by Jane Rule
Not even to Carlotta, whom he had met under circumstances which might have compelled him to explain if it weren’t always so easy for him to signal detachment. Alma had introduced them with the candid suggestion that they might appreciate each other. Alma and Carlotta were old friends, important to each other, and therefore Carlotta was a problem for Mike, which he tried to solve by alternately baiting and propositioning her.
“Narcissist, onanist,” he taunted at the series of self-portraits she had painted.
“They sell,” she answered wryly.
“Whore!”
She smiled, and so did Mike.
Joseph was meant to distract them from each other, and he was able to, sometimes by asking Mike to show him a new wrench or saw in his shed, so that Alma and Carlotta could enjoy their long psychiatric conversations in peace, sometimes offering to walk Carlotta home, for she lived only a few blocks away in a single large room at the top of an old house, whose north windows overlooked the city, sea, and mountains.
After several months, Carlotta’s place was another of his stops, domestically the most peaceful, for she lived resolutely alone and let him intrude only because she knew he would not stay long. Her basic reluctance to have visitors made Joseph thoughtful to bring a small present or observation to please her, and that was easy because she was both poor and quick-witted.
“We are all twenty-nine years old,” Joseph said one day, standing at Carlotta’s door, holding out a yellow plastic bucket in which two crabs clicked and bubbled.
“Where did those come from?” Carlotta asked, making no gesture to accept them.
“From Mike. He sets a trap down next to his warehouse.”
“I don’t accept presents from Mike.”
“But now they are from me.”
“Why don’t you take them to Alma?”
“Not enough for the family. Anyway, she doesn’t like them. She’s a cook who can’t kill.”
“It’s only practice for the main event,” Carlotta said, taking the bucket from him. “Come in.”
The dark, narrow staircase smelled of paint even more than Carlotta’s room because the windows were nearly always open. Joseph approached the painting on the easel as if it were a person to be greeted and stood some time before it while Carlotta drew water and put the pot on the stove.
“Whose skeleton is this?” he asked.
“Mine.”
“Have you really broken that many bones?”
“In my dreams.”
“Everyone is also crazy,” Joseph said, adding a single note of laughter.
Carlotta turned toward him, her beaked face fierce. “I have finally told Alma there is no such thing as therapeutic art. It’s not a category, it’s a denigration.”
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘Did you remember to eat breakfast this morning?’”
“Had you?”
“I couldn’t remember,” Carlotta answered irritably. “I think the only thing that really keeps me from killing myself is that I’m too absentminded to manage it.”
“There’s starvation,” Joseph said. “Shall I put the crabs in?”
“No, it’s a pleasure.”
Joseph watched her reach into the bucket, her long, unnaturally thin arm as rigidly strong as something made of metal, the armored, flailing crab more like an appropriate appendage than an adversary. She plunged it into the boiling water as if it were some revolting part of herself. The second crab, warned, clamped a claw on the rim of the pot and threw itself onto its back on an unheated burner.
“Shit!”
“I’ll do it,” Joseph said.
He was cautious, could even have been accused of reverence, as he lifted the second crab into the pot, discovering that one of its claws had broken off in its attempt to escape. He dropped it separately into the water.
“It could have grown another,” he observed, “given the chance.”
“I’m surprised they’re both male,” Carlotta said, and continued over Joseph’s laugh, “I’d think Mike would be pitching all the males back and keeping the females for eating.”
“He’s not a killer,” Joseph said.
“Just dangerously deluded. He doesn’t know the difference between stone or wood or metal and human flesh, and that’s not healthy for a sculptor.”
“Oh, come, he never took a knife to Alma, did he?”
“His prick … the same difference.”
“A woman can be … hard as stone.”
“Harder,” Carlotta said. “We have to be; otherwise, all of you try to carve us into your own needs.”
“Do I?” he wondered, then turned away from her studying look and asked, “Have you got any butter?”
“I think so. Look in the cupboard.”
There was no refrigerator. Carlotta kept the place so cold that it wasn’t necessary except in high summer, a time she was often fasting. Joseph found an unopened quarter of a pound of butter and a loaf of bread in a health food store wrapper. There were also two tomatoes and an unopened can of condensed milk and several packages of Japanese dried soups.
He carefully ladled some of the crab water into a mug to make soup, then sloshed the rest into the sink to clear it of a streak of black paint floating in a pool of turpentine so that the crabs could be safely cleaned there. He did not ask permission to do that job. Carlotta took the mug of soup and watched him through the steam of it, held always close to her mouth.
“Red’s the color of death in Japan,” she said.
Joseph gently inserted a thumb at the base of the red back shell and eased it off the body and legs, then let the force of the cold water clean the crab. He did not break it apart so much as disassemble it, leg by leg, like a mechanical toy whose parts could be put away to build something else another day. Only the body had to be snapped in half, and Joseph did that last and quickly.
“Are we all really twenty-nine?” Carlotta asked.
