Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  “Because I had a hunch you’d turn up before Christmas, and, if there was going to be a scene, I’d just as soon they missed it.”

  “Scene? You know you’re bloody lucky to be alive?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “If it weren’t for the kids …”

  “What have you done to your hand?”

  He looked down and saw that he was bleeding. “I was practicing.”

  “Mike, if you want to talk, that’s fine. It’s long past time we did. But if you’ve come back on some macho trip just to knock me around, forget it.”

  “Trasco, the wife beater,” he said scornfully. “That’s what I should have been.”

  “It would have ended sooner,” she said, almost as if she were agreeing with him. “Do you want to come in? You ought to fix that hand.”

  He was suddenly aware that he smelled strongly of Carlotta’s perfume, and Alma would certainly notice it if she hadn’t already.

  “I’ve just smashed our yearly Christmas present to Carlotta,” he tried to announce rather than confess. His hand and her concern about it made him feel more like a misbehaving child than a properly outraged husband.

  “Whatever for?”

  “Because you put her damned name on it, that’s why!” he shouted, near ridiculous tears.

  She didn’t laugh. The distress in her face frightened him.

  “Come in,” she said. “Please. She’s not here.”

  Alma took him directly to the bathroom, where she washed the dozen cuts, examining them for bits of glass.

  “The perfume’s antiseptic, but just in case …”

  She reached for the iodine. Before she took out the stopper, she smoothed a long strand of her blond hair behind her ear, a gesture so familiar to him he was jealous of it in any other woman. In her face intent on her job he saw unconscious tenderness, and he wanted to tilt that face to his to receive what his hand received, but the weather in her eyes changed whenever she looked up at him.

  “You’re never careful enough of your hands,” she said as she finished.

  She did not understand in him what she didn’t understand in Victor, the natural conflict of uses, the making and breaking a man must do with his hands. She would have him carry them in his pockets, tools as precious as his cock, to be as protected. He half expected her to kiss the hand she had just tended, but instead she turned abruptly away to escape the close quarters they had been in.

  “Coffee?”

  She was naturally wifely, like Ann. With Carlotta it was Mike who made the coffee. He sat down at the dining-room table to be served, the habit of a table too deep in him for Alma to break. She had finally acquired it herself, and it had pleased him, even though this table was a bright emblem of the middle class, who could afford the waste space of a dining room, that it had become a center of the house instead, a place to work or rest as well as eat. As she put the cup before him, along with a plate of Christmas cookies the boys had probably helped her bake, Mike felt at home.

  “You’ve lost weight,” she observed.

  “I’m not much of a cook.”

  They both fell silent. Having lost his first angry initiative, Mike didn’t know how or where to begin. He had never rehearsed this scene in his head because the script he wrote and rewrote was Alma’s coming to him and asking him to come home. That was always followed by a long list of his grievances, after each of which she apologized and promised reform. Alma wasn’t a woman who apologized. In real life their reconciliations were his doing, rarely with words, usually with a gesture, fixing a porch step or taking the kids for a ride, and it could never be done as a bid for sex. Neither did Alma bargain.

  “This has gone on long enough,” he finally said.

  “Well, it’s given us both time, and I certainly needed it. Thanks, by the way, for sending the money.”

  He shrugged. Being thanked for what was his to do was a habit he’d never broken her of, but he hadn’t given in to it himself. To thank for duty was to suggest a choice where there was none.

  “You’ve always been more honest than I am about big things. We were horribly unhappy, and you did something about it.”

  “Don’t flatter me. It was a bad joke. This whole four months has been a bad joke. It’s over. We don’t have to talk about it.”

  “I have to, Mike, because it isn’t over. Or it’s over for me with you. Please—try not to get angry. It’s not your fault. I just am really no good at being your wife, and, once I gave up trying, I should have quit.”

  “Quit? You don’t quit! This isn’t a game we’re playing.”

  “Oh, Mike, you’re so … old-fashioned. Who do you know who’s managed to stay married as long as we have?”

  “I am your husband, not a skirt you wear one day to your ankles, the next day to your crotch, and send to the Salvation Army next week. You are married to me.”

  “But I’m getting a divorce …”

  “As a Christmas present from Daddy?”

  “I don’t want it to be ugly. We’re not ugly people. You’ve been as unhappy as I have.”

  “Don’t tell me what I’ve been.”

  “But haven’t you?”

  “That’s beside the point. All this is beside the point. We don’t have to talk about it. I’m home,” he said, and to prove his point he started to take off his jacket.

  “All right,” she said, and she stood up. “We don’t have to talk. We never have been able to. Why should we at this point? The house is all yours.”

  She got as far as the front door before he caught up with her. If the face she turned to him had been scornful, he might have been able to hit her, but he saw in it such terrible distress he could not even put out a restraining hand.

  “Then talk,” he said desperately. “Talk.”

  “You can’t listen. It’s nothing you want to hear.”

  “Look. I shouldn’t have done it. It was stupid. I’m sorry.”

  For a moment he thought he was actually going to see his wife cry. Then she turned away, walked down the steps and over to her car, leaving him alone with an apology he’d had no intention of making.

