Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  She spoke to him. Moral disapproval could never overcome automatic good manners when Alma was caught off guard. She clearly hadn’t expected him. What a handsome woman she was! Pregnancy was not the only sort of sexual flowering that became a woman. Alma was radiant.

  Roxanne, in contrast, was drawn and withdrawn. Allen could hardly bear better than she their short exchange.

  “Thank you for being here,” she said.

  “I hoped you’d want me to come.”

  That was all.

  “Hiya,” said Victor. “Long time no see.”

  How like his father he was going to be.

  Allen caught sight of Tony, squatting over the equipment, a casual guard. He had his mother’s fair coloring, but he didn’t really look like either of his parents. His face was finer, would be sterner, and, though he was now taking his growth, he was not heavy-boned. He was, as he always had been for Allen, absolutely beautiful.

  Dale Easter stepped up, blocking Allen’s view.

  “I meant to drop you a note.”

  Allen nodded. He hadn’t been out enough yet to learn phrases of comfort for friends embarrassed by their own neglect.

  “Also to say Alma’s working out very well—first class—just exactly what I needed: brains, taste, inherited jewelry.”

  “I’m glad you’re letting Roxanne use your studio.”

  “Between us,” Dale said quietly, “she just isn’t Vancouver. She’ll be in Europe next year or the year after. Or she’ll go to L.A. I’ve heard less interesting stuff get top awards at the festivals. She doesn’t even know. It’s eerie.”

  “Who’s going to discover her?”

  “Someone … soon,” Dale predicted.

  He felt about Roxanne much as Allen did himself, and they had the same fostering instinct with her. Tonight Allen wasn’t as sure as he had been that Alma was Roxanne’s personal salvation. Alma would not betray her as Allen had Pierre. Roxanne, in any case, didn’t have Pierre’s extreme and dependent sensibility. What Alma would do was possess and limit. But Roxanne’s need to work was so fundamental she would manage. By Roxanne’s own admission, Alma was marvelous in bed. Perhaps what wore away at Roxanne wasn’t Alma at all but the same grief that fed on Allen’s bones. She had loved Pierre and been close to him in ways forbidden to Allen’s more intense relationship with him. Allen’s grief took a sudden generous step forward, knowing that he shared it, something he had not admitted with Joseph or anyone else.

  Victor passed him again in an awkward, crouching run, pursuing Joy, who fled away from him with loud, delighted squeals.

  “Oh, dear,” Ann said, following after, “she’ll be part of the show unless I can quiet her down. That Victor!”

  Nearly all the strangers were young men as discreetly gay as Dale or Allen. The militants, about whom so much was written, were a small minority even among college kids. They might read The Body Politic or The Advocate, but their own outward and visible sign was to be a little too impeccably heterosexual. Since the raid on The Body Politic, when the police had seized even the newspaper’s subscription list, fewer of the cautious young even subscribed.

  Pierre had been nearly the only person Allen knew, aside from the young prostitutes, who had made no attempt to hide his nature or his tastes. It had been one of his deep attractions for Allen, that delicate bravery. Allen found these young men tonight in no way attractive. He resented their presence as trivializing the occasion. They were here the way they’d also be at experimental films or esoteric dance recitals not because they were really interested or knowledgeable but because it was their climate and therefore their source of gossip. He had more respect for drag queens. Flaunting it seemed a more honest defense. Why then didn’t he? He hadn’t the flair or the guts. He was nervous about a wing of hair over his ear.

  Allen was suddenly shaking so badly he had to stand against the wall and let the line run over and over in his head: I am not frightened or embarrassed; I’m angry. It was ritual rather than fact. The police could come anytime. Anyone could be dead. But Pierre was dead, so what did it matter? There was the real anger. Allen braced himself on it and smiled, calm enough to hold a camera or a gun, whatever weapon he chose.

  “Deciding who to kill must be a little like deciding who to paint,” Carlotta said, “once you make up your mind you’re not going to kill—or paint—yourself.”

