Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  “Thanks anyway,” Roxanne said. “Maybe I’ll see you awhile after school tomorrow.”

  “But Dad can’t stay,” Tony said in a soft, urgent voice. “He’s married to somebody else now.”

  Roxanne made a gentle face at him, as if he’d said something unworthy of his own perception. He colored again, but he didn’t retreat from her.

  “Come home with me,” Carlotta offered. “And let’s go now.”

  “I do believe he’s in love with you, Roxanne,” Allen said as he drove them back to Kitsilano by way of the beach.

  The bay was filled with the dark shapes of freighters, waiting for prairie grain on its way to China. Someone recently had tried to persuade Carlotta to go on one of the China tours because she would understand and be drawn to their poster art, as most of the others going would not. China for Carlotta was a large warehouse next to a railway line where people selected fur hats, blue shirts, and political buttons to distribute to their friends back home. So the freighters were there as props for foreign mythologies.

  “It’s a different world,” Roxanne was saying, not having taken up Allen’s taunt about Tony. “Everyone there is doing things, and there’s money—not government money, private money, because people really are interested, really believe in the importance of what we’re doing. It’s crazy.”

  Allen dropped them off. Carlotta didn’t like to think of him spending the night in a lonely hotel room, underlining all that he had lost here. She knew he wouldn’t go to the baths or the bars. But there was nothing else to offer him. She felt very meager with Roxanne, too, the bed narrow and lustless. It was a long way for friends to come for so little.

  “I shouldn’t have asked you,” Carlotta said.

  “I had to come,” Roxanne said urgently. “I have so much to tell …”

  Some small part of it was a new lover, not so magnificent as Alma had been (and here she paused for a tribute to Alma’s breasts and thighs, which Carlotta had never risked painting for Alma’s sake), but human in ways Roxanne thought finally necessary. The greater length of telling, some several hours, was exactly what Carlotta had expected and dreaded. Roxanne had discovered the vocabulary for what she did. If there had been a trace of egotism in that new wonder, Carlotta could have told her to shut up and go to sleep. Instead, she drank cup after cup of tea, her nails making bloody half-moons in the palms of her hands to keep herself awake. Finally it was Roxanne who fell asleep in the middle of one of her own jargon-laden sentences. That aura of hair rested on the pillow; that comically generous mouth in too small a face was still. Was there something essentially simpleminded about someone greatly gifted? Carlotta had no doubt at all that Roxanne would go on to hear her work in the fictitious capitals of the world. “Yet she lacked—what was it? A kind of complexity or sophistication. There would always be something of the uncritical worshiper in Roxanne, no matter how many goddesses fell.

  They all—Joseph, Ann, Allen, Roxanne, Alma, and Mike—arrived early for the opening, more in the mood of performers than guests. The children had been left at home. The length of the drive out of town, the lack of familiarity with the gallery, the fact that it was a school night made Joseph and Ann decide to leave Joy in the care of Rachel and Susan, as Tot was left with her brothers, in the novelty proud rather than resentful of the responsibility, or so Alma reported it.

  “I can only stay an hour. It’s such a long way. Tony’s got a supplementary bottle in case of emergency, but I’m the emergency. I should have had twins!”

  She was so proud of mother’s milk she might have invented it. Since the thought of it created mild nausea in most of the others, there was a physical space left around her, across which various needs for attention had to travel and did.

  “This is more effective,” Allen was saying. “Paintings are, on the whole. But there were lots of subjects at my opening in Toronto, and they did give the impression of having been cut adrift from the walls to be free-floating images in the room. “You’re positively diminished, of course,” he said, smiling at Alma.

  “And you might have escaped from a ward for the criminally insane,” she retorted.

  “I’m the only certifiable nut among us,” Joseph said.

  “It doesn’t show,” Mike assured him, “in your portrait or in you.”

  As soon as other people began to arrive, Carlotta felt anxious as if she or her friends were in real danger, as if she had inadvertently exposed not only Allen but all of them, for they seemed terribly vulnerable there in their flesh, where each move, each gesture could betray. The portraits, in contrast, seemed safe from harm. If she had not been distracted by a number of her regular collectors, she would have obeyed an instinct to herd her friends into safety in the office, in the back alley, anywhere except here where their portraits were like “wanted” posters for the criminally free. It was odd to have her familiar personal paranoia extend as far as her imagination had, to include her friends.

