Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  “Not if it turns out to be just scribbling,” Alma said. “I’ve decided you’d better be the genius. I’m going to get a job.”

  “At last!” Allen said.

  Luckily Allen’s gallery owner friend, Dale Easter, was still looking for someone or again looking for someone, and he agreed at once to try Alma out.

  “But it’s amazing—I get either a salary or a commission, whichever is greater, and the paintings he’s selling are worth thousands and thousands of dollars. I could make real money.”

  The names Alma reeled off meant nothing to Roxanne, and the calculations of possible income meant not much more. There was one problem.

  “I can always ask Mother and Dad to take them when I have to go out of town, but, when it’s just an evening …”

  “I’ll be home,” Roxanne assured her.

  “And if one of them is sick?”

  “I can be sick, too,” Roxanne assured her.

  “What I’m thinking is maybe you shouldn’t work,” Alma said. “Maybe you should stay home.”

  “We’ll work it out.”

  “We mustn’t get into roles,” Alma said. “Do you think money could turn me into a bull dyke?”

  “So quit your job the minute the boys get back,” Pierre advised.

  “No,” Roxanne said. “Alma doesn’t want to support me.”

  “Why not?”

  “It offends her femininity.”

  “What about yours?” Pierre demanded.

  “Well, I don’t really want to be a wife,” Roxanne said. “Oh, it’s all right for you—it’s kinky.”

  “Why has the holy light gone out of inferiority? The only other person I know who understands it is Joseph, but what can he do with it, being heterosexual, except feel guilty?”

  “Is he going back to teaching next month?”

  “He says so. He says he’s got a new tranquilizer that would have kept Hitler and Jesus at their rightful trades. He says it’s peace without its price. I don’t think he’ll last a month. It’s crucifixion year for him … for all of you.”

  “We aren’t going to die together,” Roxanne said.

  “No,” Pierre said. “Carlotta thinks she has time still to commit a well-thought-out suicide. She’s favoring a menopausal gesture at the moment, but sometimes she realizes her life is a suicidal gesture.”

  “Is she doing your portrait?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wonder why,” Roxanne said.

  “Because I’m here,” Pierre said with an artful smile.

  “I wonder if she’ll do Alma.”

  “She’d kill her first,” Pierre said.

  “Still?”

  “She blames Alma for Mike, says she ruined him as an artist. Now he can’t think of anything but money. What’s more interesting, I want to know, except sex? Mike could never bore me.”

  “Alma likes Mike a lot better now,” Roxanne said.

  “Carlotta’s perverse. She’s only really interested in impossible, unhappy people. She told me sex with a woman is so normal it’s boring. I expect she was referring to you?”

  “I expect,” Roxanne admitted, and sighed.

  “I’m very loyal. I’ve thought you’d be marvelous in bed—not with me, of course. Alma’s color is always so good.”

  “I am,” Roxanne said, “but it doesn’t stay interesting unless you’re in love or at least obsessed. Carlotta was just curious—and jealous.”

  “And you?”

  “Oh, I’m always curious, and I like Carlotta, and I’m sorry she’s so jealous of Alma that she can’t love her. It’s more convenient for me, but I’m sorry.”

  “I want to trade shirts,” Pierre said suddenly.

  “All right.”

  “You’re a little too severe in that, and I’m a bit too limp in this.”

  They traded shirts and kissed each other on each cheek, a salutation and farewell they used only when they were alone together.

  “I’ll be glad when the boys get home and you have more time to yourself. Alma’s been very possessive of you this summer.”

  “I’ve got used to missing them,” Alma said. “I wonder if giving up children is like giving up smoking. Gradually you find other things you persuade yourself you like even better.”

  Roxanne expected Alma to propose a last week of evenings at meetings, readings, dances, but, though she didn’t have regular hours at the gallery, Alma was spending days there to become familiar with both the inventory and the procedures. She was ordinarily tired at night, as Roxanne had been all summer. Roxanne cooked dishes Pierre had taught her, too disguised and delicate for the boys, and they drank wine and sat long at the table.

