by Jane Rule
“Sometimes I think we live in different worlds,” Alma said.
Since Carlotta always thought so, it was perverse of her to say, looking out Alma’s bedroom window, “But we have almost the same view.”
A fact of Vancouver was that the million-dollar views weren’t yet reserved for millionaires. Carlotta paid a hundred dollars a month for hers. She would not, however, trust the police to deal with her unwelcome guests.
“What if people are doing this to people all over Canada?” Alma demanded.
“I’ve thought about that. I imagined a student going into the office of a particular university president and saying, ‘Man, you turn me on.’”
“Don’t you see at all how dangerous it is?”
“No,” Carlotta said. “I think you enjoy the paranoia, and so does Allen. Pierre killed himself because he was a shallow, vain little creature who didn’t know what else to do with his loneliness. We don’t even know that he was ever told about Allen’s arrest. It could as well have been a coincidence.”
“I just don’t want to be associated with any of it. It’s all a sordid mess, and it has nothing to do with me.”
Carlotta got a fine highlight on a cheekbone.
As Allen had lost weight before her eyes, Alma, of course, gained, life swelling in her belly and breasts. Every mood flattered her, whether she was being vain and silly or affectionate and witty. Carlotta had only to catch a few of the hundreds of right moments to have what she wanted: woman being woman.
“I am rather fine,” Alma said, a hand on Carlotta’s shoulder, admiring the painting.
She was the only one of Carlotta’s models who simply enjoyed her own image. Mike had been nervous at first and finally bored. Joseph laughed at his in his chronic distress. Roxanne took only polite notice of hers. Pierre had peered and poked very much as he must have at his image in the mirror. Allen depended on his to keep himself believing in his own anger. Ann grew more and more embarrassed by hers as it neared completion.
“You’re flattering me,” she’d say.
“How? Doesn’t it look like you? Aren’t those your gray hairs?”
“Yes, but I look—oh, I don’t know: healthier than I am.”
“Aren’t you healthy?” Carlotta asked.
“Well, ordinarily, I guess. Joseph loves it. He keeps saying, ‘It’s so like you,’ in a pleased, surprised way; so in some way it must not be like me at all.”
“I get an idea, usually a very simple idea to keep the mood under control. This is unagitated woman in the ordinary light of day. But you’re alert, you see. I have your attention. That’s what Joseph likes about it. That’s what everyone will like about it.”
“But I’m not a very good listener,” Ann confessed. “Half the time I’m planning tomorrow’s dinner at the same time.”
“Well, that’s in your hands. I haven’t left it out.”
“I do like what you do, Carlotta. I really think I do understand it.”
“That’s because I am a minor Kitsilano artist who has made certain mistakes on Commercial and in West Point Grey. We share a territory.”
“In school we were taught that art should instruct and delight.”
Carlotta laughed. In the old days Mike would have taken up such a challenge and lectured Ann to neither enlightenment nor pleasure about art as the redeemer from usefulness. What Carlotta believed she never admitted to anyone: art heals, even its own motives if it has to. “Art as the-Scab-on-the-Wound School,” she could say wryly to herself, but she would not be misunderstood to mean art is therapy.
“Art doesn’t need an excuse, does it?” Carlotta said, to answer something. “It’s only artists that do, and there isn’t any excuse for us really.”
There was something else in the portrait of Ann Carlotta didn’t talk about. Though there was a window, though the light came in cheerfully enough, there was a subtle claustrophobia in the space the figure occupied. When Carlotta was sure it was nothing but the truth, she declared the portrait finished.
Alma would be her last. In this Carlotta was confronting and transforming into myth what she envied most, celebrating all she was not. She would finish it before Alma was again blasted seedpod, sore and milky, confronting unwed motherhood in an intolerant neighborhood without even the blessing of her ridiculously indulgent parents. If Carlotta went on with figurative painting, she would invent the images she had so far only been able to take from life. What a relief it would be to work in solitude again, her muse at last outgrown.
“If it’s a girl, I’m going to name it Carlotta,” Alma said.
“You know I don’t like children,” Carlotta said.
“You could be her godmother. It’s taking an interest in a child that makes them interesting.”
“I don’t believe in God.”
“A courtesy godmother then.”
“Why involve me? It has nothing to do with me.”
“I need somebody with me,” Alma said.
“Your mother …”
“I’m not going to ask her.”
“But what about the boys?”
“They’re old enough to stay alone.”
Carlotta’s dreams no longer tampered with her own fragility and pain. They were instead confrontations with the life in Alma’s womb, often so horrifying and repulsive Carlotta woke physically sick. They stayed so vivid that she was for a time afraid she couldn’t finish the portrait before the baby was born. Then to finish it became an obsession to hold Alma inviolate against the hideous jokes played even against the gods. What if it was a mongoloid? Was Alma also afraid, knowing she was old enough to be in danger? Though she was resolutely cheerful, surely some nights her own dreams must be filled with the possibility of retribution.