  Ten years. Mike remembered listening to a man talk who had served only seven and simply did not know what to do with himself. After several months he’d stolen a car and smashed it into a tree. Neither the nostalgia for prison nor the gesture was comprehensible to Mike then. Now he felt as if he had done the same thing; only it hadn’t worked. He’d managed to get back into the jail, but with no one to judge or keep him, that accomplished nothing. Had he been horribly unhappy? He couldn’t remember. He was in touch only with the pointless misery of the last free months, which he had tolerated passively, simply waiting for the time to come to an end, for Alma to end it. Now she had. He was free, and he could feel nothing but blankness.

  He wandered around the house to discover how few traces of his own occupancy were left except behind closed closet and cupboard doors. He had been much more effectively put away than Joseph, whose domestic litter was evident everywhere in his house so that, on his return, he’d be immediately at home. Even in the bathroom Mike had to rummage in the storage cupboard beneath the sink to find a box with his razor, toothbrush, shaving lotion, comb.

  Among the womanly and childish clutter, he could not distinguish any particular signs of Roxanne. The small pair of trousers in their bedroom could as easily have belonged to Tony. It didn’t matter.

  Tony’s room had changed more than any other in the house. On the shelves where his collection of miniature cars had been, there were books, dozens of them, and there was a music stand, though no sign of an instrument. Whatever it was, he probably had it with him. Mike wondered if his son’s face would be as hard to recognize as his room after only four months.

  He found in Victor’s room what he had missed in Tony’s. Victor had obviously inherited the childhood Tony was leaving behind, but all in heaps and overflowing boxes. No amount of nagging from Alma, threatening from Mike would ever m
ake Victor orderly as Tony naturally was.

  Mike did not feel real. He was as much a ghost as if he’d actually killed himself on that ridiculous thirtieth birthday. In four months children so young would already be accustomed to his absence. Had he really missed them? He missed the idea of them. What he was really losing was the right to their friendship in the future, the bond that only contending for the same domestic space could make. He saw himself a stranger, a derelict, in a concert hall, football stadium, church, old as his father had been suddenly old, but without the right to the attention and care of the strong young men his sons would be.

  Mike could not stay in this house, tomb of a failed kingdom he had never ruled as a man should. Why? Was Carlotta right? Was he, like her, only really able to be alone? What was his art worth to him if it lost him the world? What had it ever been worth anyway? If he had given it up, if he had taken a real job, by now at thirty he’d have something to show for his life: a real house on a real street with a real wife and children in it, rather than these people who had been on nothing but a long-term loan from a patient father-in-law, who had finally decided time had run out and written him off as a bad debt. Alma was his daughter; the boys were his grandsons. Nothing here had ever belonged to Mike.

  In the basement he found the monogrammed luggage given to him for trips he had refused to take. Into it he piled some of his clothes, including the newest two of his suits. He also took the set of golf clubs and tennis racket, not knowing why, with some vague sense that not to would be petty.

  Finally he went out into the shed to see if there were any tools or materials he should load into the truck. There he found a pile of his old clothes, on top of which was an elaborately ornamented sign.

  TRASCO’S DECREES

  Soft Sculpture Is a Pile of Crap…

  Mike stopped reading. That pile of clothes was his effigy. He lifted it up and found the hidden head and hands. The screwdriver had been removed. So had the wedding ring. He looked back at the sign, obviously left those months ago by Joseph. It lacked the statement Mike had neglected to share with his friend: “Don’t make anything that can kill itself.” He carried the dummy out to the trash can and dumped it in. He hesitated with the sign. He knew it was meant as a friendly joke, but the pretentious vulgarity of those statements embarrassed him. He felt a thousand years older than the brash, hopeful fake he had been, so kindly listened to by a little fellow Mike hadn’t forgiven for going crazy, deserting Mike in his own craziness which he had claimed to be sanity itself. Joseph at least could come home. Self-pity, as sudden and debilitating as a nosebleed, tasted in Mike’s mouth and stained his vision. Why hadn’t he really killed himself when he had had at least enough self-respect to be able to do such a thing? Now he could break nothing but a stupid bottle of perfume. He crumpled Joseph’s sign, slammed down the lid of the trash can, and turned away. He had to get out of there.

  After Mike unloaded the truck at the warehouse, he dressed in one of his rarely worn suits and went down to the club where he worked.

  “Jesus, man,” his boss exclaimed. “Who died?”

  “I’ve got to quit,” Mike said, “right now, without notice.”

  He was willing to forfeit his last two weeks of pay, but his boss was a man of generous gestures and insisted he take an extra two weeks’ money instead.

  “And anytime, you know, you want to come back, you need anything, you know where I am.”

  For a moment Mike doubted what he was doing. Here, where he claimed he had made no friends, where he was nothing but a pair of fists, he was being treated with generosity and kindness. But the irony was too apparent. At thirty to be successful at nothing but being a bouncer at a third-rate nightclub was colder comfort than he could stand.

  From the club he walked along Georgia until he came to The Bay. It had been years since he’d been in a department store. First he went to the perfume counter. He did not know the name of Carlotta’s perfume, but he recognized the bottle.