  “You don’t ask for enough,” Alma said one night. “This is what you’ve wanted to do all summer.”

  “When you do. I like to do what you want to do.”

  “I don’t pay attention to whether you’re tired or needing to work or to be alone. I do pay attention to you but not to what you need.”

  “I like it.”

  “But you must take up your own space. I can’t give it to you. I can’t even think about it.”

  “I have what I need,” Roxanne said, and it was not exactly a lie since there was the room in the basement which maybe now she really could move into.

  “I bought something for you today.”

  “Show me?”

  “There in the box on the chair.”

  Roxanne expected to find something Alma thought particularly showed off her height, her coloring, her breasts, something Roxanne would admire her in. The shirt and pants she took out of the box were not Alma’s size.

  “Try them on,” Alma said.

  “For me?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  They were sheer, in greens as near to yellow as maple tassels in the spring, as dark as hemlock.

  “You are a flower, an extraordinary flower,” Alma said. “That’s my first paycheck. How would you like to be a kept woman?”

  Oh, Alma, I will go through all the fantasies with you, make all the mistakes, be your flower, your fool, your sister. I am afraid. I am often afraid for you, of you, but, yes, I’ll try anything that might possibly make us happy. There is a point.

  “Answer me!” Alma commanded.

  They made love with an intensity that they hadn’t risked all summer, as if they had been too fearful of their freedom to use it, seized it now only because they would very soon have to give it up. Roxanne worked the better on her wall for remembering the night they had begun making love in the dining room, continued in the living room, on the stairs, on the upstairs hall carpet. In their room at night, she felt not confined so much as gathered up there, an armload of flowers in the vase of their love.

  In the first month the boys were home, Alma chose to work more often at night than Roxanne imagined was absolutely necessary. Alma’s sons got on her nerves.

  “Victor, this is not Arizona. This is Vancouver. You wear shoes to the dinner table without having to be asked.”

  “Tony, if you say ‘Dad says’ one more time, I’ll think you had a lobotomy while you were there and haven’t a thought left of your own.”

  “What’s a lobotomy?” Victor asked.

  “It’s an operation that turns a person into a parrot,” Alma answered, glaring at her older son.

  He glared back. Alma’s sarcasm was never as effective with Tony as it was with Victor, who was bright enough to get the message, mostly good-humored enough to put up with it. Tony was more like Alma, able to dish it out without being able to take it.

  Roxanne had expected the boys to make comparisons between their father and herself, but for them she wasn’t in it. The rivalry was between the two parents, leaving Roxanne usefully on the sidelines, far less resentful of their new loyalty to their father than she’d expected to be, surprised at the depth of resentment it could stir in Alma.

  Because they knew the brand names of mobile homes and swimming pools, Alma complained that Mike h
ad turned them into a couple of rotten little Americans. She didn’t like the clothes he’d bought them and was not reassured by Victor’s protest: “But that’s what everybody wears.”

  “It was hot,” Tony said defensively, but unlike Victor, he didn’t wear his Arizona shirts again.

  “Do you still want to help me with my workroom?” Roxanne asked him to help him out of one of his sulks.

  “Oh, yeah, sure. I guess so.”

  Once they were working together, Roxanne teaching Tony her system of filing tapes, he dropped his guard and began to talk and ask questions.

  “Dad says sooner or later you’ve got to figure out art is a hobby. When you do that, you can take real work seriously. Is that how you feel? Is this a hobby?”

  “I guess so,” Roxanne said.

  “You don’t want to be famous or make a lot of money or anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’re not serious,” Tony concluded, but his voice tipped uncertainly.

  “I’m serious about sound—but not that other.”

  “I’m not serious about anything, not about my violin or drawing or anything.”

  “I keep forgetting how old you are.”

  “Twelve.”

  “Ah, look, here’s what I wanted to find,” Roxanne said, holding up a tape. “It’s my terminal tape. I’ve got the airport, the bus depot, the docks, the train stations. I never did get a graveyard, someone digging, the coffin going into the grave.”