“Yes,” Joseph said, beginning on the second crab, “about to embark on the terrible decade. You, Mike, Alma, Allen, and I, all of us.” His excluding of Ann was factual; she was already thirty-one.
“I’ve never liked people my own age,” Carlotta said. “That’s what made school so awful, sitting in a room with thirty-five other people whose teeth all fell out at the same time.”
“It doesn’t teach compassion,” Joseph said.
“Aren’t you going to eat some of this?”
“No,” he said, “no, I’m not.”
Joseph had walked only five miles that day, slogging, slipping work in the melting of the first snow. Vancouver was a city that pretended real winter never came there, and very few of its residents were willing to take garden spades to their share of the sidewalk. Postmen and milkmen and Joseph galoshed along in one another’s tracks, making the footprints that would freeze and break incautious bones a few days later, for old people came out like snowdrops on a mild January day.
For Joseph the cold was like a sedative, as if the flow of words were a shallow stream easily frozen, and he could look in winter at sights that would drown him in words in another season: a raccoon high in the bare branches of a maple on the corner of Second Avenue and Sasamat, a lone child skidding down the hill on the lid of a garbage can, as if his mind could skate on the hard surface of hibernating hysteria. Everyone with allergies loves winter.
“Why don’t you ever stay long enough to thaw out?” Pierre asked him, pouring out a cup of tea.
“I’d talk too much,” Joseph confessed.
“You? You never do anything but listen. Allen says there’s something wrong with you: kindness.”
But it took Joseph no effort to deflect Pierre’s interest from himself to Allen, away at the moment photographing champion Canadian skiers.
“When it has anything to do with athletics, I’m terrified. All these gay people coming out, writing books about it—even football players! Allen says muscles revolt him and only people like me are in danger of gang rape
.”
“But aren’t you glad … or at least reassured that people can begin to be more open?”
“As Allen says, it’s like going around with your fly undone.” Joseph would no more argue with Pierre about homosexuality than he would with Mike about art or Carlotta about suicide. All his friends seemed to wear attitudes like name tags, means of identity rather than principle. It was the same with the political parties they supported or actually belonged to. Mike belonged to the New Democratic Party because of his working-class background rather than his socialist convictions. Carlotta was really to the left of the New Democratic party but tolerated it on the ground that a country like Canada could never manage a revolution. Alma was a Liberal to maintain social superiority and annoy Mike. All the nicest people were Liberals. Allen voted Conservative out of affected cynicism to serve his own vices. Pierre? He believed in the federal government of whatever party, in Canadian unity because, he explained, “I have embraced my enemy and become his adoring slave.” With such a view Pierre would no longer be safe on the separatist streets of Montreal, but he hadn’t been in Quebec for five years. Joseph himself was the worst sort of liberal, a naïve humanist who hoped for rather than believed in anything. Ann was his companion in that. They all had outgrown what they knew without knowing anything else.
To be an insignificant man in an insignificant place who could carry such ordinary responsibilities as a job and a mortgage was for Joseph a protective coloring that kept him out of the eye of the eagle, for he had no desire to be claimed for a heroic or melodramatic death in service of his country or his own imagination. But insignificance did not keep him from being a man hunted by songbirds and flowers.
“How do you laugh like that?” Roxanne demanded the moment Allen introduced her to Joseph.
“Like what?” Joseph asked.
“Just the one note, somewhere between a cough and a coo.”
Joseph shrugged and turned away to let Pierre help him unwind out of his layer of woolen protection.
“He’s really a bird,” Pierre explained, instead, “a gull Allen found on the beach. See … ?” He demonstrated, pulling off Joseph’s cap. “Even his hair is like feathers.”
Joseph could imagine it was so, the fair, thinning tufts damp against his scalp, but in no way as remarkable as the head of hair on this young woman, who, as fine and frail-bodied as Pierre, suddenly bloomed like a sunflower into a stiff mass of tight yellow curls.
“I found her in a record shop on Granville … working there,” Allen explained later. “I’ve thought for a long time that Pierre needed a playmate.”
So Allen had brought her home as if she were some kind of nearly life-sized doll, to please his boy wife. She did. Her size delighted Pierre, and the flatness of her chest, which she displayed in transparent shirts or skintight tank tops with as much vanity as Pierre. Her hair enchanted him, so soft to touch and yet so resistant to any taming. She had small blue eyes, a wide mouth, and a set of large good teeth which belonged in a far larger face. She carried herself with a stiff grace which, along with her diminutive size and extraordinary hair, made her seem the more unreal, as if at least some parts of her animation were mechanical.
Joseph was at first shy of her, and it disappointed him to find her so often there when he dropped by, opening the door to him like a jack-in-the-box. If only Pierre was at home, the two of them would be involved in a project or game of some sort, often requiring the swapping of clothes. Roxanne was teaching Pierre to sew. He was teaching her to cook. Pierre tried to involve Joseph, but he could find no place in their play. Though he was glad for Pierre to find him now so seldom alone or lonely, Joseph was apt to check for signs of Allen’s presence before he rang the bell.
