for my taste.”

  Roxanne managed a half smile.

  “I’m warning you,” Allen said. “We’re going to cheer you up. Before the evening is over, you’ll forget Mike Trasco exists. But while you still remember, let me tell you this: she’ll never go back to him.”

  “Why are you so sure?”

  “She doesn’t need the money; she doesn’t want the man. And, though she doesn’t think it’s quite nice, she happens to be in love with you.”

  “The workroom is finished. He helped Joseph.”

  “Good.”

  There was a strained energy in Allen’s voice. Roxanne really wished he hadn’t been at home. With Pierre she could have wept and raged and despaired, and his comfort would have been to be as helpless as she was. Allen couldn’t stand things gone wrong. He had to fix whatever it was, and the more tired and pressed he was, the more responsibility he seemed to feel. For his sake, she would have to pretend to forget Mike for the evening. Though that would have been a relief, dropping her guard in that way seemed too dangerous. As long as she kept him locked in the vise of her attention, he couldn’t take Alma from her.

  Once Pierre’s delicious dinner, which looked planned for three weeks in advance, had been enjoyed in the sort of leisure only men seemed able to command for a meal, Allen spread the Canada Council forms on the table.

  “Tony talked very well the other night, but now you’ve got to talk. I was going to get Alma to write this up, but we’ll have to ourselves.”

  “I don’t know anyone to ask for letters,” Roxanne objected, daunted by the whole idea of a grant.

  “I’ve solved that. It’s multimedia enough so that I can write one of them, and Carlotta can write one, and I’ve got some names of people involved in experimental music here in town. The only problem is presenting it clearly. I’ll take a picture of the wall, but you’ve got to go on from there.”

  “How can I cost it? I haven’t the first notion …”

  “Roxanne,” Allen said, taking her shoulders, “stop that! You know the machines you need; you know what they cost. This is a mini-budget to get enough done so that you can give people some idea …”

  “They’ll look up and see I have a record …”

  “And that will be all the more reason for giving you the money. Artists are supposed to be outlaws. It’s just clerks in stores who’re not.”

  “But what I’m doing is crazy,” Roxanne protested.

  “Artists are supposed to be crazy.”

  “You’re a genius, Roxanne,” Pierre said. “All Allen wants you to do is admit it.”

  Confessing on a paper to be sent to an agent of the federal government what she would like to do to Vancouver was like submitting a master plan for robbing every bank in town. If she had to tell the truth, she had in mind a cast of thousands, involving everyone from schoolchildren to professionals. She wanted marching bands of tape recorders; she wanted fifty oboes on fifty different street corners, playing fifty different national anthems in their natural tone of complaint. And that was just the beginning. She wanted this performance to go on for days, for weeks, forever, a display of sound as permanent as sculpture which would transform the city.

  “Surely it’s against the law?” she asked.

  “You simply don’t say it’s a revolution,” Allen said, scribbling notes as she talked.

  “But it’s disturbing the peace.”

  “Never mind. Never mind.”

  They were drinking vodka, and Pierre didn’t let the glasses sit empty. Roxanne drank as quickly as Allen without his habit or stamina, and she was also excited. Not only Mike but Alma receded from her mind. Roxanne was cheerfully drunk by the time Allen delivered her home, and it was well after midnight. She did notice, with relief, that Mike’s car was nowhere around.

  “Where on earth have you been?” Alma demanded.

  “With Allen and Pierre.”

  “I bet!”

  “Where else would I be?”

  “In bed with Carlotta.”

  “What?”

  “You cheap little cheat! Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”

  “It happened months ago before I moved in here. It hasn’t anything to do with anything.”

  “How was she?”

  Roxanne took a deep breath, knowing it was only the vodka that tempted her to say how hugely funny and really quite bad sex had been with Carlotta, how finally daunted Carlotta had been at the hard work of Roxanne’s body. Alma didn’t want to know.

  “I spent the evening filling out an application for a Canada Council grant. It’s Allen’s idea. I think it’s probably crazy.”

  “I said, ‘How was she?’”

  “That’s the sort of thing you need to find out for yourself.”

  “But it’s much quicker to benefit from your experience … and Mike’s. He said she wasn’t bad at all, but she didn’t like you much.”

  “This is a silly conversation. Come to bed.”

  “Don’t get near me.”

  Alma’s eyes, in which Roxanne could swim naked, now tried to freeze her out, pale and hard-surfaced as ice.

  “What’s really the matter?”

  “And did Pierre have his bit of a bugger tonight?”

  At such an accusation from Allen, Pierre would have waggled his behind. Roxanne knew she should do something sexual, preferably cruel, at least assertive. She couldn’
t. She felt a pitying sympathy for them both as if she were a third party watching this scene.

  “Do you ache all day the way I do?” Roxanne asked. “I didn’t know before that jealousy hurts … physically.”

  “What have you got to be jealous about?” Alma asked sarcastically.

  “Nothing probably,” Roxanne admitted. “But I keep hurting.”

  “What would you have me do … not see him? It’s hard enough on the boys as it is without my making it worse. At least they can see there’s no animosity between Mike and me.”

  “So different from you and me.”

  “Why did you do that to me?”

  “I didn’t do anything to you. I wasn’t even seeing you.”

  “That’s a lie. She didn’t finish the portrait until well after you moved in.”

  “All right, it’s a lie, or a sort of a lie. I’d rather not lie.”

  “I can’t stand it.”

  “Neither of us can,” Roxanne said.

  She should have been able to reach out to Alma. Instead, Roxanne went woodenly out of the room and upstairs to bed. The vodka was a merciful sedative. She had been deeply asleep when she was roused by Alma’s rough lovemaking, crude name-calling, and tears which came so seldom, always in the dark. If only they could be happy.

  It was the night before Tony and Victor were to leave for Arizona. Victor was manic with nervous excitement, Tony quiet with apprehension. Alma was being overly ordinary with them.

  “I’m going to miss you guys,” Roxanne finally felt obliged to say.

  “I bet!” Victor said.

  “I’m not kidding. Two months is a long time.”

  “When your workroom is all set up, can I help with the tape recorders and stuff?” Tony asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Are you going to make a movie?” Victor asked.

  “I hadn’t planned to.”

  “To go with the soundtrack, you know? I’d be in it,” Vic offered, and demonstrated some of the monstrous faces and horrifying deaths he was willing to perform.

  “Vic, Roxanne is serious,” Tony said.

  “Roxanne is funny!”

  “Enough, Victor!” Alma ordered. “You carry on like that, and your father will kill you.”