Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  It was to this man Allen, who had been ironic and polite with all the others, shouted, “Do you know how many queens and cock-suckers like you are in this business and therefore can’t help me out?”

  “I have a fair idea,” came the cool answer.

  “Maybe it’s time people had a specific idea,” Allen said.

  “I wouldn’t get into that if I were you. Contrary to a lot of arguments you hear, the police are very cooperative about blackmailers.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of blackmailing you,” Allen said. “I was just thinking about some sort of billboard, maybe called ‘The Queens of Industry.’ There might be a series of them: ‘Fairies in Politics,’ ‘Cock-suckers in the Civil Service,’ ‘Queers in Communication and Education.’ Just for everyone’s information, because there may be some people being screwed who don’t know it or don’t know why.”

  Not only office doors but also private doors in Toronto began to close on him. At the sound of Allen’s voice, the apartment intercoms went dead, and no buzz followed for building doors to open. By the end of two weeks there wasn’t anyone in Toronto media willing to talk with him, and none of the assignments suggested or promised had come through.

  An old acquaintance, taken too much to drink to be careful enough about anyone or anything, admonished Allen, “There’s screwing and screwing, Allen, old man, and you’re into the wrong kind.”

  At the end of the third week, Allen walked into the office of The Body Politic, and there sat the men who were willing to kiss each other in public to make a political point. They had in common with college professors, which one or two of them seemed to be, a wardrobe not required to grow up and leave home. They had the clean, tumble-dry look of students, eyes young and grave above misleading beards. Allen might have been only a few years older than some of them; he felt like their grandmother, dry cleaned, clean-shaven, eyes rheumy with accustomed grief.

  “No, sorry,” was the answer there. “We bully the shit out of people to come out, but we don’t witch-hunt our own.”

  Flicked by their quiet tone of superiority, Allen said, “You know, this magazine is nothing but a larger closet—it doesn’t even get into the real world.”

  “All you guys are the same. Anything under half a million circulation isn’t real. The fourteen thousand people who take The Body Politic read it, cover to cover.”

  “Of course, they do,” Allen said. “You’re preaching to the converted.”

  “Listen, brother,” another said, “if this is a closet, it’s your closet, don’t shit in it. If you want to break out, don’t kill your fellow prisoners; shoot the guards.”

  “What I’m telling you is,” Allen shouted in desperation, “the guards are faggots! The cops are faggots; the editors are faggots!”

  Somebody took him out for a drink and talked about sociological paranoia, grief-related pathology, the health of collective living and working.

  “I don’t really think you understand what’s happening to me,” Allen said finally very quietly.

  He had never before really cared what he was asked to do; some assignments had been more interesting than others, some humanly or technically challenging. Since his first year of learning to use a camera, he had not been interested in choosing what he photographed. He simply wanted to be the very best in how it was done. Now Allen had his own subject, and no one, not even these young radicals, dared deal with it. No one would allow his revenge to be news, Very well. He would turn it into art.

  Allen had for years been the trusted photographer at gatherings where discretion nearly always was overcome by vanity and sentiment. Even the most vulnerable of men—politicians—have need of recklessness, and Allen’s collection of compromised men included Cabinet ministers as well as university presidents, doctors, and other tycoons. It had been a source of great amusement to many of them that the man who had done their most nobly exposed public faces, the portraits that inspired the nation, also had photographed their private pleasures. Allen Dent was, of course, to be absolutely trusted. He was one of them, and he did not have as much to lose only because he did not have as much.

  The revolutionaries dreamed impossibilities: if tomorrow every homosexual in the country suddenly turned green (or lavender), social attitudes would have to change. Well, Allen had offered to do nearly that single-handed, and no one would let him, as censored by The Body Politic as by Weekend.

  Allen returned to Vancouver inspired.

  “Any work?” Joseph asked him.

  “Not a thing,” Allen answered so cheerfully Joseph looked alarmed. “I decided something when I was back there. I decided that begging to be put back to work when I don’t even need that kind of money is crazy. I’m missing the opportunity of my life. I should be putting together a show of my own, an Allen Dent retrospective. I think even Dale would be interested in it.”

  “A great idea!” Joseph said.

  “I need time, and I’ve got it. I think it could be sent right across the country, and, once I get that sort of attention, a really good press, I can more or less go back to work at what I want anytime …”

  Like Roxanne, Allen needed wall space, but a great deal more of it. He stripped the walls of his house of the mirrors and hangings he had bought gradually over the years for Pierre. Then he had to repaint, and it took three coats of white to cover Pierre’s taste for dark gold. Having that long chore to do gave Allen the time he needed to think before he actually settled to going through his files.

  He had no intention of using any of the incriminating material he had in the retrospective. Those pictures would be used only as the basis for selecting the portraits he would hang. Among them he could also use his portrait of Auden, reading with the Russians, one of Allen’s first assignments to take not only a great but secretly deeply cherished face; of Isherwood, recently enough to be a gay activist; of Ginsberg; of Kate Millett. He could also include portraits of his friends: Alma, Roxanne, Carlotta (Pierre would say she hardly counted), Dale Easter. And Pierre, of course, would be the refrain. There would be portrait after portrait of Pierre. This show would be Pierre’s memorial as well as Allen’s revenge. And he did not have to say anything, even start the rumor. To anyone at all aware, the principle of selection would be obvious, and the show would be the talk of Canada without a newspaper’s or magazine’s ever mentioning the testimony it was.

