Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  “Why do you paint?” Alma said.

  “To say ‘See, we exist.’ It seems a lot of work when any mirror has the same message.”

  “A mirror doesn’t say it matters.”

  Carlotta looked up sharply to catch the color of Alma’s fading blush. Then they both laughed.

  “I’d forgotten you do that when you’re pregnant.”

  Working as hard as she was, Carlotta sometimes forgot to eat. Ann could read hunger in her face, would cook her something or make her a sandwich. Alma didn’t notice, her own sudden cravings the prerogative of pregnancy from which Carlotta was excluded.

  “One of the things I wondered about when I was writing was what could a portrait possibly say? What does a face say?” Alma asked.

  “Start with the obvious: though any portrait may not, it can say sex, age, ethnic background, nationality class, occupation, marital status, all the vital statistics. Character is in the bones, the set of the mouth, the eyes. Psychological history is the skin.”

  “You mean scars and whatnot?”

  “Obviously, yes, but if I only meant that, you’d have no psychological history at all.”

  “But isn’t most of it clichés out of old wives’ tales: the weak chin/weak character, long nose/long cock sort of thing?”

  “I’m not inventing your face. If I exaggerate characteristics, I move toward cartoon. Faces are, after all, a lot easier to read than books.”

  “I don’t agree,” Alma said, “except faces of people you know well.”

  “I only paint people I know well, and the only thing I can’t paint is our hot air,” Carlotta said.

  “But nothing anyone says is irrelevant really.”

  “Neither is the color of your eyes.”

  Carlotta stopped on her way out of the house to look at Roxanne’s wall. She had thought she wanted Alma in some kind of relationship with the view. She had done sketches of Alma standing by the window, sitting up in bed. But maybe she should be painted into Roxanne’s sound map of the city.

  “Tony won’t let me touch it,” Alma complained.

  “Quite right,” Carlotta agreed. “It’s an extraordinary piece of work.”

  “You mean to look at.”

  “Yes,” Carlotta said. “What baffles me about Roxanne is that she does complex things like this but is so … simple? ordinary? … as a person. Is she?”

  “I don’t know,” Alma admitted. “Sometimes I think she’s just so tactful she should be a secret agent. Why didn’t she say she knew I was pregnant?”

  Carlotta shrugged, still studying the wall, instructional and aesthetic, only inadvertently redeemed from usefulness by the impossibility of Roxanne’s living here.

  “It’s the only thing she left behind. It would be easier to live with if Tony didn’t make it into a shrine.”

  “Maybe she intends to come back,” Carlotta said. “Would you have her back?”

  “Not if I could help it,” Alma said. “I treat her so badly, for one thing.”

  “Yes.”

  The puzzle was Roxanne didn’t seem to notice or, if she did, didn’t seem to mind. Carlotta remembered how lightly Roxanne took Carlotta’s weary disgust in that kind of sexual requirement. Carlotta didn’t even know how impersonal a revulsion it was until Roxanne accepted it without offense. Was she stupid or insensitive, or did she have a deeper instinct for self-preservation which didn’t depend on anyone else’s concern? Carlotta had been able to lie under the weight of Mike’s first revulsion until it passed. But to laugh at it as if it had nothing to do with her and then to excuse him from the chore of her desire she could never have done. She had wanted to be in love with him. Roxanne obviously had no interest in being in love with Carlotta.

  “I started out this project,” Carlotta said to Ann, who was counting stitches again, “making love with my model. If being a ménage à trois had occurred to us all those years ago, Mike and Alma might still be together. It didn’t occur to us. It didn’t occur to me. Are you absolutely heterosexual?”

  “I don’t suppose so,” Ann said. “They say nearly nobody is.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Well, I can imagine it partly because of the way I feel about the children. If Joseph were a woman, I can imagine still being attracted to him. That’s all pretty theoretical, I admit. Only after Alma told me about herself and Roxanne, that’s what I imagined.”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “I don’t think it’s anybody’s place to judge. Oh, I felt terribly sorry for Mike. You do feel sorry for the one left. Love can feel like bleeding to death when there’s no container for it. I’m awfully glad he’s found another woman. He sounds happy.”

