by Jane Rule
Mike had not known, until after he had hanged himself, that he intended to move out. Preoccupied with the actual making of the object, he spent his anger in the work and did not really think what it would mean, swinging there in the old shed he no longer used, until it did swing there and he walked out. His message had probably been clearer to Alma than to himself, and even now, two months later, he had not defined the ultimatum of his departure and his silence. Aside from sending Alma the money she needed to run the house, he had not contacted her. He did not know what he wanted to say. Oh, he had a hundred accusations to shout, and that noise went on in his head most of the time. But none of them was new, and none was anything either of them intended to do anything about. He had shouted at Alma more often than he wanted to before he left. Sometimes he had contemplated beating her into submission, but he always finally admitted that would mean beating her to death. Though Alma dead would have been a deep relief to his anger, her body, which never had belonged to him, did belong to her sons. Mike had struck her seldom and carefully since her first pregnancy. That was why it was increasingly easy for her to refuse him, knowing she was in no real danger.
All that women’s liberation crap about women insisting on the rights over their own bodies! They’d always had the ultimate power not only over their own but over men’s bodies, over life itself. What a stupidly negative, stupidly destructive way to prove it they turned to: flushing unfinished life down the toilet and fucking each other, all the while claiming men are too insensitive, too violent to be part of the human race! Mike had wanted a daughter, a child for all the tenderness he couldn’t spend on sons, who would be his only as they grew into men themselves, comforts of his old age when a daughter would be gone from him.
“No more,” Alma said. “Absolutely no more.” Mike would not have tried to conceive a child in anger. Rape is pollution. He was, therefore, helpless, at her mercy, and she had none. He couldn’t stand it. He left her. Out with Carlotta he was “Trasco, the sculptor,” but in his head he was husband and father of the family he’d walked out on. He could not think past that, nor could he think toward it.
Joseph, sitting in the visitors’ room, staring out the window with eyes that reflected rather than saw the October brightness of the day, was no help. When Mike was able to get his attention, it was like a lake after a long drought, a dry bowl you could only remember swimming in. Mike wanted to cry, as much for himself as for Joseph.
“Don’t say anything to aggravate him,” Mike had been advised.
Mike tried to talk about anything that wasn’t important. He was in short supply of such subjects. He asked questions, inane questions: “How’s the food? Do you have everything you need?”
Joseph’s tongue seemed to have swollen to the size of his mouth, words occasionally struggling off it, hard to understand and understood not worth the effort. The face Mike found hard to remember was blurred even as he looked at it. He couldn’t tell whether it was a puffy swelling or a deflation of flesh that made Joseph so out of focus.
Only when Mike was about to leave did Joseph give him any sense that the visit had been important. Joseph took his hand and held it for so long Mike felt it was a gift he’d have to leave there.
“Listen, Joseph, I’ll come back soon, all right?” Mike nearly shouted. “And after a while you’ll get out of here, all right?”
What Mike couldn’t say to Joseph, he couldn’t discuss with Ann either; a woman already deserted twice by death and madness would not be a good listener, or anyway would reflect his petulance, the pettiness of his griefs, and he needed them to be their rightful size if he was going to deal with them.
How he envied Joseph this woman, these girl children, the quietness of them. What business had he going crazy?
Trying to keep the critical irritation out of his voice, Mike asked Ann, “What do the doctors say? How soon will he start to get better?”
“They start shock treatments next week.”
Ann seemed calm, or at least resigned. Having watched one man shed his flesh and lose his hair with promised cures, watching another cry and shake and be unable to remember might not be as frightening. The skepticism Mike felt about the treatment he kept to himself. They must have improved it a lot since they jolted an aunt of his to blank silence years ago when he was just a kid. It wouldn’t still be primitive like that, or they wouldn’t be using it.
“If he were my husband,” Carlotta said, “I’d get him out of there.”
“What would she do with him? He’s a vegetable.”
“He’s on drugs, that’s all.”
“But off them, he’s violent.”
Carlotta looked at Mike long and soberly. “So can you be. Nobody’s locked you up.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mike demanded. “Listen, my biggest problem is that I’m not crazy. Have I killed Alma? Have I raped you?”