There was a letter from Roxanne with a return address in San Diego. She was working at the Music Center there, being taught how to talk about what she was doing, being given phrases like “sound decay,” “natural drift,” “sonic meditation.” Soon not only her work but her conversation would be incomprehensible to someone like Ann and an increasing irritation to Carlotta, except, of course, that Roxanne wasn’t around to be irritating. Carlotta missed her more than she would have expected to and suspected that Alma missed Roxanne less once the physical addiction was over.
Did Canadians always have to go south of the border or across the ocean to learn how to talk?
“All right, international art is megalomania and packaging,” Dale Easter said, “but we can’t go back to village cultures.”
“What about McLuhan’s global village theory?” Alma asked.
“‘Global’ is the operative word there,” Dale said.
“Or small is beautiful?” Alma tried again.
Carlotta wished she hadn’t said she’d stay for dinner. Alma, without having broached the subject to Carlotta, was obviously trying to manipulate Dale into offering Carlotta a show. Though she was fretting about where she was finally going to show these portraits and some of the sketches, she would not have accepted an offer from Dale. He was not interested in things Canadian, and she did not want his patronage. Tony sat stiff with boredom, Victor trotting one leg through the main course and now dessert. She was sorry for them that she was not Roxanne, who always seemed so natural around children, as if they were as easy to talk with as anyone else.
“Art is elitist, Alma. Surely you’ve got enough experience now to know that. There’s no such thing as a bestseller in drugstore terms. The ‘small’ world of painting has to be international, the world of collectors and curators.”
“Carlotta sells quite well right here,” Alma said.
“How much a year, Carlotta?” Dale asked, turning to her. “Five … six thousand?”
“Now that there’s Art Bank,” Carlotta said, “and if you count the dentist bills I pay for with paintings.”
“You see? We often make that in one sale.”
“Even the artists we sell had to begin somewhere,” Alma protested.
“A
lma,” Carlotta finally said, “don’t push him. If I weren’t here, he’d explain to you that the portrait work I’m doing went out with the invention of the camera except for subjects like the queen.”
“I wouldn’t,” Dale protested. “I admire you for doing what interests you. I really do. It just isn’t mainstream, that’s all.”
“Women-Can’t-Piss-on-Fire School,” Carlotta said.
Tony suddenly laughed and then blushed.
“I’m not being vulgar,” Carlotta hastened to explain to him. “It’s Freud, and he was perfectly serious. So, of course, is Dale.”
“Art is sexist,” Dale said. “I can’t really help that. There is Emily Carr. More to the point, there’s Bridget Riley, alive, relatively young, with every coveted award, prices as high as any man’s.”
What a lot of conversational weight names had to carry, particularly for someone like Dale, who didn’t like to argue to impress. He could spend a whole evening correcting your view of him with his famous names until he was convinced you agreed. He didn’t have ideas so much as explanations.
Carlotta thought no less of Dale Easter than she did of a group of women who ran a storefront gallery on Fourth Avenue where only women’s work was exhibited, carefully screened against male content and shown only to other women. At least Dale’s bigotry wasn’t foolish. He made a great deal of money. Still, she didn’t agree with him even at the end of the evening, and he knew it.
“If you’d flatter him just a little,” Alma said. “He’s impressed with how much you make. He says he bets there aren’t many in town who can make that much selling just in Vancouver.”
“He wouldn’t give me a show,” Carlotta said. “He doesn’t meet fire regulations.”
“There wouldn’t be any trouble about that.”
“When your father sees this portrait, he may close the show on his own initiative.”
“More likely he’ll buy it.”
“I wish I didn’t have to sell it, or any of them. But I can’t afford not to now that they’re all done.”
Finally Carlotta found a gallery out in Surrey operating on a government grant to bring culture to the boondocks. It advertised its shows and concerts on huge billboards on either side of the freeway. Technically it could exhibit but couldn’t sell; however, it was glad to refer anyone interested in buying directly to the artist.
“What’s the gimmick?” Alma asked.
“Taxpayers’ money,” Carlotta said.
“They don’t take any commission at all?”
“And I don’t even have to pay for the invitations. They don’t serve wine, maybe Kool-aid and Oreos.”
“When?”
“The first two weeks of October.”
“Oh, good. The baby will be here by then. Nobody should have a September baby. It’s like living with a wood stove all summer.”
“What do you know about wood stoves?” Carlotta asked.
“I visit the poor.”
Carlotta’s mother heated her cabin with one, not because she was poor but because she liked hard work and deprivation. She cooked on a hot plate in summer, which was much hotter in Kamloops than on the coast, but not for comfort: to save wood. It was that heat, as well as her mother, which had driven Carlotta to the coast. Even now, in August, the sea breeze cooled both Carlotta’s and Alma’s rooms.
“I’m nearly finished,” Carlotta said. “I’m really finished.”
Alma looked with her. “I wish I could tear it up at night so that you’d have to begin again in the morning. I’m going to be horribly lonely now.”
“You’ll have the baby soon.”
“It’s not the same. Do you miss sex?”
“Not much,” Carlotta said.
“I sometimes wish there were whorehouses for women.”
“Well, it’s easy enough to come by if you want it—as close as the nearest bar.”
“Not if you want a woman.”
“There are those kind, too, I’m told.”