  “Nice to have you on my side,” Carlotta said to Alma’s large and handsome father. “I was afraid you might not like Alma’s portrait.”

  “Marvelous!” he said. “Simply marvelous! One goes on too long thinking of one’s children as children.”

  “I don’t want to sell you every sketch of Tony.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, but I must have them.”

  His confidence was such that he spoke as if the decision were up to him rather than to Carlotta.

  “But I’ve spoken for one of them, sir,” Allen said, suddenly at Carlotta’s elbow.

  “You remember Allen Dent?” Carlotta asked.

  “Indeed.” Alma’s father nodded but did not offer his hand.

  “The fire regulations in this building seem ideal,” Allen said, his tone gallant.

  Alma’s father agreed and excused himself.

  “I always did like playing ‘bite the hand that feeds you,’” Carlotta said, light and cool as she always needed to appear to be, fooling other people as a way of fooling herself.

  The crowd grew, became a kind of obstacle course to get through. Carlotta felt trapped in it and at the same time the cause of it, caught in her own net along with her friends. Allen had started taking pictures. The exploding flashes illuminated face after face that she didn’t know. She heard the word “tits”; she heard the word “radical.” She heard, “I want to buy the flower man.”

  Mike was standing beside her. “I’d forgotten how young we were. I didn’t remember it like that at all.”

  “What did you expect to see?”

  “The error of my ways?”

  “The error of mine!” Carlotta said, and laughed.

  “Are you all right?”

  “It’s such a crowd. There are so few people I know. Where do you suppose they all come from?”

  “Off the big road, I guess, following the billboards. They didn’t spare the advertising,” Mike said. “I’d like to see you before I go back. Do you have any time tomorrow?”

  Before she could answer, there was a sound or a feeling, as if the crowd were one great beast that had torn a muscle or a tendon. Carlotta looked toward a sigh, contraction, whatever it was. Then someone screamed.

  “Is someone hurt?”

  “Has someone fallen?”

  There were shouts, several sharp grunts, and the mass began to bubble in the vicinity of Roxanne’s portrait.

  “There’s the faggot who does it to kids, right there! Allen Dent. Get him!”

  Then, only five or six feet away, Carlotta heard and identified the sound of a bucket of liquid being emptied against the wall. She looked and saw red paint like a bloody explosion, drooling down over what had been the portrait of Alma. As the man with the bucket turned around, Carlotta recognized him. He was the trick who had paid her last month’s rent.

  “Why, you prick!” she shouted.

  “That will teach you, you two-bit whore, not to bring your filth into this community!”

  Mike’s arm had come down around Carlotta’s sho
ulders, and he placed his body between her and the man who spoke.

  “Let me go,” she commanded in a quiet but clear voice.

  She felt his arm fall away as she lunged forward. She could think of only one thing. She wanted his eyes.

  “Lotta, don’t kill anybody,” she heard Mike shout at her.

  As she felt scalp and skin under her nails, her thumbs hungering for the eye sockets to blind the bastard, suddenly her arms were clamped to her sides from behind. There were cameras flashing everywhere.

  “Let me go!”

  It wasn’t Mike. She was being held and dragged back out of the crowd by a uniformed policeman.

  “They’re ruining my paintings!” she was shouting. “Those bastards have ruined my paintings. Get them, why don’t you?”

  She saw Allen, blood pouring out of his nose, shoulder to shoulder with Mike, punching it out with half a dozen men.

  “Who the hell are these apes?” Mike shouted.

  “Old high school buddies,” Allen answered. “Meet our local aldermen.”

  Out on the sidewalk there were more photographers, more policemen, several on their way in, one holding Roxanne, whose shirt had been torn off, whose shoulder was bleeding.

  “What in hell is this?” Carlotta demanded. “Why are you arresting us?”

  For answer, she was escorted to a waiting paddy wagon.

  Joseph and Ann arrived on the sidewalk under police escort, Joseph stumbling as if he’d been pushed, Ann arguing.