  “I don’t think I follow you,” Allen said without turning his head; he was a disciplined model, used to shutter speeds.

  “Well, it’s perfectly obvious that anyone is important enough to himself to consider suicide, but that’s very subjective—didn’t Auden say something about Narcissus being in love with his own image not because it was beautiful but because it was his? Deciding to kill someone else is different—or maybe it isn’t. I wouldn’t do a portrait of anyone unimportant to me, but you all may be mine to paint simply because you’re mine, there, like the mountain to climb, and you, for instance, are there because of the traffic pattern of Joseph’s nerves. Would it cross your mind to shoot me?”

  “Are you serious?” Allen asked.

  “Yes. I may in my own way have contributed to Pierre’s suicide.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Some people believe to make an image is to steal a soul.”

  “Do you?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be so. The world may basically operate on inadvertent magic.”

  “I’d be way ahead of you in soul stealing,” Allen said.

  He thought of the drawers and drawers full of negatives. There were a few buildings, gardens, sailboats, but the vast majority were people interred alphabetically.

  “But you don’t choose. People are chosen for you … to photograph.”

  “Mostly,” Allen agreed.

  “I choose—or have the illusion of choosing. Would you, if you killed anyone?”

  “Oh, I assume so,” Allen said, “unless it was an accident.”

  “Then how would you choose?”

  “If not myself?”

  “If not yourself.”

  “I don’t know,” Allen admitted. “I can’t yet think of anyone who’d be any use to me dead.”

  “This is just a pose then?”

  Allen looked down at the gun in his hand. “It’s a metaphor.”

  “Allen, metaphors don’t kill people. That gun killed Pierre.”

  “Pierre killed himself,” Allen said. “I have got that straight finally. This gun is the last thing he touched, the last power he knew.”

  And Pierre put it in his mouth, took it like a lover, killed himself, and might as well have castrated Allen with the same bullet, for he would never again as long as he lived aim his desire at other human flesh. It would be easier to kill.

  “I don’t think about killing myself any longer,” Carlotta said. “I wonder if I think only one of us is allowed to in the great scheme of things. That would mean Pierre had stolen my soul—or my choice anyway.”

  “I don’t either,” Allen said. “I did at first, but only because I really thought I couldn’t stand it; I didn’t ever want to.”

  “It’s changed us all. I think it’s cured Joseph.”

  “How?”

  “Maybe the shock, for one thing. He said to me that going crazy wasn’t a real alternative, and he was damned well going to learn to live with flowers and be Joy’s father. I have a theory about Joseph that his emotional motor was put in upside down, and what ought to drive him crazy keeps him sane; what reassures the rest of us—a tree in bloom, a kid flying a kite—sends him round the bend. Or did.”

  “He has no impersonal use for his heart. He says he’s very glad he’s not an artist, but it would have made it easier for him, I think.”

  “Not in the long run.”

  “No, maybe not,” Allen said.

  “Oh, I don’t know. You’re so much more accessible, sympathetic, attractive with the wind out of your sails, but you keep making me want to burst into tears.
”

  “I strike myself the same way … for different reasons.”

  “It isn’t your fault, Allen,” Carlotta called to him across the great gulf of his guilt. “It really isn’t.”

  “I wonder why, then, I’m being so cruelly punished,” he said.

  His loneliness for Pierre was at times so intense he either wandered the house howling or had to leave, drive around the city, call on a friend. He had nearly given up going to the movies because so often someone tried to pick him up.

  All his adult life Allen had envied, while he belittled, men who made nearly no distinction among the requirements of their balls, bowels, and bladders. He had friends who’d as soon offer to buy him a quick one in the hotel men’s room as in the bar.

  “Better for you than a drink. Beats a shoeshine around the block …”

  It wasn’t conscious fastidiousness or moral disapproval that made Allen refuse. It was the foreknowledge of failure. To his great private chagrin, he had a monogamous cock, and he had years ago given up the embarrassment of trying to prove otherwise. Sometimes he claimed clap, sometimes worldly indifference, sometimes moral superiority to keep sexually aloof. He had never had to confess to Pierre because with Pierre he had no difficulty, nor, perhaps because he was away so much, had Allen ever tired of Pierre sexually.