  “When are you going to finish?” Allen asked Carlotta. “I’m awfully busy with my own work, and I’m tired of this gun.”

  “Good,” she said. “I’m tired of your face. Another week.”

  He did not tell her he had discovered he’d already shot his enemies. Now all he had to do was hang them.

  Enemies?

  “Yes, every damned one of them, down to Pierre himself. This was a memorial to betrayal.

  Carlotta finished her work. Joseph called round less often. Ann occasionally dropped by with a casserole or a cake.

  “I know you’re working hard. I don’t want to interrupt. I just don’t want you to forget to eat.”

  Joy toddled around the living room, where enlargements of various faces had already been put up. She stopped in front of the marvelous ruin of folding flesh Auden’s face had become, pointed, and said, “Lady.”

  “No …” Ann began.

  “Don’t correct her,” Allen said. “It’s a marvelously androgynous face.”

  When Joy pointed to a languorous Pierre and said, “Girl,” Ann blushed.

  “He would have loved that,” Allen said. “It would have pleased him absolutely.”

  “Will there be any children?” Ann asked.

  “No,” he said. “None.”

  Tony Trasco’s face, gravely young and inquiring, was immediately dismissed from Allen’s mind. There would be no wishful thinking in this show. Behind each portrait there must be one indisputable fact: homosexual experience. Those famous and self-confessed should be placed strategically near those famous and closeted. Where he had a choice, Allen selected
the more formal, the more serious, the more respectable, except in the photographs of Pierre, who would flaunt through this crowd, exposing them all.

  “Well, since I don’t do photography,” Dale said, “it wouldn’t set a precedent, and I think a retrospective a marvelous idea.”

  “I’d like to take it right across the country this spring, summer, and fall, travel with it,” Allen said.

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you there. I don’t even have a Toronto contact. All my business is in the States and Europe. I’d be glad to see what I can do in L.A. or Houston or New York.”

  “No,” Allen said, “I want this one to stay Canadian.”

  It did not take him long to locate galleries in all the major cities. A couple of phone calls to Ottawa made it clear that there was Canada Council money available for Allen and for the galleries, if they applied, to help finance the project. There could even be a catalogue.

  “Once you’re doing the right thing,” Allen said to Joseph, “everything just seems to fall into place. Before I leave here, I’ll put the house on the market. That will give me money if I need it … and freedom. I’m going to have a good look around this country and see whether there’s someplace else to go.”

  Allen began to go out again in the evening, to chamber music, to the theater. He could still attract the smiles of unattached young women, but he also now stirred gossiping ripples across the clusters of respectable men, the chartered accountants, university teachers, doctors, several of whom would hang in the show, all of whom could. Allen wished he had done more working and playing in Vancouver just for the purpose of this show. Still, he had done enough so that no one in the city would be in any doubt. All this crowd would go to the opening—oh, yes, surely. They’d be delighted to pay homage to this elusive darling, who now, because slightly tarnished, was more attractive than ever.

  Allen was excited. Sometimes, as he hung a new print, he laughed aloud in satisfaction. The pictures of Pierre, which at first he wasn’t sure he could stand, seeing that future/past of Pierre’s blown away head in every whole angle, began to feel companionable. In fact, Allen could sometimes even talk with him.

  “You’d say this isn’t a very nice thing to do,” to a face of Pierre with a shadow of beard, the kind of photograph Pierre would have destroyed if he’d had a chance. “I know that. It isn’t. If you were alive, I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t have to.”

  One of his mother’s favorite expressions to stop him from a course of action dangerous or distasteful to her had been, “Well, it’s your funeral.”

  It was Pierre’s funeral. He had, as another stupid old saying went, asked for it.

  It was not until the night before the opening, when he and Dale finished hanging the last photograph, that Allen felt the real impact of what he had done. It was Pierre’s resurrection among illustrious, if preponderantly guilty, witnesses, his Pierre: young, ambiguous, enticing, who had shot himself in the enormous silence Allen had re-created here, in sorrow, in revenge.

  “This is—ah—very good stuff,” Dale said, moving restlessly about the room. “I wonder only about—how shall I put it? Since it is my gallery, I wouldn’t want people to think that my vanity had been served …”

  “Your photograph stays,” Allen said.

  “And Alma’s? I’m not sure …”

  “And Alma’s.”

  That night Allen couldn’t sleep. Before the next night was over, he would know what he had done or was beginning to do. All his life so self-protective, so circumspect, it was an entirely new experience to be apprehensive about failing to be exposed. People must see, see and explain to each other, until the news traveled out before the show, preparing audiences all across the country. The catalogue, simply titled “Allen Dent: A Retrospective,” gave the name, title, occupation, and place of residence of every person photographed, except for Pierre. “Pierre” was the only identification of his pictures, ten of them.