Allen treated Roxanne with the indulgent affection men of his temperament often reserve for intelligent dogs. Though she didn’t find anything to worship in Allen in exchange, she was perfectly comfortable with him. After a few initial assaultive questions which Joseph didn’t answer, she kept a watchful distance from him until one day in early spring they accidentally met walking away from downtown Vancouver across the Granville Street Bridge.
“Walk with me, but don’t talk,” Roxanne said, her fending-off hand then becoming a link between them.
The noise of the traffic was so great that a conversation would have been impossible anyway. If it weren’t for the marvelous views over the newly developed False Creek area or across the Burrard Bridge to the mountains, Joseph would have avoided the six lanes of urging traffic. Leaping off a bridge of this sort must be made easier by all the racket and exhaust stench you’d leave behind. Walking with Roxanne, if he was to set his pace by hers, was like marching in a military band. Did she hear Sousa in her head to block out all the engine urgency, punctuated by horn and brake? She couldn’t be smiling unless her private sound track were tuned in somewhere else. Though Joseph couldn’t get the noise out of his own head, her absorbed company did distract him. Joseph would have taken the Fourth Avenue exit, but she walked on, determined to go with the main flow of traffic south on Granville Street. They went on until she was stopped by a red light at Broadway.
“I should start west from here,” Joseph said.
“All right,” she agreed, and turned up Broadway with him.
Joseph wanted to turn off Broadway to one of the quieter streets, but he felt shy of changing their direction twice. Finally he asked, “Where are you going?”
“Oh, nowhere. I’m just following the traffic.”
“Following the traffic?”
“Yeah. To listen to it, you know. I just like to listen to it.”
“We’d never make good walking companions. I hate it.”
“Only because you try not to listen to it. Shhh … listen.”
Dutifully he marched with her for another several blocks, then shook his head and said, “I’m sorry. That’s all I can take.”
She left him easily but he stood for a moment watching the stiff energy of her walk before he escaped.
The next time Joseph met Roxanne he was more puzzled than put off. Did she, perhaps, walk because she had to? Joseph had never considered there might be others like himself, but why would she choose the traffic to pattern her miles?
“Do you walk every day?” he asked.
“Sure. I don’t have a car.”
Joseph didn’t feel confident enough to tell her that wasn’t what he meant. He did want to find out about her but without being pressed to his own confession.
Ann was the only one who knew that he walked and why. Perhaps her unspoken skepticism made Joseph the more reluctant to test the credibility of his exercise with anyone else who might put it in the category of a fad diet. It did, after all, work. He babbled rarely and had not gone crazy.
“Do you know what I used to think?” Carlotta asked him one day, standing at her windows while a spring gale blew in. “I used to think mental hospitals were filled with melodramatic neurotics like me, but they’re not. They’re filled with mild, kind souls like you, most of whom are, of course, women.”
“I have read,” Joseph said, “that mental hospitals are really simply jails for women who tend to be violent toward themselves rather than other people when they get desperate. I don’t know why you think that excludes you.”
“Because I’m not a potential suicide really. I’m a murderer.”
“Well, I’m not essentially mild or kind either, and when I go crazy it won’t be like a candle in the window being blown out.”
She laughed. “I’d like to see that.”
“I’m not sure you would.”
Because it was spring, squalls bringing the pink snow of ornamental cherry blossom, a new blade of grass cracking the sidewalk, a robin challenging its own image in the basement window, Joseph found himself reluctantly choosing the traffic, the center of the city nearly closed from the sky, the weight of steel and concrete great enough to defy the strongest weed.
At the warehouse Mike had finished his first pi
ece and was now slowly working on what looked increasingly like the wreckage of a schoolroom.
“Didn’t you like school much?” Joseph asked, watching Mike deliberately break in two places a chairlike form he had just made.
“I loved it,” Mike said. “I was eleven the last time I had a teacher bigger than I was, and at ten I could outspell the principal. I’d have been a poet if I didn’t know …” He paused and looked out across his work. “Listen, Joseph, I’m going to tell you something important: there is no real power on earth but art, real art, great art, and the greatest is sculpture because it can be big and permanent and there. You can’t shut the covers of a book on this; you can’t take the needle off the record. You have to look at it. You have to face it. It occupies space.”
Joseph could imagine children climbing about in this deliberate wreckage as if it were a jungle gym. The boat/bench/fence also invited occupancy or siege.
“When the hell is Allen coming down to see this?”
“He said it would be better for you to have at least two of them finished.”
“But he is coming.”
“Oh, yes,” Joseph said. “He’ll come.”
“Alma likes him. She says faggots are restful.” Mike shook his head and snorted. “I told her to get her rest while he was around … it was okay with me.”