  “We didn’t throw the paint, Officer. We’re the artist’s friends.”

  Several unknowns made flying exits before Mike emerged, the frustrated bouncer, a policeman on each arm, bellowing like a bull, behind him Allen, who was being dragged rather than helped. Everyone was in the paddy wagon before Alma appeared, bathed in red paint, explaining regally to anyone who would listen that her father was in there somewhere and would have them all dismissed from the force if they didn’t release her at once. She was a nursing mother. Then she saw all the others looking out of the door of the paddy wagon.

  “All of you?”

  “All of us,” Mike said, holding out a welcoming hand.

  “What about the baby?”

  “She’ll be all right.”

  “My God, Roxanne! Are you hurt?”

  “Some,” Roxanne answered. “So’s Allen.”

  Alma rummaged in her handbag and found cotton to put under Allen’s upper lip, to clean up the cut on Roxanne’s shoulder.

  “Are we really going to be taken to jail?” Ann asked.

  “Looks that way,” Joseph said, and for once his note of laughter was signal rather than warning; Allen and Mike began to laugh with him.

  “I’m so damned proud of them all,” Allen said, under his stuffing of cotton. “The people of Surrey care enough about art to start a riot! Things like that don’t happen in Toronto.”

  “And the police care enough to join them,” Mike said. “Makes a man proud to be a Canadian.”

  “But who’s behind it?” Ann demanded. “It was obviously all planned. Even the press was there. The police were using our portraits to identify us all.”

  “I am,” Allen said. “They came to get me.”

  “I went to bed with the prick who was throwing the paint,” Carlotta said.

  “They’ve ruined the work. Don’t you care?” Roxanne was shouting. “Is it nothing but a big joke to you? They didn’t come because of Allen. They didn’t come because of Carlotta. Blame the weather. Blame the stars. They came. They always will.”

  “No,” Ann said, “that’s unjust.”

  “It will be all right,” Alma said soothingly. “Dad will be there.”

  The silence that fell was deeply embarrassed. Inside it Carlotta felt responsible for both the terror and the silliness of their circumstance. She had painted them all into this ludicrous corner, images of envy transformed, offensive deities of the big frog in the polluted little pond, where she, where they all had to live. She saw again the face of the man she could have blinded, felt the intimacy of his scalp under her fingers. She had not blinded, she had not killed him, that payer of her rent, committing a rape she would not consent to, ever. Adrenaline drained out of her like a hemorrhage. She began to shake so violently that she might have to hurl herself to the floor to stop it. Arms held her. Ann’s? Alma’s?

  There was Mike’s voice: “We’ll sue the shit out of them.”

  Joseph’s very near: “All things fall and are built again.”

  “Surely you can,” Ann was saying. “You can paint us all again.”

  Quieting, Carlotta pulled back away from that multiple embrace and discordant song, seeing them all, Joseph, Ann, Mike, Alma, Allen, and Roxanne, escaped from their destroyed portraits, survivors who had already grown far beyond her fixed ideas of them. Because they were all here now together, their lives would change again in ways she couldn’t predict.

  “I can’t imagine,” Carlotta said. “I can’t imagine.”

  About the Author

  Jane Rule (1931–2007) was the author of several novels and essay collections, including the groundbreaking lesbian love story Desert of the Heart (1964), which was made into the feature film Desert Hearts. She was inducted into the Order of Canada in 2007. Born in New Jersey, Rule moved to Canada in 1956, and lived on Galiano Island, British Columbia, until her death at the age of seventy-six.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The song on pages 10 and 11 is “Pack Up Your Sorrows” by Pauline Marden and Richard Fariña, © 1964 (Unpub.), 1966, 1977, 1979 Ryerson Music Publishers, Inc., assigned © 1977 to Silkie Music Publishers, A Division of Vanguard Recording Society, Inc., and is used by permission. The lines quoted on page 326 are from W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson, Random House, Inc., copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden, and are used by permission.

  Copyright © 2005 by Jane Rule

  Cover design by Tracey Dunham

  978-1-4804-2945-1

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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  New York, NY 10014

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  EBOOKS BY JANE RULE

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