  Carlotta was angry with Ann for being able to describe inadvertently so accurately the way Carlotta had felt after Mike left. It should have been her unique hemorrhage, not something that could be ascribed to Mike because it was also obviously the wound Ann had suffered at John’s death. There should perhaps have been comfort in such evidence that Carlotta was an ordinary member of the human race, but she resented it. Why should Ann so comprehend Mike’s suffering when Carlotta had been in the process of describing her own?

  Carlotta noticed that Ann did the same shifting of center with the children and with Joseph. She didn’t take anyone down so much as over a peg so there was less jostling for attention. When occasionally Carlotta stayed for supper, the aura, as distinctive as burning candles, was limelight defused.

  Carlotta’s mother had set up such competition for her attention and approval that all her children thought of their siblings as their worst, because most knowledgeable, enemies. Carlotta hadn’t spoken to a brother or sister in years. She had gone so far as to drop her last name from everything but documents which absolutely required it.

  The Rabinowitz children got such carefully divided attention from both Ann and Joseph that they had little practice at grandstanding. Carlotta was not surprised to hear that neither Rachel nor Susan excelled at anything. Aside from having no need to, they could also sense their parents’ fear. It was amazing that Ann risked calling the baby Joy. They were so concerned about the disfavor of the gods they might instead have named her Sorrow or at least Doubtful.

  Alma’s boys, by contrast, were exceptional in everything they did, not always to anyone’s pleasure. Victor’s specialty these days was breaking rules no one had ever thought to make up like: “No chalk-eating contests at lunch hour.” The only thing you could be sure about Tony, Alma said, was that, if everyone else got there in a downhill race, Tony would be doing it cross-country. Carlotta understood that. She hadn’t known, until she got to know the Rabinowitzes, that there were more than two options: the limelight or the dark.

  “How could you avoid knowing?” Ann asked. “Most of us do live in the ordinary light of day.”

  It must come in through the window, a kind light that would temper even John’s death in her attentive face.

  Often the worst time for Carlotta came in the early morning, when, half awake, she would dream her breaking bones. Because she was too busy with the portraits to paint what she had dreamed, she tried sometimes to retrace and explain dreams to herself as a way of stopping the noxious metallic fear in her mouth which otherwise could go on all day. Anxiety, like all other negative emotions, can develop strong immunities, and soon the explanation became a dwelling on dreams which served to increase their power. Once, impatient with the burden of what the night had dragged in like a cat hunting down her nervous system and bloodstream, Carlotta said aloud, “That’s silly!” She felt marvelous all day. It was so simple she didn’t like even telling herself about it. If banishing a neurosis were really that easy no one had any business having one, a point Ann had been making one way or another for a long time. It was with some ironic but real relief that Carlotta discovered her minimizing scorn could also be incorporated into her anxiety, so that soon she was not only afraid of her phobias but newly ashamed as well.

  “I’m getting a heada
che every time I go to Ann’s,” Carlotta confessed to Alma. “I sometimes wonder if I simply can’t stand kindly normality.”

  “I never realized you worked so slowly. You must get so bored!”

  “No, just anxious.”

  “It must be like trying to ride a bicycle an inch a minute. I don’t see how you don’t fall off.”

  “Are you getting bored?”

  “Resigned,” Alma said. “I thought at least you’d ask me to bare my breasts.”

  “I’ve decided envy in me is a kind of lust, and I must curb it.”

  “You did decide on the bed.”

  “Only because you obviously live in it.”

  “On the contrary. These days I’m rarely in it except for you.”

  “Dale working you fairly hard?”