“Is that what you’d like to do?” Carlotta asked, a coolness in her voice that irritated him.
“At least there would be some dignity in it!”
“Not for me,” Carlotta said.
“And your dignity is all that matters.”
“No. It doesn’t have to be either/or surely. You make it sound as if you’re simply waiting for me to be willing to participate in my own humiliation. It won’t happen.”
“I told you I’m not crazy.”
“Trasco, I’ve decided to do your portrait. Will you sit for me?”
“What kind of portrait?” Mike asked, and felt himself blush.
“Something you’ll like. I want to redeem social realism from usefulness. I want to do it as if it were the cover of Time magazine or a Mao poster. It may even say, ‘Trasco, the sculptor, page twenty-three,’ or something like that.”
“Far out,” Mike said.
“Wearing what you have on right now.”
Mike looked down at his red and black shirt, his jeans, and his boots, already tired of them before they were to be immortalized.
“With one of your pieces behind you. We’ll work in your studio.”
“The light’s not very good, and it’s going to get colder than hell.”
“I like the cold,” Carlotta said.
Joseph was the only friend who had become familiar with Mike’s sculpture, and Mike missed him sharply the moment Carlotta walked in and stood, looking. Joseph had never pretended to understand Mike’s work, but he was an interested, often comfortable presence, a soft bundle of attention in contrast with this measuring rod of a woman who knew what Mike was trying to do and would judge him.
“You can hardly see them,” he began, shouting at her.
“Don’t talk at me,” she said, and stepped away from him.
He had to talk. He couldn’t stand to see her there, measuring the work that was intended to measure her or any other human figure in its presence.
“You look like a woman in a department store buying a piece of furniture!”
She ignored him. He shouldn’t have brought her here like this at the beginning of her day, when she was fresh and cool, at the irritable end of his, when he had stood, literally, all he could. They should have been together first, if not smoking dope, at least having a drink or two, giving him time to explain, to prepare her for what he wanted her to see and think. Independent of him as she was, she was his doubt materialized, and he saw what he always fought seeing: the possibility that these huge frail structures were pretentious nonsense, the manifestation of his year of delusion. His eyes blurred in defensive fatigue.
“Say something!”
“I hadn’t expected so much elegance,” she replied, a tone of genuine surprise in her voice.
Shapes came back into focus. Mike was free both to see and to remember the hard skill of making imagined architecture into fact. The point, the whole point, was, of course, to call up that quality of surprise, which was his own when he was able to see what he had done. Carlotta had given him back his ability to see. He wanted to tell her how each piec
e had happened, why it happened, the balance and the hope. But he didn’t have to begin at once. She’d be here working several days a week. He could tell her slowly, asking, “Do you know what is useful? Of course, you do: all that leaks or catches fire from toilet to furnace. All that’s useful is potentially catastrophic. Art, great art, is beyond catastrophe. There is no point in making things that kill themselves. That’s too didactic, too obvious. It could be done by hooking up a tap and letting it drip. Art doesn’t function, malfunction, die.”
He would tell her how it was that he knew all this, not from the books, the critics, but from life, his own, his father’s, the prison of opposites which couldn’t be transcended except through art which must be, yes, elegantly beyond hunger and dying.
“I want to tell you about the rats and the smell of vanilla, this neighborhood when I was a kid, why I work here, make this here. I want to tell you …”
Carlotta was smiling at him. Desire, and with it dread, overcame him. She didn’t wait for him to make the first gesture, and her terrible thinness at that moment became a beautiful fragility inside the protection of his sure strength which he would fill her with, but carefully, gently. The cot he slept on would never have held him and his wife. He did not want to think about Alma, to remember the fullness of her breasts, withheld from him since the birth of his first son, the broad hips and strong thighs, the abundance of blond pubic hair, the whole lie of her magnificent body. Carlotta was a Giacometti woman, cool and hard as metal. He had never been able to imagine her naked. Feeling her hand now under his shirt, fingering through the hair on his chest, teasing his surprised nipples, he realized that she must have imagined him naked. He smiled down into her fine, peppery hair, then held her back from him, unable to release her for fear she’d not stand by herself, so fragile she seemed to him now.