“Roxanne wouldn’t take me. She said no one in them was over fifteen. We did meet other lesbians, but, you know, they’re just people after all, and you can’t just go up to a person and say, ‘I want to make love’ or screw or whatever.”
“Why not?”
“Would you?”
“Go up to someone? Sure, if I felt like it.”
“Make love with me.”
“Alma, you’re eight months and twenty days’ pregnant.”
“I don’t mean now. I mean … ever.”
“No,” Carlotta said gently.
“I didn’t think so,” Alma said. “Well, anyway, I don’t have to go on wondering.”
“You said being lesbian isn’t the way you want to live.”
“I know,” Alma said. “But the option was going back to Mike—never another man. I just couldn’t.”
That night Carlotta dropped in at the bar of the Vancouver Hotel, where she’d once worked as a waitress. Her second drink was bought for her. She was home two hours later, her point proved, fifty dollars in her wallet. She sometimes thought it was the only kind of sex she really did understand, and she didn’t miss it. She did need the money. How many more years could she reasonably count on her body’s paying the rent? The five pounds she’d gained made her look younger, but thirty-five was watershed year. The twenty to twenty-five years between whoring and the old-age pension might teach her new motives for fasting.
Carlotta felt a senior citizen indeed, as well as the wrong sex, as she sat in the maternity waiting room of the Vancouver General Hospital at four o’clock in the morning.
“I should have just called a taxi myself, I know,” Alma had said apologetically, “but I have to know there’s someone else there. I have to know I’m not by myself.”
“Are you scared?”
“Lonely,” Alma said.
To remark on a condition natural to Carlotta as if it were something that needed accommodating, if not correcting, was another of the great differences between them. Since Carlotta couldn’t be with Alma now, she wondered what earthly good she really was sitting there among half a dozen boys young enough to look blameless. When you didn’t have children to measure your own aging, you had to be startled like this into knowing you must be taken for an expectant grandmother because you were old enough to be one.
“I’d rather be her,” the tall, thin, nervous youngster sitting next to her said.
“Who?”
“Her. Having it. Instead of being guilt-tripped about it the rest of my life.”
“If that’s all you give her to complain about, she’s lucky,” a dark square of a boy said from across the room.
“Man, I don’t have a job. She did, until just a couple of weeks ago—no maternity leave, nothing.”
“Get them all pregnant and back in the kitchen, maybe there will be work for us.”
Carlotta got up and walked out into the hall. She’d never been any good at other people’s nervous systems. To deal with such vulnerable stupidity was beyond her.
“Carlotta?”
She turned to confront a nurse.
“Mrs. Trasco says that you should go home. It was a false start, but we’re keeping her here.”
“Tell her I’ll be at home with the boys.”
Carlotta had not meant to offer that, though she knew it was the other place Alma wanted her to be. Was she, in fact, trying to be Alma’s mother? Perhaps Carlotta had got to the age where, whether she was good at whatever or not, she did it. How alarming! Not even to get exemption for ineptitude.
It was dawn. The first buses were running empty in her direction. It would be a couple of hours before a transfusion of people would revive Broadway, as pale and still as something dead now in the tender light of a day that would be hot.
“We don’t stand the heat,” Carlotta said out loud in the back of the bus, an old crone, the wicked fairy godmother dismissed from the birth.
Tony was up, sitting at the dining-room table with his hands fo
lded over the note his mother had left him, facing Roxanne’s map as he always did, the only one in the family informed rather than framed by that wall.
“Is she all right?”
“So far,” Carlotta said, hearing how little comfort that would be to him. “I’m sorry. I don’t have to tell you how bad I am with children since you’ve had so much firsthand experience.”
“I’m not really much of a child,” he said.
“It’s your own fault,” Carlotta said, dreading the possibility that he’d complain about either parent.
“Do you ever hear from Roxanne?” he asked.
“Yes. She’s in San Diego at the Music Center there. I think maybe she’ll come back for my show.”
“I hope my dad’s not.”
“Why? I’ve asked him.”
“That baby’s my dad’s, isn’t it?”
“Tony if you want a heart-to-heart about that, you ought to have it with your mother, not with me.”
“She won’t talk to me.”
“I thought it was the other way round. Are you going back to bed, or should we have some breakfast?”
He was oddly companionable in the kitchen, letting her take charge while he anticipated each thing she needed.
“How did you know I’d have tea?” she asked him as he put boiling water in the pot to heat it.
“Mother doesn’t know how you stand to drink it first thing in the morning.”
He had such a grave face until he smiled. His teeth, which were like his father’s, were too bright for his fairness.
“Well, you listen to her anyway,” Carlotta said.
“When I used to ask Roxanne questions, she answered me.”
“Maybe that was a mistake she made,” Carlotta said, using a clamp to turn the bacon.
“It’s not a mistake to understand.”
“Well, so the baby is your father’s. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a bit of useless information.”
“Then she really did want us to go back to him. She really did want Roxanne to leave, and it’s only because he married that other person …”
“Bunny.”
“Bunny, that we didn’t go back.”
“I don’t think even your mother knows that. You can’t outguess someone who is also only guessing.”