  “He’s gone most of the time. But there’s been a real increase in interest. It has to do with inflation. People are investing for capital gain. It often feels to me more as if I were a stockbroker than an art dealer. I don’t so often talk about the quality of the painting as I do the potential of a rising market for one particular painter or other. I made five thousand dollars last month.”

  “What I make in a good year,” Carlotta said.

  “I need the money. I’ve had a real row with Mother and Dad about this baby. They want me to go away to have it and put it up for adoption. For the baby’s sake, they say, so that it won’t grow up with the stigma of being illegitimate. Nothing to do with their own good name at all. At one point Dad—without actually coming out with it—threatened at least a cut in my allowance. I realized I could get along without him. I don’t really need Mike or his money either.”

  “Can you go on working?”

  “Dale’s perfectly agreeable. Why didn’t you ever tell me that living alone is so delightful?”

  Carlotta wondered how she could paint the gulf between them. It was not simply that Alma had twenty times the money, lived in a painting world entirely alien to Carlotta, and thought living with two and a half children was living alone; Alma didn’t see the differences.

  Allen sent a note to say the Toronto opening was next. He was sorry none of his close, personal friends would be at his possible crucifixion. If Carlotta had had money to spare, she would have flown east for it. She couldn’t feel the easy condemnation that Alma did, though Carlotta didn’t doubt that at least part of his motive was character assassination. She was surprised to find she did not feel threatened. If anything, she felt modestly unworthy to be among those martyred.

  The review in the Globe and Mail was superb. It compared the photographs of Pierre to the circus boys of Picasso’s Blue Period, but it credited Allen with insights beyond those of even that genius. Many people had recognized the androgynous in the very young and in the old before our masks for the world had formed and after they had dropped away; few people had really explored the essential bisexuality in all of us. Allen had been able, so the reviewer claimed, to reveal, even in the most delicate face, a subtle masculine component. In portraits of our leading politicians, he could discover a surprised tenderness, a delicacy of gesture. We are all revealed as creatures not so polarized as the bra burning, etc. etc. etc.

  Carlotta went to her mirror to see if she could spy in her self that subtle masculine component which might make her whole and self-sufficient.

  “It makes me just sick!” Alma said. “How can he get away with it? Imagine turning that sort of cheap, dirty trick into some kind of testimony about our essential spiritual selves.”

  “I think it’s magnificent,” Carlotta said. “It might just release the humanist locked up inside Allen.”

  “Don’t they remember the gross indecencies he was charged with not even a year ago?”

  “He’s not a mere photographer now. He’s an artist. Gross indecency is supposed to be his raw material which, by the alchemy of aesthetics, is transformed into illuminated beauty. Do you know how?”

  “I certainly don’t.”

  “It’s because you’re so successful at disguising self-loathing as self-righteousness. Allen really stinks of nothing but your guilt.”

  “I have no sexual interest in children.”

  “But what you’re terrified of is that you’ll be accused of corrupting them by living with Roxanne. “You want to pretend that’s no sexual influence at all. And of course, it is—probably a good one for the world they’ll have to live in, though it’s hard to know.”

  “Tony and Victor have absolutely no idea—”

  Alma stopped in mid-protest. For once even she could read Carlotta’s face.

  More sins were probably committed “for the sake of the children” than made any sense unless they really were the incarnation of Old Nick they sometimes seemed to be. Children, all innocent inadvertence, tempted parents not only to Alma’s blind hypocrisies but to her greed. All selfishness and unloving piety are sanctified “for the sake of the children.” For their sake, too, sex is kept disgusting.

  Carlotta had begun to sketch the children, not with any notion of doing their portraits but because their body stances were so much more speaking of their moods and needs than those of most adults. It took a great deal longer to teach children to express emotions only in guarded, preordained ways than it did to housebreak them. Their faces generally didn’t interest her much, aside from genetic recognition.

  “Oh, they interest me,” Joseph said. “I know erosion shouldn’t sadden, but it does. Young faces are so intelligent, even the ones that turn out to be not very bright. And they’re so beautiful.”