He was shocked by his need to please her because it made him know how long he had been deprived of anything but trying to assert himself, his tongue in his wife’s mouth an aggressive warning, his cock a weapon against her. Carlotta’s mouth was all sucking promise. Her nipples, large fruit of her small breasts, hardened at his touch. He felt as clumsy as a child, pulling at her clothes, at his own, but her laugh was fond, full of pleasure, and her own fingers, accurate and intimate, made him laugh in return, nearly alarmed by how sure she was of his pleasure, those long, thin fingers down across his buttocks as she freed him for her mouth. He was lying on his back on his cot inside one of his angry sexual fantasies in which he had forced Alma to suck the life out of him, drink his seed until she choked. But now he was afraid that he could choke the woman so hungry at him, yet afraid, too, that lifting her up and rocking himself into her might hurt her more. He was dangerous, helpless, baffled, tears trickling into his sideburns, until she rose up and mounted him and he felt his palms slip on her wet thighs, his thumbs open, a cunt full of juices he had only imagined. For a second he thought he might be sick or faint with disgust, need, gratitude. He bucked into her with a violence which might have thrown her off, but she rode him as fiercely until the struggle was all he wanted, the marvelous grunting hard work of screwing a woman who wanted it so that he now held her, a thumb against her sexual pulse until it was his own, and she came only a second before him, and finally lay all those light bones on top of him in the briny swamp of sweat and come, their exhausted breathing as mutual a rhythm as their fucking had been.
The moment of peace was brief, his hands gradually recognizing the nearly skeletal body of a woman foreign to him, one he had not even really wanted, who had shown him briefly and absolutely what Alma had deprived him of. The anger was in his hands, and he trembled against the desire to break those bones that had betrayed him into such knowledge. Intuitive in sex, she misread him now, for she was stroking his hair, her tongue teasing at his ear. Alma could always sense his anger, as if it had a smell, and grew armor he couldn’t penetrate short of murder. This fragile-boned whore had no idea that the hand on the back of her neck could snap all that slippery, steaming life out of her in a second, that the arm across her rib cage trembled with crushing strength to resist a desire so much more compelling, because singular, to destroy the evidence of his betrayal. She mistook it for tenderness, and suddenly it was tenderness for a woman who was his friend and desired him and gave him nearly murderously costly pleasure and didn’t know.
Penitent, protective of her, he turned her into the shelter of his arm and willed himself to gentleness, kissing her nipples, stroking her belly and thighs, and then he touched her as Alma had taught him to in the early days of their lovemaking when they still hoped to please each other. Carlotta watched his hand, then cupped hers over his and stopped him.
“I don’t think I could bear that … yet.”
“In ten minutes?”
She laughed.
Then she looked at him seriously and asked, “How am I ever going to get any work done?”
But several nights later she began. She had borrowed klieg lights from Allen, strong enough not only to illuminate but to give an illusion of warmth. Mike, posed before the structure of carefully broken forms, was embarrassed and absurdly pleased.
“You should have your head under a black cloth, telling me to look at the birdie.”
Carlotta might not have heard him, her attention was so fixed on him. Mike had never been aware of being in the presence of someone else working as he worked. If he had not been the object of her concentration, he might have resented it. Instead, understanding her simply as he had never understood anyone before, he gave his will to her work, obediently still until he reached a state of near trance.
“Are you tired?”
As he heard her, he knew she had asked the question twice.
“No,” he said. “I thought it would be hard work.”
“After a night on your feet.”
“It isn’t,” he said. “I stop thinking of anything.”
Then he was aware that he was, in spite of the lights, stiff and cold.
“I’ll make coffee,” he offered. “Are you cold?”
“I have to be to work.”
When he brought her a mug, he looked at her canvas, which was nothing yet but blocked spaces.
“I work very slowly,” she said. “I warned you.”
“That’s all right.”
“Is that piece named?”
“Nicknamed. Joseph calls it ‘School Days.’ I don’t name any of them. Naming is a poet’s work.”