  Since women’s liberation, too much had been said against unequal relationships, which were, after all, one’s first model of love. Allen didn’t care how far kid lib finally went in sexual or financial freedom, children would always be dependent on adults. To accept that dependence was to take the responsibility of being superior, living up to its expectations. It wasn’t a matter of depriving someone else of independence but of accepting his need to depend, to be protected.

  Allen had a theory that, if he could have adopted any attractive boy he saw, he would have had no problem with impotence. Pierre, however, was a possessive only child and wouldn’t ever have stood for a rival. That was a generosity Allen could never have taught him.

  To wish that Pierre had understood him better was as futile as to wish Pierre was still alive. Allen wished both a hundred times a day, while he also knew there was no way to explain to Pierre what had happened, how it had happened. It was not Allen’s apparent infidelity but his vulnerability that had killed Pierre. If Allen could be picked up, put in jail, exposed in the papers, there was no safety left, not even inside a house with double deadlocks, with a checking account that never went under three thousand dollars. Allen could have tried to explain all that away. He, after all, could bail himself out quickly enough, but Pierre couldn’t have believed him for long as one job after another fell away and no new ones were offered. In such circumstances you don’t stay a man who can bail himself out for long.

  Allen liked to believe, because he wanted Pierre to believe, that it was a matter of good taste rather than cowardice that kept Allen from being publicly homosexual. There was something not quite nice, jock vulgar, about the political kisses men gave each other on the covers of radical magazines, and no wonder people were offended. For years Allen had, in fact, been behaving like a common criminal, and he had finally, briefly, been treated like one. He had no more faced the implications than Alma had the night he took her to the jail to bail Roxanne out. It was just beginning to occur to Allen not only that people like Pierre and Roxanne were vulnerable and therefore in need of protection but that he, Allen Dent, could be deprived of his livelihood, locked up.

  Was Alma more aware than he of the universal danger? Is that why she had backed away from Roxanne that night and now was avoiding him, genuinely afraid of contagion? Surely she didn’t really believe Allen would try to seduce her sons.

  Allen had been at home for two months when he was called on by the police for his first questioning. A teenaged boy had been murdered in Stanley Park on a night Allen was having dinner with the Rabinowitzes. It didn’t take fifteen minutes, and everyone was rigidly polite. The scattered fragments of what had been more often fear than anger fused in the intensity of the encounter. Allen did not have to tell himself that he was in pure rage when they left.

  “Because I went to a dinner party where the young waiters were in jockstraps,” he shouted at Carlotta, “I am to be harassed as a child molester, murderer, every time any child reports an incident, every time a body is found in the leaf mold, in the tide? I can’t even stand to read those items in the paper!”

  “It’s because of that homosexual murder in Toronto not that many years ago—a boy—do you remember?”

  “Of course, I remember. It would make as much sense to harass me about that as it would to harass you every time a good-looking man is murdered since you have been seen having dinner with one occasionally. Flirtation, even overt sexual behavior, isn’t foreplay for murder, even by most of those deranged with guilt—one in half a million maybe.”

  “I know it doesn’t make sense,” Carlotta said.

  “Do you? How much of a bigot are you, Carlotta?”

  “I’ve tried it myself,” she said coolly.

  “And found it too normal to be interesting.”

  Carlotta laughed. “I think that was Pierre’s turn of phrase, not mine, though I’d like to claim it. I’m a bitch, Allen, but I’m no bigot. I haven’t much sympathy with needs other than my own, and only my own faults interest me.”

  “What’s happening to me really doesn’t appall you?”

  “No more than what’s happening to everyone else. Melodrama isn’t necessarily more important. You need to be special. You need to be indignant. Be indignant. Be special.”