  “Can you get permission to record something like that?”

  “You have to wait for a friend to die.”

  “Ghoulish!” Tony said with approval. “Is it on the map?”

  “No, but I want to put it there.”

  The map was going through an awkward stage, thick enough with pictures and instructions to look as if it were about to molt.

  “I think making it worse will make it better,” Roxanne decided.

  Victor was only intermittently interested in the map, more because he didn’t want to be excluded than because he was drawn to it. It was far more important for him to reestablish himself in the neighborhood, greatly helped by a new ten-speed, given to him not by his grandfather, but by his father. Roxanne was as lenient with him as she could be about times for coming home. He began to take advantage of her willingness to stretch ten minutes to an hour, and finally, she had to tell him, if he couldn’t show up on time, he couldn’t go out after supper.

  “You’re not my mother!”

  “No, your mother would take the strap to you.”

  Victor stayed in, playing the TV in the living room at top volume while Roxanne and Tony worked in the basement. The next morning Roxanne found “FUCK” printed in a small, childish hand in a dozen places on the map, mostly in park and beach areas where there was still room to write. She wished she’d thought of it herself and told Victor so.

  Gradually, as they settled into a routine again, Alma was more willing to come home to them, but she was asking something new of the boys; they had to be interesting if they wanted her attention. Otherwise, she either talked with Roxanne or was abstracted. It was more difficult for Victor, who was at a riddle stage and found it hard to remember if he’d asked more than once. But as with so many things Alma did essentially to suit herself, this improved not only the conversation at dinner but the boys’ dispositions. And Roxanne liked better winning Alma’s attention than being burdened with it as she sometimes had been during the summer.

  “Dale Easter is a very interesting man,” Alma said. “I’d like to ask him for dinner. We could have Allen and Pierre, but I’d rather we tried just ourselves and sent Vic and Tony to my parents.”

  Allen had said Dale was very elusive about his personal life and his background. No one seemed to know where he or his money came from, where he lived, with whom.

  “Oh, he can be met in the steam bath, but he’s not there every night.”

  At work Alma couldn’t get past the impression Dale tried to give everyone—that he didn’t really have a personal life, that he didn’t really live anywhere. He traveled and worked.

  “You listen so well,” she said to Roxanne, “he might talk.”

  In type not unlike Allen, though more expensive, ambitious, and mistrustful, Dale Easter gave a first impression of nearly ineffectual diffidence. It gave him time to listen and to look before the snob or bully in the person Dale was meeting discovered that he responded neither to condescension nor threats. It made him good with buyers and artists alike, each of whom was gradually persuaded that, however Dale Easter operated in general, in this particular transaction he was an ally.

  He came to dinner not as boss but as friend, and the first thing he did was admire the paintings in the living room, most of which were early Carlottas. There was one architectural drawing of Mike’s and an acrylic seascape by John Korner.

  “I wish I could handle some of these locals,” Dale said with a wistfulness Roxanne didn’t believe. “Korner is an incredible draftsman. He knows how to draw … but he lives in Vancouver. I told you Allen once asked me if I’d at least look at pictures of local sculpture—look, sure, but what could I do with it?”

  More by tone than by any particular comment Dale was able to suggest it was the philistine world of international buyers rather than the local artists who were at fault, yet there was nothing he could do except, just by being in Vancouver himself, put it quietly on the map. Someday people would come to Vancouver not just to buy European and American art.

  “Even now, people are buying Group of Seven, and Emily Carr just had to die to be famous. Look at the price of her paintings! Eventually eventually …”

  Roxanne then caught only scraps of conversation as she finished getting the dinner. She was glad it was late enough in the year for them to be eating by candlelight. Properly on Alma’s right, Dale could sit with his back to Roxanne’s wall. But even in candlelight, he noticed it.

  “What’s this? What’s this? Is there an overhead light? Do you mind?”

  He stood in front of it for several minutes while the soup got cold.