  It was noon when Alma arrived at the door, larger than life, as she had often seemed.

  “You’ve put on weight again,” Allen said, smiling at her, not inviting her in.

  “You have got to take my picture out of that show,” Alma said.

  “Whatever for?” Allen asked. “It’s a lovely picture.”

  “Do you really think you’re going to get away with it? Do you really think all those important people are going to let you do that to them? Screwing children may be too apolitical an offense to put you behind bars, but this isn’t. This is libel. This is slander. I’ll sue.”

  “For what?” Allen asked, all bewildered innocence.

  “You bastard!”

  It was a heady pleasure, seeing Alma as angry and as helpless as she was.

  “Regretting your friends often only makes it worse,” he said, his voice teacherly as it had often been with Alma in the past, to no effect obviously.

  “Those pictures of Pierre—they’re just ludicrous. You know that. You’re making a fool of yourself is what you’re doing.”

  “A small price for the pleasure,” Allen assured her.

  “What do you think you’re trying to prove anyway?” she demanded, genuine bewilderment modestly undermining her anger.

  “I’m not trying to prove anything,” Allen said. “You work in a gallery. You know art isn’t propaganda. Its pretensions are quite different. They’re concerned with truth, if I recall the gist of my fine arts elective.”

  “Don’t you care who you hurt?”

  “No,” Allen said, smiling, “not one bit. Surely you, of all people, can understand that.”

  She looked as if she might strike him, restrained herself because of the deep lesson she had learned from Mike, no doubt, who had never been taught you didn’t hit back.

  “Allen, I would probably be a very different person if I didn’t have children. As a mother, I’m asking you to take my picture out of your show.”

  “Pierre is my even better excuse for inhumane behavior, and he’s dead.”

  “Exactly! Tony and Victor are very much alive …”

  “And therefore as unsafe as you and I are.”

  “You’re a sick man,” Alma said. “You have to be stopped. You will be stopped.”

  She hesitated, obviously wondering if there was any angle she’d neglected. Then she turned away.

  In the late afternoon Alma’s father telephoned.

  “Allen, I hear there’s a picture of Alma in your retrospective.”

  “That’s right.”

  “She seems awfully upset about it, and I wonder if there’s any way to have it removed from the show. I’d be very glad to buy it for whatever amount seemed reasonable to you … for the inconvenience to you as well.”

  “It’s not for sale,” Allen said. “It’s not a selling show.”

  “I see. Well, perhaps simply for removing it.”

  “It can’t be done, I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, surely anything can be done. We’re reasonable men.”

  “No, I’m not,” Allen said.

  “But you’ve been a friend of Alma’s. There’s no reason why you’d want to threaten her reputation in any way. She feels she’s in rather inappropriate company …”

  “On the contrary, the whole show is a monument to pretension and hypocrisy. She should feel right at home.”

  “I hadn’t taken you for a man who would make enemies foolishly.”

  Allen whistled the melody for the line “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” knowing Alma’s father would not pick up the clue.

  “Well, I’ll have to see what else can be done.”

  Allen was elated. There was nothing anyone could do.

  The next phone call came at 6:00 P.M. It was Dale Easter.

  “The gallery’s just been closed by the fire department,” he said. “I never did intend to have real shows here; I didn’t even check out the regulations.”

  “But they can’t do that!” Allen protested. “Not just like that with no
warning. Who sent them?”

  “I suppose, when I applied for the party license, the liquor board notified them …”

  “Alma’s father has done this.”

  “Allen, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to fight it. I thought at first Alma was being paranoid, but she isn’t, is she?”

  “About what?”

  “About what this show really is. It’s hot enough to burn my place down without any fire, never mind the exits.”

  “Damn it, Dale, it will put you on the Canadian map!”

  “All-star to bush league. Who needs it?”

  “If I can’t get this show to the public …”

  “You may in another six months get back to what you ought to be doing. Do you think I would have agreed if I’d realized what you’re up to? Do you think any of the other galleries would go along? Use your head.”

  “You won’t show it.”

  “No, Allen, I won’t.”

  “If Alma hadn’t said anything, you’d have been none the wiser.”

  “Until after opening night. A lot of our acquaintances would be very amused at how badly I failed Canadian identity tests. There I was, saying to Alma, ‘I not only didn’t know he was gay; I didn’t know he’d ever been a Cabinet minister; I didn’t even know his name!’ She’s invaluable to me, that woman.”

  “If I took you and Alma out of it?”

  “No way,” Dale said. “Just no way.”

  Allen stood, shaking with frustration. His mind moved from hanging the show in his own house to kidnapping Tony. Nothing that occurred to him would work. The only way he could succeed with this show was to call no public attention to it, and that, in Vancouver, was now impossible. The question was whether or not he could get it out of town and into Edmonton without interference. If he could once get a gallery run of a couple of weeks, he was sure he could keep going. Dale had neither contacts nor interest in stopping him outside town. Alma’s father would not have the influence in other cities he did here.