  “I resent them, I suppose,” Carlotta admitted. “They have nothing to do with me.”

  Lack, resentment, envy—they drove her to work toward a remarkable generosity because she represented what she envied in others rather than her envy of it. She had worked so long on manifestations of her self that the act of painting became associated for her with what was essentially hers. In work she, therefore, had the illusion of possessing what she admired. Instead of projecting herself onto her subject as she had had to struggle to avoid with Roxanne, she was learning to let the subject overtake her.

  It was the brooding power of Alma’s self-righteousness rather than its hypocrisy that became more and more obvious on the canvas. The bed began to look like a relief map of a large country, and behind the bed, Carlotta decided to put Roxanne’s map.

  “That’s where she wanted it in the first place,” Alma said ruefully. “I can’t think why I didn’t let her.”

  Would Roxanne feel an ironic triumph to have her work finally given place in Alma’s bedroom? Or would it seem to her blatant plagiarism? If she felt anything at all, she would be too tactful to say. Carlotta realized she was waiting for Roxanne to come back. She had had a couple of cards without return addresses saying no more than any holidayer would.

  Carlotta was also waiting for both Allen and Mike to come back. For her, places like Toronto and Los Angeles were not real. They were an illusion, into which actors went when they stepped offstage. Carlotta thought of all her absent friends as wandering in shadowy places, among ropes and unused props. She had never traveled, not only because she didn’t have the money but because she could not imagine herself anyplace else. Once the painter Joe Plaskett had asked her to call on him in Paris. He might as well have suggested she could step into one of the paintings of his Paris room and find her face in one of its mirrors. But she had understood him. He was as obsessive about himself, his room, his faces, as she was about her physical and psychic territory.

  What made an artist was perhaps the lack of that imagination which was supposed to be at the heart of their craft. Even Carlotta’s friends in town, if not objects of her intense concentration, soon became nothing more than scraps of gossip, rags of memory. “I can’t imagine!” was for her a cry of pain at the center of her anxiety. Perhaps only those who suffered a poverty of images for their emotions had to paint or write to survive. Mike was then not a failed artist but a man restored to a life he cou
ld imagine. Carlotta could not. He was by now far realer to her as an object in her painting than he was as a man she had tried to love.

  “We have less imagination than other people,” she explained to Ann.

  Carlotta would never say such a thing to Alma since Alma was one of those Carlotta was presuming to explain to Ann. Carlotta never made common cause with Alma to her face.

  “The most disgusting thing has just happened!” Alma announced before Carlotta was even through the door, and she looked where she stepped in case it was something which left physical evidence. “This creature came to the door, size forty-six tits in nothing but a T-shirt, a voice deeper than Daddy’s, saying she’d come all the way from Toronto because she’d fallen in love with my picture in Allen’s show.”

  “Wait until people see my portrait of you. There will be double lines around the block,” Carlotta promised cheerfully.

  “Lot, did you hear what I said?”

  “Of course, I heard.”

  “This is exactly the sort of exposure and humiliation Allen intended.”

  “You’re such a spoiled woman. I’d probably have been flattered.”

  “How can you joke?”

  “Because it seems to me funny. I suppose it gives you some sense of justification about shutting the show down here in Vancouver.”

  “Ask if I needed any!”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “I ordered her off the premises and told her I’d call the police and charge her with trespassing if she came back. You can actually do that. It’s the way Daddy got rid of a boy Joan didn’t want to see anymore.”

  “The concept of sisterhood hasn’t much touched you,” Carlotta observed.

  “What would you have done?”

  “I don’t know. I have never had a chance to practice rebuffing anyone.”

  “What a liar you are! Just between Mike and me, you’ve practiced for years.”

  “Oh, you.”

  “Well, it’s true. If I ever did run off with a bull dyke from Toronto, it would be entirely your fault.”

  “So you pretend to be outraged, and, in fact, you’re intrigued.”