  “Where on earth did this come from?”

  “It’s something I’m doing,” Roxanne said. “It’s not really to look at; it’s to read, like a score.”

  “It’s a sound map,” Dale said. “The only other one I’ve seen—not nearly as elaborate or interesting as this was in Bonn, Germany, last year at the Beethoven festival. What’s this for? When is it going to happen? Where?”

  “Oh, it’s only something for Vancouver, someday.”

  “Has Allen seen this wall?”

  “Oh, yes,” Roxanne said.

  “Well, why didn’t he tell me about it?”

  “It was in Vancouver,” Roxanne said.

  “Touché.”

  “Allen’s helped Roxanne apply for a Canada Council to put on some part of this anyway.”

  “If it happens,” Dale said, “I want to help, all right? Anyway, put King Gallery on your map and make it sound however you like.”

  The Canada Council turned Roxanne’s project down on the grounds that she hadn’t yet done anything to prove herself capable, no public concert or production of any kind. Roxanne was suddenly indignant, for she had put on magnificent sound happenings, experiences, whatever anyone wanted to call them, a couple of times a week for years in the basement of the record shop. That they had not been public was not her fault. Her one audience had called the police and could hardly be asked to testify to her years of work.

  “So put them on again and make them public,” Allen said, “and then apply again next year.”

  “Maybe Dale would let you use the big gallery,” Alma suggested.

  “I thought he didn’t want the public in and out,” Roxanne said.

  “He seemed interested enough so that we could ask.”

  “It’s impossible,” Roxanne said. “I’d need a minimum of ten tape recorders and twenty speakers.”

  “Surely you can rent t
hat sort of thing,” Allen said.

  “With what?”

  “With Alma’s money, and she’ll pay for the advertising, too. Charge admission and make something over expenses for next time.”

  “Who’d come?” Roxanne asked.

  “How much money are we talking about?” Alma asked.

  “Women aren’t supposed to fear failure,” Pierre said. “They’re supposed to fear success.”

  “Well?” Alma said, facing Roxanne.

  “All right,” Roxanne answered without any clear emotional sense of what she was agreeing to.

  It would have been easier if Allen hadn’t been sent east on a job that would keep him away for well over a month. Once Dale Easter had agreed to let them have the space, he did not go on to offer the kind of advice and support Allen could only occasionally phone in from Ottawa or Halifax or Montreal.

  Roxanne had no trouble renting the equipment she needed, but she simply had no idea how to go about getting an audience. When Allen shouted long distance, “Send out invitations,” she didn’t know who should receive them. Alma didn’t think stealing the King Gallery’s mailing list would be useful, since only about a dozen of the addresses were inside British Columbia. Her mother’s address book, though appropriately local, would not turn up anyone either interested or willing.

  Joseph offered to get his students to print not only invitations but posters, and he seemed to know which stores would accept and display advertising.

  “Get one up in the store where you used to work,” he suggested.

  “Are you kidding?” Roxanne asked.

  “No,” Joseph said, and to prove his point, he delivered a poster there himself and stayed until he saw it displayed.

  Joseph also made himself available to help set up the machines. With his help and Tony’s, Roxanne could save some time for a kind of rehearsal in the afternoon before the event began. She was not trying to do anything very elaborate or tricky. Once the machines were started, there was nothing else for her to do. But she did want to use the space of the gallery well, speakers placed, volumes adjusted properly. There were no chairs. People would mill around or sit on the floor—if anyone came.

  Allen sent a telegram to the gallery, which arrived just before eight o’clock. The only people there were Carlotta, Pierre, Alma and the boys, Joseph and his family. Even Dale Easter hadn’t been able to make it. Just as it looked very much like a family affair, half a dozen strangers turned up, young, polite, interested in the speakers and the machines. Then a man in his seventies with a long wool scarf and a loud voice introduced himself to everyone in the room as if they all should know who he was and be very pleased to see him. Finally the music critic from the Vancouver Sun appeared.