  “Sixty-three fifty,” the clerk informed him.

  He did not believe it as he counted out the money. Every year Alma calmly shelled out this kind of money for the smell of a friend. The cuts on his hand must be worn like expensive jewelry.

  He wanted to buy presents for his children. He never had. You don’t feel empty-handed going home to children you live with. It was different to contemplate calling on them at their grandparents’. He found his way to the board where all the departments were listed, stood being bumped and crowded by people trying to get on the escalator. It was like being at work on a Saturday night with the sound turned off. In all the TV ads of happy shoppers, the man buying a suit or a car, the woman in her new bra with her different brand of instant coffee, there were never other people. The gray, anxious hordes were invisible. Nobody could really like spending money like this. Faintly now he could hear music, “Joy to the world, the Lord has come.” Was there anyplace he could stand to be? He got through the crowd like the bouncer he was.

  Carlotta opened the door to him reluctantly. He offered her the bottle of perfume, still in its bag with the sales slip.

  “You still smell of it,” she said. “I’ve been airing this place out for hours. I don’t know that I can ever wear it again.”

  “You damn well better,” Mike said. “It costs four dollars and two cents a drop.”

  “I’m touched.”

  “I’m no good at presents. You know that.”

  “Well, at least now it really is from you.”

  “I saw Alma.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean after I left here.”

  “I know.”

  “For someone who’s not your favorite caller, she stops around on the hour.”

  “Can you imagine I enjoy it?”

  “No,” Mike admitted.

  “She said you looked terrible, and she was afraid you might do something desperate.”

  “She flatters herself.”

  “That’s what I told her.”

  “How much longer do you need to finish the portrait?”

  Carlotta looked at him intently. “An hour, a year.”

  “Seriously.”

  “I don’t want to burden you with more bad news. It’s finished at your convenience.”

  “I’m no good at riddles either.”

  “People as good—looking as you never are.”

  “It’s looked finished to me for a couple of weeks. You overwork it you could ruin it.”

  “Then it’s finished.”

  “I want to take off is all. I need to get of here for a while.”

  “Go,” she said.

  “I don’t mean this minute. I want to see the kids. I promised Ann I’d have Christmas dinner there and welcome Joseph home.”

  “I mean this minute.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. I’m finished.”

  “With me?”

  “Put it that way.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you are and because, like any woman, I want the little vanity of choosing the moment.”

  Mike had no more considered ending his relationship with Carlotta than he had considered divorce except in moments of angry fantasy.

  “Look, Carlotta, I couldn’t have made it through these last months without you. “You know that. “You’ve been … great. It’s just that I’ve got to get away from all this, figure out what to do with my life.”

  “Go. Figure. What do you need, a scene?”

  “No,” he said. “What do you want me to do with the portrait?”

  “Shove it up your ass! Fuck it! Burn it!” she shouted, hurling herself at him.

  If he hadn’t been professional in subduing hysterical women, she would have done him real damage. He had only one bleeding scratch on his cheek close to his eye before he had her pinned and helpless. It had always been the unexpected violence of her appetite that excited his own, the dissolving heat of so thin a covering of flesh. He could feel
her tense, waiting for a chance to break free.

  “I’m going to shove it up your ass,” he said.

  He was not afraid of her as he had been of Alma. He was not really angry with her. He needed to take her against her will in order to reach the deep compliance there was in her. Before he succeeded, she had torn the pocket off his jacket and bitten him through the cloth of his shirt, and he had, he was sure, broken the little finger of her left hand. Her cunt was hot, frothy, and he rode her until both their backs might break, and she came to him clinging, weeping, a moment before he gave in himself.

  He picked her up and carried her to her bed. They both looked like victims of an explosion. He covered her with a blanket and then sat for a moment on the floor by her. He was faint, lost consciousness for a second, came to.

  “Why did you need that?” he asked.

  She turned her head to look at him, her face thin, very pale, austere.

  “I didn’t. You did.”

  He nodded. Then he must have fainted or slept. When he came to again, she was gone. He looked around for a note. There was none. She had changed out of her torn clothes, taken a shower, even had half a cup of tea. He drank what was left, washed his abused face, straightened himself as he could, and wore the damage as he always had from the time he was a small boy, learning how to take his physical space in the world, as if it didn’t matter.

  Carlotta had been to the studio before him. Not only the portrait but all the small domestic signs of her were gone. Mike was glad because what had suited his vanity, Carlotta’s intense concentration on him, had threatened his pride, the role reversal between artist and model. The portrait itself had become too familiar from his searching it for clues and reassurances. It had finally been able to tell him not much more than that he looked like a man whose picture should be on the cover of Time, and that was a wearying irony.

  Detached from the clock with no job to go to and no further appointments with Carlotta, Mike could not remember what meal to eat, when to sleep. He thought again of presents for his children and had to concentrate to remember whether shops were closed at four in the morning or four in the afternoon. Suddenly he was afraid he’d missed Christmas altogether and had to ask someone on the street. He still had eleven hours of Christmas Eve.