Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  “But he always wanted more children. I can remember they used to fight about it. So how is he going to feel?”

  “You want a fried egg?”

  “Sure.”

  How did she know how Mike would feel? For all she knew, this Bunny might have presented him with triplets by now. There had been no communication between them since that phone call all those months ago.

  “Roxanne wouldn’t mind a baby, I don’t think,” Tony said. “She just thought Mother would go back to him.”

  “If you care about Roxanne, don’t wish her back here. She’s not one of us.”

  “She’s real,” Tony asserted.

  “Maybe that’s what I’m saying.”

  “Then I’m not either.” He lowered his voice in anger, as if he were afraid of it.

  “So, when the time comes, you’ll go.”

  Victor was standing in the doorway in his pajamas with an erection he apparently hadn’t noticed.

  “Cock-a-doodle-doo, stupid,” Tony said. “Go get dressed.”

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “At the hospital having the baby.”

  “Oh.” He turned and went back upstairs.

  Carlotta felt as assaulted by Victor’s mindless penis as she did by Tony’s questions. She wished she had never come. Now she felt trapped, having given this number to the hospital.

  “What time are you off to school?”

  “School doesn’t start until next week.”

  Carlotta couldn’t be stuck here all day. The only other option seemed to be to go back to the hospital. Tony at least wasn’t stupid.

  “Is Allen coming?”

  “Home?”

  “To your show.”

  “I imagine so,” Carlotta said.

  “Then I guess I won’t be allowed to go. Do you know why Mother won’t speak to Allen? Because she thinks I’m a queer.”

  What did Tony want from her? Was she supposed to deny it?

  “You’ll probably have to stay home to babysit, whether he’s there or not.”

  When she had fed Victor breakfast, Carlotta decided that sleep might be the most practical solution. The boys could answer the phone and call her.

  Carlotta lay down on the bed which had held both Mike’s urgent fucking and Roxanne’s tenderness: the tongue, the probing finger preparing her for Mike’s assault. If she and Mike and Alma had ever … but Carlotta could not imagine Alma as a lover; she was irretrievably a rival who even now took over her own bed and cooled whatever appetite Carlotta had tried to conjure for her own comfort.

  Tony woke her at noon with the information that Alma had gone back into labor.

  “Is that all right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she assured him without knowing what else to say.

  What did she know about birth anyway? Probably with the sort of sex education they had in the schools these days, Tony and Victor knew more about it than she did.

  “I think I ought to call my grandmother,” Tony decided.

  “She doesn’t want her,” Carlotta said. “She was emphatic about that.”

  “Well, Victor and I are still speaking to them, and Gram said, when the time came, we should go over there …”

  “You’d certainly be fed better. And why not? They’re not going to stay mad at a new grandchild. But tell them she doesn’t want them … yet anyway.”

  He was a nice kid, really, and he did have a lot on his plate. What was Alma thinking of, burdening him with a version of her own guilt? Well, she burdened everyone, one way or another. Why else was Carlotta going back to the hospital, fear a pain in her chest, unable to believe in anything but the awful?

  The baby was born ten minutes after Carlotta arrived at the hospital, a “perfect” child, that peculiar adjective used to describe a creature with all its fingers and toes, unambiguous genitals, and a head the proper size, though with how many of its marbles no one yet knew. A girl. Carlotta.

  “It must be so nice to have a baby named for you,” the nurse said. “I do like your painting very much. There’s one in my dentist’s office.”

  “My last crown,” Carlotta explained wryly. “You’re sure she’s all right? She doesn’t have a third tit or cleft palate or anything?” Confessions of only the most ordinary of her nightmares.

  “Perfect. She’s perfect.”

  “And her mother?”

  “She said she didn’t want to do it too easily or we’d think she was a peasant,” the nurse said. “She’s one of these women made to have babies.”

  When Carlotta saw her, however, Alma’s face was stained with fatigue. It was as if the baby had, in a morning, stolen ten years of Alma’s life. But she was euphoric.

  “I knew it was a girl. I so wanted a girl.”

  “The boys have gone to your parents.”

  “Well, I can’t help that,” Alma said.

  “I can’t be your mother. You’ll have to make friends with her again … or your sisters.”

  “It was Tony’s idea, wasn’t it? He could take care of himself. He’s perfectly capable.”

  “You should make friends with him again, too.”

  “Oh, Lot, I know I should.”

  In spite of herself, Carlotta was interested in the baby. It was so small a package to contain all that would become a woman, and it was so concentrated on the process of breaking itself in, unmannerly urgent at the breast, like a straining weightlifter accomplishing the movement of its bowels, and it slept as patients do under anesthetic after major surgery. Yes, it was terribly dependent, as everyone always remarked, but Carlotta was more impressed by the imperiousness of its commands which could jar even Victor out of his own hedonism to answer an infant need.

  As Carlotta studied and sketched the baby she became acquainted with the source of her own bodily preoccupations, the intensity with which she had concentrated on her own parts and processes. She had not been a doted-on only or much younger child. She had had to compete from birth as one of a litter for the attention of a parent who anyway saw in an infant’s lying in its own excrement the equivalent of some self-imposed adult penance. To survive in the most friendly of climates was an amazement. What the baby was teaching her was a new respect for herself.