  Allen allowed himself to grind his teeth and then sat in rigid silence while Carlotta worked. After a ten-minute silence he burst into hysterical tears. She took his head in her hands and raked her threatening but very gentle nails through his lengthening hair over and over again. When he was able to catch his breath, she stepped away and left without saying a word. Allen was not sure she would come back, but she did promptly for their next appointment. His relief made him petulant.

  “This is going to be a good session,” Carlotta said. “I haven’t seen you look self-indulgent in months. All your expressions used to be inside that range.”

  “Has anybody ever simply walked out on a portrait?”

  “Mike did,” she said, “but not because he was irritated with me, though he should have been. I was preparing to take my lifetime to finish it, and that was something he didn’t have in mind at all. He really didn’t take to being my muse. It was enough of a disaster to make me wonder if the feminists are right: the muse has to be female. So I tried Roxanne. I don’t think she’s capable of being a disaster.”

  “You’re not feminine enough to be a lesbian easily,” Allen said, taunting and serious.

  She regarded him with amusement.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re entertained,” he said.

  Finally Allen did trust Carlotta’s nearness and self-absorption. Because of them, she was not afraid to try to save his life. She wouldn’t spend more on it than she could afford. He didn’t have to be afraid for her as he was sometimes for Joseph, though Allen was far more careful of Joseph. Allen did not talk about guns or killing people in front of Joseph, or about the police.

  He ate often at Joseph’s table, and, aside from quite often bringing a roast, good cheeses, wine, bags of cookies, Allen took a great many pictures of Ann and the children as a way to be grateful. Though he still had a very up and down time with Susan and Rachel, Joy had decided to take physical possession of him, climbing about him as she did her father, who visibly winced, as Allen did, when a small assertive shoe landed like an avenging angel in his totally innocent lap. How old did girl children have to be before they became respecters of male anatomy? Surely the bulk of sex crimes involving children and adults could be laid at the feet of two-year-olds. Joy seemed to Allen already very feminine, with her mother’s roundness and small, full mouth. But she had Joseph’s eyes and queer, little laugh.

 
“Ann,” Allen asked one evening while he was helping her with the dishes and Joseph was putting Joy to bed, “do you ever see John’s face in Rachel or Susan?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, her tone easy enough so that he knew it wasn’t an inadvertently cruel question, “and not just in their faces—the way their bodies move, their gestures. Just the other day, the way Susan looked up—it could have been her father.”

  “Is that … hard?”

  “Oh, no, Allen. It’s wonderful. I can remember him young and well.”

  Allen didn’t imagine he could stand seeing anything of Pierre in someone else, even a small child. An eyebrow would seem grand larceny. But Pierre had been young … and well.

  It was to Ann Allen confessed his growing financial concern.

  “Oh, I could last for a year, and after that I could sell the house. I bought it for Pierre.”

  “You should take pictures of children,” Ann said. “You’re so very good at it.”

  Allen laughed. Ann’s kindness was often preposterous. Didn’t she remember that someone like Alma wouldn’t let Allen into the house?

  “Let me tell you something about Alma,” Ann said, as if she’d read his thoughts. “She thinks she can protect herself. She has to get over that.”

  “Do you see much of them?”

  “Not now. I saw Alma when she was alone, when I was alone. Sometimes she was a little overwhelming, but I do like her. She’s honest—maybe partly because she thinks it’s her due; she can afford it. Joseph doesn’t really like her.”

  “Do you find Alma and Carlotta both very self-centered … for women?”

  Ann laughed. “You men always do want us to be better than we are.”

  “Don’t you want men to be better than they are?”

  “Rather less good and happier,” Ann said.

  Happier? They-lived-happily-ever-after was a heterosexual goal which Allen had always read as what a man was expected to do for a woman, as sex was something he did to her. Happiness for Allen himself was very much beside the point, and part of his love for Pierre, his need to protect, was that happiness was so far out of Pierre’s range except as it is surprised in transient moments of pleasure which can give an illusion of happiness. Allen had never considered that goodness and happiness were natural enemies; quite to the contrary, perfect goodness and perfect happiness were synonymous. But they were states irrelevant to Allen or Pierre.