“I went to see him yesterday.”
“Who?”
“Joseph. He doesn’t remember anything that’s happened for the last six months. He doesn’t know you’ve been to see him, even that his wife has. But he does know he can’t remember.”
“Isn’t that temporary now?” Mike asked.
“So they say.”
“But they must know what they’re doing,” Mike said, wanting to be reassured.
“He’ll be easier to deal with, I suppose,” Carlotta answered, clearly indicating the obscenity that was for her. “He’s interested in amnesia anyway, treats it like a peculiar holiday.”
“Is that what we’re all having?” Mike asked.
“Are you?” Carlotta asked. “Is that what this is?”
“I’m a married man.”
“There are remedies for that.”
“Do you mean I ought to leave her?”
“You have left her.”
He had and he hadn’t. Surely Carlotta understood that.
“I saw Alma yesterday, too.”
“What did you tell her?” Mike demanded.
“Not what you wish I would.”
“What’s that?”
“That you’re the greatest fuck in town and she ought to get you back, on your terms, as soon as possible.”
“Why not? Why not tell her that?”
“When anything gets told Alma, you’ll do the telling, Trasco. You really want her back, don’t you?”
“She’s my wife!”
Carl
otta sighed and turned away.
“Listen,” Mike said, taking her arm and turning her back to him.
“To what? Your delusions of ownership?”
“What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with wanting to fuck for life’s sake? I wanted a daughter. Is that a crime?”
“Alma’s not a piece of raw material to be made into sons and daughters. She’s a human being.”
“What is inhuman about being pregnant?”
“Try it,” Carlotta suggested, “and see.”
“Have you?”
“No,” she said. “I’m like you. I’d rather paint. Unlike you, because I’m a woman, I know the difference.”
“What’s the point then?” he asked.
“Does there have to be one?”
He covered his face and wept. If her arms hadn’t circled his chest, his grief might have broken his ribs. He did not understand what was happening to him, to his life. He could not believe what he, in fact, believed: that Alma wanted no more to do with him. She was so far from his that he was, as Carlotta had put it, Alma’s cast-off property, and now Carlotta was trying him on for size.
“Get out of here!” he wanted to shout, but his throat felt swollen shut.
Her fingers were at the back of his neck, kneading the pain at the base of his skull. They moved under his shirt over the straining muscles of his back. Again her arms were around him, holding his shuddering. He was baffled and shamed by his need of that comfort, his passivity as she finally cradled him like an infant, giving him her breast. He fell asleep, his face buried in her cunt, and had horrified dreams of being born between skeletal thighs, a thing of forlorn and wasted flesh.
When he woke alone, it was a full moment before the trance of sleep was broken and he remembered where and how he was.
It was three months since Mike had seen his children. Though he knew she had not, he felt barred from them as if Alma had actually refused him access. He even found it difficult to think about them. Tony, so inaccurately named for Mike’s dead father, already wore glasses and used a book as Mike had used fists for self-defense. More than once Mike had had to take a book by force and order the kid out into the street to play, yet Mike wasn’t afraid, as Alma had accused him of being, of Tony’s brains. Once he grew into them and became whatever he chose to become, a lawyer, scholar, whatever, Mike would be as proud of him as Alma was, but Mike had to see that he also became a man who could fill his physical space in the world, something the brawny little Victor was already teaching himself, untroubled by Alma’s scolding or spoiling, because he knew the tests he had to pass on the playground whether she understood them or not. Mike had more trouble disciplining Vic because he wouldn’t be afraid. One day he’d be as silly as Mike had been with his father, too impatient to wait until the battle would be equal, and after that they’d be friends. Mike was less sure how friendship would occur between him and his older son, whose defense was like his mother’s, withdrawal into silent superiority, but the kid could draw. In that he was Mike’s. Sometimes, not exactly missing them so much as simply wanting to lay eyes on them, take a physical and emotional inventory, Mike was tempted to drive by and pick them up on their way to school, but it was a plan too clandestine, too much an admission of the loss of status he felt. To see them, he must be able to walk into the house and assert his right to be there.