  Tony was particularly good with the baby, untroubled by changing the dirtiest diaper, which sent Victor retching from the room.

  “It shows she works, that’s all,” Tony tried to explain to his brother.

  It was Tony who found the baby a name for herself. “Tot” he called her, and then so did everyone else, though Carlotta avoided any name as much as she could. She felt both identified and usurped.

  Finally the real grandparents arrived with a carload of pink and white peace offerings. Tony let them in. The baby didn’t really need a father. None of them had. The grandfather had always been the stallion in the field. That fuss was over.

  “Once you give in to it, some semblance of normal life is reassuring,” Carlotta confessed to Joseph, who was helping her frame some of the sketches.

  “I think it’s relatively easy to explain,” Joseph said. “That is, the source of terror is the source of comfort. Running from one means being deprived of the other.”

  “I couldn’t go as far as you have, however.”

  “In either direction,” he agreed. “But I didn’t know it was normal to be afraid of what makes you happy.”

  “Is it?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, and laughed.

  “But you’re on the other side of that now.”

  “‘In the prison of his days / Teach the free man how to praise’—I’m reading poetry myself now.”

  Praise. Carlotta walked about the gallery, looking at the portraits and sketches of her friends, work that had intermittently occupied her for the last five years. She knew—if anyone bothered to be critical—she would be called slick, flattering, and an anachronism. Perhaps one of the reasons she liked Vancouver was that she was rarely called anything at all, being outside the world of academic co
nnections, without a school. She had been able to follow her own needs in developing her skills. She had suffered only the doubts she herself cast about her work. She could see she had achieved what she was after: envy transformed into praise for these people given her and as defining to her as the sky or the sea or the line of mountains. She was considering the transparency of Roxanne’s shirt as it compared to the transparency of Joseph’s body when she was startled by her own name called in a familiar voice.

  She turned to discover Allen walking across the gallery toward her. They embraced. Then she stood back from him and studied his face.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “You’re barely recognizable,” she said.

  Oh, any stranger would have known him as the avenger in his portrait, the gun at his heart. He would have to wear a putty nose or grow a beard to avoid that until he aged enough to leave only a few traces of that intensity of feeling. The emptiness, which had been as fluid as tears, had hardened in his eyes. He had come to terms with permanent damage.

  “What a place!” he exclaimed. “How did you ever find it? Aren’t you terrified you’ll be cut up and sold for baked goods at the next church supper? Do you really know where you are?”

  “Under the protection of the federal government.”

  “I doubt it. Remember, I was born here, home of the enemies of Canada Council or any other federal funding body in support of the obscene arts.”

  “What’s obscene?” Carlotta asked.

  “This marvel of Alma, for instance.”

  He stood and looked for a long moment. Carlotta studied with him, trying to find anything in the least objectionable about that majestic pregnancy.

  “In this community the schools use the censored text of Romeo and Juliet which cuts out the nurse’s references to pregnancy. Our English teacher used to point out all the bawdiest puns the prudes didn’t get,” Allen explained, still looking at the painting. “You admire her just the way I do.”

  He turned to look at the portrait of Roxanne and said simply, “Tits.”

  “Oh, Allen, come on!” Carlotta protested.

  “Art, like the brassiere, must be uplifting.”

  “People like that aren’t going to come to a show like this.”

  “Don’t count on it. There’s a lot of civic pride.”

  He stood before the portrait of Pierre, his body stiffly attentive, a mourning that had become formalized.

  “He was both weaker and more eager,” Allen finally said quietly. Then he turned to Carlotta and said, “I want you to take my portrait out of the show.”

  “I wouldn’t consider it!”

  “For your sake,” Allen said urgently. “I still get hate mail from around here. The people I went to school with are aldermen and ministers and schoolteachers and parents now. You can get away with mother-fuckers like Roxanne and loonies like Joseph, even the monster mother, Alma, but you can’t get away with me, not here.”

  “You’re a fine one to talk about what can’t be got away with!”

  “For my sake then,” Allen said.

  “What you really want is community outrage,” Carlotta said to him, “and you know by now you won’t get it, so you want to protect yourself from disappointment.”

  “We needn’t quibble about my motives,” Allen said amiably.

  “We’re not going to quibble about anything.”

  “I owe you a drink,” he said. “I want to take you out for dinner. I need to know the lay of the land before tomorrow night.”

  “And I need to know what it’s like to be an artiste in Toronto.”

  “No. I dine out on my pain only when someone else is paying the bill. How I’ve missed you, Carlotta. In fact, I’ve missed everyone, even Alma. How is our bitch goddess?”

  “She’s just had her baby—well, nearly four weeks ago, a girl.”

  “And Tony is more beautiful than ever, and I’m still barred from the house.”

  “I assume so,” Carlotta said.

  “There’s such security in knowing old friends don’t change.”

  Over dinner, when she asked him hopeful questions about where he lived, who his friends were, Allen parried in a flippancy perfectly familiar, but there was no longer that central vulnerability, Pierre.

  “Were there ever any real consequences of that show?” Carlotta finally asked.

  “Real? No. Those people don’t take artists seriously. They pay more attention to their gossip columnists than to us.”

  “In Vancouver, yes, but I thought maybe in Toronto …”

  “I’m the fellow with the clever gimmick: androgyny in the prime of life. You know, even junior executives are supposed to be in touch with their own feelings these days, to climb over heads without leaving any marks, to fire tactfully. The only people who take me seriously enough to dislike me—aside, of course, from the friends of my childhood—are the radical lesbians, who, like Roxanne, think I shat in my own nest.”

  “They’re not admirers of nuance.”

  “I don’t suppose political people can afford to be, but it’s why they are so very tedious. Ordinary people, on the other hand … won’t you reconsider and take me out?”

  “No.”

  Carlotta had a presentiment that Allen would someday contradict his disappointed cynicism with a rash political act; then she realized the presentiment was instead a recollection. That made her feel old, grandmother to their past selves as well as to the baby.

  She was fixing a last pot of tea for them back in her room when the phone rang.

  “Lot?”

  “Yes, Alma.”

  “They’re both here.”

  “Who?”

  “Mike and Roxanne.”

  “They came together?”

  “Of course not, but they’re here. Roxanne arrived only about half an hour after he did.”

  “And you want me to take one or the other of them off your hands.”

  “Is there any way you could?”

  “Allen’s here with me at the minute.”

  “Oh.”

  “I imagine he could pick up Roxanne. Is Mike alone?”

  “Yes, his wife’s seven months pregnant and didn’t want to travel.”

  “Do you want us to come get her?”

  “Could you make it look … accidental?”

  “Are you going to let Allen into the house?”

  “Well, of course. After all, Mike’s here. I have to go now. Could you come soon?”

  There was real glee in Allen’s energy as they set out for West Point Grey.

  “Roxanne doesn’t deserve to be rescued, of course, but what a reunion!”

  Tony opened the door to them and blushed. Allen didn’t give him a chance to refuse them entry stepping across the threshold, putting an affectionate arm across the boy’s shoulders, and turning him into the living room, where Mike sat in the chair that had once been his exclusively, holding the baby in his arms. Roxanne stood, as if about to depart. Alma was between them, blocking their view of each other. Victor leaned on the back of his father’s chair.

  “This is turning into quite a party!” Alma said, successfully surprised. “Are you just back in town, Allen?”

  “That’s right.”

  Mike was getting up out of his chair, deftly wedging the baby against his chest with one arm, offering his free hand to Allen. Carlotta had forgotten the impact of Mike’s beauty or he had grown even more magnificent. His radiance did not draw her; on the contrary, it made the impossible distance between them all the clearer. The only time he could ever have been accessible to her was when he had lost the confidence which now seemed as bright and strong as his teeth. Only after he had released Allen was Allen free to greet Roxanne. He kissed her on both cheeks, bringing the memory of Pierre palpably into the room. Allen and Alma went through no overt ritual, perhaps because each knew this was an emergency rather than a reconciliation.

  “I was just on my way …” Roxanne said.

  “Don’t rush off
now,” Allen said. “In a few minutes I’ll give you a ride. I just stopped in to say hi.”

  “Have a drink,” Mike said. “I know there’s plenty. I just fixed one for myself.”

  He was not aware of the feud between Allen and Alma; she would not have told him anything about it. He was aware that he might be taking up more space than anyone else wanted him to, for he suddenly handed the baby to Tony turned to Alma, and said, “Would you like me to help?”

  “Please,” she said.

  She had hardly left the room when the infant storm began in Tony’s arms.

  “It’s time for her feeding,” he explained.

  Alma returned at once, sending Tony to help his father. Then, without asking permission of anyone, she opened her blouse and offered a large dark nipple to her infant daughter. Mike and Tony came back with drinks for Allen and Carlotta.

  “Drink time for everyone,” Mike said, moving to stand beside his ex-wife and the baby.

  This tableau in its ordinary balance of family life was what Alma had often thought she wanted back, but at the center of it now, she was unaware of it. Her whole attention was on the child.

  Carlotta looked over at Roxanne, who had all but physically vanished. Did she feel banished from that kingdom or freed of an obsession? Allen was not looking at Alma at all. His eyes rested on Tony.

  “I’d rather watch the hockey game,” Victor announced, breaking the moment into acceptable pieces.

  “We get to do that tomorrow night,” Tony explained. “I’m sorry I won’t be at the opening, Lot, but Tot’s too little. We’re going to stay home with her.”

  “You’ll have to see it later. There are some sketches of you and Vic.”

  “Really?” Allen asked. “For sale?”

  “I think my grandfather’s spoken for them all,” Tony said.

  He wasn’t in the least flirtatious with Allen, but the special gravity of his tone and expression was disturbingly attractive. Even Carlotta could see it, or she was admitting to her conversion: children are people.

  “Where are you staying?” Carlotta asked Roxanne.

  “I hadn’t thought …”

  “Here,” Tony offered quickly. “You can have my room. I’ll bunk in with Vic.”

  “Sure,” Vic agreed. “Because Mother sleeps with the baby.”